I'm greatly honored to introduce our speaker for tonight, Dr. Joseph Boyd. He is Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, also a Political Science Professor. He received his degree from Carroll College in Montana in Political Science, and a Ph.D. in Master's Degree from the University of Notre Dame in Political Science. We are really honored to have them share some of these expertise on the intersections between politics and popular culture. Please give them your full attention, and we will have time for questions and answers at the end of this talk. Thank you very much, Elise. Thank you. I really do have to extend a special thanks tonight in particular. Not only is it wet and it was incredibly foggy, so to venture out, thanks. The fact that you did it on Mardi Gras confuses me. And then, of course, later on tonight, I hear that there is actually something for those of you who are just here for the politics, that there's also something else happening tonight, some kind of joint address to Congress or something. So thank you very much for spending this time here and having this conversation. Hopefully it will be worth the effort and the putting off of the eating of the last remnants of King Cake. The content of this talk actually was something that comes from a chapter that I wrote for the philosophy of Christopher Nolan, looking at the film director, who's famous for movies like Inception, and then, of course, the Dark Knight trilogy, and trying to find a consistency within an approach to the philosophy of Christopher Nolan. I say that primarily because I originally wrote this chapter in 2014 and sort of put together this talk about a week before the elections. And I say that because there are a lot of parallels that folks are going to be able to draw to contemporary events, which is fantastic. It's also completely unintentional. But I think that it shows the importance of this kind of research agenda and this kind of research project, because it's not so much that we use popular culture to say, see this event is explained now. Instead, it's to look at the theoretical framework, what happens when we watch or consume popular culture that begins to frame our ideas, begins to frame our conceptions, and helps us then to start to understand the events that are happening around us through a very particular filter and through a very particular frame. So all of that being said, feel free to draw parallels. I hope that you will. I hope we can engage in that conversation. But to get started tonight, what I wanted to do is just talk a little bit about that research agenda that I mentioned, looking at popular culture as a mode of understanding politics. I've done a number of books and articles related to popular culture as a means of understanding the political realm. And I did so for really a reason. I started off because I had an opportunity to write something for the X-files of philosophy and I was a big X-files geek and so I'm not going to turn that down. And then actually the more I started to explore that, I began to realize I honestly don't believe that there's anything more important that I can study when it comes to politics and political science. That's not to say that there aren't other important questions out there right now. I just honestly believe with where America is in terms of its overall consumption of entertainment, the way in which we engage politics through entertainment forums and through forums of popular culture, whether that be social media, through the films, television, the songs that we watch, when football becomes political, when all of those things become the subject of politics. I think it's incredibly important that we understand what is it that people are consuming, how are they consuming it, and what is the implication that that might have when it comes to the formation of values or of identity. And so I'm going to actually start back and I have that famous picture of Plato and Aristotle sort of juxtaposed with Superman and Batman and actually it was for a reason that I chose. Supposedly in this famous picture of Plato and Aristotle, you have Plato sort of pointing up to sort of describe the forms, the ideals as it relates to politics, whereas Aristotle has his hand down almost like it's bringing us down to earth and to think about the practical and that's certainly something that becomes represented in these two iconic figures. The heroic ideal that is not even of this planet, right, is of the aether, is the Superman and then the one who engages in the much more practical down to earth. This is what has to be done in order to accomplish that. So that's why that image, by the way, was selected. And it's there actually that I want to start in thinking about the ancient Greeks to sort of think about why even talk about Batman? Why spend time on these films? Why is this even interesting? And in part it's because when we think about some of the early writings of individuals like Plato, he talks about art as being a form of imitation or mimesis. That there is the form, the ideal that is out there. That we can think of an ideal that is justice. Then there's the construct, right, how we form laws or how we form society in order to try to represent that justice, to try to represent that ideal. We have an abstract understanding of what justice is and then we write laws. We build judicial systems to try to then impose that justice or create a vehicle for that justice to exist. And then Plato says there's also the artistic rendering which he feels is an incredibly far removed horrible representation of what that form is. That rather than even being an actual physical representation, it's a mimic of even that. That art removes us farther and farther away from the form that is justice. He writes in the Republic that imitation is far removed from the truth for it touches only a small part of each thing and a part of that itself is only an image. But it's also interesting to note that Plato's criticism of art was not because it was irrelevant. It was not because it was unimportant. It was actually so relevant and so important that he felt that things like poems, songs, plays, all had to be sanctioned and edited or completely banned if they imparted the wrong kinds of ideas. And the reason for that is because he felt as though that while this art is imitating, while it is mimicking society around us, it also appeals to a very raw place in us, right, in a rational place but a place where we can be moved, a place where we can actually form identity and see value, even if it's not based on rationality. In other words, Socrates' big fear was that if we told the wrong kinds of stories, then the implications of that are going to be that we're going to have the wrong kinds of citizens who are going to pursue the wrong kinds of goals in a society that is horribly improperly structured. In other words, art becomes so important that it can begin to trump reason, that it can begin to move us down a path where it's entirely based on emotion, and it can actually then become more influential in public discourse and deliberation than even rational thought. So in that regard, Plato is saying that it's really critical for us to think about artistry, to think about entertainment, because we have to then understand the implications that that entertainment is going to have on an overall society. In my mind, that becomes all the more critical within a democratic society when what we're consuming, if in fact it is as powerful as Plato suggests and as numbers of political thinkers have suggested sent Plato, if we're relying on democratic discourse to lead us to making decisions, then what happens when our art, when our popular culture, when our entertainment begins to form our conversations more so than rational deliberative thought about evidence in public conversation? Now I say this as if somehow I'm going to sit here and tell you that then movies are entirely bad, that it's all horrible, and that's just not the case, because like with almost everything that's out there, there are positive sides to that same kind of dark side that exists. So just as art might persuade us to think irrationally, there might actually be some value to that. And one of the thinkers that I often reflect on in being, somebody who represents some of the positive things that come out of those emotional peals, is a philosopher who comes of course much, much, much later than the thinker like Plato, Richard Rorty. And Rorty talks about something known as sentimental education. He links it to the novel and it's becoming more broadly linked to any stories, in particular epic stories that have the ability to get us to think about individuals who are different than we are, to think about things like equality and like justice that may not be able to be represented in a purely rational or reasoned fashion. In other words, Rorty talks about the possibility of democracy being able to feel yourself in the struggles of others, to be able to see yourself represented in the struggles that other individuals are going through, because then and only then can we start making decisions not in our interest, but in a public interest, because we begin to see the human connection rather than just whatever my self-interested or rational ends happen to be for me, I can begin to see that extracted onto others. So Rorty actually makes very controversial claims about things like the novels, where he got in a lot of trouble at one point in time where he talked about how a book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, did more for civil rights than any direct action politic movement did. I think he's overstating the case, by the way. But I think he also has a point about the power of those novels to be able to enable us to see ourselves in other individuals, to be able to feel their struggles and to make those our own. And those same kinds of things happen when we start consuming films, when we start consuming television, when we feel a song for its politics, as much as it is that we think deliberately about evidence that might be presented to us. And so from that respect, popular culture does have the ability to make people think and to make people feel, to move individuals towards conclusions, and therefore is incredibly important for us to think about as scholars within American political society. Because democracy is really about a defined public sphere, about ways in which we interact with one another. And I had mentioned before that I feel as though this research agenda is the most important one that I can engage in, primarily because so much of politics, of political science, has been focused on a traditional conception of the public sphere, as being a space for individuals to have discussions about public concern, engage in political discussion, and activism with a goal of having outcomes of policy formation. I guess I would ask you, is that where politics stops? Is all politics about people coming together and having conversations within an open public forum in order to try to influence policy formation through activism? It's part of it. What are some other examples that you might raise about other types of political activity? Social media pops to mind immediately. Discussion, literary discussions can border on it. I think about the music in the 60s and the Vietnam protests. Are there other thoughts that haven't been covered there about where politics is taking place besides just in these direct action activities? Close doors where transactions are being made. Big donors and people with power. Excellent, excellent. We can envision the cloistered rooms where power deliberations and negotiations are happening outside of a public sphere. How about in the home? Politics happening there just as much as it is within these larger frameworks where values are imparted, where structures of power are certainly played out in a wide variety of different forms. You see the public sphere then is, is these things, are these things, is these things? I'll have to think about that. The public sphere certainly does have this traditional orientation. Habermas and others are not wrong about that. But I would argue that there's also an expanded understanding of the public sphere that deals as much with the policy oriented activity, the protest direct action politics as it does about the formation of political identity. You mentioned social media. And we know hopefully of the studies that have come out of how people become sort of very selective about the kinds of information that they'll get on their feeds that come through not typically as rational arguments but of means, of short videos, of songs, of cartoons that are all reinforcing or in some cases actually forming identity that people have that enabled them to think very specifically about the world around them. So my argument for popular culture and its importance is not to say that traditional direct action politics, the traditional conceptions of the public sphere, the traditional conceptions of democracy are wrong, but instead that we need to expand our understanding of that. We need to see popular culture as performing a political function. In this way, I would argue that popular culture can perform four very democratic, small d-democratic functions within our society that it can expose us to issues that might not otherwise be overlooked, and I should also add on to their or overlook issues, which is also equally powerful. It can legitimize viewpoints that were previously marginalized or it can reinforce values and structures and propositions that are held at the mainstream, that are held at the core of cultural belief. Popular culture can set agendas, introducing ideas to the public conversation, and it can also frame questions within a political context so that when we begin to think about questions, we're thinking about it not from some kind of objective or removed framework, but through a filter of how we've come to understand the world based on these images, ideas and values that are imparted through the kinds of things that we're consuming through popular culture. How do we address the issue of popular culture being a blend of entertainment and fact and almost becoming that, quote, unedited art that was discussed earlier where people accept popular culture as fact when it is a blend most of the time. It's a blend of opinion, it's a blend of fact, and then it's a blend of pure entertainment times. We don't always have the authors who at the end of the book say, by the way, these are the things that are fact and these are things that are a product of my imagination to make it more interesting. So how does that then impact the way opinions then are formed in regards to popular culture just not being accepted. It's a really great question, and my snarky answer is going to be you could have easily taken the words popular culture and just insert political discourse into what you just said, and it's a mix of fact, opinion, and entertainment. At the end, we don't have politicians who are coming out and saying, okay, here's what I know is fact, here's some of the stuff that I'm just kind of making up, and here are things that I'm just throwing out there as red meat to appeal to constituents. In a lot of ways, the reason why then the other sort of half of this is not to just say, hey, popular culture is really important. It's also then to start to decontextualize what's happening within popular culture so that we can understand the threads going through so that as then consumers of this entertainment media, entertainment culture, widespread, ubiquitous consumerism, we can become more critical thinkers, more critical consumers, so that we know what we're seeing when it's being imparted to us. So a recent example that I can think of that I'm struggling with, and Elise and I were talking about this, was just at a conference where a graduate student who is a native Hawaiian was presenting about the Disney film Moana, and went through here's what's happening in the story, and then she went through and said, now here all of the ways that Disney has taken these different Pacific Islander myth narratives lumped them together in a way that doesn't make any sense from a traditional cultural perspective, and more importantly is incredibly damaging to the culture and the way that it perceives itself. So in that way what she's doing is she's saying Disney has this power, and on the surface they're actually seeming like they're doing this sort of very inclusive, multi-ethnic, progressive kind of programming where they're going to take a Polynesian myth and represent it with heroes that don't look like traditional Disney princesses. Doing things that traditional Disney princesses didn't do, but also doing it in a way that really undermines some elements of Pacific Island culture, in particular the idea in spoiler alert, I do this a lot by the way, when Maui steals the heart that causes this whole thing to happen, but first of all that's not part of their myths, Maui is essentially a Pacific Islander Hercules, I mean that's the kind of myth that Maui is to represent, but moreover, and this I found really powerful when she presented on this, was that essentially then once Maui does that, that's what leads to a lot of the natural devastation then in the film, and it has to be restored, essentially saying that it wasn't through colonialization that the native populations within the Pacific Islands were decimated, but that they did that to themselves, it was their gods, it was their culture that was destroying it and that had to be reset somehow. And so in that way then there is this element to where these stories can introduce us to thinking about cultures differently, and it can also distort it in a way. So this project, and that's a very long story to say, that this project is really designed to get us to consume entertainment, that's going to happen, but to become really critical consumers of entertainment to ask what's really happening here, what are the implications of that. And to bring it around to why I think you all are here tonight, and I was going to do this like this the whole night, but I wanted to keep my voice once I switched over to Batman, so I'm not going to even try anymore. But this idea that popular culture is critical for us to understand is represented in the popularity of the image of the Dark Knight, the image of the Batman, which helped to actually propel a resurgence in consumerism centered around the superhero movie, the superhero epic films. So now we have almost every movie it seemed like that's being made is some new superhero spinoff, or some continuation of superhero stories. And so whether we're talking about really one of the resurgence of Batman with the Michael Keaton film that sort of initially rebooted Batman and initially sort of brought superhero stories back in to then Alan Moore's comic The Killing Joke, really helping to kind of reframe what the modern superhero is, Batman becomes a representation of what almost all of these superhero films are doing, whether we recognize it or not. In other words, Batman becomes quite literally a symbol, but in this way not necessarily of just these stories, but of a symbol that becomes a way that we can understand the superhero narrative and almost all action films as superhero films are a subgenre of the larger action hero framework. Because there are a number of elements that are present within a film like Batman that are ever present in our action hero genres, in our action hero films and movies. See Dark Knight is, as an action film, falls very strongly and very heavily into that action hero genre, where Carl Bergets, who had contributed to the Homer Simpson Ponder's politics looking at the action hero film, sets a theoretical framework for understanding the politics of the action hero movie that I think is best summarized in this quotation. The action hero movie values emotion over reason, intuition over empiricism, order over rights, uncompromising action over debate and due process, suspicion over tolerance. The genre does not redeem or validate anything fundamental about American judicial or political ideals or enlightenment values. Rather, it repudiates foundation of American liberal political theory. Think about that for a minute. What's more quintessentially American than John Wayne and John McClain? These action heroes who are essentially doing everything to violate the foundational principles on which American political culture is allegedly based. And Batman, as a representative of the genre, is perhaps one of the worst when it comes to violating rights, placing order over any consideration of rights, willing to torture, willing to engage in extraordinary rendition, willing to act over international lines at any point in time, never placing himself to actually considering due process of law, but instead just doing what needs to be done to restore order and to protect the people. And so Batman in a lot of ways reflects this ongoing conflict in our own political discourse because it really is setting that action hero narrative up against the liberal values that are America's political core. I should stop for a second and say, when political theorists refer to liberal values, who wants to take a stab at what that means? What is liberalism? The law is seeking the rights, respect for individual liberty. And that is represented in that top one. I should ask the questions before I advance the slides. Absolutely. I mean, at the core of liberalism is the emphasis on individual rights, on the individual's freedom, on an individual's liberty. And the notion that no individual, by their birthright, is better or more entitled than any other individual. That instead we have the right of law, we have due process of law that makes everyone equal under the law and that we are to have those rights that help us to engage individually in the pursuit of our own understanding of the good within a social framework. I have what I believe is good. Each of you have your understandings of what are good. Sometimes we might intersect and find that we share commonalities in our perceptions of the good and other times we're going to differ radically in how we understand the good life and what is good and what is valuable. Liberalism is a political theory that establishes a framework in which we can all have those different conceptions of the good and pursue them. Now that makes liberalism sound pretty sweet, in part because that's what a lot of our American political traditions are rooted in. Either this Lockean, then Jeffersonian, Madisonian understanding of individual rights as being incredibly important enshrined in public documents. But as much as America has a liberal foundation, America also has very strongly defined conservative traditions. What do I mean by conservatism and don't just, I should cover that up. What does conservatism mean as a political theory? It's exactly what you're talking about. Respect for tradition. We go all the way back to the 18th century, the importance of monarchy in place and social order over the upsurge of disruptive liberal civil rights. Why emphasize tradition? What is it about traditionalism that is important for a conservative thinker? Is it just keeping things the way they are for keeping them the way they are? I believe that traditionalism is a good thing that gives moral order and public order. And I guess because it works. Conservatives argue that the reason why traditions exist and the reason why traditions survive and thrive is because of practical experience. That these things worked and so there's a preservation of that tradition because they see society as being this repository of cumulative wisdom. In other words, that we have gone through a lot over time. We've gone through numerous changes, evolutions, revolutions, and that we begin to learn as human beings very practical ways of being able to solve political and social problems. And they say that those are largely solved not through sort of forcing through top-down change, but instead in preserving those traditional institutions that we value primarily because they work to the ends that we desire those institutions to work. So in that way it's not just we're resisting things because we're stodgy or because we're somehow rooted in or stuck in our own ways. Conservatives feel it's critical that we preserve those institutions for the sheer fact that they do work, that they help us from making the big mistake. And then they'll point to revolutions around the world and say see what happens in Russia when there's a revolution and what results from that. See what happens in China when there's a revolution and what results from that. See what happens in Cuba when there's a revolution and what results from that. They talk about what happens in their minds as being detrimental when those traditional institutions and cultural repositories of wisdom are not preserved. And within the United States, when you just think about the political founding, it's clear to see the tensions in liberalism and conservatism. The tensions between individual rights and the sense that localism and religion and traditional cultural groups and communities should ultimately make decisions. So American political values are caught up in this tension between liberalism and conservatism. It's America in conflict, and that's where the appeal of the superhero genre and the appeal of the Dark Knight becomes, I think, very interesting to consider. Because the Dark Knight is certainly very, very different than the Adam West sort of campy throwback. I hear that Dan Anhalt dances a really good bat-to-sea, by the way. So after it's all done, get him to give you the little cape and cowl moves. I understand that the only ones have watched the Adam West movies when they came out was not in the movies. I feel so badly because I think I was the only person in the Lego Batman movie who actually knew that Egghead was, indeed, an actual villain in the ancient Batman movies from the old texts. It scares me more than if you had the Lego version on your own. I have children. I have children, and I wanted to tell them all about it when I got home. That's a joke. They came with me. But played by Vincent Price, by the way, if you're wondering about Egghead. So Christopher Nolan gives us a version of Batman that is very political and is centered around this tension of liberalism and conservatism in America. How many of you are familiar with the Dark Knight trilogy? Okay, so several of you are. How do we get Batman? How did we get Batman? How did Batman start, right? Isn't that the first one, Batman Begins? How did Batman begin? I hear actually that Dr. Cullen won't give extra credit unless people respond to these questions. What does the bat has this symbol of fear? Well, what happened to him that he needed a symbol of fear? He fell down a well from that. He fell down a well and all these bats came. And it was terrifying to him, which is why ultimately he chooses that symbol of fear. But what else happens? For a while when he grows up, he's still Bruce Wayne. And in fact, Bruce Wayne is going to go seek revenge on the individual that killed his parents, right? He goes to the courtroom where he's going to actually gun down this criminal who shot his parents. But unfortunately, the crime boss, Carmen Falcone, beats him to it because Joe Chill, of course, is going to rat out the entire mafioso organization that's running Gotham. And so Bruce Wayne feels deprived of this revenge that he was going to seek. And so he goes and he goes into the mob boss's restaurant in this really seedy part of Gotham and he's going to stand up to the mafia and the mob boss makes fun of it. Look at Prince of Gotham walking in here thinking he knows anything about what criminals are and what this element is or that this action is going to mean anything. And in fact, it's really Falcone in throwing him out that inspires Bruce Wayne then to go and actually learn what it means to be a criminal because what he begins to see in that moment is that he is completely powerless. This billionaire who has seemingly everything is powerless to be able to restore order within the state because he needs to become something larger. The state is ineffective. The police are corrupt in Gotham. The institutions are impotent or also corrupt. They're run by crime. People live in fear. Bruce Wayne needs to become something more.  He never becomes a real criminal himself because he'll only ever steal from Wayne Industries. So he's just stealing from himself but he's learning about this criminal element. And it's actually, I believe it was in a Turkish prison that he was approached by a man representing Raza Ghul in the League of Shadows where they're going to teach Bruce Wayne how to become something more. It's where then Bruce Wayne ultimately sort of sheds part of his identity to embrace the bad hand and become a symbol of something larger because he's going to impose order back on this community that had been overrun where the state had failed time and again to protect the people of Gotham and to preserve actual order. So this is very different than the Adam West Batman who used to just hang out until Commissioner Gordon would give him a call and say, hey, let's work together on something. This is a person now who's going to be working completely outside of the state and in a lot of ways, countermanding what the state is even trying to preserve. When you think of the original Batman, I always think of the 1960s. The social unrest that existed and the difference in the hero then at that point in a time of what was viewed as social unrest. And it predates most of the real serious social unrest. I have not the Civil Rights Era. No, not the Civil Rights Era. But that kind of calmed down a little bit because you had the Voting Rights Act in the past before this came out. Well, the real Batman was in 1965. So it's only in here after the Civil Rights Act. So that's why I think of it as that it heals like it tries to capture a little bit at least what that era was like in the 1960s and where our social consciousness was at that point versus right now. Well, and interestingly enough, I think when you look at the themes that come out of the 1960s Batman and actually a lot of the comics of that era and what was known as sort of the Golden Age of comics and then what was inspired from that, those are comics that are attempting to actually sort of re-embrace the American idea, right? It was a reinforcing of the state. And when we think about the social movements even at the time, the social movements, although there were some pushing for really exclusionary, more nationalistic movements within the broader framework, a lot of the mainstream sort of Civil Rights efforts were an attempt to make America expand its citizenship, expand its rights, expand the promise, not work outside of that promise because it had ultimately become a failure. I would argue that over time what begins to happen is just as we enter into sort of the second and third waves of Civil Rights and as we enter into really a postmodern political age where our discourse becomes really fractionalized and becomes reinforced in these small sort of echo chambers that seem to all hold that theirs is the only real sort of value and way of looking at the world, that's where we start to get some of these darker images. And so I think that what we see in those films is understandable in thinking about the differences between what the movements were trying to do at one time versus where we are now as a society. So I want to be conscious of time here and get to some of the ways in which the Christopher Nolan's Batman attempts to engage in a political program. I want to make it very clear that while Batman presents, the Dark Knight presents, a theoretical framework for understanding politics, it does not do it from an individually consistent way. And that's the interesting thing about somebody like Nolan is he grabs a little bit of this kind of conservatism, a little bit of that kind of conservatism and sort of remakes a character where we can see a number of these political thinkers and political traditions under the conservative umbrella operating all at the same time. So I start actually with David Hume because I think that it's actually a humane element, a humane strain of politics that we see really underwriting a number of the social conservative movements and social conservative thinking within the United States. David Hume really strongly inspired James Madison's understanding of how social order needed to be based on a humane understanding of what the individual was like. And David Hume talked about the notion of how politics itself should be based on practices that are embedded in common life in our traditions rather than in more abstract concepts like rights or the consent of the governed, right, democracy. And the reason for that is because Hume actually sees those abstractions as working against the principles of political authority, working against social order. That when we have individual rights, that means that there are times that we become more important than a social good. Now think about that for a minute and think about exactly what due process is designed to do. We may have lots of reasons to believe that somebody is very, very guilty of an incredibly heinous crime. But due process means that we have to go through a very strict process in order to be able to try to prove that individual guilty or to even gather evidence to see if we might have made a mistake in our understandings, right? In other words, it places the individual at a position of primacy and that the state is actually trying to work to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this individual is guilty. And for Hume, that can sometimes get in the way of actual social good, of social order. And that rather than thinking of abstract concepts of rights such as freedom of speech, we ought to be thinking about what type of speech we ought to engage in. What are our responsibilities in engaging in communication, right? In that way, he actually looks at saying that sometimes there is a social good that should trump individual rights in that abstract sort of notion. And Hume also feels that legitimacy of political authority rests on the habit of obedience. In other words, that we begin to see things as legitimate in terms of authority because we're habituated to understand systems of order, political structure. And so what's interesting then is that means that authority or the power to control would exist a priori of any kind of willful act that we would have, thus undermining this idea that we entered into a social contract, right? That we came together and that we formed a state based on principles of rights. Hume would say actually authority existed before that was even enabled to happen. There had to be structures of authority and that ultimately we get habituated towards those which undermines this idea of rights as being the core of any kind of political order. And for individuals like Hume, anarchy is a concept that ought to be avoided above all of their things, right? Anarchy meaning the complete dissolution, destruction of the state, the elimination of a social order. And I'll have to qualify it, I guess, by saying Hobbesian natural state of nature kind of anarchy because otherwise Dan's gonna tell me it has too many rules and then it's a completely different discussion. But anarchy is to be avoided because there's virtually, it's virtually a no one self-interest, right? That absent the state, right? We can't form meaningful political bonds. Conservatives like Hume, again, tend to buy into that notion of Hobbesian state of nature where we might cooperate for a period of time but only insofar as it's in our interest and when it stops being in our interest then we end up degenerating into warfare, right? So ultimately it leads to a life that Hobbes describes as nasty, brutish, and short. And that's the kind of anarchy that conservatives like Hume see. And so it's the need to prevent society from falling into disorder that conservatives would ultimately argue that we need to establish authority and to have that operate even if it's against sometimes those very principles that we say we wanna preserve, right? In the film, and I know you can't see the image very well because of the light but the district attorney Harvey Dent who was supposed to be the white knight of Gotham representing all that was good and right about the state. All that was good and right about these institutions.  And he loses all belief and understanding in the state as being able to preserve this that you can't somehow solve these problems, these great existential threats by being a decent person or abiding by values or justice or the law. His quotation, you thought we could be decent men in an indecent time. And this is where conservatives actually would argue that you're right. Sometimes there are such threats that it would cause us to actually step outside of those values that we would hold dear because that's the only way that we can preserve and protect order. That's the only way that we can restore order to a society and prevent that existential threat. And that's where Batman then steps in. The state has utterly failed. The institutions are either, as I mentioned before, corrupt or impotent. And Batman, Bruce Wayne as the Dark Knight, steps outside of any of the constraints of the state, even working against those values and some of the challenges they're presented by those individuals that are closest to him. Lucius Fox or Rachel Dawes or even Alfred.  But he goes against all of those things in order to try to restore order. To try to restore justice where the state has ultimately failed. And those pursuits set him directly at odds with the political institutions that make up Gotham and at his core against the kinds of liberal protections that ultimately define the American political state. Batman as a vigilante figure becomes a representation of anti-statism. The state has failed us. Our institutions are unable to deal with the threats that are all around us. These institutions can no longer help us. His vigilantism is actually an anti-statist argument that as the hero Batman actually takes on and dawns the role of being the metaphorical sovereign. In other words, the state can't provide order. The sovereign is the one who can do that. And the sovereign is ultimately justified in engaging in any action that is necessary to restore order because that's the only way that these principles can even exist in normal times. Now, what's interesting too is when you start to think about the villains that are in Gotham, they are not of Gotham. In fact, as in many, many, many, and I'm not willing to say all because I've not seen every single action hero movie, it's often some time of external existential threat. It's not one of the community, right? It's a threat being imposed on the community. So it's not like Batman's turning against the people of Gotham. There's this existential external threat that he's going to rise up and protect the people of Gotham. The hero, however, right, Bruce Wayne, the son crown prince of Gotham, right? His Gotham said he is of the community. He is part of the community. He is both the elite and his family engaged in numerous charitable actions is of the people, right? He is a child of Gotham. It's the community sort of insulating against external threats. And we can talk a little bit about that, how that feeds into and all of these narrative perceptions of external individuals, people around the world, the quote unquote other, right? And the formation of the other as being individuals who are different from us, who are outside of our community that become a threat in terms of the perception of those who would see that as being villainous. Batman is somebody who's going to see that around him these ineffective liberal democratic actors, right? These state institutions that are ineffective. They're actually just enabling the enemy, right? Because they're enabling the enemy, because they're giving the enemy all these protections of laws and due process. They're not willing to do what's necessary to take the enemy down. So that just enables the enemy to act. And so the hero, right, Batman, declares a state of exception, right? We value, we hold these truths as being important, but not right now because the threat's too great. Declares the state of exception because as the film seems to suggest, the only way to preserve the law is to break it, is to go outside of the law. That's the only way to restore order. And so ultimately then Batman begins to reflect this kind of neo-conservative distrust of liberalism and the principles upon which the liberal state is founded on. So why do I say neo-conservatism? Well that's because ultimately if we are to think of Hume as being somebody and that Hume and Burke, individuals who represent a sort of classical or traditional kind of conservatism, there was sort of a new brand of conservatism, neo or new conservatism, that began to arise in political thinking, that began to take elements that are actually very authoritarian, very reactionary in nature, and wed those two of the principles of conservatism to create this kind of new political thinking. One of those individuals who was very influential in doing that was Carl Schmidt, who argued that the sovereign, or the ultimate political authority, is not what's defined by law necessarily, but instead whoever has the ability to declare the state of exception in a time of perceived crisis. In a time of crisis, the sovereign is freed from the usual constraints of law, from the limits that are imposed on, that it's no longer crippled by procedural limitations, that it must do whatever is necessary in order to be able to establish an equilibrium within the state, in order again to restore order. And Carl Schmidt inspires thinkers like Daniel Bell and Irving Crystal, who were very actually influential in defining a lot of modern conservative political agenda and had an incredible amount of influence on the formation of the Republican Party platform. In particular, during the second Bush administration, there were a number of individuals within the administration who used to cite these two thinkers in particular as sort of a justification for a number of the efforts that were engaged in the war on terrorism. That ultimately, these neo-conservative thinkers argued that liberalism's evolution has gone from one of freedom, of individual rights, liberty and freedom, to one of state control. The modern phrase that I've heard, and some of you may, does anybody know who Steve Bannon is? Has anybody heard that name recently? He's a top-level advisor within Donald Trump's administration. He uses a different phrase than state control. Has anybody heard the phrase, the administrative state? That's one that has become very popularized and it's introduced, it's worked its way into a lot of recent press conferences. And it's this notion that somehow it's no longer really even freedom because the state has become so administratively heavy that it's begun to regulate freedom out of social action. So that, again, is that sort of thread of neo-conservative political thinking within modern politics. And it's this notion that somehow, once the state becomes so administratively burdened, it becomes ineffective to actually deal with problems. That you need something that's outside of the administrative state in order to be able to actually deal with real problems. Now, like traditional conservatives, neo-cons embrace this notion of traditionalism. They actually embrace the notion, preservation of values and of traditional institutions, but unlike traditional conservatives, who were incredibly skeptical of any kind of top-down authority, to preserved localism, right, to preserved cultural institutions as a means of responding to social problems, neo-conservatives embrace top-down state-mandated policy to effect change. In other words, centralization is now a tool of power rather than a tool of vice. That this becomes a way that if we can somehow have centralized power that is unaccountable to the people, then that can actually be used to impose sort of positive responses when crisis arise. And neo-conservatives began to look out and criticize then what's happening with liberalism as it forms into the administrative state, saying that liberalism can ultimately devolve into two primary ways, or two primary ends. First, it either becomes a valueless nihilism where we become so focused on equality and inclusion and multiculturalism that nothing has value anymore because there are no values that are enabled to be placed in a position of primacy over any others, or it becomes what is referred to as brutal statism, that the state becomes such an incredibly decentralized authority that it begins to crack down on any true freedom. So that was coming from the thinker Leo Strauss who also falls into that sort of neo-conservative tradition. And I say that because we see that criticism emerge within the villains of Batman. First and foremost, we have liberalism as valueless nihilism, the Joker, the individual who makes claims such as, the world is only, or the only sensible way to live in this world is without rules. Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am?  I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just do things, right? There's no value there. There's no there there, right? He's a person that Alfred described as one of those individuals who just wants to see the world burn. And one of his lines, introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos. The Joker is there to destroy institutions, to tear it all down because none of it has meaning anymore. He's the representation of the ends of liberalism from the Straussian point of view. This valueless kind of nihilism in which nothing makes sense. And those other villains within Gotham represent the other end of the perspective that Strauss since reduces. The notion of liberalism as brutal statism. Now, I kid you not, this slide, and you can go back and look, I had this slide in the presentation before the election. This quotation from this movie was actually sort of paraphrased in a number of people, and of course the administration denies it. But the Trump administration, in his inaugural address to the United States, used part of Bain's speech. This notion of right here, the powerful be ripped from their decadent nests. Oh, no, it was this one right here. We take Gotham from the corrupt, the rich, the oppressors of generations who have kept you down with midst of opportunity, and we give it back to you, the people.  It was really, it's very, very funny. And again, I think that I don't want to dwell too much on, you know, trying to make the connections between you see how this impacts this, but what I think is really critical is to again think about how ultimately we start to think about some of these principles, some of these ideas, and how those get represented. But Bain, who works as an agent, essentially of Raza Ghul and later his daughter Talia Ghul, they're set out on ultimately raising Gotham, right? They're going to destroy it, but they're going to do it actually in a way that engages in sort of a revolutionary overthrow of the state to impose a very brutal form of statism until inevitably they'll destroy everything, right? Through a giant bomb underneath the city. And I just, I want to finish the rest of that quotation because I think again it captures this idea of liberalism as brutal statism. Gotham is yours, none shall interfere. Please you please start by storming Blackgate, the prison, and freeing the oppressed. Step forward, those who would serve for an army, it should be an army, not an army will be raised. The power will be ripped from their decadent nests and cast out of the cold world that we know and endure. Courts will be convened, spoils will be enjoyed, blood will be shed, the police will survive as they learn to serve true justice. This great city it will endure, Gotham will survive, right? And all of those then, both of those versions of liberalism as an end from that neo-conservative perspective then get represented in these films where Batman as a symbol of the state is as much defined as that which he is battling against as he is an independent character. In other words Batman becomes a response to these threads of perceived threat which are coming from again that neo-conservative perspective are coming from the ends of liberalism. So Bruce Wayne at great personal sacrifice grows a beard, becomes hobbled, I think we're a lot alike in a lot of ways. A great personal sacrifice attempts to preserve this belief and decency of the political elites. What's interesting about the Dark Knight is that at the end of the Dark Knight rises the second film or I'm sorry the Dark Knight no the Dark Knight, period is that he ultimately tries to preserve the image of D.A. Harvey Dent. Not as Too Faced, the villain but as the White Knight, as the savior of Gotham because ultimately that's the way that then he can restore order. But of course a really critical question is what if Bruce Wayne decides not what happens when Bruce Wayne decides that there is no end to the state of exception. What happens when the Batman decides that everything becomes a threat. It's all an existential threat. What happens then? And the films sort of deal with this not in a very historically accurate way but certainly in a way that is intended to sort of laugh off this idea that somehow Batman wouldn't cede power back. D.A. Harvey Dent said when the enemies were at their gates the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect the city. And Daz's response, Rachel Daz's response which has never really dealt with is the last man who they appointed to protect the Republic was named Caesar who never gave up his power.  And that ultimately is what Batman takes on. He becomes the villain for the people of Gotham for some time so he can preserve order and then step away and then they can have their city back. That's the people of Gotham really turning to a figure that we don't fully understand. When we look to those individuals who are willing to step outside of the traditional order we have to ask them logically where are those lines drawn how do we ensure that we remain somehow protected or that order would ever be restored. These films would celebrate the hero as this anti-state actor who will preserve us from these existential threats really start to impart a conditioning where in the United States as consumers of this kind of entertainment we become much more susceptible to arguments that make those kinds of claims about suspending rights. Where we become more willing to question whether or not individual rights, freedoms and due process are really all that important and if you haven't done anything wrong what do you have to fear kind of thing? And those are very dangerous to any kind of society that ultimately roots itself in principles of rule of law of rights of principles of justice and this form of political equality. I feel that I tried to wrap that up a little bit quickly because I know I've only got about five minutes left and I wanted to make sure that I had enough time to engage in conversation so I'm going to stop with the presentation portion and move to any kinds of questions, comments, feedback that you all have. It's fascinating to me that the neoconservative critique of liberalism echoes very, very closely the Nazi critique of the Weimar system. Wow. So we say it's new but that's 80 years ago now, 90 years ago in the 1920s. Sure. Here's where I agree because they're both rooted in the same kind of reactionary political attitude that there's a notion that somehow there's something great to restore some kind of recovery story and that we're reacting against liberalism or freedoms or the state run amok and that we need to restore us back to a principle in time. Now that being said and of course Strauss is somebody who echoes a lot of fascist political thinkers not just from the Nazi traditions but from other fascist traditions as well and yet it's also something that I wouldn't fully equate the kind of neoconservative perspective with what the intended outcomes of the fascist state are. So they've got very kind of similar critiques of liberalism but then take that to I think very different ends as to instead of trying to move towards sort of an ongoing state where everybody has their place in the social order and beginning to view the state more like an organic body than as some kind of institutional product of human action juxtaposed that with individuals who would use state power to try to dismantle administration and ultimately if the ends are to be fulfilled preserve or to return to some kind of more localized control but that being said I think you're right they're born of the same river in terms of reactionary kinds of principles but I can also say so are Ein Rand and Karl Marx they're both born of the same river as well because they both sort of have the same principle of what it means to produce something to make something of value then they just split it into very different ends as to then well what does that then mean by way of rights as well Yeah I would differ in the one area with the in that they both talk about this idea of the sovereign they might have used that phrase but it fits very much what he saw himself as Yeah absolutely and again I think that there are a lot of really strong parallels and I think that there are at least from a political theory perspective there are different ends of the movement Yeah please One thing that I just kind of found interesting in my other connection was before when we talked about how the people become more important than a new process or rights I can kind of see that happening after like 9-11 we had a huge up front of national security like all that happened where there was more security more monitoring and different things and working with safety and now we've had a lot of orders but like I'm trying to balance on similar ways Yeah and again I think that that's sort of what I think what makes that end more palatable as we begin to think about why is it that people are so quick to want to sacrifice aspects of freedom and protection in order to be able to have that restoration of order in part we understand it through the sort of political history and the traditions that come to form sort of the core of belief in the United States I think another part of it is how these issues get framed time and time and time again so that we begin to see the representation of when the state is ineffective it can lead to all these horrible ends, remember after September 11 I remember people walking around saying this is terrorism now this is the new normal from that attack so people were seeing that as this existential threat that would be perpetual unless the state did something immediately to react and we were willing to accept almost anything the state was willing to do as long as it made us feel safe and so there were a number then of very rapid political changes that really set up questions of security and individual rights and due process and I think at least in part one of the reasons we can understand that is because again how these issues of existential threats are constantly framed through that consumer entertainment how we've been socialized through our stories to begin to perceive the world around us so any reason to have you seen the vein where the pop culture genres that depict the U.S. or whatever the society is is always in the state of war because the idea is power take away rights like Alex was saying because it's a crisis or it's a war you know if we think about our U.S. recent history from cold war to war on terror even the 90s Paris concerns the war on drugs so do you see that in your research that it's like all this time war so we always need to extend within the action hero genre and the sub-genres that go with that even when I think I was really hoping that for example Captain America Civil War was going to set up a complex argument of trying to balance what do we do with these super humans that are not answerable to any state but instead that argument which it was building up to it's just sort of like but then a crisis really emerges again and now we're all on board we can deal with that again and let them try to come get me and I'll stand up and take the law on my own hands again and so I think that within those action hero genres it's always a state of crisis it may not be full blown war but there's always some kind of breakdown of the state there's an inability of the state to really engage in these sort of extra status measures and that either is from some kind of individual acting outside of the state or the elimination of the barriers within the state that enable heroic figures like a president for example to stand up there's a reason why we never see congress as the hero in an action film one it wouldn't be interesting and two because institutions aren't heroic people are symbols are ideas are and so what then you do is you always create these sort of barriers and in fact one of the things that I'm hoping to work on next is looking at the way that in any kind of political movie congress is always set up as the enemy and as something that creates problems for the heroic president and not just as a we've got differences of opinions that we need to work through committee and compromise but instead there's a real enemy creation anybody who opposes the presidency somehow is demonized, vilified and we usually find out that they're corrupt and doing it for wrong kinds of ends so in any time the presidency is sort of elevated to that heroic status bureaucratic agencies and congress are always seen as an obstacle to be eliminated never something to be worked through and I want to work through that a little bit more so one it depends on the genre and and two if we're talking about these kinds of films absolutely there is always that state of crisis and there's always the replacing of the sovereign somehow by this other force any? Like I might be going out on a limb here but when you're saying like congress a lot of different people I can kind of connect that to the justice league perfect or it's not just one hero it's multiple heroes coming together and working together to solve a problem I don't know what problem is of a face and a movie so I just kind of think that maybe we might see some representation of that but maybe in the program Well and again I think that you're going to see a different version of what we already see in the Avengers just with darker lighting and because it's a DC movie but you know within that sort of the I almost said super friends that dates me within the justice league narrative Batman once again does a little something interesting and you see this actually introduced even before some of the you know in some of these other films I think it was at the end of Suicide Squad which I think I'm one of six people who didn't think that was a terrible movie and Batman gets files on everybody and in some of the justice league sort of narratives Batman has actually assembled together all of the weapons that will take down every single one of the other superheroes because even within that framework Batman sees that there is a necessary moment in time where he may have to step in and reimpose order because he sees himself as being sort of again that sovereign that has to sometimes declare a state of emergency even amongst the exceptional he makes like a little kryptonite bullet right well that's right he just has really interesting gadgets I started actually really worried about myself when I realized for a long time my two favorite superheroes were Batman and Iron Man and then I was just like I just have like a thing with like billionaires with gadgets right it's some probably Peter Pan fantasy that I've got I grew up so any final questions I know I've really imposed on your time tonight so I'm sorry but the people that say that they would rather have the overall people's rights rather than individual rights what happens when somebody has said that they're guilty and they're not I mean if it's all about the citizens right it doesn't you don't have any individual rights or purpose I mean doesn't that kind of just make us all I mean I don't have to go but to an extent that we're all just kind of doing what we have to do rather than being part of a bigger picture that's interesting I think what the again coming from a political theory perspective what I think a conservative would argue is you know there's nothing wrong inherently with the idea of rights per se most of the time rights are just fine right it enables us a framework in which we can act in some kind of social area but we shouldn't let that abstract notion of rights get in the way of us doing what needs to be done in times of crisis right and so the conservative political thinker would say that rights only have value in so far as they're practical for achieving some kind of collective communal good right and in their mind that community good is what should be strived for and that rights as a concept are devoid of any real value except as tools that help us to achieve the common good but in times where in rights can step in the way of the common good if for example I were to start using I you know incredibly this is probably not the best example but really just vile rhetoric all the time where it was really tearing away at sort of a social order and then I just say freedom of speech right the true political conservative right from a political theory perspective would say we ought not let that individual claim to some kind of license or liberty reign supreme all the time that sometimes we need to censor activities for the social good and so that's where you'll see conservative arguments for example that align in a lot of ways with the number of feminist arguments against pornography the notions that somehow individual's ability to just kind of do whatever they want and say it's a form of expression and the market accepts it they see that as individualism run amok and something that ought to be censored and pushed out of society because it's devoid of social benefit and it actually leads to social harm and so in that way then a conservative would say most of the time right at least a conservative within the United States or even most of the time freedom of speech freedom of expression is what helps democracy work but that's not universal and it ought not be treated as a universal that trumps the social good where's the conservative then take or the line on the crisis that does never end so you mentioned you alluded to a little bit kind of with the Harvey Dent comment and I think of course I'm a German history specialist I think of the Reichstag fire we have this crisis we've got to get old communists we've got to get all these people arrested but that crisis never ends it just sort of continues and this is where I also have and what I hope comes out of this is the sense that whenever I say liberal I say we whenever I say conservative I say we whenever I say fascist I tend to say we and so I will admit though now to a personal aspect of my politics I'm Orwellian in the sense that Orwell has that really beautiful line in 1984 that no revolutionary movement ever captured control just to then later see it back to the people that the real danger here is that threat of once someone takes over then the crisis in order to continue to justify the legitimacy of power is to continue to manufacture crisis after crisis after crisis so as to never leave that state of exception and that becomes the danger that ultimately Harvey Dent says well then you're either the hero because you've done something and then you step away or you live long enough to become the villain where you then become that thing that you were battling against now what makes Batman of course a hero as opposed to many movements throughout history is that ultimately once that existential crisis has been completely eliminated Raza Ghul is gone, Talia Ghul is gone Bane is gone, all of these existential threats are gone then Batman fakes his own death and moves to Paris with Catwoman because that was he fulfilled his responsibility orders restored, people believe in the state he's not there to tear down institutions, what becomes dangerous is when we can't trust individuals to act like stories do, when we can't trust them to become the heroes and that becomes I think the danger and I'm happy to stay and chat with people individually, I also want to let folks drive home I do want to leave you with one last anecdote one of my favorite moments in all of the primaries in this last presidential election was when now President Trump flew his helicopter into Iowa for one of the early sort of primary events and this little kid walked up to him and saw a billionaire just hop off his plane to come around and have people gather around him and he just said are you Batman so I'll leave it up to you to whether or not he actually was Batman


Everybody forced here up in one box the 2021 prison football hobby for Connor C Connor. Thank you very much Good luck.  They get the card. It's a different guy play heat What did he play for the heat? There's one of those Sticky things Sticky note things It's the second pack tonight. We've seen that out All right, anyway There's a Herbert second-year base Rookie's Jalen Phillips Eric Stokes green scope rookie desvets Patrick the 75 and Auto in the first pack is a rich again and a franchise legends auto It's a 99 on the rich again and yeah, I mean prism is not a product about the autos though Jacob Harris Chris Evans orange for the Bucks Anton Winfield junior to 249 and Ricky emergent Jamar Chase Yeah, if you're chasing specifically autos, I think there's better products to rib But I mean that's just not what prism is about Schubert Hubbard Demetric Felton blue wave Terrell Davis to 199 Doesn't have numbered. I feel like it was like that last year. You can hit numbered stuff Ricky's Kelvin Joseph Rashad Bateman Blue wave Tony Romo to 199 Ricky's Tys and Campbell J2 fell a red wave Russell gauge to 149 Silver rookie auto Kenan Wang Wu. Yeah, I usually I only rip retail people say it's good I mean, I don't like go out and get it right away for the most part unless it's like the right price or if it's like Like tops chrome baseball update was like they only do like the mega boxes and stuff So that's one way to go Peyton Turner a Sante Samuel green scope Jalen Ramsey to 75 Patrick Mahomes Heck yeah, Jeremiah. Heck yeah Cleal Herbert quitty pay purple power Kevin Byard to 49 Silver Jared Cook Joe Burrow second year Rookie's Seth Williams kind of gain. Well purple ice Adam Thielen color match at 225 Silver Pat Tillman nice Pat. Yeah, eventually Chris. Don't come out with stuff Ellinger Tyler Wallace hyper rookie Pete Werner Saints to 175 and locked down Blake Martinez Let me find it like target one more son. Yeah Trask Cox Hyper Odell Beckham jr. To 175 and Silver rookie Carlos boogie Basham Come on big card here, let's see it Rookie's Amberie Thomas Amari Rogers purple ice rookie Javante Williams at 225 Nice Javante and silver for the Giants Leonard Williams. No idea what Beckham does to be honest How long is he gonna be out for? Rookie's Greg Rousseau jaymond Davis purple for the Jets Denzel Mims to 125 and New recruits rookie Travis ETN Thanks again for the order Connor. We will get those cards right out to you


So hello and welcome everyone. Can you all hear me? If someone can confirm in the chat section Perfect. Thank you so much So hello and welcome everyone to the first session of the privacy and data governance track Today we have Yousuf's hand to talk about a red hat snake and Jenkins a combo for reliable stack So our speaker Yousuf is our principal software engineer in red hats developer group And he has 14 years of experience in software development And he is one of the key contributors to the red hats project fabric eight analytics So I hope you all are same excited as I am to know about Red hats neck and Jenkins all right, so I will share the pre-recorded demo and the session by Yousuf and Hemant will also paste the YouTube link in the chat section in case if you face any issues if like Hoppin breaks for you while watching the session so you can directly go to that link But do remember to come back here to ask your questions to Yousuf All right So I'm going to share my screen Hello and welcome everybody, my name is Yousuf Zany and I'm a principal software engineer at red hat India and Today, I'll be talking about how red hat sneak and Jenkins have come together to give the users a Reliable stack So these are some of the points that we are going to cover today The first one is what are the major problems that the developers face on a day-to-day life? what's the probable solution why sneak and What's up with Jenkins like why we are talking about Jenkins over here? So let's take the first thing first Let's talk about the problems that the developers face on a day-to-day life Let's pick up which are all the prime major ones that they face The first one is how do developers choose a right dependency? So if you are following NPM or Pi Pi or Maven so you would know that on a daily basis there are thousands of new packages which are released Now how does a developer know which one which of these packages useful which one he should be using which he should not be using There are so many Available in the market. So which one to choose and which one not to choose This is one of the dilemma that they come across on a daily basis The second one now that you have a stack you have a manifest file containing lots of packages or dependencies Each of that package or dependency will have its own licensing terms and there can be chances where The developer might have included packages which are not compatible with each other or rather I'll say the licenses of which are not compatible with each other There might be outliers. There might be restrictions which might come which might come because of an Because of a package which is selected in the manifest file Having a weird type of license. So how does a user get to know about all these things? The third and one of the primary information that usually gets goes unnoticed is The security vulnerability What if the package or the version that the user has selected is having vulnerability associated it to it? How does one know about it? And the last one the package that the user has selected or the developer has selected to be a part of his stack How popular it is how well maintained that is? How does one get to know about it? So we have talked about the problems that we have. So what's the solution? Here is the solution that we have code ready dependency analytics From red hat partnered by snick. So snick provides the vulnerability information over here And what it does is all the four problems that I spoke of so These are addressed in a form of a report so We in this platform we scan your manifest file we get the details of your packages and then Do a lot of analysis in the behind the scenes and then come up with a comprehensive report Which addresses more or less all the problems that I spoke of earlier So what is it that we have in the report? Let's have a look So crda as a platform uses the information that we get from the developer's manifest file And then does it so on intelligent intelligent business logic behind the scenes and then comes up with this comprehensive report that is shown to the user So this Namely contains four major tabs and we'll go into details of each of the tab one by one So the first one here is the security issues And this information most of it is provided by snick And here we are the here red hat is partnered with snick where they provide us all the vulnerability information So it's not that snick is scanning your repository over here It says that they are providing the vulnerability information to us And then we use our own intelligent logic behind the scenes to Use that information use the information from your manifest file club it together and then come up with this Report in front of you So then comes the question why sneak so snick is the world leader when it comes to vulnerability database they have the Most number of vulnerability information and the most accurate ones And not only that they also create their own vulnerabilities from time to time and so what happened that The in the security vulnerability information, which is not even available publicly Is available to us via sneak which tells us that this is Probable vulnerability which might be coming up and that we can show it to the users So that we categorize in the commonly known vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities unique to sneak So those the two sections that you see over here So the ones that are publicly available you get to here you see here plus you get to see The information that is not even available publicly. So that's where sneak Comes in really handy and really helpful and comes up with a very good information about the security vulnerabilities So now let's go into the details of what this whole card has in for you So the first and foremost it tells us the total number of vulnerabilities that are found And it not only tells us the details about the direct Dependencies but also the transitive dependencies Which the user might not be even knowing that these are all the transitive packages which are available Or the vulnerabilities which are there attached to these transitive dependencies The second is the details about the vulnerabilities obviously it tells about the Uh Details of the publicly and the non-public which I already spoke of Now here is the information which is Really important It tells us the details of the current version that the user is using in the stack And the recommended non-vulnerable version that he should be upgrade to So that if he wants to get rid of all the vulnerabilities that are associated to that package And here you see the details about the severity of the vulnerability The cvss core the exploits all those details are shown over here And that's not all So there is a subsection over here where you can click and get to see all the details about the transitive dependencies So the details is nothing uh different from what you see over here It's just that uh under each direct dependency It has a list of all the transitive dependencies which are vulnerable and then it has the vulnerability information for them as well So going to the second card. This is the dependency details card So here you get to know about the details of your dependency So what all things are in store over here? Let's go one by one So first and foremost we tell which are all how what's the total number of Dependencies that we have analyzed And how many transitives did we analyze Along with your direct dependencies. That's the count that we show over here It doesn't show this is not saying that 23 are vulnerable This is just showing the total number of transitives that are present in your package Then over here we show what is the current version that the user is using and what's the latest version which is available in the market So if you want you can upgrade it to the latest version and use the latest one And then over here it tells about all the github statistics Which in a nutshell tells the user how popular this package is or how well maintained this package is By looking at this statistics Going to the third card, which is the licensing licensing details card So here we have all the information related to the licenses So what is the first one we After scanning all the packages Of the in the manifest file we come up with the suggested license for your For your project and in this case it says that after scanning all the dependencies It understands that the suggested License that we should be declaring for this particular project should be mit That's the suggestion that it gives The second thing it tells about the licensing conflicts So in case there are two or more packages, which is having some conflicts in the licenses Then that information will be shown over here And then there is an unknown licenses Which means that because see Which means that these licenses are not known to us in our system We don't know about these licenses because many a times it happens that user come up with their own Some weird names Or there can be new licenses coming up every now and then so we need some time to have those things Up in our system and then reflect it over here. So for all such licenses we mark it as unknown So that shows that we do not know about these and then we make sure that we Over the period of time we include them as well And then those Do not continue to be unknown anymore And the last one is the restrictive licenses. So licenses anyway have different different categories. So if most of the packages are really open And available Free to use and then there is some packages, which is very very restrictive. So such Such packages are called outliers or restrictive So those are again mentioned over here that there are some licenses Which are restrictive like say you have most of them with the aperture 2.0 or mit And then there you have one or two packages, which is having afro gpl Something like that. So then the one with afro gpl obviously is restrictive and It's going to change the entire license for your project. So that is mentioned over here that You have a restrictive license if you want you can use it if you don't want you can change it Now the last information is about the add-on tabs. So here we have our own ai Models which run and then comes up with a suggestion of the packages that can be added to your Dependencies as companions. So in this case, you are seeing that there it is giving a suggestion of four Dependencies, which should be added. So Let's see what all details it shows so It tells about the confidence score of each of the dependency Uh, this is again coming from the ai model. So how confident it is that this Dependency should be included in your manifest file. So we mentioned it by the confidence score So if the confidence score is very high, it means that Many many people are using it and our engine highly recommends that this should be there as part of your system or your part of a project and then along with the Confidence score and the package name. It also gives the latest information which is available in the market The GitHub statistics about the package so that you can you you can check how popular this is Which I already spoke of you can check all these details. Which tells you how popular it is among the different developers and then Obviously, this is just a suggestion that we are giving you. So we expect a suggestion Feedback from you as well. Did you like our suggestion? Did you did not like a suggestion? You can always give us a upvote or a downward So this is all that we have in the comprehensive stack report Wow, that was really detailed and comprehensive awesome, isn't it? So now that we know what are all the problems and now that we know that we have a solution The next question that comes to our mind is how do we use it? So there are a lot of ways how the platform can be used But as part of this Demo or this presentation we will be discussing about how it can be used in Jenkins as a Jenkins plugin So before I go to the demo, there are a few tree requests that I would assume that people already know or if you want to Work along with this and if you're watching this video on youtube probably you can pause here follow these steps and then continue So the assumption is like who was the Jenkins admin? He should have the crda cli installed in his system The admin should have generated the uuid by using the crda auth command The Jenkins should be installed in your system. That's a basic thing And then our plugin which is called the red hat code ready dependency analysis Plugin should be installed in that Jenkins instance So these are some of the prerequisites and the reason why I'm skipping these steps is because there's a constraint on the duration of the length of this video or the Or the presentation so I cannot go on doing all these things which takes a little bit of time In order to save the time. I'm just putting this as a steps So just go through these steps and then You are you are good to follow along from the next steps that I show And don't worry about all of this If you are not aware of where to find the crda cli if you are not aware how to install it and all I'll have all those links in the description And at the end of this slide, I'll have all of everything in place. So please do not worry about it Okay So assuming that you are done with the initial steps now, let's it's time to start the actual demo So once you're logged into the Jenkins portal The first thing is to create some credentials And for that you have to go to manage Jenkins Go to manage credentials And here you need to click to create a add credentials Now in the drop down that you have That you find over here in the kind you have to select the crda key So automatically it will give all the details that it requires to create the key So keep the scope as global and In the crda key field you click on This help key in order to understand what is it that is required So here we need the crda token Which you would have created as part of the initial step via the crd sli So let's just give some dummy value over here Just assuming that you have provided the crda key over here Now comes the part of the id and the description So id you there are two options like you you can either give your own id Or allow Jenkins to generate its own id So for the purpose of the demo, I'll put some id over here And the same I'll keep it in the description And if you click okay, and that's That's the credential that is created for you So that's the first step So once the credential setup is done, the next part is to start using this plugin As part of this demo, I'll show it by a build pipeline project Jenkins pipeline project And a Jenkins freestyle project So let's take the freestyle project first So once you click on this configure button If you scroll down under the build section, you will see a add a build step option And in that you need to select invoke crda analysis So as soon as you click on that, it will give you all the fields that are necessary for this plugin To run the important parts is the file path and the crda key So the file path obviously for the demo purpose I am keeping this file in a temporary location But in your case if you're running it in a full-fledged manner, obviously you'll have different different steps Like you'll first clone the repo then build the repo run some chx and all and then probably have this step So obviously you'll have a you'll have a different location. But yeah, let's keep it as it is Just for simplicity. So this is the location. Let's copy and paste here And if you remember just sometime back we created this Secret so This is the one which I already had earlier and this is the one that we created sometime back So let's select that. So now it says that All the mandatory fields are provided Now The third part is the crda CLI version. So here if you do not want to use the latest version Then you can actually specify a particular version that of that you want to use. So the Format is v Dot dot dot so you can give zero not two dot two over here If you wish to use this version if you do not Provide anything over here. It will take the default version And the last one is the contribution towards the usage statistics. So from here We take some consent from the user to collect some telemetry data We do not Store any user name email and all the stuff. It's just for us to understand like where this call is coming from How many packages did we scan? How many vulnerabilities did we report? Such type of information. So if you wish to provide or if you wish to allow us to check that data and Keep a trap of it Then you need to Check this button if you don't want then don't check this button So that's all that is required as part of this plugin step And if once you click save after that you can click on build Let's go to the console What if you see that it's saying that it has It has found that Zero two three was the version which was already installed So that is why it is ready to be used If this version was not present or if you would have wished for a different version to be used Then that installation would have happened first for that cli and then this analysis would have begun So once the analysis is done you get this information or this information in the text form in the logs And you get all these details about the vulnerabilities the packages that we scanned and all those stuff And along with that we get a link Via which you the user can see the comprehensive report that I was talking about earlier So in the logs you just see the vulnerability information because we feel that that is the most important one That we that the user is concerned about and that's why we provide that first Now along with that if you see here You see a icon red hat icon Which says crd stack report and if the user clicks on that the same information the same vulnerability information You can see it in a much more better View which is in the graphical format and then here you can see the exact details of how many direct Dependencies we scan how many transitive scan how many were found as vulnerable How many vulnerabilities did we find the the ones which were publicly available the ones which were unique to snake And along with that which is is the severity the low medium high and critical Once you're done with this you also have an option to see the report from here as well the same one the same link that I That was provided in the logs The same report can be accessed from here as well. You just need to click on it And then you see the entire report over here So which contains not only the security issues, but also the dependency details the licensing details And the add-ons feature So here under the vulnerabilities, you see the ones which are commonly available the ones which is unique to snake And yeah, one thing which I forgot to mention earlier was If once you start using this platform for the first time, obviously you will not be a registered snake user You'll be only a crda user So in such cases, there are some limitations that you will see in the vulnerabilities information That you won't see the exploits you won't see the vulnerabilities which are unique to snake But rest of the things you'll see the as it is If you want to see all the information, then you just need to register yourself with snake, which it which is totally free Of course, there's nothing that you need to That there's no money involved over here. You don't need to pay anything And once you register yourself with snake, you just need to provide the sneak token over here. It's a very simple step You just need to click go to the utm Follow the steps from there. So if you just click here, it will take you to the page Registration page Do follow the steps get the key and then Put it back over here and then click submit and it will show you as registered And as soon as you are registered, you will start seeing all the features like the Unique information and the exploits and the details and everything will come up So this is what you see In the crda Jenkins plugin and the report when you are trying to view it from the Freestyle project similar report will come up for the Jenkins pipeline also, but yeah, let's See how can that be done? So let's now check the pipeline In case of pipelines, there's a little bit of difference on how do we do the configuration So if you click on configure here, you will see that we usually use the pipeline scripts to Do the build So in this, this is the line which we are interested in. This is the one which is going to Actually call the crd analysis and these are the four parameters file crda key id CLI version and concentrometry Along with the values that we need to pass now This can be a little tedious because people might not remember the exact Exact parameters. They might have some typographical Errors that they can do while writing this So a better way to add this command here is by using the pipeline syntax So click on this pipeline syntax generator and go to crd analysis And here you will see that the options are there that what are all the fields that is mandatory And in this you fill out the details And then this select the crda key provide the cli version And the concentrometry and then click on the generate pipeline script So as soon as you click on this the command that needs to be passed will be generated And this can be copied and pasted here So that The proper value is sent and there is no Scope of any errors manual errors And then just click on save and click on build So let's go to the console and here also we see that The requirement required version is 0 to 3 And it is doing the analysis and this time I have selected pom.xml to show you the Maven part of it in the previous example We saw the package json And in this I wanted to show you the java part So once the analysis in this is completed It will show you the same similar type of results Which is the vulnerability information in the logs along with the url Which can be clicked to see the report And along with that There will be a UI representation of the same Where you can go in checking the details See the vulnerability and then On a click you can see the report as well So if you remember I had mentioned that Jenkins is not the only place where you can find us. There are a lot of other places So there are different stages in development life cycle So let's start with the first thing like the developer has just started writing the code He has just opened an IDE and he's you know started with the Manifest file or he's just adding some packages to start his project Maybe starting with the hello world itself. So he has to have some packages, right? So as soon as the first package or the first Dependency is added in the manifest file our plugin kicks in and then at that instant It tells the developer if he has any vulnerability associated with that package and if the user wants then he always have an option to Check out the comprehensive report at any point of time during his entire development cycle and he will get to see The detailed report as I showed earlier. So those plugins are available in vs code and IntelliJ Now, let's get to the next stage. The coding is done. We have committed the code So as soon as you commit the code, obviously, you will have some sort of a build pipeline Setup so there again, we have different options You can either use the Jenkins plugin in the way that I have already explained Or you can use the GitHub action or tecton whichever one You like you can pick anyone and then according to your requirements you can use either of them Now coming to the last part where the Even the commit is done now the image is created And now you're ready to Ship the image or you're ready to promote the image So if you are uploading the image to quay again, we have an option over there as soon as you upload the image to quay Our plugin will kick in and it will give you the details about the vulnerability and all And the same goes with the clear image scanner if you want to use you can use there as well Now, suppose if you are sort of a command line hero Who doesn't want to use any of these plugins who doesn't want these UI interfaces and all and You know, you are comfortable writing commands and all for so all for such people You also have our command line interface where after you type some commands, you'll get the your entire stack scanned And then you will get a link for the Detailed report which you can click on and see the report. Yeah, obviously the report will remain as a UI component You cannot have a command line interface for that But at least the execution part and all you can do it via the cli And then you do not have to Install any plugins and all if you want if you don't want to do that And as I promised earlier, these are all the relevant links Where you can find us where this about the details on the Jenkins plugins here the cli Vscode plugin intelligent plugin and if you want to play around I have also pasted this sample report link And you can click on it just to see how the report is get a firsthand field Anybody Whoever is watching this video can just use this link and then Play around with the report and have a look at it If you're watching this on youtube again, I repeat that all these links are available in the description Just go and check it out. Play around Check out all the features Give some feedback whether appreciative or if you do not like something Tell us about that and also let us know what are all the Other features that you will be interested in what are all the new things that you will be interested in Currently we are supporting golang, maven npm and python So if you want any other programming languages to be included in this platform, which are all the Languages that you would like Uh, please come in. Please let us know about all those things and then we'll make sure that we pick up the ones which The developers want the most And with that I'll come to the end of the presentation You guys are great. Thank you