#it also talks about stagnation for most of the 20th century

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I believe a civilisation that conserves is one that will decay because it is afraid of going forward and attributes more importance to memory than the future. The strongest civilisations are those without memory - those capable of complete forgetfulness. They are strong enough to destroy because they know they can replace what is destroyed. Today our musical civilisation is not strong; it shows clear signs of withering… […] Conducting has forced me to absorb a great deal of history, so much so, in fact, that history seems more than ever to me a great burden. In my opinion we must get rid of it once and for all.

- Pierre Boulez (in 1975...he changed his mind in the 1990s)

Frenchman Pierre Boulez was classical music’s most celebrated maverick, widely regarded as the 20th century’s greatest innovator of classical music. Boulez’s 1967 proclamation that the answer to the stagnation of opera was to “blow the opera houses up”, is just one of many bold and candid statements that have won him recognition as one of classical music’s most outspoken and controversial figures.

But he has also said: “I don’t want my statements to be frozen in time. A date should always be attached to them. Certainly if you take a picture of yourself 30 years ago, that same picture cannot be used as a picture of yourself today.” His incendiary comments, whether directed at his contemporaries (he has described Duchamp as ‘a pompous bore’, Cage as ‘a performing monkey’, and Stockhausen, ‘a hippie’), or more general topics such as culture and history, however, suggest that he enjoyed the controversy.

It was Boulez who once declared, without a trace of irony, that any composer who did not acknowledge the necessity of Schoenberg’s 12-tone system was “useless”, and who wrote caustic articles such as “Schoenberg Is Dead”, criticising the Austrian composer’s approach just months after his death in 1951.

I find much to disagree with Boulez especially about his remarks on wiping out civilisations and defacing all past art, including da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

But other times I agree 100% such as when he said, “In the provincial town of Paris the museum is very badly looked after. The Paris Opera is full of dust and crap, to put it plainly. The tourists still go there because you ‘have to have seen’ the Paris Opera. It’s on the itinerary, just like the Folies-Bergere or the Invalides, where Napoleon’s tomb is. […] These operatic tourists make me vomit. If I write a work for the stage I certainly won’t write it for star-fanciers; I shall be thinking of a public that has an extensive knowledge of the theatre.”

Or his views on minimalist music, “If you want a kind of supermarket aesthetic, OK, do that, nobody will be against it, but everybody will eventually forget it because each generation will create its own supermarket music - like produce that after eight days is rotten and you can’t eat it anymore and have to toss it away.”

Many young composers of his generation in the 1960s and since read his writings, but they didn’t always know his music. And yet what you might not guess from the polemics is the sheer beauty of his compositions.

Messiaen, who taught Boulez, would say of him that, underneath it all, he was simply a poet. Messiaen also believed it would take a long time for the wider public to really understand Boulez’s music, because it has a very particular and original sensibility. Messiaen would talk with pride of his former student, describing him as a formidable and immense talent, though when young “he was like a flayed lion”. Boulez was indeed a very angry young man.

He attacked anything in sight, including those who had taught him, such as René Leibowitz, a Schoenberg disciple who was largely responsible for introducing serialism to Paris. At one point, Boulez even turned against Messiaen, who had done so much to encourage and help him, and it was five years before their relationship was restored.

Boulez grew up in Nazi-occupied France. He was 20 when the Second wWorld War ended. The continent had to make itself anew. Messiaen used to describe travelling home on the Metro with Boulez after classes. Boulez would say “Who’s going to put music right? It’s in such a terrible state.”

And Messiaen would reply: “You.”

He considered himself from his earliest days to have an almost Napoleonic mission regarding music and its cultural role. His ambition was not only to compose, but to change the attitude of the public, institutions in France and - later - the wider western world with regard to modernism. He initially pursued this aim with a heightened form of ideological dogmatism. The works of the Second Viennese School, and composers such as Bartók and Varèse, were not played at all in Paris in the late 40s; that they are now part of the international concert repertoire is in large part due to Boulez.

As a conductor, his approach to the early modernist masterpieces has had a tremendous impact on the way they are considered by younger conductors and heard by audiences. He made stupendous recordings of hundreds of pieces of music – among them works by his illustrious contemporaries Carter, Ligeti, Kurtág, Stockhausen, Berio and Birtwistle - and has inspired and helped generations of younger composers.

Through the power of his personality, the scale of his reputation and his considerable personal charm, Boulez has made big things happen, way beyond the confines of manuscript paper. Paris’s new concert hall, the Philharmonie de Paris, owes its existence to him, as does the rest of the Cité de la Musique, his own group the Ensemble Intercontemporain and IRCAM, the musical research institution attached to the Pompidou Centre.

In his own music, however, he moved away from Serialism, the great rallying cry of his youth, and over the years further distanced himself from the concept, now viewing it with scepticism. For me, his best compositions are not the ones from his early years but the works in which the foundations of his earlier idiom are treated much more freely and with greater fantasy. I believe that only when he accepted he was fundamentally a French composer did he find his true voice.

Le Marteau sans maître (1953-57) was a breakthrough. It is a work in which you can also hear the profound influence of extra-European music, above all from Asia and Africa. This radically alters the sonority and the music’s sense of time and direction, as well as its expressive viewpoint and ethos. Boulez was by no means the first French composer to be open to, and ravished by, eastern music – it had already had a transformative effect on the father of modern music, Debussy, and on succeeding generations – but he took it a stage further, and the curious marriage between his already transforming serial universe and the extra‑European world produced a unique style.

For me, his quasi-symphonic portrait of Pli selon pli, portrait de Mallarmé – completed in the early 60s – is a greater masterpiece, and the decades that followed produced gem after gem: Eclat/Multiples, Cummings Ist der Dichter, explosante-fixe, Sur Incises. There is no better postwar musical piece written for orchestra than Notations, his five hyper-elaborate orchestral canvases, all based on very simple serial pieces he wrote for the piano in his early 20s.

Arguably the most important composer-conductor since Mahler, Boulez knows the orchestra more intimately than any of his colleagues, and these short, dazzling showpieces have an intoxicating exuberance and elegance.

Boulez only published around 30 works in his lifetime. When he died at 90 years old in 2015, I’m sure he regretted that he hadn’t written more. But I suspect he has not had the easiest of relationships with his muse. This is a man with a vastly refined and critical mind. His intelligence is so questioning and extreme, and his aural imagination so sensitive and acute, that composing must have been a taxing experience. The world today doesn’t need huge numbers of pieces, as it did in, say, Haydn’s time. What are needed, surely, are essential statements, singular and unique works. And these he has provided, without question by the time the curtain came down on his life.

Having cultivated the image of the angry young man of new music in the post-war years, it took a long time in public perception for the austere, uncompromising radical to morph into the hugely respected and revered figure Boulez became in the last decades of his life. As he mellowed further over the following decades, he also began to conduct music by a number of composers he would surely have dismissed out of hand in his hardline early years. That inevitably required some quiet revisionism.

I have an enormous regard for his rendition of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. It’s a surprising landmark in every sense. Boulez’s performance of Patrice Chéreau’s centenary production of the Ring Cycle shocked and then seduced audiences at Bayreuth. Filmed in 1980, it’s still among the most searingly insightful readings of the cycle, musically and dramatically, ever performed. Another of the highlights of Boulez’s operatic career, this 1992 performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in Peter Stein’s production at Welsh National Opera revealed the expressivity, focus, and clarity that Boulez brought to everything he conducted.

Like everything he conducted, though, it was the precision and lucidity of his performances that were so revealing, and which illuminated a range of 20th-century music in a way that few conductors before him had ever approached. And while a good handful of Boulez’s own works – the second and third piano sonatas, Le Marteau Sans Maître, Pli Selon Pli, Eclat/Multiples, Sur Incises, the orchestral Notations - will surely endure, it is his achievement as a conductor and educator in moving the music of our time and of the immediate past into the mainstream of our concert life that is likely to be his lasting, crucially important memorial.

His skills as a conductor are vast - he would have been every bit as intellectual and important if he was just a conductor and had never written a note of music himself. As it is, his music, thoughts, theories and treatises are all a massively important part of 20th and 21st century music.

#boulez #pierre boulez #quote #music #composer #french #sound #conductor #orchestra #france #serialism #paris opera #icon #essay

[gourmetpunk]

Just finished reading Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” (the whole book) today and it got me thinking some things. I think I was already aware of it, but her articulation of the weird separation between form and content in art and her subsequent quest to try and get critics to conceive of (almost) everything in terms of “style” (in which content is a part of form) has helped me to define some of my own positions on different media a bit better.

Notably, I’ve always talked about how I have pretty radically different tolerances for snobbery depending on the medium of art I’m discussing: I have strong biases towards classical literature and against modern literature, but an even stronger bias towards “modernist/postmodern” literature that tends to fall somewhere in between those two (say between the late 18th and late 20th centuries); by contrast, I have an extreme bias against most forms of classical music, am relatively OK with “classical tradition modernism” and am most interested by far in modern pop music (dating from around 1920 to present). Other biases of mine include a general even appreciation for movies from all different eras and “brows” (though a slight preference toward what might be called more “highbrow”), a much more enthusiastic bias towards “modernist/postmodern” visual art than classical, and a scattershot critical appreciation for video games from different eras (video games are way too new to truly have a “classical” era, of course, and even movies are the same way to an extent - I’ll get to that in a minute).

I think a lot of this can be explained by my own understanding of the form and content (and by extension, “style”) present in each of those mediums. Music, for example, is primarily a formal medium, with content secondary to the form in most cases, if it is prominent or present at all - certainly most classical music is virtually content-free in my view. Not only do I find the form of modern pop music much more interesting (with its effectively accelerated version of the “theme-and-variation” principle in classical and the additional influence of rhythm-based African music), I also note that the second half of the 20th century saw pop music taking on more and more content than classical music ever had, even as it remained secondary to the music. This makes it more interesting and compelling to me than the classical canon in terms of both form and content. The avant-garde that stems from both the “post-/modernist” classical tradition and from jazz (which, remember, is just an extension of pop/folk ideas) interests me mainly because of its breaks from the conventions of classical and pop, though I don’t always find it successfully interesting in these breaks.

My preference for older literature, however, stems partly from the fact that I see both form and content as both ever-present and ever-prominent in literary history and that I see both as stagnating increasingly within the last 40-ish years. Literature has tended to carry a pretty equal weight of form and content (with the balance shifting across different eras, cultures, movements, etc., but I think it comes out fairly even), and so I see it as important for a literary work to pay serious attention to one or both of these aspects. I do, however, tend towards a preference for formal development, and that’s probably why I favor the modernist era especially, which might have been one of the most exciting periods of formal experimentation in literary history (that I’m aware of, at least). So it’s not like it’s a perfect downward trending curve here; I might characterize my interest in (most) literature throughout the ages as slowly ramping up from like early history until the 19th century (a lot of this stuff being more of historical interest to me than genuinely enjoyable), at which point it starts to peak heading into the early 20th century, then crashing at the end of that same century. I hope to be proven wrong on this some day with a burst of either new or previously-unknown-to-me authors managing to revive the artistic spirit of this medium. A couple have been promising so far.

Movies and visual art are things I know much less about in terms of form. I tend to feel incredibly stupid hearing people discuss interpretations of art in these mediums, so whatever opinions I have on them I would advise anyone to take with an even larger grain of salt than my opinions on music and literature. But I suspect my preferences in these mediums come out the way they do has to do with a) my ignorance of them, and b) in the case of visual art in particular, my boredom with classical visual aesthetics that continue to dominate our modern culture in a way that classical literary aesthetics do not (but classical music still does a little bit, which also explains my reaction to it as described above). The content of movies tends to be a lot more obvious to me than of painting as well, and the repetitive (and often obvious) subject matter of a lot of classical painting also does it no favours in my eyes, though I can appreciate the formal variations to an extent.

I probably drift a little towards the “highbrow” in movies for reasons that also might help explain my taste in video games: both media are really too young to have had true “classical periods” in the ways that music, literature and visual art have, and thus the content of both tends towards the obvious, melodramatic and underdeveloped more often than not - both are far more interesting to me in terms of their form than their content. Seeing as “highbrow” movies tend to emphasize formal qualities over those of content, they tend appeal to me slightly more - but only slightly. Because (and I think this is also true of video games) I also see (or think I see - remember, I’m not good at visual aesthetics, so this is kind of just conjecture) a lot of craft being put into the form of non-highbrow movies as well, and thus I can appreciate all kinds of different movies. What this actually means is that a lot of my favourite movies would be considered “middlebrow” - case in point, my favourite of all time remains The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen.

And video games, well, I’ve pretty much said it already: they’re too young to have a classical period to react against and even more immature in movies in terms of content. Unlike music, content is more important alongside form in video games, so I often find myself trying to find at least something to appreciate in that realm if I find a game to be formally compelling - some of the most successful in overall style have been Outer Wilds, Celeste and The Talos Principle. You might note that these are all pretty recent, and I do happen to believe that a lot of the best recent video games are better than the “best” of the older ones; this is partly because video games face a challenge inherent in their medium that almost no other medium faces: the technological barrier. In the time of, say, Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (which, by the way, I do count as being a great game still, more for form than for content - Majora’s Mask is the reverse), something like Outer Wilds was basically unthinkable to create with the technology available then. That being said, this also has something to do with the fact that the democratization of game-making technology and the indie game boom of the 2010s has also helped refine both content and form in games even more than technological advancements; where games’ plots, aesthetics and gameplay previously had to be filtered through several layers or corporate market testing before, rogue developers can now go wild with their most experimental impulses. We have just lived through (and are perhaps still living through) what might have been the second great period of artistic advancement for video games as a medium, and it’s an exciting time! But this doesn’t mean I have no love at all for the “classics”, insofar as they exist as a canon. Some older games, though in need of tweaking to play in an enjoyable form today, have actually held up incredibly well on a formal level, and some were even ahead of their time in content, too. I have many more opinions about the way in which the current trend of “remastering” classic video games often alters these games as individual works of art in a way that is fundamentally different from restoring movies, books, or “remastering” musical albums, but that’s for another essay altogether.

Ironically, I just mentioned that I should read Pierre Bourdieu in my last post, who I know would probably write all of this off as attempts to justify that tastes common to the class I occupy that I have unconsciously reproduced. I’ll have to read that book in full to see if there’s a more nuanced argument there than that, but I suspect I would disagree. That is also, however, a matter for another essay, and I feel like I’ve done enough taste-justification here already. Sorry.

#Long post

[cauldronofmorning]

I’m reading through this essay on bipolar currently, and it’s very interesting that seasonal affective disorder was first researched in 1845 (”Griesinger also described "seasonal affective disorders": melancholia usually has its beginning in autumn and winter, mania in spring. He also described rapid cycling and mixed types of affective disorders.”) while bipolar - called “manic depressive insanity” - was first properly talked about in 1899, becoming “bipolar” in 1966.

( @gene-ious tagging you for reasons)

#it also talks about stagnation for most of the 20th century #with 1966 literally being called 'the year of rebirth'

[regenderate-fic]

Someone Else, In This Vast, Empty Universe: Chapter 1

Fandom: Doctor Who Rating: Mature Ship: Yasmin Khan/Rose Tyler, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan (implied), Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler (implied) Characters: Yasmin Khan, Dan Lewis, Eustacius Jericho Word Count (Chapter): 1,660 Series: Sometime Soon Other Tags: Canon Compliant, Missing Scene, Historical, Historical Dress, Dimension-Hopping Rose, Globetrotter Yaz Read on AO3 / Read in order

Summary: Yasmin Khan has been stuck in the past for a year, trying to find the date of the apocalypse, trying to find her way back to the Doctor.

Rose Tyler, jumping through dimensions on her way to the Doctor, falls out of time and into 1902.

They find some comfort in each other.

(Fic is complete, with updates posting Tuesdays and Fridays.)

NOTES: okay if you follow me on tumblr or know me from discord or whatever you know i have not been able to shut up about rose/yaz parallels lately. i have finally followed that to the natural conclusion of "rose and yaz should kiss," or, more accurately, "rose and yaz should bond over both being desperate to find the doctor and find solace in each other."

this is rated mature for some later scenes but honestly i never write anything above general so it might just be, like, mature by my standards.

ALSO i'm using "globetrotter yaz" for yaz in the past as a parallel/equivalent to "dimension-hopping rose." i think yaz can have a nice little homeric epithet. as a treat

It’s been a year without the Doctor.

A year stranded in the early part of the 20th century with Dan and Jericho, traveling the world, looking for clues about the apocalypse, watching the hologram of the Doctor over and over again.

I’m sure I miss you.

It’s the one thing keeping Yaz tethered, the anchor that allows her to do what she needs to do. She will see the Doctor again. She’ll find a way back, and when she does, she expects the longest hug of her life. Most likely followed by an even longer argument, but… the Doctor is worth the argument. The Doctor is worth fighting for. Even if the fight is against the Doctor herself.

For now, though, Yaz keeps going. Most days, it all feels like a lot of waiting: a trip that would’ve taken less than a second in the TARDIS now takes weeks and weeks by boat or train or on foot. At first, she was often seasick, but she’s gotten used to it now, the constant rolling of the ocean around her, the sound of the wind and the sea. It’s comforting, actually. Reminds her that even when she feels like she’s stagnating, getting nowhere, stuck forever in the wrong century, even when she’s miserable and lost and sad, the world is constantly changing.

She just wishes it would change in her favor.

The worst part is knowing that while she waits, the entire universe is being ripped apart. Or, she doesn’t really have the language to talk about it— but somewhere in the future, the universe is being ripped apart, and Yaz should be there.

She doesn’t know what to do.

She’ll never admit it to Dan or Jericho, but she’s starting to think their mission is pointless. What good is it to find out when the battle for the Earth will be if she can’t get the information back to the Doctor? What good is it if she can’t be there, fighting on the front lines? What good is it to spend years on this quest, finding almost nothing— there’s a prophecy about metal men coming to Earth, but there’s no way to track down when, and Yaz and Jericho have been poring over a few different ancient texts trying to decipher the unfamiliar scripts. And Yaz knows there are a hundred years of archaeological discoveries that aren’t available to either of them. She desperately misses a time when she could pull her phone out of her pocket and instantly have the information she was looking for. (Her phone still sits in her pocket, powered off. It doesn’t work here, but it’s nice to have something familiar.)

And most of all, Yaz misses the Doctor. Even shoved in a tiny cabin crossing the ocean with Dan and Professor Jericho, she’s lonely without the Doctor by her side, rattling off facts about wherever they are and pulling custard creams out of her pockets. Yaz knows she’s been mopey, too— sure, she keeps herself focused and purposeful, but she knows Dan and Professor Jericho are worried about her. She doesn’t sleep as much as she should. She’s been having trouble eating. And she knows this is an irrational response to not having her best friend around, just like she knew before when she was tacking up paper and string to the wall of a strange TARDIS. But that doesn’t exactly mean she can stop. She’s still alive, anyway, and not in serious physical distress, so it’s all right.

She’s in London, with Dan and Jericho— they’re taking a little bit of a break before they go off to Greenland, chasing a lead they got off someone in Egypt. Yaz can’t stand taking a break, but Dan and Jericho need it: they’re not fueled solely by sheer desperation to get out like Yaz is. They’re worried, and they want to get out as much as anyone would in their circumstances, but… Yaz is the one who’s losing sleep. So for their sake, she tries to slow down, tries to find secretary work, tries to forget about the maps and diagrams and notebooks she keeps stashed in a briefcase, tries to keep herself busy with long walks through town.

It doesn’t work. She still thinks about the Doctor constantly. Wonders where the Doctor is, what happened to her after she was turned to stone. Wonders whether she actually misses Yaz, or was just saying it for the hologram. It’s not healthy, the way her thoughts spiral— this is why she needs to keep moving, keep working on a way to get the Doctor back. But… well, they’re only breaking for a few weeks. Yaz can do a few weeks. Can’t she?

Except as she walks briskly through the streets on their second day, she isn’t so sure. The thoughts are taking over again, and all she wants is to be back in the TARDIS, reading in the library while the Doctor tries to bother her with facts about the Ottoman Empire or string theory or whatever else she’s gotten herself into.

She walks faster. Maybe if she gets lost in the crowd, blends in just right, she’ll become part of the blur and her thoughts will fade away.

They don’t.

She keeps going anyway, striding between clumps of people going in and out of shops and taking leisurely strolls, barely paying attention to where her feet are falling— until suddenly she takes a hard left and crashes right into someone.

“Sorry!” she says, jumping back. “I wasn’t looking—” And then she looks up at the person she ran into.

She’s wearing 21st century clothing. A blue leather jacket, black trousers: the sort of outfit Yaz has half-convinced herself she’ll never see again.

“No, it’s my fault,” she’s saying, but Yaz doesn’t care.

“You’re from the future,” she blurts. It’s not a question.

The woman freezes. She steps back, then looks Yaz up and down before saying, “Right in one.” She has a London accent, Yaz notes. “Who’re you, then?”

“Yasmin Khan,” Yaz says. “Yaz to my friends. I’ve been stuck in this century a year now.” She hesitates. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for a friend,” the woman says, a wistful look in her eye. “Although I seem to have gotten a bit sidetracked… was aiming for 2009.”

“Time travel.” Yaz smiles. “Never reliable.” She misses it. “Don’t suppose there’s a way you could get me and my friends back to 2021, is there?”

The woman shakes her head, slipping what looks like a yellow button set in a metal casing out of her pocket. “Sorry. Only takes one.” She holds it up with a critical eye. “Besides, I think it’s broken. It’s not supposed to do time travel, strictly speaking, and it hasn’t been charging, either.” She sticks it back in her pocket. “Think I might be stuck here for a while, too. Anything I should know?”

“You’ll want to dress the part,” Yaz says. “It’s a lot harder to blend in in a leather jacket.” And she would know: for the first few days, she refused to change out of her clothes. It was ridiculous, but some part of her at the time felt like as long as she still dressed like she was from the 21st century, her position in the 20th wouldn’t be permanent. She still keeps that outfit in one of her suitcases, even though it’s not good for much besides gathering dust. She runs an eye over the other woman, trying to assess her size. “You might fit into some of my clothes, at least until you’ve got a chance to get something of your own.”

“Suppose it’ll have to do,” the other woman says, not unkindly. She smiles faintly. “I’m Rose, by the way. Rose Tyler.”

“Nice meeting you.” Yaz hesitates. Rose’s name sounds familiar, but she can’t quite place it. “D’you know the Doctor?” she tries.

Rose freezes, her eyes wide, her lips slightly parted. Yaz feels her heart beating in her chest: she was right.

“The Doctor? Is he here?”

“She,” Yaz says, “and I’m pretty sure if she were here, we’d be able to get back to Earth.” She tries to keep the bitterness out of her voice, but, well… it’s true.

“Regenerated, then,” Rose murmurs. “Not the same.”

And then it hits Yaz where she’s heard Rose’s name before. She says it the second she thinks it.

“Jack mentioned you.”

“Jack?” Rose looks like she’s been slapped. “Captain Jack Harkness? I thought he was dead.”

Yaz shakes her head. “He can’t die, apparently. He said it was because of you.”

“Oh, my God. But— the Daleks— I didn’t mean—” There’s a long moment while Rose processes. “What did I do to him?”

“He seemed all right when I met him,” Yaz says. “‘Course, I don’t know how far out that was from the last time you saw him.”

“Yeah.” Rose’s gaze is fixed somewhere over Yaz’s shoulder, her eyes glazed over with memory. “It’s been a while for me, too.” She shakes her head. “Suppose I can look forward to seeing him again, at least. When I make it back.”

“I liked him,” Yaz says. “Gave me some good advice.” She pauses. “Anyway, if you’re stuck here, you should come with me. We’re staying in a boarding house down that way.” She points vaguely behind her. “I’m sure the others won’t mind if you stay with us for a bit. Especially if you share my room.” They splurged for two rooms this time, in celebration of not being in the middle of the ocean. One for Dan and Jericho, one for Yaz. “It’s not the nicest in town, but we’ve had worse. I don’t recommend traveling three to a two-person cabin on an overseas boat trip.”

“Good advice.” Rose pauses, considering for a long moment. “Suppose I don’t know where else I’d go, if not with you,” she finally says. “Lead the way.”

#my fic #chaptered #yaz x rose #yasmin khan #rose tyler #thasmin #ten x rose #canon compliant #missing scene #historical #dimension hopping rose #globetrotter yaz #doctor who #fanfiction #someone else in this vast empty universe #sometime soon

[robertreich]

THE STATE OF THE DIS-UNION

An impeached president who was on trial and is up for re-election will be delivering a state of the union address to the most divided union in living memory. He will be giving his address to both his jurors and prosecutors, and most importantly, to the voters that will decide his fate in November.

It’s not unprecedented for an impeached president to give a state of the union address. Bill Clinton delivered his State of the Union in 1999 while in the middle of his Senate trial. But that’s where the similarities end. Clinton was not up for re-election when he gave his speech, so he didn’t need to employ any campaign-style rhetoric. Trump is a polarizing, divisive president who is addressing an America that has never been so divided. But this begs the question: why are we so divided? We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, abortion, and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. So why are we so divided now? Ferocious partisanship is not new. Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House who led the House’s impeachment investigation into Clinton, pioneered the combative partisanship we’re used to today. But today’s divisions are far deeper than they were then. Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists — keeping everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming, and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division. But that begs another question: Why have we been so ready to be divided by Trump? One theory is the underlying tension that an older, whiter, and less educated America, concentrated in rural areas, is losing out to a “new” America that’s younger, more diverse, more educated, and concentrated in urban areas. These trends, while much more prominent these days, have been going on since the start of the 20th century. Why are they causing so much anger now? Another hypothesis is that we are geographically sorting ourselves into Republican and Democratic regions of the country, surrounding ourselves with like-minded neighbors and friends so we no longer talk to people with opposing views. But why are we doing this? The rise of social media sensationalizing our differences in order to attract eyeballs and advertisers, plays a crucial role in exacerbating the demographic and geographic trends I just mentioned. But it alone isn’t responsible for our polarized nation. Together, all of these factors contribute to the political schism we’re experiencing today. But none of them alone point to any large, significant change in the structure of our society that can account for what’s happened. Let me have a go. In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina for a research project I was doing on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children. What I heard surprised me. Twenty years ago, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now, that frustration had been replaced by full-blown anger — anger towards their employers, the government, Wall Street. Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. By the time I spoke with them, most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power. I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, and growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These complaints came from people who identified as Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. A few had joined the Tea Party, while a few others had been involved in the Occupy movement. With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked them which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, Democratic Party insiders favored Hillary Clinton and Republican insiders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush. They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging.” In the following year, Sanders – a seventy-four-year old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t a registered Democrat until the 2016 presidential primaries – came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses. Trump – a sixty-nine-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality-TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about everything – won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (although he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin). Something very big had happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They have come up with myriad explanations for Trump’s ascendance, some with validity; some without: It was hatred of Obama, it was hatred of Hillary, it was people voting third party, it was racism and xenophobia. It’s important to note that although racism and xenophobia in America date to before the founding of the Republic, they have never before been so central to a candidate’s appeal and message as they’ve been with Trump. Aided by Fox News and an army of right-wing outlets, Trump used the underlying frustrations of the working class and channeled them into bigotry, but this was hardly the first time in history a demagogue has used this cynical ploy. Trump convinced many blue-collar workers feeling ignored by the powers that be that he was their champion. Hillary Clinton did not convince them that she was. Her decades of public service ended up being a negative, not a positive: She was indubitably part of the establishment, the epitome of decades of policies that had left these blue-collar workers in the dust. (It’s notable that during the primaries, Bernie Sanders did far better than Clinton with blue-collar voters.) A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and Trump in 2016. By 2016, Americans understood that wealth and power had moved to the top. Big money had rigged our politics. This was the premise of Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal (“I’m so rich I can’t be bought off”), which he quickly reneged on once elected, delivering everything big money could have imagined. The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. Vicious partisanship, record-breaking economic inequality, and the resurgence of white supremacy are all byproducts of this rigged system. The biggest political battle today isn’t between left, right, or center: it’s between Trump’s authoritarian populism  and democratic (small “d”) populism. Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement that tackles runaway inequality and heals the racial wounds Trump has inflicted. Even though he’s a Trojan Horse for big corporations and the rich – giving them all the  tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks they’ve ever wanted – he still has large swaths of the working class convinced  he’s on their side. Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. We must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, sexualities, and classes, and band together to unrig the system. Trump is not the cause of our divided nation; he is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. It’s not enough to defeat him. We must reform the system that got us here in the first place to ensure that no future politician will ever again imitate Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery. For now, let’s boycott the State of the Union and show the ratings-obsessed demagogue that the American people refuse to watch an impeached president continue to divide us.

#video #videos #democracy #American capitalism

[justablogofaweeb]

Off topic subject/ I think I know when Jotaro Kujo’s Birth date is!

 Ok so most of us know that Jotaro Kujo was born in either January 21st or February18th in the 1970′s. So I decided to look and see which month had the most children. That led me nowhere since they both had a 2.14% result. Then I got to thinking, “Economy usually plays a part in having a family. Lets look at that.” So I looked up  `1970 January Japanese Economy History’ and   ‘1970 February Japanese Economy History’ so now I will paste what I found On wikipedia!  (1970 January Japanese Economy History)  *from Wikipeada*   The Japanese economic miracle is known as Japan's record period of economic growth between the post-World War II era to the end of the Cold War. During the economic boom, Japan rapidly became the world's second largest economy (after the United States). By the 1990s, Japan's demographics began stagnating and the workforce was no longer expanding as it did in the previous decades, despite per-worker productivity remaining high. ^^^^^^So this sounds like things went from good to bad real quick. Not really a good time to have a child. But still possible.^^^^^ (1970 February Japanese Economy History)  *From wikipeida*  Throughout the 1970s, Japan had the world's third largest gross national product (GNP)—just behind the United States and Soviet Union—and ranked first among major industrial nations in 1990 in per capita GNP at US$23,801, up sharply from US$9,068 in 1980. After a mild economic slump in the mid-1980s, Japan's economy began a period of expansion in 1986 that continued until it again entered a recessionary period in 1992. Economic growth averaging 5% between 1987 and 1989 revived industries, such as steel and construction, which had been relatively dormant in the mid-1980s, and brought record salaries and employment. In 1992, however, Japan's real GNP growth slowed to 1.7%. Even industries such as automobiles and electronics that had experienced phenomenal growth in the 1980s entered a recessionary period in 1992. The domestic market for Japanese automobiles shrank at the same time that Japan's share of the United States' market declined. Foreign and domestic demand for Japanese electronics also declined, and Japan seemed on the way to losing its leadership in the world semiconductor market to the United States, Korea and Taiwan.Unlike the economic booms of the 1960s and 1970s, when increasing exports played the key role in economic expansion, domestic demand propelled the Japanese economy in the late 1980s. This development involved fundamental economic restructuring, moving from dependence on exports to reliance on domestic demand. The boom that started in 1986 was generated by the decisions of companies to increase private plant and equipment spending and of consumers to go on a buying spree. Japan's imports grew at a faster rate than exports. Japanese post-war technological research was carried out for the sake of economic growth rather than military development. The growth in high-technology industries in the 1980s resulted from heightened domestic demand for high-technology products such as electronics, and for higher living, housing, and environmental standards; better medical care and more welfare; expanded leisure-time facilities; and improved ways to accommodate a rapidly aging society.[72]During the 1980s, the Japanese economy shifted its emphasis from primary and secondary activities (notably agriculture, manufacturing, and mining) to processing, with telecommunications and computers becoming increasingly vital. Information became an important resource and product, central to wealth and power. The rise of an information-based economy was led by major research in highly sophisticated technology, such as advanced computers. The selling and use of information became very beneficial to the economy. Tokyo became a major financial center, home to some of the world's major banks, financial firms, insurance companies, and the world's largest stock exchange, the Tokyo Securities and Stock Exchange. Even here, however, the recession took its toll. In 1992, the Nikkei 225 stock average began the year at 23,000 points, but fell to 14,000 points in mid-August before leveling off at 17,000 by the end of the year.Since the end of the Cold War[edit]1989 Economic Bubble[edit]Further information: Japanese asset price bubbleIn the decades following World War II, Japan implemented stringent tariffs and policies to encourage the people to save their income. With more money in banks, loans and credit became easier to obtain, and with Japan running large trade surpluses, the yen appreciated against foreign currencies. This allowed local companies to invest in capital resources more easily than their overseas competitors, which reduced the price of Japanese-made goods and widened the trade surplus further. And, with the yen appreciating, financial assets became lucrative.With so much money readily available for investment, speculation was inevitable, particularly in the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the real estate market. The Nikkei stock index hit its all-time high on 29 December 1989 when it reached an intra-day high of 38,957.44 before closing at 38,915.87. The rates for housing, stocks, and bonds rose so much that at one point the government issued 100-year bonds. Additionally, banks granted increasingly risky loans.At the height of the bubble, real estate was extremely over-valued. Prices were highest in Tokyo's Ginza district in 1989, with choice properties fetching over US$1.5 million per square meter ($139,000 per square foot). Prices were only slightly less in other areas of Tokyo. By 2004, prime "A" property in Tokyo's financial districts had slumped and Tokyo's residential homes were a fraction of their peak, but still managed to be listed as the most expensive real estate in the world. Trillions were wiped out with the combined collapse of the Tokyo stock and real estate markets.With Japan's economy driven by its high rates of reinvestment, this crash hit particularly hard. Investments were increasingly directed out of the country, and Japanese manufacturing firms lost some degree of their technological edge. As Japanese products became less competitive overseas, some people argue that the low consumption rate began to bear on the economy, causing a deflationary spiral.The easily obtainable credit that had helped create and engorge the real-estate bubble continued to be a problem for several years to come, and as late as 1997, banks were still making loans that had a low guarantee of being repaid. Loan Officers and Investment staff had a hard time finding anything to invest in that would return a profit. Meanwhile, the extremely low interest rate offered for deposits, such as 0.1%, meant that ordinary Japanese savers were just as inclined to put their money under their beds as they were to put it in savings accounts. Correcting the credit problem became even more difficult as the government began to subsidize failing banks and businesses, creating many so-called "zombie businesses". Eventually a carry trade developed in which money was borrowed from Japan, invested for returns elsewhere and then the Japanese were paid back, with a nice profit for the trader.The time after the bubble's collapse (崩壊, hōkai), which occurred gradually rather than catastrophically, is known as the "lost decade or end of the 20th century" (失われた10年, ushinawareta jūnen) in Japan. The Nikkei 225 stock index eventually bottomed out at 7603.76 in April 2003, moved upward to a new peak of 18,138 in June 2007, before resuming a downward trend. The downward movement in the Nikkei is likely due to global as well as national economic problems.  ^^^This is the worst time to have a kid.^^^^^  And with this info, I’ve come to a conclusion *or rather an assumption* That Jotaro Kujo’s Birth date is January 21st 1970.  Why you ask? Because The Japanese economic miracle. It states that it is “ known as Japan's record period of economic growth between the post-World War II era to the end of the Cold War.” And I may not know a lot about solders but I do have a grandpa that was one and he told me that after the war was when most babies were born. So that’s one fact/assumption. the other is when the artical states “During the economic boom, Japan rapidly became the world's second largest economy (after the United States). By the 1990s, Japan's demographics began stagnating and the workforce was no longer expanding as it did in the previous decades, despite per-worker productivity remaining high.”  what I take from that is people who are good at their work or travel for their work get paid more *like Jotaro’s dad* So Holly would be able to take care of her new born baby while her husband is away earning the cash. But I could be talking out my ass on this.  All this is just an assumption. A guess. A theory. make of it what you will.  Author chan OUT!   

[arcticdementor]

For the liberal optimism that has been under assault since 11 September, 2001, the coronavirus pandemic is another rattling blow. The late-1990s vision of a world progressing steadily towards global harmony, towards sunlit uplands of universal democracy and technological wonder, has long since given way to pessimism, anxiety and crisis. But even more than terrorism and the Iraq War, the financial crisis of 2008 and the eurozone stalemate, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the pandemic of 2020 promises to stall globalisation, harden borders, freeze economies, and push the dream of liberal progress ever further into history’s rear-view mirror.

Twenty-five years ago the liberal establishment was embodied by youthful politicians, by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in their pre-Iraq, pre-Jeffrey Epstein flower. Even 12 years ago it was embodied by Barack Obama, the soaring orator and handsome post-racial technocrat. But in 2020, even if the coronavirus dooms Trump’s populist presidency and allows some sort of establishment restoration in the United States, it will be personified by Joe Biden – a reassuringly normal politician in certain ways, but also the physical embodiment of political sclerosis, exhaustion and old age.

…

There is, however, another possibility besides a looming liberal crack-up – that a political order can be exhausted and sclerotic, its great ambitions foreclosed and its projects frustrated, and still continue for a good long while without either real reform or real collapse.

That may well be the fate of the liberal order over the next few generations: a kind of sustainable decadence, a zombie existence punctuated by periods of temporary crisis and alarm that continues indefinitely because all of its plausible rivals and inheritors have too many challenges and weaknesses of their own to effectively exploit its incompetence, torpor and stagnation.

…

Such an intellectual and cultural revolution could happen: Islam’s encounter with the secular heir of its ancient Christian rival is the kind of strange collision in which unexpected futures might be forged. But the form of Islam that could imaginably replace liberalism has yet to be invented.

…

Take the case of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has lately sought to return the ideological role that Moscow played under the czars – as a rallying point for traditionalists worldwide, and as a religious-conservative bulwark against Western liberalism and secularism. Putin has enjoyed some success with this gambit: he has admirers among Europe’s far-right parties, such as Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France, authoritarian friends around the globe, and his interventions in Ukraine and the US elections in 2016 have prompted a surge of Western-liberal Russophobia, with talk of great ideological conflict and a renewed Cold War.

But as a world-view, a system, an alternative civilisational architecture, Putinism is mostly smoke and mirrors. The Romanovs embodied a real ancien régime, an order rooted in a deep historical inheritance even when its days were numbered. Putinism does not have a similar justification for its powers, and following the collapse of Soviet communism from 1989 and the prolonged doses of neoliberal economic “shock therapy” that came after, Russian society is no more traditional than its more liberal and democratic neighbours. There is no legitimate mode of transmission for Putin’s system once he dies: his successor will either take power by brute force or claim (like his predecessor) the pseudolegitimacy of a rigged election – even liberalism’s enemies pay tribute to its norms. Either way, there will not be a clear alternative to liberalism, only violence, or parody, or both.

Perhaps there is something embryonic within the regimes of various Putinesque strongmen that could develop into a serious ideological challenger to the West. But unlike the totalitarianisms of the 1930s – or, for that matter, unlike the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – none of these regimes has claimed an alternative source of legitimacy; an alternative vision of where sovereignty resides. In practice “illiberal democracy” is either liberal democracy with somewhat more nationalism than Western bien-pensants prefer, or pseudodemocracy dominated by a dictator who refuses to admit his authoritarianism.

…

Nor is this illiberal form of politics even necessarily new. Set aside his cultivation of nationalist and post-liberal intellectuals, and is Viktor Orbán’s democratic but one-party-dominated Hungary all that different from the de facto one-party rule that often characterised 20th-century Mexico, South Korea, or Japan? It is not unusual for democratic systems to produce powerful parties that bend the rules to keep themselves in power. Nobody thinks that Mexico, when it was governed uninterrupted by the Institutional Revolutionary Party between 1929 and 2000, represented an ideological challenge to liberal democracy. For all the anxiety about Orbán or the Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice party, the same may be true of eastern Europe today.

…

It is for this reason that, unlike Islamism, the Chinese system has won soft admiration among the Western elite. Though not admirers of one-party rule, precisely, they are pundits and businessmen – such as Michael Bloomberg, a failed candidate for US president – who are impressed by the way that Beijing can implement big policy changes without the snarls of democratic debate.(Or the way that it can shut down an entire province to contain a viral outbreak that runs wild across the liberal West.) And unlike Putin’s Russia, China has enjoyed a rate of economic growth that is both an advertisement for its system and a source of growing global soft power. Those elites in developing nations – in Africa especially – who think China’s one-party meritocracy is a model worth imitating are closer to constituting a nascent post-liberal order than the illiberal client states of Moscow.

But there is an alternative hypothesis, that in the near future there will be a kind of convergence-in-decadence between the world’s rising powers and the liberal West. In this scenario, growth and progress outside the West levels off and political futility increases, and the afflictions of Western liberalism – problems of political sclerosis and intellectual exhaustion – wait to greet China (and India and Brazil, and Turkey and Nigeria…).

…

Disappointing growth is hardly a hypothetical. In Brazil and South Africa, often touted as potential great powers of the future, the growth rates of the last ten years have been indistinguishable from growth rates in the US and Europe. India has done better, and the absence of one-child totalitarianism means that it is not growing old as fast as China. But in the last few years, there has been an unexpected Indian deceleration, linked in part to the ham-fisted way that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government imposed currency and tax reforms. The joke often applied to Brazil, that “it’s the country of the future, and it always will be”, recurs with similar countries for a reason: it is (relatively) easy for poor, misgoverned countries to grow rapidly for a time when government policy improves, but it is a lot harder to accelerate past the pacesetters and into the new economic territory that a would-be rival of liberalism would need to do.

…

If disaster fails to strike, Chinese power will be greater in a generation than it is today. But a powerful China is not the same thing as a hegemonic China, or a China that is held up as a cultural or political model for the world. If China ends up as another rich-but-stagnating economy with a distrusted elite relying on a surveillance state to maintain its power, then it will not have pioneered an alternative to Western liberalism; it will be another case study in the convergence of liberal democracies, pseudo-democracies and would-be meritocracies, all becoming de facto oligarchies trying to manage stagnation and its discontents.

****

The desire of China’s elites – the very people who seemed poised to guide the West’s great rival – to leave for New York and London illustrates another way in which liberal decadence is well defended: the Western order is still good at weakening potential rivals through recruitment.

…

Two types of brain drain sustain this balance: one global and the other national. The global brain drain happens through high-skilled immigration – the one kind of immigration that still has something like bipartisan support in the polarised West; and for good reason, if you think of it as a process whereby the skilled professionals or would-be professionals of Latin America and Africa find their way to Europe and North America. In 2012 Ethiopia’s health minister claimed there are more Ethiopian doctors in Chicago than in their homeland, to pick a particularly arresting example. These professionals try to help their children find their way into the West’s elite, while the countries that they leave behind get remittances in exchange for losing their natural leadership class to Western cities.

The efficiency of this global brain drain is blessed by practically every professional economist, but its political consequences are also notable: it is a good way to make the Western world’s potential rivals a little bit better off monetarily but a lot less talent rich, by siphoning away their most ambitious citizens through offering them membership of an elite that they might otherwise supplant.

Something similar happens domestically as well. The most feared “barbarians” in the Western world today are not invaders from the distant steppes; they are the Rust Belt “deplorables” voting for Trump, the gilets jaunes burning shops on the Champs-Élysées, the Little Englanders forcing their country into Brexit. A great deal of elite commentary about the crisis of the liberal order assumes that these internal rebels might topple the system from within, that populists “inside the gates” are now the existential threat that Western institutions last faced from the Soviet Union.

But there is little to suggest that the populist movements are prepared to wield power in any effective way; their power, too, is limited by the way that meritocracy has recruited away the men and women who in a different era might have been the working class’s leaders and the hinterland’s elite. Populists can fill the streets and sometimes elect prime ministers and presidents, but they are disorganised, poorly led, conspiratorial and anti-intellectual in a way that undercuts their own effectiveness.

Perhaps populists just await the right combination of the man, the movement and the moment to become agents of actual regime change in the West. But it is also possible that meritocracy really does protect elites from effective challenges, and enables even an exhausted liberal establishment to return, Biden-esque, to power once the disturbances are over or once the populists conspicuously fail. This points to a future distilled by the US intellectual Michael Lind and his vision of what the later-21st century might hold if populism is defeated:

The other possibility… is that today’s class war will come to an end when the managerial minority, with its near monopoly of wealth, political power, expertise and media influence, completely and successfully represses the numerically greater but politically weaker working-class majority. If that is the case, the future of North America and Europe may look a lot like Brazil and Mexico, with nepotistic oligarchies clustered in a few fashionable metropolitan areas but surrounded by a derelict, depopulated and despised ‘hinterland.’”

…

On the other hand, rising temperatures have a greater chance of seriously destabilising poorer countries in the global South, Africa, the Middle East and India. They are more likely to limit economic growth, to overwhelm efforts at mitigation, to encourage yet more of those regions’ elites to decamp for London or Los Angeles, and to kill those left behind.

In which case, it is possible that strictly as a matter of Machiavellian self-interest, unmoored from moral debt or humanitarian obligation, climate change will help sustain the zombie liberal order instead of threatening it. A crisis created unintentionally by Western industrial development could, in one of history’s cruel ironies, help a decadent West hold off challenges from its rivals because it imposes greater ecological costs on the formerly colonised and defeated, than on the countries that led the first industrial wave and began to warmthe world.

One can imagine a future shaped by climate change that is like the present, but more so. Every rich place on Earth would be more like every other rich place, likewise every poor place, and the national-level political order would seem like a fractal of the international political order.

There would be an elite that seems interchangeable from country to country, a restive impotence and a lot of human suffering wherever that elite is hated or opposed, zones of chaos and disorder that do not really threaten the metropole, and no nation or civilisation charting a radically different course. That is a picture of what it would mean for the liberal order’s decadence to endure even after the pandemic, and to gradually become universal; that is what sustainable decadence would mean.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion? Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And it is more likely than you think.

#ross douthat #the new statesman

[eldunea]

hear me out: lotor sincline as muggle studies professor and head of slytherin house.

would happen probably in his late 20s/early 30s after he designs the sincline mech and gets the wizarding space program up and running. at that point he’d probably hand off official control of his project to his mother honerva (though he’d still have some influence over it) and start focusing some of his energy on his decolonization project where he wants to bring back POC customs of wizards and muggles living side-by-side. to achieve this end. his aim as muggle studies professor is to get students used to the idea that wizards and muggles can and should coexist peacefully.

he has four main focuses in teaching his course: customs, history, philosophy and science. he tends to focus more on the last three than the first because those are more within his realm of knowledge. he also has more of an international focus rather than simply a european one when talking about history, philosophy and science--he could go on forever about how indigenous mesoamericans domesticated and bred 3,000 varieties of plants, or about the intricacies of lao tzu’s tao te ching, or about the hidden role of claudette colvin in america’s civil rights movement. and if there’s one thing that he nerds out about more than pre-contact histories of his parents’ peoples, it’s muggle jewish inventors. 

he has a special unit that he teaches to third years about 20th century atrocities and totalitarianism. he spends literally the entire second semester of third year talking about why dictatorships form, the tactics of corrupt leadership in controlling peoples’ lives, and how it’s every citizen’s duty to prevent this shit from happening again. he drives the message home by doing a comparative study of the rise of voldemort and the rise of hitler, and talking about how muggles’ racial biases toward POC have always influenced how wizards felt as well. one of the underlying themes of this unit is that wizards are more influenced by currents of muggle society than many would want to admit, and that’s why muggle studies is important.

one of his biggest messages as a professor other than the fact that wizards and muggles can live peacefully with each other is that muggles are the real wizards. literally when he starts class with third years he starts off with “wizards are fucking useless, i have the stats to prove it, we’ve technologically stagnated since the 1900s and we have the lowest proportion of inventors and scientists of any people in the world. muggles discovered the inner workings of nature through the likes of newton and einstein and hawking, and meanwhile in our corner we have bartholomew briggleby still pooping in the backyard and vanishing it like a dog because he’s never heard of a toilet.” he is vociferous about the notion that wizards are technologically lazy and complacent and it is imperative that the next generation starts being more like him and going out and inventing.

his domesticated foxes kugel and brisket have free run of the hogwarts grounds and all the students love them. occasionally a third fox--lotor himself--shows up with them. students, not knowing that it’s one of their teachers, have affectionately named it “blintzes.”

he’d also teach alchemy to the 6th and 7th years if there’s sufficient interest. the workload in the years where he has to do that is hellish but he pulls it off.

and some separate headcanons about lotor as head of slytherin house because HO BOY he’s about to start a revolution up in this bitch

he’s the first POC head of slytherin as well as its first jewish head. he goes to the chamber of secrets and takes a picture of himself leaning against the giant head of his house’s founder and writes a giant magical blogging post about how slytherin was antisemitic, how he said “jewish blood is just as dirty as muggle blood,” how he wanted to use the basilisk to purge the school of jewish students as well as muggle-born ones and how lotor literally became head of slytherin house out of PURE SPITE. he just.

“this isn’t your house anymore. it belongs to the people who live in it. it belongs to the ambition of the muggle-born who wants to show he’s just as good as any pureblood, or the romani child who wants to be the first in her family to graduate hogwarts. the cunning of the abuse survivor who has done everything in their power to survive. the leadership that young indigenous activists show when we fight to save the planet from the point of no return. the fraternity found in solidarity between jews, christians and muslims. I REFUSE to let hogwarts be a place where one house remains a bastion for prejudiced slander and hate, because if one house isn’t safe for the marginalized, the whole school isn’t safe either.”

half of his house hates him for that. if it’s not the conservative snob students calling for his removal, it’s their parents who most likely silently supported the death eaters while voldemort’s campaign was raging. but many of them learn very quickly not to mess with him for a reason stated below.

with all this feel-good talk, he seems more of a gryffindor or a hufflepuff. but to those students who break the rules or who try to make his life hell on the basis of his identity, he has steady reminders of how much of a slytherin he actually is. students who try to undermine him or others in sneaky ways are surprised to learn that he’s twice the filthy piece of shit that they all hope to be; no matter how clever they think they are he’s at least ten steps ahead, and it drives the lesson home when he manages to beat them at their own games. he sends the students off to detention with a smirk on his face, telling them “you can’t outfox a fox.” most of the time he takes absolutely no shit from troublemakers and isn’t afraid to teach them lessons the hard way. but if someone is looking to go after a known bully or something along those lines…he might look the other way.

he’s also damn good at keeping people in his house from going down the wrong path. he’s seen both sides of the coin--having been abused by white supremacists all his life and then experimenting with dark magic to get back at his abusers--so he knows real trouble when he sees it and he always puts a stop to it. 

this is where his persuasion comes in: he knows those kids won’t listen if he appeals to conventional morality, because he sure as hell didn’t listen either. so he appeals to their value systems instead. like if he catches someone with a hand of glory stealing stuff from other students who wants to be a master thief, he won’t blather on about why stealing is wrong, he’ll say “wow, i didn’t know your biggest dream in life was to be a petty felon. you’re a slytherin. where’s your ambition? don’t you want to be more than that?” or if someone wants to hurt someone via dark magic to achieve their ends, he’s like “well that’s not very clever of you. aren’t you smart enough to think of another way to get what you want?” of course, he always makes sure to walk them through the ethics of it later, but he knows he has to appeal to their self-interest, their ego and their childish still-developing emotions in order to hook them in. basically it takes a bastard to know a bastard and lotor is a supreme bastard so he can get inside their heads like nobody else.

one of the things he often has to do as a result of keeping kids out of trouble is confronting blood supremacist and otherwise bigoted parents when he talks their kids out of following their values. it’s fucking exhausting for him having to deal with their bullshit on a yearly basis but every time this happens he tells his students, “arguing is the jewish national sport. i was born for this” and goes right in.

if the parents get real bad, whether through hammering in bigoted ideologies or other forms of child abuse, lotor will straight up invite them to stay in hogwarts year-round. some of the nastier parents have straight up refused to let their kids go to hogwarts anymore and opt to send them to durmstrang, so this is their only option if they want to continue their education in a school that like, doesn’t teach the dark arts. he sometimes lives in the slytherin common room during the summer to keep an eye on the kids that stay there because they can’t go back home in one way or another and he’s more of a parent to them than some of their parents ever were.

#headcanon. || HARRY POTTER AU

[artelingua]

'We have a once-in-century chance': Naomi Klein on how we can fight the climate crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/14/crisis-talk-green-new-deal-naomi-klein

On a Friday in mid-March, they streamed out of schools in little rivulets, burbling with excitement and defiance at an act of truancy. The little streams emptied on to grand avenues and boulevards, where they combined with other flows of chanting children and teens. Soon the rivulets were rushing rivers: 100,000 bodies in Milan, 40,000 in Paris, 150,000 in Montreal. Cardboard signs bobbed above the surf of humanity: THERE IS NO PLANET B! DON’T BURN OUR FUTURE. THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!

There was no student strike in Mozambique; on 15 March the whole country was bracing for the impact of Cyclone Idai, one of the worst storms in Africa’s history, which drove people to take refuge at the tops of trees as the waters rose and would eventually kill more than 1,000 people. And then, just six weeks later, while it was still clearing the rubble, Mozambique would be hit by Cyclone Kenneth, yet another record-breaking storm.

Wherever in the world they live, this generation has something in common: they are the first for whom climate disruption on a planetary scale is not a future threat, but a lived reality. Oceans are warming 40% faster than the United Nations predicted five years ago. And a sweeping study on the state of the Arctic, published in April 2019 in Environmental Research Letters and led by the renowned glaciologist Jason Box, found that ice in various forms is melting so rapidly that the “Arctic biophysical system is now clearly trending away from its 20th-century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but also beyond the Arctic.” In May 2019, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services published a report about the startling loss of wildlife around the world, warning that a million species of animals and plants are at risk of extinction. “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” said the chair, Robert Watson. “We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. We have lost time. We must act now.”

It has been more than three decades since governments and scientists started officially meeting to discuss the need to lower greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the dangers of climate breakdown. In the intervening years, we have heard countless appeals for action that involve “the children,” “the grandchildren,” and “generations to come”. Yet global CO2 emissions have risen by more than 40%, and they continue to rise. The planet has warmed by about 1C since we began burning coal on an industrial scale and average temperatures are on track to rise by as much as four times that amount before the century is up; the last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, humans didn’t exist.

As for those children and grandchildren and generations to come who were invoked so promiscuously? They are no longer mere rhetorical devices. They are now speaking (and screaming, and striking) for them selves. Unlike so many adults in positions of authority, they have not yet been trained to mask the unfathomable stakes of our moment in the language of bureaucracy and overcomplexity. They understand that they are fighting for the fundamental right to live full lives – lives in which they are not, as 13-year-old Alexandria Villaseñor puts it, “running from disasters”.

On that day in March 2019, organisers estimate there were nearly 2,100 youth climate strikes in 125 countries, with 1.6 million young people participating. That’s quite an achievement for a movement that began eight months earlier with a single teenager deciding to go on strike from school in Stockholm, Sweden: Greta Thunberg.

The wave of youth mobilisation that burst on to the scene in March 2019 is not just the result of one girl and her unique way of seeing the world, extraordinary though she is. Thunberg is quick to note that she was inspired by another group of teenagers who rose up against a different kind of failure to protect their futures: the students in Parkland, Florida, who led a national wave of class walkouts demanding tough controls on gun ownership after 17 people were murdered at their school in February 2018.

Nor is Thunberg the first person with tremendous moral clarity to yell “Fire!” in the face of the climate crisis. Such voices have emerged multiple times over the past several decades; indeed, it is something of a ritual at the annual UN summits on climate change. But perhaps because these earlier voices belonged to people from the Philippines, the Marshall Islands and South Sudan, those clarion calls were one-day stories, if that. Thunberg is also quick to point out that the climate strikes themselves were the work of thousands of diverse student leaders, their teachers and supporting organisations, many of whom had been raising the climate alarm for years.

As a manifesto put out by British climate strikers put it: “Greta Thunberg may have been the spark, but we’re the wildfire.”

For a decade and half, ever since reporting from New Orleans with water up to my waist after Hurricane Katrina, I have been trying to figure out what is interfering with humanity’s basic survival instinct – why so many of us aren’t acting as if our house is on fire when it so clearly is. I have written books, made films, delivered countless talks and co-founded an organisation (The Leap) devoted, in one way or another, to exploring this question and trying to help align our collective response to the scale of the climate crisis.

It was clear to me from the start that the dominant theories about how we had landed on this knife edge were entirely insufficient. We were failing to act, it was said, because politicians were trapped in short-term electoral cycles, or because climate change seemed too far off, or because stopping it was too expensive, or because the clean technologies weren’t there yet. There was some truth in all the explanations, but they were also becoming markedly less true over time. The crisis wasn’t far off; it was banging down our doors. The price of solar panels has plummeted and now rivals that of fossil fuels. Clean tech and renewables create far more jobs than coal, oil, and gas. As for the supposedly prohibitive costs, trillions have been marshalled for endless wars, bank bailouts and subsidies for fossil fuels, in the same years that coffers have been virtually empty for climate transition. There had to be more to it.

Which is why, over the years, I have set out to probe a different set of barriers – some economic, some ideological, but others related to the deep stories about the right of certain people to dominate land and the people living closest to it, stories that underpin contemporary western culture. And I have investigated the kinds of responses that might succeed in toppling those narratives, ideologies and economic interests, responses that weave seemingly disparate crises (economic, social, ecological and democratic) into a common story of civilisational transformation. Today, this sort of bold vision increasingly goes under the banner of a Green New Deal.

Because, as deep as our crisis runs, something equally deep is also shifting, and with a speed that startles me. Social movements rising up to declare, from below, a people’s emergency. In addition to the wildfire of student strikes, we have seen the rise of Extinction Rebellion, which kicked off a wave of non-violent direct action and civil disobedience, including a mass shutdown of large parts of central London. Within days of its most dramatic actions in April 2019, Wales and Scotland both declared a state of “climate emergency,” and the British parliament, under pressure from opposition parties, quickly followed suit.

Humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts

In the US, we have seen the meteoric rise of the Sunrise Movement, which burst on to the political stage when it occupied the office of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in Washington, DC, one week after her party had won back the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections. They called on Congress to immediately adopt a rapid decarbonisation framework, one as ambitious in speed and scope as Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, the sweeping package of policies designed to battle the poverty of the Great Depression and the ecological collapse of the Dust Bowl.

The idea behind the Green New Deal is a simple one: in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s lives in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to surging white supremacy to the collapse of our information ecology. Challenging underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once.

In tackling the climate crisis, we can create hundreds of millions of goods jobs around the world, invest in the most systematically excluded communities and nations, guarantee healthcare and childcare, and much more. The result of these transformations would be economies built both to protect and to regenerate the planet’s life support systems and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them.

This vision is not new; its origins can be traced to social movements in ecologically ravaged parts of Ecuador and Nigeria, as well as to highly polluted communities of colour in the United States. What is new is that there is now a bloc of politicians in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, some just a decade older than the young climate activists in the streets, ready to translate the urgency of the climate crisis into policy, and to connect the dots among the multiple crises of our times. Most prominent among this new political breed is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at 29, became the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress. Introducing a Green New Deal was part of the platform she ran on. Today, with the race to lead the Democratic party in full swing, a majority of leading presidential hopefuls claim to support it, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. It had been endorsed, meanwhile, by 105 members of the House and Senate.

The idea is spreading around the world, with the political coalition European Spring launching a green new deal for Europe in January 2019 and a broad green new deal coalition of organisations in Canada coming together (the leader of the New Democratic party has adopted the frame, if not its full ambition, as one of his policy planks). The same is true in the UK, where the Labour party is in the middle of negotiations over whether to adopt a green new deal‑style platform.

Those of us who advocate for this kind of transformative platform are sometimes accused of using it to advance a socialist or anticapitalist agenda that predates our focus on the climate crisis. My response is a simple one. For my entire adult life, I have been involved in movements confronting the myriad ways that our current economic systems grinds up people’s lives and landscapes in the ruthless pursuit of profit. No Logo, published 20 years ago, documented the human and ecological costs of corporate globalisation, from the sweatshops of Indonesia to the oil fields of the Niger Delta. I have seen teenage girls treated like machines to make our machines, and mountains and forests turned to trash heaps to get at the oil, coal and metals beneath.

The painful, even lethal, impacts of these practices were impossible to deny; it was simply argued that they were the necessary costs of a system that was creating so much wealth that the benefits would eventually trickle down to improve the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. What has happened instead is that the indifference to life that was expressed in the exploitation of individual workers on factory floors and in the decimation of individual mountains and rivers has instead trickled up to swallow our entire planet, turning fertile lands into salt flats, beautiful islands into rubble, and draining once vibrant reefs of their life and colour.

I freely admit that I do not see the climate crisis as separable from the more localised market-generated crises that I have documented over the years; what is different is the scale and scope of the tragedy, with humanity’s one and only home now hanging in the balance. I have always had a tremendous sense of urgency about the need to shift to a dramatically more humane economic model. But there is a different quality to that urgency now because it just so happens that we are all alive at the last possible moment when changing course can mean saving lives on a truly unimaginable scale.

#naomi klein #green new deal #reposted the whole extract because IMPORTANT #climate crisis #my emphasis #important

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Hey ! Why are so interested in Napoleon ? Are you Corsican or just interested in the history ? And third question ( sorry ) do you position yourself on the politics in Corsica like the French colonization etc ? Sorry for all the questions

Hello! 

Why are so interested in Napoleon ? Are you Corsican or just interested in the history ? 

I think this is the hardest answer. Off the bat - I am not Corsican nor am I of Corsican extraction. 

I got interested in Napoleonic history when i was 14/15 after watching, of all things, Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Adventure. It was the Napoleon-Falls-Into-A-Tree-While-Time-Travelling incident that tickled me pink. I then went and bought some biographies and the rest was history. 

When I was in highschool I think I saw a lot of myself in young Napoleon. I too moved countries at a young age, indeed I moved every two years from the the age of two to fourteen. I was also angry and arrogant and self-possessed and Romantic and had a chip on my shoulder and was depressed and wanted more from life etc. etc. 

As I got older, studied history in a professional academic way, my interest changed and now: 

a) I find the entire period interesting - I’m especially taken with translation, language and identity in the making of Empire (broadly - not just Napoleonic France but also 17th and 18th century colonial Mexico, early modern Venetian-Ottoman relations, Tuscan approaches to linguistic hegemony on the Italian peninsula, Language and culture and Concepts of Civility within the Metropol, also translation and conversion and identity at the margines of empire and within the Metropol) 

(I just love language and identity and civility and knowledge making. I jack off to that. Just so you all now have that Lovely Mental Image. You are welcome.) 

b) As I get older I find Napoleon’s exile and how he shifted within that space interesting. Give me salty, fat and depressed 48 year old Napoleon over 20-something Napoleon any day. I *get* salty, fat and depressed 48 year old Napoleon. 

c) He is also a chaotic bisexual who was a hot mess and a walking shitpost. These are things I appreciate. 

And third question ( sorry ) do you position yourself on the politics in Corsica like the French colonization etc ?

As I am not Corsican, indeed I am not a European (am of European/settler-colonial heritage in Canada), I am cautious about positioning myself in a political situation to which I am an outsider. Now that I’ve said that, have my thoughts. 

Broadly speaking, I think nationalism is unhealthy and leads to terrible things (Quebec’s nationalist movement as a response to Anglophone hegemony, and a historic lack of access to full rights and political disenfranchisement [legitimate issues] within Canada is an example that springs to mind).  

Corsica occupies an interesting space within French colonial activities - especially in the colonized Mediterranean where, historically, Spain, Ottomans Venice and Genoa were the more aggressive expanders within the region. 

Corsica’s history is one of being passed around between controlling powers within the western Mediteranian region. They regularly bounced between Pisa and Genoa (their Pisan religious architecture, a testimony to the time under Pisan control), but with stints under the Saracens and others. Before France, the dominent foreign power that controlled Corsica was Genoa. So, in a matter of speaking, Corsica has long been a colonial, or at least a satellite, subject of a foriegn power since Rome. 

How does that shape an island’s identity? In the 18th and 19th century there was a strong understanding of Corsicans as under-dogs and as persecuted, denied representation in Ducal city state politics of Genoa and later the royal politics of Bourbon France. 

This is what made the Revolution important to Corsica (and what complicated Napoleon’s relationship to the Corsican independence movement of his time). The French Revolutionary government granted Corsica full representation in government and voting rights etc. This was one of the issues the Independence movement sited at the time and the French Revolutionary government answered it. 

Now, all of this to say, France did undertake Francophonization of the island. This was not a clearly articulated protocol to dealing with Corsica, but a product of the reality of being part of the French state. Which is to say, there was no “beat the Corsican out of them” approach that we see in colonial spaces in the “New World” (beat the Indian out of them) or in French Indo-China, as examples. It was a (relatively speaking) passive removal of Corsican language and culture rather than an active removal (within the context of France and how she dealt with language and cultural domination in colonial spaces). None of this is good, of course, the slow stripping of language, culture and identity is never good, but I’m just trying to provide context of where Corsica fits in with regards France’s approach to spaces external to the Metrpol. 

Further complicating this is that Corsicans themselves benefited from, and actively participated in, French colonial projects external to Europe. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, Corsicans often left the island to make their careers as colonial administrators in French Africa, Caribbean and Indo-China. This participation in French colonial spaces complicates their own relationship as a people who have suffered, though not nearly to the same degree, French cultural colonization efforts. 

I think it’s a good thing that there are ongoing efforts to preserve the Corsican dialect, and they seem to be successful if my obsessive checking on How-To-Learn-Corsican google results are anything to go by. I think Corsica has a beautiful, fascinating and utterly unique culture that should be better understood and preserved, although not to the point of stagnation and isolation. Nor at the expense of people who wish to make Corsica their home  (coughDon’tBeRacistcough). 

It is a fine line to walk, the desire to preserve linguistic and cultural identity in the face of globalization and against historic linguistic hegemony of a dominant culture in a multi-cultural and multi-linguistic nation but also allowing for natural change and shift and also you know, not going down the racist nationalist hole that many can (coughQuebeccough). 

Also, untangling and understanding Corsica’s own participation in, and benefiting from, the colonial project initiated by France is something that ought to be addressed and understood especially in juxtaposition of Corsica’s own experience of Francophonization and cultural strip-mining as a result of French hegemony. 

I hope this answers your questions! Also never apologize for asking - I enjoy talking about this and love have people ask me random things. <3 

#napoleon #napoleon bonaparte #napoleonic #history #corsica #corsican history #colonialism #colonization #18th century #19th century #linguistics #language and identity #oh god I didn't even get into Corsica's relationship with the Church or with mainland Italy #that's a whole other kettle of fish

[skov36cummings]

Anger Against the Device - Why the particular Big Fuss More than Globalization?

As typically the film star Joan Crawford once remarked, "The only issue worse than staying talked about is simply not being talked concerning. " In the particular converging global economic system, things are not every that different: In many ways, the only factor worse than starting your borders will be not opening your borders. Sure, you can find disadvantages to the free exchange involving goods, services, and money. But the benefits are huge. And even those countries that will close their region are going to remain in the spine of the package even during occasions of economic turmoil. "So what? inches some may request. "Who needs the trouble and dysfunction and pollution and even all the some other side associated with some sort of burgeoning economy? " Well, the poor, for one. Obviously, the particular rich have benefited a lot from the exploding worldwide economy- and abundant countries a lot more than weak ones- but various other than a path of languishing nations in sub- Saharan Africa, almost every developing country in the world is more preferable off today than they were a few years back, when more when compared to the way half the world's population was pushed to live upon less than $2 a day. How about these people? Would an excellent return to the protected, insular ways of the past help or even hurt the indegent people of the globe? Let's look from the Great Major depression. We've all heard about the rich tycoons who misplaced their shirts when the stock industry crashed in 1929. But it was the growers and the workers which suffered most. Plus when the usa shut its borders in order to trade together with the Smoot- Hawley Tariff Take action in 1930, it not only released its recession towards the rest of the particular world, it directed other countries to be able to close their borders in retaliation. Quickly, an American recession became a worldwide depression. The effect? Most of those fats cats who suffered losses in the share market suffered, although many still acquired some in reserve- or were in a position to find innovative jobs. It was the particular poor, however, who were devastated by the depression. All via history, it had been all those countries that opened their doors and even traded that prospered the most: Portugal, Rome, the Venetian Empire, Holland inside the Golden Age, Real England, Japan plus the United States more than a lot of the 20th century- now a whole raft of appearing market economies within the 21st. Cina, for example, prior to it opened its doors- albeit partially- for the world economic system, was obviously a poor, having difficulties, backward economy. Right now it's on trail to become the greatest economy in the particular world. And lots of hundred million individuals have recently been brought out involving poverty in the particular process. "But elaborate in it personally? " many men and women in rich nations ask. It is usually true that actually rich countries include workers who require to be protected from your hardships brought around by economic transition. The American midsection class, for instance , also during the "boom years" of typically the 1980s, saw normal wages stagnate. Since then, the mean income of America's workers has grown by only seventeen percent. In that time, the income regarding the richest 0. 1 percent of the population provides quadrupled. Worldwide it can even worse. By beginning of the particular 21st century, the particular world's richest sixty- five million people were earning over five hundred times more compared to the world's weakest sixty five , 000, 000. Visitors to nearly every city in typically the developing world will be confronted with gigantic slums filled to capacity with individuals trying to be able to eke out a living, sometimes beneath the most unsanitary problems. So what's the answer? Stop economic expansion by putting an end to globalization? How will the poor in developing country slums fare then? In addition to what in regards to the middle- class workers which saw their incomes stagnate even during the boom years? Will things acquire any better regarding them during an economic downturn? Most likely not. The modern international economy has to be able to keep growing. Only then will this be able to generate enough jobs in order to provide opportunities regarding growing populations. Sadly, some people will be against globalization for cultural reasons. The French antiglobalist Jos� Bov�, for instance , when used his tractor to destroy some sort of McDonald's restaurant near his sheep grind, denouncing the evils of global domination by multinationals as well as the proliferation of negative American food. But why was typically the restaurant being developed there in typically the first place? Most probably, as a certain part in the population had found it helpful, indeed desirable, in order to eat at McDonald's. Globalization, by description, opens up gates. It gives us new opportunities- in order to buy, sell, in addition to travel abroad. In case it means of which some ay lose their job, it also signifies that numerous more will obtain jobs. Statistically, industry and exchange mean economic growth. Sure, the rich are likely to the actual many when profits boost. But an evergrowing firm also means enhanced demand for labor- either in the form of direct employment or by increasing the requirement for a complete range of items and services through outside the company- which creates careers. That does not mean we all have to blindly accept the inequities that globalization exacerbates, but instead of blaming globalization regarding the unequally allocated wealth, why don't you enjoy fault the governments of which allow it to be distributed unequally? There is some thing that governments employ, and still have used for centuries, to redistribute wealth- taxes. And the way these people work is basic: You take a lot more money from the abundant than you do from the poor. Then you definitely provide courses that help everyone. But , in typically the end, the poor attract more. And read more is better away. Instead of killing the goose of which laid the golden egg, why not distribute the eggs more equitably? Throughout Sweden, for instance , typically the government follows an insurance policy of "protecting the particular worker, not the task. " This Scandinavian compromise allows a new government to recognize the failure associated with certain industries- shipbuilding, for instance , which on high- wage Laxa, sweden makes little monetary sense- and target on helping the particular newly unemployed staff, providing generous social services and financial aid to help all of them through the difficult period after shedding their jobs. America has a similar program called Deal Adjustment Assistance (TAA) in order to workers that have lost their very own jobs to worldwide competition. Approximately $1 billion a season is spent in retraining and being out of work benefits. In comparison to the approximated hundreds of huge amounts of dollars that are gained every season from free deal, it may certainly not be much, nevertheless it's a start. Some estimates in the value of free trade, in the particular United States only, are more than a trillion dollars a year. How will be this possible? Typically the way trade works is simple. You usually buy from additional countries only if it's cheaper as opposed to the way it would turn out to be in your own home. The idea is to let each country to trade what it generates most efficiently- plus then give it time to import the rest. Simply by allowing countries to export what they will have got a comparative benefits in producing, these people can earn beneficial foreign exchange- which allows them in order to import those items and services that will other countries are usually better at generating.

#Helmet review #click here #more info #here #read more #website #get more info #check here

[kendrixtermina]

I posted 18.775 times in 2021

309 posts created (2%)

18466 posts reblogged (98%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 59.8 posts.

I added 450 tags in 2021

#feelings - 207 posts

#music - 55 posts

#enneagram - 39 posts

#silmarillion - 29 posts

#fe3h - 24 posts

#baby tries to art - 22 posts

#fire emblem three houses - 20 posts

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#fire emblem: three houses - 18 posts

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Longest Tag: 126 characters

#i think her last visit was before i found out about enneagram though so i don't know where she lands on that front. 749 maybe?

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

Some thoughts on Rhea

emotionally she scares & repulses me & I believe she is basically a villain (albeit a sad and sympathetic one), but writing-wise she is actually pretty good character.

It has to be acknowledged that she is a tyrant, an incompetent leader and downright creepy towards Byleth, but I don't want her to get the "crazy bitch" treatment either.

we need more complex female villains who aren't just simple cliches of the vain sorceress, femme fatale, angry vengeful fury etc.

Also, it's pretty interesting to see this take of a demigod who is both literally the child of a deity but also interacts with religion as an institution?

There is one ancient play featuring Dionysus which did something like this, but it was written from the PoV of a believer so it would by definition show him as right instead of exploring ambiguity there.

Another remarkable thing about Rhea is that it's one of the few times where I've seen a sympathetic take on Lawful Evil. Most creative types tend to understand chaotic evil - just being overwhelmed by anger, vengeance, boredom etc. so we get sympathetic chaotic villains, but lawful villains are usually like... your dad, or your least favorite bigoted politician.

Someone who is distinctly not you, and who you couldn't see yourself becoming. But sometimes a villain NEEDS to be someone you could become, to serve as a warning.

Rhea is not like that - though she IS a shitty authority figure, we also get to see her in a very personal light, & get a glimpse at her inner mechanics beyond just generic projection. We see how her great fear of betrayal came to be & her longing for guidance, her isolation in playing the part of the leader which she cant really see herself as.

Since the 20th century it has been in vogue to portray the authoritarian follower personality as humanity's default state but if you look at more modern writings it's really more of a damage in response to either over-control/ overprotectiveness or great disruption of safety.

And authoritarian followers tend to cling to leaders because they themselves are really bad at decisions & prone to the precise kind of stagnation that Rhea's rule represents.

In a sense seeing the purity brigade defending Rhea is like dudebros idealizing Tyler Durden. They resonate because it's the same psychological structure, perceived struggle & feelings, but they miss the point where this is shown to be bad.

93 notes • Posted 2021-08-23 10:49:54 GMT

#4

While I get why that’s a interesting box to play in & I don’t want to tell anyone to stop having fun I think a lot of contemporary FF tends to overstate the ‘alieness’ of the Maiar. 

Looking at the source material the Maiar that we do see don’t seem all that different from the incarnates in mindset aside from having loads of power and knowledge. 

Gandalf is a main character in four books, & we see him very capable of getting frustrated, irascible & downright desperate. And then there’s Saruman. He waaay outclasses our heroes with his Scary Compelling Voice that makes him seem great & wonderful while he keeps talking, but beyond that he is basically just an A-grade pathetic jerk who goes down with precious little dignity. He’s not above anything, including flinging petty insults as his colleagues... or even Theoden.

What does stand out is that they’re often shown as having more big-picture focus(probably because of the power & knowledge) - see that bit in Unfinished Tales where Gandalf is trying to convince Thorin to take Bilbo along & gets nowhere with all his talk about the future battle against the forces of evil until he loses his cool and says something like “Do this and I’ll owe you forever”, which Thorin does understand.

Or the way Thingol & Melian are just completely reacting right past each other from the moment Beren shows up. The scene right after he departs is especially contrasting,  Thingol is thinking something like “Like I’d ever wed my daughter to some random mortal!” while Melian is like, “Oh dear you just locked us into a crappy timeline, this will have huge repercussions in the future”

But even Melian whos one of the more powerful & mystical ones is still wholly capable of like, losing all sense and running off in a daze after her hubby kicks the bucket....

152 notes • Posted 2021-04-19 09:25:28 GMT

#3

You gotta admire Maedhros’ specific talent for always being exactly 5 mins too late to avert desaster

He gets close enough to Formenos to hear some of the fighting noises but by the time he shows up with his brothers Finwe is toast (not that they could’ve done much)

Does get to his father before the Balrogs give him the coup de grace, but by that point he was already mortally wounded

Doesn’t make the meeting with Fingon’s army during the Nirnaeth (thanks again Gothmog)

Only learns after the fact what Celegorm’s underlings have done with Doriaths’ princes and cannot find them alive; 

Catches up with Elwing quick enough to corner her but not quick enough to get her before she jumps off the cliff

162 notes • Posted 2021-07-01 21:17:56 GMT

#2

Edelgard and “meritocracy” - an essay

In this essay I wish to adress the common argument that “meritocracy bad, therefore edelgard bad” & the logical leaps therein.

Before we begin, I’d like to stress that she doesn’t even use the word “meritocracy” & they’re not even looking at it’s modern definition but reacting to the way it has been used as a fighting word to denigrate the poor specificically in the post reagan modern USA & then assuming Edelgard means the exact same thing by that without bothering to examine what she actually says & in what context.

Modern capitalism & the way it uses rhetoric of merit as an excuse is bad & with its reduction of human value to their moneymaking ability, definitely inherently ableist, I agree totally.

But 3H does NOT take place in the modern world. Progress is always relative to what came before. It*s progress away from entrenched problems.

It’s a total failure to even imagine a world different from the sucky one we live in - that’s exactly what tolkien meant  by that saying that if we’re prisoners we have a duty to escape.

Edelgard doesn’t live in a capitalist society nor is she bringing about capitalism (if anything Claude’s the one talking of free trade & giving the merchants what they want, though he is almost certainly playing them much like the church)

And the main component of capitalism - factory owners, rich elites who owns large swathes of companies or real estate - is nowhere to be found.

In our world that cropped up because industrialization made owning factories, offices, trade etc. more lucrative that just owning the land, so factory owners replaced landed lords, essentially promising the peasants freedom if they helped them overthrow the kings but granting them only in a limited manner - the flawed inequal democracies that resulted were a compromise between peasants and factory owners.

But by and large the nobles are very much in the same niche as the factory owners today - they own the land and get special trade privileges (the means of production), they often abuse the populace with impunity, the peasants are very poor.

Edelgard cracks down on corruption & special trade privileges even during the timeskip.

And like the rich of our world, they have a self-mythology propaganda justification based on merit. Yes, there is the “by the grace of god” argument, too, but crests give you extra fighting power, and if you look at the Ferdinand support for example you do see that Fodlan’s nobles - especially the adrestian ones - see themselves as a honed elite that is trained from birth & therefore better at ruling.

Not quite the same argument a modern billionaire uses - who is very invested in convincing you that they didn’t get their power and wealth by their birth - but a myth nonetheless.

Edelgard’s not bringing “meritocracy” as in brutal competition opposed to caring social safety nets, but as opposed to unearned privilege.

If you wanted to compare that to any kind of sociohistorical context, you might look at Napoleon’s peasant liberation or the implementation of civil service examinations in ancient China.

That wasn’t an all good thing - In the same way that Europe is very impacted by the legacy of rome both good & bad (there are persisting bad attitudes toward war, authority and agriculture for example), east asia still has a lot of education obsession causing pressure & unhealthy work habits to this day.

But if you compared ancient china before the reforms to ancient China after it definitely got better, by ancient china standards.

We couldn’t expect the people back then to come up with all advances up to our exact modern values at once (not can we be sure how much of our values will stand the test of time)

Considering that Fodlan’s ideal of merit is basically what Lorenz, Ingrid and Ferdinand are embodying for their respective countries, and that she stocks her inner circle with very different leaders, it is no stretch to say that she wants to shake up the social ideas of what even counts as merit, to make ppl value other things that crest power or elite upbringing, the same way we might say today that hey, cleaners are valuable actually.

Edelgard is basically doing her world’s equivalent of taxing the billionaires - reducing the power of what the overprivilieged class happens to be, & it’s obvious from her talk of how she despises inequality that she would hardly be for rule of factory owners.

When Edelgard says that she wants to make Fodlan more merit-based, that has to be taken in the context that she lives in a world where your birth determines everything, incompetent nobles can be as lazy as they want, and no one cares how competent you are if you lack a crest, title or both.

If she looked at our world, she would quickly see through the propaganda that it is supposedly “merit based” and object to how wealth and national origin obviously dictate wealth & opportunity while talented people go to waste in sweatshops.

Now of course there have been arguments even against “perfect” meritocracy - one is the devaluation of working class jobs.

To this one could answer that this is more a flaw in how merit is conceived. Historically there have been societies that exahlted blue collar work, artisans or farming.

The second argument, however, is not so easy to get rid of: That is devalues people who can’t just go & produce like machines, especially the unemployed, the sick, the mentally ill, the disabled…

But at this point we’ve got to lean back & get our definitions straight, & make it clear what we even mean by “meritocracy” -

Because if we’re just talking about the basic idea that competency should be rewarded, I don’t think too many people disagree with that. We might see a problem with valueing the competency of a doctor or lawyers dispropottionally over the competency of a cleaner or a bricklayer, but we all, by and large, want the people who prepare our goods and services to be competent. Maybe we wouldn’t exalt it over all over qualities, but most of us admire skill.

Of course the problem with the political rhetoric of “meritocracy” is that it goes beyond just rewarding skill, first with the afore mentioned rewarding of only some skills, but mostly with the reversion or overemphasis of the above: Saying that skill is the only thing that matters (to the exclusion of any inheent human value) & that those who don’t have it are worthless.

First I want to throw out the thought that this is a product of the production/profit orientation of capitalism, but one could of course imagine, as many sci fi authors have done, a non-capitalistic society that is still obsessed with merit at the exclusion of those who are not oriented towards productivity & care more about fun & relationships than producing, or those who can’t produce because they are sick or disabled.

So now we must ask ourselves the question: Which of those views does Edelgard actually hold?

See the full post

168 notes • Posted 2021-09-22 13:00:00 GMT

#1

A systematic comparison of the routes. 

To the surprise of no one, Silver Snow is the worst. 

266 notes • Posted 2021-05-06 00:08:02 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

so my top tag was feelings. i had a lot of feelings this year. who would have thunk.

tbh most of those feelings were "dreading the consequences of my actions", "urge to kick myself for repeating my follies" and "great weight of despair sucking all the will from my soul", but under the present circumstances i dont suppose thats all that special.

but there was some good stuff too, like anime and video games, and my mom & siblings. And cool music what would i do without cool music

thanks to all of you for sticking around

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

[orbemnews]

Short-Sellers Fear for the Future Wall Street’s skeptics are suffering Short-sellers have long been some of Wall Street’s most reviled villains. But the recent “meme stock” frenzy — in part, a concerted effort to squeeze such investors — has left many fearing for their livelihoods, The Times’s Kate Kelly and Matt Goldstein report. Short-sellers have been battered by the bull market. Hedge funds that primarily bet against stocks were down 47 percent over the past year. “Short-sellers have been beaten up and left for dead on the side of the road,” said Jim Chanos, the investor who famously bet against Enron ahead of its collapse. Now they are worried about new challenges: The GameStop frenzy shows that internet-enabled herds can bet en masse on companies, driving up their stock price and saddling shorts with huge losses. “I see dead hedge funds,” one user posted in a Reddit forum. 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President Biden presses for a huge stimulus measure. The president defended efforts to pass a $1.9 trillion package with only Democratic votes, rejecting calls for smaller proposals. In related news, Democrats plan to unveil a $3,000-per-child cash payment. Democratic senators propose rewriting a tech legal shield. The “SAFE TECH Act,” proposed by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, would establish limits to websites’ immunity from legal liability on user-posted content. It has encountered resistance from groups that say smaller tech platforms could be hurt more than giants like Google and Facebook. SoftBank’s Vision Fund posts a huge quarterly gain. The Japanese company’s tech investment fund reported an $8 billion profit in its latest quarter, thanks to portfolio companies like OpenDoor and DoorDash going public. SoftBank as a whole reported an $11 billion profit, surpassing estimates. The best of the Super Bowl. Sure, Tom Brady solidified his status as the greatest quarterback of all time as he led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a blowout victory over the Kansas City Chiefs. But let’s talk about the ads, which included pleas for unity (Bruce Springsteen for Jeep), nostalgic weirdness (Timothée Chalamet as the son of Edward Scissorhands for Cadillac) and just plain old weirdness (Toni Petersson, the C.E.O. of Oatly). Andrew’s favorite: Jason Alexander, in a manner of speaking, for Tide. Where do you get your financial advice? As lawmakers and regulators investigate the meme stock frenzy, they are taking a closer look at online forums and social media accounts. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said yesterday that she wanted to “make sure that investors are adequately protected.” Disclosures and disclaimers are in focus. The trader known as “Roaring Kitty” put a disclaimer on his popular YouTube videos about GameStop, recommending that potential investors consult an adviser before acting. But an analysis of more than 1,200 TikTok videos by 50 “StockTok” influencers found that 14 percent encouraged users to make trades without a disclaimer, according to the cryptocurrency trading platform Paxful. Those videos, some of which were flagged by TikTok as “misleading,” have garnered 28.4 million views. Regulators have been here before. During the dot-com boom, the S.E.C. kept tabs on chat rooms for signs of manipulation, as in the case of Jonathan Lebed, a teenager who posted messages touting stocks he owned. In September 2000, he settled with the agency by agreeing to pay back $285,000. There’s an ETF for that: The asset manager VanEck is starting a fund that scours Twitter, forums and blogs for stocks with a lot of online buzz. “The elements in the new system consist of central computers, an automatic communications network and desktop terminals.” — On this day 50 years ago, the Nasdaq booted up the first electronic stock exchange, which The Times called “the most revolutionary innovation in the history of the over-the-counter market.” Microsoft’s president talks politics After the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, companies have been rethinking their political donations, as we detailed this weekend. Microsoft, which has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent election cycles to Republicans who went on to challenge the certification of votes after the storming of the Capitol, said late last week that it would cut them off. In the first in-depth interview about the decision, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, spoke with Kara Swisher on the “Sway” podcast. One donation came as a particularly unpleasant surprise, Mr. Smith said, referring to a gift to Senator Josh Hawley, who led Republican efforts to question the election result. “When I learned in January that that donation had been made in the early part of December, it did not bring an enthusiastic beginning to my morning,” said Mr. Smith, who leaves day-to-day decisions in this area to the company’s PAC department. Microsoft has redefined its PAC policies. Mr. Smith said the company would now more explicitly consider issues like whether politicians “are good for democracy.” There is still a place for the corporate PAC, Mr. Smith argued. Although the point of a corporate PAC is up for debate, “I think we have one for good reasons,” he said. Those reasons, namely, are because crucial matters of privacy, security and competition are “going to be decided in the world of politics.” The serial SPAC sponsor Alec Gores strikes another deal The blank-check company Gores Holding VI is acquiring Matterport in a deal that values the real-estate technology company at $2.3 billion. The merger also includes a cash infusion of $640 million. Alec Gores was early to the SPAC game, notably with his firm’s 2016 deal for Hostess. The firm also boasts the biggest SPAC deal to date, taking United Wholesale Mortgage public last year in a deal worth more than $16 billion. Gores Holding raised its seventh SPAC last month, helping January set a record for SPAC fund-raising, with blank-check I.P.O.s worth nearly $26 billion. Today’s deal was the first by Gores since Justin Wilson and Ted Fike joined from Softbank’s Vision Fund, suggesting a tech shift for the firm’s SPAC business. Matterport makes spatial data technology that helps create 3-D visualizations of properties like homes and event spaces. The week ahead Corporate earnings continue to come in better than expected, defying initial forecasts of another pandemic-fueled decline and forcing analysts to upgrade their expectations. Blue-chip companies hoping to keep the streak alive this week include: Fox, KKR and Twitter on Tuesday; Coca-Cola, G.M. and Uber on Wednesday; and AstraZeneca, Disney and PepsiCo on Thursday. Bumble is scheduled to make its market debut midweek, and is predicted to raise about $1 billion in an I.P.O. that values the online dating company at around $6 billion. And finally, the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump starts on Tuesday. Will Biden curb the ‘curse of bigness’? The Biden administration must choose between taking a progressive view of antitrust regulations, using the law to rein in or break up big companies; sticking with the laissez-faire approach that critics say has led to extreme concentration; or trying to find some middle path. The pressure on the president from the left comes from those who argue that a tougher approach simply hearkens to the past, when the authorities recognized what Louis Brandeis, who went on to become a Supreme Court justice, called the “curse of bigness” in the early 20th century. “Monopoly power is a causal factor in our most serious economic challenges,” states a new report from the American Economic Liberties Project, an antimonopoly nonprofit, shared first with DealBook. The group argues for a new-old ideological regime that reins in consolidation, proposing dozens of actions for the Justice Department, F.T.C., F.C.C., Congress and many other official bodies. “This is a major project,” the group’s executive director, Sarah Miller, said. The need to “reject old ideological underpinnings” is a unifying theme throughout the report, she added. “There is not just one silver bullet.” A new lens is needed, Ms. Miller said. For decades, antitrust reviews have employed a “consumer welfare standard” that examines mergers for economic efficiency, mostly focused on the effect a deal has on prices. But people aren’t just consumers — they are also workers, voters, entrepreneurs and community members. In practice, Ms. Miller argues, as industries consolidate, consumers sometimes pay less for products, but wages also stagnate and entrepreneurship falters. “America’s concentration crisis did not emerge in the Trump years,” but it deepened during this time, according to the report. The group compiled a downloadable database of more than 1,300 significant mergers during the Trump era, noting that “basic, usable information” about M.&A. is mostly unavailable to the public. THE SPEED READ Deals In SPAC news: Elliott Management is reportedly considering raising $1 billion for a blank-check fund; SoftBank is seeking $630 million for two SPACs; and Danny Meyer, the founder of Shake Shack, is planning to raise $250 million for a fund. (WSJ, Bloomberg) Oatly, the maker of plant-based dairy products, is reportedly seeking a $10 billion valuation in its I.P.O. (Bloomberg) Politics and policy Donald Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 presidential election have cost federal, state and local governments an estimated $519 million. (WaPo) Tech Best of the rest Bill McGlashan, the former TPG executive embroiled in the college admissions scandal, will plead guilty to two charges. (Bloomberg) Jeff Immelt accepts some blame for G.E.’s stumbles — but offers a lot of excuses, too. (NYT) Clawing back pay for misconduct is hard, so some companies are forcing top executives to set aside share grants for at least a year, even after they vest. (WSJ) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Source link Orbem News #Fear #Future #ShortSellers

[askariakapo90]

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