#and going 'la la la this contradicts my assumptions so it must be wrong'

[tanadrin]

TBH after reading the first paragraph of your latest post I thought the rest of it was going to be "and here's why all of that is laughably retarded and my take on how our institutions are captured by lysenkoists" - entire fields are badly wrong often, especially nutrition, why do you buy it?

I buy it because the science is reliable.

I don't know how you could characterize nutrition science as "captured by lysenkoists" in any form, unless by "lysenkoist" you just mean to generally disparage science you think is politically motivated. "X field is Lysenkoism" seems usually to be a lazy critique by people who want to dismiss politically inconvenient research without engaging with the substance of why they think a field or sub-field is wrong, which is the least interesting kind of critique.

The human body is complicated, so nutrition is hard to study. That sounds quite simple on its own, but it's very difficult to underrate the complexity of systems developed by random mutation and selection. I remember an anecdote I read once about circuits designed via genetic algorithm, which produced results that were difficult to understand. Individual elements usually had multiple overlapping functions, and there was one that had a closed loop totally unconnected to the rest of the device--but if you removed it it totally stopped functioning. Only after some serious investigation did the experimenters determine this was because of some kind of weak electrically-induced effect that this loop produced, which was nonetheless critical to the circuit's function. Most biological systems are designed in a similarly infuriating way, and the algorithms that produce them have been running for millions of years. On top of that, it's difficult to observe the human metabolism in action, and we're still not equal to the task of simulating it at any kind of realistic detail.

I think like a lot of biology, nutrition and food science has done quite a lot of impressive stuff given those restrictions, but "what are the causes of fatness in general, and the obesity epidemic in particular" are narrower questions that we've focused on intently only for a few decades. The obesity epidemic is recent, and for most of its history the science of food and nutrition has been concentrated on more pressing issues like how do we feed a rapidly growing world population, and prevent dietary diseases like rickets and pellagra, and not "what is the precise relationship of fatness to various health conditions, and what factors most directly control fatness."

The stuff you refer to as "laughably retarted" is what falls out of the evidence as soon as you start looking at it in any detail. These aren't controversial or difficult-to-replicate results--they're out of step with the common medical wisdom in some ways, but only because the common medical wisdom is often laughably retarded. Some doctors still get taught as fact that black people feel pain less acutely than white people, and until COVID hit and forced us to reexamine the evidence, common medical wisdom totally misunderstood how airborne particulates worked, based on a single totally misinterpreted study from a hundred years ago, even though any air pollution scientist could have set them straight. Because of a single anecdote by one researcher (I think Kinskey, but correct me if I'm wrong), a lot of gynecologists seem to think the cervix feels no pain at all, meaning IUDs are commonly inserted using sharp-tipped forceps to hold the cervix--and while this is fine for some, others find it excruciatingly painful, because it turns out that the sensitivity of the cervix to pain varies wildly among individuals. And these areas--pain, airborne disease, and gynecology--are comparatively tractable to study.

We have known since time immemorial that if you starve, you get thin and eventually die. Since 1761, we've had calorimeters that can give us a rough guess on the energy contained in food; and with those two tools you can rough out at basic CICO model. You could stop there, and treat all subsequent developments in the area as Lysenkoism because they didn't conform to your prior assumptions on what fatness is and means, but then you'd have no tools to understand questions like why obesity began rising toward the end of the 20th century, long after wealthy industrialized countries moved to a more sedentary lifestyle, how appetite relates to actual food consumption and exercise, what the metabolic effects of different foods are, the role of gut bacteria in health and how they're influenced by diet, and lots of other interesting questions. And, well, that would be laughably retarded.

#i mean correct me if i'm wrong #but this isn't even a case of competing theories #there's just a set of rather interesting studies over here #and a bunch of people who haven't looked into them at all putting their fingers in their ears #and going 'la la la this contradicts my assumptions so it must be wrong' #if somebody ran a study that said #'yep diets do work and people do keep weight off long term in most cases' #by all means tell me about it #i'd be super interested to hear it

[touka-7-w-7]

Carta SR Idia Shroud traje de Ceremonia (Español-English)

Se desbloquea al obtener el traje de ceremonia y subiendo de nivel la carta

Unlocked by obtaining the Ceremony Outfit and leveling up the card.

NO RESUBIR esta traducción / DO NOT repost this translation

English translation below

Cap. 1

Cap. 2

Esto es imposible 

Dormitorio Ignihyde - Habitación de Idia 

Idia: Ah….  .

 ….. Es imposible. 

Idia: Por qué hice esa tonta promesa de ir a la [Ceremonia de Entrada]…. .

Idia: No, esto ocurrió debido a que soy un hombre débil ante las peticiones de Ortho…. . 

Idia: ….. No claro que no!!!!! 

Idia: Para un Hikikomori la Ceremonia de Entrada es un gran evento donde todos los estudiantes de la escuela se reúnen, y en el cual ¡no hay forma de escapar!

Idia: Además, no soy el Líder del Dormitorio ahora….!? 

De solo pensar en cuánta atención podría recibir de los que me rodean–.

*Toc toc

Ortho: Nii-san?

Idia: Hi! …. O-ortho. Qué ocurre? 

Ortho: Voy a ir a la sala de repuestos* por un momento. 

N/T: Ni idea esa parte decía una palabra extraña q no entendía x"D, les dejo la oración por si alguno sabe (しばらく連動フィールドに行きます) 

Ortho: La ceremonia de entrada está a la vuelta de la esquina, necesito acostumbrarme al nuevo cuerpo rápidamente! 

Idia: Oh, si. Ten cuidado. No llegues tarde. 

Ortho: Sip. 

Idia: Se ve bastante feliz….. 

Se ve feliz por la ceremonia? 

Idia: A pesar de que lo sabía desde hace tiempo [No podrá hacer el exámen durante la Ceremonia de Entrada], me sentiría mal si se lo dijese ahora. 

Toc* toc*

Idia: Ah, hi!? Or… Ortho? 

Riddle: Idia Shroud, soy del Dormitorio de Heartslabyul, Riddle Rosehearts. 

Idia: Ri-ri-riddle!? Qué, qué haces en el dormitorio de Ignihyde? 

Riddle: El director me mandó aquí. Incluso aunque te pusiera un collar antes para asistir a las reuniones, no es seguro si irás a la ceremonia de entrada….verdad? 

Riddle: Cielos, la ceremonia está tan cerca que no he mostrado mi rostro ni una sola vez a causa de las preparaciones. 

Riddle: Tú y Malleus senpai son los únicos líderes que faltan en la reunión. Así que vamos, date prisa por favor. 

Idia: Mm…. 

Riddle: Mm? 

Idia: Imposible. 

Riddle: … Ah? Imposible? Qué es lo que es imposible? 

Tú condición física no está bien?

Idia: No, no hay ninguna posibilidad en estos momentos… asistir a las reuniones… hablar cara a cara con los demás líderes… no puedo hacerlo! 

Riddle: Debes estar bromeando…. tu serás un líder pronto. Tal debilidad no es aceptable. 

Riddle: Yo también estoy corto de tiempo.* 

Date prisa, abre la puerta por favor! 

N/T: Que no le queda mucho tiempo libre. 

Idia: No, No no no, no quiero! Yo, no quiero ser un líder de Dormitorio! 

Riddle: Que irresponsable. No importa la razón, es natural asumir el papel una vez dado.

Idia: Uh…. Yo estoy fuera de ese algo “natural~. 

Empecé a impulsar mis propios valores.

Riddle: Eres una persona malhumorada! Acaso estoy diciendo las cosas mal!? 

Riddle: Todo es molesto para ti. Al menos prepárate decentemente para la ceremonia de ingreso…. . 

Idia: Esa es la máxima magia de “todos” … la misma presión para borrar a un individuo, la esencia de pasar desprevenido, por la teoría general.��

Idia: Estoy asustado, no quiero llegar a ser un hombre joven sin autonomía.×

Riddle: Aghh… 

Riddle: Dices que no puedes hablarle a nadie a la cara, pero ….. porque estás del otro lado de la puerta, ¡puedes decir todo lo que quieras!

Riddle: Como siempre pensé, tu actitud para inspirar a esa persona* ha perturbado la moral de la escuela.

N/T: no se si se refiere a las personas en general o alguien en especifico xD

Riddle: Por encima de todo, me siento incómodo. ¡Detente ahora!

Idia: Eh, ser la única persona en el mundo….que miedo… no se como se sentiría eso…. .×

Riddle: Aghh! Lo que haces me ofende! 

Riddle: Nunca seré un Líder de Dormitorio incompetente como tú, Hikikomori! 

Idia: Yo tengo una personalidad modesta y confusa a diferencia de ti que está cubierta de avaricia y codicia… 

Riddle: …. Tú, qué es lo que acabas de decir? 

Idia: Hi… 

Idia: P-por favor, ¡Déjame solo! Me ha ido bien con este estilo de vida desde antes de que tú llegaras.

Riddle: Ajá, claro. Probablemente. Debe haber sido fáacil. 

Riddle: Por qué no dejas que Ortho Shroud se haga cargo así no tienes que hacer nada! 

Idia: Eh….  . 

Riddle: No asistirás a la reunión, ni vas a prepararte para la ceremonia de entrada, ni tratarás con los invitados, ya que todo depende de ti.

Riddle: Como sea, de seguro tampoco atenderás la próxima ceremonia, cierto? Al menos le dirás hola? 

Riddle: Lo siento por querer obligar a trabajar a un Líder de dormitorio irresponsable !!!

Idia: Ha? ¿Dije que no asistiría a la ceremonia de entrada? ¿Puedes dejar de hacer tus propias suposiciones?? 

Idia: Estaré en la próxima ceremonia de entrada!!!!!! 

Riddle: No acabas de contradecirte? 

Riddle: Ahora yo soy el tonto, lo que sea, puedo esperar un discurso inspirador de tu parte? 

Idia: Por supuesto. 

Riddle: Eh. Esta bien, entonces sostendré mi pañuelo y te estaré esperando!

 Idia:  …. 

Idia: …. 

Idia: …. Soy un idiota — — —!? 

Idia: [… Estaré en la próxima ceremonia de entrada] 

Idia: No puede ser. Es imposible! Ahhhhh… qué es lo que haré?…..  . 

Fin. 

× [si no lo malinterprete, Idia estaba leyendo algo mientras ignoraba a Riddle, quien estaba afuera parado frente a su puerta.] x"D

Estos capítulos los traduzco del japonés con ayuda de traductores así que si hay algún error en la traducción es mi culpa. (´°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥ω°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥｀)  

This is impossible

Dorm Ignihyde - Idia Room

Idia: Ah…. .

 ….. It is impossible.

Idia: Why did I make that silly promise to go to the [Entrance Ceremony] …..

Idia: No, this happened because I am a weak man before Ortho’s requests…. .

Idia:… .. No, of course not !!!!!

Idia: For a Hikikomori the Entrance Ceremony is a great event where all the students of the school gather, and in which there is no way to escape!

Idia: Also, I’m not the Dorm Leader now….!?

Just thinking about how much attention I could get from those around me.

*Knock Knock

Ortho: Nii-san?

Idia: Hi! … O-ortho. What happen?

Ortho: I’m going to the spare room* for a moment.

T/N: I haven’t idea, that part said a strange word that I did not understand x"D, I leave the sentence in case anyone knows (し ば ら く 連 動 フ ィ ー ル ド に 行 き ま す)

Ortho: The entrance ceremony is just around the corner, I need to get used to the new body quickly!

Idia: Oh yeah. Be careful. Do not be late.

Ortho: Yup.

Idia: He looks pretty happy …

Do you look happy about the ceremony?

Idia: Even though I knew it for a long time [You won’t be able to do the exam during the Entrance Ceremony], I would feel bad if I told you now.

Knock Knock*

Idia: Ah, hi !? Or … Ortho?

Riddle: Idia Shroud, I’m from the Heartslabyul Bedroom, Riddle Rosehearts.

Idia: Ri-ri-riddle !? What, what are you doing in Ignihyde’s bedroom?

Riddle: The director sent me here. Even if I wore a necklace before you to attend the meetings, it is not sure if you will go to the entrance ceremony… right?

Riddle: Heavens, the ceremony is so close that I haven’t once shown my face because of the preparations.

Riddle: You and Malleus senpai are the only leaders missing from the meeting. So come on, hurry up please.

Idia: Mm….

Riddle: Mm?

Idia: Impossible.

Riddle: … Ah? Impossible? What is impossible?

Your physical condition is not well?

Idia: No, there is no chance right now … attending the meetings … talking face to face with the other leaders … I can’t do it!

Riddle: You must be kidding…. you will be a leader soon. Such weakness is not acceptable.

Riddle: I too am short of time.* Hurry up, open the door please!

T /N: That he doesn’t have much free time left.

Idia: No, no no no, I don’t want to! I don’t want to be a Bedroom leader!

Riddle: How irresponsible. No matter the reason, it is natural to assume the role once given.

Idia: Uh…. I’m out of that “natural” something.

I started to push my own values.

Riddle: You are a grumpy person! Am I saying the wrong thing !?

Riddle: Everything is annoying to you. At least prepare decently for the entrance ceremony…. .

Idia: That is the ultimate magic of “everyone” … the same pressure to erase an individual, the essence of going unprepared, by general theory. ×

Idia: I’m scared, I don’t want to become a young man without autonomy. ×

Riddle: Aghh …

Riddle: You say you can’t speak to anyone’s face, but ….. because you’re on the other side of the door, you can say anything you want!

Riddle: As I always thought, your attitude to inspire that person* has disturbed school morale.

T/N: I don’t know if it refers to people in general or someone specifically xD

Riddle: Above all, I feel uncomfortable. Stop now!

Idia: Hey, being the only person in the world… .that fear… I don’t know how that would feel…. .×

Riddle: Aghh! What you do offends me!

Riddle: I will never be an incompetent Bedroom Leader like you, Hikikomori!

Idia: I am I have a modest and confused personality unlike you who is covered in greed and greed …

Riddle:…. You, what did you just say?

Idia: Hi …

Idia: W-please, leave me alone! I’ve been doing well with this lifestyle since before you arrived.

Riddle: Aha, sure. Probably. It must have been easy.

Riddle: Why don’t you let Ortho Shroud take over so you don’t have to do anything!

Idia: Eh…. .

Riddle: You will not attend the meeting, nor will you prepare for the entrance ceremony, nor will you deal with the guests, since everything depends on you.

Riddle: Anyway, surely you won’t attend the next ceremony, right? Will you at least say hello to him?

Riddle: Sorry for wanting to force an irresponsible Bedroom Leader to work !!!

Idia: Ha? Did I not say that I would not attend the entrance ceremony? Can you stop making your own assumptions ??

Idia: I will be at the next entrance ceremony !!!

Riddle: Didn’t you just contradict yourself?

Riddle: Now I’m the fool, can I expect an inspiring speech from you?

Idia: Of course.

Riddle: Hey. Okay, so I’ll hold my scarf and I’ll be waiting for you!

Idia: ….

Idia: ….

Idia: …. I’m an idiot - - - !?

Idia: [… I will be at the next entrance ceremony]

Idia: It can’t be. It is impossible! Ahhhhh … what should I do? ……

The end.

× [if you don’t get it wrong, Idia was reading something while ignoring Riddle, who was standing outside his door.] X “D

I translate these chapters from Japanese with the help of translators so if there is a mistake in the translation it is my fault.  (´ ° ̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥ω ° ̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥ ｀)

#idia shroud #twisted wonderlanf #TW

[montagnarde1793]

Ribbons of Scarlet: A predictably terrible novel on the French Revolution (part 4)

Parts 1, 2, 3 and 5.

Inaccuracies: the minor, the inconsistent, the fuck no and the unintentionally hilarious

I have no intention of detailing every historical inaccuracy in this book. I’d say we’d be here all day, but we’ve already been here all day, so maybe all week?

The book is riddled with minor errors, oversimplifications and dubious interpretations — some of which could be chalked up in theory to writing from a limited POV, but this is not a book that allows for that kind of complexity. Opinions may be those of the characters, but explanations for events and who belongs to what group and so on tend to be those of the authors regardless of which character is speaking.

Given the level of detail of this book, I would count things like Condorcet’s being made a member of the Constituent Assembly or the Revolutionary Tribunal being founded by September 1792 minor errors. They might even have been deliberate (combining the Constituent and the Legislative Assemblies or the Tribunal of 27 August and the Revolutionary Tribunal, for “simplicity”’s sake).

“Les Enragés” is also an official group and that’s their official self-designation in the world of this novel. Um. Ok.

Also things like the complete lack of self-awareness revealed by the assumption that because 21st century Americans consider omelettes a breakfast food this must be a universal constant.

Anyway, I find that kind of thing irritating but pretty inevitable. Errare humanum est and all that.

Other minor errors are forgivable in and of themselves, I suppose, but indicative of a larger lack of understanding, similar to some of the implausible scenarios the authors set up (cf. Manon Roland’s random trip to Caen).

There’s a moment, for example, when one of the figures on trial for “conspiracy” in the red shirt affair appeals to the crowd by saying “I am suspected merely because I am an émigré.” (p. 490) which is hilarious when you realize the fact of being an émigré and returning to France after the cut-off date was already punishable by execution — a law pushed among others by our friends the reasonable, moderate “Girondins.” And I say this not to condemn them (on this point, at least) — there were actual, serious arguments in support of such a law — but to highlight a trend. The authors have decided that certain figures are reasonable, so they give them what they consider to be reasonable opinions, whether or not those opinions line up with those they actually held and, as we’ll see, they’ve decided others are dangerous extremists, so likewise they only get to do things the authors consider extreme, or at best hypocritical.

Usually there’s at least some consistency to the errors — too much in fact, as noted. But the fanciful claim that the guillotine was painted red and that everyone who was executed was dressed in red to hide the blood is repeated more than once, before being replaced with the accurate assertion that dressing the condemned in red was reserved for assassins (also arsonists and poisoners, in accordance with the penal code of 1791).

More serious are the “errors” that serve a certain narrative, like the repeated assertion that Louis XVI abolished torture and notably execution by breaking on the wheel. Er… no he didn’t. I’m going to charitably assume that the authors just confused torture for the purposes of obtaining a confession with torture as a punishment. Louis XVI abolished the former, not the latter. That may seem like a nitpick, but they make a very big fuss about it.

People were still being broken on the wheel until the implementation of the Constituent Assembly’s penal code which provided that all executions should be equal and as quick and painless as possible — ultimately leading to the adoption of the guillotine. The first execution by guillotine is apparently such a crucial event that we have to implausibly have Louis XVI’s sister sneak out and witness it, but we’ll just ignore the fact that the “hero” La Fayette’s cousin bloodily repressed the mutiny of Swiss soldiers in Nancy resulting in a number of hangings and one man being broken on the wheel — repression that La Fayette applauded — in 1790, because 1790 is a year in which nothing happened.

Besides, as is well known, La Fayette never did anything wrong (Sophie de Grouchy forgives him for firing on her when she was petitioning for a republic in 1791 (p. 509-510) so you should too, I guess. Though while we’re here, her signing the Champ de Mars petition is a pretty unlikely scenario, actually, given that only the Cordeliers petition remained after the Assembly’s 15 July decree and that even before that Condorcet didn’t dare to sign his articles in favor of a much less democratic republic than the Cordeliers were advocating for Le Républicain (which prudently stopped publication after 15 July).)

The abolition of torture thing is merely one of a number of errors or exaggeratedly charitable interpretations of Louis XVI’s actions to fit the myth of the fundamentally well-meaning, soft-hearted reformer who was just in over his head. Mme Élisabeth’s violence, while I commend it for its accuracy, serves to highlight her brother’s pacifism. We’re meant to believe that of course it was nothing but revolutionary slander/conspiracy theories to think he was actually intending to use foreign troops to restore himself to absolute power, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Mme Élisabeth asserts that she would like that to happen but her brother would never and Manon Roland confirms it from her point of view too.

On a similar note, Condorcet gets his usual “consensual figure” treatment. We’re unsurprisingly fed the myth of Condorcet as the paragon of democracy and feminism, with nary a touch of ambiguity. Even Pauline Léon can only reproach him with being ineffectual. That’s par for the course, as is framing the people’s fears of grain speculation as a conspiracy theory at least from Sophie de Grouchy’s point of view, though nothing in the text contradicts her at any point (p. 61), but framing Condorcet’s pre-revolutionary math lectures at the Lycée as him and his wife opening a school for popular education and Sophie de Grouchy personally teaching Reine Audu to read at her husband’s invitation… That’s pretty disingenuous.

On the other hand, nothing is too awful to be believed without question of the “radical” revolutionaries, whether it comes from dubious sources (as regards the myths about Lamballe being stripped naked and/or raped before or — depending on the “source” — after being massacred, or about Charlotte Corday’s head being slapped by the executioner and her body examined for evidence of virginity, or Robespierre’s lusting over Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe and personally participating in Catherine Théot’s rituals) or is just made up. Surely the September Massacres were bad enough without imagining that random bystanders — including children — were being raped and massacred in the streets? Since calling for the execution of adult royals based on their actual actions doesn’t sound sinister enough, let’s have Pauline Léon demand the massacre of Louis XVI’s underage children too!

On that note, I have to wonder whether part of the problem is that we’re so used to hearing about atrocities on a scale that dwarfs anything that happened in the 1790s that what the sources suggest — which could still be pretty ugly, don’t get me wrong — doesn’t live up to the hype. The French Revolution is built up in reactionary propaganda like it’s one of the periods of the worst violence in history. I suspect that it’s like with a scary movie: your imagination will conjure up something far scarier than what they could show you on screen. So, expecting to find horrors, you readily believe whichever sources (or “sources”) have the most of them and fill in the blanks when the sources don’t match up to your image of what terror, chaos and violence look like.

It’s basically just deductive reasoning: they say there was horrific violence, so I’m going to depict what must have happened according to my mental image of horrific violence. It’s no different really from deciding a character is reasonable and therefore giving them the opinions you find reasonable. But not only is this poor methodology (which perhaps you don’t care about, as a novelist), it sucks out everything that’s nuanced or complicated or surprising about history for the sake of flattering your own prejudices. And that’s a shame.

Anyway, as for the red shirt affair, it’s generally believed by historians to be a cynical maneuver on the part of the Committee of General Security* to make Robespierre look like a tyrant by executing a large group of supposed co-conspirators with would-be assassins Ladmirat/Ladmiral and Cécile Renault but needless to say — and following G. Lenotre’s lead — that’s not at all how it’s portrayed here. Robespierre is of course personally involved for his own (necessarily hypocritical) reasons. He wants Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe but in this telling she and her family have reason to believe he’s cozying up to royalists like them for personal political gain too. Oh, also, Saint-Just and Fouquier-Tinville are lusting over Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe too, because why the fuck not?

*To use the misleading standard translation (sûreté ≠ sécurité)

Particularly ludicrous is the insinuation that not only did the Convention abolish slavery entirely as an expedient — which, to be fair, some historians argue, though there’s ample evidence that proves there was more to it than that — but that they had to because otherwise the British and Spanish would come to the slaves’ aid first. As if the plantation owners were not doing their level best to deliver their colonies over to the British precisely to preserve slavery. That bit was just insulting.

But you know, why let a little thing like reality interfere with dividing the world into reasonable people and hypocritical demagogues and the mobs that they incite, am I right?

And it’s often the absence of certain realities that poses the greatest problem. Like, counterrevolutionaries aren’t a real threat, that’s all a figment of the revolutionaries’ imagination... but as usual this idea coexists uncomfortably with the existence of actual counterrevolutionaries in the narrative.

The war, which dominated everyone’s reality from 1792 onward, is barely mentioned. Manon Roland is made to treat the idea that the Prussians were well positioned to march on Paris after the surrender of Verdun as an absurd rumor (p. 268-269) and we’re meant to agree. (This was very much not an imaginary threat, if you didn’t know.)

Also! Get ready because I’m going to cite Serna favorably for once:

Il est frappant de noter combien l’historiographie s’est de suite intéressée aux massacres de Paris et aux prisonniers d’Orléans, sans vraiment porter son intérêt sur les morts civils sur le front et la mise à sac des villes et villages à la frontière, deux poids deux mesures qui ne peuvent qu’interroger.

–      Pierre Serna, « « La France est république » : Comment est né le Nouveau Régime dans le Patriote français de Brissot » dans Michel Biard, Philippe Bourdin, Hervé Leuwers et Pierre Serna, dir., 1792. Entrer en République, Paris, A. Colin, 2013, NP, note 37.

(Translation: “It’s striking to note how the historiography took an immediate interest in the massacres in Paris and the prisoners of Orléans, without really getting interested in the civilian deaths at the front and the sacking of cities and towns along the border, a double standard that we can’t help but question.”)

I mean, we know why: military violence, up to and including every kind of war crime, is normal and expected as long as it’s a proper war conducted between two foreign powers (though the various foyers of civil war also don’t really come up in this book). But yeah, that is a pretty big fucking hypocritical double standard, isn’t it? And one that this particular novel reflects rather than invents (as is also true of many of its other flaws, to be entirely fair).

It’s also particularly ironic, for a book that touts itself as feminist, that the real gains made by women regarding inheritance, marriage redefined as a contract between equal partners dissolvable by divorce, the rights of single mothers and illegitimate children and so on — even if the periods of Reaction that followed reversed them — are nowhere to be seen. Nor do we see women voting on the constitution of 1793 or fighting in the army or any of a number of things real women did. I concede that no one novel can be expected to show everything, but given the things they bent over backward to include, would it have been so difficult to include things that are thematically relevant?

This wouldn’t even piss me off so much except for the way Pauline Léon’s storyline ends. Her arc consists of her being convinced of the folly of those of her beliefs that the author doesn’t approve of so that she can be used as a mouthpiece for the moral the author wants us to take from all this and then being forced into marriage because she gets pregnant. And I cite (p. 433):

They would silence us all.

One woman at a time.

First the Angel of Assassination. Then Widow Capet, who had once been queen. Olympe de Gouges five days ago. Now proud Manon Roland.

A professed Girondin, Manon was still against tyranny and had been an advocate for the republic since the dawn of the Terror. Once, I wouldn’t have been able to admit that, but I could admit it now. Now that it’s too late.

And, when she tells Théophile Leclerc he got her pregnant, he replies (p. 435):

“‘We must marry. You’ve no other choice,’” he continued when I didn’t respond. […]

We had wanted liberty in France. But what freedom was there now? I had none. Théo would possess me utterly. I knew it, because the look her gave me had me wanting to crumble to the ground. All the choices I’d fought years for had been stripped away.

And now, I was nothing.

If there’s one point in history before the last 50 years or so that that’s not true it’s in 1793, when this scene is set. Will she be more comfortably off if she marries? Yes, and that would unfortunately be true pregnant or not. But there’s nothing forcing her to marry him if she doesn’t want to and even if she does he doesn’t own or control her under revolutionary marriage law. Were things perfect for women in 1793? Of course not, but given that they were a lot worse both before and especially after, I’m more than a little sick of 1793 being portrayed as the most misogynist of all the misogynist eras.

Ironically though, they omit Amar’s report and the closing of women’s political societies* which is a far more relevant and accurate point if you’re trying to make the case for revolutionary misogyny. Not to mention, it’s kind of baffling to leave it out of Pauline Léon’s storyline as it was targeted against the society she led in particular. (Her section ends instead with Manon Roland’s execution.) But I guess that would require introducing Amar and we can’t have people believing that Robespierre, Danton and Marat weren’t the only Montagnards; they might get confused otherwise. Maybe at this point I should just be glad they didn’t give Robespierre Amar’s speech in the name of consolidation of characters?

*NB, mixed societies were never closed (until the Thermidorian Reaction shut down all political clubs), so the result is a bit more ambiguous than is often claimed.

Anyway. We’ll finally conclude this mess in the next part…

#en anglais #French Revolution #Révolution française

[apptowonder]

Theology, Math and Logic, Pt I: Is Theology a "Calculus" or a Science? (A Brief Hot Take)

I wanted to share some thoughts that have been swirling around in my head about ideologies and thought systems that may have relevance to the conversation on theology. This stuff is fairly ethereal and I am not an expert in mathematics, modern philosophy or formal logic*, so I may butcher definitions. Bear with me. So the other day I was talking with an old friend of mine who I had just recently gotten back into touch with. He's a computer scientist and was describing to me what (to me) seemed like a very esoteric but useful system of mathematical theory (homotopic type theory, where you visualize sets of things as "paths" on an imaginary map and measure them by how they overlap and connect to each other). In laying out the principles of this theory, he used an approach that felt to me much more grounded in logic than in math equations per se, going principle by principle until he had more or less built up the concept in my mind. I described to my friend how his process of laying out an ideology felt very familiar to me. It sounded like the way some people talk about theology, laying out core principles and trying to build on them in a "systematic" way. Sometimes this works and produces a theological system that's elegant and beautiful. Sometimes it produces a system full of contradictions. Sometimes it produces a system that has all the right moving parts but it's hard to imagine why anyone would find it appealing or helpful. What intrigued me was the differences in approach between doing this in theology and doing this in math or other fields. I began to try and think about whether theology is more like math or more like science. There's a great video by Youtuber Vsauce about numbers beyond infinity.** In it, he briefly discusses how in science, your assumptions are based on assumptions about how the world works, and must be modified to most closely match the observable physical universe. In math, by contrast, all that needs to happen is that your assumptions are logically consistent and that they don't contradict themselves. Math can "create" systems that cannot exist in the physical universe but which still work from a mathematical standpoint because they are consistent. We use "calculus" to sometimes refer to not just the math system, but metaphorically to a way of thinking that is built on math-like prepositional logic ("If A=B" etc). A question comes to my mind: is theology a "calculus" or a science? And why does it matter? When I talked to my computer science friend about my theological studies, I framed it as a kind of calculus. I talked about how in the absence of an empirical mode to "verify" our understanding of God within the physical universe, theology must be more of a math than a science. I admitted that as a result of this phenomenon, I often evaluate theologies less by whether they are "true," but by whether they help people live more well-adjusted lives, as well as how well they mesh with my understanding of God. On an objective level, I think probably most of our ideas about God and none of our ideas about God are true. This is not to say I'm a relativist, just that the Creator of the universe is going to by nature be so far beyond our comprehension that we will necessarily get things wrong. I don't see this as a problem because we can still cultivate a loving relationship with God. On the other hand, the work of the Christian mystics, as well as the existence of a Bible with at least some historically verifiable events suggests that there are "science" elements of faith. The disciple is, in a sense, both a kardionaut and a field researcher, exploring the depths of their heart and the heart of God, as well as discerning how God is active in the world. Math also doesn't know what to do with paradoxes, but the Gospel and faith delight in paradoxes. There is so much about the both/and. Truth and grace. God and human. Already and not yet. Foolish wisdom and wise foolishness. In that sense, theology is more like the science which observes light as both a particle and a wave. It's also more like art. The student of theology can make radical moves with their "colors" on the canvas, mixing and combining palettes in unexpected ways to approach a portrait of the great Subject, God. Like a poet, they write and revise words in an attempt to come closer and closer to the image of God, an image which can be approximated but never fully captured except in the person of Christ. I think when people judge other people's faith (especially within the same broad religious tradition), they're operating under the assumption that theology is a science and the other person is doing it wrong. In a pluralist society, I wonder if the truth of the Gospel might be communicated more effectively if we allowed the pure light of God's love to be filtered through the lens of people's experience. Corrections may need to be made along the way, but if we think of the pursuit of God knowledge as more of a calculus by which we come to a way of life and discipleship that encourages our own unique flourishing under God, and less as a set of highly specific truth claims that must be defended at all costs, we might be better off. On the other hand, it's possible to lean too far into this thought pattern and to ignore both the witness of the Gospel and the ways in which God does tangibly "show up" in our lives. When academic theologians construct thought systems which read prettily off the page but which do not account for God's capacity to surprise and challenge us, then we need to remember that God does promise to show up in our lives, to be attentive to the "science" of the heart. *Nor, by the patristic/matristic definition am I truly a "theologian" (one who is able to speak about God from intimate direct experience a la St John or St Gregory Palamas), but I am at least a student of theology. **Link

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 112 Review

Eren gonna Eren Edition

“[He] lives in a psychic economy of aggression and domination. There are dominators and the dominated. No in between. Every attack he receives, every ego injury must be answered, rebalanced with some new aggression to reassert dominance. These efforts are often wildly self-destructive. We’ve seen the pattern again and again. […] We can’t know a man’s inner thoughts. But we’ve seen action and reaction more than enough times to infer, or rather deduce, his instincts and needs with some precision.”

Ladies, if he

Loves running

Has a really hairy chest

Is a total bad boy

He’s not your man, he’s Zeke Jeager, and…well, he still probably plans to screw you over.

You know what I love about the scenario Nicolo paints here? It’s that in spite of how much the story has changed, in spite of how much more grounded in real world issues the story has become, Paradis may still end up getting done in by a titan apocalypse.

Because  P A T H S !

So the EFC invades the restaurant, locks it down, and takes everyone hostage. My only beef is that they didn’t have Onyankopon open the door to leave only for Eren to be standing on the other side. A la this.

Wait, yes, that’s it! Onyankopon opens the door and Eren’s just there. Then we cut to a shot from Onyankopon’s perspective showing Eren looking into the camera. He casually raises a gun to the viewer like the thief at the end of The Great Train Robbery and…

K, so we finally get the EMA heart to heart we’ve all been waiting for.

….

I think Eren is being legit here. *dodges thrown chair*

Just let me explain!

When it comes to this scene, what needs to be understood is that Eren is performing a dominance ritual.

Dominance rituals are ritualistic acts of humiliation that primates, including humans, perform in order to establish a hierarchy. In a human context, dominance rituals are strongly associated with male alpha bro culture.

Donald Trump is the most famous practitioner of dominance rituals out there. For example, Trump is known to give his enemies various nicknames.

Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hilary, Pocahontas (Elizabeth Warren).

That’s a dominance ritual. Trump is asserting his dominance over others by referring to them by an insulting name. The fact that Trump only ends up coming off as immature is beside the point. Dominance rituals are inherently immature. When Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz refused to push back, Trump’s dominance over them was confirmed. It’s not rational, it’s primal. Plain and simple.

And that wall he keeps yammering on about? That’s a dominance ritual too. It’s a wall that Mexico is going to pay for. It’s about humiliation. It’s about humiliating the country that’s sending the “rapists” to invade us. (The wall also has an important revenge aspect to it, but that’s not relevant here.)

To this day, Trump continues to perform dominance rituals with his underlings. One time he called his Chief of Staff into the Oval Office and ordered him to swat a fly.

Eren has engaged in dominance rituals before. When he confronted Reiner in the basement, Eren establishes that if Reiner doesn’t do as told, he will blow up the building. Eren then commands Reiner to sit.

As though he were a dog.

It was a show of force. A display of power. The power Eren held over Reiner. And he was clearly enjoying it.

Next, Hange visits Eren in jail. They sincerely ask if Eren cares about what happens to Historia and Eren reacts by performing a dominance ritual on Hange. He asserts that they have no power over him and that he’s only in jail because he’s humoring them. Again, when it comes to Eren, it’s all about power and having power over others. Eren asserts his power, his dominance, over Hange by throttling them. Hange can do nothing but call him a perv.

In this way, (post-time skip) Eren is no different from Trump. They are both obsessed with power and being powerful. They are both determined to be in control and when they are both denied this, they both get pissed.

I keep banging on this drum, and the sound of it has probably driven would-be followers away, but this is the hill I will die on: the best way to understand Eren’s character is to analyze him through a trumpian lens. You simply cannot capture the perverseness of Eren’s inner self without making the comparison. It’s just too appropriate.

In this scene, Eren’s trumpiness has never been more obvious. It’s actually incredible. In this chapter, Eren truly became the President of the United States. Let’s go through the scene moment by moment and witness the highlights.

The scene starts with EMA (and gabi) sitting with their hands placed on the table. Because Eren ordered them to.

Eren does get into roasting Armin and Mikasa, but note the timeline of events in the conversation. First, Eren asserts he is free. He goes out of his way to emphasize that his actions are an expression of his wants and desires.

This isn’t important just because Eren is telling his compatriots that he’s not a puppet of Zeke. Freedom and self-determination have always been important to Eren.

Like most people, Eren thinks of freedom as not being controlled by others. As not being dominated. That’s not wrong; the problem is that because of his zero-sum thinking, Eren also associates freedom with being dominant. Not being dominated, but by being the dominator.

There are only two types of people in this world: the strong, who dominate the weak, and the weak, who are dominated, and you’re either one or the other.

When you’re weak you aren’t free because being weak necessarily means people can have power over you. Because there are only strong and weak people, it follows from this that being free means being strong and dominating others. When no one has power over you, when no one can restrict you, you are free. Because the world is zero-sum, as Eren erroneously thinks it to be, no one having power over him means he has power over them. That’s what zero-sum thinking means: if I have more power, then they necessarily have less.

Trump is similar. Donald Trump is notorious for his desire to dominate others. It defines his every action. I already mentioned his propensity to use his underlings as human flyswatters. You wanna know why he decided to run for President in the first place?

There aren’t any words for it. Just watch the clip and think about what this says about him.

Whenever Trump is attacked, he must punch back “ten times harder.” Because he has to reestablish his dominance. When you’re obsessed with being strong (in an utterly childish sense of the word), you must hit back harder. It’s about putting on a show, a show of your power.

In this chapter, Eren punched back “ten times harder.”

So Eren says he’s basically attained what he’s always wanted in this series: freedom.

And then.

Mikasa says he’s wrong. Not just that, but the way she says it.

“No. You’re being controlled.”

She flatly and bluntly says to his face that he is being controlled. That he is a slave, if you would. Later, when Armin said Eren was the real slave, Eren was pissed. Why would this statement by Mikasa be any different?

And to top it off, Mikasa took her hands off the table. Against Eren’s orders. So not only was she, and Armin by extension, calling him a slave, she also disobeyed him

In primal terms, this is a challenge. And it was only after this that Eren started roasting them.

Eren wishes to be in control. To have power. To dominate.

Eren chose to engage in this dominance ritual because in his mind they slighted him when they questioned his power and acted against his wishes. He did it to put them in their place.

If that sounds incredibly petty and immature…that’s because it is. Dominance rituals are not just inherently immature, they are a marker of immaturity. People perform dominance rituals because they are insecure. They need to be dominant. It’s an impulse, and people like Eren lack the maturity to control those impulses. For all his talk of hating people who surrender, the only one who has surrendered here is Eren.

He has surrendered to his baser human instincts.

In this regard, Eren is basically a toddler throwing a temper tantrum.

People have said that Eren must have been pretending to believe what he said because his past actions contradict what he said. Much like how some people claim Trump’s latest Twitter rant is part of some brilliant strategy, people have claimed Eren shat in the punch bowl because he’s playing 10-dimensional chess and everyone else is playing Go-Fish.

In reality, Eren shat in the punch bowl because he thinks shitting in the punch bowl at a party is how you show everyone who’s boss.

The idea that it’s either “Eren meant what he said and he hates his ‘friends’” or “Eren didn’t mean it, he cares about them” is a false dichotomy. I’m sure Eren genuinely cares for his friends. It’s just that Eren also has the emotional development of a three year old and his feelings got the better of him.

So now Eren launches into his rant. He targets Armin first.

Eren claims that people are the products of their memories. In general, Attack on Titan has operated on the assumption that people “live on” through their memories. This is called the psychological theory of personal identity. You are who you are by virtue of your experiences as archived in your memories.

This…is a very problematic and simplistic account of personal identity. There are philosophers who believe that our identity is grounded in our psychology, but their accounts are more complex than just, “you are your memories.” 

To quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“First, suppose a young student is fined for overdue library books. Later, as a middle-aged lawyer, she remembers paying the fine. Later still, in her dotage, she remembers her law career, but has entirely forgotten not only paying the fine but everything else she did in her youth. According to the memory criterion the young student is the middle-aged lawyer, the lawyer is the elderly woman, but the elderly woman is not the young student. This is an impossible result: if x and y are one and y and z are one, x and z cannot be two. Identity is transitive; memory continuity is not.

Second, it seems to belong to the very idea of remembering that you can remember only your own experiences. To remember paying a fine (or the experience of paying) is to remember yourself paying. That makes it trivial and uninformative to say that you are the person whose experiences you can remember—that is, that memory continuity is sufficient for personal identity. It is uninformative because you cannot know whether someone genuinely remembers a past experience without already knowing whether he is the one who had it. Suppose we want to know whether Blott, who exists now, is the same as Clott, whom we know to have existed at some time in the past. The memory criterion tells us that Blott is Clott just if Blott can now remember an experience Clott had at that past time. But Blott’s seeming to remember one of Clott’s experiences counts as genuine memory only if Blott actually is Clott. So we should already have to know whether Blott is Clott before we could apply the principle that is supposed to tell us whether she is. (There is, however, nothing trivial or uninformative about the claim that memory connections are necessary for us to persist.)

One response to the first problem is to modify the memory criterion by switching from direct to indirect memory connections: the old woman is the young student because she can recall experiences the lawyer had at a time when the lawyer remembered the student’s life. The second problem is traditionally met by replacing memory with a new concept, “retrocognition” or “quasi-memory”, which is just like memory but without the identity requirement: even if it is self-contradictory to say that you remember doing something you didn’t do but someone else did, you could still “quasi-remember” it.

Neither move gets us far, however, as both the original and the modified memory criteria face a more obvious problem: there are many times in one’s past that one cannot remember or quasi-remember at all, and to which one is not linked even indirectly by an overlapping chain of memories. For instance, there is no time when you could recall anything that happened to you while you dreamlessly slept last night. The memory criterion has the absurd implication that you have never existed at any time when you were unconscious. The person sleeping in your bed last night must have been someone else.”

This isn’t to fault the series though. Storytellers are allowed to take liberties with reality for the sake of their craft. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

No, problems only start to arise if readers, or even the author himself, start talking as though something profound is being discussed.

I assure you, there is nothing profound about this.

For the sake of continuing this analysis, let’s grant that this account of identity persistence is true. In that case, Eren is saying that because people are who they are by virtue of their memories, Armin’s actions aren’t entirely his own; he’s being influenced from beyond the grave by Bertolt. Given that the series already assumes memories=you, my sense is that Eren’s words, however harsh, will ultimately be vindicated.

Because it’s not like Eren being an asshole has stopped this series from siding with him before. (I’m still salty over last chapter.)

Eren declares that Armin is soft. Yep, nothing new here. It’s not surprising at all that Eren’s preferred method of action is the most aggressive one. Eren is a hawk and like many hard-right war hawks in our world, he thinks the doves are soft.

In the 1980s, when the US was negotiating a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union, Donald Trump gave some advice to the lead negotiator: show up late to the next meeting, walk over to where the top Soviet official was sitting, and, while remaining standing, bury your finger in his chest and say “Fuck you!” Trump’s idea of how to deal with foreign adversaries is to dominate them and show them who’s boss. Not much daylight between that and Eren here.

And then, the best part of the whole chapter happens:

“Armin, Bertolt’s gotten to your brain. You’re the one being controlled by the enemy.”

NO PUPPET, NO PUPPET, YOU’RE THE PUPPET!

This is basically something Trump said to Hillary Clinton in a debate once. I can’t believe this is happening.

Taking someone’s criticism of you and throwing it back at them (instead of, ya know, refuting the criticism) is a classic trumpian maneuver. Most recently, Trump did it against his former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson.

“I’m just saying. There’s nothing further removed from freedom than ignorance.”

The MC of this manga is a living YouTube comments section!

GoddamnitAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Okay, next is Mikasa.

Snoo here says both her physical strength and the strength of her concern for him is derived from her Ackerblood.

It’s no secret that Eren resents Mikasa for how much she cares for him. Even as recently as chapter 69, Eren still protests when Mikasa tells him to rest. Here, Eren even uses the word “clinginess” to describe that aspect of Mikasa he thinks the ackerblood explains. I wouldn’t be surprised if his mean spiritedness in explaining this was at least partially motivated by this resentment.

As much of a 4channer Eren is being here, the fact that Mikasa involuntarily protects Eren is compelling evidence of him being right. As with Armin, I wouldn’t be surprised if the series ultimately takes the stance that Eren is an asshole, but also has a point. Because apparently we live in a world where everyone has a point.

And then Eren does the most damning thing he’s ever done in this series.

Eren, channeling all the alpha bro smugness in the universe, literally turns his nose up at Mikasa and, in what can only be described as obscene racism, declares that the Ackermanns are a slave race and that he hates them for it.

F!@#. This. Guy.

Oh, and making Mikasa cry is bad too. That’s important, just not in the same way. Feeling the need to emotionally annihilate someone makes you a shitty person. But I would argue that believing in “slave races” and hating people for being a member of that race is even shittier.

When Eren says Mikasa is a slave, he not only denies her agency. He denies her personhood. That is obscene.

That said, my money is on Eren’s saying he’s always hated Mikasa being more hot air than anything else. Like I said, this is a dominance ritual; Eren is doing this to show his power over Mikasa.

Mission accomplished.

And take note: Eren says he hates the submissive even as he demands submission from others. He gets pissed when Mikasa takes her hands off the table against his orders, yet hates people who blindly follow orders.

This is not hypocrisy.

To understand why, look…

:]

At Donald Trump.

Trump demands subservience from Republican members of Congress, but it is no secret that he holds them in contempt for that very subservience. Trump/Eren’s obsession with being strong is partly motivated by their disdain for the weak. Thus, they demand obedience even as they hate the obedient.

Finally, the dominance ritual turns physical. Eren wails on Armin, beating him senseless. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to utterly dominate Armin like he did. But Eren wants to make it clear how much bigger his biceps are, so there you have it.

Now Eren’s on his way to Shighanshina and Zeke has escaped. Like two star-crossed lovers put on a path set by fate, Zeke and Eren seem destined to meet up again. When they do, they’ll be able to mobilize the Wall Titans.

Eren is a lot like Trump, but there are major differences. Most important is that Eren is even more dangerous than Trump.

Trump is a wannabe dictator. He admires despots the world over, most likely because of how those despots have come to dominate their countries. But Trump himself lacks the competence to undermine American democracy and install himself as dictator.

But Eren is very much a competent person. He isn’t senescent like Trump is. He’s young, physically strong, and smart. He is emotionally volatile, and hopefully Armin and co. will find a way to use that against him, but so far this hasn’t been a problem for him. This makes him a far more potent threat.

There are three entities in this story that could fairly be described as evil and they’re the Marleyans, Zeke, and Eren. They are all dangerously competent. Meanwhile, the ostensible good guys, Paradis, have been made to look like the Keystone Cops.

So what’s this they say about the EFC controlling everything now? Did the populace rise up against the government off panel or something?

I know I’m probably being pedantic here, but this is really silly to me. They really expect us to believe that a rebel force of just 100 soldiers was able to take over- 

*checks notes*

-basically everything in just a couple of days?

Hopefully they’ll elaborate on this in the next chapter. My guess is that because the people so strongly support Eren’s cause, the government’s authority isn’t recognized in large swathes of Walldian territory.

Because apparently I was right and Eren IS a folk hero to these people. Good grief.

The final note here goes to the issue of Eren’s supposedly free will.

It’s been speculated that Eren is being coerced in some way. I’ve seen theories ranging from, “Zeke made him do it,” to, “Eren’s being mind-controlled by the Attack Titan.” However, as I’ve laid out in this post, my sense is that Eren’s actions here aren’t a hard break from his already established character. If he is being coerced, then it’s not so much that he’s being forced to act out of character. Rather, it’s more like the negative aspects of his character have been exaggerated.

This is the strongest reason to believe Eren is being controlled in some way. It’s not unbelievable that the little kid we met in chapter 1 would grow up to become the man we saw in chapter 112. What’s harder to believe is that Eren’s personality would undergo such…radicalization in such a short period of time.

Eren has always seen the world in a zero-sum, strong vs weak kind of way. Could this aspect of his personality have festered into what we saw in this chapter? Yes, if given enough time, but Eren looks to have made the evolution seemingly overnight.

Eren has been slighted before and he has responded with aggression, but IIRC he’s never done so when the slighter is someone he loves or respects. Eren was always getting to fights with Jean during their trainee days in part because of Eren’s problem with being overly aggressive. But part of it was also just how much Jean’s cowardice pissed him off. Jean was someone Eren had no respect for and I’m sure that was partly why Eren was so quick to tussle with him.

Compare this to Mikasa. Mikasa has been motherly towards Eren before, sometimes even in a mortifyingly public way. For a man who cares about strength and being strong, his ego was probably smarting. But in spite of that, Eren rarely lashed out at her. He protested, sure, but it’s not like he tried to make her cry.

For Eren to go from this to what we see now is a bit hard to swallow, which is why I will admit that the mind-control theory can’t be ruled out.

But I wish it could be.

Attack on Titan could be the story of a boy who just wants to protect what he cares about, but, through their own character flaws, grows up to become a despicable human being. But all this just being mind-control would ruin that.

Throughout this post I’ve drawn parallels between Eren and Donald Trump. The fact that this comparison can be drawn at all not only makes Eren’s character intriguing. It makes it politically relevant.

Where do people like Donald Trump come from? Where do believers in right-wing nationalism in general come from? This story could be an exploration of that.

Eren doing these awful things because he’s been put down a path of radicalization is interesting and even socially relevant.

Eren doing these awful things because he’s being controlled by the big, bad Attack Titan is dumb, Saturday-morning cartoon s!@#.

The prospect of mind-control Eren is not welcome and I hope this theory is wrong. 

…

…

UPRISING 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO!

#snk 112 #snk chapter 112 #attack on titan #shingeki no kyojin #spoilers

[pricechecktranslations]

Maybe as a translator I shouldn't really get involved in fan theorizing and arguments (I really try not to, honestly, unless someone specifically asks my opinion), but I've been seeing this pop up for several months now and I feel like voicing my take on it. I've also found out that apparently my copy of the book isn't coming in until next Wednesday, so I'm not...in a bad mood necessarily but I'm in an antsy one I suppose.

The girl in Full Moon Laboratory is not some big secret at this point, it's not Levia, it's Irina. I am not arguing that it was always intended to be Irina, but it is Irina now.

First I'm going to provide arguments that I've seen as to why it's Levia, deconstruct them, and then provide arguments as to why it's Irina. Note that like many theories on the Mysterious Rin Character, it assumes from hints in the songs that it's the same person as in Clockwork Lullaby and Wordplay. Note also that I am starting to think that while they were the same character originally, mothy may have changed his mind on that, and most of the more recent references to this trilogy have focused exclusively on Full Moon Laboratory.

Let's begin. My argument gets fairly long so I've put it under a cut.

Arguments I've seen that it's Levia and not Irina:

The song features a Rin character, and Levia is a Rin character/Is voiced by Rin/her copies are Rin characters. + Irina is not a Rin character.

This means almost nothing in the current day and age of mothy's work. The song was made a very long time ago, back when he might have had different ideas about where the series was going. I'm not going to argue it's necessarily a retcon but one is plausible. Especially considering that Irina's vocaloid, Iroha, hadn't been released at the time. The fact that the character he depicts is wearing Rin's vocaloid outfit suggests that he didn't have an actual character design in mind when he made it, similar to how Riliane's dress got retconned upon actually developing Daughter of Evil as a story.

Levia is a scientist who wore a labcoat, and the girl in Full Moon Laboratory mentions performing experiments that stain her labcoat red.

Leva is stated to have been a psychiatrist. She was not someone who did experiments on the body, that was Behemo. She was tasked with souls and minds. There is no point during this where she would have been doing something that would stain her labcoat.

The song talks about two people fusing, which could be a reference to how Levia and Behemo ended up as one person inside Elluka/the two of them ending up in a dragon form together.

There's nothing that directly contradicts this but it's a weird thing to mention in the timeline of the song, which is associated with being during the time of her experiments. Levia was not performing any experiments as a dragon or in Elluka. Furthermore, as I'll go into later, this is one of the lines rewritten to be about Irina in The Song I Heard Somewhere.

In The Song I Heard Somewhere, Irina says that the song (the Clockwork Lullaby) changes every era. In Full Moon Laboratory and Wordplay, the character sings "la la la la lu lu lu" instead of "lu li la" like Irina does in TSIHS, which means FML and the rest must take place in a different era. This era is the Second Period, which is where Levia comes from.

This one involves so many leaps in logic to get here that as far as I'm concerned it's complete hogwash. First it requires the assumption that her going "la la la la lu lu lu" is her singing the Clockwork Lullaby and not just vocalizing (which I can see, fair enough). Then it requires the assumption that when she says era, she means the periods, and the Second Period in particular (an era is just a long span of time. She could be referring to the fall of the Magic Kingdom Levianta as being the changing of an era, for example). It also assumes that mothy hasn't retconned that melody at all, even though during TSIHS he's explicitly retconning lyrics from FML.

The girl in Clockwork Lullaby (assumed to be in the Third Period now because she sings lu li la) talks about humans as though she's not one herself.

Again, nothing to contradict this but neither is Irina. She's a ghoul child, and eventually ends up in a cat body.

Levia was researching the duality of mankind, something that the girl from Wordplay was also doing.

Not directly contradicted but the events in Wordplay describe the character experiencing the duality of mankind, not researching it. And it described events that we have not yet seen in regard to Levia, such as being abandoned.

The similarities between The Song I Heard Somewhere" and "Full Moon Laboratory" are meant to parallel the duality of Irina and Levia.

I could buy this if there was stronger evidence that FML actually was about Levia. As it is this feels like a poor attempt at just explaining away the glaringly obvious signals mothy is sending.

FML talks about someone having tried to create her, and project MA tried to create Levia through birth.

First off, that's a mistranslation (and I've seen this song referenced that way more than once so that's why I'm addressing that here). It's someone who DID create her. Secondly, Levia has a mother. She was given birth to, ergo it's unlikely she would consider anyone as having "created" her. Not to mention, she's never tried to create anyone else.

.

Arguments that it's Irina (which rely on concrete, recent facts and not assumptions or speculation):

The Song I Heard Somewhere explicitly references lines in Full Moon Laboratory, with minor alterations to better fit Irina's personal situation. These lines are "On the night of the full moon the experiment begins", "Supposing I joined together two so that they became one/They couldn’t become double", "Before disappearing, he said/I won’t return here again, continue with your experiments”, "On the night of a new moon my revenge begins", and "Just like that person made me/This time I’ll turn people 'evil'".

Having done this, the song associates FML with Irina. Her creation refers to having been made by Seth and transferred into a red cat by him later, her experiments being done to honor the mission he gave her/turn more people into HERs like him, his disappearance being linked to his "death" from the catastrophe, etc.

In the Judgment of Corruption novel, Irina is described as having been born as the Red Cat Sorceress inside a laboratory called Lunaca Labora. This is stated to be old Leviantan, which is translated to mean "Full Moon Laboratory.

Do I really have to explain this one? TSIHS references the song Full Moon Laboratory while dealing with her transference into a red cat. Her transference is then explicitly said to have taken place in a location called "Full Moon Laboratory".

.

These might not seem like much but it really doesn't take a lot of evidence to support this theory when the arguments don't involve assumptions or guesswork but actual bright neon signs pointing to a specific character that can't be dismissed because they are outright stated directly. These have taken place within the last two years, meaning that whatever mothy might have had in mind when he first wrote the song, this is the direction he's going with it now.

The biggest reason why I don't think it's Levia is that most of what people go to for evidence is from a long time ago even though Levia herself was only introduced relatively recently. Mothy has shown that he's willing to retcon many of his oldest works to fit better with the narrative he's making now (changing "just like Hansel and Gretel" to "Our names are Hansel and Gretel" in Abandonment, all of the rewrites in Cloture and Wiegenlied, etc). Therefore, I think that Wordplay, Clockwork Lullaby, and FML themselves are unreliable as evidence, and it's better to go to what he's saying about all that stuff now.

Now, perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps he'll pull in a twist. But my point is, there is nothing, I mean nothing, that mothy has said in his story recently that directly and unambiguously associates Levia with Full Moon Laboratory, and any and all theories on the topic require assumptions and "well, these two situations could be similar if you look at it a certain way". Irina has two very clear, specific references to FML to her name. It's clear which one he's indicating as being the character in the song at this point.

#evillious chronicles #()price speaks #regardless of whether or not it's actually her it's obvious what he wants us to assume

[americanliberation]

Murray Rothbard Quotes Rebuttal

I’m not a political scientist or philosopher, but here my thoughts on some of these 33 choice quotes from Murray Rothbard. As a teenager, I too considered myself a Libertarian or Anarchist, but that was before I was really had a grasp of the role that government plays in the maintenance of the Suburban lifestyle that my life grew out of. Now these attitudes seem embarrassingly selfish and ignorant...lost in blue-sky philosophical absolutes and lacking in realism or nuance.

“If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real world he must also have the right to sustain his life.”

What does ‘having a right’ consist of? A justification in one’s own mind? A guarantee from a legal system? How are individuals to be protected from violations of their rights except by some enforcement agency that governs those cases? Yes, sure in theory everyone should ‘have the right’ to sustain their life, but to what degree and by what means? Does my “life” include my preference for having several large estates with servants, or does it only allow me to avoid starvation and hypothermia? What happens when my rights to sustain my life conflict with your rights to do the same?

“On the free market, it is a happy fact that the maximization of the wealth of one person or group redounds to the benefit of all; but in the political realm, the realm of the State, a maximization of income and wealth can only accrue parasitically to the State and its rulers at the expense of the rest of society.”

This seems laughably in contradiction to reality. First of all what ‘free market’ has ever existed? Secondly, what benefit to all is redounded by the maximization of wealth by hoarding unoccupied housing to control the price of rent, or by investing in off shore bank accounts that force others to bear the burden of funding the commons? How does making money by manipulation of financial market fluctuations not count as ‘accruing parasitically to the investor at the expense of the rest of society’? When a state government spends money, it does things like employs citizens to improve physical infrastructure or subsidizes citizens directly who might otherwise suffer or die simply because they lack a constant cash flow at some vulnerable point in their life.

“The essential activities of the State necessarily constitute criminal aggression and depredation of the just rights of private property of its subjects (including self-ownership).” 

Criminal according to whom? Doesn’t the State define what is and what isn’t a crime? Sure, aggression and some degree of control over citizens and their property is a feature of government, but any large organization could exercise such control and aggression over individuals in the absence of a State also. Ideally, nobody should ever resort to violence for any reason, but in reality, violence is a very easy way for people to get what they think they want or need from other people. Is it better to have individuals and gangs fight each other directly a la Mad Max, or is it better to pay for an organization to manage such threats using a system of laws, courts, police, and military?

“The State, by its very nature, must violate the generally accepted moral laws to which most people adhere.”

Is it realistic to expect that a State (or City, Company, or Mercenary Army), being a supra-individual organization maintained by many individuals, would not behave in ways that individuals don’t. It is also a (typically Libertarian) presumption that moral ‘laws’ would be ‘generally accepted’ or adhered to in the absence of a larger organization’s power to enforce its policies.

“The State says that citizens may not take from another by force and against his will that which belongs to another. And yet the State…does just that.”

It seems sophistic and naive to see this as surprising. Why limit this to a State though? Don’t churches preach against materialism while using donations to build lavish empires? Don’t companies steal ideas and human resources from each other while making their employees sign Non-Disclosure and Non-Compete agreements? Yes, part of the injustice of power is hypocrisy. That in no way says anything about the superiority of pre-State power to State power.

“To go beyond one’s right of self-defense would be to aggress on the rights of others, a violation of one’s legal duty. And yet the State by its claimed monopoly forcibly imposes its jurisdiction on persons who may have done nothing wrong. By doing so it aggresses against the rights of its citizens, something which its rules say citizens may not do.”

This is pretty much the same as the previous. OMGz, powerful organizations are hypocritical and aggressive! Who would have thought? It seems painfully obvious to me that removing the State necessarily removes citizen-hood as well, so any expectation of civility would be based purely on the idea that people (including the violent sadists that Rothbard must imagine are running all States and executing their policies) will suddenly stop being aggressive and hypocritical once there is no State to punish them.

“The State is an inherently illegitimate institution of organized aggression, of organized and regularized crime against the persons and properties of its subjects… a profoundly antisocial institution which lives parasitically off of the productive activities of private citizens.”

This seems ridiculously arbitrary in its selective bias. Large modern States contain many institutions, most of which are quite benign and beneficial. Who plows the interstate highways when there is a snow storm or fights forest fires when they impinge on cities? How would paying fees for such services to thousands of private contractors be any different than what a State does? Rothbard’s assertion is no truer than it’s opposite. States such as the Nordic countries would seem to be legitimate and profoundly social institutions which nurture and protect the citizens that make them up, their properties, and their productive activities. A State is nothing but an Anthropological phase of human civilization. The State (agriculture) improves upon the chiefdom (pastoralism), the tribe (horticulture), and the band (foraging) by employing individuals as temporarily appointed or elected office-holders rather than individuals inheriting power automatically for life from a ruling family.

“Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the state is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist.”

Again, there are counter factual examples to this unsupported assertion right now. Not every State expands by ever greater incursions on private individuals or enterprises, nor are states inherently anti-capitalist. Look at Norway or China.

“We must, therefore, emphasize that ‘we’ are not the government; the government is not ‘us.’ The government does not in any accurate sense ‘represent’ the majority of the people.” 

Eh. Governments are just groups of individuals, just like businesses or churches or gangs. They can represent the majority of ‘the people’ or they can represent powerful minorities, or they can represent the will of some particular individual. At least Democratic governments have statutes in writing that explicitly demand a formal and potentially enforceable commitment to represent the majority of the people. What else has that but a Democratic State?

“The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State…is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.” 

I certainly don’t leap to the necessity of the State, but I do understand that with all of its imperfections, it is an improvement over chiefdoms, tribes, and bands which would inevitably tend to fill any vacuum left in the absence of a State. There could also be a future sociopolitical form for humans that would transcend Statism, Capitalism, and Socialism. I have had some ideas for doing this.

“All of the services commonly thought to require the State…can be and have been supplied far more efficiently and certainly more morally by private persons. The State is in no sense required by the nature of man; quite the contrary.”

Wow, this is quite near sighted and in complete ignorance of Anthropology (my undergraduate degree). It is like saying that we are perfectly capable of breathing without an atmosphere because SCUBA gear exists. The bigger the business, the more it relies on the large scale stability that governments attempt to provide. Sure Amazon does a fantastic job of using taxpayer’s roads to efficiently deliver packages, but Amazon also has a reputation for treating many of its employees poorly. There is no indication that a world run by Amazon and Walmart would be any more moral or efficient than a Democratic government. To the contrary, we have only to look to the history of the Congo Free State to see what happens when ‘private persons’ are left to rule by their own unobstructed whims. I’m not really seeing anything worth commenting further on in this list. They all seem to just be ad hoc complaints about government based on the naive assumption that their absence would only result in positive effects and not threaten the basic civility that is taken for granted. Even the most superficial consideration of the empirical consequences of a Stateless power vacuum would suggest that such civility is more fragile and State-dependent than Rothbard imagines.

#Libertarianism

[clubofinfo]

Expert: The overthrow of iniquitous power relations is a point many would celebrate. But such overthrows are themselves marked by the contradiction of their origins. Any revolution must, by its very nature, suffer inconsistency, defeats and weaknesses. In the United States, a different sort of sexual revolution is taking place.  It is not linked to liberation in the way sex was linked to the emancipation of the body in previous decades. There is something distinctly sombre, calculating, and determinedly forceful about the movement to wrest control from men who generally have had it good in the power stakes. Cloaks and covers are being blown. Those being placed on the pyre for burning are now so numerous as to warrant a multitude of scrapbooks and scribbles.  From across the political spectrum, the casualties are accumulating in the media, political and publicity circuit. Figures considered creature of good repute have been cast to the wolves.  A total inversion seems to be taking place, from the newspaper cycle to the White House. The problem with such matters is that the allegation has started to assume a substitute force of conviction. It has become sufficient for individuals to lose their positions because allegations, untested by the wearing rigour of cross-examination and investigation, have assumed the force of de facto law. Even within this accelerating movement, there are disagreements about how far one should go in dismembering the order and its attributes. Are some of the figures being scalped in this business receiving unjust attention? Take last month’s disagreement shown by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner behind the series Girls, both taking to the barricades defending a friend and writer on the show, Murray Miller, against the accusations of Aurora Perrineau. To be fair to Perrineau, she has not left it at a mere accusation, hoping to get away with easy gain. According to Deputy Charles Moore of the LA County Sheriff’s Department, she has gone so far as to file a police report against Miller citing sexual assault. Miller, through his lawyer, rubbished the claims, deeming them “outrageous”. But the point of interest here, at least from the heady consequences arising from Me Too righteousness, is the disagreement it has caused those who would otherwise have taken the torches to the bundles. Dunham and Konner are careful to pay appropriate tribute.  “During the windfall of deeply necessary accusations over the last few months in Hollywood, we have been thrilled to see so many women’s voices heard and dark experiences in this industry justified.” As with every feminist, claimed the co-showrunners, the occasion was of celebration. But there came a danger with too much conviction as with “every time of change there are also incidences of the culture, in its enthusiasm and zeal, taking down the wrong targets.” The risks from moving from a selective, judicious targeting of deserving targets – those men who have been resting on crumpled laurels for decades, drawing benefits from a system that has, within it, its own apologetics – to a totalitarian presumption: that all in the various industries must, by virtue of being there, necessarily assault or abuse, are considerable.  To that end, they trigger a sense of power dynamics that should require testing and investigation rather than unquestioned, dogmatic acceptance. For Dunham and Konner, the case against Miller was full proof. (The point here is interesting, in so far as it presumes a certainty untested in the courts.)  “While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story, our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.”  The figure is itself suggestive, extracted from a realm of unreliability. Dunham, after being subjected to a predictable salvo of baying critics, subsequently issued a statement claiming how she “naively believed it was important to share my perspective on my friend’s situation as it transpired behind the scenes over the last few months.” That she had even assumed such a position of scepticism immediately catapulted her into the circles of fire. Gilliam B. White, writing for The Atlantic, simply assumed a robotically programmed position in favour of Miller’s accuser, using a predictable cocktail of identity politics to undermine a defence.  “Intentionally or not, Dunham’s initial call to scrutinize Perrineau, a biracial actress, but not Miller, fed into an implicit message that believability, sympathy, and public rage are reserved only for certain women.” Rather daftly, such a stance repudiates evidence of conduct in favour of identity as truth, a point that is equally flawed from whichever racial perspective one punts for. Perrineau should hardly deserve exceptional treatment in the stakes of proving claims because she is biracial, a sort of exotic assumption of credibility. But the culture of complaint, as Robert Hughes termed it, has no limits the hyperventilating circles of US identity politics. Instances of such overtaxing zeal are starting to grow.  Proportion and evidence were certainly left wanting regarding an accusation (note the singular) against the Australian actor, Geoffrey Rush.  The Australian paper, The Daily Telegraph, sniffed a story that the Sydney Theatre Company had received a complaint “alleging that Mr. Geoffrey Rush had engaged in inappropriate behaviour.” Not being a paper known for its attention to detail, it ran a headline claiming Rush to be “KING LEER”.  This was a howler other papers, notably the companion Herald Sun, refused to run with.  “The Tele are running with a yarn,” went a text message to the paper’s staff, “which is highly libellous.” Rush responded in kind, launching a defamation suit. “It is an action I am taking in order to redress the slurs, innuendo and hyperbole they have created around my standing in the entertainment industry and greater community.” Detached from probative fields of inquiry, the sexual accusation becomes dynamite and dirt. It destroys the public image, fracturing the brand. Many a figure would no doubt deserve it, but equally, such a figure would surely be entitled to that concept that lacks currency so often in public debate: natural justice. http://clubof.info/