The One Problem I Had with The Force Awakens

This last Thursday I finally finished my first semester of graduate school.  I also saw Episode VII: The Force Awakens that night.

Many people who have written about Episode VII have felt the need to talk about what the original Star Wars trilogy meant to them.  Unlike a lot of the people who attended the premiere, I am not a hardcore fan of the series.  I quite enjoy the original trilogy and would even call A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back great movies, but I don't hold the same level of reverence for the series a lot of people do.  That's not to pretend I'm above geeky obsessions; half of this blog is me picking apart geeky works of fiction that I unapologetically love to obsess over.  It's just that I didn't grow up with Star Wars the way many of the more dedicated fans have, and as a result it doesn't represent more to me than a well-done, exciting trilogy- which, of course, means I still hold it in high regard.

With that said, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.  I think, other than the dazzling visuals and imaginative universe that are trademarks of the Star Wars universe, what truly made this movie good was its cast of characters.  I loved the introduction of Finn, Rey, and Poe; I loved the way they fit Han Solo, General Leia, and Luke Skywalker in; more than anything, though, I loved the dynamics between these characters and the relationships this film created.

I also very much enjoyed the absence of a character internet writer Seanbaby

perfectly described as "a floppy-eared moon fuck in black face"

That's what made the film for me.  Yes, they cut and pasted a lot of the same story beats from A New Hope.  Considering how much pressure they had from the fans to make movies that "actually felt like Star Wars" I don't blame them for adhering so closely to the original trilogy.  But while the story beats borrow a lot from the beginning of Episode IV, the characters in this movie are very much their own.  Their interactions and journeys are enough, at least to me, to call Episode VII a success.

I've seen a lot of criticisms of the new film, some of which I think are unfair and some of which I think are fair but didn't quite ruin the experience for me.  An example of the former is the complaint that Kylo Ren doesn't feel as intimidating as Darth Vader; the movie makes it clear that an intimidating, inhuman villain like Darth Vader isn't what they are going for in Kylo Ren.  An example of the latter is the complaint about how Han stumbles across Finn and Rey; the level of perfect coincidence is definitely ridiculous and made me cringe as a writer, but as a viewer I was just glad to see Han Solo show up again on the big screen even if what got him there was kinda silly.

But there was one major problem I had with the film that jarred me out of the experience: it had to do with Finn.

In what will be obvious to most people reading this but not quite everyone: SPOILERS AHEAD.  You should only read on if you have already seen the movie.

Finn is introduced to us as a storm trooper who doesn't like violence and hates his role as a storm trooper for the First Order, the successor to the Empire from the original trilogy.  The inner conflict is seen through Finn's body language before we even see his face.  As part of the group sent to Jakku to rough up Max von Sydow's village to find the map that contains the location of Luke Skywalker, Finn sees an ally of his get gunned down right before his very eyes.  This nameless storm trooper's bloody hand desperately flails around as he is killed by one of the resisting villagers, leaving blood-stained finger prints on Finn's helmet.  This kicks off Finn's arc as a storm trooper who hates the violence he finds himself mixed up in.

This is not the look of someone who enjoys being surrounded by killing.

Shortly thereafter Finn helps Poe Dameron, one of the Resistance's top pilots, escape from captivity.  When Poe asks Finn why he is breaking him out, Finn responds with "because it's the right thing to do" after everything he has seen.  It's a well-done moment that begins Finn's arc from storm trooper tired of killing to someone who fights for the Resistance against the evil First Order.  When done right, this character archetype can be one of the most interesting types of characters out there.

Then his arc loses consistency only minutes after Finn breaks Poe out of his cell.

 When Finn takes Poe to the hangar to escape, they end up commandeering a TIE fighter.  Poe, being the pilot he is, takes the controls of the TIE fighter.  That leaves Finn in charge of the turret attached to the back.  When he climbs into the turret seat Finn's struggle is entirely external, trying to figure out how the controls for the turret work.  As soon as he figures out how to work the controls, he gleefully starts killing his former allies as he makes his escape with Poe.

The tone shift is jarring.  In the scene before he stood somberly over his dead ally, clearly upset to see the death of one of his own.  Then, in the very next scene, he's blasting away at the only people he'd known ever since he was kidnapped as a child and forced into the storm trooper army.

The horrors of war are truly too much for one man to bear...

unless that man gets to shoot a totally fucking sweet laser turret!

Speaking of being kidnapped as a child and forced into the First Order army, let's think about that for a moment.  If a large portion of storm troopers are people who were kidnapped as children and forced to become soldiers, that makes Finn's lack of remorse even more weird.  How many people does he kill who are just as scared as he is, but haven't summed up the courage to defect from the First Order?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he should've not shot at them or that this needed to be a film where he is constantly haunted by unrelenting guilt for the entirety of the film.  What I am saying is that it was off-putting to see Finn, a person who knows the plight of the common storm trooper better than anyone, switch from being shaken by the death of a fellow storm trooper to gleefully shooting at them without even a hint of hesitation.

This trend continues throughout the movie.  We see later how much he fears The First Order, especially when he wants to flee to the outer system to escape their reaches, but we never see much about his connection to his former fellow troops.  Later, when he first picks up Luke's light saber, we see him face down a fellow storm trooper who busts out what looks like a laser chainsaw that calls Finn "traitor!" before initiating an attacking.  I thought this might be a former friend of his, yelling "traitor!" because they feel betrayed by Finn switching sides.  Maybe they would have an emotionally impactful showdown and we'd see Finn feel some sort of inner conflict about fighting former comrades of his.

Unfortunately, it just turns into a normal fight against a generic storm trooper who just happens to have a cool looking weapon.  Finn goes on to keep mowing down storm trooper after storm trooper without a second thought.  Later he helps blow up the Starkiller, which is the size of a small planet.  As someone who used to work there Finn surely had to have people he knew there, but he helps initiate the plan and carry it out without any sort of internal turmoil.

Who needs moral ambiguity and nuance when you have a motherfucking lightsaber?

Again, I'm not saying Finn shouldn't have done anything he did.  The First Order is clearly terrible and, even if the storm troopers might be human beings coerced into fighting for them, any storm trooper who fired a gun at the Resistance were fighting on the side of planet-destroying fascists.  They needed to be dealt with for the good of the galaxy.

But when you have someone who grew up a storm trooper, who knew the human side of them, who understood that many of them probably didn't want to be there but felt like they had no choice, it's strange to see Finn kill wave after wave of them without even blinking.  Even a throwaway line or facial expression to show any hint of conflict would've shown hints of an internal struggle that Finn was trying to overcome.


So that was my biggest problem with Episode VII.  Rather than having a character arc that shows Finn gradually come to terms with the fact that he has to fight former comrades of his, we go from him being shaken up by the death of a comrade to joyfully shooting at other storm troopers in the time it takes some people to take a dump.

Regardless, I still very much enjoyed the movie.  When the beginning text crawl and music started I found myself more excited than I thought I would be.  Despite how early I had woken up that day and how much I had done, I never felt the least bit tired.  The movie raced by and I felt like it ended too soon, despite a run time of two hours and fifteen minutes.

I can't wait to see where this trilogy goes.  This movie set up a lot of promising character arcs and interesting directions for the dynamics between them to grow.  Hopefully the next two movies include more complex character moments for Finn and everyone else. Given what this movie showed me, I have confidence they'll build something wonderful.

Why The Way We Think About Bias is Wrong

Often, when we think about bias, we think about a person or group explicitly making their opinion known and using slanted rhetoric that clearly favors their position.  Everyone knows that Fox News is biased towards the Republican Party and MSNBC is biased towards the Democratic Party, after all.  Instead, they should put their opinions aside and let the facts speak for themselves!

If only it were that easy.  Avoiding bias isn't just about using a neutral tone and consulting the facts.  Bias runs much deeper than that, and it isn't at all mutually exclusive with neutral tones or factual accuracy, either.

Here's an experiment.  Choose a recent world event and read different news sources about the event.  Not opinion columns, just regular articles.  Let's take the recent anti-government protest in Beirut as an example.  Here's ABC News (United States), The BBC (Great Britain), Al Jazeera (Qatar), Tasnim News Agency (Iran), and Deutsche Welle (Germany) covering these protests.

 Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything from the world's greatest news personality.

Take a quick glance through at least a couple of those articles.  They cover the exact same event, but check out how they frame their story.  What historical context do they give to this event?  What individuals and groups do they choose to cite?  How do they describe the different factions in this story?  Which quotes from the protesters do they choose to use?  Each of these articles have different answers to these sorts of questions, each one presenting different pictures for the exact same event.  And here's the thing: none of them are factually inaccurate or using slanted rhetoric.

It's not just news, either.  It's an inherent part of how we receive and impart information of any type.  Being a history graduate student, I'll use the field of history as an example.  The process of creating History with a capital "H" involves consulting all sorts of credible sources, extracting verified facts, and weaving together a narrative.  But which credible documents do you consult?  Which verified facts do you include?  How do you integrate all of this information into a historical narrative?

Once more, it's tempting to say "let the facts speak for themselves!" and leave it at that.  But think about the implications of that for a moment.  If you were a historian trying to chronicle the present, in order to document the present right now, you'd need to use bias.  You'd need to make decisions about the questions from the above paragraph.  Otherwise, you'd have to go through literally every single document about the present and include literally every single fact you find.  Could you imagine how long it'd take to write the History for a single day if you included a multifaceted, well-sourced section about every documented event that happened during that day?

In the United States, we all remember how George Washington crossed the Delaware River to fight Hitler in a bare knuckle boxing match [citation needed].  But why do we not mention almost everyone else who has ever crossed the Delaware before or since?  On the other hand, why have we not studied George Washington's bathroom etiquette in depth?  It's because historians have collectively decided that those aren't important details to include.  And if they didn't make those sorts of decisions, we'd have impossibly pointless and boring history classes that would take weeks just to cover what happened in a single hour of any given day.

And that concludes everything we know we know about the 11,584,137th person to ever cross the Delaware.  Now, onto one of my personal favorites, the 11,584,138th person...

No one would study History if that were the case.  We need to chisel down how much information we include to make it digestible, and those decisions ultimately come with bias.  How important do you consider peasants, or merchants, or artists, or nobles, or prostitutes, or incredibly good looking internet bloggers when creating your History?  Do you think History is closer to a biography of certain great individuals or of mass movements determined by complex social factors outside of any one individual's control?

Regardless of your answer to that last question, you're probably going to mention some influential individuals and some influential mass social movements either way.  What kind of individuals and movements do you include?  And how influential does an individual have to be, and how big does a movement have to be, before either of those meet the criteria of "influential" in the first place?  Does that change based on the relation between what these individuals or movements stood for and your own world outlook?  That includes not just your opinion on an issue, but how much you think a certain issues matters; if you care more about the issue of environmentalism than animal rights, regardless of your actual stance on either issue, would you be more likely to include themes from the environmentalism debate in a History textbook of yours than those of animal rights?  If not, how would you decide which themes to put in there?

It's not just modern History that suffers from bias problems, either.

We often think of the Middle Ages as super religious, defined by peasants whose life was dominated by the church.  And, yes, that was the case for a lot of people.  But it's also important to note that during this time most people who could read or write came from the church.  Most of our sources from the time period, therefore, come from clergy members, and the result is that our understanding of the time period is heavily skewed by a religious perspective.  There is evidence to suggest that plenty of non-religious people were around back then, too (check entry 9, though the whole list is worth a read).  Considering where most of our historical sources from that time period come from, though, we're given a lot more information about the church and its importance than a more comprehensive variety of sources would reveal.

In reality, most people from the Middle Ages enjoyed playing chess against Death.

What's crucial to understand here is none of these examples necessarily involve deliberate bias.  Yes, certain documents we use from the past might consciously be trying to alter how people might view the world.  Yes, certain historians will purposefully cherry-pick facts only if they conform to the narrative that they wish to create.  But other times, it's all the nuances of both our general world view and how we view History specifically that subtly inform how we decide what constitutes "real" History.

This makes History sound like a field prone to bullshit, but this type of debate isn't exclusive to History in particular.  Not by a long shot.  The point is that, when it comes to choosing what information to include and how to frame that information, we are always making decisions about what is "important" no matter what area of knowledge we're talking about.  Decisions like that are impossible to make without bias on our part.  I mean, how many people completely agree on what's important in life in general, let alone what's important when it comes to a particular topic?

Bringing it back to the news, when we're reading an article, we're reading a collection of facts and interpretation of these facts that come about as a result of countless processes of selection beforehand, and even if an attempt is made to be neutral about the subject of the article it doesn't erases the biases of everything that led to it.  On top of that, "neutral" itself is a relative term, because different groups of people have different default "neutral" positions.

I've heard people call Al Jazeera, one of the world's most respected news sources, unreliable because it's "anti-American", for instance.  Yet that's just as revealing about our own biases in the United States as it is for those who write for Al Jazeera.  In the US, both major political parties consider United States power and influence to be a good thing, and therefore the "neutral" middle ground between these viewpoints does too.  The Democratic Party may generally prefer a more restrained and multilateral version of United States hegemony, but it doesn't question US supremacy itself.  So when Al Jazeera includes perspectives of those who do and don't like US hegemony, in their own attempt to be neutral because they're based in a part of the world that doesn't automatically consider US supremacy to be good, we are tempted to see it as "biased" because it doesn't fit with our version of what is neutral.  In reality, there is no such thing as truly, objectively neutral.

Except for those from the Neutral Planet, of course.

So when it comes to bias, it's not just a matter of people explicitly stating their opinions, lying, using charged rhetoric, or even purposefully being biased at all.  Yet, for those who do want to talk about a topic and be biased, what facts they do and don't include is much more important than taking potshots at the people they disagree with.  Only choosing facts that make the people you don't like look bad, while not explicitly saying a single bad thing about them, has the dual benefits of painting them in a poor light and not making you look biased in the conventional sense!  Documentaries are great at doing this, though it happens everywhere.

Let's take something that is in no way controversial: racism in the media.  In today's day and age, no one in the news is going to blatantly come out and say black people are criminals.  They don't need to, either.  Just disproportionately cover crimes with black perpetrators and people will unconsciously fill in the blanks on their own.  Bombard people with images of black folks as criminals and you don't need to say a single prejudiced thing about them.  Hell, I would imagine most people involved with the news don't even do this on purpose, and are unconsciously perpetuating this racist imagery that they themselves were bombarded with growing up.  And it's not because those people thirty years ago were consciously racist, either- they almost certainly grew up in the same environment with the same sort of stimuli.  I could go on, but the point is that we can't entirely escape the confines of our biases.

That sounds like cynical resignation that could justify total bullshit because "nothing is really unbiased, man! What's the point of exchanging information if it's inherently impossible to be completely objective?  Might as well just say fuck it and write whatever you want!"

Caution: that's a slippery slope toward becoming an "edgy" doofus

who has nothing particularly interesting or noteworthy to say.

But that doesn't have to be the case.  Most of us don't enter into friendships or romantic relationships expecting the other person to be perfect.  Instead, we get to know people we feel a connection with; if we judge them to be overall good people, we build a bond with them.  It's when we allow for imperfection while still valuing the other person and how they can help us grow that we open up the possibility for very rewarding and positive experiences with them.  There's no reason we can't exercise that same idea for how we deal with information: valuing what we get while making sure we understand it isn't flawless.

Like with almost every other problem, awareness of the issue is the first step.  By understanding that no single source of information can ever be perfect by itself, we can seek information from a variety of credible sources and mold our own outlook to make it as well-informed as possible.  When I say a "credible" source I don't mean an unbiased one, of course.  I mean one that has trustworthy factual accuracy and is held to a certain set of standards, whether journalistic, academic, peer-reviewed, or whatever else.  If we consult a diverse group of quality sources and expose ourselves to as many merited ideas as possible, then we can expand our worldviews and grow intellectually.

This approach may take more effort and nuanced thought than pretending you are immune to bias or embracing "fuck it!"-style cynicism, but the results are more than worth it.

Floyd Mayweather vs Ronda Rousey? A Technical Breakdown

Floyd "Money" Mayweather has a weird cultural narrative around him.  He's often cast as the Bad Guy in WWE-style fight marketing whenever he has a boxing match, largely due to how arrogant he is and how extravagantly he spends his own money.  It's a silly act that works to create drama for a fight.  But he also has a very real record of domestic abuse, and the boxing media is usually pretty silent about the issue.

So, Money Mayweather is marketed as a terrible person for silly reasons, but is actually a terrible person in a way that those involved with the boxing industry are largely silent about.  Gotta love the bullshit theater behind professional sports, eh?

The man is great at two things: boxing and trolling people.

Well, UFC women's bantamweight champion Ronda "Rowdy" Rousey has taken shots at Money Mayweather for his history of domestic abuse.  Her most recent dig came after winning the ESPY Fighter of the Year award, when she sarcastically wondered how it felt for a girl to be beating him for a change (Mayweather was also nominated for the award).  He responded with an uninspired comment about how much money he makes, and now the internet is abuzz with talks of a hypothetical Money vs Rowdy match up.

There are plenty of people, qualified and unqualified alike, offering their opinions as to who would win in a hypothetical MMA fight between the two.  Rather than just give my opinion like everyone else, I'll break down different factors to consider in a hypothetical match between the two.

And no, this won't just be me saying "Mayweather's hope lies in his boxing while Rousey's lies in her grappling" like everyone else.  We'll be digging a little deeper than that.

Factors in Rousey's Favor
1. Mayweather's Stance: When developing as a fighter of any sort, one deceptively important decision comes in the details of your stance.  Do you make your stance more side on, so that your lead leg and shoulder are far forward and your body is practically perpendicular with your opponent's, or should you be more squared up, so that your entire body is facing towards your opponent's?

No fighter will either square up completely or go completely side on.  The trick comes in deciding exactly how squared up or side on your stance should be.  In boxing, there is good argument to be made for standing more side on than squared up.  It presents less of a target to your opponent, and also allows you to protect your face better when you hide your chin behind your lead shoulder, which will absorb most shots aimed at your head from that side (this is known as a "shoulder roll").  Mayweather is a prime example of a boxer who stands in a very side on stance, and is an absolute super saiyan when it comes to using the shoulder roll.

Notice how he is almost perpendicular to his opponent, and because of that

his lead shoulder protects him from his opponent's right hand quite nicely.

It serves him very well in boxing.  In MMA (as well as kickboxing), however, there are a lot more than just punches to take into account.

When you stand in a side on stance like Mayweather does, your lead leg is very far forward.  This is good in that it gives you range, but it also leaves your leg very exposed to attack.  This doesn't matter in boxing, of course, but in a combat sport where kicks are allowed, it becomes a serious problem.  In the UFC, fights have been won by TKOs by leg kick, and even fights that don't end explicitly in TKO by leg kick can still be decided by them because they severely limit movement when done consistently and with effort.

Against someone like Mayweather, who has no experience dealing with kicks, Rousey could go to town on his lead leg.  She could also go for single leg takedowns against that leg; it's not her specialty, since she is much more adept at the clinch, but against someone as untrained in grappling as Mayweather she'd still be able to get the single leg pretty consistently.

2.  The Clinch: No, this isn't me insulting your fighting knowledge by saying Rousey has an advantage here.  What I'm talking about is Mayweather's love of the clinch.  Money has made a science of not getting hit in his matches; when he is at range, he uses his fantastic footwork, head movement, and aforementioned shoulder rollering to avoid damage.  When he's forced into an up close exchange, however, one of his favorite tactics is to dive into the clinch after throwing a combination.  This happens time and time again in his matches, including against Manny Pacquiao, which upset a lot of people who expect boxing matches to be Rock Em Sock Em Robot matches where fighters stand in front of each other and exchange haymakers until someone falls down.

Though a lot of the memes made after the match were, admittedly, pretty hilarious.

Mayweather's tendency to clinch would get him into huge trouble against Rousey.  Now, obviously he'll be aware of this and wouldn't consciously choose to clinch against Rousey.  The issue, though, is that he has spent over two decades, day in and day out for hours on end, cultivating a boxing style that includes a habit of clinching with fellow boxers as a defense tactic.  That's not something that would be easily dropped after a few months, or even a year, of training against an instinct you have developed as long as someone born in the mid-90s has been alive.

3.  Variety of Attack: MMA is full of examples of "superior" strikers getting out-struck by people who are grappling specialists.  Often, fans will either attribute this to the striker having an "off night" against the grappler or the striker getting "exposed" by losing on the feet, depending on whether or not they were rooting for the striker.  What it actually is, however, is a case of MMA science.

When you're such a good grappler that your opponent is afraid of grappling against you, it actually opens up your ability to land strikes.  The reason is this: defending against a clinch or takedown attempt is very different from defending against strikes.  A strategy that elite MMA fighters with a grappling base love to use is feinting a takedown, which causes an opponent to drop their hands, then throwing a strike that catches their opponent off-guard.  Former heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez is an ace at mixing up his grappling and striking offense this way.

Wrestling-based Velasquez would not have landed this many punches

against punching-specialist Dos Santos in a pure boxing match.

Ronda Rousey is no Cain Velasquez (that's not an insult- very few fighters can do what he does), but she nonetheless mixes up her strikes and grappling nicely, especially during her last few fights.  To be clear, her boxing needs work: she throws wild strikes and walks straight forward toward her opponents (more on that in the next section).  But when she comes toward them, her opponent has no idea if she is going to attempt to clinch or hit her, because she is known to alternate between both.  They have to be ready for anything, and spreading an opponent's defense thin like that means you can land good shots against someone who is theoretically the "better" striker.

Factors in Mayweather's Favor
1.   Physical Strength: I'm not going to go into this too much because most people know this already, but yes, cisgendered men are generally physically stronger than cisgendered women of the same size.  That would affect how the bout was fought, because Rousey would need to be much more careful about messing up against Floyd than the other way around.

Of course, we've seen it before where the smaller person uses superior fighting technique and strategy to beat the bigger person:

...but the fact remains that a disparity between their physical strength exists.

2.  Footwork: Mayweather is an expert at controlling range.  When he wants to get close, he clinches; when he wants to be far away, he uses his excellent footwork.  I already mentioned how his clinching would become a liability against Rousey, but his footwork would be exactly the opposite.

As I alluded to above, Rousey's main tactic for getting into the clinch against her opponents has been walking straight toward them and swinging away.  In her most recent match against the hilariously over-matched Bethe Correia she did exactly that.  Against someone like Mayweather, who has the ability to use his footwork to circle out against danger or come in on varied lines of attack, Rousey's tactic of walking straight forward to engage her opponent would fail miserably.

3.  Body Shots: If Rousey's key to slowing down Mayweather is leg kicks, then Mayweather's best shot at slowing down Rousey is through body shots.  Good body shots are devastating (I know from experience; I dreaded them in both boxing and muay thai sparring).  They also rob you of energy.  Because MMA fighters don't have time to develop their striking ability as much as boxers and kickboxers do, however, they often neglect body shots and mostly hunt for the head when throwing their punches (though there are exceptions, such as the aforementioned Junior Dos Santos and the Diaz brothers).

Dos Santos landing a body shot, which we don't see enough of in MMA.

Boxers are much better at throwing body shots consistently, and Mayweather is no exception.  He goes to the body often, and uses this as an important part of his fighting strategy.  There's the old saying in boxing that when someone covers the head, you attack the body, and when they cover the body, you attack the head.  Floyd, like every other high level boxer, uses this strategy.  If he could land body shots consistently against Rousey, she'd fatigue quickly and possibly drop her guard, allowing for Mayweather to aim shots at her head.

Keys to Victory
Rousey: Rousey's biggest key to victory would be to attack that lead leg which Mayweather leaves sticking out while in his heavily side on stance.  She could attempt leg kicks to slow him down and draw out the match, single leg takedowns to try and get him to the ground and end it quickly, or, ideally, alternate between both.  If she did this while improving her ring craft to a level that she isn't just walking straight forward and swinging, she would eventually get the fight to the ground and undoubtedly finish it.

Mayweather:  Mayweather would want to use his footwork to control the range of the fight.  He'd have to stay mostly on the outside, only coming in on smart lines of attack to throw a few punches then get right back out before Rousey could get her hands on him.  He'd want to make sure he alternated between shots to the body and head in order to keep Rousey guessing.  Every additional way in which he could make himself elusive would, of course, come in handy.

Verdict
It would be an intense fight, but in the end, history has shown that as long as a grappler has at least a little striking competence, they will beat the striker with little grappling competence, even if there's a strength gap.  We saw it when Royce Gracie dominated the early UFC tournaments, even when his opponents out-weighed him dramatically (before weight classes, 176 pound Royce often went up against men who weighed well over 200 pounds).  We continued to see it time and time again in Pride and the UFC, before fighters became well rounded enough that striking specialists learned basic grappling techniques and defense.

The greatest MMA heavyweight of all time, Fedor Emelianenko, weighed in the range of

about 220-230 pounds in his prime, and was the smaller guy in almost all of his fights.

In this throwback to 90s/early 00's-era MMA, all Rousey would need against Mayweather is one chance to get the fight to the ground.  That could come about in a number of ways: catching Mayweather in the clinch as he steps in for an attack; getting a single leg takedown on Mayweather's vulnerable lead leg; being able to initiate the clinch against Mayweather later in the fight after cutting off his mobility with repeated leg kicks; Mayweather instinctively clinching against her, as he has a habit of doing.  It would only take one of these things happening, at any point during the fight, for Rousey to get the fight to the ground, in which case the fight would play out similarly to Randy Couture vs James Toney.

A lot of people think the strength disparity would be too much for Rousey to overcome.  And in the striking exchanges, they very well would be.  If Rousey got it in her head that she could actually beat him while staying in striking range the entire match she'd probably lose very quickly, even if her boxing skill level were at all comparable to Mayweather's (and it definitely isn't).

But MMA has a science and set of tactics behind it that are very different than boxing's, and Rousey's experience with and understanding of them outweighs Mayweather's substantially.  Physical strength matters- there's a reason why weight classes exist- but there is an irrefutable mountain of evidence that shows elite skill set can overcome a physical strength disparity if the physically stronger person isn't near their opponent's skill level.

Prediction: Rousey.

Sonny Liston and the Tragedy of Formerly Incarcerated People

Few people know the name Sonny Liston.  Is that... a spokesperson for mouthwash products?  A mascot for a generic Sunny-Delight ripoff juice brand?  A loveable character in a sitcom from the 70's?

Few people know his name, yet he is in one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th Century.  In fact, the photo may be the most iconic sports picture of the 20th Century.

Yeah, that's the one.

Sonny Liston captured the heavyweight title from Floyd Patterson on September 25th, 1962.  On February 25th, 1964, Liston lost the title to Muhammad Ali, then still known as Cassius Clay.  Yet Sonny Liston's story is much, much bigger than a simple fight record.  He fought as a heavyweight boxer during an era when boxing was one of the three major sports in the United States and the heavyweight champion had a larger than life cultural narrative attached to them.  Liston had his own narrative thrust upon him, and it wasn't pleasant.

Charles "Sonny" Liston was probably born some time between 1929 to 1932.  Yes, "probably", you read that right.  His real date of birth isn't actually known.  His parents were Tobe Liston and Helen Baskin, who lived in extreme poverty as sharecroppers in Arkansas.  Growing up, Liston's father beat Sonny and his siblings severely.  His mother left his father in 1946; she brought some of her children with her to St Louis, Missouri, but wasn't able to bring all of them.  Sonny was one of the ones who got left behind.

Liston worked various odd jobs until he could finally afford to run away to St Louis to be with his mom.  When he moved to the new city he tried to go to school, but was mocked for his illiteracy and quickly dropped out.  With no prospects for education or decent work, he turned to crime to feed himself and his family.  He had numerous run-ins with law enforcement, his first arrest coming in 1950 for armed robbery of a diner and two gas stations.  Sentenced to five years, he famously said "at least I'm guaranteed three meals a day."  During his time in prison, he learned how to box thanks to one of the Catholic priests who held services there.

Liston was released on parole in October of 1952.  Soon thereafter, he began his professional career as a boxer.  However, because of his criminal record, the only people who would finance him were those with connections to organized crime.  Having no other options- boxing was the only legitimate work he found that he could make a living off of- he became signed professionally under management connected to the underworld.  He also worked as an enforcer for them to supplement his income as a boxer.

Thus, the narrative around Liston as a boxer became that of a violent "thug."

Sonny Liston in his earlier days as a professional.

As a boxer, his style unfortunately supplemented the thug narrative.  He had the largest hands of any heavyweight champion ever, at 15 inches around, and an otherworldly power in his punches.  He scored many knockouts, which excited fans but further added to the negative image of him in the media.  To them this wasn't someone using "the sweet science" to defeat his opponents, but rather someone so strong he was almost more beast than man.

During the rest of the 50's Liston found success in the ring, but encounters with the law outside of it. As a youth he had been pushed into a life of crime by desperate circumstances, which wasn't helped by his large and threatening appearance.  Now he found himself stuck in a vicious cycle of being monitored and confronted by cops simply for being Sonny Liston, which created tensions between him and law enforcement that only added further to his demonization.  He was arrested multiple times while working for the mob enforcers that society had all but literally thrown him toward.

By the dawn of the next decade, however, he finally became a serious contender for the heavyweight championship.  He could no longer be ignored.  He could be, and was, very much loathed, however.  Especially in comparison to the reigning champion, Floyd Patterson.

Patterson was born January 4th, 1935.  On November 26th, 1956, he knocked out the elusive, all-time great Archie Moore to become the youngest ever heavyweight boxing champion at age 21.  Like Joe Louis over a decade before him, he was adored by everyone, even a good portion of white America.  He was quiet, thoughtful, and very open about his insecurities.  He supported integration and the Democratic Party, as opposed to the black militancy that Muhammad Ali would later come to represent.  He was, in many ways, the 'Good Negro' archetype to Sonny Liston's 'Bad Negro' archetype.

Floyd Patterson

Floyd Patterson grew up in conditions not too different from Sonny Liston: extreme poverty and hunger, which caused him to eventually resort to crime.  Specifically, petty theft.  There was one major difference between the youth of Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson, however, which defined the vastly different trajectories their lives would take: instead of ending up in prison, a teenage Patterson was sent to a reform school named Wiltwyck (a school championed by Eleanor Roosevelt, who Patterson became friends with).  The class sizes were small, the teachers were excellent, and, above all, Patterson was taught that he was worth something in a positive, affirming environment.  He spent two years there, and he credited it with completely turning his life around.

This opportunity that Patterson received but Liston didn't could be its own chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. In the Floyd Patterson biography written by W.K. Stratton, the writer mentions this disparity in opportunity and Patterson's awareness of it.  "Unlike Floyd, [Liston] was offered no opportunities akin to Wiltwyck to help him overcome his troubles. [...] Patterson saw much of himself in Liston. Floyd believed he could have ended up just like Liston- threatened by cops, doing time in prison, answering to gangsters- if life hadn't provided him opportunities Liston never received."

Many people didn't want the Patterson vs Liston fight to happen.  Everyone from the NAACP leadership to President JFK himself urged Patterson not to fight Liston.  The boxing press alternated between calling Liston a brute who didn't have the character of a champion to calling Patterson a coward for dodging Liston.  The bout was eventually signed, however, thanks in large part to Patterson thinking Liston deserved a chance at redemption.  Everyone from Frank Sinatra to Jackie Robinson heartily endorsed Floyd Patterson.

The fight itself was brutal.  Patterson used his wily head movement and landed his trademark left hook a few times.  It worked at lessening the severity of Liston's assault, but ultimately Liston was too much for him.  Liston used his signature approach of leading with his left hand, which was his dominant hand, a strategy Bruce Lee would be proud of.  Not only did he have power, but he had strong fundamentals and varied his jabbing technique as well.

Patterson vs Liston

Just past the two minute mark, it happened: Patterson hit the canvas.  The supposedly 'evil' side won by knockout.

Everyone in the world not named Sonny Liston seemed to be disappointed.  In a casual interview with writer James Baldwin before the fight, in which Sonny Liston opened up because Baldwin was one of the few people who ever approached him like a human being instead of a monster, Liston had said "I wouldn't be no bad example if I was up there.  I could tell a lot of those children what they need to know because I passed that way.  I could make them listen."

The day after winning the championship, Liston boarded a plane to Philadelphia.  He told one of his friends with him, reporter Jack McKinney, his plans for turning his image around.  "There's a lot of things I'm gonna do.  But one thing's very important: I want to reach my people.  I want to reach then and tell them, 'you don't have to worry about me disgracing you.  You won't have to worry about me stopping your progress.'  I want to go to colored churches and colored neighborhoods.  I know it was in the papers that the better class of colored people were hoping I'd lose, praying even, because they were afraid I wouldn't know how to act... I don't mean to be saying I'm just gonna be champion of my own people.  It says now I'm the world's champion and that's just the way it's gonna be.  I want to go to a lot of places- like orphan homes and reform schools.  I'll be able to say, 'kid, I know it's tough for you and it might even get tougher.  But don't give up on the world.  Good things can happen if you let them.'"

When he arrived at the airport after the fight, he walked from his seat to the outside with anticipation.  This was it, his new beginning.  He would move beyond his troubled past and start life anew, the heavyweight champion of the world, a man who'd made some mistakes but ultimately came to grow as a person.  A real underdog story in the flesh.

...except, the only people awaiting him outside were an adversarial boxing press, and a small group of them at that.  Not a single fan had shown up.

As McKinney said about their arrival: "You could see Sonny literally deflate like a balloon with the air being let out.  It was a good forty five seconds or minute before he finished taking in the whole scene, confirming to himself that there was nothing there, and then the next thing you know, his back stiffened and his shoulders rose, as if he was saying to himself, 'well, if this is the way it's going to be...'"

 Holy shit, here's a picture of kittens to counter how depressing that was.

 And so it was that Liston remained the "thug" heavyweight champion.  He faced Patterson in a rematch less than a year later, one which wasn't warranted after such a decisive victory, but was nonetheless demanded by the world in the hope that Patterson would regain his former title.  He quickly defeated Patterson once more, then faced a brash young challenger named Cassius Clay on February 24th, 1964.  The rest is history.

Liston never regained the title, but continued his mob-backed boxing career until his death in December of 1970.  He was found January 5th, 1971, by his wife, dead in their Las Vegas home after she returned home from a trip she had been on for two weeks.  His body was badly decomposed, and they couldn't figure out if it was a heroin overdose or lung congestion and heart failure that did him in, as he had a history of both heart and lung disease.  Like with his birth, Liston's exact date of death couldn't be determined, though the coroner estimated it to be December 30th.

To go back to James Baldwin's interview before the first Liston/Patterson fight, Baldwin said he went away from their meeting liking Liston.  "While there is a great deal of violence in him, I sense no cruelty at all.  Anyone who cared to could turn him into taffy.  [...]  it seems to me that he has suffered a great deal.  It is in his face, in the silence of that face, and in the curiously distant light in the eyes- a light which rarely signals because there have been so few answering signals."

Liston was the product of systematic racism and classism in a country that didn't like to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality, or even existence, of either of those forces.  When the reality of his experiences came with him into the limelight, society at large turned on him for his desperate responses to them.  Even the liberals.

Fast forward to the United States today.  We make up only about 5% of the world population, but almost 25% of the world's prison population.  Since 1970, our prison population has gone up about 700%.  About 37.6% of the prison population is black, despite making up about 13% of the total population.  Our bloated criminal justice system is still taking people who could be so much more, doing so because lobbying by large corporations keep legal penalties harsh so they can pay pocket change for prison labor, rather than pay normal employees proper wages.

Their board of directors are still hard at work trying to figure out

if there is a way to pay people exclusively in middle fingers.

I could go on about the systematic reasons behind why the prison industrial complex exists and all the ways in which prisons are so inhumane- not to mention how they create a culture of violence that often forces non violent offenders to become violent as a means of survival- but this post is about the experiences of formerly incarcerated people like Sonny Liston.

To my surprise, I've learned that most formerly incarcerated people don't go on to become heavyweight boxing champions that are loathed by the world at large.  In fact, many don't even become professional boxers at all!  Still, the core of Liston's experience is very common for those who serve their time in prison: stigmas attached to their status make it hard for them to transition back into life in the outside world.

Job and housing applications often require people to disclose whether or not they've been to prison, especially for a felony.  Many employers, especially in a hyper-competitive job market like our current one, instantly discard applications from felonies.  On top of that, the time those who have been locked up spent in prison means a gap in previous employment, credit building, and other such factors employers and/or landlords may look at when considering applicants.  Thus, even the more open-minded types of employers and landlords find gaps on applications from formerly incarcerated people that others don't have.

Thus creating a tragic cycle of Cookie Crisp theft and incarceration with no end in sight.

Think about that for a moment.  Getting by is hard enough as it is without a criminal record.  Just keeping your head above water in a fiscal sense is a terrifying and draining experience, and as we lose more private sector jobs to outsourcing or automation and more public sector jobs to tax breaks for the wealthy, it can only become harder.

Now imagine that same scenario we all face, but people don't want to hire you for even the minimum wage jobs, nor accept you as a tenant.

To be clear, this isn't to say that people in jail are perfect angels, or that employers and landlords don't have the right to know if applicants have ever committed a serious crime before.  The problem is that we live in a time where higher education, public assistance programs, and public spaces are receiving far less funding than they were a generation ago.  Meanwhile, as I mentioned above, the prison system is thriving and incarceration is at an all time high.  Over half a century later, young Floyd Pattersons and Sonny Listons everywhere are much more likely to end up in prison than in a place like Wiltwyck.  They'll get busted for minor offenses, get swallowed up by the prison machine, and get stuck in a cycle of incarceration that benefits no one except for the wealthy who lobby for harsh incarceration laws.

Don't take my word for it, either.  Michael A Wood is one of the many current or former (in his case, former) police officers talking about the problem with policing as it is currently constructed.  In a fantastic podcast interview with Joe Rogan, he recalls one kid in particular when he first started working as a cop in a unit dedicated to drugs: "I would interview these guys in the little rooms. And this one guy, Daniel Taylor, is the one I'm specifically remembering. And he was just a marijuana dealer, and he had a kid, and he was struggling to have this kid. He was young, he was trying to help. But he had gotten locked up a lot when he was younger, so he was selling weed to try to buy diapers for his kid. And he would tell me his stories, and he would be crying.

And it was just like, 'fuck!' There's no difference between this kid and me. There's nothing. The only difference is that when I had a dimebag in my pocket, there wasn't a chance in hell that anyone was gonna look. But him, he was gonna get caught eventually. And it sent him into that spiral. And this could've been a good kid. I wouldn't be surprised if he were still in jail now. There was nothing wrong with him.  Our whole system created a criminal out of a decent kid."

 We need to overhaul the system from the ground up so that people who are born into disadvantaged circumstances have room to grow and thrive.  As things are now, people in low income neighborhoods- especially low income black or Latino neighborhoods- are far, far more likely to end up with a prison sentence than with adequate resources for success.  And so there will continue to be more Sonny Listons, more Daniel Taylors, more children who could've been so much more and found so much more happiness if they'd only had the opportunity.

We need more Wiltwycks, not more prisons.


Note: all of the biographical information not linked to a website comes either from David Remnick's "King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero" (a fantastic book which also dedicates its opening chapters to both Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston to give context to the rise of Muhammad Ali) or W.K. Stratton's aforementioned biography of Floyd Patterson.

The Importance of History

For those of you reading who don't personally know me, a couple months ago I began working as a mentor for an after school program at an elementary school.  It's been a great experience so far.  One thing I try to do with the students in the program is ask them about their classes and what they've been learning about.  The other day, I had just such a conversation with one of my students.  As we talked about learning and which classes she likes, she told me point blank that she finds history boring.  I was saddened but not at all surprised.  It is a sentiment that all too many people have, and it's a serious problem.

And it's not really their fault, either.

This fall I'll be starting graduate school at San Diego State University, going for an MA in History with the goal of becoming a community college professor.  It'll be a tough road- and I don't just mean my schooling.  There's a good chance I'll be hired as an adjunct professor, and if so, a 25% chance I'll be on public assistance considering how little adjuncts are paid.  It'll be tough, but it will be worth it.

"And that concludes today's lecture about US-Nicaraguan relations during the pre- and post-revolutionary years through the lens of gender.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go rummage through a garbage can because I haven't eaten today."

But if you had told me ten years ago this would be my current path, my fifteen year old self would probably laugh at you.  Because back then, I still viewed history the way most people do: a long list of dates and proper nouns to memorize.  A bunch of names, places, and events that told me about the past, but not much else.  Even the war stories that were supposed to be "exciting" for male students held little interest for me.  There were some things here and there that captured my attention, but history as a whole?  Gracias, pero no.

In the time between then and now, however, my view on history has changed thanks to a variety of chances to see it in a different light.  From great teachers and professors, to the community college debate circuit, to underground hip hop (especially Immortal Technique), I was given the chance to learn that history is so much more than a list of numbers and words to memorize.

One of the most oft-repeated sentiments about history is that learning about our past helps us understand the present.  It's one of the most cliche sayings about history, but also one of the truest.  Knowledge of history allows us to give context to the world around us.  As a culture, we don't like learning about the past because we confuse knowing about the past with being stuck in the past (just look up all those feel-good graphics floating around on Facebook about never looking back and always living in the present).  But we miss out on so much of the world when we don't understand where everything came from.

To give an example, in my Top Everything of 2014 post my "Actual News Story of the Year" choice went to the US beginning to normalize relations with Cuba.  Now, to someone whose only knowledge of the history of US-Cuba relations is "Castro took over in a revolution and then there were missiles and the trade embargo happened because... communism?" are missing out on a lot of important information

The most important information: the Cuban rebels were known for their beards,

and were actually called Barbudos (bearded ones) by much of the press.

To give an incredibly brief summary of US-Cuban history, things started with the Spanish American War that began in 1898 between the US and Spain over Spain's territories.  The US won, and in 1903 the Platt Amendment was passed to make Cuba a "protectorate" (read: colony without using the word "colony") of the US.  That meant that whenever Cuba did anything to stand up for itself, and/or did anything to go against US interests, the US would intervene.  Those who came to power in Cuba had to be loyal to US interests, or they would be overthrown.

Revolt was common, but none truly succeeded until the 1959 Revolution, Fidel chief amongst the figures in the revolution.  Fidel's leadership after the revolution involved both good and bad: he mobilized literacy and healthcare campaigns in the countryside, changed the economy from the ground up to an egalitarian model that created a lot of gains for those who had been at the bottom, and overall created a strong socialist state that helped the people who needed it most.  On the other hand, he was a repressive dick who didn't allow the slightest bit of dissent or non-state approved voices.  But, however repressive he was, he wasn't any worse than Fulgencio Batista, his US-backed predecessor that he overthrew in the Revolution.

The Cubans that came to the US immediately after the 1959 Revolution were largely wealthy elites (which is why Cuban Americans are known for being staunchly conservative).  And, with their wealth and disdain for Castro, a strong anti-Fidel lobby was born.  The influence of the first wave of Cuban immigrants in favor of blacklisting Fidel's Cuba, and the lack of wealthy opposition, meant that the embargo with Cuba hadn't gone anywhere even a couple decades past the Cold War.  Politicians who tried in the past were met with fierce opposition from these first wave Cuban immigrants, while not having much of a political base of support in favor of normalizing relations with Cuba (plenty of people are for it, but no one has been for it strongly enough to lobby and organize around it as a cause).

So the embargo remained until the present, where most first wave Cuban immigrants have now died off, and both their descendants and later Cuban immigrants simply don't hold the same anti-Fidel opinions the first wave of immigrants did.  With less of a lobby around to fight against normalizing relations with Cuba, it has finally become a distinct possibility to do so.

Though we all know Pitbull's hardline pro-party outlook
is the most important Cuban American lobby of all.

Knowing just those four paragraphs of information drastically changes how we can look at, and think critically about, the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba.  There is so much more to this situation than "Cuba and the US didn't get along, communism is bad, trade embargo!"  And it brings up a lot of questions, the proper examination and answering of which are far beyond the scope of this post.

Beyond simply understanding the present, understanding history means we also have extra information that allows us to make more informed decisions when going into the future.  To stick with this same example, I support the idea of normalizing relations with Cuba.  But what will this normalization of relations look like?  Because using historical precedent, we see that when the US and Cuba had strong ties, the US was using Cuba like a colony.  That raises questions that need to be thought about moving forward, questions that we won't think to ask when we aren't aware of the comprehensive history behind a certain issue.  And right now many students in K-12 aren't taught a comprehensive history that challenges them to think critically.

To be clear, I don't think the watering down of history is some grand conspiracy that everyone in the K-12 education system is involved in.  Rather, I think it's a combination of a variety of factors,
none of which involve a bunch of shady Illuminati-types sitting around a table and laughing manically to themselves.

Yet, intentional or not, we have to teach history in a way that feels relevant and important to those learning it.  Otherwise, we are doomed to continue hearing students talk about how "boring" history is as their actual history is being ineffectually taught (or in some cases, like with ethnic studies in Arizona, even denied) to them.  More students like the ones in the program I mentor for, or even fifteen year old me, will continue to avoid history.  And there is no way we should want that to happen.  History is too important.

Nerd Culture, Artistic Merit, and Criticism

I am a proud nerd.  I play video games, read graphic novels and manga, and a few weeks ago I went to Wonder Con to be surrounded by my people.  If there is someone out there who thinks they could ever beat me in a pointless trivia contest about the nerdy shit I like, especially Final Fantasy games, they've got another thing coming.

A picture of me at Wonder Con, my natural habitat.

One of the biggest debates right now involving nerd culture is whether or not video games can legitimately be considered art.  There are a ton of positions people have taken in the debate- some say yes simply because it is a form of entertainment and that's enough to qualify it as art; some say yes because they think well made games have artistic merit beyond entertainment; some say no because they don't think games have any artistic merit; some say no, not out of disdain, but because they believe the interactive nature of games qualifies it as something else instead; some don't care because they think "real" art is a bullshit concept; some don't care because they simply don't care what their games are considered, they just want to play them.

Obviously, gamers as a whole have responded overwhelmingly in favor of considering games to be art.  As for me, I fall somewhere between "yes, video games at their best have artistic merit to them" and "I don't really give a shit because 'artistic merit' is an ambiguous, ever-changing, and often elitist concept" in the way I view it.  I personally play most of the video games I do because I enjoy the narratives in them, and I think the interactivity games have between player and character can add a certain dimension to story telling that other mediums don't have.  I don't really care about the opinion of the type of snobs who debate what "real" art is.  But, since I do think games have a lot to offer as an artistic medium for people who are serious about story telling, I'd therefore like them taken seriously by aspiring story-tellers so that we can continue to see great games get made.  I've written about poignant moments in video games before, and have used video game stories and characters as examples in other posts I've written about story telling.

Yet I've also noticed an alarming double standard in a substantial portion of the gaming community.  We want to claim our games are worth the classification of "art", and therefore have merit to them.  But, at the same time, whenever someone critically examines our medium in a way we don't like- especially when it comes to serious social issues like racism or sexism- a lot of us collectively lose. Our. Shit.

 

On second thought, nah, creating a game where you beat up a woman for gently calling out sexism
in games is a totally healthy and productive form of discourse, and not at all horrifyingly atrocious.

Aside from hordes of misogynists trying to run women off the internet (or out of campus speaking engagements with threats of school shootings) for speaking up about misogyny in games, one of the most common responses from gamers to these types of criticisms is "leave us alone, it's just entertainment!"  And yes, games certainly are entertainment, too.  But if we want our medium to be taken seriously- and it's pretty clear that most of us do- then we have to stop throwing a violent tantrum every time someone critiques our medium in a way we don't like.

Don't get me wrong, I get it.  We used to constantly be given shit for our past time, with criticisms ranging from gaming being a waste of time to it being used as a scapegoat for horrible acts of violence like school shootings.  Now, just when society is starting to take the medium more seriously, and with it also now becoming a popular activity that a substantial portion of the population enjoys, there are social critics saying our hobby has issues with sexism, or racism, or homophobia?  I just want to play video games in peace and have that be respected, damn it!

But here's the thing: we should be happy this is happening.  Because serious conversations about these topics don't happen for shit that no one takes seriously.  Has anyone ever had an in depth, nuanced conversation about race and gender dynamics in Family Circus?  Of course not, because nobody gives a shit.  The only time Family Circus has ever brought anything worthwhile to the table was when the comic was dubbed over by a PG-13 Robot created by a mohawk-sporting badass who wanted to teach that robot about the human concepts of friendship and absolute despair.

Thanks, PG-13 Bot.

We're living during a time where people are having serious conversations about video games through the lens of different social science, humanities, and social justice lenses.  When I went to Wonder Con, there were actually panels about these sorts of topics.  Panels about video games (and comics) and where they intersect with different topics like psychology, sociology, feminism, ethnic studies, anthropology, political science, economics, and more.  This isn't something that would be happening if we didn't take games seriously.

Taking something seriously as an art form doesn't only mean praising what it does well.  It means critically analyzing it, examining the medium through various lenses and trying to make thoughtful observations about what you experience.  We can't expect all of those observations to be ones we as gamers like.  And creating a shit storm each time that happens is like a teenager begging their parents for a car, getting it, and then getting upset whenever they have to pay for gas or take responsibility whenever they get into an accident.

I love gaming, and I will continue to think games have merit as an art form.  For that very same reason, I will also continue trying to think critically about games when playing them.  Including thinking about serious topics that might bring up uncomfortable observations.  Because both games and the gaming community do have some serious issues that need addressing (and subsequent action to be taken).  Not because there is inherently anything wrong with gaming or the people in it, as these issues can be found in anywhere; rather, because these games are created within societies that have these same issues.  And if we can't come to terms with the idea of games being analyzed in ways we don't like, then we have no business claiming games should be taken seriously.

But I think we should.  Because games are awesome for so many reasons, and have a lot to offer beyond only entertainment.  It's on us, as gamers, to decide if we want to recognize that, and everything that comes with it.