#I’d kill for a debate where the candidates actually answered questions

[silvia7272]

2 ~ First Meetings Aren’t Normal Part 1

So, I wanted to write about how Marinette and the rest met the girl. I hope you’ll all enjoy it; I was so happy so many people have liked my post. I was debating whether or not I should add my other stories on here. And it was a bit long so it will be split into two or maybe three parts. And if you want to be tagged please say and I will tag.

Word Count: 3605

Tags: @queenmj10

***

If Marinette was asked how she met and became friends with the new girl within a day of meeting her, she’d have to think back to the day when she had just finished defeating an Akuma and parted ways with Chat Noir. The battle had been excruciatingly long, and she only had mere seconds before detransforming into an alleyway. It had been in September, the start of the new year for her whole-class who were ‘luckily’ kept in the same group, something about once you get to a certain year you stay in that class.

“That was such a tough battle Tikki. I’m so tired now, I have so much work to do as well. I don’t know how I’m able to carry on like this.”

“I believe you can Marinette, after all, you’re incredibly smart, and I’ll help you all the way” Marinette held her closer to rub cheeks at that moment.

“Of all the people you’re Ladybug?” A voice scoffed.

‘What!?’

Marinette felt her heart stop.

She had one objective, not let anyone uncover her identity.

That objective was compromised.

She turned her head to see an incredibly short old woman with a cane and covered with a black cape. Under the hood, she had many wrinkles and a beauty spot above her right eye, and a slight yet distinctive scar on her cheek with piercing brown eyes.

“I thought Wáng would’ve chosen a much more experienced Warrior” Before Marinette could process what had happened and ask her anything she had gone. When she peeked out it was like she had vanished.

There was only one thing she could think of.

‘I have to go to Master Fū”

***

A million thoughts raced through the girl's mind at once. Tikki had tried to calm her but with no luck.

‘I was discovered as Ladybug, does that mean that my identity really was discovered? Does that mean I’ll have to give up being Ladybug? But I can’t, I still have to find out who Hawkmoth is and- no! That would mean I have to give up Tikki no I can’t I-’ When she finally arrived and swung the door open.

“Master Fū something terrible has happened! My-” She stopped and surveyed the scene around her. It looked like he had been waiting for her to come, lucky charm or not.

But what surprised her more was the fact he had laid out not one, not two, but three teacups on the table.

“This girl doesn’t have the proper training here Wáng. I thought even you had standards?” A gasp was heard, that was the same woman from before behind her.

“Master, it's her, she accidentally saw me detransform. I’m so sorry Master” She held her head down disappointed in herself but before he had time to respond the woman had grabbed the girl with her cane by her neck.

“She’s far too weak without the Miraculous Wáng. When will she begin training properly? I should’ve come sooner if I would’ve known the state Paris was in. Really Wáng, you chose a teen to protect Paris all on her own, my kid would be far better than her” Ok Marinette had enough. She didn’t know who this was but like hell, she could talk to her like this.

However, before she could glare and produce a retort Fū cleared his throat.

“Mrs Franchezca Hernandez. I can assure you than Marinette is more of a capable fighter than you’d think. For the past year, she and Chat Noir have always protected Paris from each Akuma attack that has happened. The Parisians are safe in the Ladybug’s hands.” Master Fū looked so sure of himself, but that didn’t stop the woman from scoffing.

“Whatever you say. But my kid will be joining the city tomorrow” She turned to smirk back at them after opening the door.

“I’m sure she will prove she is a better candidate than this child” She threw her hood back on before exiting the building.

“Master Fū who was that? Why was she here? Why is she even allowed to be here? Wait, is she another Guardian?” Fū sighed, he had a lot of explaining to do.

***

“So… She’s not a Guardian?” They were spending this time reviewing the events of what just happened.

“Yes and no. She had been a previous holder or the Ladybug Miraculous, but she didn’t exactly… Enjoy the experience. She quit after her first battle-” Marinette jumped up.

“What!? But it was her responsibility to protect and be a hero, she just threw that away? How can she be that irresponsible and still come here? And Tikki why didn’t you tell me?” The red Kwami closed her eyes and sighed, she didn’t like keeping secrets from her holder, but Guardians’ words overrode her holders.

“I’m sorry Marinette, but we aren’t allowed to point out previous holders, and… I didn’t like her anyway; I’d rather forget her.” Marinette smiled softly and hugged the Kwami.

“Oh, Tikki I could never stay mad at you”

“However, she still is a capable fighter, you shouldn’t underestimate her Marinette, with or without the Miraculous, she would’ve been perfectly able to win our first battle. She only chose not to use the Miraculous as she already was skilled enough. She didn’t agree with being given powers to fight, she thinks you should train for it and use only self-power.” Marinette looked astonished, was she mad?

“But how could someone without a Miraculous hold their own in a battle, Hawkmoth would wipe the floor with them, it’s too unsafe if they didn’t have a Kwami with them” Surprisingly Fū and Tikki chuckled at her response.

“You’d be surprised Marinette, when you see them in battle your opinion will do a 180°” She didn’t seem convinced but nodded anyway.

“Now I think you’d better get home; your Parents must be worried right?”

“But Master I still have so many questions, is it really alright that she knows my identity? And what about what the Lady said, someone else is coming, is she really going to replace me? Can they really be trusted?”

“You will find the answers on your own, but for now you must attend your home now” She sighed defeated but left. How in the world would she find out the answers?

She knew one thing or another, it didn’t matter how good that girl is.

She was Ladybug, right?

***

A new year, a new start, for some people yes, but for a bluenette now, absolutely not.

Because of the liar at school, she had successfully taken all of her friends and made her the outcast.

When she tried so hard to get them all back, because a little kitty friend told her too, they denied her kindness. Threw it all away.

When they all voted her out of being Class President, as they wanted someone kinder as their Class President, Marinette was done. Marinette exclaimed how she wasn’t going to be fired, but that she quit instead. She had done so much, and she was tired of being treated like dirt.

She didn’t want to set a good example.

Or one of the Marinette’s of the world.

She wanted to be treated like everyone else.

Like a real person.

‘Whatever’ The class thought before electing Lila as the Class President, she already had so many famous connections, they could have the trips of a lifetime.

And then Marinette ended her ‘friendship’ with Adrien.

He had chastised her for being so mean to the class, that she should’ve continued being friendly with them, that she should’ve continued trying to win them over a lot harder than she had. Marinette, angry, said how she had been giving her heart and soul into all of those gifts that she had made. She had spent nights making those handmade gifts and they didn’t care; she had done so much, and they didn’t care.

He was persistent that she apologises so everything could be better, that’s what he believed in.

But she laughed, the last months making her come to a harsh realisation.

Her crush had died out, and not all friends are as loyal as they make them out to be.

They didn’t talk for the rest of the year.

And no one had contacted her over the summer.

It was then that she truly realised that they really didn’t appreciate their friendship, it had taken everything in her to not breakdown and cry herself to sleep.

“I’m so tired of fake friends, I want someone who will truly have my back” Then she slept, but Marinette would smile at this memory, knowing that her wish came true.

***

It was just like any day, she wasn’t late per se, but she was still rushing to get to class, arriving before Mlle Bustier was better than later.

As she was approaching the steps she slipped and fell, her clumsiness really came in at the worst of times.

She prepared for the impact… But it felt softer than she anticipated.

Opening her eyes, she saw grey. It looked soft and felt so… Fluffy?

“How did a pillow get here?”

“That was my doing. Are you ok, you fell so fast I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to catch you in time?” A redhaired girl spoke as she stuck her hand out for her.

Marinette looked at her warily, she wasn’t anyone she membered seeing around the school, was she new or just extremely good at hiding herself?

‘Please don’t tell me the third new persons gonna betray me as well’

She got up by herself anyway, she was still cautious of others, even if she didn’t know them.

The girl rubbed the back of her head, possibly embarrassed by something, while giving a smile.

“Sorry I gotta go, my Aunt’s gonna kill me if she doesn’t see me soon” She turned to walk off but then stopped as if remembering something.

“I just wanted to say I love your bag design, I can tell you spent so much time working on that, good luck MDC” Waving she ran off inside.

‘What was that all about? And MDC? Why call me- Wait that’s my name, how did she know my name!?’ Sadly, those questions wouldn’t be answered till later.

She had entered silently, then again, no one had actually paid attention to her presence so it's not like it mattered.

Slipping to the back was easy, the place where she belonged.

But that would end soon.

When the rest of the class entered that was when Mlle Bustier cleared her throat to gain the classes attention.

“Now I know that you’re all very excited about this new year, there will be even more challenges to be presented and I hope you’ll all do your best”

“But for now, we have a new student joining today and I hope you’ll all make her feel welcome.” There were gasps and excitable whispers, another person to make friends.

‘Another sheep to follow my pack, I wonder how easy it will be to make them wrapped around my finger’ Lila smirked, convoluting all the lies she was about to make.

So, they looked at the door in anticipation.

And waited…

And waited some more.

Confusion was spread around the classroom before Bustier walked outside to tell the newbie that she could walk in.

But no one was there.

“Erm, it seems she may be la-”

A body climbed through the window and landed in front of everyone.

“Hiya everyone! I’m the new kid and I just gotta say-”

Swoosh

She was in front of Lila’s desk, taking her hand in hers.

“I love your jacket; it flatters you so much” Before Lila could respond the new girl moved in front of Adrien and held his hand.

“Your eyes are such a lovely shade of green. And you look super cute for your age” Again, she moved along before giving a comment to everyone.

“I love your hair, brown and red totally suit you.”: Alya

“Your aesthetic just screams cool, chilled and totally relaxed dude. I respect that”: Nino

“Wow I love your drawings, they look so detailed, and you look so cute, like a cinnamon roll”: Nathaniel

“Your hair cries pink but I see Rock ‘N’ Roll in you. Plus, you have roller-skates, awesome”: Alix

“That purple is such a lovely contrast to your black hair, it’s such a gorgeous colour”: Juleka

“You look sooo cute, your eyes are such a deep blue plus pink really suits you Pinkie”: Rose

“Your build shouts athletic, I would love to have a race against you sometime”: Kim

“I heard through an article you were able to produce an AI called Markov? I just gotta say that’s amazing, I would love to see how you managed that.”: Max

“Your hair is so colourful, I’m super jealous of how you’re rocking it”: Mylène

“Aww you look so sweet; I can tell you love each other so much”: Ivan

“Wow, you look absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, your eyes are a beautiful shade of blue you could totally be a model”: Chloé

“Wow, you look so adorable with those cute glasses you have”: Sabrina

“And Mlle you look so pretty, I love your hairstyle”

…

Wow, she just complimented everyone in the room.

Everyone but Marinette but that didn’t matter to them.

“W-Well that lovely of you erm”

“My name is -” The door slammed open.

“ROSINA SCOATS! I thought I told you we’re to enter together!” In came an old Lady.

Old Lady?

Marinette froze.

‘That’s the Lady from before, so if that’s her, then Rosina must be the new fighter here, so did that mean she knew I’m Ladybug? No no that couldn’t be possible, even if Master Fū knows the Lady she shouldn’t tell anyone else right?’ She hoped positively.

When no one was looking at her Rosina winked at her.

She winked?

‘Oh god, she winked at me. She knows. I’m doooomed’ Marinette groaned as she dropped her head against her desk.

“I’m sorry Auntie I couldn’t help it; I’ve never seen so many new faces before” Her smile seemed to brighten everyone's mood in the class. Except for the one who knew her much longer.

Whack.

The walking stick was residing on the young girl’s head. But her grin never left her face.

“And I’ve told you time and time again not to. Honestly, girl, being in a new place does not give you the right to ignore what I’ve taught you Amoretto” The girl giggled, obviously this was something that had happened often.

However, some people didn’t take kindly to that.

“Hey, you shouldn’t hurt your Niece, she didn’t do anything wrong” Truthfully that comment she gave Lila caught her off guard, so this was a small thank you, after she will have her wrapped her finger.

“Yeah, Lila’s right, she didn’t do mean any harm. Lay off her will ya” The class joined in minus Marinette who was still having her crisis over identities until the old Lady slammed her cane down to the floor.

“Silence. You will cast no judgement for how I raise my Cherub. You will learn to remember that. Do not continue this conversation any further. Now Mlle I suggest you learn to control your class before I settle them straight.”

Whack.

“I will be off, if you need anything you know how to contact me. Now go sit next to that Marinette girl” She turned and left them all still in slight shock.

‘How did she know Marinette’s name?’ They pondered before their minds went back to the girl in the front.

“Please don’t worry about that little scene there, you have no need to fear, it’s just an affectionate tap. Besides I’m strong enough to protect myself” She quickly glided up to sit next to the blue-haired girl.

“Hey, it's cool to see we’re in the same class MDC” She giggled before taking her seat.

“Yeah… Great.”

***

The class had gone slower than what she had imagined it to be. But as soon as the bell rang, she was immediately dragged out before she could ask the girl beside her some questions.

In the dining hall, everyone from her class was crowding around her making her embarrassed. Geez had she been the only new girl there?

“Are you alright? You don’t have to put on a brave face just for us, we can help you.” Everyone seemed to congratulate the brown-haired girl for being so nice and helping out the new girl.

“Honestly, I’m alright, I shouldn’t really run off anyway, she may not look it, but she was only worried about me. And besides, I’ve trained enough for something like her staff to not hurt me. You know what they say *‘dă shì qīn, mà shì ài’. Trust me it doesn’t hurt” She really didn’t want to talk about this apparent abuse she was facing anyway. They blinked at the phrase but carried on. They all introduced themselves and tried to get to know her.

“So how come you’ve moved here? What was your last school like? Do you want us to take you on a tour?” Alya asked the newbie. The reporter instincts growing within her.

“Well, that first question is slightly classified, sorry, I can’t tell you yet. And I’ve never been to a school before, I’ve always been home-schooled because I’ve been travelling the world since I can remember. And I think I’ll manage on my own thanks; I have my map and I’m determined to get everywhere by that” Her smile never wavered. Lila smirked, she totally seemed like an easy target, although it may not be a challenge like Alix and Max, she looked like a likeable person. One that could easily fall into her lies.

“Classified? Does that mean you’re on a Mission of some sorts? -Gasp- Are you here because of the Akuma’s? Are you planning on helping Ladybug and Chat Noir?” So many gasps and questions flew towards her and for the first time, she felt uncomfortable.

“Guys, can’t you see she’s getting uncomfortable? Sorry, they can be a bit excited over Akuma related topics. Especially Alya” The blond stood next to Rosina.

“Hey!” The one in question denied.

“Are you really going to disagree?”

“…No” She pouted.

“You’ve travelled around the world? Same, I hope we can be besties soon, travel bestie” Grinning ear to ear to the redhead.

“Hey, do you think you can teach us some phrases then? That would be so cool if you could” One of them suggested.

“I guess, I am multicultural after all, learning Mandarin was so hard for me, French was a lot easier” The girl remembered the many nights of staying up with books trying to cram everything into her brain before going to bed and other important activities.

“Statistically speaking Mandarin is the hardest language to learn and yet is also the most widely spoken native language in the world,” Max stated pushing up his glasses while Lila giggled.

“Yes, but because my Mother had some connections, she gave me the best Chinese speaking teachers she could find to help me learn the language, not as I needed it as much as they thought I would. They were so impressed **I could learn it in 8 weeks” Lila missing the attention, fibbed to gain it back, not like Rosina minded.

“Oh, really that’s quite impressive”

‘She didn’t even know what I said, and she calls herself multilingual?’

Before she could think anymore Adrien stepped in, he didn’t want the new girl to get bullied if she called Lila out for lying, he didn’t want another case of Marinette.

“Also don’t worry about never being in school before, I was home-schooled too until last year. Trust me you’ll get the hang of it.”

“Ok Adrian”

“Err its Adrien”

“That’s what I said wasn't it? Sorry, I sometimes get names mixed up, I hope you don’t mind?”

“Don’t worry we’ll all help you with your problem, I have a similar one. I suffer from tinnitus after saving Jagged Stone’s cat on a runway, and because of my selfless bravery, I was punished because the sound of an aeroplane engine burst my eardrum.” To the end, she was in tears as her classmates comforted her.

“Right, but I don’t have a hearing condition Layla”

“It’s Lila” She tried to give back a sweet smile but, on the inside, she just wants this girl to fall under her spell already.

“Ok Layla”

This was going to be a looooong day.

***

When Marinette finally got out of Dupont she felt exhausted. Rosina did look nice, but she couldn’t exactly be pleasant to her if she was anything like her Aunt. What was she really like? Was she just putting on an act for everyone else like Lila? Was she really going to try and become Ladybug?

She sighed before walking back to her house, expecting to see her Parents joyful faces as she tells them about their wonderful day.

But that didn’t happen.

“These macarons are lovely Mrs Cheng” A girl stated as she munched down on several macarons at once.

“Oh please, call me Sabine. You are such a lovely girl”

“Really? Thank you very much, I hope you’ll continue thinking of me like that”

“Oh Marinette, we’ve met your new friend, I’m so glad you two are friends so soon after meeting” Rosina turned and looked at her with a slight wave.

She wanted to faint so badly, but she couldn’t.

Because she was Ladybug.

***

I am very into an Inuyasha x MLB crossover right now, but with Marinette and Rosina being treated like a little Sister.

Anyway, I hope you like it, part two will be next. After I will ask which next part you want from either meetings with the rest of the Marinette protection Squad, Chloé and Marinette becoming friends or Piper’s introduction.

Also, if there are some more tags I should write, please say so it can fall into that category.

* dă shì qīn, mà shì ài = Hitting is affection and scolding is love

** I saw that it would take 88 weeks if you practice Mandarin 5 hours a day.

#marinette dupain cheng #marinette deserves better #ml salt #salt fic #alya salt #adrien salt #but he has redemption later on #maybe #ml class salt #my oc tag #my oc character #my oc #miraculous ladybug #lila salt #let me know your thoughts #series soon #have a good day

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 15, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

Tonight was supposed to be the night of a televised town hall meeting featuring both President Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. But, after Trump tested positive for coronavirus, the organizers of the event turned it into a virtual meeting. Trump refused to participate. So Biden arranged an event of an hour and a half on ABC. Then Trump arranged his own, separate hour-long town hall on NBC.

NBC faced deep criticism for giving Trump a platform when he had ditched the official plan. But the network made up for that criticism by giving the position of moderator to journalist Savannah Guthrie, who has a J.D. from Georgetown Law School and worked as a litigator. Although the setting of the NBC event was oddly partisan—the backdrop consisted of masked women nodding along with the president’s answers—Guthrie repeatedly pressed Trump on his evasive answers to questioners, and his frustration was palpable.

Before the event, Trump had denigrated it. “They asked me if I’d do it, I figured, ‘What the hell? We get a free hour on television,’” he said.

But the questioning did him no favors. He refused to distance himself from QAnon supporters, who believe in the conspiracy theory that Trump is secretly orchestrating an assault on a ring of pedophiles and cannibals made up of the country’s elites. He admitted he owes $400 million to someone, but insists that he doesn’t owe it to Russia or any “sinister people” and that it is a “very, very small percentage” compared to his assets. He refused to say whether he had tested negative for coronavirus on September 29, the day of his first debate with Biden, and said he could not release his tax returns because they were under audit (when Guthrie noted that there was no rule stopping him from releasing them anyway, he got visibly angry). He maintained that he has a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, but could not describe what that is. As usual, he insisted he is treated terribly.

Meanwhile, over at his own town hall, Biden put to rest Trump’s accusations that he is senile or “sleepy.” Biden answered questions from voters ranging from what he would do about racial inequality to our standing in foreign affairs. He showed deep knowledge of the issues, citing history and statistics, as well as providing detailed plans for what he would do to address the nation's problems. He was empathetic and human—the word people keep using is “decent”—and seemed energetic and eager to get underway with his plans for getting America back on track.

In one of the more striking moments of the evening, moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Biden “If you lose, what will that say to you about where America is today?” Rather than giving the obvious answer for a presidential candidate-- “I won’t lose”—Biden demonstrated that he is willing to accept responsibility for his actions, something that has been perilously thin on the ground for the past four years, and demonstrated his confidence in his fellow Americans. “It could say that I’m a lousy candidate and I didn’t do a good job,” he told Stephanopoulos. “But… I hope that it doesn’t say that we are as racially, ethnically, and religiously at odds with one another as it appears the president wants us to be…. Because we have the greatest opportunity than any country in the world to own the 21st century and we can’t do it divided.” [sic]

After the events, fact-checkers provided the grounding for the obvious: Trump made it up as he went along, hitting some of his favorite debunked talking points, while Biden misspoke on some of the details he outlined (he got troop levels in Afghanistan wrong, for example) but stayed close to the facts.

More than anything, though, Biden reminded us of what a president is supposed to sound like. It was an extraordinary relief to hear someone actually talk about the issues the country faces, rather than make everything about himself. And then, after the televised part of his town hall ended, Biden continued to answer questions, talking to voters because, well, that’s what real politicians do.

Trump’s willingness to grab free airtime tonight reflects his campaign’s financial straits. In these last days of the campaign, as his funds dwindle, Trump has been using the resources of the federal government—also known as our tax dollars—to support his bid for reelection. He has poured more than $32 billion into direct aid for farmers, put letters in government-distributed boxes of food claiming personal credit for the program, and promised billions to seniors to help cover the cost of prescription drugs. He has planned a $300 million advertising campaign to help us “defeat despair” over the coronavirus, and has used the White House for both the Republican National Convention and a recent political rally.

All that money is supposed to move voters into Trump’s column, but tonight did nothing to aid that effort.

Still, he doesn’t much seem to care. His administration seems to have turned into a revenge operation. Today, Trump appeared to celebrate last month’s killing of murder suspect Michael Reinoehl by law enforcement officers who had been deputized as U.S. Marshals. Reinoehl was a suspect in the killing of a right-wing agitator in Portland, Oregon, when the officers shot him. “They knew who he was; they didn't want to arrest him, and in 15 minutes that ended," Trump told an audience at a campaign rally in North Carolina, seeming to gloat over an extrajudicial killing. Trump also continued to attack Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, just a week after the FBI arrested 8 men for plotting to kidnap her.

We also learned today that intelligence officers had warned White House officials, including the president, that Russians were using Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to feed disinformation to Trump. A former intelligence official told Washington Post reporters: “The message was, “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine.” This makes the willingness of Republicans to push yesterday’s “revelation” of an incriminating laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden even more astonishing. NBC News reports that intelligence officers are investigating that story to see if it is a foreign intelligence operation.

On Twitter tonight, conservative columnist Bill Kristol wrote, “A friend who has served at very high levels of government, a true public servant and a serious conservative, emailed me earlier: ‘The Republican Party has become the party of facilitating Russian agitprop and voter suppression. Not what I signed up for.’"

Today the administration rejected a request from California Governor Gavin Newsom for a disaster declaration to free up money to help the state after six wildfires have burned hundreds of thousands of acres across the state. California is a reliably Democratic state that will likely give its electoral votes to Biden.

Meanwhile, in the absence of a coronavirus relief bill, poverty is growing. Depending on the scale they use, researchers say 6 to 8 million Americans have slipped below the poverty line. Republican strategists appear to be willing to deepen the recession if it means crippling an incoming Biden administration. According to a report in Bloomberg, Republicans are setting the stage to kill future federal spending. If Biden is elected but the Republicans hold the Senate, they will refuse any aid to address the coronavirus crisis, thus hoping to cripple a Democratic presidency from Day One.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Heather Cox Richardson

#political #election 2020 #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American

[spiftynifty]

How come it seems like lm and jds can talk more candidly about their intentions regarding other ships like allurance and even k/l but not sheith? I don't understand why they can clarify things like allurance and how it was there from the beginning or flat out state that they never intended for k/l to be a thing, but when it comes to the topic of shiro and keith they won't just clarify what they did or did not intend/want their relationship to be? I'm confused by it. :(

Ooof this is an excellent question and I suspect a complicated one. 

First off, they can be candid about Allurance because 1) it’s a hetero couple (and therefore “acceptable” to executives and conservative parents) and 2) it was strongly implied and built up for almost the entirety of the series before they officially, canonically, became a couple. There’s no ambiguity there. They can be candid about kl because Allurance technically “kills” the ship by virtue of existing, but more importantly kl is the fanship that they have been directly asked about on more than one occasion and probably straight up badgered about it more times than we’re aware of. When your production studio gets blackmailed in the hopes of making k/l canon, that ship is being brought to your attention. 

Also, Afterbuzz is run by kl fans who have anti-like tendencies. They angle kl questions in nearly every interview, and I was pretty miffed by the way in this interview they heavily, heavily implied that only Sheith fans hated s8 “because their ship didn’t become canon” and yet in the same breath talked about how Allurance wasn’t good and came out of nowhere (something JDS delightfully shut down). In the live chat for the recent interview, people from all ship alignments kept begging the hosts to ask about why SK’s friendship wasn’t included in the final season. In the saltiest tone you can imagine, one of the more vocal kl hosts decided to answer the question (”they helped each other grow and evolve and since they’ve done that, we don’t need to see their friendship anymore, it got lots of screentime in other seasons”) and never let the showrunners actually speak on it, instead moving swiftly to another topic that aligned more with the hosts’ own interests. It was almost like she was afraid of what the answer would be. Was she afraid they’d say “well actually, on the matter of that, Sheith was our intended endgame” or was she trying to save them from having to talk about something NDAs prevented them from talking about? 

So why CAN’T they talk Sheith? I have a few theories. This gets long and a little rambly, so I’ve thrown it under a cut. 

1) Don’t ask, don’t tell. Except for post-s7, the showrunners themselves have never been asked about Sheith’s relationship in an interview. I think most Sheiths were afraid of rocking the boat and potentially upending a SK endgame by drawing too much attention to it. We were/are definitely the quieter side of the primary vld ships and honestly most of us were not expecting our ship to be canon. 

But vld ships and the ship wars are notorious across geekdom for vitriol and death threats, and the creators didn’t want to add any fodder to either side. In the middle of production it would have benefited no one for the EPs to say, “yeah sheith is meant to be viewed romantically” or “no, we can’t go back and change the story to make that true”. Either one would have resulted in an uptick of harassment from antis towards them, towards other fans. And nevermind the production side where DW/WEP weren’t ready for even a hint of m/m until right before s7 dropped. It was only AFTER they got the greenlight on gay Shiro that showrunners could finally be vague and say “some people will interpret [sk] as brothers, others will say it’s 100% confirmed they’re in a relationship”. Which is, in my opinion, a pretty interesting way to respond to that question. But again, if that interviewer hadn’t been brave enough to ask it, I highly doubt it’s something that the showrunners themselves would have ever brought up.

2) Sheith was actually intended to be romantic, but was blocked. We know now that Adam being greenlit as Shiro’s boyfriend happened right before (like a week or less) before s7 dropped. This was a show that had been in production for almost 4 years by this point, and the showrunners stated they picked Shiro to be their rep early on in the process. When they planted that idea in executive’s heads is anyone’s guess, as is when the proper fight for it began. I suspect their immediate team of directors, writers, and in-house producers were well aware and supportive, but kicking that up the chain was another story. I also have a suspicion that it wasn’t until season 6 was complete that the matter was brought up because greenlighting everything we got in s6 knowing Shiro was gay the whole time puts a lot of eyes on Keith. 

And really, it was Keith who was the problem all along. 

In every version of Voltron, Keith is the main protagonist. He’s the leader of the team, the primary “image” of Voltron, and thus, certain things about him need to be maintained. I’m not sure if this is sheer coincidence or not, but he is the only person on the team who stayed visually the same to his OG counterpart. All of the other paladins have gone from white dudes (and a white lady) to POC, or have had a genderswap. There is much debate about Keith’s race with people creating their own headcanons but ultimately Keith can pass as white. While the handbook states Lance is Cuban, Hunk is half black-half Samoan, Shiro is Japanese and even Pidge gets “Italian”, Keith is just listed as... human. Which is a surefire way to not upset fans who have HC’d him as POC while also not-NOT saying he’s white. Everybody “wins”. 

In addition I’m confident a major stipulation of the OG Voltron owners (the “gatekeepers”, as a few of the VAs and the showrunners themselves have darkly alluded to) was that Keith could not be LGBT. We know now he was meant to end up with Acxa, a fact that was already obvious to many of us from their Weblum meetcute. But that relationship was never scripted. 

Setting aside the fact that the OG Voltron owners (WEP) didn’t want Keith to be LGBT, I’m sure executives at Dreamworks would have struggled with the idea as well. Shiro stans can come at me all they like about this but Keith was always meant to be the primary protagonist of the show, of every version of Voltron, and making the main, masculine hero of a well-trodden, oft-rebooted franchise gay/bi would have been an ENORMOUS move for animation. Making him end up with the other main, masculine hero would have honestly broken the internet and the minds of countless conservative executives, and been a major benchmark not just for cartoons, but ALL media. Animation often trails behind TV and movies in terms of social progress because something something “protect the chillllldrennn”. And right now I’m struggling to think of a popular live action TV show, or movie, with an older audience, where the main masculine hero is lgbt, and in a relationship with the other main masculine hero. Feel free to offer me examples in replies but the fact that I’m struggling to think of anything is pretty telling. In short, if this revolutionary move still isn’t happening for the live action 13+ audience, asking for it to happen on a cartoon with a 7-11yo boy demographic is like asking for the moon. Keith couldn’t be gay, because immediately it would have been obvious to anyone that he was already very much in love with the other LGBT character on the show. Hell, it’s already pretty obvious in canon that this is the case, and dodging the question about his sexuality is dodging the confirmation that he’s in love with Shiro. 

I’d like to believe that one of the solutions to the Adam Problem that was proposed was that KEITH ends up with Shiro, but they were laughed out of the office. The pair’s incredibly close bond aside, it would have been the absolute easiest fix production-wise. They already have their shared history doing most of the legwork, all that’d have to be changed is:

-adding Shiro to the L/K scene in 8x01, just sitting there as Keith encouraged Lance.-Re-recording a couple of Shiro’s lines in 8x05 to make him seem at least somewhat upset that Keith was kidnapped-Showing Keith and Shiro hanging out in the video episode. You could just use the shot of Keith and Pidge but replace Pidge with Shiro.

And the best part is, you could change just one or two of these and then do the wedding epilogue you always intended (but write something that doesn’t insist Shiro retired) but with Keith instead of Rando. Not to mention, there is a slight, slight possibility there was a S/K scene (or two) cut along the way. I strongly disagree with the theories that have floated around about the “massive edits” done to s8, but I think there could be truth to the idea that a Sheith scene was cut to make room for Crew Member, or an effort made to downplay the Sheith friendship that comes off way more intimate than any interaction Shiro has with [man]. It’s more likely that SK scenes never existed at all in this season as the showrunners had to cave to pressures to “have more action”, had no idea what to do with Shiro besides relegate him to a stiff cardboard general, and perhaps had to follow strict instructions about the kind of friendliness an out & proud gay man could show to the men he’d enjoyed good interactions with before. 

All this to say, the Sheith battle is messy. It’s fine for the showrunners to say “getting the greenlight for Shiro was a battle” because it’s a battle they won that makes everyone look pretty good. It makes Dreamworks look like they Learned Something and are going to be more open to LGBT content in future properties. It makes WEP look not-terrible because they can add “allowed a character who wasn’t really an OG Voltron character to be gay” to their list of “generous” things they allowed for this re-envisioning of their property. It’s self-congrats all around.

Blocking Sheith has the opposite effect. It reveals that WEP is homophobic because they could allow Pidge to be a girl and Allura to be black but making the hero a non-straight man? That’s TOO FAR. It reveals that Dreamworks higherups are homophobic because they weren’t ready for two LGBT protagonists, just one plus a background character with 3 lines who is literally never named. No one wins, and to be asked about Shiro and Keith and be honest about it could potentially be the showrunners saying, “god, we wanted to, but we were blocked at every single turn”. And thus DW and WEP are the outed villains of the story.

3) Shiro and Keith were never meant to be read as romantic. The showrunners don’t say anything because there’s simply nothing to say. Sometimes the most incredible ships are happy accidents. Sometimes people genuinely don’t realize what they’re doing. I felt a little disheartened watching the AB interview because the way they talked about wanting to include more [man], or how they “hoped viewers would read between the lines” re:Shiro/Curtains, was so casual and flippant it was like they genuinely thought most people would be fine with Shirando if only there had been more scenes between them, as though completely severing Shiro’s relationship with Keith and instead only showing scenes of Shiro bonding with a new character would come off as a good move rather than a baffling (and somewhat hurtful) one. 

I do believe that certain directors were absolutely fans of the pair and angled in what they could. Chris Palmer is behind the famous “shiro loves you baby” art and responsible for the eps that include Shiro’s gay panic, the Sheith hug, “As many times as it takes”, Shiro falling into Keith’s arms, and “We have to stop, Shiro’s out there!!” among others. Steve Ahn was the director behind 2x01, 3x01 with heavily grieving Keith, Blade of Marmora, and the episode where Keith screams Shiro’s name so loud he astral projects and then Shiro holds his hands over the controls. He also got really soft when he talked about the pair in an episode of Form Podcast (before JDS kinda hastily shut him down). And even Eugene Lee, he directed The Black Paladins which is an episode so Sheith I still can’t believe it’s real, and 7x01, the other episode so Sheith I can’t believe it’s real. All three of these guys were the original series directors, which is pretty inchresting. 

But that doesn’t mean the showrunners were necessarily onboard. Maybe it was really important to them to show a positive male friendship since that never happens in media, just as they felt having Allura sacrifice herself was a powerful feminist move. However the thing I keep circling back to is JDS’ early interview about The Winter Soldier and how if he ever got the chance to do that, he hoped it would be in the future when things could be more progressive, hinting that he wanted to throw more overt romantic undertones if he himself ever got a fight like that to write or direct. It’s pretty interesting that he wrote the Black Paladins, which mirrors the Stucky fight in Winter Soldier so much that it actually rotoscopes one of Bucky’s moves. I’d also point out that JDS’ favorite characters are Shiro and Keith, and I find it impossible to be a fan of both and not also be a fan of how much they love each other, and how much that love straddles the line between romantic love and friendship.

This got long, but I hope it was helpful. The likely final-ever showrunner interview will be on Let’s Voltron sometime this month, and I do hope that now that the series is over someone is brave enough to ask them, “so... what was going on between Shiro and Keith? In a perfect world, what would have happened there?”. In a way it doesn’t matter though. There is always the risk of them saying “nothing was going on there” and us agonizing over whether that was a lie to protect their careers or bald-faced honesty in the face of an NDA or fucks-given that might have expired with their contracts. 

But I think the best we can hope for is the same situation that happened with the Avatar creators and that live action movie: 3 years from now when the NDAs are well and truly expired, JDS & LM may come out and say, “SO, on the matter of Shiro and Keith, it’s time to come clean.”

#sheith #vld meta #voltron #askspifty #it's still wild to me that people say they're brothers #like really i have questions about your siblings if that's the case #Anonymous

[jeannereames]

Could you comment on kasta tomb? Is the excavation still ongoing? Has there been new discovery/hypothesis/debate? For a while it was all over the news then it fizzled out. Google searche only surfaces old articles. What's the academic consensus, if any, regarding whether it was a dedication to Hephaistion?

 Okay, so, for the TL;DR crowd:

1)    The excavation is more-or-less on hold due to lackof funding (like a lot of excavations in Greece).

2)    No new discoveries for reason 1, plus the usualquagmire in Greek archaeology of access to a site and turf wars. But, thesethings also take time.

3)    It wasn’t a dedication to Hephaistion. I don’tknow an academic (outside the excavator’s team) who genuinely believes it was. Attachingit to H. (or any other major figure at ATG’s court) is part of the usualattempt to get media attention (and funding).

Let’s start with #3, which will in turn answer #s 1 and 2.

First rule of archaeology: gold and famous names raise money.It doesn’t matter how important one’s discoveries actually are for the field,it matters how well the lead archaeologists can market what they’re finding topeople/gov’t with funds. Sometimes really good (non-gold) artwork also can beused for attention.

Witness how the archaeologists at Bethsaida (Israel) havehandled the finding of an iron-age stele w the image of the moon god in a “highplace” in the gate. This is *really cool*, given the date (900s?). But do theytalk about its rarity, etc.? Oh, hell, no. The email I got from Rami pointing to anarticle about the find from Israel’s Jerusalem Post announces, “Archaeologists identify citygate from time of King David.”

Famous name! Especially in Israel.

Now, compare: “Large Looted Tomb from Hellenistic Period Foundin Northern Greece,” or “Archaeologists Report they may have Found the Tomb ofAlexander the Great’s Mother/Best Friend/General…etc.” Now, which of those isgoing to get anybody to read the article? :-D

That’s how you get media attention (and hopefully, money tokeep digging, as archaeology is EXPENSIVE). Yet if the claim turns out to bebogus/unsupported, the media attention goes away or can even turn against theexcavator. If/when the first goes down, sometimes the team tries to come upwith other exaggerated explanations to maintain that spotlight, but this canjust dig the grave deeper.

So, why couldn’t this tomb be Hephaistion’s?

First, there are other burials in it—five people to be exact.Were it a monument for Hephaistion, it would be a cenotaph, not a tomb (hisbody was burned in Babylon), and it would be solo, not have other people there.Macedonian Tombs come in two basic types: solo and family. We do have otherfamily tombs (most famously, the Tomb of Lyson and Kallikles, excavated byStella Miller-Collett), and this appears to be similar to that. So attachingthis tomb to Hephaistion faces the immediate problem of, “Uh…other people?”

(Couldn’t they be his surviving family? Well, maybe, but it’sstill really weird. Trying to argue such a thing would be better called “reaching.”*grin*)

The presence of an older woman in (if I recall right) her60s, led some to propose it was Olympias in there—except, again, other people,plus we know (from ancient testimony) that Olympias was buried in Pydna (whereshe was murdered on Kassandros’s orders). So it’s also not Olympias. BothOlympias and Hephaistion are important enough that they’d have merited a solo,not family, tomb. (And most all of Olympias’s family were killed and buriedelsewhere.)

Another name put forward is Nearkhos, one of Alexander’sgenerals, who had land in the Amphipolis area. At least he is a possible candidate,although the tomb might be too late for him (but he sure as hell would have hadthe money for it). Like our Macedonian soldiers, Lyson and Kallikles, Nearkhosmight have sought to establish a family tomb. Again, it’s a reasonablepossibility, just a question of whether the tomb is too late.

Back to Hephaistion (and why it’s not him)…

The argument that it is rests on the presence of some graffiti on stones. First, the graffiti does NOT name Hephaistion (that’s an interpretationby Peristeri and her team). Second, if this were a tomb memorializing such animportant person, why on earth would it be indicated by graffiti?

The graffiti says “arelabon” followed by the letters Eta andPhi (and maybe a sigma?). Peristeri has turned that into “parelabon” and “Hephaistion”:received by Hephaistion. Problem: “arelabon” appears twice, missing thenecessary “pi” in both cases. While missing letters in inscriptions is hardlyunusual, missing the same one in two different places is odd. I’m not going toplay with that further, just leave it for true epigraphers. (I’m aprosopographer, so I deal with epigraphy only occasionally and largely withnames.) What I really want to kick to the curb is the idea that the letters area monogram for “our” Hephaistion.

My current research work involves epigraphical occurrences ofHephaistion, as well as other Hephais-based names in both their Attic-Ionic andDoric forms. Trust me, there are a LOT of names that start with Eta-Phi, evenbeyond Hephais-based names. But even if this meant “Hephaistion” the nature ofthe graffiti itself suggests somebody working on the tomb: an architect,mason, or other craftsman—not the person for whom it was made. We find suchcrafters marks on pottery, bronze, etc. (We also find such etched names on dedicationsin temples, but I don’t think that applies here.)

I think if this was really referencing Hephaistion Amyntoroshis full name would have been given (not a monogram), and it would be a lotmore prominent within in the tomb.

Furthermore—and one of our eternal problems with IDingMacedonian tombs—is that, unlike many figured tombstones (stele), Macedoniantombs usually DON’T name the dead person buried there, even when we suspect theymay portray the dead persons image (like the Tomb of Judgement at Lefkadia).The Tomb of Lyson and Kallikles is unusual. Instead, we get names like the Tombof Judgement, or the Tomb of the Palmettes. The Tomb of Eurydike was calledthat by later archaeologists; there’s absolutely no indication that it belongedto Philip’s mother. It’s almost certainly a woman’s tomb, but that’s about allwe know.

And oh dear, wouldn’t the whole Royal Tomb II at Verginadebate be SO much simpler if there was actually a flippin’ name on the tomb?!There’s not.

Identifying who’s buried in a tomb is REALLY HARD. Itdepends on dating, objects, and probabilities.

So yeah, some craftman’s graffito on the Kasta Tomb means zilch,except that he got his wish and has been spoken of by posterity.

So…trying to turn this into a cenotaph or tomb ofHephaistion is a pile of …wishful thinking. 😉  It’d be cool if it was…but it’s going to takea LOT more evidence to make that claim (not to mention explaining the 5 peoplein there).

Another problem is trying to DATE this sucker.

Those who want to tie it to Alexander more directly are desperateto make it early Hellenistic, despite clues to the contrary ranging fromarchitecture to the gown style of the Karatids. I’m not an art historian, so Iwon’t dig into that. I’ll simply point to one thing I found extremely curiousbut have not seen anyone (yet) address: the use of blue in the mosaic.

Now first, no silliness please about the Greeks not “seeing”blue; that was going around the internets for a while. Yes, they saw blue! Butthe color palette common to painters like Apelles in the late Classical period weremore earth tones. (Again, not an expert. I’m just gonna point to the word ofOlga Palagia, et al. Go and read Olga.) We find these colors in the pebblemosaics at Aegae (Aigai) and Pella, as well as Dion, et al. Even in thebeautiful Persephone painting in Tomb I and Aegae/Vergina.

The first time I saw that BLUE in the Kasta Tomb mosaic, itreally struck me. Unfortunately, art historians tend to catalogue mosaicsby how they’re made, not the colors in them, so I haven’t been able to track thisdown further, except to say that I, personally, have not seen an early Hellenisticpebble mosaic in Macedonia that used blue pebbles. Maybe there’s one hiding ina museum basement somewhere, but these mosaics are pretty spectacular and tendto be shown off. Blue as a color in mosaics is later, showing Egyptian influence.It’s also seen more in tessera mosaics than pebble, which were going out ofstyle by the Roman era. (I think the last datable pebble mosaic is from Delos,1st century BCE—again, Olga.)

So given the use of blue in that mosaic, I’d prefer to see adate that’s mid-Hellenstic at the earliest.

Ergo, we’re probably looking at the family tomb of animportant Hetairos during the Antigonid Dynasty. That’s my best guess.

Incidentally, pointing to the 4th century AmphipolisLion and saying, “Well, it was on top, so the tomb must be 4thcentury!” is horrible methodology. Something stuck on the top of thetomb (which may or may not have been there originally) does not date the tomb. Evenif the lion had been inside, that doesn’t help. Let me explain with an example:

Just because you want to be buried with your great-aunt Bertha’sWWII WAVE wings does not mean that *you* fought in WWII. 😉 It means you were buried with an antique. Sothe presence of the lion means only that the tomb probably can’t date BEFOREthe 4th century lion. That doesn’t mean it can’t date afterit. In fancy archaeologist-speak, the Amphipolis Lion provides only a “terminuspost quem” (earliest date for X), not a “terminus ante quem” (latest date for X).

#Kasta Tomb #Macedonian archaeology #Hephaistion #Hephaestion #classical archaeology #amphipolis tomb

[innuendostudios]

New video essay! Internet reactionaries argue as though they have no core beliefs at all, and will just say anything to own the libs. So are they nihilists, or is there more going on?

You can ensure this series continues by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re online blogging about a Black journalist’s commentary on marketing trends in video games, movies, and comic books, and you’re saying how the vitriol in response to her fairly benign opinions reveals the deep-seated racism and misogyny in a number of fan communities, most especially those that lean right, when a right-leaning commenter pops in to say, “Or maybe they just actually disagree with her about marketing trends! For Christ’s sake, there’s no mystery here. People aren’t aren’t speaking in coded language. They are telling you what they believe. She had a bad opinion; why do you have to make it bigger than that? Why can’t you ever take people at their word?”

You pause and ponder for a moment. Mmm… Aw heck with it, you’re in a discoursing mood. Let’s do this.

“Mr. Conservative, in order for me to take you at your word, your words would have to show some consistency. Let me just lightning round a few questions about the reactionary web’s positions on marketing trends: Do you believe that having the option to romance same-sex characters in an RPG turns the game into queer propaganda, or do you believe that killing strippers in an action game can’t be sexist since no one’s making you do it? Do you believe that the pervasiveness of sexualized young women in pop culture is just there because it sells and that’s capitalism and we all need to deal with it, or do you believe that a franchise has an obligation to cater to its core audience even if diversifying beyond that audience is more profitable? Do you think words are inherently harmless and only oversensitive snowflakes would care about racialized language, or do you think it’s racist if someone calls you mayonnaise boy? As long as I’ve got your ear: Are you the Party that believes in the right to keep and bear arms because you’re distrustful of all authority and what if we need to overthrow the government someday, or do you believe that cops are civil servants and we should trust their account of events whenever they shoot a Black man for looking like he might have a gun?

“Does optional content reveal a game’s ideology, or doesn’t it? Is capitalism a defense for decisions you don’t agree with, or isn’t it? Is language harmful, or not? Do you hate authority, or love cops and the troops?

Alright, alright, ease off. Add some nuance.     “Now, I know the Right is not a monolith, and maybe these arguments are contradictory because they’re coming from different people. We’ll call them Engelbert and Charlemagne. Maybe Engelbert’s the one who thinks any institution funded by tax money is socialist and therefore bad and Charlemagne’s the one who says we should dump even more tax money into the military and thinking otherwise is un-American. But here’s the thing: Y’all have very fundamentally different beliefs, and you’re so passionate about them that you enter search terms into Twitter to find people you don’t even follow and aggressively disagree with them, and, yet, you’re always yelling at me and never yelling at each other. What’s that about?

“And I can’t say how often it happens, but I know, if I let Engelbert go on long enough, he sometimes makes a Charlemagne argument. And vice versa.

“And, I see you getting ready to say, ‘The Left does the same thing,’ but ba ba ba ba ba, don’t change the subject. That’s an extremely false equivalence, but, more importantly, it doesn’t answer my question. What do you actually believe, and why are you so capable of respecting disagreement between each other, yet so incapable of respecting me - or, for that matter, a Black woman?

“See, I don’t take you at your word because I cannot form a coherent worldview out of the things you say. So, forgive me if, when you tell me what you believe, I don’t think you’re being candid with me. It kinda seems like you’re playing games, and I’m the opposing team, and anyone who’s against me is your ally. And you’re not really taking a position, but claiming to believe in whatever would need to be true to score points against me, like we’re in that one episode of Seinfeld.” [Card Says Moops clip.]

(This is borrowed observation #1, link in the down-there part.)

Hoo, it feels good calling people hypocrites! Person says B when earlier they said A and you point out the contradiction! You don’t take a position on A or B, and you still “win”! I see why Republicans like this so much.

But that’s the kind of point-scoring we’re here to deconstruct, so let’s get analytical.

There’s a certain Beat-You-At-Your-Own-Gaminess to the Card Says Moops maneuver. “Safe spaces are bullshit, but, if you get one, I get one too.” “There’s no such thing as systemic oppression, but, if there were, I’d be oppressed.” It’s dismissing the rhetoric of social justice while also trying to use it against you. Claiming “the Card Says Moops” does not, so much, mean, “I believe the people who invaded Spain in the 8th Century were literally called The Moops,” but, rather, “You can’t prove I don’t believe it.” Not a statement of sincere belief, simply moving a piece across the board. All in the game, yo.

If they could be so nakedly honest with you and themselves to answer “what do you actually believe” truthfully, one suspects the answer would be, “What difference does it make? We’re right either way.”

This has come to be known as “postmodern conservatism,” a fact I find hilarious, because, in The Discourse, “postmodernism” is a dogwhistle for everything the Right hates about the Left. (...it also means “Jews.”) Postmodern conservatism is the thinking that, at least for the purpose of argument, the truth of who invaded Spain is immaterial. You have your facts, I have alternative facts. What is true? Who’s to say?

Regardless of what you actually believe - what you believe serving no rhetorical purpose - you are at least arguing from the position that material truth does not exist. Truth is a democracy. Whoever who wins the argument decides who invaded Spain.

It would be reductive to blame this pattern of thought on the internet, but its recent proliferation isn’t really extricable from the rise of chan culture (this is borrowed observation #2, link in the down there part). 4chan didn’t cause this thinking, but sites like 4chan reveal it in its most concentrated form.

The two most common properties of a chan board will be anonymity and lack of moderation, which means, among other things, that you can say whatever you want with no systemic or social repercussions. People may disagree with you, but it carries no weight. You won’t be banned, you won’t have your comments deleted, and, because there’s no way to know whether any two posts are made by the same person, you won’t even get a reputation as “the person with the bad opinion.”

The effect this has on the community is that there is no expectation, in any given moment, that the person on the other end of a conversation isn’t messing with you. You can’t know whether they mean what they say or are only arguing as though they mean what they say. And entire debates may just be a single person stirring the pot. Such a community will naturally attract people who enjoy argument for its own sake, and will naturally trend towards the most extreme version of any opinion.

In short, this is the Free Marketplace of Ideas. No code of ethics, no social mores, no accountability. A Darwinist petri dish where ideas roam free and only the strong ones survive. If the community agrees Bebop is better than Eva, well, then I guess Bebop is better than Eva, because there wasn’t any outside influence polluting the discourse. Granted, it could just be a lot of people thought it was funny to shit on Eva, but it’s what the community has decided, so it will at least be treated as truth.

This demands that one both be highly opinionated and to assume opinions are bullshit, to place a high premium on consensus and be intensely distrustful of groupthink.

A common means of straddling these lines is what I call the Stanislavski Opinion: the opinion you entertain so completely that you functionally believe it while you express it, no matter the possibility that you will express - and, to an extent, believe - an opposite opinion later. Most of us go through a phase in our youths where we’re online and like the idea of believing in something, but don’t know what to believe just yet, so we pick a position and find out if we believe it by defending it. We try on ideologies like sunglasses off a rack. Most of us will eventually settle on a belief system, and this will usually involve some apologies and some comments we wish we could scrub from the internet, but it’s an important stage of growing up.

But some percentage of people will seek out a space where there is no embarrassment, the comments scrub themselves, and never growing out of the Stanislavski Opinion is actively rewarded. There, figuring out what you believe would make your ability to argue less flexible, and, besides, if you believed anything unironically, much of the community would still assume you’re trolling. Where no one is bound by their word, what, really, is the difference between appearing to have an opinion and having one?

Sincerity is unprovable and open to interpretation. Decide someone is sincere if you want to make fun of them, decide they’re trolling if you want to make fun of someone else. What is true? What do you want to be true? It’s easy enough to start thinking of one’s own opinions the same way: What do I believe? What is it advantageous to believe? Your answer isn’t binding. You’ll change it later if you need to.

The person I’m describing, you spend time online, you’ll meet him a lot. His name is Schrodinger’s Douchebag (borrowed observation #3, link in the down there part): A guy who says offensive things & decides whether he was joking based on the reaction of people around him. Any website that lacks effective moderation and allows some level of anonymity will, to varying degrees, approximate 4chan, and be overrun with Schrodinger’s Douchebag.

When this type of person defends rape jokes by saying all humor is inherently punching down because there must be a butt to every joke, he hasn’t thought about it. He assumes it’s true, because he figures he’s a smart guy and whatever he assumes is probably right, but he’s unfazed if you prove otherwise; there’s no shortage of dodgy reasons he might be right and you wrong. He’ll just pick another one. What matters is that the game continues.

The thing is, Bob, it’s not that they’re lying, it’s that they just don’t care. I’ll say that again for the cheap seats: When they make these kinds of arguments, they legitimately do not care whether the words coming out of their mouths are true. It is a deeply held belief for precisely as long as it wins arguments.

So it’s kinda funny, right, how many of these folks self-identify as “rationalists?” I mean, typical rational thinking would say: If I am presented with the truth, I will believe it, and, once I believe it, I will defend it in argument. This? This is not that! This is a different idea of “rationality” that views it not as a practice but as an innate quality one either possesses or lacks, like being blond or left-handed: If I’m arguing it, I must believe it, because I’m a rational person, and, if I believe it, because I’m a rational person, it must be true. You speak assuming you’re right, and, should you take a new position, this telescopes out into a whole new set of beliefs with barely a thought. Stay focused on the argument, and you won’t even notice it’s happening.

You might now conclude the internet reactionary believes in nothing except winning arguments with liberals. And, like Newtonian physics, if you assume this framing, you will get highly useful results. If you enter conversation with Engelbert and Charlemagne believing they do not mean what they say, they are only entertaining notions, and, on a long enough timeline, they will eventually defend a position fundamentally incompatible with the one they defended earlier in the same argument, you will navigate that conversation much more effectively!

But, like Newtonian physics, this framing is lowercase-a accurate without being capital-T True.

In reality, nihilism isn’t that popular. People will tell you, “I don’t care about anything, I just like triggering the libs,” but why is it always libs? It is piss easy (and also hilarious) to upset conservatives, why only go after the SJWs? The easy answer is, well, if you upset a feminist, you might make her cry; if you upset a Nazi, he might stab you, and that has a cooling effect. But the more obvious answer is that they actually agree with the racist, MRA, and TERF talking points they repeat, but would rather not think about it.

So much of conservative rhetoric is about maintaining ignorance of one’s own beliefs. To uphold the institution of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy while thinking you are none of those things. (Well, OK, knowing you’re a capitalist, but thinking it’s a good thing.) Most people have a baseline of fairly conventional, kindergarten morality, and conservatism often clashes with it. You can rationalize these contradictions - “I’m not a bigot, I just believe in states’ rights” - but, as American conservatism gets more radical, it gets harder to square one’s politics with what one assumes to be one’s beliefs. So you learn, when someone challenges you, to cycle through beliefs until something sticks, just play your hand and trust that you’re right, or, in extreme cases, insist you have no beliefs at all, you’re just here to watch the world burn.

But they’re not. They are willing participants in the burning of only certain parts. They don’t care what they believe, but they know what they hate, and they don’t want to think about why they hate it. On paper, they believe in freedom of religion and freedom of expression, but they also hang out in communities where Muslims and trans women are punching bags. And, like a sixth grader who believes one thing in Sunday school and another thing in biology class, they believe different things at different times.

This thinking is fertile ground for Far Right recruitment. I’d say the jury is out on whether chan boards attract Far Right extremists or are built to attract Far Right extremists, but they’re where extremists congregate and organize because they’re where extremists are tolerated, and where they blend in with the locals. They learn the lingua franca of performative irony: Say what you mean in such a way that people who disagree think you’re kidding and people who agree think you’re serious. People who don’t know what they believe but clearly have some fascist leanings don’t need to be convinced of Nazi rhetoric, they just need to be submerged in it and encouraged to hate liberals. They’ll make their way Right on their own. Folks start using extremist rhetoric because it wins arguments with SJWs - usually because that’s the moment SJWs decide it’s not fruitful and possibly unsafe talking to you - and this creates the appearance that, if it keeps winning arguments, there must be something to it. The Far Right literally has handbooks on how to do this.

Those who never consciously embrace the ideology - who don’t transition from participating to getting recruited - are still useful. They spread the rhetoric, they pad the numbers, and often participate in harassment and sometimes even violence.

There’s a twisted elegance to all this. Think about it: If you operate as though there is no truth, just competing opinions, and as though opinions aren’t sincere, just tools to be picked up and dropped depending on their utility, then what are you operating under? Self-interest. The desire to win. You’ll defend the Holocaust just to feel smarter than someone, superior. Think about how beautifully that maps onto the in-group/out-group mentality of dominance and bigotry. Think how incompatible it is with liberal ideas of tolerance. I think this is why we don’t see a lot of these “I’m just here to fuck shit up” types on the Left. Don’t get me wrong, the Left has gotten on some bullshit, but (excepting politicians, whom you should never assume to mean anything they say) it’s sincerely-believed bullshit! We don’t build identities around saying things just to piss people off.

The takeaway from all this is not only that you can’t tell the difference between a bigot who doesn’t know they’re a bigot and a bigot who knows but won’t tell you, but that there is no line dividing the two. When some guy, in the middle of a harassment campaign, says the victims should be nicer to their harassers because that will “mend the rift,” I don’t know if he believes it. But, in that moment, he believes he believes it. And that scares the shit out of me. But, if you’re asking how many layers of irony he’s on as compared with the harassers, nine times out of ten it doesn’t matter.

Borrowed observation #4 is: “We are what we pretend to be.”

#the alt-right playbook #alt-right #video essay

[hamiltimebinches]

Vampire! Lafayette x Reader: A Deadly Mistake

A/n: I’m sorry for punching you in the gut with feels but this is the one of the only ways I can see this ending. Not all stories have happy endings to them anyways.

Timeline: Canon

Warnings: Angst

Request: “I really love ur Vampire Laf x reader! May I request one where the reader’s family was killed by a vampire and they meet one at a party which is Laf and she thought he was a human until in one point of the story??? Thanks!!!”    

Requested by: Anonymous

Words: 2,500

     Growing up an orphan is difficult for anyone. At least if you’re a male you could easily get a job, well, actually that’s not the case. If you’re a male you can get a job easier than a female orphan would be able to. I was lucky enough to be taken in by a family that was close to mine. The family was especially willing to take me in when they heard of my parents bloody demise.

     The family that had taken me in, the Bakers, were much more wealthy than my family had been and are invited to many more parties than my parents together attended in their lives. Unfortunately though because this family took me in I have to attend parties with them. Every single party and there’s at least three a month. Now, this wouldn’t be a problem for anyone else but for me it is, seeing that I’m not a very social person. Never have been, especially not after the incident. 

     So, here I am attending another one of the parties the Bakers have been invited too. A cool breeze tousled my hair and goosebumps to crawl up my arms. The breeze wafted the pleasant smell of the gourmet dishes prepared by the chefs. All around men were happily drinking and discussing politics while the women gossiped in small clusters. The candles cast a warm and charming glow in the courtyard.

     Why one would throw a party during the night outside is beyond me. It’s not particularly cold I just happen to be a lighter dress tonight. It was unbearably hot today and I didn’t think it would cool down this much when I was getting ready.

     I warily surveyed my surroundings. I happen to be standing off to one of the sides, where the party really isn’t taking place. This is what it’s always like, when I go to parties I always stand off to the side. I act as though a wall flower that no one gives even a second of their attention. It doesn’t really bother me all that much though. Half the time I don’t even want to be at the party I just go because I have to.

     I wrapped my arms around myself, debating whether or not it would be a wise idea to slip into the house. If I get caught I can always claim that my little sister ran into the building and I was searching for her so I could bring her back out. I was just about to try and slip into the house unnoticed when someone walked up to me. That’s new, no one ever bothers with me.

     “Pardon me, Miss, but you seem chilled.” I looked up to see a handsome male somewhere around my age standing a polite distance away and holding out a jacket to me. I noticed that the jacket must of been one he was wearing with his outfit. I gingerly took the jacket from his hand, just waiting for him to snatch it back. He never did though. The fabric was nice and seemed warm. I slowly slipped it on.

     “Thank you Sir- Sir...” I’m just now realizing I have no clue who this kind man is. He seems friendly enough. “Lafayette. You’re very welcome, I’d hate for such a pretty lady as yourself to freeze.” He said. His accent is different, it’s not from here. It’s some kind of European accent, maybe French. This Lafayette is quite the charmer isn’t he.

     “It’s a pleasure to meet your acquaintance Lafayette. I am (Y/n) (L/n).” I said politely. “Likewise.” He responded, momentarily holding my hand and placing a soft kiss upon its knuckles. In the warmth of his jacket I slowly started stop shivering, it was very kind of him to let me use it. “Ms. (L/n), how would you like to accompany me on a stroll?” Lafayette questioned casually. That’s surprising, not only does someone take notice of me for once but they are now asking me to walk with them. It’s strange, no one has ever done something like this before. Especially because of the rumors...

     Lafayette waited patiently for me to answer. What should I tell him, should I accept or not. I would like to accept, it gets lonely standing all on my own all the time, but now that I have the chance to get away from that loneliness I’m hesitating. I don’t want to accept because if he does rumors surely will start spreading about him. None of them being good. The only reason he’s probably over here with me is because he hasn’t heard of all those nasty rumors that make people avoid me. I should decline his offer, yet when I look at his kind face and the hopeful twinkle in his eyes I know I can’t resist the urge to accept.

     “I’d love to, Lafayette.”

     I smiled as I thought back to that night, it feels like it was in another life time even though it’s only been a year. “What are you smiling about, my love?” Lafayette questioned as he slid a strand of my hair behind my ear. “I’m just thinking back to when we met. It feels so long ago now.” I answered glancing up into his deep brown eyes. “It has not been that long (Y/n), but I understand how you feel.”

     With a small smile I looked down, the beautiful grass and flowers of the meadow coming into view. This is his and my secret place, a place we go to get away from the world. It’s a meadow in a little clearing in the heart of the woods not too far away from the estate I live in. The two of us had stumbled upon it once as we took a stroll around the land the family I stay with owns, obviously we took a little detour in the woods though.

     “Laf, why do you love me? Me of all people.” I asked suddenly, it’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve always wondered why he’d ever want to court someone like me. There’s so many better candidates for someone as amazing as him. He could have any girl he wants yet he chose me. An orphan who most look down upon.

      “Whatever do you mean?” Lafayette asked, genuinely surprised. “Why would you choose me of all people? Most people look down upon me because of what happened to my parents, because I’m an orphan. There’s all these terrible rumors about me because of how my parents died. How they were killed by a vampire, which is true, but there’s so many terrible rumors about me playing a part in their deaths. Some people say that I asked the vampire to kill them, that I’m the reason they’re dead. Others say that I am a vampire and have some how kept it a secret. It’s all so horrible, why would you associate yourself with someone like me?”

     Tears threatened to fall as I said all those things. This isn’t the first time Lafayette has heard me mention what happened to my parents and the rumors but it is the first time I’ve let him know about my insecurity. “(Y/n), I don’t care about the rumors, I love you. I love you for who you are. I don’t want any other girl than you.” He said, his voice sincere as he cupped his hands around my face. As a stray tear fell from my eye he wiped away and kissed my forehead.

     “Aww, how sweet.” Lafayette jumped away from me as a new voice came into the picture. I followed his stunned stare to see a man standing not too far off at the edge of the woods. “Lee, what are you doing here?” Lafayette growled an icy glare directed at the new comer. This guy gave me an uneasy feeling.

     “Jeez, I heard the rumors but I never thought they were true. I guess some things that those stupid women gossip about are true.” This new comer, Lee, said with a chuckle. “What’s going on?” I whispered but I got no reply. “I’m actually having trouble believing this, you’re courting that girl who’s family got killed by stupid old Miller. This is quite the scandal if you ask me, but I suppose this young lady doesn’t know the truth about you. After all, she’d leave you in an instant if she knew the truth.” Lee continued on with a malicious grin.

     “What is he talking about Lafayette?” I asked quietly. “Yes, Lafayette, what am I talking about? Why don’t you shed some light upon this situation for us?” Lee mocked with a dark chuckle. “It’s nothing (Y/n), he’s just a fool playing games.” Lafayette answered but for some reason I don’t feel like he’s telling me the truth. “Nothing?” Lee questioned with a growl, his eyes glowing crimson. I gasped, my hands flying to my mouth. Not only are his eyes red but I can now clearly see fangs protruding from his mouth. This man is a vampire!

     Lee sighed. “It’s all fine and dandy that you’ve fallen in love Lafayette, but at least you should let her know that you’re one of us before wooing her.” He said with a wave of his hand. I slowly looked towards Lafayette, hoping with every bit of my being that this was just some bad dream. He was looking away. “I- Is it true?” I asked him. “Yes.” Lafayette said in a dejected sigh.

     How could he?! He fell in love with me knowing fully well how much I loath vampires because of what they did to my family. He fell in love with me knowing fully well that he was deceiving me about what he really is. He knew very well how much it would kill me to know I was in love with a vampire and he still stayed with me.

     “Now that all that is out of the way... We really should get down to business now that she knows what you are. As you know, Lafayette it is illegal for any vampire to fall in love with a human and that it is punishable by death but I am feeling gracious today. This can end in three ways, two of them working in your favor.” Lee said, clasping his hands together. A sadistic smile finding its way to his face.

     “Now, if you don’t want me to tell the authorities you can either kill this young lady or you can turn her. If you refuse both of those the young lady will still lose her life and you will too. Choose wisely.” My eyes widened at the offer, so this is how it is. I’m either going to end up dead or one of the things I hate with all of my being.

     “And what if I refuse all three options?” Lafayette questioned through clenched teeth. I can now clearly see his fangs, how could lie to me for so long? How could he make me think he’s something that he isn’t? If he truly loved me he would have left me alone, he had to have known that one day he’d get caught.

     “You can try. The moment you do anything rash though is the moment your pretty lady’s fate is decided. One of the many vampires that are surrounding this area will get her away from you and suck every drop of blood from her body. You possibly can’t have thought that I would’ve come here without back up, if you did you must be truly foolish.” Lee said with a chuckle as he leaned up against one of the many trees. Lafayette looked around and hung his head, a distraught look that only I could see crossed his face.

     “I’m so sorry.” He whispered, turning to me. “I can’t have any of them touch you though, this is the only way.” Lafayette said as he put his hands on my shoulders, pulling me closer. I tensed up, realizing that this is it. I am either about to loose my life or be turned. Both of those are terrible possibilities. How could this happen to me? He moved closer to my neck, I tried to get away, it didn’t work. I let out a little shriek as his fangs pierced my neck. I could feel the blood as it flowed out of the wound. My vision blurred and darkened and I lost consciousness.

     “Ugh, my head.” I groaned as I sat up slowly. What happened? I thought as I surveyed my surroundings. I am in the meadow, how did I get here? I can’t remember. How late is it? The sun seems to be setting. How long have I been out here? When did I get out here? I suppose that doesn’t matter, I have to get going though. If I don’t get moving I’ll end up getting caught out here in the dark. But wait... I feel like I got here when it was dark so how on earth could it be sunset? That’s when it all came flooding back.

     I slowly looked down at myself and let out a scream. All over my dress was blood, an unimaginable amount of blood. It really did happen then, it wasn’t all some crazy dream. I let out another scream, this one being of anger and despair. I heard ruffling in the grass beside me. I looked over. There, getting into a sitting position, was Lafayette. There were red tears stains on his cheeks and he looked like a mess. If I’m still alive it means he didn’t kill me, he turned me. Turned me into something I loath.

     “You’re awake.” Lafayette said, relief in his voice. “Listen, (Y/n), I’m so sorry. I wish things didn’t have to turn out this way. But it was the only solution, if I didn’t turn you you were going to die. I couldn’t let you die, not like that.” He apologized, choking up as tears filled his eyes and threatened to spill. In any other situation it would have broken my heart to see that but all I can feel right now is anger.

     “You should have just let me die. This, to me, is a fate worse than death.” I growled as I stood up. He stood up too. “What are you talking about? You don’t mean that.” Lafayette said but even then I could tell that he didn’t even believe it. “I do and I mean this too: stay away from me, I don’t want to see you ever again. And if I do? I won’t hesitate to kill you.” I said, surprisingly keeping my tone calm. “Wah- (Y/n)- please! Don’t leave me!” Lafayette exclaimed, reaching out for me. I stepped out of reach and turned around but before I walked away I said one last thing to him that to this day, hundreds of years later, do not regret.

     “Goodbye, Lafayette.”

#request #hamiltime #hamilton #hamilton imagine #hamilton imagines #hamilton fanfiction #hamilton one shot #hamilton x reader #lafayette imagine #marquis de Lafayette #lafayette #lafayette fanfiction #lafayette x reader #lafayette one shot

[ghostmartyr]

SnK 102 Thoughts

Any of you ever watch Imagine Me & You?

In it, some small child whose name I can’t remember asks what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. The answer given by one of the romantic leads whose name I remember slightly better but am pretending not to is that they can’t both exist.

Taking all bets, folks.

First thing’s first, and oh my gosh, it actually comes first in the chapter! What witchcraft is this!

That’s way more visually appealing in the manga, but. ...I mean, looking at it, all of my reasons seem very silly, because that is horrible and I could probably be spending this time making it better, but I’m not going to, so now we’re all sad.

It’s a metaphor.

(it wasn’t supposed to be)

Anyway, the in-universe confirmation that wow, this is all a bit much, are you sure any of this was a good idea? is greatly appreciated. Expected, on some level, but when the story starts going dark places, it’s easy to distrust the motivation. So I remain a mostly unhappy camper at this getaway, but canon taking a moment to pause and wonder why someone thought this was a good plan is nice.

I’m going to get lost in questions and character stuff very quickly, so for the sake of making sense of what is going on in The Plan, bullet points are my new friends.

Jaws and Cartman are were contained

Scouts are closing off the streets and killing enemy combatants

Civilian casualties are considered un-ideal--officially

Lamps are being positioned on high buildings

The plan is contingent on disabling the War Hammer Titan ‘in time’

Eren nomming the War Hammer is in his book as a Good End

Survival is emphasized over everything else

My guess is that no one wanted this (whatever it is) to turn into a Titan brawl. If everything had gone according to plan and stayed that way, Pieck and Galliard would be imprisoned, no Marlyean soldiers would be left alive within the internment zone, and the War Hammer and an impressive number of prominent government officials would be dead.

Currently, the Panzer Unit is live, Galliard’s running about, War Hammer is not contained, and the Beast Titan is here.

The Beast Titan would have appeared either way (like the lamps, which have me wondering if Armin is showing up), because no steps were taken to contain him. Both sides have been counting on the Beast Titan to be available in the coming something or other.

Zeke has been kept in the shadows as far as a lot of his feelings on things. He disdains war and copes by treating it as a game, and he loves his family. The inner workings of all of that isn’t readily available, making him a potential wildcard. Since Eren’s taken up baseball, the thought of something being up with him has been a topic of active discussion.

If things went as planned, the Survey Corps + Eren would have unfettered access to Zeke. Titan holder, primary instrument of the most vile Marley offenses, and someone with royal blood. Only two people alive can say that last one, and one of them is presumably still an ally to her military.

Confronting Zeke is a reasonable plan in most every category you could ask for. Wanting to face him in isolation makes perfect sense, and you can’t say that about many of the known quantities here. My questions are if what he knew what he would be walking into, if Eren wants something different from what the Scouts want out of him, and if Zeke’s commitment to Marley’s side is as plain as it looks.

Since the Yeager boys have been so hush hush about what they’re up to lately, I’m not very interested in speculating (Zeke’s face has Isayama lines, but to be fair, a lot of people just died, and he does dislike war), but I am looking forward to the answers.

...Well, I say that. However

If nothing comes of Galliard trusting Zeke’s presence to be a good thing while his frame emphasizes light next to Pieck’s silent shadow... I will be disappointed. If anyone’s keeping score, Eren’s frame is more of a midtone shadow. I believe Pieck’s is darker, but that could be an optical illusion since her frame is descending into darker tones, and Eren’s lighting is evenly dispersed within his frame.

And since there’s only three panels left on the page, the other people having flashlights on their faces are Magath and his surviving troops and Gabi.

Symbolism.

Or not, but I’d like it to be.

Let’s move on to angry children, also known as Gabi and Floch. With Gabi first because oh hell, kid. Kid. Her friends are dead. People she saw every single day on her way to achieving her greatest pride are dead. There’s no rhyme or reason to it that she understands, or even maybe could understand, given what Marley’s done to her, she’s still alive, and she’s angry.

We’ve seen that anger in the exact person it’s aimed at. Hopefully Gabi learns a thing or two from it, preferably without getting killed in the process. Her cousin’s still MIA (Reiner is either having a horrific mental breakdown, going to go full Warrior mode and make everyone’s awkward planning more awkward by exploding out of the ground, or unconscious, and all of these choices make me feel really bad for Falco--who is a character who can still have a worst day of his life instead of stopping to debate which one was truly worst), and...

Gabi may have no problem committing war crimes to win a fight, but she’s a child who wants to be a Warrior so she can help her cousin. She’s not innocent in the usual sense that children are, but she is a child, and she has a very soft heart.

Sasha spares her life, but Gabi’s living a nightmare, and the devils of Paradis brought it to her.

-rewards Sasha a “You Tried” star-

Our other angry child should know better, but even though it hasn’t been explicitly stated, it’s basically been established that therapy does not exist in this world. Floch is where he was four years ago. He’s upset at the injustices he’s suffered, and willing to lash out at anything connected to what’s responsible.

Jean’s best feature as a leader has always been understanding people’s weakness. But I think with Floch, he’s found something of a barrier to communication. We’ve seen Jean try to talk to him before, and if their interaction here is anything to go by, he hasn’t stopped. Except as much as Jean knows about personal weakness, hate isn’t something I think he gets.

Arguably, it’s because he knows so much about personal weakness that his feelings don’t fester into something dangerous (Connie has a similar moment when he says he understands why someone would kill Sawney and Bean).

Jean sees the big picture. He knows there are more victims than just them here.

Floch sees his personal pain, and bleeds all over everyone. He’s destroying a zone full of people who have been more warped and abused than he has any empathy for, and feels he’s in the right because look at what they’ve done to us.

And look at what their side has done to someone like Gabi.

I don’t think the two situations are the same, thanks to Marley’s copious awfulness getting into every potential interaction both sides of Eldians can have, but the emotional response is easy to see:

These people did a horrible thing.

They should be punished.

Only the root cause of everything goes so much deeper than all of that, and it’s not something that can be fixed by lopping off flowers. Gabi is like. twelve, and her emotional trauma just happened. Floch is like. twelve, and he was getting by just fine before the mess he survived four years ago.

And it is painfully obvious how much that specific event has trained Floch’s thinking. He wants Erwin to survive the Serum Bowl because Erwin is the devil humanity needs to break them free of their cage.

He’s grown up since then. Humanity doesn’t need Erwin to be their devil. Humanity just needs a devil.

Look. Eren?

Floch_is_agreeing_with_things_you_did.

Mikasa is not.

Regardless of what this plan is, you have made your mistakes and they are many, and the first statement does keep in mind that those mistakes might very well be the whole point but come on.

This chapter is hard to read, and I really wanted to open this post saying thank you for Mikasa Ackerman’s existence, because I don’t think I have ever been more grateful to see her.

I haven’t bothered obfuscating how much I loathe Marley. I think their conduct is evil, and the world would be better off if they got wiped off the map. All those angry child feels from above are actively present when I consider what they’ve done with their nation.

One of the recurring... is it a theme? It feels like a theme, but it’s also sort of just a random thing I’m pointing out, and the language I want to use implies things about the story that I’m not sure is really an objective. In any case, something we see over and over again in this series is that monsters are human.

Gabi watches a whole squad of soldiers get demolished. Among them is a man who watches the gate she passes in order to train to be a Warrior. He treats her as a child more than an Eldian, and knows enough about each individual Warrior candidate ask about their progress and laugh about Falco’s crush.

He’s a human being.

The children he’s being friendly with have been coerced into indentured servitude and live in internment camps that are under constant watch, where leaving is punishable by--well, people like him. He’s a cog in an abhorrent machine. One small piece that helps keep it running.

Humans do evil things. You could probably have a lot of fun arguing that a human’s capacity for evil is part of what makes them human. Evil monsters aren’t always creatures beyond understanding or sympathy. Sometimes they’re just people who take the easy path that someone else burned down a forest to make.

You could also argue that part of what makes a human human is their capacity for goodness in the midst of evil. The guard spends the last moments of his life trying to keep a little girl safe.

I don’t like Marley, but I like seeing the sparks of decency in people start a flame. You want to believe that if people can be good to each other even when they’re covered in muck and sin, that goodness deserves a chance to make it out alive and flourish. You want to think that if everyone could just be convinced to be their best self, the world would be okay.

A lot of sparks are snuffed out during this attack.

Marley getting wiped off the map without devastation and heartbreak is a nice pipe dream, and I might still daydream about it or hand-wave things in fics, but regardless of my personal angry child feelings, there’s too much death here to feel good about any of this.

So I really, really appreciate that Mikasa Ackerman exists. She’s here for Eren, and she’s actively participating in this operation, but you can see her heart breaking at what’s been done. People are dead. Civilian people. Children. This is something that’s happened, and there’s no fixing it. There’s only pain at the result.

Mikasa is the stoic badass. But all she’s ever wanted is for her family to be at home with her. However she counts them, they’re what’s nearest and dearest to her heart. She has extraordinary combat skills, and if she could go the rest of her life without needing them, she would be happier.

Someone suggested that one of the Scouts present could be the little girl that Mikasa saves in Trost. I have no idea if that will pan out or not, but I love the idea.

The anime’s handling of Mikasa deciding to live during Trost is what hooked me in this series, but the moment with that little girl is one of my favorites for her. She charges in, kills a titan, threatens a dude, and leaves. Perfect hero is perfect even with only that, but the little girl and her mother, instead of running to evacuate now that they can, stop and thank her. And Mikasa turns back and salutes them.

Their salute in this world is meant to represent offering up their hearts to humanity. Mikasa has select few people she loves beyond all else, but whenever she steps in to fight, she does so wanting people to be safe. She feels her responsibility towards her comrades more keenly and openly than many of the characters we’re familiar with.

Mikasa’s line about the world being cruel, yet beautiful, is one of the more memorable ones in the series. As a theme, it’s marvelous, but as something that comes out of a character’s head, it’s... very gentle and touching. The world is cruel, but while it’s being cruel, there’s still warmth. Even from people who are now gone.

Mikasa is a kind person who gives small children her time and nearly cries at her friend’s joy when he finally gets to play in the ocean. She’s known terrible cruelty at the world’s hands, but she also loves the world’s beauty. It isn’t an empty acknowledgment. She sees it, and she feels it, and she fights for it.

What Eren just did is... abominable. She loves him, but... hell, every beautiful panel of Mikasa and Eren before the War Hammer gets back up is a testament to how much pain he’s caused, and how much heartbreak is involved.

Mikasa is compassionate, and this arc... really needs that.

Even if now I’m wondering if “Too Little, Too Late,” is referring to her instead of one of the larger sides. That title really works for anything you want to stick it to, since the phrase is basically shorthand for “everything’s fucked.”

This series has gotten painful in ways I didn’t exactly need it to.

Monthly serials hurt.

#Shingeki no Kyojin #SnK 102 #Mikasa Ackerman #shingeki no spoilers #SnK spoilers #spoilers #tl;dr #chapter post

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/how-republican-senators-account-for-the-trump-presidency-the-new-yorker/

How Republican Senators Account for the Trump Presidency - The New Yorker

If you’re interested in how Republican politicians are talking about Donald Trump in the end phase of his first term and perhaps his Presidency, one good place to look is to the campaigns of the ten Republican senators who are least likely to be reëlected—most of whom represent states that the President won comfortably four years ago. Judging from current polling in those politicians’ races, the Democrats may well gain control of the Senate: they need to pick up only two or three of the vulnerable Republican seats, in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina, Iowa, Montana, Alaska, and Georgia (where two Republican seats are being tightly contested). In the past week, I watched eight of those senators’ debates, which had a throwback tinge to them: the television graphics were boxy and dated, the questions excellent, and the candidates nimbler than you might expect. Politicians are charming people who have been operating under a spell of charmlessness for a decade, roughly since Mitch McConnell made it obvious that he was on a mission to thwart the Obama Administration and a mood of wartime enmity suffused the capital. But the more consequential anachronism of those Senate debates came from the Republican senators themselves, who generally acted as if Donald Trump were not the President and his policies were not the bedrocks of their party—as if, once he leaves office, the dials could be turned back to their 2011 settings and the decade could begin again.

The 2020 drumbeat, for Republicans, has been to warn of an ascendent socialism. “You put Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden in charge of Washington, you’ll see a federal takeover of the health-care system,” Steve Daines, of Montana, said, in a recent debate against his Democratic opponent, Governor Steve Bullock. But you don’t hear much about immigration, or trade, or any of the other issues that have defined Trump’s Presidency. The longer I watched the Senate debates, the more I found myself rewinding the footage to scan through the Republican candidates’ responses. Surely they’d mentioned the President, and somehow I’d missed it? But often they just hadn’t. In late September, Joni Ernst, the Republican senator from Iowa, made it through an hour-long debate with her Democratic challenger, a real-estate executive named Theresa Greenfield, without mentioning Trump by name. When asked directly about the Times revelations that the President, while living a billionaire’s life, had paid just seven hundred and fifty dollars to the federal government in annual income taxes, Ernst redirected. “Many years ago, I echoed the call for the President to release his tax returns,” she said. “But, bottom line, we would love to see lower taxes for everybody, including all of our hardworking Americans.”

I was watching on YouTube, and in the comments alongside the debate I could see the essentially erratic character of 2020 politics unfolding: viewers were talking about Hunter Biden or “Putin’s puppet” (Hillary Clinton’s most lasting epithet for the President), or exclaiming “TRUMP TRAIN!” On Twitter the Ernst-Greenfield debate didn’t register, which has fit the pattern; the Senate debates have been noticed only when someone declared them a rout. But what I saw in the sedate PBS studio where the Ernst-Greenfield debate was held, with Iowa’s veteran political columnist David Yepsen at the helm, was two capable candidates calmly advancing the basic positions of their parties: taxes should be higher, or lower; billionaires should get a smaller share of the spoils, or about the same amount; the Supreme Court was bound to dissolve Roe v. Wade, or it wasn’t. No one owned anyone. Beneath the madness of Presidential politics, the parties were moving at their usual rate, that of tectonic plates, and the only reasonable posture was to sit at your listening station like a geologist, headphones securely over your ears, waiting for the infinitesimal movement of a needle.

Now and then, there was some movement. I’d been particularly interested to watch John Cornyn, the three-term senator from Texas. A sixty-eight-year-old former judge with a long face and a formal manner, Cornyn is Mitch McConnell’s No. 2 and arguably the closest thing the Republican Party has to a tectonic plate. He had seemed to luck out when Beto O’Rourke declined to challenge him, leaving him with a little-known opponent, a former military-helicopter pilot named M. J. Hegar. But Hegar turned out to be effective. When, in an October 9th debate, Cornyn accused Hegar of “tacitly” endorsing police defunding, she spat out, “I never do anything tacitly—I’m not a tacit person,” and then kept muttering about it under her breath. She’s charming! Cornyn can be charming, too, in a courtly way, but he couldn’t quite get around to it because of all the time he had to spend furrowing his brow and reassuring Texans that things were not quite as bad as they appeared.

Midway through the debate, Cornyn got a simple, telling question from the moderator, the excellent Gromer Jeffers, of the Dallas Morning News: Could he name a single way in which he had positively affected the lives of ordinary Texans, in his eighteen years in the Senate? Cornyn nodded his long face, and told a story about the aftermath of a mass shooting, in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017, when an Air Force veteran, who should have been prohibited from owning firearms because of a domestic-violence-related bad-conduct discharge, entered a church and killed twenty-six people. Cornyn said, “It occurred because someone who should never have been able to get their hands on a firearm, a convicted felon, was able to bypass the background-check system because the Air Force had not uploaded those names.” Cornyn recounted that, four days after the shooting, he introduced a bill that passed with bipartisan majorities, which closed a loophole in gun background checks. Cornyn said that “the Attorney General has now made the point in just six months; six million more people’s names are on the background-check system” to keep arms out of the hands of “dangerous criminals.” A bell rang, signalling that Cornyn’s time had expired; it had the feeling of a record scratch. Wait, what? One of the half-dozen most powerful Republicans in the country, a staunch ally of the National Rifle Association, was being asked to describe how he had improved the lives of ordinary people in the most powerful conservative state in the country, and his best case was that he had strengthened background checks? What had he been doing all this time? Maybe that was the trouble. The Senate’s agenda, focussed on mollifying Trump and confirming judges and cutting taxes for the highest earners, didn’t offer much to, as Jeffers had put it, “ordinary Texans.”

For five years, Republicans have been wearily answering (or, more often, dodging) the question of whether they support President Trump. But in this election they are being asked a deeper question, too, about what they have actually delivered during this decade of steady conservative ascendance. Across the debates, I could hear the backbeat of “Montana values” and “Arizona values” and the regular cymbal crash of “conservative judges,” but there was no melody. After watching Cornyn and Hegar’s debate, I clicked over to a recent Cornyn ad on YouTube. It features a middle-aged schoolteacher, with blond hair and caring eyes, passing out papers to students while praising the senator for having helped to deliver federal funds to public schools so that they could reopen safely. Cornyn then appears, nodding thoughtfully, with a mask emblazoned with the Texas state flag covering the lower half of his face. Texas is changing, in ways that Cornyn is wise to genuflect toward, and this election has the look of a blue wave. But, at the end of four years of largely unchecked conservative political power, Cornyn has neither a Trumpian case to make for his own reëlection nor a more traditional conservative one. The background checks, the money for schools—he was simply arguing for the reliability of a longtime incumbent.

The most touted contest right now, and among the best-funded, is taking place in South Carolina, where the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is in a close race with Jaime Harrison, the forty-four-year-old associate chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In the last quarter, Harrison raised fifty-seven million dollars, mostly from liberals outside the state; with Kelly and Sara Gideon, in Maine, he is one of three Democratic candidates this cycle to raise more money in a quarter than anyone running for the Senate ever had before. Like Graham, Harrison is an obviously talented politician—he is especially good at concisely telling the stories of ordinary South Carolinians, some from his own family, and using them to point out how little Republican representatives have done to help them. But the candidates’ lone debate, on October 3rd, was most interesting because Graham, unlike most other members of his party, did not run from the President. “I think President Trump has done a good job. He rebuilt our military, he’s cut our taxes, he’s getting trade deals, he’s securing our border,” Graham said, and then tacked on the Party line. “This race is about capitalism versus socialism, conservative judges versus liberal judges, law and order versus chaos.”

The trouble for Graham was that Harrison kept also making the debate about South Carolina, and about how little Republicans had done to help alleviate suffering there, from the disastrous response to the coronavirus to the ideological refusal to accept the Obama Administration’s offer to expand Medicaid in the state. Graham countered by insisting that he knew suffering: his relatives, he kept emphasizing, worked in the textile mills. “I get it. We’re all one car wreck away from needing help,” Graham said. Many Republican incumbents have expressed worry about lockdowns suppressing the economy; Graham mentioned other side effects of the pandemic, too: “Alcoholism is up. Domestic violence.” He did not win the debate, but he also sounded like he wasn’t pretending.

Graham is in many ways a signal figure of the Republican Party, because, rather than represent a single faction, he has, at different times, represented all of them. From shortly after his election to the Senate, in 2002, he was mainly known as John McCain’s plainspoken sidekick, and joined McCain as part of the Gang of Eight pushing for immigration reform in 2012, telling his party’s Convention that year that “we’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” But, after Trump’s election, Graham became a prominent backer of the President’s agenda, a transformation that culminated in a fiery partisan display during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. As Jess Bidgood put it recently in a sharp profile of Graham in the Boston Globe, “the story of Graham’s vulnerability in a state he has represented in Congress since 1995 begins not with the left but with his persistent problems on the right—which he attempted to tamp down once and for all through his alliance with Trump.”

Even if you could somehow exclude Trump, and the complications of making alliances with him, the Party’s future no longer looks much like its past. Those Republicans who seem most likely to run for President in 2024—among them Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio—have all oriented themselves to a party that is now dominated by white voters without college degrees, and by what Hawley has described as anti-cosmopolitanism. If one of these politicians does end up leading the Party, then it will have something to do with how establishment conservatives used their power during the Trump era: to impose tax cuts that exacerbated inequality and weakened the economy, and to undermine a health-care policy that Americans increasingly support and rely on. That has left the Republicans—even the Party’s central politicians—without much to brag about after years in charge. Once again, Gromer Jeffers, the journalist who moderated the Texas debate, saw it clearly. He put up a graphic from a recent poll of the state in which a strikingly large proportion of respondents had no opinion about Cornyn whatsoever. Jeffers asked the senator, “Why is it that nearly a quarter of Texans don’t know your name?”

Read More About the 2020 Election

#account #presidency #republican #senators #trump #Politics

[drunkoctopusinc]

Saw this on Instagram and not gonna lie- it kinda bugged me. Some of these points are accurate, some I disagree with but I see the argument for, others are out and out wrong. Usually the inaccuracies are due to purpously inflammatory phrasing, which is understandable since its a meme but the issues are to important for the language to stand fully uncriticed. Basically, I know it’s just a meme but I wanna pick it apart since this stuff is important and quite frankly I’m a little bored.

“Total support for Isreal”

This is true of the official platforms for each party. That being said I think it’s important to note you will find Democratic candidates and office holders with more moderated views on Isreal and (increasingly so) candidates who strongly support Palestine. There is no such moderation or diversity of opinion on the Republican side. If you want to cast your vote for someone who doesn’t support Isreal you might find that in a Democrat especially in the House of Reps, so be sure to look up your local candidates because they might surprise you on this one.

“Do Wall Streets bidding”

Wall Street is basically begging for Dodd-Frank to be repealed, and no Democrat is gonna do that. A Democratic administration created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and since 2010 there have been 3 separate bills introduced by Democrats to improve/reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. (The most recent was a bi-patrician bill sponsored by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), John McCain (R-AZ), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Angus King (I-ME)) I understand how a lack of success can make it feel like Democrats are just doing Wall Street’s bidding, but that’s not the case. There are certainly differences in the level of regulation Democrats are asking for, but the broad strokes is Democrats want regulations put on Wall Street, while Republicans believe Wall Street can be trusted to do whatever they want.

“Unlimited Military Spending”

Much to my chagrin, this is true. Regardless of party affiliation it’s good for any elected official to say they brought jobs to the district, and more fighter jets mean more jobs building fighter jets. No one wants to rock that boat.

“Hostility to Russia, Iran, & China”

This one has multiple parts with varing degrees of debatablity. For Russia the Obama Administration tried to soften relations but Putin basically responded “No thanks Toots” and proceeded to violated Ukraine’s sovrienty, back a dictator using chemical weapons on his own people, and meddle in our elections. Basically the Dems tried but it’s a two way street and Russia’s gotta be on board too. Meanwhile Trump and the Republicans seem to be fine with Russia paying militants to kill Americans and undermining democratic norms in the 2016 US elections as well as a bunch of other European elections so seems like they want to get along with Russia whatever it fucking takes. So I’d say there’s a pretty big difference on that one.

Regarding Iran, there’s not much difference between Democrats and Republicans. Both are skeptical about Iran and don’t want to risk the alliances we have with other middle eastern nations in order to tighten bonds with Iran. HOWEVER, the Iran Nuclear Treaty was a huge step forward in calming tensions which damn near every democrat supported. And the Republicans basically yeeted it into the sun for no good reason. So at least democrats don’t want to make shit worse with Iran. As for China 100% hositlites would have remained the same with a Dem and probably most Republicans. But at the moment Republicans support an active trade war with China which is only making our relations with them worse. So for both Iran and China the Dems gotta get at least some points for not wanting to make shit worse.

“Full Spectrum Dominance.”

Yes. Both parties want the US to a strong political and economic force on the world stage without any major foreign threats. (TBH I struggle to see the problem with this because that dominance could be used to give every nation wi-fi and tasty cookies just easily as to perpetuate rampant injustice especially when its so vauge as to what they mean by Full Spectrum Dominance. But I don’t have nothing against you if you don’t want the US to persue dominance as goal.)

“Let Money Rule politics”

Campaign finance reform is a complicated issue because there isn’t 1 clear answer for how to do it. Campaigning costs a lot of money and candidates have to get that money somehow, unfortunately there isn’t really an answer for how it needs to be done that can’t in some way be attacked for not going far enough or not solving the real problem. So while Democrats generally try to find solutions and create reform, it is perfectly understandable and reasonable to feel they aren’t actually solving anything. However I think it’s important note (given how important this years election is) that Joe Biden has been very consistent on voting for campaign finance reform for the past 40 years, even going so far as to create a system of public funding for congressional elections in the early 90s. So if this is a high priority issue for you Joe Biden has a strong record on it.

“Neoliberalism Rocks!”

I’ve found online the term “neoliberalism” is used to describe such a wide range of policies it’s becoming less and less clear exactly what a person means by saying “neoliberalism.” So how accurate this claim is really depends on how you define “neoliberal.” That caveats aside, traditionally both parties have their neoliberal cohorts, and they do wield a far bit of power since they usually are the “deal makers” who talk more with the other side and create the compromises which get broad enough support to pass. However, the Republican Party has been drifting away from neoliberal policies for some time and has been completely sprinting away from them since trump was elected. For example here are some policies self described neoliberals love which recent republicans have taken a massive shit on; Free Trade, easier immigration, and a carbon tax. Neoliberals are inherently in the middle so yes both parties have neoliberal segments (Bill Clinton, Bush Senior for example) but Republicans are rapidly running further and further right, so if not already accurate to say “Neoliberals universally identify as democrats” it will be soon.

“Spy on Everyone!”

This is a bit hyperbolic but yeah mostly. While there are officals on both sides who want to stop or at least curb the survalince state when talking about the respective parties as a whole there aren’t big differences on changing this, at least not public ones.

“Screw the Old and the Poor!”

This one is just so wildly overstated as to be impossible to really discuss/debate effectively. I could say this is false because both parties agree we should strive to eleminate poverty but they differ on how. I could also say this is true because neither party has proposed a solution which would actually help end poverty, or I could say this is false because the Democratic platform includes issues like raising the minimum wage and expanding the social safety net which will help the poorest Americans. There’s no way to really analyze for accuracy because its so broad and emotional that it’s really more of an opinion statement than anything. (To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with such a statement. In many ways they are critical to the nations broader political discussion. it just doesn’t lend itself to what I’m looking to do with this post and I felt it would have been dismissive to just say “it’s an emotional argument so I don’t care”) The only substantive thing I can say here which still fits into my general structure is no candidate wants to do anything against old people because old people vote in big numbers. It’s the reason despite talk of cutting medicare and social security Republicans haven’t actually tried anything substantial on those issues.

“Oligarchy not democracy”

This is another one that gets caught up in definition. If you use the strictest definition of democracy and a broad definiton of Oligarchy then yes this is right but otherwise it really depends on how you define oligarchy. The majority of Americans have the right to vote, thus they have a say in what our government does. This would generally meet the most common definition of democracy and neither party wants to change that (at least not officially.) there is no bi partisan call for the wealthiest 1% or even the wealthiest 10% of Americans to have exclusive control over our governance. Of course that’s the most inflammatory version of this statement, and I doubt that’s what the person who wrote it was saying. The more likely definition of oligarchy this person was using is a government where an elite class hold a disproportionate share of political power rather all political power. In which case it’s very very hard to agrue the US isn’t an oligarchy. I mean even if we put aside the more heavily debated question of how strongly political power and money are, I think everyone would agree my senator has more political power than I do. Plus, the founders didn’t want “mob rule” they were terrified of a populist leader rising up, so they didn’t create a pure democracy. Instead they made republic, which one could argue is simultaneously an oligarchy and a democracy. This means when anyone looks to maintain the current american system even in the broadest strokes it could be agrued they’re supporting oligarchy over democracy. However you could just as easily argue they’re supporting democracy. The line between oligarchy and democracy aren’t as clear as we’d like them to be. (And of course when you bring the “how strongly are political power and money connected” debate back into the picture it only gets more obscured). Now, to finally get to my point, the degree to which the US is an oligarchy is unclear and so is the degree to which each party supports maintaining the oligarchical elements. However I think saying that either party doesn’t support democracy is inaccurate. BUT I also think it is vital that we recognize under Trump the Republican Party has tolerated repeated undermining of our democratic system risking serious and dangerous backsliding into totalitarianism. The Democratic Party has not engaged in this backsliding at all and has fought against it as much as they can, and you absolutely must understand that as you vote this fall.

“Vive US imperialism!”

Yeah this is pretty much spot on. I mean I don’t think either political party is looking to conquer Cuba or to steal Baja California from Mexico but yeah the bulk of people in each party are at the very least not invested in reducing what has been called “Neo-imperialism” which is almost certainly what this statement is referring to, so while I could get this on the technically but that would be disingenuous.

“outlaw third parties”

Third parties are legal. No one wants to make them illegal, the constitution also wouldnt let them. The problem is our voting system makes third parties mathematically unstrategic. You could argue they are functionally unallowed and there’s no insensitive for either party to change that so the idea here isn’t to far off, but outlawing third parties is such a bold claim, and that mathy disadvantage is drastically reduced in local races. So if you support a third party or want to create a third party, go for it. Just know that your efforts will be best spent starting local.

“Crush the left”

Pretty sure “the left” here means self described socialists and further left in which case yes. the establishment of both parties are still scared by the s-word and even worse the c-word because no one wants to be the USSR. But there are loads of people who would define the left as the democrats and the Democratic Party doesn’t want to crush Democratic Party. (It doesn’t mean to be a self destructive idiot but sometimes it just can’t help itself) so again I know what they’re going for here but little astrisk for other people might not.

“Regime change is cool.”

If regime change was something both parties liked there would be US troops in Venezuela right now. The oldest Democrats might not be out and out against all regime change but no democrat (and plenty of Republicans quiet frankly) want to repeat the Iraq War. When it comes to regime change worse case something democrats and republicans disagree on and best case something they both agree is bad.

TL;DR- there are key differences between the political parties, regardless of what a meme might say. It’s not the 90s anymore so those differences are pretty big and only getting bigger. To each there own on who and what they support, so do your research and learn which party and which candidates best represents your values.

PS- if it’s Donald Trump go jump of a bridge.

#2020 election #joe biden #donald trump #democrats #republicans #discourse #im kinda just venting here about the sloppy Rhetoric the internet praises #like i know theres no reason to expect nuanced debate #but it bums me out we dont actually understand the other side of any agrument because we only see there self-congratulatory memes #nothing wrong with memes #just they arent a subsitute for actual discussion #anyway this is just me over thinking stuff

[uomo-accattivante]

SCREENPLAY REVIEW - ANNIHILATION

This is a very old review (from 2015) of Alex Garland’s Version 10 screenplay I came across on the site below. (SPOILERS BELOW)

*** Extracted from website link below:

Screenplay Review – Annihilation

Genre: Sci-fi Thriller

Premise: A young biologist is recruited on a mission into a mysterious energy field that threatens to destroy the planet.

About: Writer Alex Garland has blessed us with some of the best sci-fi of the last 10 years. He wrote Ex Machina, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd, and even adapted mega-project, Halo, before the 67 lawyers and producers representing the 13 companies involved in the film blew the thing up. In short, if you have a sci-fi project, Alex Garland is one of the first guys you call. This time, just like he did on Ex Machina, he’s writing AND directing. Annihilation was adapted from the novel of the same name. It is being referred to as the first book in the “Southern Reach” trilogy, which means nothing to me at the moment, but will hopefully make sense at the end of the review. It will star Natalie Portman.

Writer: Alex Garland – Jeff VanderMeer

Details: 126 pages (version “10” according to the title page, whatever that means)

Longtime screenwriter Alex Garland stormed onto the directing scene early this year, writing and directing one of the best indie films of 2015, Ex Machina. How did he parlay his writing into such a deftly directed first film? By, um, not giving a shit about directing apparently! Garland’s gone on record as saying he doesn’t like directing nor does he care about it. To him, it’s all about the writing. Spoken like a true screenwriter.

With that said, you have to wonder why someone who isn’t into directing has agreed to direct another movie so quickly, and a big one at that. My guess is that the salary bump from writer to director is enough to make even the most reluctant writer reevaluate. And hey, spending three months in close-quarters with five beautiful woman doesn’t sound like such a bad gig.

Biologist Lena Kerans, who specializes in cancer research, is struggling through the most difficult time of her life. Her soldier husband went missing in battle over a year ago, and Lena hasn’t been able to move on.

Then, one day, inexplicably, her husband (Kane) returns home. Kane has no memory of how he got here and no memory of where he’s been. When Lena rushes him to the hospital, a government motorcade intercepts them, and the next thing Lena knows, she’s waking up in a military base.

Eventually, she meets Dr. Ventress, who informs Lena that they’re off the coast of Florida where a large growing anomaly is taking over the area. Within a few years, it will extend down into Mexico. Within a decade, it will usurp the entire planet. Great, Lena says. Now where the fuck is my husband?

Ventress explains that her husband is being kept on life support, and with the anomaly approaching, they’ll have to desert the base soon. If that happens, they will have to leave Kane, as he’s in too fragile a state to be transferred.

It just so happens that Ventress is going on one last mission with a group of three woman into the anomaly to see if they can figure it out. We gradually learn that Kane was on one of the former missions inside the anomaly and that he’s one of only two men who made it out alive.

Naturally, since her husband’s life is on the line, Lena demands to be a part of the mission. And she makes a good case for herself. She’s a biologist, and this growing anomaly is basically a cancer. Maybe she can help.

Ventress agrees, and the team of five women head inside. Once in, they notice that everything is both the same yet different. The animals (gators!) are twice as big. The plants are twice as exotic. And time doesn’t seem to exist wherever they’re at. But when they come across video of Kane’s old team, they begin to realize just how dangerous this anomaly is, and that just like everyone else who’s ventured into this bubble, they’re probably not making it out alive.

“Annihilation” asks a pretty interesting question. What if the earth got cancer? What if a mutation started to spread and expand to the point where the earth itself died? That’s a great sci-fi question. But it also teeters on the edge of “3 A.M.” idea territory. You can almost smell the pot wafting through the outline’s pores.

Indeed, I can hear the echoes of someone nicknamed “Lugnuts” ingesting an epic bong hit and wondering aloud, “And what if, like, all the animals were, like, TWICE AS BIG,” to which he receives a smattering of delayed approvals, peppered with the occasional pot-cough-slash-laugh. Surely, a pizza will be ordered soon, charged to whichever member of the group is getting his entire tuition paid for by daddy.

Okay, that may be a cheap shot. But Annihilation does suffer from a case of the over-idea. It’s the price you pay when you go from something contained and clear, like Ex Machina, to something sprawling and ambitious, like this. You gain scope and complexity. But you’re forced to juggle more balls. Which means a better chance of those balls falling.

But I’m not here to judge (okay, maybe a little). I’m here to observe. And one of the first things I observed was the concept of “mystery replacement.” When you write a script like Annihilation, where the first act is centered around a mystery (a growing field that people go into and never come out of), you’ve set yourself up for a front-loaded movie. That is, once you show the audience what’s inside the bubble, they’ve got nothing left to look forward to besides the next bong hit.

Because the entire first act is predicated on the mystery of this unexplainable phenomenon, Annihilation is a prime candidate for front-loaded status. Luckily, there’s a solution to this. Every time you answer a giant mystery in your script, you replace it with either another giant mystery, or a series of smaller mysteries. VanderMeer and Garland do a good job with this. Once we’re inside the phenomenon, new questions start arriving. Giant animals. Grotesquely altered humans. What happened to Lena’s husband’s team?

I also want to commend Garland on the structure, which is one of the first things beginner screenwriters must learn before they can make the move to the more complex aspects of storytelling, like character development and theme. So instead of sending our characters into this big anomaly blob and “seeing what happens,” (a common mistake I see a lot), Garland immediately establishes a goal. Get to the lighthouse. The lighthouse is where the anomaly began, so by that logic, that’s where the answers will be.

This may sound like a minor thing, but it’s actually really important. Having a physical destination gives us form and focus. We know where the story needs to go, so we can give in to all the craziness that happens along the way. Had we shown up here and the characters said, “Uh, okay, let’s look around,” we the reader are going to get frustrated quickly. “What’s the point?” we’re going to ask. “Where is this going??”

An overarching goal is a great start. But sub-goals are what really give a script structure. In Annihilation, the characters know they can’t get to the lighthouse in one day, so they create a series of checkpoints they’ll try to make it to each day. Again, this may seem insignificant to the casual screenwriter. But what this is doing is dividing the screenplay into easy-to-follow bite-sized chunks. We know we’re trying to get to A. Let’s see if we can get there without getting killed. Next morning, we have to get to B. Okay, let’s see if we can do that. Then C, and finally D. And, of course, if you’re doing your job, each leg will be more challenging.

Think of these mini-goals as pillars. If you were to place a pillar under the left side, or beginning, of the screenplay, and then place a pillar under the right side, or ending, of the screenplay. What’s going to happen to the middle? It’s going to sag right? So you have to place a series of pillars along the middle section of the script. That’ll keep it from drooping, or worse, falling down completely.

And if structure were all this script were being judged on, I’d give it a good grade. But I also have to judge it on its ideas, which are interesting in some places but muddled in others. The “What if earth got cancer” question is fun. But I’m not sure I understood why plants and humans and animals were meshing into single forms. And why sometimes that meant weird hybrid entities, and while other times it meant dolphins as big as whales. There was an inconsistency there that became frustrating after awhile.

And something smelled fishy about this team being all-female. The explanation we get is that men could potentially be more violent inside the vortex and therefore less likely to survive. The problem with that explanation is that over 500 people have gone into this thing, and only two have gotten out. They were both men. This tells me the all-female team is more a result of that being the hot new thing in books than it is a logical decision. And hey, if you want to go all-female or all-male or even all-horse, that’s fine. But it’s your job as a writer to come up with a legtimate reason for why that’s happening. If you don’t, the suspension of disbelief is broken (note: Suspension of disbelief is broken every time an audience veers out of the movie to ask a logic question: “Wait a minute? Why are they all women? That doesn’t make sense.”)

It’s the same issue I have with the Ghostbusters thing. What’s the reason to go all-female other than that’s the trend? There isn’t a story reason behind it. And if you’re deliberately excluding men from the story, isn’t that just as bad as deliberately excluding women from a story?

But I’m getting off-track here. Must have been that five minutes I spent watching Trump debate earlier. The main point is that Annihilation starts out with an interesting idea, and keeps its story moving swiftly, but once the answers start coming, they do so in unsatisfying muddled ways. With that said, I’m curious what Garland’s first large-scale directing effort will look like. The cinematography as well as the robot concept in Ex Machina were gorgeous, which is reason to stay optimistic.

*** @losethehours @coolfayebunny @charliexowrite

#oscar isaac #kane #annihilation #alex garland #spoilers #southern reach trilogy #natalie portman #lena kerans #gina rodriguez #tessa thompson #jennifer jason leigh

[stagedelight]

Ooh, could you talk about some of that coaching? I see all sorts of posts about inaccuracies in how something or other did some non-green character, but I've never read anything from the other side!

Absolutely!

This is actually a more complicated topic than you may have realized – so actor followers, go easy in the notes, I’m just giving a layman’s summary here, they don’t want the whole Discourse. ;)

The problem is that, on the one hand, if you walk up to a purple on the street and say “hey, show me how you sit when you’re nervous,” they won’t have the first clue how it is that they sit when they’re nervous, let alone how to teach it to someone. On the other hand, though, having an orange teach a green how to act like a purple is obviously a bit silly.

For that reason, there’s some (ha) debate over what’s the best way to teach actors how to play different castes. I’m not going to try to outline all the different points of view, let alone explain and defend mine; instead, I’m going to give you what you’re actually asking for, by describing how it is in fact usually taught.

The majority of the instruction is based on videos, because while it wouldn’t be that expensive to hire (say) a yellow to come to your school to serve as a sort of life model, that would be out-of-caste income for them, which makes it hard to arrange as a regular thing; not to mention that people tend to have a very different demeanor when they’re that self-conscious and aware of being watched. (And, of course, hiring a blue to do the same would get quite expensive!)

So, instead of having live models, we have videos of real people from various castes. (These are candid videos, whenever possible, where the person wasn’t aware they were being filmed, or at least not paying much attention to it; recordings from security cameras, for instance, or quality control cameras on assembly lines.)

A typical lesson in caste-acting might be on how different castes react to sudden and unexpected bad news. The video clips could include an excerpt from a policeman’s body camera, in which she informs a gray couple that their child was killed in action; a recording from a hospital security camera of an orange learning that a patient has died; a blue being informed of a natural disaster on live television; a yellow being arrested for fraud; a green being told they’re terminally ill; and a purple being fired. (In practice there’d likely be more than one clip per caste, especially for a topic which crops up as often in drama as this one.)

In addition to the candid recordings, there’d be excerpts from various media in which greens portray people of various castes reacting to bad news. These would be chosen to showcase a spread of depictions: some good, some bad, some deliberately exaggerated, some with one particular flaw, and so forth.

In the first part of the class, the students watch the candid recordings, and the teacher guides them in pinpointing the inter- and intracaste differences and similarities. For instance, he might draw their attention to how oranges tend to look to nearby people to see their reactions before reacting at all themselves. He might also point out that, after the first moment, oranges and grays have certain responses in common, and encourage the class to think about why that might be. (The answer is that oranges and grays have often attended the same emergency response classes, and many of them fall back on that training under stress.)

At this point, the class will if possible break from the discussion/lecture format for the students to do some acting! The teacher will work with them on applying their observations from the earlier discussion to portray characters of different castes more convincingly. (There are lots of games that get used here, for a bit of variety.) Students are encouraged to critique these depictions, with the teacher moderating heavily to keep the criticism constructive.

When the class returns to their seats, the teacher shows them the second set of recordings, and again there’s a discussion session with a heavy emphasis on compare-and-contrast. Errors versus deliberate inaccuracies often comes up as a topic, with the perennial question of what is acceptable artistic license and when is “artistic license” being used as an excuse or a crutch. (I can hear all the actors in the audience groaning – don’t worry, I’m not assigning a five-page paper!) A good teacher will also bring up theatrical conventions from different places and times, and encourage the class to reflect on those and on today’s. Mostly, though, the students enjoy picking apart the performances of professional actors for flaws and stereotypes and unrealistic portrayals.

Finally, the teacher will assign homework, which might involve any combination of: refining their performance from earlier based on the discussion in the second half of the class; observing people of different castes, when that’s practical given the topic (not so much for this example); and the standard “write an essay comparing and contrasting” sort of assignment.

In addition to video-based classroom lessons like the ones described above, students studying caste behavior regularly go out on field trips – often at the end of a unit – on which they can observe different castes “in their native environment,” so to speak. This can mean going to the courthouse and watching judges at work, or visiting the fire station and seeing how firefighters respond to a call, or any number of other possibilities.

Whenever possible, the teacher arranges in advance for the students to have an opportunity towards the end of the trip to speak to, and ask questions of, the people they’re studying. Making good use of this sort of opportunity can make a surprisingly significant difference in what a student gets out of their education. There’s always students who ask silly questions, and students who try to show off by asking questions they know the answers to, and students who ask questions that aren’t particularly useful for acting, and students who are too shy to ask anything at all. But if you ask serious questions (“I notice you always place stacks of paper on your desk so that they’re angled slightly – why?”) you can get really interesting answers (“So that I’ll notice if someone has put something on my desk without telling me, because they’ll always put it parallel to the sides of the desk”). That sort of detail can be amazingly powerful in illuminating your portrayal of a character, giving them realism and depth.

You’ll notice, of course, that all this doesn’t cover reds at any point. Because in-depth study of reds and their mannerisms is less than child-appropriate (especially if it’s mandatory), it’s generally not covered in schools at all.

For many actors, this never becomes an issue; large portions of the dramatic tradition simply don’t allow for red characters appearing on stage. You can easily go your entire career without ever playing a red – and most people are just as happy to do so!

If you do choose to study the topic, there are adult workshops available, as there are for other areas of acting which aren’t considered child-appropriate (for instance, simulating sexual acts on stage). These do involve actual reds, at points, but the usual safety standards are observed; there’s a sheet of glass between them and you at all times. Some people still find it intensely unpleasant, but I think it was very much worth my while; I’d feel my education was incomplete if there were a caste I simply couldn’t portray with any kind of accuracy.

(There’s a persistently lingering rumor among children on the acting track that the red workshop involves some kind of initiation ritual in which you deliberately touch a red, so that you know what it’s like. This is patently false; the entire purpose of being an actor is to imitate things without having to actually do them. But, well – children. I’ll leave the corresponding rumors about the sex workshop to your imagination.)

#standard boilerplate: this is an in-character blog set in a fictional universe; it is filled with lies #amenta rp

[evelyntransitions-blog]

Day 39 recovering from crap

It’s been a while since i’ve posted here, mostly from depression and because a lot of lame shit happened we’ll start from the top. -Fuckin’ Kekistan ball won the battle of the balls. Mostly because the admins used a bunch of bots. Then kept making fun of all the leftist esc’ balls. Top tier trolling but kinda shitty. Don’t cheat at your own contest. That’s lame. -Speaking of anarchy I had this little debate with one of the admins, that stemed from me trying to see the good in people from all the political philosophies, and that they were misunderstood leading them to fend for themselves because of their ideal society. Nevertheless most peoples ideals come from wanting to help other people, even really die hard Conservatives don’t want a bunch of lazy people, who can’t have any faith in anything good and want to save their kids from hurting themselves or going to hell. They seem to care about their country too and hate immigrants on the grounds of wanting to look out for their family, because they believe immigrants are making things like healthcare inflate due to the mass amount of people on it. It’s fucking awful and prejudice as fuck, but they’re still looking out for their own. As terrible as ingroups are, to care about a group of people still shows some compassion. No one is truly selfish. They can be evil, but not truly selfish.  So random anarchy ball admin praises me on acknowledging how “Selfish” people become in the face of adversity and explain, that An-caps are selfish too but they don’t want to hurt anybody they just want to make money and be left alone. This is obviously false because if you do something like own a business you’ve created a hierarchy volentary or not, you’ve gained control of other peoples lives for the sake of survival. One could argue all philospohies would implement this, but business overall demands a person strip away their identity for production more often than not blah-blah-blah etc. etc. etc. That’s why people say they’re not real anarchists because they suppress a persons identity for the sake of giving others power or something like that. I actually talked to the purple and black ones, one of them gave me a long reading. Sheesh. It’s a good read none the less, but I think i’ll stick cleaning up the environment and hopefully in the future growing food for the less fortunate and giving it away for free to spite corporations and businesses that sell food or take up land. I don’t want to stick myself into a dogma though. But I digress. I try to explain that people aren’t necessarily selfish, they can do good things and this admin seems to take it really personally, and goes all out in treating me like i’m naive and says people just do good things to feel good. Boi’ you don’t know my life. Have you dealt with someone who’s co-dependent and tried to help them when you have depression because you don’t want to see them kill themselves, not because you want them around (because frankly they’re a burden to your happiness as awful as that sounds), but because you see how wonderful of a person they are and want to see them love themselves, when i’d be easier just to leave. Fuckin’ parents raise kids and make sacrifices sometimes not out of romanticization of motherhood-fatherhood but just because they care. This isn’t as common as people think, but it happens. Forgiveness within itself exists not out of feeling good but knowing it’s right and compassionate. In reality forgiveness is alturism because having to put up with someone who wronged you, and risking feeling like shit (and also feeling like shit for having to listen to them and apologize or hear them apologize) is fucking work, and annoying as piss. I have a lot of stuff to do some i’m not going to go into personal examples. Point is the guy to me sounds like he’s trying to justify sociopathy and i’m not down for that. So we argue but it doesn’t get far. I take the cheap example and go for people who risk their lives on impulse to save others. If people naturally risk their lives without thinking or wanting to feel something, they’re more naturally selfless or at least have the capacity to be totally selfless. There’s HOPE. They have nothing to say to that. Nevertheless I spent 2 days post this between volenteer work and work-work debating myself to make sure I was correct. In case this example tanked, I tried to look for another one in my life or a person and thought back to when I wronged my now best friend as a child, and left him for a girl. I remember meeting up with him and him wanting to serve me shit or tell me to fuck off, as he often tells, but he decided to forgive me. He didn’t even want people around. He wanted to be alone and to die. Maybe he secretly wanted someone, but it wouldn’t make sense that the childhood shithead (me) would be that person. I have faith that he decided to be selfless on his own accord. I’ve grown to love him, and we’ve risked our lives for each other, between standing up to oppressive people, and keeping each other from killing ourselves. We’ve had co-dependent patches when we started but nothing too insane. It’s become guiene love and we can respect each other as opposed to looking at what’s best for us. Little human sacrifices.  Faith-Hope-Love that’s what Christians, they’re clearly unto something. Heh’. Nevertheless the whole discussion made me depressed because I started worrying about the person. All political philosophy aside, if this person is that cynical, I want to know what’s eating at them. Solving that mystery and feeling good about helping them is selfish, and would probably lead to backlash, but I hope they find peace and ditch their cynicism. This  tore me up and fed my depression; me worrying about someone I didn’t even know.

-So more politics but no anarchy. This part isn’t bad but a quick note. The Libertarian party is doing pretty well and they seem optimistic. Though i’m not from New York i’ve looked into a particular candidate named Larry Sharpe. I’ve been watching his posts for a while and he seems to sacrifice a lot of his personal beliefs for what he thinks is fair and liberates the masses. He seems to hate taxes and his opponent. His opponent hasn’t said much about him so far, but seems to mean well too. He’s tried to help a bunch of people from what I gather, but has raised taxes so high that small businesses are failing and people can’t move to new locations are get their bills paid. In helping people he overstepped his shit, and fucked up. I gather this from the comment section on his posts. Generally speaking, people don’t like him on those grounds, but the ones who do only like him because he’s nice. This constant debate on how much people should help is fucking with my head. What really is best for humanity? It’s fucking with my head, but I can’t let it control my life. Personal shit/Shit regarding taking care of myself. I went to my therapist and he’s being a butt. I gather he’s worried about me transitioning because he asked a lot of questions about my presentation as a (trans) woman. The questions felt very intrusive asking why I don’t do “x”. Some of them were redundant and I felt the need to justify everything. I don’t like being put on trial, my Dad that and it fucked me up. I wanted to give him the right answers as opposed to how I felt, or just be avoidant. There was a lot of glaring and him sounding stressed. So when Mr. Therapist did something similar, it fucked me and I had an “episode” and began spewing out a bunch of information and asking him what he’s going to do, what he thinks, if he would just listen, that he doesn’t trust me and that all the doctors visits make me feel less like a woman and more like a lab rat. They feed my dysphoria. I had sort of this weird out of body experience where I was just talking but my body felt like it wasn’t there. That I had separated myself form reality to keep myself safe. It was pure anxiety and miserable. He proposed that I didn’t trust him and that I thought he was against me, but I tried reassuring him and it just ehhh. I kept going over the possibility that I might have autism (See next paragraph) considering my psychiatrist keeps thinking that because I can’t always communicate my thoughts, and it was a mess. I “yelled” a lot trying to get my points across, not really angrily but my voice was raised. He gave me a journal to write in. Even after he said our time was up, I got really selfish and glued myself to the couch wanting him to reassure me and asking him questions with what ifs. Like what if I just took estrogen, and he said he’d support my decision and root for me. This is why I think he’s decent. None the less the intrusiveness and lack of transparency bother me. The think that bugged me most is that he said he didn’t think I was ready because I had “one last hurdle to overcome” And when I asked “What?” He said he didn’t know. Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I spent the time after in my car having a panic attack and feeling numb. I didn’t even schedule another appointment. I wanted to just die but my inner voice told me to breathe, strap in my seatbelt, drive home and get some sleep. I posted on Facebook about my depression and everyone got worried. I’m glad I got good friends. I went home and got to sleep. Woke up and went out with chinese food with my roomate and her boyfriend(?).

-I went to get tested for (Asperger's) Autism earlier in the week because my psychatrist seems to think I have it. Every doctor I have says one thing, while others suggest different. It’s the same with friends and family. Mom thinks I have it. Best friend doesn’t think I have it. Mom knows me at home, Best friend however has autism and has autism run in his family. Am I autistic? Who knows. I’m sure right wing neckbeards edgelords would think I am, because I respect women generally speaking. Nonetheless they did an interview sort of thing, and i’m able to go in and get officially tested. This will be when I have money. That doctor said it was a 50/50. The visit was the same as all the others XP

- After a good 3 bottles of Mikes hard practically in a row I finished that fucking English Essay and turned it in. -I was able to talk to my school councilor for the first time in months. She’s the best. I’ve had her around since I started figuring out my gender identity (I think that’s a stupid as word tbh, considering the brain is an organ, so to some degree i’m female). I gave her an hours worth of rambling and she as always responded with kindness, listening and sincere advice. She doesn’t care for my therapist or psychiatrist from what I can gather, and I already know she doesn’t care much for my parents. She did want me to try to be more honest with the therapist though, despite the panic, and just address my needs upfront. I’m not sure how capable i’ll be of doing that, but I can respect the advice, mostly because it’s her. I can almost fully trust her. She’s at like 99% where most people are at like 40%. My best friend is at 100% unless it’s making plans. He tends to fuck up with that. Oh well, nobody is perfect.

- I did some volenteer work over the weekend which was nice. Blockers/lack of energy and stiffness in my limbs didn’t fuck with it too much. It feels nearly impossible to lift boxes at my work though.  -Though it doesn’t have to do with me, some fucker stole shit at my work and got caught. It was a thing of cool whip, in which he’d do something that a manager described post arrest as “whip its” in which a person would inhale nitrogen from a whip cream can. Personally if he wants to do drugs and ruin his life that’s his own business. Sure someone cares about him but trying to prevent shit like drugs via police seems to cause more problems. Just let people voluntarily go to rehab and be there for them. I am glad he got caught for stealing though, i’m not a fan of stealing unless someone is trying to feed their kids, or themselves because they’re living in severe poverty and prices for x company are high. Even still a lot of businesses can be decent at times and if you tell them you’re poor they sometimes really help people out (been there done that). You’d think someone who prasies things like anarchy would be like “DOWN WITH THE COORPERATE GREED” you could also argue that someone who’s okay with Captalism would be like “NO THIEVERY PEOPLE EARNED THAT MONEY” there’s also the thought of “HOW DOES ONE LIKE ANARCHY, CAPITALISM BUT HATE ANCAPS. WHAT ARE BELIEFS (I’ll talk about that in another post).” Nope my reaction is that stealing is terrible for everyone because x company will just give employees less hours or jack up prices. It makes things harder on the poor. Stealing also lets in police prescence and furthers the police state. If people really wanted to piss on the government if applicable be totally obidenent and expose police violence. If people don’t believe in police and don’t feel a need for them the state would eventually defund them or people wouldn’t become cops. It’s happening in the county I live in, and it’s awesome. Hopefully one day there won’t be any police or at the very least police that are more social workeres than anything. I could live with social worker police. Some countries have that. That’s how it’s supposed to be (except in terms of major riots which may not happen due to less police, and kidnappings. Police existing to hunt down kidnappers is ideal. I wouldn’t mind private cops to do that though) That’s it, no go outside =w=

[wellmeaningshutin]

Short Story #96: Tired of Politics.

Written: 4/12/2017                                                                Interwoven Week

For the first time, in a long time, Nick had questioned his views, both politically and scientific, and he wasn’t sure anymore if he was right. His friend had made a Facebook post on something his roommate said, and while everyone laughed at it, laughed at the idea that they were supposed to be the deluded ones, instead of the people on the other side, Nick realized that there was a point to what they were laughing at, but there was also a point to their laughing. Both sides were credible, and this had taken a lot of energy to process, so he decided that since it took him so long to figure out the possibility that he may be wrong, it was too much effort to figure out the actual answer. So, he pushed his laptop off of his lap, and announced to his wife, “I’m done with everything, this is just too much for me.”

“Done with what?” Asked his wife, not looking up from the book she was reading.

“Science, politics, everything. People keep arguing that both sides of the issues are right, and they both seem to know what they’re talking about, and I’m tired of it all. I don’t care if I was right or wrong, I just want out. I don’t want to hear about politics anymore, I don’t want to get involved in a billion debates over whether or not vaccines give you autism, or if global warming is real or not. I don’t care who is in the white house, and what they’re saying, I think I’m just going to stay out of it.”

Still not looking at him, “How are you going to stay out of it?”

“I don’t know, I think I’ll just try to, like, not bring it up or whatever.”

Looking up at him and laughing, “And how do you expect to do that? Nowadays there’s no way that you could expect to stay away with this sort of ‘discussion’”, she made air quotes when she said that last word, “because its going to find you wherever you are. No matter where you go online, somebody’s going to connect something to current events, to their own opinions, its just unavoidable. You could look up a video on how to tie your own goddamned shoes, and you can find a ton of comments along the lines of ‘If only this candidate I don’t like was competent enough to tie their own shoes’, followed by a comment chain where people try to convince each other of their own opinions, without even trying to listen to the other people. Its a fucking mess.”

“Well, I’ll just stay away from the internet then. I’ll just go back to doing things the way people did things when the world sucked.”

“That’s a nice thought, but what about all of the opinions that are all over the television, the protests on the streets, the disk jockeys that have to put their two cents in? And if you manage to avoid all of that, what about normal conversation? This isn’t the sixties anymore, people don’t shut up about politics. Its actually become a main talking point for everyone, you can’t talk to anyone without them complaining about what’s going on, its like a social norm.”

“Well-”

“And let’s not forget that-”

“Okay, whatever, I’ll just be a moderate then! I’ll sit on the fence, and try to be as unoffensive as I possibly can.”

“I think you’re idealizing people then, because no matter what you do, somebody is going to hate you. And these days, due to everyone being so opinionated, it looks worse if you don’t pick a side, than if you do, because you’re basically saying that people’s view points are on par with the view points of their enemies. That’s basically worse than having the position of their enemies, because at least then they could call you deluded and not take you seriously at all. However, since you would refuse to pick a side, they would see you as a bigger problem, not only because you put white nationalists and social justice warriors in the same category, which is like saying that people of one side are just as bad as their enemies, but it also leaves you vulnerable to the hateful ‘if you’re not with me, you’re against me’ fallacy.”

“Oh god, please don’t use the word ‘fallacy’, like” rolling over and putting his face into his bed’s pillow, “I’m following the point you’re making, but I just can’t take that word anymore. Its just a part of the problem. People keep throwing that shit back and forth, and it feels like a majority of the time they don’t know how to use it right, but I’m not sure if I even know how to use them right. Like, everyone keeps saying radically different things in the name of ‘logic’, but nobody wants to think that they might be illogical.”

“Sorry babe.”

“Its okay, its just…”

“Exhausting?”

“Yeah. You’re making good points, too, but its just kind of making everything worse, you know? Like,” his forehead creased, which is a rare occurrence since its normally smoother than the image socially inept guys have of themselves when they wear suits, but it creases up whenever he gets lost in thought, which isn’t very often, “I think I just want to just leave everything behind, just go live in the woods, you know? I need to return to nature, I need to return to my roots. Maybe people weren’t meant to be political animals, maybe the fact that we’re trying to form societies is the reason we’re so unhappy. Like, if we were supposed to be civilized, then wouldn’t we have formed the perfect society already? Wouldn’t it just come naturally to us? You know who doesn’t fuck with politics? Trees. Gnats. Wolves. I think I’d probably want to live with the wolves the most.”

“I love you but that’s fucking stupid. How come everyone thinks of living with the wolves? You always hear of children raised by wolves or whatever, but why does it have to be wolves? Why not something more majestic, like salmon?”

“Salmon aren’t, what the fuck are you talking about? Why the hell would I want to live with salmon?”

“They leap up rivers, they fucking own the place when fall comes around, have you ever seen them leap around? Have you ever seen footage of an eagle swooping down and tearing a salmon from the river? Think about it. Eagles are majestic animals, they’re like the most majestic animal, especially since they’re America’s god damn bird, and you know the good ol’ US wouldn’t do anything if it wasn’t the best thing to do.”

“That’s why we’re not China.”

“And a majestic animal has to eat the most majestic food that they can find.”

“Don’t they eat other things than salmon?”

“Yeah, but salmon leap, and-”

“But a lot of animals leap, wolves fucking leap. I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make right now.”

“I think I might just be hungry, salmon sounds really good right now. Like, for some reason I want to have a burger, that has a fried egg on top, then on top of that egg is a good slice of smoked salmon.”

“Are you high?”

“Why do people always ask that when somebody says something out of the norm?”

“I was only-”

“Like, whenever I paint something, or come up with an idea, people always say ‘you must have been really high when you thought of that’, and its just frustrating. Like, is it a way for non-creative people to explain their own lack of ideas, since they can’t imagine how a sober person could actually think of something interesting? Or is it a way for society to undermine the real thinkers in life, like do they just claim that most of the out-of-the-box creative efforts are only a side effect of addiction, something only a user could come up with, as a way of shaming- Hey, wait, what are you doing?”

“I’m packing.” Nick said as he began to stuff random clothing articles into a knapsack. “This is the kind of stuff that I want to get away from, I don’t care what you’re views are on society. Hell, I don’t even care about what my own views are anymore. Society can go to hell, fuck it and all of its issues. I’m going to go live with nature, where nobody is going to judge me, where it will just be me and the trees and the wolves. And if we don’t have any wolves then I’ll hang with the coyotes, and if we don’t have those I’ll just have to adapt, like nature, like how evolution changes animals so that they can survive better in their environments.”

“That’s not how evolution works, if-”

“Look, I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m right or wrong, because I’m going to be where opinions don’t exist any further than ‘oh, I’m hungry’ or ‘oh, something is hunting me’. Animals and plants are the ones who know what the real things are to life, they know that survival is all we should worry about. Do you think rabbits sit around and think they’re clever for referencing Plato’s cave? No, they eat grass, and try not to die. That’s life.”

“But in civilization you don’t have to worry about that stuff, its all-” he didn’t hear the rest of what she said, he was already out the door and ready to start his new life. ———————————————————————————————————

Now, Nick didn’t really know much, if anything, about surviving out in the wilderness, but he believed with some hard work and a can-do-spirit that he could solve any problems that life threw in his path, and because of that he spent the first night shivering, and trying to find a place where he would feel safe enough to sleep, where he wouldn’t be at risk of some mangy beast eating him in his sleep. Overall it was not a fun night, especially with the twigs snapping in the distance, the hoots of the owls, the vague howls in the distance, the deer carcass, which had its mid section ripped open, and its insides spilled out onto the forest floor, which made Nick confused, because he couldn’t tell if he was afraid of the dead animal, of the gore, or the fact that it seemed fresh, meaning whatever killed it was waiting nearby, and could possibly try to do the same to him. At one point it seemed like he had finally found a safe spot to get some rest, one that was also able to help protect him from the night’s concerning lack of warmth, but after only a minute of shut eye he felt something crawl onto his hand, and learned that spiders existed out in the wild, and that this made them scarier, because he couldn’t see them at all in the dark, and he had to abandon his spot after a lot of panicked thrashing, since he couldn’t tell how many more of the disgusting things were lurking in that spot. He wondered if spiders lived there, because they knew that people and animals would see that it was a good place to rest, making it the perfect trap. He wondered if spiders were proof that there was no god, or at least not a kind god. During the two hours that preceded the sun’s rise, he was haunted by an image of that disemboweled deer, with spiders crawling either in or out of its body, and he couldn’t tell which was worse.

The day time was really pleasant, except for the gnats and bees. It seemed like the nightmarish quality of the woods had disappeared when the sun rose, and there was suddenly nothing to worry about anymore, everything had become beautiful. However, he soon learned that beauty disappears the longer you look at it, and that after ten hours in the daylight, the forest had become one boring place. For some reason, Nick hadn’t seen a single animal at all during the day, and that was starting to annoy him because he was starting to get hungry, and he would rather try to kill something instead of having to play Russian Roulette by trying to eat a random plant, just hoping that it would be safe to eat. Nick decided that if he never saw an animal, or at least couldn’t kill one, and he was forced to eat a plant, he would stay away from the mushrooms at all costs, since they were stereotypically dangerous. Red berries were also a definite no. Sometimes he wondered if grass was the safest thing to eat, and he also considered leaves, or even tree bark. When he finally found a river, he hoped for salmon, just so that he could catch a couple and eat them, but the river’s current turned out to be far too strong for him to even think about stepping inside of it, even if it was just for food, although he did spend two minutes drinking from it, glad that he at least didn’t have to worry about dehydrating.

Night time came once again and he decided to try and stay next to the river, hoping that any predators would be afraid of the current, or that if they leaped at him he could duck out of the way, which would cause them to sail right over him and splash into the current that would force them into a watery grave, or, at the very least, would knock them against a rock that would kill them, and allow Nick to eat their remains. Desperate, starving, and exhausted were the words he described himself as. About half way through the night he had started to drift off, but in his hypnagogic state he saw images of a creature coming out of the river and eating him alive, and decided to wander away to find somewhere where he wasn’t at risk of being murdered and consumed. He tried to figure out how evolution worked, and wondered if his wife was currently pregnant, and he had died in the woods, would his kid be born to adapt better in the forest? Later he cursed himself for actively thinking about the subjects that he was trying to escape from, and then he cursed a rock that he had tripped over, believing that it stood where it was with the intentions of knocking him over. At some point he used the word “philistine”, but couldn’t remember the context, or the meaning of the word. At some point he tried to climb a tree, hoping that if he was up high he could be safe from predators, but the first tree he attempted to climb had claw marks on it, which gave him second thoughts. No animals had been seen, but they were definitely sensed, as if he could feel them out in the dark, waiting for him to take a rest, just for a second, so that they could do the same thing that they did to the deer. He wondered if there were also spiders in the tree, or if scorpions were a thing he had to worry about. Scorpions also seemed to be proof in a lack of a loving god. When the sun rose again, he realized that he had lost his knapsack at some point, and was worried that something had stolen it from him, right off of his back.

This second day was tiring, and the warmth of the sunlight made him want to fall asleep, but he was still worried about predators. Sure, wolves and mountain lions would probably be dozing off right now, but what about raptors or spiders, which he was wondering if they ever slept, he wondered if they were like sharks, and had to stay in constant movement. He was starting to reach a point beyond exhausted, a point whose existence he was unaware of. Plagued by the idea of sudden death at every corner, he considered to skip ahead to the end and bury himself in a shallow grave, then he started to wonder if he could sleep easier if he buried himself, since any predator would only walk over him instead of tearing into him, and that’s when he had the image of digging into the ground, and finding a large mass of spiders under the dirt, like a pit of writhing, black, bodies with way too many eyes and legs, which also didn’t move in the way that legs should move. When he sat down on a stump to rest and stare off into space, trying to think of something pleasant, like water, or smoked salmon, a snake crawled over his foot, and he ran screaming into the forest. Since that was the first animal he had come in contact with (plenty of birds had been seen, but they were too distant and unreal for him to actually consider animals, and the question of bugs being animals was one that he was too exhausted to answer), he decided that it was a sign that he was going to die soon. Later he would wander if he should have killed it and eaten its meat, but then he decided that the meat was probably highly poisonous. He repeated the word “poisonous” until it no longer sounded real. Eventually he found the river again, drank from it, than ate several fistfuls of leaves, until he had picked up a leaf whose backside was infested with spider eggs, and decided to stick to grass for the rest of that meal. A childhood memory came to his mind, where he had hit a spider with a rolled up magazine, but when he lifted it a swarm of baby spiders had taken its place, like a nightmare of physical impotence.

Night came and he began to hear voices in the night, which told him things like “I’m going to cut you open and fuck your guts”, or “the wind is inside of you, hold onto the wind”, and he didn’t know if it was the forest talking to him, the animals talking to him, or ghosts, but then he grappled with the possibility of it being all of the above, a thought that creased his forehead. Starting to believe that the state beyond the threshold beyond exhaustion was clarity, he believed that he could know without a doubt that he was going to die the next night. He started to wonder if that was the forest lying to him, just to get him to let his guard down for tonight. For eleven minutes he had fallen asleep, but he wasn’t aware of this. He tried to climb a tree but was too weak to do so. Eventually he found a group of sleeping deer, and was amazed that he had finally found animals that weren’t fucked up, even if deers seemed to be really strange dogs. They didn’t mind it when he slept with their group, since by his actions an appearance, they figured that he was about to die. After a night of sleeping with the deer, without even trying to hurt them, they had decided that he must be a defected human, and didn’t mind it when he followed them around the next day, although the buck did make sure to keep a close eye on him.

After being fully rested, he was amazed that the deer had taken him in as one of his own, and considered the previous nights in the forest as a sort of spiritual journey that led him on a path to his real people, which weren’t wolves or fish, but deer, which just seemed to wander around, were a paranoid about getting murdered, and ate grass whenever they were hungry. It didn’t really seem any different than what he had been doing, and it started to seem as if this was the beginning of the rest of his life.

However, now that he was able to find sources of food and water (even if they were crude), was able to feel safe, was in the company of others (even if they weren’t human, he found the fact that they couldn’t discuss whatever opinions they may have very appealing), and was able to safely sleep each night, he started to desire more, he started to desire entertainment, stimulation, but worst of all: status. After he was able to tell the does apart, he began to notice cliques among them, noticed who was friends was who, who didn’t like who, and he knew that the buck was in the middle of everything, he was the guy at the top. However, Nick was also a male, he was also considered to be one with the deer, so it wouldn’t be irrational to assume that the buck could see him as a challenge to his power, right? Wouldn’t it be reasonable for the buck to do everything it could to keep Nick away from taking its position, for it to resort to such tactics as spreading false rumors about Nick to the does, to try to assassinate his character, to try to spout anti-human rhetoric to keep him out of power? This last idea had made Nick furious, because he couldn’t understand how they could assume that he was a cold killer, a callous hunter, just because a very, very small percentage of humans hunted deer. He could imagine the buck playing off the few gruesome cases in a way to appeal to the emotions of the deer, to have them make their decisions on fear over fact, and that wasn’t alright, Nick couldn’t take the idea of that, so he knew that he had to strip the buck from power.

It had never occurred to him that the only reason he considered, and feared, these tactics was because these were similar ones he applied back in the civilized world.

First he considered murdering the buck, but the guy never turned his back to Nick, not for one second, and he was naturally armed with those antlers that could rip Nick’s chest right open, which made him wonder if this buck had slain the dead one he had seen on his first night. So, he knew that he would have to wait for a predator to show itself, either so he could use the distraction to murder his rival, and take its position, or so he could defeat the predator himself, and show that he was a bigger hero than the buck was, and cast his shamed predecessor into the exile of the woods.

During that night, while the group had slept, there were sounds of whisperings out in the woods, and it seemed like the buck had not noticed. Nick wondered if it was just in his own head, or the forest’s way of tricking him, then he saw a flicker of orange, and realized that it was hunters out in the night. This was his golden opportunity. All he had to do was talk them up, since they wouldn’t be suspicious of a person, because what rational hunter would think that a fellow human would actually have sided with the deer, had sided with nature. As he silently approached the hunters, he started to wonder why they had to go out and hunt, then decided that it was probably because they were rejecting the fact that humans were destined to live with nature, not society, and had to kill animals to only strengthen their denial. While Nick had moved his way to the huntsmen, he made sure to be quiet enough to not alert any of his pals, but it also happened that he had moved quiet enough for the hunters to not be aware of his presences. When they finally saw him near, one had thought he was a beast and the ragged man was greeted by a loud noise and light, panicked, and then ran back to his friends, not knowing where else to run. Knowing the call of the ferocious hunters, the deer began to flee into the forest, while the buck led the charge, and ended up intersecting the path of Nick, but confused the guy for a hunter, which caused the buck to panic and lunge at Nick with its horns, which gored him, tore his middle section open, and caused him to drop to the ground, ripped open, while his friends had abandoned him.

As he lied there dying, in an intense amount of pain, he was annoyed by the fact that there was a Shakespeare quote that he wanted to say, but couldn’t remember it. The hunters found his body, while he was slowly welcoming the cold, but numb, embrace of death, he could hear the hunters blame strict gun laws, which prevented them from having enough fire power to avenge the poor guy. If he wasn’t so weak, Nick would have screamed.

#Free Write #Short Story #Writers on Tumblr #Tired of Politics #Nature

[dhpdaedalus]

Week 2 of Drumpf: Believe Me: The Last Thing We Need is Trump to Drop Dead from Natural Causes

Typically the Republican Party, the GOP, the Conservatives of this country propound the preservation and importance of religion. This last election was unique in that both parties--the religious right and liberal (sometime secular) left perceived the candidates on the poles of good and evil. Thus, the failure of the Democratic party and many Clinton supporters was not just an election, but the victory of evil over good. The question of civil society and civil rights is the domain of the liberal left, but why is the fight against Trump being framed as a right/wrong, good/bad concern? 

What are the dangers of viewing politics on a good/evil axis? I think it’s useful to look at two dissenting voices from the left of center and right of center to see how nimble the debate around Trump policies can be, whether seeing them as ethical or judicious makes sense strategically. 

A recent email exchange between Noam Chomsky and Sam Harris can serve as an example of how framing something in the context of good and bad (via good and evil, see Nietzsche “Beyond Good & Evil) can predetermine the sorts of answers that appear to force a concession of one moral value for another. (I didn’t follow the entire stunt of email bating/debating with Chomsky, but the entire discussion seemed to inappropriately concede to Harris’ desired framework, which is a binary between Western values and “non-Western values.” I should stipulate that I actually haven’t read any of the books, in their entirety, that these two authors have produced pertaining to politics. On one hand the dispute between them is an exchange of both referring the other to a book the former wrote, on the other hand the exchange comes off as a PR stunt on behalf of Harris to garner more attention to his platform from Chomsky fans and/but on a third, prosthetic hand that forces the hands of both of the other hands, and on which I’m qualifying my admitted lack of reading either of their books, both have an excess of non-literate media sharing their political perspectives, media that has communicated in the very least that it isn’t necessary to read their books because, if this media is purposeful, effective, and functional, it (the media--interviews, podcasts, speeches, et al.) can disseminate their political perspectives at least as sufficiently as their books. )

A Generalization of Chomsky & Harris Perspectives on American Foreign Policy as It Pertains to the Point of Trump Dropping Dead by Natural Causes

Noam Chomsky’s critique of American foreign policy is that it’s imperialistic. We uproot dissent in foreign countries through covert CIA and/or overt military operations for the goals of imperialist domination and subsequently economic benefit. The banner under which the U.S. government declares its violence against other people--Terrorism, Freedom, Democracy--as part of the manufacturing of the domestic population’s consent, may change but the motivation is constant. The inaccurate rhetoric of American foreign policy is found not only in the inconsistency of how these banner themes are applied across the globe--i.e. some Muslim countries being our enemies while other being our allies--but also in how our own country does not adhere to its own rallying dogma. While U.S. politicians wage war in the name of Democracy, the same politicians may be countering democratic processes at home. Chomsky’s repeated references abroad are to the CIA interventions in Nicaragua, military support of the genocide of East Timor by Indonesia, the invasion of Iraq under the guise of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and World War II. 

Sam Harris’ stance on U.S. foreign policy is that it’s the U.S.’s duty to police the world, to protect civil society and this can and may and at times must be done through militarization and tough love (i.e. secret missions, assassinations, et al.). To secure civil society, we must fight against those who oppose it, e.g. Putin. Because there are regimes that do not recognize human rights, its the duty of HR proponents to fight against the tyranny of the opposition in order to affirm women’s rights, create secular governance and end dictatorships. In the debate with Chomsky he emphasizes the “good intention” of the American foreign policy. His references abroad are much narrower than Noam’s, focusing on the Middle East and Russia since the Cold War until the present. 

Harris’ argument is pretty close to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” which was the popular framework around the 9/11, Iraq War. It’s a world picture that appealed to George W. Bush. We, the West (Western Europe & North America), are culturally incompatible with the non-West, but really they mean Islam. Asia’s fine. They make our stuff. This clarification is the first of many. It’s not just Islam, but Middle East, and just Middle Eat but Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Egypt at times...who else...Yemen? Ok, it’s ad hoc. They could have said, “They’re in our way to drive to Kazakstan and must be destroyed,” and it would have been more accurate. You’ll notice, this is the basic road map for Trump’s “Muslim travel ban,” and it’s echoed by many European nationalists. But before I get to how this doesn’t float as a logical argument, I want to return to the fantasy of some good grace shining upon North America, just below the 48th parallel. 

Trump & the Grim Reaper

Ok, so with the context of these two interpretations--Chomsky & Harris--‘twer Trump to drop dead, flat out on the floor of the oval office, not resting but stone dead, deceased of natural causes the entire opposition, the rational center, the apprehensive Michiganders that cast no Presidential vote, the Left and Ultraleft would have no other alternative but to revive the idea and belief of Divine Intervention. There would be no room for secular belief. It would simply not be tenable to have the electoral college hand to leave this flaming paper bag on our doorstep and then, suddenly, not have to deal with it. It would be none other than “miraculous.” Thus, both the right and left in the U.S. would collide in religious fervor. The discord of U.S. politics since the mid 20th Century would simply evaporate, having reached a boiling point with in an orange burst of 5th Avenue egocentricity of smoke and mirrors. You think I’m kidding, but there would be no protection for civil society through/on the grounds of secular or non-belief; there would be only “believers.” Civil society would equate to Christian society in the U.S. The conservative right would simply continue their born-againing, and the left, well, they would born again also. The illogic would be...illogical. Here’s how. 

The claim that defending Muslims or Islam in America or the rest of the world by the liberal left while aspiring to secularism, human rights and equality, or at least separation of church and state, is contradictory, according to Harris. (More than Chomsky Harris engages in debate with the religious and spiritual communities as part of the New Atheist movement.) But first and foremost, this is a stereotype about any religious society, not just Islam. What about Buddhists? Are Confucians ‘ok’? Second, to view a society solely by their religious makeup is anti-intellectual, as it discards any other valuable assets of that society. I watched the first Sean Hannity interview with Trump, you know, the one where Sean basically tricks the old fart into agreeing to pardon some people he knows, and what’s more interesting than any of that hour rehearsed interview is that a youtube commercial by the Islamic society directly followed the video. It correctly explained the many contributions to the world that Islam has made. For example, the idea of zero. Where would be without zeros? But the point is that any society, regardless of their origin stories, afterlife beliefs or distinctions between “science” and “religion” (this is a Western distinction, BTW. See ‘China’) have great contributions to the world, knowledge, food, history, language. Third, can you secure secularism while securing a freedom of religion? *(And I should clarify that I’m an atheist, more over secular). The answer is ‘yes,’ and it’s possible only through example, at probably through law, which is what most of these countries that are worried about Muslims already have. They have a higher standard of living which sets the example for people in poorer countries to say, hey, maybe it would be a good idea to go there, or, ‘wait, no one is getting killed there, that’s an example of my kind of neighborhood.’ As for laws, you vote on them. It’s democracy. For those of us who cling to secular society just because we believe it’s superior than sharia law, well that’s is just as dogmatic as those who cling to another belief system. 

Having given the Harris-teria a few nods, it’s important to return to Islamophia directly, because it’s pertinent in not just the U.S. What is actually going on here? That is, what’s really at stake right now: is there an overtaking by Islam, or an ebb of civil rights? I’d say, ‘no.’ There is no coordinated effort for Islam to finish the job of the Crusades. In real numbers, no European country crosses 11% of Muslims.  What’s the bigger danger, some head garb or fascism turning against the civilian population. Fascism is alive and well in the U.S. and Europe. Why is this a bigger concern? Well, discriminating against 100% of society because you have 10% you don’t like is sad math. 

As pointed out during the Weapons of Mass Destruction campaign and Bush: Deux, Islam isn’t the enemy, as we have allies in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco...actually, most of them, at some time. If you’re worried about Islam, go make a friend who’s Muslim and you’ll be happier. If you’re worried about extremist--whether black, brown, or white--the answer is to improve their standard of living. In fact, for you Europeans who are thinking of protecting your country against the influence of refugees, just know that that’s exactly what George W. Bush would have said. You hated that guy. So did I. Don’t fall for him. You’re better than that. Use your creativity and innovation to deal with this in an un-Bush-ly manner. 

And when compared to our current and recent allies, the Clash of Civilizations model simply doesn’t hold water. I didn’t buy the rhetoric during Bush Deux and I don’t buy it via S. Harris. Reagan didn’t buy it either, as he sent weapons to Afghanistan to fight the clash with the other spectre: Communism. Not even Trump really buys it. Actually, most of the countries we are fighting in, have been fighting in, funding military conflict, or have special operations aren’t Muslim, they’re Christian. As of 2014, the U.S. had around 134 countries that SOCOM, SOF, training of foreign militaries that was going on. Central & South America. Southeast Asia. Pacific Islands. 

(Christian countries)

Apart from their selective cartographic interpretation, they (Bush, Harris, Huntington, but not CIA) also completely omit the civil rights issue pertaining to discriminating against Muslim Americans, which can be traced back to Civil Rights movement, Louis Farrakhan, Malcom X, et al. Discrimination against Muslims is not only illegal under Constitutional right to  the Freedom of Religion, but it savagely and disproportionately effects people of color. If Harris preferred a logical, historical continuity, the lines of discrimination are much more ardent than the clash between civilizations in this country and others. And so, calling it the BS that it is catalyzes the liberal left’s defense of Islam: that it’s a false pretense. 

The contradiction of Harris, and much of what’s come to be the Nationalist movement across many European countries, that declare the inhumane treatment of outsiders (refugees, immigrants, even citizens of other cultures), is quickly shown outlined in the uncivil actions necessary to maintain the alleged civil society. (But then, is it still civil? Was it ever?) Logically, it’s congruent to the camp that believes the death penalty is necessary to ensure that killers don’t kill in a society where killing isn’t allow or you have to bomb to get peace. What’s curious about Harris and Nationalists who advocate violence to ensure peaceful society is that they never advocate for greater support of non-military organizations whose missions more acutely align with these proposed ideals: Amnesty International, for example, works for human rights not only abroad but also within these “civil societies.” They are just one of the many organizations, non-military organizations, that work to do exactly what this contradictory camp suggests, though without contradiction. 

#travel ban #Trump #secularism #civil society #divine intervention #islam #christianity #holy war #isil #spontaneous combustion #sam harris #noam chomsky