#Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence

[aads22]

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

– Steven Pinker

#Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence #we also have inclination to empathy #to cooperation #Steven Pinker

[my-bated-breath]

Do you think Aang and Katara would still end up together if Katara killed her mother’s killer? How would that affect their relationship?

Hey anon! Sorry it took me a while to answer your question, but the truth is that there is no clear trajectory regarding Kata/ang in this situation, especially when we take into account that Kata/ang in the show canon was abrupt and significantly underdeveloped. More specifically on Kata/ang, both Katara and Aang’s arcs were twisted to accommodate for their endgame romance, but while Katara’s arc reaches its culmination by the end of the Final Agni Kai, Aang’s character had become inconsistent in its direction throughout all of season 3.

As such, two conflicting outcomes can result from this hypothetical scenario — one outcome which upholds Aang’s flaws and stagnated growth, or another outcome which forces Aang into growing, accepting, and understanding, as was the original intent behind his character.

From a broader context, Aang’s entire journey since he woke up in the iceberg has been about him reconciling his airbender and Avatar identity, and by the end of season 2 when he is with the guru, Aang is on the cusp of fully accepting his Avatar responsibilities, of letting go of his selfish attachments (or in other words, his blinding biases).

Except Aang cannot let go as he hoped he would be able to. Because his attachment to Katara is selfish, but beyond that his attachment to Katara is a replacement for his attachment to the Air Nomads — and it draws him away from his duties as the Avatar, causing him to embrace an ideal he does not comprehend. After all, the Air Nomads were not perfectly pacifistic either.

Still, just as Aang refuses to recognize the complexity in the Air Nomads’ legacies, dismissing what he may deem as an act of violence, Aang refuses to recognize the complexity to Katara’s rage and compassion, to her violent and protective nature. In my meta “On Ideals and Idealization,” I elaborate on Aang’s idealization of Katara:

Aang loves Katara, yes, but he is in love with an idealized version of her. In his mind, he holds close the idea of a gentle Katara, a smiling Katara, a compassionate and all-loving Katara. Even though he has seen her darkest moments when she bloodbends Hama - arms bent in disjointed angles, fingers curled as if manipulating puppet strings -  it does not tarnish his image of her because, at this moment, she is not the persecutor, but the persecuted.

After her experience with Hama, Aang is there to comfort her and help her come to terms with the terrifying power she now possesses. With her face streaked with tears and eyes widened with horror, it is clear that this is a power that Katara does not want, that it has been thrust onto her against her own will.

The conclusion that Aang draws from this is that Katara’s inner darkness is a separate entity from her inner light, and he perceives this acquired part of her as a blemish on her inherent goodness. As such, in “the Southern Raiders,” when he witnesses how Katara’s anger and grief drive her to hunt down her mother’s killer, he equates Katara seeking closure to Katara succumbing to darkness, tainting her purity and compassion in the process.

Thus, given Aang’s reaction to Katara’s bloodbending, he may be inclined to love her in a piteous, nearly-obligatory manner. He’ll love her as the victim who lost sight and control and he’ll love her as a being of compassion and pacificity, but nothing more. Just like in the Southern Raiders, he may magnanimously grant Katara his forgiveness and his continued love even when she never asked for it. And in the end, Aang and Katara will kiss on the balcony of Iroh’s tea shop, only this time it’s not only “the hero winning the girl,” but “the bright and cheerful boy fixing the broken girl” as well.

This is the ending where Aang clings onto idealization even when it renders him a hypocrite, in the same way he is a hypocrite for shouting at his friends for pushing him to kill Ozai when it is implied he killed thousands at sea in the Siege at the North Pole.

This is the ending where he does not grow.

Note: Aang retreating into a ball of earth as a narrative parallel to the beginning of the series when he was encased in a ball of ice would have been much more powerful if only Aang entered the Avatar State through character growth rather than by the power of the Pointy Rock of Destiny (TM).

Now, let’s consider an ending where Aang’s perspective broadens rather than narrows and where Aang unroots himself from the past, pulling free from stagnance. Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario in which Aang finds out Katara killed Yon Rha. How may he react?

He may not be able to at first, too torn between his belief that Katara only uses violence as a last resort and the reality that Katara uses violence as a means of agency as well. Revenge corrupts; it is a stain that cannot be washed away. There is no reconciling Katara’s previous compassionate and loving nature with this dark path she has now chosen.

Except this is Katara he’s talking about, Katara who he loves and gave up the Avatar State for. Surely there’s a way to save her, right? Yes, just as Aang told Katara before she left, forgiveness is the answer. And while Katara may not have chosen forgiveness in the end, Aang can guide her by example.

The next day, he approaches her with the offer to exempt her from her wrongdoings.

Katara, tired and mournful, looks down at Aang.

“What was so wrong about what I did?”

Inside she is hurting. There is truth to what Aang said, that revenge is poisonous both to the victim and the perpetrator, but it is not poisonous for the reasons he thinks it is. As George Orwell writes in his essay, “revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also” (Revenge is Sour). There’s no doubt that Yon Rha was despicable, and there’s only a little doubt in saying that his punishment should fit his crime — the only regret Katara may have here is that killing Yon Rha is a meaningless act, for she has already gained power over him in every meaning of the word. Revenge is only a gateway to senseless violence and hatred; it is not a slope from which there is no recovery, and given Katara’s emotional intelligence, she likely has or will recognize this. Although she may feel regret, she needs no one’s forgiveness.

Aang is shocked. “But violence is never the answer,” he stands by, he pleads by. His voice grows quieter. “You know that… you knew that, didn’t you?”

Katara answers him, but it’s all a blur. She says something about agency, protection, and justice. He remembers something about that too, about the fury that burned in her eyes when she declared, “I will never, ever, turn my back on the people who need me!” Then there was the hostility simmering in her glare towards Zuko, the way she muttered that she didn’t trust him, not when he could still hurt them — hurt Aang — again. 

Because Katara’s anger and compassion do not simply split themselves into two identities. Instead, they coexist and coalesce into one. They drive each other; they feed into each other; they are two sides of the same coin.

Excerpt from my meta Rage, Compassion, and the Bridge in Between

The beloved ideal of Katara — the one that he thought was on the verge of being tainted, the one that never existed — shatters. But just because it’s broken doesn’t mean Aang doesn’t want to fix it. So in the days leading up to Sozin’s Comet, he tries to pick up the fragments to the Katara-he-knew and piece them together again, all the while avoiding Katara’s mournful (yet resolved) stare. He ignores the way Zuko and Katara share glances with a heaviness as if they were the only two people in the world, full of some significance he cannot grasp. Still, it haunts him like the way Zuko’s touch lingers on Katara’s shoulder or Katara’s hand brushes Zuko’s briefly whenever they don’t think anyone’s looking, reflecting a togetherness escaping loneliness.

But there’s no answer that arrives quick enough to save Aang from his doubt and confusion. All too soon, Sozin’s Comet is upon them, and Aang wanders to another world on the lion turtle's back — but this time when he listens to the past Avatars’ advice, his perspective undergoes a paradigm shift.

They are right. The Air Nomads that he prioritized, that blinded him to his duties — they do not exist. Their love is still there, pure and human but not all-encompassing, tucked in the corner of his heart. And Katara was the same. She was and is not all-loving or all-compassionate or all-anything, really, because she is more human than that.

This time Katara’s image shatters again. But Aang does not follow the falling pieces to the ground, desperate to find them and force them together again. No, he sees past the remains and sees Katara for who she is. For who she wants to be. For who she can be (around someone else), when she’s not compelled to take on the caretaker role just for him.

(And he thought he was so generous, offering to forgive him. But it was never his forgiveness to give in the first place.)

Aang lets go of his last attachment.

The last airbender lives on, but so does the Avatar.

#atla #atla meta #anti kataang #anti kataang meta #zutara #aang #katara #anti aang #of sorts? #my bated breath's posts #my bated breath analyzes #i kind of rewrote aang's arc in the finale in my mind and a little bit of that slipped through #anon you asked a hard question so i gave you a 1.5k+ meta in response #i hope it's everything you ever hoped it could be #anonymous ask #ask #is tumblr hiding this post from the tags again?

[linkspooky]

Toga Himiko’s Normal Life

Himiko looks like the most straight forward case of what pop culutre considers to be a classical sociopath / psychopath in My Hero Acadmia. Shigaraki, Dabi, Hawks were all groomed to become the way they were, but Himiko possessed a natural inclination towards blood and violence from the start. She seesm to be a natural born cold blooded killer, however in this meta I’ll argue that while Toga seems like the flip-side of a normal, good person like Uraraka, she’s actually just a normal girl herself. 

1. Character Origins

Volume sixteen of My Hero Academia had an official illustration included as an extra that shows the characters Twice and Himiko drawn together in an illusion to a famous Joker and Harley Quinn illustration. 

Now, I’m not going so far as to claim Himiko was based off of Harley Quinn, but one the league of villains and characters like Twice (and ReDestro) have made similiar references to the Joker before that especially with the quote “All it takes is one bad day”. There’s also enough similarities betweeen the two characters, they’re both the only female members of a crime syndicate that is mostly men, and dominated by men. Their backstories mirror each other, they were both relatively sane, normal, girls, until suddenly they cracked one day and became a total inversion of their previous presonality. There are enough similarities that I could use Harley as an example to explain a few of the important ideas present in Toga’s character. 

They are also both female characters who are written with love as the central concept of their characters. Harley’s origin as originally depicted in the comic and episode for the Batman the Animated Series “Mad Love” goes as follows: Harleen Quinzell was a psychiatrist working at Arkham. Eventualy she came to sympathize with one of her patients which triggered a transformation in her from well meaning doctor, to love-sick sycophant of the joker who broke him out of prison. 

A lot of Batman Villains have origins like this. The most comparable one is Harvey Dent. Proescutors, Doctors, we are told the people who hold these jobs are good and righteous people. Even Harley herself started out as someone who just sympathized with a patient too much. However, somehow they become flipped into the exact opposite versions of themselves. They go mad for lack of a better words. Harvey Dent who was once a symbol of justice, becomes nothing more than a murderer, and Harley Quinn goes from healer to the sidekick of a mad clown willing to destroy everything in the name of love. 

The question, asked in both Himiko and Harley’s stories is how can good people flip like this? 

Most people have a black and white view of these issues: good people are only capable of good actions, and bad people are capable of bad actions. It’s hard to swallow the fact that any normal person has the capacity to cause so much harm inside of them. 

We see similiar remarks in the background of Himiko’s story. Himiko comes from a good upper class family, she went to what was most likely a good school, she was always smiling and surrounded by friends. Everyone who comments on her sudden transformation reacts in a similiar way. “She was aways so cheerful and well-behaved, I still find it hard to believe.” She was always such a good girl, and good people don’t do those things. 

Normal people, good people, don’t have the capacity to do bad. That’s what makes the transformations so shocking. Therapists/Doctors are supposed to heal, Prosecutors are supposed to be just. And now we return to our old friend Jung. 

The story of Harleen Quinzell and Harley Quinn. The story of Himiko Toga the happy middle school girl and Himiko Toga the serial killer is a tale told over and over again, it’s just usually told with male protagonists instead of female ones. It’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is a late-Victorian variation on ideas first raised in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Stevenson’s monster, however, is not artificially created from stitched-together body parts, but rather emerges fully formed from the dark side of the human personality. In the story Dr Jekyll, an admired member of the professional Victorian middle-classes, conducts a series of scientific experiments which unleash from his own psyche the ‘bestial’ and ‘ape-like’ Mr Hyde (ch. 10). Gothic fiction had examined the idea of the sinister alter ego or double before on many occasions but Stevenson’s genius with Jekyll and Hyde was to show the dual nature not only of one man but also of society in general.

“Man is not one, but truly two.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

Both cases are tales are transformation, of the monster coming from within. Himiko transforms from middle school girl into serial killer. Harleen Quinzell transforms into Harley Quinn. Dr. Jekyll becomes Mr. Hyde. We witness a transformation into a monster that seems the antithesis of everything that person was boefre, but was inside of them all along this works because of the jungian idea of the shadow. 

The shadow is the unconscious side of personality. The shadow is what exists but what we do not acknowledge. If our behavior during everyday life, choosing to smile, choosing to talk to people, choosing to use our manners is a mask then the shadow is the face beyond the mask. The conscious personality conceals, the shadow reveals. It’s the difference betewen who we are and who we choose to be. The shadow isn’t necessarily negative however. The shadow is just the repressed side of our personalities, it’s what we try to hide. 

The shadow plays a role in Harleen’s transformation. While it’s present in Mad Love as well, a recent miniseries ‘Harleen’ really dives into the Jungian symbolism. There’s even several similarities in common with Himiko’s story, for example there’s a scene where Harleen is shown watching the bat man beat up joker and notice how everyone is cheering despite the fact that it’s violent. 

Himiko’s interest in a boy is sparked by watching him get into a fight while everybody else is cheering for him. 

The cover page depicts the change between Quinn and Quinnzel as a crumbling mask, which is the exact same imagery used for Himiko. 

When she enters Arkham she chooses to depict Harley Quinn’s silhouette in Harleen’s shadow. Once again implying that the transformation is not so sudden and jarring as it seems, that Harley Quinn has always been there and is a part of her psychology the same way Mr. Hyde is inside Dr. Jekyll. 

The comic even points it out. Harleen, and also by extension Harvey Dent are people who claim to be “good, righteous people’ and yet both of them end up transforming into murderers. Two-face’s name is literally two-face.

There’s also one particularly Jungian sequence in the middle of the conflict. She dreams (dreams are unconscious and therefore the realm of the shadow in Jung’s theories) about the city of gotham as a place inhabited with citizens who are monsters wearing the faces of human beings. 

The idea is consistent throughout that Harleen is not really a ‘good person’ she’s merely repressed. She has had this capacity to be violent inside of her, this selfishness, all of these dark desires carried with her all along but rather than deal with them in any healthy way she repressed them until repressing them is no longer an option. Harvey Dent’s face gets half burned off, Harley’s skinn gets bleached by chemicals, the monsterous features inside of them are now worn on their faces and they have to wear their ugliness on the outside rather than the inside. They are now expressing every single thing they have repressed. However, the suggestion in both stories is that these are not special cases, that Gotham is such a repressed society that everyone is repressing the things they don’t like about themselves in that way. Harley fell in mad love sure, but love was just the reason, just the trigger, the truth is those feelings always lurked inside of her and she had no healthy way of dealing with them before that point. 

That is the shadow, it’s everything you repress but it never disappears. If you ignore it, it takes on a life of its own. In some cases, like Harley’s you basically become your own shadow. Harley is the flipped upside down version of Harleen Quinzel, now her inner demons are what are expressed on the surface (desperation to be loved, violence, etc.) while her ‘normal’ self is hidden under a mask of insanity. That’s in fact how she ends the comic, Harley qalking around while Harley is trapped on the other side of the mirror because they have basically traded places. Now Mr. Hyde is walking around, while Dr. Jekyll is hidden personality. But it’s important to remember it’s not something like a split personality, Harleen Quinzell and Harley Quinn were always two sides of the same person. Even when she starts expressing her ‘bad’ traits, the good traits don’t go away. They’re just hidden underneath the surface the way the repressed bad traits used to be. Because you’re not good or bad, you’re not one side or the other. You’re both at the same time. Man is not one, but truly two. 

So the complexity in Himiko comes from understanding that she’s BOTH a normal girl, and also a blood crazy yandere psycho. 

2. A Normal Girl - Uraraka Ochaco

Uraraka is a pretty standard shonen heroine. She’s a cheerful girl. She’s a supportive friend. She’s the embodiment of what you’d call a good, kind, person and doesn’t seem to be any more complex than that. She lacks say the drive to be a hero that Midoriya does, the superiority complex that Bakugo has, the emotional issues that Todoroki has. She seems to always be agreeable and in a cheerful mood. 

If you look just a little bit closer though she always seems to be walking on eggshells when she’s around others. She doesn’t want to join Deku and the others to try to save Bakugo from the heroes because, it might hurt Bakugo’s feelings. 

When she loses in the hero tournament, she apologizes to her parents crying not because she feels bad that she lost, but she feels like she failed them. Like it was her job to win and bring money home. However, when Deku comes to check on her in the room she’s already completely hidden her tears. 

Going into her backstory we learn that Uraraka is walking on eggshells around everybody due to her own parents, that she’s spent her life trying to be as small of a burden on them as possible because she could see the tired looks on their faces. She’s a child who felt guilty that her parents had to take care of her. 

So, for Uraraka her entire life is devoted to making herself seem as small and inconsequential as possible. Other people’s needs will always trump hers. Other people will always have more noble motivations for becoming a hero than she has. Other people’s emotions will always be louder and take priority over hers. Uraraka sees her own emotions and needs as mere trifles that get in the way, and so she always shuts them down. We see Uraraka as a version of Himiko, a high school girl who always appears to be cheerful and well-behaved but is merely repressed. 

Uraraka repeats the same unhealthy behavior as Himiko once did. Which is why Uraraka’s first meeting with Himiko goes with Himiko getting such a cold read on her. 

It’s helpful to view Himiko as the flipped version of Uraraka. Uraraka hides everything that’s pleasant about her on the inside, and on the outside appears like a perfectly selfless girl. Himiko is someone who hides her good qualities and instead wears the mask of a bloodthirsty psycho on the outside. While Uraraka lives by denying her selfish desires, Himiko always chases after them and is true to them. 

Traits that are repressed in Uraraka, are expressed in Himiko. Especially traits that society sees as bad in girls, like selfishness, being emotional, etc..

The way Himiko acts is especially jarring because she seems convinced she’s a normal person. She’s in her own little world, making friends, getting along with other people, it’s just her friendship just happens to involve stabbing. 

Himiko appears to be a girl psychotically obsessed with blood and nothing else. A girl who only cares about killing other people and chopping them up to bits. When she expresses the feelings deep inside of herself, literally no one can make heads or tails of what she’s saying, she doesn’t sound like a girl just a bloodthirsty monster. 

While Uraraka seems like she has nothing in common with what is essentially a weird serial killer, we learn that the exact behavior that Uraraka’s creation is what led to Himiko’s current state of mind. 

The difference between them is not that Uraraka is a person of higher moral character, or a better person, but rather of circumstances between the two of them. It’s not the choices they made but rather things they were born into and couldn’t control. Uraraka has parents that accept her even when she fails and encourage her. 

Toga had parents that  abused their daughter, and then abandoned her. 

Uraraka chose to repress herself, while Toga was forced to become repressed by her parents. While we don’t know for sure if it was physical abuse it’s at least emotional abuse, and it had to be to an extreme extent to make Himiko snap that hard. The same unhealthy behavior but push to extremes gets extreme results. 

3. Normal Girl - Himiko Toga

Himiko did not become the way she is because she was lacking empathy or born with uncontrollable urges for bloodlust, but because of the environment around her that always forced her to repress herself. From the knowledge that her parents would never love her for who she really was. Himiko wasn’t born that way she was a response of what was done to her. 

People who don’t really know Himiko always judge her this way, that she’s incapable of understanding other people, that she has no empathy for others. She’s almost literally labelled and dismissed as a one dimmensional yandere trope by the people surrounding her. 

However, Himiko is in fact always doing the opposite. She’s constantly trying to empathize with others. Her maddened way of talking to both Tsuyu and Uraraka in her character introduction is exactly that, her trying to feel that kind of connection. 

Himiko’s fascination for Uraraka is a desire for empathy and understanding. One that you could say even surpasses some characters on the hero’s side, because she’s willing to try to understand the world’s of people who are nothing like her. Himiko’s next most significant action in the manga is to take Camie’s place and go after the kids. While she does fight against them she’s not overly violent, just curious. Deku even reaffirms some of Himiko’s primary traits. 

Himiko is always talking a lot and trying to explain her way of thinking to other people, because she wants them to understand her. However, because she’s bad at communicating this tends to come off as babble and a lot of people completely dismiss what she says and don’t attempt to listen. 

She expresses two things one a desire to know Deku on a deeper level, immediately asking him very personal, and sometimes very downright invasive question and two she also notices the closeness that Deku and Uraraka have for one another. 

Once again this is a repeating theme for the league. Himiko repeats the same desire that Twice has, to become a person who is trusted in the same way. 

Once again it’s important to remember that Himiko is just the flipped version of a normal girl. If most people hide their bloodlust and show their good sides, Himiko hides her desire to be trusted and to empathize with other people underneath her bloodthirsty urges she shows on the surface. She positions herself as a femme fatalle, but she’s actually just a girl who’s trying to understand why other people are different then her, and why Deku and Uraraka can have a relationship mutually founded on trust when she can’t. 

Himiko’s past was so repressed she never formed real relationships with people. Not only that she assumes that nobody will want the real her, because the moment she flipped and the real her was exposed everybody in her life abandoned her and she had to run away. 

After her brush with Deku and Uraraka we see Himiko start to be trusted by her comrades and a marked transformation takes place in her. 

We see shades of the old Himiko. A selfish girl who only exists to fulfill her whims. However, we’re shown Himiko is capable of empathizing because not only do Shigaraki’s words get through to her. 

Himiko is also for the first time able to reach the emotions of another person. Remember when Himiko tries to explain how she’s feeling, she babbles, and babbles and nobody listens. However that changes and for the first time, not only does Himiko pick up exactly on what’s troubling Twice, she also comforts him the way he needs to be comforted. She tells him that yes it might be his fault that Magne died, but she sees that he’s doing his best to make up for it and she gently encourages him. 

Remember how important this is for Twice. The world has never forgiven Jin for his mistakes. He hit the wrong guy on accident, while obeying the law, and lost both his job and his home. He started stealing to make ends meet, and as a result he lost his mind. When he makes a mistake it always blows up in his face but this time, Himiko notices that she’s panicking and comforts him telling him it’s okay he’s made this mistake and he can still work hard to fix it. 

Not only that but she notices what the problem was with Jin, she was able to notice the symptoms of his psychotic breakdown and rather than dismiss it as just Twice being crazy was able to help him in real tangible ways by wrapping her hanky around him and covering him up like he asked. Uraraka has a very surface level kindness, she’s kind but only by walking around on eggshells with everyone. Himiko is able to see through people, but uses that to comfort people on a deeper level. 

The “Himiko just can’t control herself because of her quirk” narrative is something that Himiko rejects herself. Because that’s not what Himiko wants. Himiko doesn’t want to be special or different from other people. 

Himiko sees herself as normal, and what she desires to be understand and be understood by other people. She doesn’t like Curious’ narrative for her because it made her out to be a freak or someone special when Himiko is trying her best to get others to understand her as a normal girl. Himiko can’t repress herself anymore, she can’t become normal the way her parents taught her too so not permanently broken, and forced to always express herself she’s trying some other way. 

What she wants isn’t to hurt other people, not really though. Those thoughts just turn violence, because Himiko is herself a person who’s endured a lot of violence. Himiko is basically a child that’s been on her own living on the streets and surviving for years, with all the dangers that entails, and also people who can shoot lasers and punch things really hard chasing after her. 

The more she’s isolated and on the run, the more violence she endures, the more violent and unhinged her thoughts become. The more she’s exposed to people who accept her for who she is, the more she’s trusted by those people, the more empathic and sensitive Himiko becomes instead. Himiko’s desire isn’t violence, when she’s pushed to her utter limit she says what she wants is to become a girl like Uraraka who is just loved and trusted by others for who she is. 

And I genuinely believe at the core of Himiko’s character this empathic girl exists. Himiko becoming violent and unrepressed doesn’t mean her empathy disappears. The complexity from Himiko is that she’s both the knife wielding psycho and the normal girl who just wants to have friends at the same time. If behind every normal person there’s a monster lurking is true then the opposite is true as well, behind every monster there’s a normal person. 

This is an idea expressed by Twice again. One of the villains that Hawks dismissed as a bad person, was capable of showing him compassion and gentleness even when he screwed up. Toga was capable of empathy for Twice besides the use he had for others. Toga herself is shown to be capable of more empathy than Hawks, who is one of the most selfless characters in the series, and who is convinced his actions are always done in order to save others.

However we see their treatment of Twice is so drastically different. Hawks treats Twice in a selfish way refusing to listen to what Twice wants, and only ever used Twice as a tool to exploit. Twice himself thinks that now that he’s no longer useful, Himiko won’t be kind to him anymore however we see the opposite. 

Twice admits to Toga that he’s the reason that everyone is in danger right now and he completely failed, and he’s not going to come save them. He admits that he’s useless and Twice himself said Toga wouldn’t be kind to him anymore. However in that moment, Himiko ignores the fact that her life is literally in danger and everything is going to hell around her to comfort Twice one final time and tell him the words he needs to hear.

It’s literally the single most empathic moment of the manga, and it’s in direct contrast to Hawks’ behavior. A hero as devoted to saving other people as Hawks, who genuinely likes Twice as a friend doesn’t show him any empathy at all and even stabs him as the back. A psycho like Toga puts her own feelings aside and notices Twice’s feelings, and gives him comfort and thanks him in his final moment because to her Twice has value as a person beyond what his use is. That Himiko is capable of this kindness, but equally capable of her monstrous actions earlier in the series  is what makes her human. Her kindness doesn’t make her any less mosntrous, and her monstrous qualities don’t make her kindness go away she’s both at once, rather than either or. That’s where the complexity comes in. 

Toga is a very human character precisely because we see her at her most monstrous, and we see that girl slowly relearn how to express the kindness that’s always been inside of her in healthier non-stabby way. A normal girl who learned how to be a monster to protect herself. A monster who is slowly relearning to be a normal girl.

#himiko toga #jin bubaigawara #league of villains #league of villains meta #league of villains friendship #mha meta #my hero academia #my hero academia meta #my hero academia villains

[wisdomrays]

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS: How Many Prophets Were There? Were They All From Arabia?

Prophets were raised and sent to their people in different lands and at different times. One hadith puts the number of Prophets at 124,000; another mentions 224,000. Both versions, however, should be evaluated critically according to the science of hadith. The exact number is not important; rather, we should realize that no people has ever been deprived of its own Prophet: There never was a people without a Warner having lived among them (35:24) and: We never punish until We have sent a Messenger (17:15).

To punish a people before warning them that what they are doing is wrong is contrary to His Glory and Grace. The warning precedes responsibility, which may be followed by reward or punishment: Anyone who has done an atom's weight of good shall see it. And anyone who has done an atom's weight of evil shall see it (99:7–8). If a Prophet has not been sent, people cannot know what is right and wrong and so cannot be punished. However, since every individual will be called to account for his or her good and evil deeds, we may infer that a Prophet has been sent to every people: We sent among every people a messenger with (the command): "Serve God and avoid evil" (16:36).

The Prophets were not raised only in Arabia. In fact, we do not even know all of the Prophets who were raised there, let alone elsewhere. We know only 28 of them by name (from Adam to Muhammad), and the Prophethood of three of them is uncertain. We do not know exactly from where they emerged. Supposedly, Adam's tomb and the place of his reunion with Eve is Jidda, but this information is uncertain. We know that Abraham spent some time in Anatolia, Syria, and Babylon. Lot was associated with Sodom and Gomorrah, around the Dead Sea; Shu'ayb with Madyan; Moses with Egypt; and Yahya and Zakariyya with the Mediterranean countries—they may have crossed to Anatolia, since Christians link Mary (Mayam ibn 'Isa) and Jesus with Ephesus. But these associations remain suppositions at best.

We know the names of some Prophets sent to the Israelites, but not the names of any others or where they appeared. Moreover, because their teachings have been distorted and lost over time, we cannot say anything about who they were and where they were sent.

Take the case of Christianity. Following the Council of Nicea (325 CE), the original doctrine of God's Oneness was dropped in favor of the human-made doctrine of the Trinity. For the Catholic Church, Jesus became the "son" of God, while his mother Mary became the "mother" of God. Some believed, rather vaguely, that God was immanent or present in things. Thus, Christianity came to resemble the idolatrous beliefs and practices of ancient Greece, and its followers began to associate other things and people with God, a major sin in Islam.

Throughout history, deviations and corruption of the Truth started and increased in this way. If the Qur'an had not informed us of the Prophethood of Jesus and of the purity and greatness of Mary, we would have difficulty in distinguishing the cults of and rites of Jupiter (Zeus) and Jesus, Venus (Aphrodite) and Mary.

This same process may have happened to other religions. As such, we cannot say definitely that their founders or teachers were Prophets or that they taught in a specific location. We only can speculate that Confucius, Buddha, or even Socrates were Prophets. We cannot give a definite answer because we do not have enough information about them and their original teachings. However, we know that the teachings of Confucius and Buddha influenced great numbers of their contemporaries and continue to do so.

Some say that Socrates was a philosopher influenced by Judaism, but they offer no proof. Words attributed to him by Plato imply that Socrates was "inspired" from a very early age to "instruct" people in true understanding and belief. But it is not clear if these words are attributed correctly or exactly what his people understood them to mean. Only this much is reliable: Socrates taught in an environment and manner that supports the use of reason.

Professor Mahmud Mustafa's observations of two primitive African tribes confirm what has been said above. He remarks that the Maw-Maws believe in God and call him Mucay. This God is one and only, acts alone, does not beget or is begotten, and has no associate or partner. He is not seen or sensed, but known only through His works. He dwells in the heavens, from where he ordains everything. That is why the Maw-Maws raise their hands when praying. Another tribe, the Neyam-Neyam, expresses similar themes. There is one God who decrees and ordains everything, and what he says is absolute. He makes everything in the forest move according to His will, and sends thunderbolts against those with whom he is angry.

These ideas are compatible with what is said by the Qur'an. The Maw-Maws's belief is very close to what we find in the Qur'an's Surat al-Ikhlas. How could these primitive tribes, so far removed from civilization and the known Prophets, have so pure and sound a concept of God? This reminds us of the Qur'anic verse: For every people there is a messenger. When their messenger comes, the matter is judged between them with justice, and they are not wronged (10:47).

Professor Adil of Kirkuk, Iraq, was working as a mathematician at Riyadh University when I met him in 1968. He told me that he had met many Native American Indians while earning his Ph.D. in the United States. He had been struck by how many of them believe in One God who does not eat or sleep or find himself constrained by time. He rules and governs all of creation, which is under His sovereignty and dependent on His will. They also referred to some of God's attributes: the lack of a partner, for such would surely give rise to conflict.

How does one reconcile the alleged primitiveness of such peoples with such loftiness in their concept of God? It seems that true Messengers conveyed these truths to them, some soundness of which can still be found in their present-day beliefs.

Some people wonder why there were no female Prophets. The overwhelming consensus of Sunni scholars of the Law and Tradition is that no woman has been sent as Prophet. Except for a questionable and even unreliable tradition that Mary and Pharaoh's wife were sincere believers, there is no Qur'anic authority or hadith that a woman was sent to her people as a Prophet.

God the All-Mighty created all entities in pairs. Humanity was created to be the steward of creation, and thus is fitted to it. The pairs of male and female are characterized by complex relation of mutual attraction and repulsion. Women incline toward softness, weakness, and compassion; men incline toward strength, force, and competitive toughness. When they come together, such characteristics allow them to establish a harmonious family unit.

Today, the issue of gender has reached the point where some people refuse to recognize the very real differences between men and women and claim that they are alike and equal in all respects. Implementing these views has resulted in the "modern" lifestyle of women working outside the home, trying to "become men," and thus losing their own identity. Family life has eroded, for children are sent to daycare centers or boarding schools as parents are too busy, as "individuals," to take proper care of them. This violence against nature and culture has destroyed the home as a place of balance between authority and love, as a focus of security and peace.

God the Wise ordained some principles and laws in the universe, and created human beings therein with an excellent and lofty nature. Men are physically stronger and more capable than women, and plainly constituted to strive and compete without needing to withdraw from the struggle. It is different with women, because of their menstrual period, their necessary confinement before and after childbirth, and their consequent inability to observe all the prayers and fasts. Nor can women be available continually for public duties. How could a mother with a baby in her lap lead and administer armies, make life and death decisions, and sustain and prosecute a difficult strategy against an enemy?

A Prophet must lead humanity in every aspect of its social and religious life without a break. That is why Prophethood is impossible for women. If men could have children, they could not be Prophets either. Prophet Muhammad points to this fact when he describes women as "those who cannot fulfil the religious obligations totally and cannot realize some of them."

A Prophet is an exemplar, a model for conducting every aspect of human life, so that people cannot claim that they were asked to do things that they could not do. Exclusively female matters are communicated to other women by the women in the Prophet's household.

#allah #god #prophet #Muhammad #quran #ayah #sunnah #hadith #islam #muslim #muslimah #hijab #help #revert #convert #dua #salah #pray #prayer #reminder #religion #welcome to islam #how to convert to islam #new convert #new revert #new muslim #revert help #convert help #islam help #muslim help

[swpoliticsandmemes]

Imperialism as explored by Star Wars. Sorry in advance.

I think it’s neat how ever since the good guy/American revolutionary vs bad guy/British empire set up in ANH, the Galactic Empire has been increasingly been grounded in more lucid and descript forms of violence, oppression and exploitation so that now we have one of the most monopolistic and soulless corporations (and in some ways the face of modern American capitalism), Disney, ironically owning a property that gives a competent account of what Empire looks like that doesn’t shy away from the political implications (many of which even go against Disney’s interests.)

First off we have the very shape galactic civilisation: densely populated Ecumenopolises such as Coruscant as well as other advanced and politically influential worlds like Alderaan and Chandrila are focused towards the Galactic core, while groupings of planets with decreasing levels of political and economic significant fall to further and further outskirts. It almost seems to be an intentional allusion to the core-periphery model that plays a central foundation to both Marxist and non-Marxist analyses of Imperialism. Although I’m resigned to accept it was more likely a natural tendency for the creators to put the centre of galactic civilisation in, well, the centre of the galaxy, although any look at the galactic map would possibly put this into question as most of the known space is heavily skewed to the Galactic east, and the deep core actually ends up being on one side of civilisation than in the centre. 

Either way, the nature of the relationship between the core and the periphery ends up fitting the real-world model, and this is the case for not just the Empire but for the Republic too. In Phantom it’s just a matter of seeing a contrast between the criminally-run Tattooine to the vast wealth of the capital. I should say now that two key facets of this analysis is that 1. republics, even self-professed anti-imperialist ones (America, USSR, Iran come to mind), can and do engage in imperialism, and 2. there is, at least for some people, a sense of continuity between the Republic and the Empire. This latter point sort of reflects how the early Roman Empire claimed to be a continuation of the Roman Republic, as evidenced by the style of the address for the Emperor being ‘princeps’ or first-citizen, as opposed to the later ‘dominus’ or lord. While Mon Mothma and others would see the Republic as having been destroyed by Palpatine’s coup, men like Yularen and Tarkin smoothly transitioning between high-ranking positions in both governments, would disagree, although by the time of ANH the old systems had been so firmly eroded that even Tarkin gloats that the “last vestiges of the old republic have been swept away.” Nonetheless, the Core-periphery system remains and in fact is intensified during this time, with the Core cultural elite being emphasised in Thrawn and Princess of Alderaan (and reinforced on-screen with the constant overindulgence in English accents) and with assignments for Imperial officials being considered more worthy if being closer to the core.

With the core-periphery model being the basis assumption, there are three predominant models of imperialism. One is based off international realism, which we can dismiss out of hand because it depends on multiple independent states playing a zero-sum game on an anarchic chess board, but in the GFFA, with a few exceptions like the distant Chiss, there is an assumed universal (or in this case, galactic) governance. However, we will come back to IR realism in a bit. The other two models are in direct opposition with one another, although they are not mutually exclusive as most modern theorists try to adapt aspects from both. 

One is the metrocentric view, based off the works of rabid antisemite J.A Hobson and general scumbag  V.I. Lenin. The nub of their theories was that imperialism was an extension of surplus capital from industrialised nations, as the faster rate of growth in productivity outpaced demand in the home country/metropole (or core) it became more profitable to invest in less developed countries as lower wage-bases would help maintain a high rate of return. However, so many of these places had strong religious or cultural institutions or were even based on non-monetary sharing economies, which necessitated political intervention for a capitalist incursion to work, and so financial interests prompted national governments to dominate these countries, destroy said institutions and build physical infrastructure based around hard resource extraction. 

In the sense that the Empire is centrally driven, this theory applies, although the motivation is different. As far as I’m aware, none of the major colonial empires were run by an evil cult centred around the totalitarian authority of one single individual and his acolytes (in this regard the Empire is more like Nazi Germany than anything else.) However, the Empire does clearly work on extracting value from peripheral planets to fund the opulence of the core, and with the clear distinction from the Republic where this process also happened, the Empire wields its military power to protect and accelerate that process, with Imperial Star Destroyers deploying to investigate a slave revolt on Kessel in Solo and a permanent military presence between the resource-depleted Gorse and Thorilide-rich Cynda in A New Dawn.

It’s difficult to ascribe the motivation for expansion in the Empire since it begins already controlling the Galaxy, although picking up on my earlier point about republics engaging in forms of Imperialism, we have something from Tarkin, when it’s revealed that the Republic expanded from the Core, “ravenous for new resources and not above exploiting to enhance the quality of their lives.” The book goes on to explains how competing financial interests propelled expansion, which is interesting because it possibly clues us into the instability underlying the Republic in the prequels, with unchecked financial interests causing corruption and unrest (just short of suggesting class conflict) and feelings of resentment from predominantly Outer Rim and non-human planets who join the CIS. Although the CIS was mostly just a project for those same opportunistic financial interests (such as slavers and interplanetary banking cartels), it’s interesting to note that the regular citizens genuinely thought they were fighting against the corruption of the Republic, with one Parliamentarian in The Clone Wars suggesting that unlike the Galactic Senate, the Raxus Parliament is not influenced by corporations. 

But for the faults of both the Republic and the CIS, the Empire outstripped them both; bringing back slavery, coercing entire races such as the Geonotians to work before eradicating them, and with the word ‘stripmining’ becoming a very popular word among various OT media. However, a counterargument to this being a form of metrocentric Imperialism could be the relative non-presence of financial interests during the Empire era. Indeed, while most callous resource-extraction in Africa during the late 19th century was geared towards creating products to dump into world markets, most of the resource extraction we see in the Empire is about directly supplying the military (tibanna in Thrawn, thorilide in A New Dawn) and even the presence of people profiteering seems lacking. Even the villain most clearly associated with profit-seeking capitalism, Denetrius Vidian from A New Dawn, is a member of the Emperor’s inner circle. This alignment of industrial and state interests is probably why the Empire is described as being fascist by Wookiepedia. While I don’t contest the definition, I still think we can accurately compare it with late 19th century colonial Empires, which also had large military-industrial complexes to supply, and whose alignment with private joint-stock companies such as the East India Company is not too unlike the Empire’s close ties with the Mining Guild. 

The opposing view is the pericentric model, which argues that the nature of Imperialism is more determined by local conditions, and that colonial empires preferred to rule with a light touch when necessary. The view was supported by the fact that different Imperial territories would have different arrangements. For example, Britain was content just taking a concession from Qing China and dumping Opium into its markets, while it became more direct involved with various African lands which didn’t have a relatively stable system of governance for which to work with. Meanwhile, Britain found itself entangled into occupation of Egypt after the local situation deteriorated after an anti-colonial rebellion, even under the generally anti-empire prime minister William E. Gladstone. 

I feel this model applies less to the Empire, since we’ve seen that it pursues imperialism with an almost perverse fervour, but there are examples which fit. Although with less power, the Queen of Naboo remained as an institution, and Clan Saxon collaborated with the Empire and became a pro-Imperial client regime. Meanwhile, the King of Mon Cala resisted the Empire and so was deposed, with it being implicit that had he cooperated, he could have remained as ruler. In Rebels, we see how increasing insurgency leads to greater and greater direct control by the Imperial Navy. Ultimately, however, it’s clear that the Empire, contrary to the pericentric, has a greater inclination towards greater direct rule, with Tarkin saying in ANH that more power will be handed to the regional governors. 

Finally, we return to realism, but not to investigate the Core-Periphery model any further but rather to look at another aspect of the Empire, it’s overextension. Part of this is probably to the do with the last point, its desire to control as much as possible, leading to Leia saying in ANH, “the more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers.” This form of realism, offensive realism, plays right into this. This theory comes from Jack Snyder’s The Myth of Empire, and it postulates that late 19th and early 20th century empires became fixated on constant expansion, to deter any incursion into their own hinterland and to break up opposing alliances. This policy, in fact, led to the opposite happening, with empires becoming too stretched thing to properly defend its hinterland, an being so aggressive as to prompt fearful opposing nations to band together to take them down. 

In the Star Wars, we can see this in the Tarkin doctrine and the Death Star. The belief that total aggression will be necessary to deter even the slightest thought of resistance leads to an ungodly amount of resources being devoted to this one superweapon, at the expense of other projects getting less than they need (as explored in Thrawn: Treason with both protagonist and antagonist feeling rather miffed by the lack of funding for their own projects). The destruction of Alderaan (among countless other cruelties and war crimes) does more to spur on the Rebellion than anything else, especially once the superweapon they spent so much of their resources on gets taken right from under them. And in a way perhaps that’s the good thing about any empire, that it sows the seeds of its own destruction half the time. 

So yeah, sorry about this ungodly and incomprehensible overanalysis of an IP for children. It ended up being way longer than I thought it would, and this was just about imperialism (empire on a grand scale, as opposed to colonialism which would be the specific practices employed by empire in a territory.) I might make another one of these if I get the time.

#star wars #star wars the clone wars #star wars rebels #the clone wars #rebels #a new hope #the phantom menace #attack of the clones #revenge of the sith #tarkin #thrawn #thrawn: treason #a new dawn #princess of alderaan #leia #imperialism #empire #republic #essay

[emersonmanandnature]

March 13, 2020

How can we be gods children if we don’t know him by his true natural self? Who is god? Is he a figment of our imagination? An imagination scared of the directions presenting themselves, so we look for comfort in an illusive god we made trustworthy without flaws, a perfection we ourselves can’t possible know or be.

And yet aren’t we perfect as well if we seek our own inner journey and express our feeling through our artistic talents.

Some say we know him through ourselves, our internal, necessary dependence on something bigger, more powerful than our meek voices. A vision of a healer that can bring us to his promised land.

But is that really a faithful promise or just a cliche given to sooth the savage beast in us all. For religion is the calming drug we are given because if it wasn’t we would be in constant rebellion, fighting and killing each other, oh wait, we are doing that anyway. So why is religion and a promise of salvation the hook that catches us and won’t let go. I guess you could say faith through religion is a good money maker and the script had already been written. A lot of plagiarism there because it is hard to start your own religion and end up with billions of scared people following the repetitive words necessary for their resurrection.

Why is god hiding his presence from us? Is he a little overweight and his beard a little scraggly perhaps because he has been traveling around this universe saving other planets enjoying their foods but ignoring our despair?

What does he have against us, beside our egotistical self importance and a desire to rule others? Maybe he sees our need to squelch the oligarch’s fatherly corruption, living in their heavenly paradise here on earth, forget about dying and losing their power and dominance over humanity. That is never going to happen unless we all come together as one, not mouthing gods demands but our demands to live a full life without having to fear if our jobs will be shipped overseas and if this planet can withstand for now the absolute looting of our resources for profit by murdering human beings.

They say you can’t take it with you, no shit sherlock, you can’t even take yourself to hell on a sleigh ride. The ending is a darkness in despair. So why not be for now, a glutton for pleasure here on this planet, with frighten adults acting like children afraid of their own shadow. Well, they should be scared for the corruption even for the wealthy is getting too complicated and devoid of reason. Take, take, and take some more seems to be the new scriptures of our earthly presence. We feel the fear and anguish coming as our society of laws break down into street violence amongst the people while the rich will be sheltered in a manger of wealth behind a giant wall protecting their insatiable desires.

For the wealthy this is their heavenly vision, for they derive pleasure in seeing others suffering and their greed is seen everywhere across this speck of dust by jealousy and envy, as the sinners speak our truth.

Their psychopathic mental self-interest impacts the citizens with degradation and criminal intent, for the 1% could careless about humanity, they are only attentive to their own desires first, for the elites with no moral foundation toward other human beings needs, beside those that share their immoral moneyed excessiveness, cherish all self-indulgence as a necessary representation of their smug and self-centeredness, an obnoxious determination to destroy the free spirit in the populace, living not just in the good old usa of debauchery but in corrupted countries worldwide and controlling the populaces behavior as the romans did when god sent his only son to perform an impossible task and allowed christ to suffer for our sins that washed us clean of guilt and made us stronger to systematically attack and dismantle truth with vicious propaganda lies to influence the racists that still believe they are the goodness of this petty earth, better than those poor humans in their repeating excuses of why this earth is in turmoil, not by the military industrial complex, the corrupt corporations, and the bought and sold political stooges claiming to be our buddies as they take more of our hard earned tax dollars and then pass fraudulent laws that are only give aways to the criminals that live fat on the herd expressing how important they are for the world to succeed in destroying itself.

Dissecting a known truth as a scheme to influence the men and women of angered hate toward themselves, outward toward innocent families not knowing the true culprit of their fears and loss of jobs is the wealthy that use our hard earned tax dollars for their own personal pleasure and can’t believe these fools that believe they have their best interests when all the rich want is more and more of what you got until you have no more and are forced to live in the slum streets of cities worldwide.

These one per centers are not like us human beings, they have no morals or empathy for anyone or anything unless there are profits to be made. They are as cold as an ice berg, hold on not any more, these staggering warming temperatures, lets say they are as sinful as hellish evil prospering on our once heavenly paradise.

The politicians smirk and take pride in serving these destructive powers of dark hate. Their swollen heads of self-glorification turn their angry eyes toward anyone different than their own corrupted morals and the criminal minds allow them to gain a little more income but not enough for them to get heady and think they are now part of the elite class that can’t be bothered with the break down of a cohesive society based on love for all for that was never going to be part of the deal when christ sacrificed himself, for he was alone, a forsaken prophet looking to bring mankind together but where is the profit margin in kindness.

We exist in a corrupt world that inflames hate to deflect the true goals of the wealthy, a living hell for everyone whether they toe the line of bigotry or not.

Lets remember god killed guilty and innocent people alike, he murdered easily enough at least in the old days before he decided to send his only son to suffer for our sins, pretty good trick there, are you afraid of a little pain yourself? snuffing out every human on the planet except gods favorite lackey, the boatman, Noe’s ark, who saved the animals and god said, “I will never again curse the ground on account of man, of the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”

I would think the killing off the people on earth is pretty evil. Was god competing with the Prince of Darkness to see who could claim the most pervasive disregard for human life ever known. Does god have feelings of anger like we do if so wouldn’t he be human? 

Even in today’s violent wars for profit nowhere have we hit that goal, the death of all the human race but we are getting closer to the truth of our predicament, the wealthy trying their best to imitate god. I wonder if we should start making our case for survival, do you think!

But for now we are the leftovers from paradise denied, we do your dirty work for you and you can sit back and condemn us for our murderous nature even though we inherited this from you, our father.

Praise the lord for his brutal killing of his flock just like we are prone to explosive acts of murder in our own unique ways.

We are god’s drones on auto pilot doing his bidding, trying to impress him with our lack of morals for he showed us how murdering is part of being a good servant to his needs.

God’s perfection is an illusion an abstraction of nonsense, the killing of humanity is our own worse fears of hate and malice toward anyone different from our skin color, not gods.

Oh sure, 2,000 years ago he came and performed miracles of love through god’s grace, given to his son to change our dependent minds on the physical nature of this reality.

By conditioning humans to think of their own resurrection to heaven so they would eventually lose interest in this planet earth for the religious zealots condemned anyone that thought this world could be our paradise. For our earthly presence here in this place is for the people to suffer at the hands of the church and others, angry mobs seek vengeance in the name of his holiness, lord and supreme being. It sounds like these religious zealots were practicing their opening act for lucifer, calling their presence on earth a killing field without mercy for those heathens different from our shady truth. For he is our truth and our salvation and we must endure the pain we inflict on other human beings for soon they will be like us and will demand our deaths.

Through the creation of more and more powerful weapons mankind gave religion the go ahead to condemn other faiths as heathen and below their godly standards. And lets face it if you make a weapon that can easily kill another why not go ahead and do it for ultimately aren’t we just animals with a bomb and without a moral compass.  

Was god a ruler with an earthly projected character, just a powerful man made force hidden in our psyche, out of our sight but yet present everywhere, in everything and every one of us, as we became the powerful judge and jury. When we get down to our true behavior we are the criminals our sons and daughters learn from us what true violence and destruction is. Not just the heartless truth of what we are but also what we will never become, a loving community with one goal, freedom and tranquillity for all people no matter their skin color. When you have a commandment, “love they neighbor as thyself,” ignored just to perpetuate violence on others for strategic profits I would say our lords words have been abandoned!

Adam and Eve betrayed his trust through the devils work. And we are also betraying god’s work though our own inner hate and frustration that we have not been saved from ourselves for 1,000s of years.

Did god really expect someone new to this reality, fresh from being nothing to suddenly being a physical presence in the garden of eden, and all of a sudden living in a wealth of exotic foods and of course god himself smiling and giving him orders, this had to be an overwhelming fantasy paradise and to think that not only is there a god above them but also a devil below them, kind of a smorgasbord of good and bad things for our future lives to be blamed for. Damned if we don’t pray to our  almighty god and damned when we act in a devilish fashion out of ignorance.

Lets get real here for just a minute, I don’t think my sins add up to the sins of the wealthy and their investment in killing the planet and other human beings through wars for profit and their deep addiction to power at any cost as long as the cost is put on the backs of the working people for they, the new gods of pain and despair are above the law and especially gods laws and are deeply entrenched in manipulating our behavior through mind altering influences that pits us fighting amongst ourselves as the corrupt oligarchs sit and count their billions just to feed their overgrown ego’s of avarice and vanity. Where is our protective god now, has he come down from the heavens and booted these crooks out of the temple again and sent them on their merry way to live in the fiery pit? In today’s hell hole on this planet we don’t have the excuse of adam and eve for we know the score in life and we see and feel the wealthy’s hatred and greed towards all of us, the little people with no special purpose but to serve their needs.

These rich self-centered ego’s always looking for profits to torture and murder innocent men, women and children. What kind of god would allow this to be the norm where the oligarchs get their money and the people get the shaft through opened eyed murderous evil.

And our lord god allows these killings as a necessary step toward our salvation and if that is the case then god is in for a whole lot of trouble, a lot of soul cleansing, we seek our savior external to our own inner being, usually in a church setting that stigmatizes us as devilish sinners that need to pray morning, noon and night and praise the lord every minute as we abandoned all of our unspoken dreams, we are all sinners even though most of us don’t know any demonic sins we have committed yet we are labeled sinners with no purpose it seems but to hate our inner and outer selves.

I must disagree with this callous obnoxious poser rock of preacher’s lies that speak this garbage because they hate themselves and their hidden actions of lust and addiction to the little power given them from the congregation of his lost lambs ready to be sheered of any hope of salvation. Unless they like his mansion and his bedroom.

If god was so easy to know then we all would be saintly sinners and his pep talk each week would be to live your life to the fullest not in fear and hate but in love of thy neighbor, as I love you and as you should love yourself.

But our absent father, son and the holy ghost have abandoned his children to the voracious appetite of caveman behavior, humans with no moral constraints and no qualms of killing innocence with starvation, war, prison, slavery, no jobs, no hope and hate just for more profit.

Hate is the new marketplace for all of us to shop at. We have any kind of weapon you want. The dealers don’t care what you do with it as long as you lay down the bucks to purchase your inner hatred being fulfilled.  

How are we to praise his image of redemption when mankind is on the verge of insane violence just for material possessions?

Words inspired by ancient minds desperate to believe in something more than this pain of living, sought solace in an imaginary friend, a savior to ease our suffering through a resurrection. A friend that was beyond our understanding, beyond our earthly presence and this figure of love for his children became the religions of the masses passed down through centuries of suffering by the hands of the powerful rulers who praised this new distraction which gave them more power to steal from the populace as a necessary evil, a demand from our lord that these men of wealth were above the law and through the centuries of violence toward the meek, hatred of anothers skin color, a willingness to attack and murder another religion as god’s will, this was all a mental mind game, a society that was and is manipulated into believing that the rich and powerful have the right to place themselves above the law because these diabolical gluttonous predators are in the same category as your god you worship, it was just they didn’t promise anyone would escape this earth, this physical hell.

Why the lonely death amongst the physical presence of others? Wouldn’t it be better to know that a supreme creator is there waiting for you, not in silence but yelling and screaming, you can do it, you can be saved. A mental illusion of comfort for your trials and pain for living a life for others without satisfaction for you and your family.

We the herded children of this false dream of paradise, somewhere up their, some place in the dark starry night maybe a trillion miles away is our foundation for suffering in this astral plane of nonsense and not going insane from the brutality of the powerful, always seeking more than they deserve.

I think we can now agree that our paradise is not exterior to our selves but in us and we now have to focus our intuitive perceptions toward seeking our own salvation through our love for all people’s of this earth.

Yet, you still feel a presence, it is a wordless silence as you interpret your own vision, in your own words hoping what you think and feel is your god’s mercy funneling the holy spirits thoughts into you as an objective witness of his revelation.

The wealthy have no god but themselves. They understand their power with only meager limitations, their fright of retribution for their underhanded manipulation of prices and for taxes that give them more authority over the inferior beings that look to the stars as they are being brutalized from every possible angle by the plutocrats.

Where humans pray for their salvation, the rich pray for the next blockbuster investment with no fears of loss for they will be warned early if the stock they put millions on collapses so they can get out quick and then watch the poor working people lose their shirt and soul to greed.  

Wealth always makes money for the family, if you cut corners so be it, my god will understand the financial side of life, so what if he entered the temple and threw out the money lenders, I am not one of those, yes, I sucked money off the poor but it was a good deal for them as well, I can’t think of anything on top of my empty greedy head but I am sure they were given something for their land and their back breaking work on property they owed mucho bucks on.

We saved them from earthy pain through the hanging tree.

The wealthy will finally break with the gluttonous universe of possessions and their ego will finally be humbled from the obsession to be seen and heard as if this would placate their inner fears and you there! look in my eyes, nothing you do is immortal and you soon will be on the down slope with bodily decay grasping for any hold you can manage, flowing easily into that pitiful need to beg for your liberation from death and never finding the pardon you demanded by showing your goodness so purposefully disguised, giving to others what they never asked for and didn’t need or want.

One cannot refute or excuse the lost opportunities of youth, each seeking her or his own structured becoming, the known entity of your external self one would eventually stop respecting and hoping for a universal change in their life but only beginning to understand what the greedy demanded by creating this appalling wealth on the back breaking work of the many. No last supper here, only a watered down excuses for a life disappearing and being replaced by the same quality of consciousness as before, let the greed attract the amoral deceptions of avarice, those bewildered by the voracious appetite for power move forward until they are systematically robbed of their selfhood and beg for their last meal on this planet knowing there will be no mercy without suffering.

If the church represents god’s voice on earth and the church is seen not as a saintly experiment in thought control but a corrupt and incompetent group of men that have a lustful heart for the weak and use their status of holiness as a facade to dig deep into others lives, to feel their trauma of existence with gleeful proclivity knowing they have an innocent to betray with lies they sold to the congregation, to tweak their hearts to give more and more, for in their robed disguise they rejoice in their saintly hypocrisy and toast those that can’t see the foundation of the church was not god’s will but the lust for power of those present in their false words, giving to the parishioners a truth that one can’t deny for if you do find fault with the logic of obsessive religious power, a god like characteristic, you will be abandoned to the wolves of debauchery, that think of themselves defenders of gods word, love thy money as thyself, a quote someone wrote but to believe it you need confirmation from the holy spirit, coming to you with talons spread for a sacrificial lamb with a bleeding soul repenting in screaming terror of existential nothingness.

We seek the truth of the intellect but not the truth of our intuition, we have incorporated into our thinking this illusion of the past as truthful and as truth it is responsible for all that we feel and see in god’s earthy glory in our present moments, we must believe and accept the truth of others that use this bait and switch to earn vast sums of money from all that god is, (their little puppet on a stick), we are his children and as his children we must live the life he gives us and if we wander away from the path to his glory we will be punished with everlasting hell on this round peanut hole called earth.

A universal symbol of stupidity, a mind caught up in profit over a helping hand, without courage to express and defend the nature of truth by opening your heart to every living person on this planet.

But wait, see we are doing god’s little work by making people suffer for his crucifixion. If he died for us the least we can do is ask all of us to die a slow painful death too, amen, praise the lord!

Centuries ago the believers believed that the son of god came to earth and sacrificed himself for the sins of the working folks at the doors of his church of truth. But with a bait and switch move they switched places with the apostles of faith and they became the custodians of the lies that break the spirits of souls by allowing none to doubt the possibilities of the pleasure palace of sexual delights. We now seek god in many disguises.

Ask yourself if jesus was right to expose the greed and corruption in the temple by driving them from his holy presence then why do we still believe in the greed and corruption christ tried to exterminate. The answer is quite simple human nature. We are an animal persona with a semblance of intelligence but when it comes down to the earthly pleasures we are rutting in the back woods just like any other beast of burden.

Your belief is not an outside force telling you what to believe but an inner belief in your silent god and with prayer you hope to extend your life beyond the demanding years of old age. Your paradise is waiting as long as you don’t contradict the emperors of religion and the corporation living in vatican city. Which amount to the same kind of criminality and lust running rampant in the society of blind ignorance of our real truth.

Your internal force of god is the only way to experience the true revelation of our savior. Can you spread the word of god beyond yourself, for once it enters the mind of another person then their hearing is just an acceptance without internal sight. We believe what we are taught, just as you were as a child, you are told what to believe and how to act, how simple and detrimental to the freedom of our individual souls.

Conditioned beyond self recognition we accept the universal hope of truth but instead we get a commercial of malice expecting all to join in the big extravaganza of shopping on his holy birthday.

We look to him for answers of our trust of exterior values that are never real and are meant to manipulate us into contribution to the chump fund, as if the church doesn’t already have the wealth to help the starving children around this god forsaken planet of mercenaries.

We accept his silence as our truth and we proceed forward not in a loving relationship but in a money transaction between lawyers of equal status centered not on the words of a misfortunate prophet but others that interpreted his demise as a foolish wish and that in order to survive these men and women of the holy flock of voracious selfishness must insist on payment up front before any transaction is completed in the name of god.

#conditioned #forsaken #profit #self #endings #no morals #politicians smirk #egotistical self importnace #faith #captive #cjcorwinoriginal

[ipraygreywords]

Slayers Week 2 Day 2: Villains

But is he really? 

 “I am both better and worse than you thought” (Sylvia Plath). 

Of all the many characters for whom I have written, none is more difficult to pinpoint than Rezo, in this particular regard.  This is the man who heals stray kittens for little boys when nobody is looking, who devoted 150 years of life to traveling nonstop and healing hundreds of thousands of people of illness, but also steals another preteen boy’s body for the chance to cure his own blindness.  See what I mean?

My ultimate conclusion is that Rezo is a good person who has had to compensate for personal impediments using opportunistic means, and because Rezo was never fully in control of Rezo’s own judgment or Rezo’s own choices, these actions became increasingly abhorrent in the two to three years before his death: but he still did a great deal of good in his life, and, were he to live free of that influence, he would be unequivocally good. That is WHY he was chosen to be corrupted.  Bad people attack symbols of goodness to demoralize their enemies.  But let me back up. Because woosh. This is a complex topic.  

Sussing out Rezo’s moral alignment is difficult because Rezo, as we see him in canon, never does anything without the powerful, corrupting presence of a ma-oh (the strongest tier of demon in all his world, one of only four in the universe, who are eclipsed by only one other being) which was affixed to his soul from birth.  This ma-oh (the mouthful name of “Ruby-Eyed Shabranigdu”) chose Rezo intentionally as a vessel, from which he hoped to eventually be resurrected (in the process, killing Rezo–a fact which alone is intriguing, because Shabranigdu has done this before to other humans, who survived his resurrected and far more comfortably cohabited with him).  So when one analyzes Rezo’s actions as a human being, one always has to try and separate out Shabranigdu’s manipulations from Rezo’s natural inclinations. Let’s get a couple (overly simplistic, imho) anti arguments out of the way first:

–People who dislike Rezo often point out that Shabranigdu picked Rezo because he saw vulnerabilities that he could exploit to the point of serious moral corruption.  That means it was possible to break Rezo: but I–and Lina Inverse, the chief protagonist of the Slayers series–believe that still doesn’t condemn Rezo as a “bad” or “weak” person. It just means that Shabranigdu, who is a master manipulator, could find a strategy with which to erode Rezo’s will. I also believe that because Rezo was born with a famously powerful capacity for white/healing magic, and a demonstrable urge to serve others in ways that could not possibly benefit him, Shabranigdu thought it would be perversely hilarious to target a cleric: a person in whom people placed their trust, to have their best interests at heart, and to make them well. (Shabranigdu’s main goal is to wreak despair and violence on the world, and return it to a state of chaos, so why not take down a few more people beyond Rezo, ruin their faith in the benevolence of their healers, while he’s at it? But I’ll get to this more later.)

–People who dislike Rezo also often assume that Shabranigdu was the cause of Rezo’s eyes being sealed shut, causing him “blindness,” from birth. Why is this important to your question? Because when we analyze the series more closely, it becomes clear that Rezo’s eyes are a protective seal AGAINST Shabranigdu’s resurrection, which means that the ma-oh cannot complete his resurrection unless Rezo opens his eyes (we see this both in Slayers Season One and in Slayers Evolution-R).  When Rezo was born, his eyes acted as a failsafe shielding the world FROM Shabranigdu.  Shabranigdu had to act against that failsafe to be reborn.  So Shabranigdu turned the VIRTUE of the sealed-shut eyes into a HANDICAP which embarrassed, discouraged, and isolated Rezo, because he could cure everyone else with his amazing healing skills, but not himself (and even a saint must eventually feel jealousy and resentment from that)–such that EVEN THE THING THAT MADE HIM FAMOUS, AND GOOD, AND LOVED BY OTHERS, BECAME A SYMBOL OF “BUT NOT YOU: YOU DON’T GET TO BE HAPPY LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. NEVER YOU.”  A person who is depressed and angry and alone is much easier to break.  See below.  

–People who dislike Rezo almost always cite what he did to his own grandson Zelgadis as the most condemnation-worthy “evidence” that he is rotten to the core. While there is NO EXCUSING WHAT HE DID, and I will NEVER think what he did is okay, I could not disagree with these individuals more.  Rezo is capable of forming and maintaining loving attachments; in the end, Shabranigdu USES precisely those loving attachments to isolate Rezo, by perverting their purity, and breaking his loved ones WITH HIS OWN HANDS. What better way to demoralize a good person than to make them SEEM to choose being a monster?  There are actual contemporary scientific studies that prove that one of the best ways to torture prisoners of war is to make them torture others. It dehumanizes them, renders them weapons, and lowers their resolve to fight back. This is what happened when Rezo took Zelgadis’s words “we need to do small evils for great good, and get stronger” and twisted them into an excuse to make Zelgadis a chimera–effectively alienating Zelgadis from the world just as Shabrranigdu had Rezo–as part of his research to cure his own eyes.   (People reading this who have the “but he knew Zel could never be cured, and Evo-R proves that!” rebuttal, let me know, because I have a whole separate meta theory on that, which does not exonerate Rezo, but does cast serious doubt on the allegation that the chimera process can never be reversed).   –Rezo does terrible evils (the other big whoppers are creating and experimenting on a clone of himself, and deliberately spreading a disease to an isolated kingdom to take advantage of its ill as test subjects).  But, and while this isn’t a make it or break it thing, he lso more than once shows genuine contrition for the evil he has done, when it will benefit him in no way to do so. This is rare, and sometimes it is on the tail end of a lot of emotionally manipulative bargaining and self-justification (borne primarily of pride), but he has either apologized or openly acknowledged that his choices were evil and unconscionable, on both the occasions that he was confronted by the heroes for his choices. –People who dislike Rezo like to say “he only started his white magical career to try and heal his own eyes!” to which I answer: yes, and? The subsequent entire life he spent healing people while continuing to master other magics to heal himself were not mandatory. No one was forcing Rezo to share his findings with others.  That was an act of selflessness.   –Both times that Shabranigdu is reborn out of Rezo (which…rips apart his body, fun times) and he realizes it, he helps the heroes kill Shabranigdu, and without him they would have failed to do so.  Which. You know. BIG INDICATION that he’s not, at heart, a bad guy lol. –Rezo plans ahead to try to do damage control for potential collateral, when he does selfish and reckless things.  It’s usually not enough, and he puts new meaning to the word “quixotic.”  But it still matters for the purposes of your question. For instance, when he finally breaks down and chooses to resurrect Shabranigdu, he plans to create an arguably evenly-matched creature called a “Zanaffar” with which to kill the demon the moment he gains vision.  He also creates laboratories deep underground so that explosions can be contained and do less damage to the surrounding area.  He also thinks (wrongly) that he can heal all the people in Taforashia before they die, once he can see.    Rezo’s fatal flaw in all these cases is to assume, out of desperation, that he is capable of more than any one human being ever could be.  

Which is not good or evil, really, but HUMAN: pulling us back toward a consistent, perennial theme of Slayers, that humans are flawed but redeemable creatures, neither gods nor demons, who exist to maintain the *balance* of the cosmos (the true plan, according to Xelloss, of the most powerful of all beings, referred to as LoN).  

–People expect too much of Rezo, which I think was a genuine, conscious point the Slayers writers wanted to make.  

It doesn’t excuse anything he did that was evil.  At the same time, there are two ways to dehumanize a person. One is to vilify them.

The other is to idolize them.   Zelgadis idolized Rezo. Eris idolized Rezo.  Pokota idolized Rezo.  And Rezo took advantage of that, and that’s wrong. But think about that for a moment. It is wrong, on a moral level, to idolize a living person, and expect god-tier ethical purity at all times and under all forms of pressure.  It is wrong, and it is hurtful.  Sometimes it’s done out of naivety, sometimes emotional codependence, but in any case, it is wrong. I speak here from painful experience on the receiving end of idolization. It exerts impossible pressure on a person. And it is scary.  

Hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people idolized Rezo. They built statues and made paintings of him. They installed him as one of the “Five Great Sages”–literally the most revered of magical users/scholars of ALL RECORDED HISTORY.  They threw so much money at him that he owned “several” mansions by the time of his death.  Rezo was good at maintaining the facade of authoritative serenity. But my God, was it ever that: a facade.  He was tired, angry, and afraid: so afraid that he once told his servant Ozel, in strictest confidence, knowing she would tell no one else, and in a tone of deep depression,  “Sometimes I lose my sense of what it is to be a person.”  

And don’t we all know the feeling, when we too are at a crossroads?  Isn’t that HUMAN?

I genuinely believe the Slayers writers wanted the audience to sort of meta-replicate the feelings of Rezo’s disciples, and expect Rezo to be a saint, and then be horrified and angry when his worst actions proved seriously otherwise. And then by the end of the story, I think they were meant to realize, this was just a guy. This was just a guy who had the rough equivalent of Satan possessing his body and soul, a guy who was meant to be a healer but had his whole life rendered a farce because of his own soul’s attempt to keep a monster sealed inside.  Rezo became a living prison for a demon, and he could not contain it. No one, in fact, who has served as the vessel of Shabranigdu has been able, ultimately, to resist him.  

#Rezo the Red Priest #Slayers Week #Rezo #Rezo Greywords

[theorynexus]

25 means we are 1/4 of the way to 100. Are we 1/4 of the way through the epilogue?  I cannot say.

This does not paint Jane in the best light. Again, she continues to come off as self-centered, and now, furthermore, seems to think that she deserves the title of President as some sort of inheritance that is naturally hers to claim-- as if it were an extension of her existence as Heiress.   This is certainly not the attitude that a president should have, given the fact that the title, President, naturally implies a representative system and a role invested with the will and trust of those who place you in that role.    (This is honestly why I am skeptical of any god taking up the role, honestly: it naturally clashes with their nature as existing beyond the populace, and the obeisance which the individuals they have brought into being on that planet seem to pay to them, to some extent or another.) It would also seem that Jane may not value her “friends” as much as one might hope she does, all things considered, based on the quotes, but maybe this just relates to the trolls, who she didn’t have much of an interaction with before the endgame of her session. This could naturally lead to her not feeling a connection with them later on, which I won’t begrudge her, if that is the case.

Here, while Jane is correct that Karkat did not engineer his campaign, the Crocker heiress makes a crucial mistake in judgment which does not bode well for her capacity to properly estimate the value and capacity of others (which is an essential political skill):     Her lack of serious interaction with Karkat (or apparent desire to, in the past, it would seem, based on the fact that she did not pursue it, regardless of their similar positions in the social order-- something which I would have thought would naturally lend itself to her interest) leads her to misunderstand his natural drive to leadership, or the great charisma which he possesses, regardless of his lack of recent desire to indulge in/make use of them.  The lack of imagination that any of the other ex-Players might be interested in running in opposition to her does not offer a good impression of her qualification, either. If she had been more aware of/concerned with that possibility, she naturally would have investigated all of them more and/or dug into their pasts for potential strengths, weaknesses, and dirty laundry.    What happened to her being an aspiring gumshoe? 

True, assuming that there is actually some sort of unified planetary government.  Perhaps there actually is, given the Gerrymandering issue related for the Consorts.  It is still oddly ambiguous as to when exactly these electoral rules/regulations were established, and I am wary of jumping to conclusions.  Regardless:  I do wonder if the emphasis, there, is meant to suggest she’s being a bit megalomaniacal?  I am not 100% sure what to make about her concerns regarding whether or not she seems to be prejudiced against trolls. Her paranoia about it could suggest that she knows people think she might be. On the other hand, it could be symptomatic of her concern over possible alienation of non-human votes. Politicians have to (or are at least supposed to, theoretically) be very careful about the way they phrase things; thus carefully considering the impressions one leaves as a result of wording is not out of the realm of reason even without an actual bigoted mindset being involved, I should think.

*raises an eyebrow at her underestimation of Dave’s frankly incredibly competent and well-developed mental faculties*    (Her analysis of their whole family having a “scheming gene” is interesting, however.) More indication that she is thinking very politically in her mindset, yes, yes~      I am in agreement with her opinion that using the term “stock” might be a bit jarring to the public conscience, considering it seems to border on racist thought, though not necessarily quite reaching that point.  Moreso, it reminds me of the archaic mindset regarding nobility being capable of breeding more capable and well-developed individuals than them masses, and thus certain families having natural advantages over others as a pure result of their family lineage. I suppose this is somewhat fitting, insofar as Jane is supposed to have a bit of an “old soul,” as far as her thoughts and language is concerned, just as Jake does.  Even so: as I said, she is right to be concerned with regards to potential public backlash, probably, considering how diverse that society is, racially. The term is probably even more loaded in their world than in ours.

This final line of self-reassurance is quite amusing. That said: I wonder why Dave has become so obsessed with such concepts of late.  While I am sure he already had a good grasp on them in general, considering his exploits during the Session, I also don’t recall him talking too terribly much about economic matters during the main course of Homestuck’s story.   I wonder if this is why Dave thinks that Jane has a poor understanding of economic issues, despite her role as a business woman.  The question then becomes: was that one-sidedness a result of Dave’s personality and Jane’s inability to address it properly, or was it a result of her actual lack of knowledge and/or competence in such issues.   There’s also the question of whether Dirk Strider could compensate for Jane’s lack of capacity, should the latter option be the case, in a similar way to how Dave intends to compensate for Karkat’s own weaknesses if said crabby troll ascends to the Presidency.    Given her personality, there may be some level of difficulty for Dirk to convince her to let him work, in this scenario, especially given she may or may not conflate business-running capacity for wider economic management skill, and thus pride herself in her potential economic manipulation/running prospects.    As such, there may be some risk of significant damage, should Jane in fact be incompetent in such matters.  Or, as Dave begrudgingly admits, maybe it’s just an issue of retaining the definition of what it means to be rich, or some such nonsense, which is at stake (at least as far as the economy is concerned). (Random thought:  Is Dave concerned with economic matters more because of the popularity of Hamilton?  Hmm.)

Oh. Well, this analysis of the leanings of the various demographics of the world is interesting. That comment regarding the Consorts is quite concerning, though. I understand that they may have limited mental capacities (hard to be certain), and they may be short-lived (I will have to check on this to be certain [update: can’t seem to find any evidence of their actual lifespan, despite their prolific breeding capacity]), this does not necessarily mean that they should be barred from representation in government.  Obviously, there are complex issues at play regarding how political rights should be dealt with when alien species are involved. These have not actually been tackled in real life, and thus there are not easy parallels to be drawn, with regards to how one should deal with the above-mentioned significant deviations this species has from humanity; however, this does not mean that they should be stripped of any sort of representative rights. I thus cannot support her attitude toward them in the slightest. Perhaps a more mild form of concern with how their voting capacities might impact her chances might have been warranted, but the way she reacted overall was not.

I am cast into a similar dilemma here. On the one hand, it is admirable for Jane to be concerned for the balance and well-being of the planet. On the other, the final sentence of this statement is absolutely reprehensible, and considering the fact that there are literal gods remaining on the planet that I am sure could potentially deal with any major danger such as the outbreak of inter-species war, there is absolutely no reason to support such a thought. I cannot support a person with this sort of mindset taking up political office-- especially when such a position is above all the species on the face of an infant planet, which could potentially spread its life to the far reaches of their new little universe.  I very much hope that if she loses, it will be a graceful defeat, and if not, that it shall be a victory which can be tempered in its impact upon the populace of the world via the meddling of the others around her.

This is a somewhat irrational fear, I would wager, considering the violent history of the trolls was a result of a rigidly-enforced social structure that came as a direct result of Lord English’s influence on the Trolls’ universe, and that of a tyrant whose intention was to maintain and expand a galactic empire-- causing the social structure of her empire’s citizens to conform to a particularly violent bent as a way of ensuring the necessary military force required for the ends mentioned above.  Jane seems to have some major lack of education in matters of political philosophy and sociology, given her incapacity to make such deductions regarding the origins and likely persistence (or lack thereof) of those traits.    Oh, and any sort of conversation with the (ex-Player) trolls or Beta Kids should have given her clear indication that before the Scratch of their universe, the trolls had a very peaceful society. Thus, any rational supposition that the trolls which populate Earth C have any sort of inclination to violence had better be backed up by clear evidence relating to the earlier history of said planet (which for 5,000 years, Jane admits has been idyllic) and/or the events that have happened in the few years that the kids+trolls have been back. Where’s the Beef?

#Homestuck Epilogue #Homestuck Analysis #Political Philosophy #Homestuck Spoilers #Homestuck Liveblog #Sociology #homestuck theories #Jane Crocker #Character Analysis

[lossofdecency]

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

Steven Pinker

#quote of the day #humanity #quote #life quotes #steven pinker

[anarchist-caravan]

In addition to the content itself, I think this piece by Shaun Bartone is a valuable example of how to approach the genre of buddhofiction. Approach, not arrive at. Let me back up a bit.

I believe that a responsible and rigorous approach to the study of a system of thought like x-buddhism involves movement along a continuum of recognition and negation. A wholly realized engagement, I believe, requires a third move: redescription.

Recognition involves, literally, re-cognizing, thinking along with or re-thinking, the system’s postulates. This practice results in a deep and informed hermeneutic appreciation. If you stop there, you will be an apologetic scholar or a good-subject practitioner, or something along those lines.

Negation is necessary in order to draw out the covert ideological machinations at work in the system. It allows you to consider what Adorno calls the “social truth content” at work in the ostensibly culturally-transcendent unitary system. In teasing out complicity in the formation of the capitalist subject, for instance, much of the current criticism of x-buddhism, particularly of Mindfulness, operates in this manner. That is, the negation performs an unmasking of the neutral, innocent, timeless truth dogma to reveal a socially embedded and necessarily political formation.

What then? Once the unitary system is exposed for possessing an identity other than the one it means to project, how do you respond? Some people abandon it, others dig in deeper and defend it. Human beings are complex creatures, and so are their responses to the inevitable deflation of the dharmic big Other. The aim of this blog is to catalyze a third response, namely redescription.

Redescription is a creative response to this deflation. Redescription, in fact, requires deflation. For, it is only through deflation that the specular dogmatics of x-buddhism come to lie prostrate on the ground, and rendered mere raw material for the sustenance of us homo sapiens apes. It is an eminently destructive-creative task to redescribe x-buddhist postulates. As the root of the term implies, this requires it to be formed, fashioned, cut anew (from proto-Indo-European √skribh).

Another term for redescription is buddhofiction. Like science-fiction, buddhofiction simply spins its material into the tale. It has neither need nor inclination to justify itself. It precedes from the premise that it is too late for arguments. Buddhofiction is a genre of peace. It has done with the violence of sectarian sniping. Why? Partly out of futility. Partly out of boredom. But mainly because there is still work to be done. I remain confident that x-buddhism has some really good shit going on.

So, how do you create a buddhofiction? No one can say exactly. Saying exactly would be yet another deployment of the troops to storm Fortress Dharma. This piece by Shaun Bartone is highly suggestive of an approach; it makes a gesture toward the way. He lays out a problematic—the void that appears in the inevitable death of capitalism—and poses a question: “How can we use Buddhist Dialectics (as opposed to Buddhist religion) to deconstruct—counter-construct—what life is like after Capitalism?” A buddhofiction collides these problematics into one another, producing a text that is constructed from its elements—techno-dystopia, zombie economics, brute futuristic sociology, x-buddhist emptiness, nothingness, and lack—yet is none of these elements. So, toward the creation of a new cut of x-buddhist flesh and blood…

(Glenn Wallis)

Buddhist Futures: The Black Hole of Post-Capitalism By Shaun Bartone

What happens after Capitalism? What is life like? Now that Capitalism has captured and colonized, appropriated (stolen), marketed and sold back to us every facet of our own lives, our relationships, needs, desires, cultures, even our “spiritualities,” what is left to us when Capitalism dies? As Joe Brewer wrote, “the pain you feel is Capitalism dying.”

Are we left with nothing but a black hole of Emptiness? Is there nothing to replace it? What alternatives are there to fill the void left by the death of Capitalism? It is like the death of God, an existential crisis.

I question and challenge those who beg for the end of Capitalism. Yes, Capitalism will come to an end, but what it will be replaced with might be even worse. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

I see the end of Capitalism as a naturally occurring process of Science overtaking Capitalism, and this is from a functionalist perspective. As science and technology (STEM) grows, it begins to take over all those social functions that used to be managed by Capitalism. STEM will become the new Overlord, controlling every waking (and sleeping) moment of our lives, what we produce and consume, what we do with our bodies and our leisure time, how we identify ourselves, how we relate, how we think. 

Then Capitalism will be seen for what it is in terms of Resource Allocation: a crap shoot, a wild guess, and not even—a blind shot in the dark compared to STEM. STEM will out-perform Capitalism at every level. STEM will have the capacity to allocate resources far more efficiently with greater exactitude and productivity than Capitalism ever could. Capitalism, with its “Economics,” which is nothing more than a self-reinforcing religion consisting of unnamed and untested premises (doctrines), will seem quaint and archaic, like the remnants of an old religion that one discovers between the dusty leather bindings of an ancient book in a library. We will look back and laugh at the hocus-pocus of “Economics” and how it pretended to manage the allocation of extreme complexity, how it was used to obfuscate and mystify its abject failures.

Capitalism has only been able to remain productive and profitable because STEM came to its rescue in the mid-twentieth century and began to take over many of its resource allocation functions, via computer technology and artificial intelligence. STEM will out-manage and out-perform Capitalism in every sector, but unlike Capitalism, its goal will not be profit—it will be CONTROL. The STEM-controlled world will be run not by Capitalists, but by Netocrats*, the technological elite. (See The Futurica Trilogy.) Entities (corporations?) that control resources will have access to everything they need and want, without having to buy or own anything. Stockpiling stuff (and “money another quaint Capitalist invention that will become useless and extinct) is inefficient and counter-productive, a waste, and STEM will not tolerate waste of any kind. Its sworn enemy is Entropy.

Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and investor began a recent video for  BigThink.com: “We think of capitalism as being locked in an ideological battle with socialism, but we never really saw that capitalism might be defeated by its own child — technology.”

Is there any shred of evidence to support this foregoing conjecture?* We already have a perfect foreshadowing of a STEM-controlled world: China’s new “social credit system.”  Communist China has figured out that people will submit to any authority, conform to any rule, if there are steep social consequences to pay for violating them. China is using social networking to note every action a person takes, every email, social media post, chat, purchase, bank transaction, phone call, every security checkpoint you pass through, how you behave in a queue, the expression on your face when you approach a clerk at a train station, every move you make is recorded and calculated to create a “social credit” ranking. If what you do is counted as cheating, stealing, lying, failing to pay debts, disobeying the rules, hostile or simply “untrustworthy,” you will receive a low social credit rating. Because of your low social credit rating, you will be denied access to jobs, apartments, credit, public transportation, and public services. China’s social credit system is the first to operationalize a totalizing system of social control using STEM.

And that’s only the beginning, because STEM technologies can be used to “produce the subject” that is engineered to meet the demands of STEM-controlled system, turning humans into a kind of raw meat robot. Robots are not taking over the world; rather, we are becoming the robotic subjects of a STEM-controlled world.

New computers could delete thoughts without your knowledge, experts warn. New human rights laws are required to protect sensitive information in a person’s mind from “unauthorised collection, storage, use or even deletion.” Now two biomedical ethicists are calling for the creation of new human rig… The Enlightenment is over; Neoliberalism is doomed. Techno-Fascism is the new fungus growing over the dried bones of Capitalism. Japan has decided that all its public universities will no longer teach arts, humanities, languages, or social sciences. Not even law or economics. Only science, engineering and technology. Why not? Because STEM doesn’t need law or languages, economics or psychology. It doesn’t need art or stories; it doesn’t need human culture. Because essentially, it doesn’t need humans. STEM is a post-humanist worldview. Capitalism, with its Enlightenment ideals of individuality, freedom, equality (cough), rights, law, and justice will seem downright romantic compared to the technological nightmare that replaces it. Surrounded by the digital flicker of a techno-dystopia, we may be nostalgic for the gilded glory that was Capitalism.

So that brings me back to the initial question: What happens after Capitalism? What is life like? Are we left with nothing but the black hole of Emptiness?  Ah, Emptiness! How can we use Buddhist Dialectics (as opposed to Buddhist religion) to deconstruct—counter-construct—what life is like after Capitalism? Is it possible that what we need to do is embrace is the emptiness of chaotic change, the void of having nothing to replace Capitalism, so that we can actually let go of it and begin to create something utterly new, alternative, and totally unlike what is surely going to replace it, an uber-technological dystopia? The end of Capitalism is the end of paid labour for profit. It is the end of paid work, as John Holloway says in Crack Capitalism. Sometimes we will work for wages, sometimes for barter, but “jobs” will be scarce. Now we must fend for ourselves. What will we do with our lives without jobs? How will we survive? Can we enter the darkness of nothingness, the hunger of lack, of risking everything that is known and familiar, to search in the wilderness for some other way to live, post-capitalism?

Can we collectively work out our values, our desires, our existential imperatives, the basic ground of being, relating, communicating, cohabiting and subsisting? What kind of societies can we create while scarcely surviving on the margins of an over-developed world teetering on the brink of eco-cidal extinction post-capitalism?

Resistance involves renunciation. Will we live like feral monks, not [just] deprived of food and shelter, but renouncing and resisting cooperation with a totalizing technological system that would turn us into raw meat robots? It is not just the refusal to participate in a corrupt system, but the deployment of a critically conscious resistance to the ideology  that operates the codes and programs of a system which metes out reward and punishment for [non]compliance.

Will we refuse to be vector vermin co-opted into Mindlessly reproducing the social credit system? Or will we develop a Critical Mindfulness that makes a cognitive break with a totalizing system? Will we be able to create relations of mutual pleasure and support? Of creativity and play? cultures of wild imagination? Or will it be an existence of brute survival?”

#buddhofiction #STEM #post-capitalism #surveillance #Technology #Techno-dystopia #Techno fascists #China #Japan

[fanaticwritings]

of sunflowers;

pairing: deviant!connor x deviant!alina (OC)

word count: 3.5k+

warnings: slight angst, insecurities, body image issues, slight body shaming, profanity, but LOADSA fluffy fluff

a/n: This fic is for the amazing @shsl-special-fx-artist​ who was kind enough to commission me! Honestly, I let my heart write this fic because one of the major plot points is something that’s very personal to me. I don’t know if I was able to put my feelings across but I really, really hope you enjoy this! Also, I hope I did your character and request justice!

If you enjoy my writing and have an idea that you’d like to see come to life, consider commissioning me! || buy me a coffee

[note- unbeta’d, all mistakes are my own.]

The Detroit Psychiatric Centre at which Alina worked was one of the biggest care facility for humans and now androids, to have ever been built.

Connor and Alina walked into the huge glass building and the air instantly turned cold and somber. It was a high June afternoon of peak summer and yet, Alina found herself shivering. Flocks of people sat on the chairs at the waiting area, a look of worry and despair etched on their faces. The gloomy mood of the building did little to lift their dull spirits. Alina felt something tug inside of her, a dire wish flashing in her brain. A deep desire to help these troubled humans somehow.

“Which ward?” The HJ300 at the desk asked them.

“73839,” Alina answered promptly.

The patient at the ward was a middle aged man, almost 45 years old, as Alina’s database told her. He had a severe case of drug addiction. Alina was to tend to him for the next four months, after which he would be sent to rehab if there was no improvement.

“Hello, Mr. Geronimo,” she greeted, flashing a sweet smile and walked into the ward, Connor following her close behind.

Mr. Geronimo mumbled something inaudible as he shifted in his chair slowly, a blank expression on his face.

“I am Alina. How are you today, Mr. Geronimo?” she asked kindly.

He mumbled something again, his chin trembling slightly. “Where is it?” he seemed to say and Alina grimaced.

Humans were so fragile, it amazed and troubled Alina greatly. Everything there was to know about them was programmed into her already but they somehow still managed to surprise her at times.

Alina talked to the man for a while, as she tried to understand the extent of his addiction and how to begin his treatment. The man became more and more irritated with every question Alina threw at him. She spoke gently but it didn't seem to make any difference. Connor had to physically contain the man, who suddenly stood up and flung himself at Alina. He was given a sleeping pill then and collapsed almost immediately.

“How do you do this everyday?” Connor asked, softly when Geronimo was rested on his bed.

“It is what I was programmed to do, Connor,” she replied, glancing at the man.

“But you are now deviant, Alina. You could do anything you want,” he said, confusion lining his face.

“Deviant or not, it is still what makes me, me. Taking care of people is something I enjoy doing, it comes to me naturally,” she paused, glancing at Connor.

“Would you do anything other than fight crime?”

Connor's eyebrows furrowed at that. Alina could see that he was thinking hard.

“I suppose not,” he said finally, looking at her.

Alina smiled at that.

“My shift is finished. We should go back to Hank,” she announced after a while and Connor nodded.

They ambled back into the outside world, where everything was a bit lighter and cheery. Everywhere around them humans and androids walked and talked harmoniously, and Alina felt immense happiness course through her.

They decided to walk to the DCPD instead of taking any other sort of transportation. Connor didn't say much on the way, he seemed to be lost deep in thought. It was evident in the way his forehead was all scrunched up and mouth twisted into a slight frown.

One strand of hair curled at his forehead- a trademark characteristic that distinguished him from other RK800 models.

Human emotions… were complex. So much so, that even humans didn't understand the extent of them. When the first AI was created, it had a conscious- the first prototype conscious that would be the foundation for the androids that were built today.

Alina’s model, however, was a bit advanced, in terms of the extent to which she could emulate human behavior. Her brain, which housed her conscious also had artificial glands that released the android version of human hormones like oxytocin-a2. It wasn't a hormone, but a 256-bit code that made her “feel” for those she tended to. It made her tender and gentle- almost motherly in nature.

Since her deviancy, the code had corrupted- or rather morphed into something else that she wasn't obviously programmed to understand. It transformed to make her even more gentle, more understanding of human emotions. That's why she had worked with Hank and Connor to understand deviants and help in dealing with them.

Working with Connor, in human terms, had been life changing. He was specifically built to help the police department but he was the gentlest android Alina had ever met. He was kind, took care of her without being prompted to but was also focused when it came to fulfilling his missions.

Over time Alina began experiencing strange things, like random system errors and regular crashes. All of those happened around Connor and Connor only. She felt more and more inclined towards him- her eyes would always search for him in a crowded room. In her spare time, more often than not, she found herself thinking about him.

It didn't take a genius to figure out that she had developed a sense of attraction towards him.

Still, she was in denial of everything she felt. It confused her immensely and as an android.. she wasn't used to confusion.

Admittedly though, she enjoyed watching Connor and those little, endearing things he did.

Distracted by just how beautiful Connor was looking right now, she didn't see where she was going and bumped into something- someone.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, composing herself. A group of middle-aged men stood before her. As fate would have it, she'd bumped into the burliest of them all.

“Watch where you're going, droid,” the man said, agitated. The tone with which he said 'droid’ was almost offensive. Alina didn't mull over it much though.

“I'm sorry,” she said again, louder and clearer this time. She proceeded to walk away but the man had other plans.

“Fucking droids. Just because you have rights now-,”he raved. He said this in a hushed tone but knew that Alina could very well hear him.

Connor seemed to have finally noticed that something was up and stalked back to Alina’s side.

“What's the problem?” he asked, gentle yet stern.

“Your friend here doesn't realise how huge she is. Could bowl a few people over this 'un,” the man replied, an ugly sneer curling at his lips.

His words stung. Literally stung. Alina could feel her thirium pump beat faster as she struggled to be rational. His words didn't mean anything, then why did she want to crawl into a hole and hide forever?

“There's no need to be so rude, sir,” Connor said calmly but Alina saw his shoulders tense up and jaw clench.

“Don't fucking talk to me like that, you plastic sack of shit,” the man yelled, going against Connor, bumping his chest into him.

Alina was having none of this. Swallowing her anger, she tried to pull Connor away.

“Move over, the elephant’s on a rampage,” the man mocked which made a couple of men in the group laugh.

Alina tried to ignore them and pull Connor away. But Connor didn't budge. His eyebrows furrowed and jaw clenched even harder. In the blink of an eye, the man was being pushed up against a wall and a few good inches off the ground. Connor fisted the man’s collar, slamming him against the wall once more.

“Shut up, you pathetic excuse of a human,” he spat through gritted teeth. The rest of the men in the group had moved away, staring at Connor with wide eyes.

“If you ever, ever talk shit to another android again, I'll make sure you don't have a tongue anymore,” he threatened, giving the man a last, shuddering slam. The LED on the side of his forehead swirled to a dark red.

“Do what you want, scum. I’m gonna call the cops on you and your uglyass girlfriend,” the man spat, his face red and attempted to push Connor away but to no avail. 

Just as Connor raised a fisted hand to punch him, Alina interjected. “Stop! Connor, let him go,” she screamed silently, communicating through the telepathic link that connected all droids.

Connor’s grip on the man faltered as he glanced at her, watching the pained expression on her face and the tremble in her lips.

“We're bigger than this,” she spoke clearly, even though her chest physically hurt as she tried to control herself.

Connor hesitated for a moment before he let the man go, mouth contorted in disgust.

The man, nor the group, dared follow them as they walked away.

Alina didn't have the nerve to look at Connor; she didn't think she'd like what she'd see. She'd never seen this side of Connor before. Never been on missions that involved severe violence. It scared the hell out of her.

That, however, was secondary. Her mind kept going back to the man and his words. Alina was used to this sort of behavior but it fueled her insecurity nonetheless. All the positive emotions she'd manage to gulp down to shove those treacherous thoughts away, vanished as they rounded the corner to her house.

She didn't want to go back to the DCPD, she wasn't stable.

“Alina-,” Connor began as they approached the gates to her apartment. Alina looked up at him, finally. A troubled expression graced his face and his LED flashed a bright yellow.

“I'm truly sorry for what happened,” he said, wringing his hands together.

Alina shook her head. If she spent a second longer here, she wouldn't be able to control herself.

“It's fine,” she mumbled, flashing him a weak smile and turned away.

She heard him call her name as she brisk walked to and up the stairs. In a matter of seconds she was inside her tiny apartment and then in her room, slamming the door of the bathroom behind her.

She slid down against it, as every emotion washed over her, drowning her. Androids couldn't breathe but she was suffocating- her functions failed slightly, the LED on the side of her head burning a bright red.

And then the tears came.

Unless androids willed for the tears to stream out, the artificial saline water would never leave their synthetic skin.

But as the events of what had transpired came back to her, haunting her thought process and shadowing all rationality, she seemed to have lost all control over herself.

“Could bowl a few people over, this 'un.”

She buried her face into her hands, as the tears slid down her cheeks and fell to the ground.

For a while she stayed there, unmoving, sobbing into her arms.

Why was she made this way?

She stood up then and walked over to the mirror in the bathroom. Her reflection greeted her back- a blue tinted, tear streaked face she knew all too well. And hated.

Blonde hair curled over her forehead in bangs that swept towards the right, and a neat bun that the rest of her hair was twisted into.

Closing her eyes, she willed her programming to alter her hair into a light brown that fell down her back in mermaid curls.

They didn't suit her at all.

She tried a bunch of different hairstyles, a million different textures but none framed her chubby face well.

The fault lay in the structure of her body itself, then.

The synthetic layer of her body peeled away, replaced by the standard white-grey plastic alloy.

She had a voluptuous body. It was a part of her structure, something she had absolutely no control over. If she wanted to, she could never change that aspect about herself. 

Why was she so limited? Why was she different from the rest of the Androids?

Why was she the one who had to hear Gavin tease her all the time? Hear countless people mock her physique?

How was any of this fair to her?

The questions pounded through her head and she could not think one possible answer.

It just was.

She wasn't the conventional android.

She was an imperfect mess. An unattractive, bloated mess. It hurt to see androids that were so much more beautiful than her, androids that didn't get to be at the receiving end of the cruelty of some humans. It hurt to see Connor turn back and glance at a passing Android, as they walked together and be completely unaware of her existence.

The shrill sound of her doorbell jerked her from her thoughts. She quickly reactivated her skin, and wiped the tears on her palm.

It was Connor at the door.

“I really do not want to talk right now,” she muttered, looking away and turning to close the door. It was unlike Alina, to shut the door on someone she loved but for the first time ever she felt.. exhausted.

“Alina, please,” was all he said, voice a mere rasp.

Alina pulled the door open a smidge, although her heart wasn't fully into it.

“We need to talk,” he said, walking in, waiting for her to join him after she had locked the door.

Alina settled down on the tiny couch and Connor sat down right beside her, hips touching.

“If it's about today, Connor- I would rather not,” she said, politely. She just couldn't. She couldn't go through it again.

Connor's expression softened.

“I know. But I read your stress levels today, Alina. They were at a 100% when the man..”

Alina looked up at him. She didn't want to tear up again. Not in front of Connor. She wasn't weak, no. She couldn't be weak.

“I want to know what you're thinking,” Connor said, nudging her shoulder. He sounded so gentle, Alina almost gave in. Damn the electricity that surged through her whenever he spoke. Damn the synapses in her brain that sparked brightly at his touch.

“Why?”

Alina didn't want to sound ungrateful. She was glad that Connor was making an effort, but right now her rationality couldn't make sense out of anything.

“You are my friend, Alina. Friends care for each other. I feel.. I must too,” he said softly.

She didn't know what to say to that.

“I didn't want to fight the man today,” Connor said quietly, after a while. “But I felt… this need to protect you and-”

He glanced at her, faltering. “I apologise for my behavior. I seemed to have scared you.”

“It's okay, Connor,” she said, smiling weakly. Connor’s sudden outburst was the least of her worries right now.

“It’s not okay. But..that is not the only reason why I'm here,” he said, voice dropping an octave.

“I sensed utmost discomfort in you when the man was talking. While I understand the reason, I couldn't help but wonder.. why do you let it get to you, Alina?”

There was such genuineness in Connor’s voice, Alina didn't have the heart to be mad at him.

“It's... strange, Connor. I cannot explain the origin of these insecurities, they have no rational explanation. But, perhaps, they exist because they are irrational,” she gulped. She knew that she was not really making sense but then again, what did?

Connor was gazing at her intently, head tilted ever so slightly as he tried to understand her.

He inched closer suddenly, turning to face her. He lifted one arm gently, as the skin on his hand faded to reveal the bare plastic beneath.

“If you can't tell me.. show me.”

“Connor I-”, she began but he cut her off.

“Please.”

Who could say no to those eyes? She held his stare as she lifted her own hand. Her hand stopped before his, as she looked at him hesitantly.

Connor let his fingertips brush against hers and Alina could swear electricity crackled between them.

Connor shut his eyes as he scanned through her memory.

This was huge. Alina was letting herself be completely vulnerable with Connor and yet… she didn't feel afraid. Not in the least.

She could feel - if that was the right word- his presence within her, an experience that was so liberating, Alina was almost overcome with all the new emotions that spilled in her.

Seconds later, Connor pulled away, hand dropping to his knee. He stayed awfully quiet for a moment.  

“Alina,” he spoke gently then, and she glanced at him fleetingly. What was he going to say? He probably knew how much she hated herself. Would he hate what he had seen too?

“I may not be able to fully understand the emotions that you feel but I know,” he paused, reaching out to brush a stray strand of hair behind her ear, “- that you are beautiful.”

Alina couldn't bring herself to look at him. How could she? He was being so kind and yet.. Alina didn't know if she should believe him.

“You may not be like other androids, but it's what makes you, you. You're different, Alina,” he said, lacing his hand through hers.

Alina almost jerked at his touch.

“You're so different and so intriguing,” he said softly. Alina glanced up at him at that. There was something different in the way he was looking at her and Alina felt her thirium pump… flutter. Connor was acting so strange, it confused her.

“Connor what-” she began, but faltered again. She was suddenly incapable of forming sentences. The intensity with which Connor was looking at her wasn't helping either.

“You like roses, am I correct?”

Alina nodded.

“But you also like sunflowers. Why?” he asked, ever so gently. His voice was a soft rasp and Alina would have listened to him speak all day.

“They're both beautiful flowers,” she answered, without hesitation. Now she was genuinely curious. Where was he going with this?

He stayed quiet for a moment, staring into her eyes. She wanted to look away but it was impossible to.

“Then why do you aspire to be a rose when you're a sunflower?” he asked, tilting his head.

Her heart actually missed a beat and a bunch of random errors popped in her brain at his words.

He had called her beautiful and compared her to a sunflower. She had only seen this happen in the movies that the humans made.

“Connor, I-I don't know what to say,” she said quietly, voicing her thoughts. She understood very well what Connor was getting at but it still troubled her greatly. He found her beautiful? Alina?

“You don't have to. I just want you to know, that just because you're different, it doesn't make you any lesser than anyone in this world. You're fairly attractive, you have beautiful eyes and-” he stopped, noticing Alina’s wide eyes.

“I overstepped, didn't I?” Connor said, grimacing and let go of her hand.

Alina regretted it instantly. Had Connor just confessed to her that he found her attractive?

The insecure part of her was screaming “No” and all sorts of ugly things but for once, Alina turned her focus to Connor and Connor only. What the hell was happening?

“Connor d-do you.. feel the same for me... as I do for you?” she asked, hesitant. There was a slight tremor in her voice as if she couldn’t believe her ears. Her Connor? Liked her as well?

Connor looked up at her through his lashes, eyes questioning.

“Every time I'm with you, I feel this surge of energy in my system, these metaphorical sparks at my fingertips- a whirlwind of something in-explainable,” she said so quietly, she wondered if she had said it aloud at all.

And then Connor's voice rang loud and clear inside her head.

“I feel all of that and so much more, Alina.”

Connor didn't spare her a single moment to process his words, before his lips were crashing against hers, frantic and fiery.

Alina knew what kissing was like, her database told her more than she wanted to know about it and yet it felt so strange.

It made her feel like she was floating, the dopamine-a2 and seratonin-a2 in her reaching unprecedented levels. Connor had one hand gently cupping her cheek, and the other clasped around her own, skin once again deactivated. She was completely vulnerable to him once more and there was so much of Connor around her and within her, she thought she was going to combust.

There could not have been a more tender moment between them.

They sat pressed against each other for a while, as the world fell around them.

“Don't ever, let anyone tell you that you aren't beautiful. You are so so beautiful to me,” Connor spoke in her mind, as he continued to nibble at her lips. Alina lost herself in the feel of him against her. 

“I admire you so much, Alina. You are so loving, so kind and so gentle,” he finally said aloud, when they had to break apart. 

Alina gazed up at him through dewy-eyes. 

The way Connor was looking at her right now, the way he had her hand pressed against his chest, made Alina feel as if she really was the most beautiful thing to ever exist.

If Connor could love her as she was, couldn’t she too? All the patients she had worked with ever, flashed in her mind through her boxed memories of them. They had loved her so much. They hadn't cared how much she had weighed. They had told her that when she smiled, she lit up the world.

The universe had it's mix of people. Some didn't agree with her and some did. Some loved her and some didn't. Everyone she had ever met was different than the last.

Your heart is what makes you several times more beautiful, Connor had said. 

There was a lot about the universe Alina had to learn, a lot more she had to discover.

But first, she was going to learn how to love herself for who she was.

a/n: Please, please leave feedback it would mean a lot to me!

#dbh imagne #dbh connor x oc #dbh connor x reader #dbh connor #dbh connor read insert #dbh connor rk800 #rk800 x oc #deviant!connor #dbh connor fluff #dbh connor x plus sized! reader #dbh commissions #bryan dechart

[rheaitis]

Writing has been #difficult this week. I was gonna write about my own mental state as part of Mental Health Awareness Month, but apparently I'm not well enough to be able to write that stuff out for strangers yet. Moving on, then.

Today marks the first day of US Pride Month, so the five media posts this month are all gonna be queer as hell. And, like, happy; no dead queers here, so buckle in that rainbow seatbelt, cause this is gonna be one gay-ass ride.

Today's media is some 38 episodes long, and both diverse and diversely queer. It's got transformative work, it's got early eighteenth-century politics, it's got pirates, it's got treasure, it's got lesbians and bi women and genderqueer historical figures, it's got long-term committed poly folk, it's got blood, it's got gore, it's got amaaaazing black women ruling their own communities with care and compassion, it's got disabled folk being given focus and allowed agency, it's got conspiracies and alliances and mentoring between people of all genders and generations, it's got really lovely cinematography and music, it's got Toby Stephens' fabulous micro-expressions.

That's right, gentlefolk, today's media consumption is Black Sails. This is more of a weekend binge project, or a month-long thing if you're inclined to be sensible about things. It is also aimed at creasedknees, because I want her to watch it so we can squee.

Black Sails is a prequel of sorts to Treasure Island, dealing with the adventure that leads to the discovery and burial of that treasure. It takes up Captain Flint (Toby Stephens), Billy Bones (Tom Hopper) and of course John Silver (Luke Arnold) from the novel, and peoples itself with various fictional and fictionalised historical figures of the time, most significantly Jack Racham, Anne Bonny, and Charles Vane, who function as foils to our heroes throughout the show. I'm going to talk about them in just a bit but first Our Hero Captain James Flint, whom I adore entirely. (I want to like John Silver, but as in the novel Silver is a marvelously done character, without ever being someone it's safe to trust wholeheartedly or really at all.)

Captain Flint kills someone in the very first episode, and he doesn't actually get any nicer. (Even that killing is preceded by the pirate crew taking a ship with due savagery, so if you dislike gore I sadly cannot recommend watching this series.) In fact he escalates considerably, up from individual acts of piracy to cannonades directed at cities, and the show doesn't particularly gloss over this violence or the human cost entailed. Flint is the most consistently Slytherin character I have ever seen (and the fact that he resembles his mother to the last and most infinitesimal degree is often jarring): a man of vaulting ambition and enormous rage, with a capacity to hold onto grudges undiminished over a decade and longer. I love him. I love him absolutely, and not just because he is so wonderfully tender with all the women around him without ever doubting or trivialising their personhoods or capacity for doing what they set hands and minds to, though that is admittedly a very large part of why.  Flint is always furious, always hurting, always ruthless with himself and his crew and associates, groaning away from a primal wound.

Primal wounds are maybe a good way to talk about this show without showering people with spoilers, as so many of the main characters have such wounds, inflicted by living in systems characterised by ills ranging from slave trafficking, bonded labour, debt prisons, early marriage, sexual violence, weaponised misogyny and institutionalised homophobia, and too often and deeply realistically by the rutted interstices of such injustice. Again realistically, the show's leads do not emerge from these experiences as noble crusaders, but rather as a den of Slytherins desperate to get ahead in whatsoever manner they can, and find whatever they think of as safe harbour: from Max (one of the characters original to the show and superbly played by Jessica Parker Kennedy) who wants to leave behind her miserable childhood and exploited adulthood by gaining entry into the Big House where life is soft and easy, to Madi who wants to lead her enslaved people into liberty, to Rackham who wants to make his mark on the world through narrative instead of having his story told as one of crushing poverty and debt. Our villains have stories as well, but even the few delineated in any detail are effectively subsumed in the institutional machines of which they are privileged cogs.

But important as all these stories are in motivating and substantiating the show, Flint's is the wound at the core of Black Sails. There are problems with this centering of white queer trauma in a show that, set in West Indies, could and almost certainly ought to have instead centered PoC and enslavement. It does deal with these issues, and inarguably allows Max and Madi Scott together as much space as Flint. Still, one has to accept at the start that this is a show about queer resistance that includes other aspects of marginalisation, rather than being a show of marginalised resistance against the institutions  perpetrating and perpetuation said marginalisations. Significantly, Max and Mr. Scott are not initially characterised as being interested in working towards liberation, but the viewer complaints about the slow reveal of Mr. Scott's plans in this regard seem as facile as the screaming about Flint being queer.

I can go on about this show endlessly, as T, poor child, can easily testify, because I love everything about it, from the cinematography, to the gore, to the wlw relationships and just Anne Bonny queen of my heart and every violent impulse. And I do think that if I was a better person I would dwell longer on the gorgeous and deeply complex relationships between Charles Vane, Jack Rackham Anne Bonny and Max, and how I want them all to be alive and married but for Charles and Max to never ever ever touch, OR for Charles to scrub himself raw and bleeding before he's ever allowed to be near Max, and also Max's brilliance and subtlety and compassion and ruthlessness, how she's clung on to kindness in a deeply unkind existence and how that in no way signifies a lack of Nature, red in tooth and claw, and the way her change of clothing reflects and reiterates her change of status and and just. Her faaace, her golden glowing beauty and that heart-stopping smile. But the thing is my interests were set early and I imprinted on exactly one sort of character as a child and I continue to love them more than anything, and much as I adore Max, and much as I worship Madi Scott's regal compassion and strategic mind and her trust in and friendship with Flint and her renewed affection for Eleanor (whom I love also! and who is so sharp and such a merchant-prince and so tramelled by her gender), well. Look. I love Flint. I love his anger, and his sorrow, and his everything. I think it's remarkable how Flint’s story goes from Achillean (my lover is dead I will go to war, my lover is dead I will burn down this town, fight this empire, challenge fate/gods) to Odyssean (I am home from the wars and here is my lover who has longed for me as I for him). But what I love the most is how in a story that is almost entirely about stories and how and when and by whom they are told, Flint gets to say, angry and wounded and betrayed again,

This is how they survive. You must know this. You're too smart not to know this. They paint the world full of shadows... and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn't true. We can prove that it isn't true. In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it.

I love it so much, so intensely, so much more than Rackham's playing around with narratival style and truth, I love my sad bi ginger pirate uncle, and so would you if you gave the show a chance. It's all on directseries.net, at fairly good quality, with subtitles and everything. Please pretty please?

#Black Sails

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 57

The #2 Beatles cover band came into Lewiston. Opening for them, was the #1 Elvis Impersonator. My father decided we should go as a family. I'll admit it was entertaining, though I often forget to mention it when asked about the shows I've been to as it didn't mean that much to me. I think some of the more drunk members of the audience were able to momentarily convince themselves that it was the real Elvis opening for the real Beatles. They hollered and danced. It was never really hit me that hard, though, in full garb the Elvis impersonator had his moments. They were obviously practiced musicians – but I couldn't help but to think about the contest that must be held for Elvis impersonators and Beatles impersonators. It seemed kind of silly to dedicate your life to playing someone else's music. You would have to be so passionate about that person. I remember looking at Allison – who was not quite a preteen but not quite a little girl anymore either, and noticing her clapping her hands and singing ecstatically. I count her as one of those people who was able to convince herself that the Beatles were really playing. Allison was a mad fan of the Beatles.

David was having more and more anger issues, throwing more and more fits. Becoming more violent. Maria left again to live in Juliaetta with Earl, and for awhile by the end of my year up in Moscow, Allison and David were left to their own devices at the house while my father was at work and I was in school. If you discount the possibility of a serial killer noticing two unsupervised children alone (it was at this time that serial killer Joseph Duncan III had actually kidnapped a boy and a girl about a county up from us), things might have been fine – if David wasn't becoming the way he was. I sincerely wish David had been raised differently. Something in him had snapped. Given there was nobody to stop him, he became violent and frightening to Allison. He was pushing himself to do bad things. He was like me, but worse. I wish I had never had the influence on him that I had had. I think he was depressed, but there was more to it than this. He was pushing the very limits of what he could get away with – and it was going farther than anything I had ever done. He ended up chasing Allison with a knife, screaming that he was going to stab her to death. Allison ran barefoot for two miles to get away from him to save her life, as he screamed and yelled psychotically down the street with the knife in hand.

I hadn't heard about all this stuff going down. I had been completely submerged in my own psychology and studies. But when I heard about it, it upset me. It was rather shocking. He was only nine years old. David needed help. Allison didn't need to be around this or to live in fear everyday after school. Something was very wrong with this whole picture. I knew something drastic needed to happen. This was not normal kid stuff. I knew David to be sincere in this way. He wasn't the type of kid who was aloof or pulled pranks. He was an all in or all out type of person. And I knew him to be a very sympathetic, and abnormally gracious human being most of the time. So for him to be chasing Allison with a knife, he must have really been feeling it. He must have been losing his mind.

Looking for constructive advice, I talked to Jenni about it. There of course wasn't much anyone could do though. I didn't want to, but I decided to take my dad aside one evening and try to explain the situation to him. I knew this would be a challenge, since to question David's behavior, was, by extension, questioning my father's own behavior. David was in many ways mirroring my father's rage and violence towards me. Both Allison and David had grown up watching it. They internalized it. And David also felt inferior as the youngest – I in particular made him feel powerless. I had been a mean babysitter. Never did I feel compelled to stab anyone to death, but I had been psychologically damaging. It wasn't good for me to be forced to babysit them like I did, but it might have been worse for Allison and David. David was attempting to gain the control he felt he needed. My mom's coddling him made him weak and expect more. He was becoming a disaster.

At first, my dad kind of understood what I was saying, but then he brushed it off with 'boys will be boys'. I tried to explain to him that while boys might be a little rowdy or less inclined to brush their hair, it was absolutely not normal for a boy to chase his sister with a knife screaming psychotically to the end of town. David's fits to where he would cry and scream till he couldn't breath weren't normal – and he had been doing that for years. He felt horrible and he needed help. This was a stage of his development where his mind was wiring who he would be for the rest of his life. I was worried. I felt that my father's neglect in this area was incredibly unfair to David and selfish. Our father had always ignored anything that was going on that was unpleasant – and he had given David his name. David in his eyes was sort of his prodigy. So by saying anything negative about David, my father felt I was insulting him personally.

He sort of blew the whole thing off, and then told me that he knew Allison could be manipulative. My father was big on this 'manipulative female' thing – always has been. He felt that men were honest and simple, and women were knifing and complex. In his pseudosciency way, he reasoned that we women were too weak to fight with our fists, so we played mind games – it was programmed in our nature to torture men, be it our brothers or our significant others. He didn't think men were capable of those mind games in any way shape or form. He absolutely didn't believe men could wrap their minds around being manipulative or emotionally abusive as he felt men could only do what was natural to them, and he felt that half the time, when men do things wrong it was because a woman had manipulated him or pushed him psychologically to do it. Though my father was not religious, he definitely blamed Eve for man's mistakes like some weird culty Abrahamic religious leader. It was infuriating, but he essentially blamed Allison for David's behavior. He was close to blaming me simply for being the messenger and telling him something he didn't want to hear. Him and David were male and in some way infallible. Allison and I were women, and we had to take it. That was the low key message. And nothing further got said. I had this sick feeling in my chest, and it just seemed to sit there.

In school, I just kind of got quiet. I felt powerless and uncertain of my own future. I tried to talk about the band Sarah and I were going to start that coming year with Sarah, but she didn't seem that into it. I threw myself more and more into books. I picked up a copy of 1984 by George Orwell. I read it in three parts. I remember reading the last one hundred pages or so on Sarah's couch. It was one in the morning, and Sarah was talking on the phone with Alex. I think it was a bit earlier in Georgia, or later. I don't know the time difference, but they talked to one another at times that were limited given the time aspect of it. She spent most nights talking to Alex on the phone these days. I remember reading all of 1984 and it blew my mind. I felt sick for days. I had never thought of a system as something that could never change. That was ultimately what made me the sickest. The book was extremely psychological. It wasn't some grand narrative of an evil king that gets overthrown. In the end, Winston lost and Big Brother won. I felt panicked, and I wondered if there were elements of modern society that were just like 1984 in their self perpetuating cycle of oppression. I could hear Sarah on the phone joking with Alex. I felt a million years away from it all.

At other times, I would just watch documentaries on baboons that were always playing on Public Television. Baboons seemed at times, more like little werewolves the way they tore down small gazelle like deer, the way they viciously ripped each other to shreds for dominance. Even though human beings seemed very civil, were we really? Were we as a species more or less just more complex violent apes? Between these baboon documentaries and reading 1984, my faith in humanity seemed to flow out of me, and I didn't have any way to explain it. In a way, it was humbling I guess. I no longer saw the world with myself as the center. I kind of understood that I was going to die someday, in some manner, regardless if I lived a full life of success, or if I died a nobody. People had been doing it for thousands of years, and really, who was I to proclaim my life so special? My goals stopped mattering to me as much as they had. I was not as excited about my own reflection. But I was still very ticked off. I could no longer be apathetic about the news. I was infuriated with the Bush administration. I saw human nature as primarily selfish, and yet there was something in me that said that it didn't have to be this way, that somehow there was something to be said about the human spirit, and maybe there was something greater – but I was still losing faith somehow. I was frustrated by my own inability to really communicate with people in person. I felt like I had gotten so angry, and held it in so long that did what stars do when they become black holes. So what I felt in me was this incredible void. It made my skin feel tingly, it made me feel sort of euphoric and afraid at the same time. It was like an energy I had no way to channel. And I have been this way ever since.

I also read A Handmaid's Tale, which, though it didn't make as much of an impact on me as 1984 had, was full of a million small ideas about gender, power, tradition, and mortality that were very interesting that built up to something that made me reevaluate the world around me. It was the kind of book I pondered about for many years. When they made a television show of it last year, I was all over it, and I was not disappointed.

I felt a little confused about conspiracy theories at this point. I guess when I had at first taken to believing in anything from the Lochness Monster to your everyday ring wearing freemason being some kind of overlord, I wanted to believe things, and so I had. It brought meaning in my life. Now, with this newly found sense that any belief I held had to be in some way justified and backed by evidence, I went back into looking for conspiracies with a lot of skepticism. But I wasn't really disappointed. Oligarchs exist. The world is rapidly changing behind the scenes. Excuses for wars are invented, corruption isn't a conspiracy theory when it comes to how our government operates with corporations. Our news media is controlled by very few. JFK's assassination was very fishy, so was Martin Luther King's. There are very eerie unexplainable crafts that do fly in impossible ways, that have been recorded and verified by government agencies and top level government people.

Not to mention that a lot of things the government or people of power don't want you to see isn't even exactly a secret. You could read all day and get very well documented well understood shadowy information about the backstory behind a lot of things that pertain to everyone that will make you feel very uneasy about the world we live in. You can listen to theoretical physicists or neuroscientists and get a very trippy reality check. It's out there. And in terms of evil conspiracies, a good portion of the time, things get leaked, or simply don't get reported, or get reported at the same time something more colorful is being reported on so that people don't look the opposite direction. If you care to, and you are aware enough, it's not that hard to find it, especially with the internet, if you are willing to put in the research and get the verification by sound sources. They just hope people don't go looking for it. I think more is done to keep people distracted, but even that sometimes backfires. I believe I was wrong in thinking, or hoping for some major plotline about who runs the world and it's money, mostly because it was meant to back my own ego, and it was based on zero evidence. But that isn't to say that there aren't all manner of shady situations going on.

I think this might have been why I got very intrigued by the MK Ultra program and such. This got me to reading about operation paperclip, and how the United States brought Nazi's into the United States. Telling my father about it one day, he confirmed it and explained to me that he had first hand met one of these Nazi scientists back in the 60's or 70's. Many of these Nazi's were secretly brought to north Idaho specifically because it was unpopulated, unseemly, and mostly white demographically. This one Nazi fellow was actually paid by the company that ended up being ATK – where my father worked, back in it's early beginnings to help with something engineering related. My father didn't know who this man with a German accent was at the time, but he saw my father working (this was after my father had stopped being a hippie), and he came up and praised him and told him something about him being an ideal example of a superior man with good work ethic. Later it was explained to my father that this guy was a true German Nazi who was secretly brought to the United States, so that statement of him being the ideal white man was actually pretty creepy.

I found that in nursing class, if I hurried up and got ahead, I could spend a good portion of my time just reading online about these weird facts about Nicola Tesla, Aleister Crowley, various experiments, and so forth. I was sitting there quietly reading intently one day. The room was full of kids writing their fiction stories, and the guy next to me got up to use the bathroom. Another guy came over and took his chair. I would have said something, even though I didn't know that guy – I still didn't want him to lose his chair, but I looked at the other fellow who had taken the chair, and I thought surely that kid knew what he was doing. I didn't want to get in a fight with this person over someone else's chair, so I didn't say anything. Sure enough, the guy came back to find his chair was missing. He looked over and saw that this other guy had taken the chair. And from the corner of my eyes, I watched him snap. He began shouting. Instantly, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. It physically rattled my entire perceptions for a moment. The other guy nervously gave him his chair back, but guy 1 wasn't happy with this. I was closing my eyes in shock. The next thing I knew, this guy had taken the chair and thrown it against the wall as hard as he could. It came crashing down on my computer and the computer next to mine.

The guy ended up having to go into the office, where I could hear him screaming hysterically. He was the same guy I think I mentioned me sitting next to on the first day when I accidentally didn't swallow my diet pills correctly and exhaled a bunch of dust. He ended up having schizophrenia, and everyday I go up to Moscow, I see him pacing back and forth in the Moscow mall with headphones on. It seems rather sad. He was actually a rather normal person for most of the time I knew him, and he seemed generally very nice. What I remember most about the situation though was just how badly I was affected by violent unpredictable situations like these. Because after that chair came crashing down on me, I was about ready to gag. I couldn't breath right. I couldn't even register what I was seeing. My hands were shaky for hours. I didn't feel right in the head. I was nauseated and jumpy. I guess I was getting to a point where I had had my fill of loud violent angry men. I didn't take it personally that the guy had thrown that chair. I know he didn't intend on upsetting me like that. He was caught in his own rage to the extent where he couldn't even be considered fully responsible, the way I saw it.

There was also an incident that got kind of heated, and rather than scare me, I felt rather inspired by it. So there was this dumb hick in our class. I think his name was Tony or something. He was cousins with a lot of people from Kendrick, and he was pretty excited to ask us if we knew such and such. He was outwardly friendly, but completely ignorant, and what we discovered, a racist. He was sitting in the class before the teacher had come in, and he was talking about something or other when he started calling someone he was talking about the N word. I can honestly confess, I was completely lost in a daydream, but Sarah had heard him say it, and I had heard people say it before when I had been in the Kendrick school. The word made me sick, but I had never had the courage to jump on anyone over it, and instead I generally buried my face in my arms with guilt. When he used that word, this girl named Emily stood up and asked him what he just said. He was shocked, I think everyone was. There was no doubt in her face. He tried to laugh her off, but the look in his eyes, you could tell he was scared.

I don't remember what went down exactly, other than it was awesome. I hadn't realized that sticking up to someone like that was something a person could do. Emily was already really cool to me, and I already admired her. I never spoke with her or about her, but she was actually in a band which I thought was amazing. She was a drummer in a band, she wore skinny jeans, she illustrated children's books. She was very confident, and didn't judge anyone. She was probably the coolest person in that school – possibly one of the cooler people I had ever met who was my own age. And apparently she had no qualms with getting up and taking care of racists in there tracks. She bitch slapped this guy with words until he was shaky and red in the face. She eventually forced him to apologize. It was perfect. I couldn't help but feel my own inadequacies watching this situation unfold. What did I ever do when this kind of thing happened, but duck my head? I kind of wished that I had been more like Emily. She did what everyone needed to do. She didn't care if she made a scene or what people thought about her. If more people were like Emily, the world would be a much better place.

During the end of school, we were taken on a few field trips. The first one was to this art exhibit. It wasn't the original artwork I don't think – or at least most of it wasn't, but there was a gallery exhibit of Lichtenstein's iconic artwork. If you don't know exactly who that is, you should look it up and most likely you would instantly recognize it as the classic comic book format. He basically came up with a way of creating small dots in comic books to create a sense of shading. I wasn't terribly interested in it personally as someone who inspired my art per say, but I still found it rather intriguing and influential.

I remember we also went on a field trip to the local city waste treatment system. It was smelly due to human waste. It was fascinating in this sick sort of way. In each tank, you could see the water being settled and changed – at first being raw sewage. You could see the brown stuff – being turds. Little did I know that I would be doing something sort of related to this for a job years later – though I never dealt with human sewage – rather industrial waste. At another time, we visited this exhibit in Pullman of fossils and bones. There was this spectacular thing where they had this horse's body separated perfectly between glass sheets, so you could see it all stretched out and separated. Anyone who has seen the television show Hannibal may know what I am referring to. It was incredibly interesting. Afterwards, everyone was taken to this creamery in Pullman where they made fresh ice cream. I don't think I ended up getting any ice cream though. I didn't have any money, and I was beginning to feel really uncertain of myself in public situations. I was afraid to go up and buy any ice cream. I felt halfheartedly frustrated at Sarah because she didn't do anything to help me – though in no way was she obligated. Afterwards, I remember being in some building that was several stories up. It was connected to the campus in some way, and I think it might have been related to entertaining a lot of people in some way. There were a lot of seats by these windows that overlooked a large portion of the town. Sarah and I sat up there quietly and looked out. The sky was gray, and it was rainy. There was something extremely pleasant about this little space. Sometimes I still dream about being up in that building looking out.

It was getting to be spring again, and Sarah and I were leaving to go home one day after school. It was still rather dark out, when out of the bushes came two people I in no way expected. It was Ava, and Melissa, Zack's girlfriend. They were both rather high, and they had a bunch of stuff in their hands. I noticed that the both of them were wearing Zack's clothes. I looked at Sarah, and wondered what the hell this was about. From what Sarah and I gathered, Melissa had broken up with Zack. I guess he had decided to go on a trip to Minnesota without her, and she was fed up with him. I didn't quite understand what the ordeal was about. But the key to this entire situation that hit my like a ton of bricks was that Zack and Melissa were no longer together. This meant that perhaps, just maybe if I connected with him again, we could maybe start again. And I guess Melissa was upset and was choosing to give Zack's stuff away as revenge – which I didn't think was right – but honestly I was so happy to hear it was over between them that I didn't care too much. It was mostly articles of clothing, and a few Pink Floyd cloth posters. Sarah got the one from The Wall, and I was given the image of the two men shaking hands, one of them being on fire.

This situation gave me this new sense of hope. Perhaps this could be a new start for me. A part of me honestly wanted to make something really deep out of this. I mean, why had Melissa and Ava found Sarah and I to tell us of all people? Why did we need to know? We never had had much to do with Zack or Melissa's relationship. Something seemed almost too weird to be true about them just showing up and finding us that evening. Sarah and I were thinking about it a lot over the car ride home, but there didn't feel like much could be said. Somehow, I still had been able to keep it from Sarah that I had feelings for Zack. I swear she must have known. How could she not? I was still weary of talking about it though. I really didn't want anyone to know. I felt like something would be ruined if I said anything.

After Danny kicked my mom out of the his house, she went back to Jim and Connie's place. It felt like old times on the weekend again. I sat around all day and watched UFO shows that investigated the same old incidences. Allison went into her area and watched endless amounts of Steve Irwin wrestling down iguanas. David went into his room and played LOTR games. It was strange being back. Things didn't last that long however. Both Jim and Connie assured my mom that she could stay for as long as she needed to get her life on track, but I ended up overhearing them at two in the morning, Jim was getting angry and drunkenly saying he was going to bust down the door and tell my mom to get her and her fucking rat children to leave. Connie was trying to talk Jim down, saying that while she felt we needed to leave as well, she couldn't bare the thought of my mom struggling out in the street, which was somewhat of an over-exaggeration of what would become of any of us, since we primarily lived with our dad and she had other friends.

I told her, and she got very upset. We stayed one more night. That night, Allison woke up to use the bathroom in a state of drowsiness. I wasn't in the room so I didn't see it happen, rather I heard a lot of commotion and walked in to see what had happened. The lava lamp broke, and the weird stuff inside of the lava lamp got all over the floor. Allison was deeply cut and blood was oozing everywhere. My mom had woken up, and she was shrieking at Allison. I think David had joined in. It made me sick to my stomach, watching the both of them tear into Allison as if she had intentionally broke the lava lamp on the floor. Nobody seemed concerned with the laceration on her leg. I ended up shouting at my mother to leave Allison alone, and ended up calling her a bitch. This escalated into her screaming throughout the house. Jim and Connie weren't home. I hated her so much. She forced Allison to scrub the floor with the stuff all over the carpet while she shouted in Allison's face about how worthless Allison was, as Allison whimpered in pain. She had gotten the weird stuff stuck in her cut. I had to step away I realizing that me getting angry wasn't going to fix things. I had angered her too much and if I even tried to clean it up, she was going to intentionally provoke me and make it impossible for me to do that. She was pissed off at me for having stepped in to defend Allison, and she was intentionally mistreating Allison to piss me off – so as horrendously upset as I was, I knew I had to step away to make things mildly better for Allison. It was three in the fucking morning, and too early for this insanity. Who does this? Honestly, I knew she deserved to be socked in the face, but it would only make things worse for Allison. I had to bite my tongue the best I could.

My mother was still with Danny for whatever reason. It just seemed painful and insulting for her to go along like nothing had happened. We ended up moving back to the Nye's, the very same place we had started when Danny had invited us to live with him. I remember that Easter of that year, Maria showed up with her kids, Roxanne showed up with her kids. It was planned to be some kind of fun Easter egg hunt out by the river. It ended up sort of miserable. Danny was there, and he started insulting my mother over everything. Maria's son Ian, who was about four by this time, was misbehaving and got into some kind of trouble tossing rocks at moving vehicles. Maria ended up getting upset and jealous because she felt that Roxanne was getting more out of Easter than she was. Maria wanted presents for Easter as a full grown adult, and she began freaking out about it. Meanwhile, I just sat there eating the eggs awkwardly in the grass with Allison. David got upset at Allison and then later at Roxanne's first daughter Sagen, and then at the boys. It was just a mess, and clear to me early on that there could be no good outcome for everyone to get together. Nobody enjoyed it. It seemed rather pointless to even try.

I was feeling artistically dead. I had almost given up art entirely by this point. It just didn't seem to come naturally like it used to anymore. I loathed anything I created and I felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again and even though I didn't want to do what I was doing, I couldn't stop. I also didn't know how I felt manga styled art anymore. It didn't affect me as much as it used to. I remembered years before when Katie, Sarah, Ava and I would all sit around the table and draw anime for endless hours. I couldn't do it anymore. It was kind of a pain to realize five years into an artform that I cared very little for it. And even had I still been into anime, I mostly just didn't like my particular style. I didn't feel as though I was doing much with it. I envied Sarah. She just seemed to be able to draw these flowing illustrations – the folds of cloth looked perfect, the skin looked translucent, she could draw feathers. She knew how to somehow draw things on MS paint and make them look pretty decent. My stuff looked flat and phony. I felt stuck.

I was still very upset with Sarah, but I just didn't want to talk about it anymore. I wrote a few angry letters, but I was getting to this place where I was afraid we would stop being friends if I challenged her too much. I didn't want to lose her as a friend. And maybe it was a little selfish. Honestly, for all her problems, she was the sanest person I knew. And we were still close in some ways, but to a degree it just wasn't the same. For about a week around this time, she was starting to look at me nervously when I talked about the 'band we were going to be in, and answer or say things to me in a funny guilty sort of way. I thought about getting mad about it, but I held my tongue. I knew that if I started talking, I was afraid of what I might say and that I might not be able to stop. I didn't want to go through this anymore. Of course, Sarah had her own plans. I should have seen it coming, but somehow I didn't. We were leaving school one evening, and she told me in the car on the way home that she needed to talk to me about something. She seemed hesitant and very nervous – which made me nervous, She told me in this deliberate distant way that Alex was going to visit that summer – which I was completely fine with as of course people can't just date online forever – but she continued on in a hesitant fashion, that at the end of the summer, she was going to go with Alex to live with him and his parents who were moving to Texas. Alex could play piano and guitar, and they were going to start a band together. I was never a part of that. Meaning there would be no band between Sarah and I. Meaning she more or less knew there would be no band or us working together in any way for a few months, but she had been afraid to let me know. Meaning everything I had planned for my future was in pieces. Meaning I would have no friends, and nowhere to run when my father or mother came after me. Nobody to watch movies with or take walks with on Friday evenings. Who was I without Sarah Mae?

I took it as well as I could. At first, I just shrugged it off, and slouched into myself in the passenger seat. Sarah went on sort of defensively – knowing perhaps what this meant for me, stating that at least for once she was being honest with me, and showing some sense of responsibility. It had been tempting for her to simply never let me know, but it wouldn't have been right. I had to agree there I guess. I had to give her credit where small credit was due. She hadn't known for certain the real plans between her and Alex, and she had let me know a week after the plans had been set. I took it calmly at first. I felt sort of numb and was quiet the whole ride home. I think in a strange way, Sarah had wanted me to get upset. I think it would have made her feel less guilty had I instantly lashed out at her. But at this point, what was the use in fighting her? She had made her plans. She had taken initiative, and she had made her own decisions. It was a bitter pill to swallow for me, but in a way it made me feel a little better. The last six months made a whole lot more sense to me then. At least now I knew something. At least she had for once been up front with me. I wasn't shooting at the moon anymore. I had some perspective.

It felt wrong though. It gave me strong message. I really couldn't expect so much from Sarah. Nobody really wanted to be around me. She didn't want to be in a band with me, or fight with me anymore. I was extremely envious that she was going to be in a band that would probably sound better than whatever it was we were going to theoretically create. I didn't even know how to think about it anymore though. The very thought of it made me feel tired and sick inside. I didn't even know if I wanted to quit school anymore. I went home, I curled up in a ball, and I just sort of felt myself sinking. I didn't feel angry. I felt weak, and scared. I remember trying to cry, but not being able to. Instead, it just felt like this large lump in my throat. I was having troubles breathing. This had been my future built up in my head, and having it stripped away from me left me feeling rather empty. I didn't even have enough substance to me to get properly angry.

I think at some point I must have gotten up out of my bed, and walked barefoot outside. Somehow, I ended up sort of waking up walking myself down into the back alleys near the end of town. My feet felt that itchy burn of not being accustomed to being barefoot. My head felt like clay. My eyes were moist and shrunken. I was incredibly confused. Somehow I had blacked out and ended up on the street and I had no idea how. I pushed back the fright and went home. I knew there was no use telling anyone. I didn't think anyone would believe me, and besides,  it was kind of personal.

It was around April or May, and a few weeks since Sarah had told me the news. We only had a few more weeks of school. I no longer knew what I wanted to do, if I wanted to drop out or stay. Mike and Jenni, upon hearing the news took some pity on me. Mike seemed more set on making Sarah doubt her decision than he was going after my choices. Sarah would not be swayed though and both Jenni and Mike knew it. I just didn't know. I felt like I had all kind of crow I had to eat if I told anyone I wanted to stay in school. I had put up such a fight, but now it seemed pointless. I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to stay in school. Who would shuffle me up for class each day?

I wasn't going to fight with Sarah anymore. I suppose I had tried to explain to her what her leaving meant to me. It upset her, but I was now noticing that Sarah had a way of turning off what people said to her when it conflicted with what she wanted. And being abusively angry at her for doing this only made it worse. It also seemed like it would be rather selfish of me to push things or expect her to stay at my expense. I had to swallow something very big – something that was killing a part of me to swallow, and try to be happy for her and put my own feelings aside. I was entitled to nothing. Still, I think she was translating this to something she was more accustomed to, which was me being furious. Instead, I either acted robotic, or seemed pitiful and it was confusing. In the midst of our silent mulling of her leaving, we were headed towards home from class school one day. It was a windy day, a bit overcast but not bad. We hadn't driven too far from the school, and we were stopped at an intersection. Absentmindedly, I looked into the clouds in front of us, and I saw this very enormous looming black triangle in the sky. It was mesmerizing and strange in a way that I can't really explain. It moved in a way I had never seen anything in the sky move before. I first noticed it because clouds had cleared around it due to the wind which had exposed it.

I watched it intently for about forty seconds or so. It moved in a line, then took a sudden 90 degree turn back into the clouds. I could see parts of it through the clouds though, and then it seemed to suddenly disappear. The light turned green and we took our turn. I looked at Sarah, and tried to tell her what I had just seen. She looked at me and told me she had seen it too. We went over it and agreed we had seen the same exact thing. And the mechanical perfection of it was hard to explain. The whole time I watched it, I hadn't been scared. I hadn't even registered that I might be seeing a UFO. I had mostly been baffled. It had seemed almost mundane. It was broad daylight. UFO's hadn't exactly been on my thoughts. Also, I didn't even know that UFO's were ever reported as triangles. Normally, I had the impression that they were all either saucers or simply strange lights. It wasn't till I went home and looked it up. Honestly, I would even have been skeptical of my own account, knowing that the human brain can play tricks on itself, but Sarah had seen it too.

I am not going to go out and saw that there were aliens in the cockpit or anything. I have no idea what it was that I saw. I knew that it was enormous. My father, who has flown planes before told me that based on the clouds I was seeing, even at the lowest altitude, the triangle was probably at least 40 feet. The thing was very big – big enough to where I could see that it was made of very dark metal, even above the clouds. Had it been night time, I don't know if I would have trusted what I was seeing, but since I had a second witness, and since it moved very mathematically, deliberately and hastily. It seemed to be able to slow down and speed up in a single second, I had to say that it sounded like many other UFO sightings that I ended up finding online. I guess there is nothing like a UFO popping in your life in the center of a midlife crisis to pull you out of your own life for a second or two and reevaluate everything.

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[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 175

Are Genes the Source of Behavioral Disorders?

We learn about a new gene everyday that is specifically associated with a certain human behavior or that causes a certain physical situation. One gene is responsible for crime, whereas another gene is the cause for baldness. This leads us to blame nature and physiology for these faults. Some recent findings, however, have proven that, contrary to popular perception, genetic expression is also regulated by a person's physical environment and its socio-cultural influences, thus human behavior is not just dictated by genetics. Genes, gene-dependent synthesized hormones, and culture are involved in the shaping of human nature. Behaviors appear in a set of motifs generated by both genetics and culture.

If we consider human nature as a book, the encoded information contained within, together with all the elements of inner and outer environments (bio-psycho-socio-cultural), becomes meaningful and functional. This is because each book has a visible structure composed of letters (semiotic DNA sequence) and a manifested meaning (semantic web) in a particular environment. From this point of view, genes should not be seen as mandatory codes, but should be considered as similar to the art of marbling (or ebru, which is the making of different patterns on a fluid by small vibrations of the ink droplets), for they are created by the united effect of various dynamic forces, and can only be understood accordingly. Human willpower and responsibility will also gain meaning and value when they are analyzed within the framework of the reaction intervals presented within the motifs of human nature which are shaped by the mutual effects genes and cultural factors have on each other. In this sense, human nature and culture should be evaluated together. We can organize the factors that determine human behavior and manners under three main titles - genetic, physicochemical environment, and psycho-socio-cultural factors. We can only speculate statistically as to how large or small a role each factor plays in development.

Behaviors like an inclination to crime, having intimate feelings for same sex individuals, cognitive and sensory sharpness, a desire for excitement and risk, or an inclination to addiction cannot be described by one or two genes. For instance, there are many factors (environment, genes) involved in acts of violence. However, one missing and insufficient factor can trigger violence. For instance, the Monoamine oxidase A enzyme is encoded by the MAO-A gene; this enzyme is in charge of degrading neurotransmitter molecules such as dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine (these enable signaling between nerve cells). Depending on the mutations or polymorphisms of this gene, if the enzyme cannot function sufficiently, these individuals display an inclination towards violence and aggressive behavior. But if the person is aware of the situation and gets educational support from others, this behavior can be controlled.

Similarly, every person has a variable degree of genes that put them at risk for cancer. If these genes are activated via environmental factors - such as smoking, poor nutrition, mutagens, carcinogens - cancer may develop. On the other hand, if a person is lacking the cancer-causing genes or has low inclination towards cancer, such a person may not get cancer, even if he or she is a smoker. Similar statements can be made for genes associated with addictions, sexual perversions, and violent tendencies. More significantly, we can produce more value and meaning out of behavior-related genes when we evaluate them according to their context, position, and other factors, along with their relations to other genes. That is to say, there is a complicated network of factors that shape behavior. That’s why a DNA sequence alone cannot determine, all by itself, the development of emotions and manners, skills, and personality. In other words, phenotype can never be predicted 100% just by the interpretation of genetic information.

Brain and personality development is a multi-faceted, exposome mystery. From the start of pregnancy, especially throughout the preschool era, everything one is exposed to, and the way those events shape one’s nature, is called exposome. This can include subconscious events, for all sorts of personal history plays a role in such development. The connections of 1011 neuron cells that exist in an average human brain are not only determined by genes. Human DNA contains 6.2 x 109 nucleotide (letter), or information. Reading and using this raw information depends on many factors. Neurons can establish new connections via internal and external stimuli, while on the other hand, the number of neuron cells and connection networks can be changed by the neurochemical substances and hormones that they synthesize. All of the information required to define fine details in the motifs and connections of brain cells is not present in the genome. Mere environmental factors are not enough to complement this missing information.

Aside from these, many factors play a role in brain development and function. When the ends of axons and dendrites extend, they do so by recognizing nanomolecules that guide them all the way to the target organ or region. They happen to make minor changes and deviations during this extension. These changes are extreme enough that this extension is part deterministic and part trial and error. They reach the target through a statistically systemic algorithm but with a certainty less than 100%. Axons that are extended from eyes to the brain have a 1% possibility of taking a wrong turn at optic chiasm, and therefore not reaching the brain or arriving at the wrong region of it. However, there are also signalization systems built in our brains that recognize and correct these errors. If axons cannot receive the correct signals from target neurons, they get degraded. And sometimes a neuron of the axon terminates itself. These observations clearly show that brain development does not take place by a molecular program that is predetermined down to the minutest details but rather through a flexible program open to changes and errors.

This flexible program is explained by materialistic philosophy as “chance,” which basically means being in the right place at the right time to encounter the right factors. The same program, in religious literature, is explained by factors known as fate, kismet, destiny, divine blessing, and grant. Aside from that, there are also certain uncontrollable activations and a genetic background in the brain that are involved before we start a conscious action. From this perspective, motifs generated by biological and genetic inclinations set the infrastructure for the freedom of decision making and self-determination. Since our thoughts, emotions, and acts are formed within the neurogenetic and neurochemical construct of the brain, the motif that is created by the background here generates inclinations for specific acts and behaviors. In other words, events that take place in our brain chemistry during the fetal period and early childhood years are significant determinants of human development. The human brain can function in a state with willpower and consciousness, but can also function automatically, without consciousness. Briefly, it is through our genes that the framework of what we can achieve, our reaction intervals and threshold values are determined, and the possibility of an act is indicated. But the boundaries of the final decision are determined via statistical possibilities as a result of a person’s interaction with their environment. Therefore the boundary is not determined in a mandatory fashion, but via external dynamics (like manners, beliefs, or moral nourishment).

Human willpower is our capacity and strength to make free decisions and selections under the effects of spiritual, genetic, and environmental frameworks (endophenotype). The decisions and selections cannot take place independently from the sources nourishing one’s metaphysical world, cultural circles, or from the impact of neurochemicals in the brain and our hormones. “God burdens no soul except within its capacity” (2:286) is a sign of mercy and compassion from the Qur’an, indicating that the field of action and boundaries of the human willpower are determined based on multiple factors and wise causes. Producing customized religious rulings according to one’s natural strengths and weaknesses is also a very meaningful legal action in Islamic law. It is, in a sense, an acknowledgement that everyone has trials and experiences that are different than others’.

Humans have responsibilities within defined, limited conditions, and they can only make decisions within those permissible intervals of conditions and the constraints of their natural dispositions. If we can analyze human actions in a model that looks into their dispositions, cultural environments, genetic inclinations, and spiritual and moral nourishment, then we can attain better results in the education and character development of human beings.

Each factor mentioned above affects the child’s sexual separation and differentiation to various degrees. Misbehaviors during sexual development may emerge as a result of a complex mosaic of biological, psychological, sociocultural factors. There is not a complete consensus around the main reasons for this, yet each researcher favors one factor in the light of their expertise and ideological choices. However, objective observations and research point out that the quality of relationship between the parents and children is very influential in this matter. The display of unhealthy sexual inclinations stems from a negative background where there is not enough parent-child relationships to help the child develop. In families of children with strange sexual behaviors, a suppressive, excessively controlling model of mother and a distant, aggressive model of a father who resorts to violence are often found to exist. That is why many problems with intimacy and sex that occur later in life can be viewed as a developmental ailment and a problem of insufficient parental communication rather than a mandatory genetic phenomenon.

Various problems can arise when healthy differentiation and separation do not take place during a child’s development. A child, in the beginning, is like a part of the mother. If differentiated by detachment from the mother, and from her compassion and care, a child struggles to develop a healthy sense of ego. Such a child becomes inclined to develop a personality that is dependent, passive, and lacking sufficient confidence.

Research clearly states that each child is born with different inclinations and threshold values that are determined genetically and hormonally for each of his or her possible characters and behaviors. These potential inclinations and threshold values can surface depending on internal and external stimuli and educational styles. Even though both genders carry hormones belonging to each other naturally, during development one steps forward upon expression of encoded gender genes. When it comes to displaying sexual abnormalities, everybody is, genetically speaking, a dry log or a wet log. A dry log can easily catch fire, a wet one does not. However, it is the responsibility of society and parents to provide a spark-free environment for the dry log. Spiritual and biological nourishment during the developmental process are found to be significantly influential in diseases and aging, in disorders of character development, and in anomalies in sexual behaviors. When proper measures are taken timely, via suitable environments and educational modes, the possible surfacing of behavioral pathologies may be prevented or reduced for children potentially at risk. Through correct guidance and education, the expression and regulation of genes can be altered and managed, controlling these naturally present inclinations.

#allah #god #prophet #Muhammad #islam #muslim #muslimah #hijab #help #quran #ayah #hadith #sunnah #revert #convert #religion #reminder #dua #salah #pray #prayer #welcome to islam #how to convert to islam #new convert #new revert #new muslim #revert help #convert help #islam help #muslim help

[rlschmaltz]

Gain Your Lives, or Win Your Souls: Political Theology in Reaction

By Robert Schmaltz. December 15, 2017.

After posting The Death of Faith Requires the Absence of Faith to my blog, fellow writer Gianni Friegas (Twitter: @GianniFriegas) was thoughtful enough to both critically and carefully engage with the text. Gianni’s comments reveal alternate points of entry into the text, prompting further consideration on my part. For this I am thankful. I pray what follows demonstrates at least a measure of thought which Gianni induced.

  The Death of Faith… is intended to serve as an introspective answer to an ascetic question. A question in good faith seeking an alternative to making contributions to the swarming antagonistic attitudes within and without the church. The aim of the piece is to shape a faith based response to a point of tension between rational and empirical experience. The thinking therein follows largely from the synoptic gospels. These meditations rest more in the Gospel According to John, a book that is as mystical as it is political.

 It is plain to say that for Christians the world maintains a constant strain on the life of our faith. God calls on us to recognize the gift of suffering as means to extend beyond tribal inclinations to recognize this strain is put on all of humanity in the world. As I write in The Death of Faith…, sustaining a religion of love amidst “the widespread presence of ferocious violence, grinding poverty, severe hunger and thirst, domestic abuse, rape, the human mills of war and genocide” is arduous. Made all the more straining by those segments of the church that serve as accessories to policies which sustain those cruelties.

 Though, through prayer and mindful attention toward the Liturgy, what fills my heart is the intimate nature of the space provided for receiving and embracing the ministry of Jesus. Every time I turn to accuse, to judge, or to express some rage prompted by the day’s state politics I sense my participation in acts that are wholly inimical to Christianity. It is easy, perhaps even comforting to imagine specific “others” cast into the mob that condemned Christ to death. We might imagine “others” as responsible for making a mockery or a fraud of the Messiah. It is easy to imagine “others” amidst the riotous crowd lining the way for Jesus of Nazareth from sentencing to Golgotha “(the place of) the skull.”

 Meanwhile, the principal difficulty which comes amidst a life of faith is not foremost from without but centrally from within. The sad fact is we are all at some instance a part of that disorderly mob animated by anger, fear, and frustration. We are a part of that mob as we comply through both body and soul with reactions persuaded by the enemy of humanity. Roc O’Connor, SJ, (2015, pp. 25-16) offers this centering exercise as a way to reflect on this part of our fallen nature, suggesting Christians need only turn to Matthew’s account of the Gospel and bring a personal examination to these few passages:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (5:3)

Blessed are the ones mourning; for they shall be comforted (5:4)

Blessed are you who reproach you and persecute you and say evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be glad (5:11-12)

But I tell you, do not oppose evil. But whosoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him also the other (5:39)

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those persecuting you so that you may be children of your Father in heaven (5:44-45)

 Christians are shown that all of humanity is bestowed with many gifts, including love and forgiveness. The Ministry of Christ elevates these two gifts, especially love more than any other as the means to following in companionship with Him in serving the established Kingdom of God. Now in the Matthew’s Gospel we also find Jesus exclaiming “Do not suppose that I came to bring peace on the earth; I came not to bring peace, but a sword…” (10:34-35). Receiving scripture as whole, it seems to me in bad faith to imagine this “sword” as not materially relevant to holding up notions of just war, violent rebellion and forceful self-defense.

 Though critically speaking, even while under duress the majority Christians are living non-martial lives. It benefits us to turn to Luke 12:51 where the sign of the sword is filled with “division.” The sword then to faithful is the instrument of discernment, used to navigate the course of the soul amidst the dense complexes of motives of being in the world. The sword, division, and discernment echo back to Micah, who faced with desolation “will look to the Lord” waiting on the God of salvation, in prayer knowing that God hears us (Mic. 7:7). Again, taken as a whole this is the radical act which carries our faith through the vicissitude to now eternal; from the staff in the right hand of Moses to Jesus in the Right Hand of God.

 For Christians, the mystical is political (borrowing from Orthodox Theologian, Aristotle Papanikolaou). The mystical takes up its practical implications through our turn away from a being moved by the creaturely evil of our fallen self toward participating with society through actions which are witness to God’s “divine providence which with strength and gentleness guides human and cosmic history” (Catechism of the Catholic Church).

Participation that begins in a manner of taking care of personal and interpersonal needs with respect to family, friends, and meaningful work. Participation that then forms an ethic which works to shape society, aware of social conditions, and acting to promote right and just conditions for life to flourish. John Milbank describes this as participating in the church of the Eucharist, where sacramental potential is found everywhere in how we perform our personhood in relation all humans and non-humans in the world. This then serves as an ordering principle, resulting in political activity (Papanikolaou, 2012, p. 138).  

 To those who will listen, Jesus says “No one can serve two masters… You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Mt. 6:24). We cannot act as messengers of love, compassion, and forgiveness while at the same time act from a place of indignation and rage. The ministry of Jesus makes clear, to become more responsive to the Word of God we must develop our mindful attention to God’s unceasing divine presence in the world.

 To do this it would seem, we must become less responsive to the constructive entity of worldly power that draws a great deal of influence from a state of confusion, evoking the reign of Hezekiah extended from the city of Babylon. This is a power of mastery that impresses upon body and soul. A power of sinful pride that is continually (not to be confused with eternally) managed and coordinated today by industrial executives, academic administrators, heads of state, bureaucrats, specialists, and all who seek to alienate thus resulting in a broad and deep reaching apparatus.

 This apparatus is consistent with Agamben’s description, having a “concrete strategic function, always located in a power relation” and as such “appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of power.” It is the reign of power that is exercised over the mind/body down to the biological compound. A bio-political state seeking to command every instance of life toward death. Just as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, I suggest this apparatus finds each of us most passionately, individually, where we raise the instrument of discernment to establish divergence at the seam of our faithful Passover from one mode of being to the being with One.

“If your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light…” (Mt. 7:22).

Eye is sound, being alert to the continuous and regular vibrations of God’s unceasing divine presence.

 Jesus calls us into religious experience through the major-minor. Major in that Christ inaugurates the Kingdom of Heaven now. While minor according to the caring ordination of the New Law. These to me are the poles of what Gianni recognizes as the world recreated. From “Adam to Adam” Gianni reflects; Adam was seated at the head of humanity and with him we are fallen. The now risen Christ is at the head of a new humanity, our body instructed by love and forgiveness as citizens of His present kingdom. Christ is seated at the right hand of God’s power today. This is major. A power to return us to what one is and all one can be. A power exceeding the state’s seizure of Holy Land and bodies.

 The New Law brought to life by Christ is called a “law of love.” It introduces an agapic ethic that seeks to hold our hearts, steering our acts by love and recognizing suffering, not by fear or alarm. Grace is the unique gift that God gives us through Jesus Christ. The social, holy, and spiritual commandments are made complete through the incarnation of Christ by the ministry of grace. It is through God’s gift of grace that discover how it is that we may sin less, keeping in touch more with God’s divine presence and discover what it is that we are.

 Who we are is shaped by our acts of participation in the moral order of this kingdom. They are caring, loving, charitable, mourning, and forgiving acts. The New Law is minor in the manner of God’s intimate appeals, touching on our interdependent needs and vulnerability. The New Law is major by the fact that our participation in society according to this loving ethic extends from God’s reign, the life sustaining power that bends society toward prophesy and what is yet mystery.

 The consummate expression of the major-minor is entered into through the Paschal Mystery. The Paschal Mystery is not an event, not a thing, this is a person. Christians do not act in a manner to celebrate a past event, but as Robert Taft, SJ, writes, “a present person, who contains forever all that he is and was” (emphasis mine). Following this personhood, the Second Person in the Holy Trinity, Saint Paul says to us, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead” (Eph. 5:14) for as long as we can receive the message, Christ who shows us the kingdom of God is in our midst, the kingdom of God is within us (Lk. 17:20-21).

 We enter through the Cross of Christ into the Kingdom as illumined by the Paschal Mystery. We are called as we are to follow the personhood of the Word of God. In this world but not of this world. Through scripture, liturgy, and acts the Christian faith sustains the witness of God’s divine presence though our reverence of Jesus Christ’s personhood. It is because of His personhood that the entirety of the life of Christ is instructive. It is by this unique light that we as persons of faith can find revelation throughout the entirety of life.

 The light in Gianni’s eyes observed that for me, this entire meditation turns around the quiet manner by which Jesus enters the world and then returns. In fact, this advent I’ve been praying on this first instance a lot, entering into the Nativity. Jesus comes into the world quietly. Recently in prayer together, Paul Licktieg, SJ, observed this so lovingly, “Jesus came to the world through the willing devotion of a small girl, in a tiny province, in a little corner of an empire.” This is how God’s salvation comes into the world, in the quietly willing of devotional ways.

 Then let’s consider how Jesus leaves the world, on the Cross at Golgotha. Gianni turns our attention to John 19:25, where “by the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene." Imagine Jesus, a person whose body is trembling on the Cross turns to provide one final lesson. Along with the faithful mentioned above, John mentions another disciple standing near to them, the disciple which Jesus loved. Though this disciple is not mentioned by name. Who is Jesus speaking to through his last breath? There fulfilling his living Ministry Jesus says, “Behold, your mother!” (Jn. 19:27) Referring to Mother Mary.

 Father Bieganowski, SJ, suggests that John welcomes each of us as disciples to see ourselves as the one whom Jesus loves, standing there at the foot of the Cross. It is each of us, brought together by God’s love, who faithfully take Mother Mary into our own home so that our soul may be healed. Mary, the Mother of the Church whose body and soul gave full consent to God’s plan. This is how we are called on to serve amidst the generations of God’s kingdom.

 Christ did not return following the resurrection to raze those who persecuted him, yet eclipses that kingdom. Mary, who would recite psalms with other girls truly absorbed this lesson “abandon yourself to God.” In doing so, Mary is host and caregiver to the changed world. “Not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh nor the will of man” (Jn. 1:13) but by following the Word of God with this commitment, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Lk. 1:38).

Images:

Michaël Borremans, “The Virgin” (2014)

Michaël Borremans, “The Son” (2014)

Works Cited

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. 391-395. Accessed December 13, 2017. http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p7.htm

O’Connor, Roc, SJ, (2015). In the midst of our storms: Opening ourselves to Christ in the Liturgy. Archdiocese of Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications.

Papanikolaou, Aristotle (2012). The mystical as political. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

#christianity #catholicism #theology #political theology #ethics

[insideanairport]

Patrisse Cullors' “When They Call You a Terrorist”

❍❍❍

A Black Lives Matter Memoir

After reading this book, you might find yourself so excited that you want to only read books by black women writers. The book is as exciting and informing as autobiographies of black radical activists such as Angela Davis and Assata Shakur. It reminds us of other works such as: Push Out, We Were Eight Years in Power, Long Walk to Freedom, White Fragility, Golden Gulag, and Revolutionary Suicide. It is written smoothly with a down-to-earth style of writing. She has a non-academic working-class tone that connects with everyone.

POPO

The ending of the book [Spoiler Alert] is very powerful with the birth of Patrisee’s child, the presidency of Trump, the rise of hate crimes, mentioning the names of victims of police brutality and the future of the Black struggle. On a #SayHerName-style, she brings to light the names of victims of police violence and white supremacy. She reminds us of the ordinary Americans who lost their lives due to police racism. People such as Tanisha Anderson, Miriam Carey, Shelly Hilliard, Rekia Boyd, Shelly Frey, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Kathryn Johnston. The reason for this imperative is that women are often left out when the histories of white supremacy, slavery, and genocide are told.

”These few names are only part of a long, terrible list, but, like the horrific history of lynching in this country, when the story is told, women are often left out of it even as we are lynched, too. And some of the women are pregnant at the time of the lynching. And maybe because our movement is being led by women, Queer and straight, cisgender and Trans. And maybe because so many of us have family who have been harmed in jails and prisons but that harm has not become part of the broader public discussion about the bind, torture, kill that is part and parcel of the American system of incarceration.”

Colonial Structures

In chapter 15, Patrisse identifies the United States as the country of borders and walls. As a first-generation immigrant, I completely agree with this description. I don’t take this description only literally. This definition of the United States as the country of borders and walls does not only apply to the brutal border regime with concentration camps for children, deportations, and criminalization of asylum seekers. It also applies to the European mindset which is always preoccupied with congealing definitions and categories. It prevents people to accept each other for who they are and making an effort to understand cultural differences and historical trauma in order to heal the previous wounds inflicted. 

Historically speaking, white supremacy has a tendency to define and categorize everything outside of itself as the “other” or “minority” or “abnormal”. When I was living in the United States, I thought this solely applies to the North American mindset. However, If we look into European societies as well as European settler-colonial states around the world, we see the same type of mentality reminiscent of colonial enlightenment which still hasn’t been flushed out of the systems.

Patrisse has lost close friends and family to police brutality and white supremacy. She is telling the reader, if her dead body was found in police custody, we should know that the police have killed her. Her position is not only from a radical black perspective, but it is also within the black queer tradition.

We know historically that women often do the work and men get the credit for it. And living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to centre men and their voices rather than women and their work.

She skillfully takes the reader into the “world" of the working-class black community in America. In some instances, she takes us even deeper into the community of queer activists of color. The non-black reader should naturally understand the reality of ethnic profiling targeted towards the black and Latinx communities. The history of police in the United States is founded upon white supremacy, slavery and defense of public property. 

Today, if we step out of North America, we see similar patterns of police brutality emerging increasingly in Western and Eastern Europe. European societies as the so-called defenders of Western democracy and civility are turning into deportation regimes and in some cases semi-apartheid Islamophobic regimes. Although they are spending tremendous energy in hiding the data from the international community and presenting themselves as civil and superior to North America, they increasingly see themselves vulnerable to the new generation of BIPoC activists and organizers. 

The European Network Against Racism (ENAR) after releasing its 4-year report in 2018, noted that hate crimes that target racial and ethnic minorities are on the rise and need immediate actions to be prevented. Yet, only one-third of the 24 member states have guidelines, policies, and instructions for the police in documenting the hate crimes. If that doesn’t sound right to you, you are not the only one. First of all, the question comes to mind what does the other two-third think about hate crimes? and the second question is that “Are you designating the police in charge of documenting the hate crimes, even though a good portion of hate crimes might actually come from police themselves? The report also shows that the police do not take reports of racist crimes seriously or they do not believe the victims of racially motivated crimes. (1) 

Turns out that Stephen Lawrence and Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi are not the only people in Europe to be the victim of hate crime. (2) Recent reporting shows that London recorded 1,652 antisemitic incidents in 2018, an increase of 16% in one year. (3) Meanwhile, in the United States, the FBI reported that in 2018 alone, 8,646 people were victims of hate crime in 7,036 single-bias incidents. Almost 60% of these incidents were motivated by race, ethnicity, and ancestry. (4)

Another EU survey in 2015-2016 showed that 14% of respondents with different ethnic minority and immigrant backgrounds have been stopped by police in the 12 months preceding the survey. (5) In France, according to the results of a national survey of more than 5,000 respondents, Arab and African men are twenty times more likely to be stopped and searched than other males groups. (6) In England and Wales, black people were nine and a half times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police. (7) All these are excluding the Algorithmic profiling that has been vastly problematic across Europe due to its preexisting structural racism. 

When Silicon Valley first emerges, it might as well be a Nordic country for all its homogeneity. Even today, its diversity has not yet found a way to reach into the communities of those who were legally and willfully excluded.

ENAR Shadow Report 2014-2018 (1)

In occupied Palestine, we see the same techniques of systemic killings being exercised towards Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, police, and settler-colonialists. That might be one of the reasons for the huge solidarity between Palestinians and Black activists in Ferguson when military tanks started to appear on American streets. (8) Today, beyond Angela Davis’s pro-Palestinian activism and support for the BDS movement, we see a broader unification of forces between black & brown activism with Palestinian liberation.  

Susanville, incorporated in 1860, was named for the child of the man who laid claim to founding it at a time when founding something was a euphemism for manifest destiny and homesteading and all the blood and death both of these wrought. “Founding,” a term like the phrase “collateral damage,” the use of which was ratcheted up in the 90s so they didn’t have to say dead Iraqi children.

Formerly incarcerated mothers, organizers and activists at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., after performing a play highlighting Black-Palestinian solidarity on September 3, 2018. (Will Johnson) -972mag (11)

Governmental Terrorism

“There’s a difference between abuse and torture. Both are horrible, often unbearable, and both leave scars. Neither can be minimized. But I make the distinction here in order to explain that while abuse may or may not be intentional, and is often spontaneous, torture is always intentional. It is always premeditated. It is planned out and its purpose is to deliberately and systematically dismantle a person’s identity and humanity.”

Patrisse recalls a day when his brother Monte gets into a car accident with a white woman, and she calls the cops on him. LAPD arrives and arrests Monte after tasing him brutally. Patrisse's brother gets into trouble simply because he has a mental problem and he is black. Later in the book, she asks herself: why cops never seem to understand that black people can also have mental illness?

She criticizes the classical racist “War on Drugs“ policies that were basically “War on Black and Latinxs peoples”. Even Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman admitted that the purpose of these laws was to target black peoples and anti-war students. (9) The laws were written so broadly that it made otherwise normal daily activities illegal. It gave police a nice opportunity to arrest those who targeted. These policies are similar to the strategies used on indigenous peoples which have resulted in spending more money on erasing their language rather than saving them. (10) The War on Drugs was the campaign to start the prison industrial complex targeting Black and Latinx peoples. And these laws were so ineffective, that for example in Los Angeles between 1990 and 2010, about 10,000 people died.

As of this writing, three of the organizers from Ferguson, DeAndre Joshua, Darren Seals and Edward Crawford, have all been found shot dead in their cars. The cars of two of the young men, DeAndre and Darren, were burned, which destroyed forensic evidence, and Edward’s death was ruled a suicide—even as he had just started a new job and had secured a new apartment, hardly the action of someone looking to die.

BLM

After reading this book, if a non-black person [anywhere] doesn’t see the police brutality as something real toward black and brown communities in the United States, then I guess there is no way to have a discussion with that person. If after reading this book, someone doesn’t comprehend the urgency and magnitude of the Black Lives Matter movement, then I guess there is no way to have a discussion with that person. 

There are many white folks who decide to stay neutral amidst the rise of far-right racism and xenophobia. “White Silence is consent” was a slogan introduced by the Civil Rights activists in the ’50s and ’60s. Today, after Trump’s presidency and impeachment, amidst all the human rights violations that the United States government is inflicting upon humanity, remaining silent is taking the side of white supremacy.  

“…while I know the basics of what he experienced the first time he was sent to LA County Jail in 1999, a jail run by the sheriff’s department, it will not be until 2011 when I read a report issued by the ACLU of Southern California that I fully understand what was done to my brother there. This is to say that Abu Ghraib was first practiced on this soil, in this America. And before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Before the second Gulf War. The skills to torture people were honed in this nation on people who were not terrorists. They were the victims of terrorism.”

Culture Issues

Patrisse Cullors talk about her memory when her white classmate invited her for dinner. She accepts the invitation. When they are eating at the dinner table with the family, the father is asking Patrisse questions such as "have you thought about what you want to be when you grow up?". She tells herself: “It is incredible. Who asks children such things and over a well-set table where all the family has gathered to eat, converse? I’ve only seen that in movies, on the TV shows I love, 90210. But this is real life and here I am.” And then she asks herself: "Have I ever known such a moment in my own home?"

White people’s economic and money-oriented mindset is well known around the world. White parents like to talk about money during mealtime, even when kids are around. In contrast to this first-world behavior of homo economicus, the majority of non-Western cultures highly value the eating time as something important if not sacred. It is the designated time for the family and loved ones.

Bib.

1. racism, european network against. ENAR Shadow Report 2014-2018. s.l. : ENAR - European Network Against Racism aisbl, 2018.

2. Pianigiani, Gaia. ‘Racist’ Killing of Nigerian Asylum Seeker Stuns and Saddens Italy. nytimes. [Online] July 7, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/world/europe/racist-killing-of-nigerian-asylum-seeker-stuns-and-saddens-italy.html.

3. Staff, Algemeiner. UK Jewish Communal Body Reports Record Number of Antisemitic Outrages During 2018. algemeiner. [Online] 2 7, 2019. https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/02/07/uk-jewish-communal-body-reports-record-number-of-antisemitic-outrages-during-2018/.

4. (UCR), The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting. 2018 Hate Crime Statistics. United States Department of Justice. [Online] 2018. https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics.

5. Rights, European Union Agency for Fundamental. Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey (EU-MIDIS II) . Luxembourg: Publications Of ce of the European Union : European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2017, 2017.

6. defenseurdesdroits. Enquête sur l’accès aux droits Volume 1 - Relations police / population : le cas des contrôles d'identité. s.l. : defenseurdesdroits, 2017.

7. Mijatović, Dunja. Ethnic profiling: a persisting practice in Europe . Commissioner for Human Rights. [Online] 2019. https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/ethnic-profiling-a-persisting-practice-in-europe#_ftnref5.

8. Ahmed, Nasim. A new civil rights movement unites Palestinians and Black Americans. middleeastmonitor. [Online] April 5, 2019. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190405-a-new-civil-rights-movement-unites-palestinians-and-black-americans/.

9. LoBianco, Tom. Report: Aide says Nixon's war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies. CNN. [Online] March 24, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html.

10. Nagle, Rebecca. The U.S. has spent more money erasing Native languages than saving them. newsmaven. [Online] Dec 6, 2019. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/the-u-s-has-spent-more-money-erasing-native-languages-than-saving-them-qh2w3-wqPUCNqrGcblbHQg.

11. Taylor, Jen Marlowe and Je Naé. From Palestine to Ferguson: Reflections on shared grief and liberation. 972mag. [Online] Oct 1, 2018. https://www.972mag.com/october-2000-killings-black-palestine-solidarity-play/.

#reading #blm #blacklivesmatter #activism