#ok here's the thing re: some recent discourse

[rollercoasterwords]

ok here's the essay re: "realisitc?? they're literally wizards!!"

upon further reflection (25 min voicenote 2 twin, 1 conversation w 2 friends) i think i have. managed 2 organize + articulate my thoughts.

obligatory disclaimer: this literally does not matter i'm talking about hp fanfiction in 2023 this is not a serious issue beyond being like. kind of annoying. unfortunately i just enjoy writing abt stupid fandom discourse hopefully going back 2 school will cure me of the incessant need 2 write essays for fun but who knows. anyway me writing this essay is not me saying this is a huge or important issue i just like 2 talk <3

anyway! the ~discourse~ i've been noticing in the marauders fandom, which from my pov has had sort of an uptick recently (although who knows if that's objectively true--maybe i've just stumbled across more of it. from where i'm sitting, though, it seems like it's become more of a hot topic in recent months) generally goes as follows:

person a: omg ugh i hate that in [x fic] [x character] has/is/does [x flaw] :(

person b: oh well [x character] having/being/doing [x flaw] makes the story more realistic

person a: UM they're literally wizards at a magic school lol....who cares if it's realistic....

and the reason this both interests + annoys me is that i think. giving person a the benefit of the doubt + assuming they aren't being purposely obtuse (bc in that case we're just talking abt trolls), it demonstrates such a gap in understanding. bc the thing person a is fighting w that response is literally a strawman

the strawman:

saying "um they're literally wizards" is only a "gotcha" moment if it's pointing out an inconsistency in person b's thinking. it is only pointing out an inconsistency if, when person b says "it makes it more realistic," we take that to mean that person b is saying "a story is better if it more closely matches our own reality." in that case, saying "they're wizards!!!" points out an inconsistency, bc obviously characters being wizards does not match reality. gotcha!!!

the problem is that that isn't what person b is saying. so by responding "they're wizards" as if that's some sort of "gotcha" moment, person a is misinterpreting person b's argument, constructing a strawman that nobody is actually arguing, and then tearing down that strawman with a pithy little sarcastic comment that positions them as soooo much more reasonable than person b.

so what is person b actually saying?

the problem is that saying "[x character] having [x flaw] makes a story more realistic" is not an argument about the story being better, it's an explanation for why someone would write the story that way.

another disclaimer - some "person b"s in this situation might, in fact, be using "it's more realistic" to try and argue that a story being more realistic makes the story better; however, that is not a position i'm going to be defending here. i think any argument that roots itself in a so-called "objective" measure of what makes a piece of art better or worse is a non-starter, and in that case i think person b and person a are perhaps both misguided in different ways.

but what's happening from person b's pov is - person a asks "why would anyone write [x character] with [x flaw]?" person b tries to answer that question by explaining: well, it makes the story more realistic. the implication here is -- a story being more realistic is a personal preference that some people are going to prefer; people write + read stories for different reasons. this is the reason that i enjoy the story, personally. that's it!

and the thing is, "realistic" in the context of a fantasy story does not mean "matches real life exactly." in the context of fantasy, "realistic" refers, in my mind, to two things:

1. cohesive internal logic

even within a fantasy universe, there are going to be structured societies, rules, laws of natures, etc. what makes a fantasy story more realistic is not how closely it adheres to real-life structures + rules, but how closely it adheres to its own established structures + rules - its own internal logic.

for example: in my fantasy world, fairies can fly but mermaids can't. then, suddenly, without explanation, i write a scene where a mermaid can fly. this makes the story less realistic, in that it breaks from its own internal logic, and stretches the limits of readers' abilities to suspend their disbelief. like - we've already sort of "agreed" to suspend disbelief about fairies + mermaids existing, because that's just the established norm of the story, but as readers we are still looking to follow some internal logic. oftentimes, when people are complaining about fantasy stories being more or less realistic, they are referring to the story's own internal logic.

this means if someone is writing hp fanfic set in a canon universe, working in the established canon universe where certain biases + flaws exist, it makes the fic more realistic to adhere to that internal logic. obviously, a fic writer can choose to change that internal logic and say, for example, "in my story the wizarding world doesn't have homophobia, and that's an established societal norm that is part of the story's internal logic." that's fine! it's just a matter of personal choice whether that's the story that somebody wants to write or not, y'know?

2. reflection on real life

the other aspect of "realism" that i think people are referring to when they talk about a fantasy story being more or less "realistic" is the ways in which that story does reflect actual reality. like--fantasy stories don't exist in a vaccuum. many writers use fantasy stories to reflect realities from actual life; things like prejudice or oppression or war, etc. placing these real-life issues into a fantastical setting allows a new lens through which to think about them, pushing us to examine them from different angles.

for example - take k.a. applegate's animorphs series. it is, in many ways, completely unrealistic, in that it's about kids who can turn into animals fighting off an alien invasion. but k.a. applegate wrote the books to demonstrate the utter horror and devastation of war, and much of the subject matter reflects real-life wartime situations. a kid who only hears about war through the news or through action movies where there's a clear good guy and bad guy, a clear right and wrong, might find it easy to disregard the horror. but when applegate took those real-life situations and placed them into the fantastical setting of animorphs, she's providing an age-appropriate way for children to understand that no, war is not an action movie, it's a horror story.

this is why "realism" in fantasy matters to people. some writers are using fantasy not as pure escapism, but as a way to explore real-life issues through a different lens, one that may allow people to empathize with an issue in a way they normally don't. obviously, some people are just writing fantasy for fun escapism -- and that's fine! there's space for both types of stories to exist simultaneously; what doesn't make sense is assuming that just because somebody engages with media differently from you, there must be something wrong with it.

anyway. the conclusion to all this i suppose is that i think if you genuinely do not understand why someone would write a character a certain way, rather than assuming the worst or assuming there's no good reason it's generally better to like. actually ask and listen to the answer people are giving u + try to understand where they're coming from. not everyone is going to want to read the same types of stories, and somebody writing a character w certain flaws shouldn't feel like a personal attack, bc fandom is a self-curated experience where u literally don't need 2 read or write anything u don't want to. The End

#ranting and raving #txt

[rotationalsymmetry]

Re: bi/pan discourse.

This is probably way too much nuance for tumblr, but here goes.

1. People can identify however they want.

2. Having heavily overlapping labels is not inherently bad.

3. As far as I can tell, the pansexual label comes from a good place. A lot of older people using “bisexual” used/use it on the assumption that there are two genders, because practically everyone in western culture assumed two genders. Nonbinary genders being a widespread concept is a very recent thing, in a contemporary Western context. And while bisexual as a term doesn’t have to assume two genders to be a meaningful term, it’s also not bad to have a term that explicitly acknowledges the existence of nonbinary genders.

4. There are also advantages to the term bisexual, including that it’s more widely recognized and most of the activism specifically for bi (m-spec) people as opposed to queer people as a whole has been done under the bisexual label. And apparently including that some people figure the bisexual label applies to them but pansexual doesn’t, for various reasons.

5. Ok. In the context of all the preceding: I think the discourse that arose after “pansexuality” showed up has been overall harmful to (bisexuals/pansexuals/people who don’t like labels but could use one of those if they wanted to/m-spec people.) And yeah, I got the infographic that people have used the term for decades, but I hadn’t heard it until about 10 years ago so I think it didn’t have mainstream usage even within the queer community until around then. That doesn’t mean it’s the fault of people who like the label or that people shouldn’t use it, in fact, I think that to get over the harm the discourse has caused the community it is absolutely essential to not blame other m-spec people for the harm or police their language. I do suspect a lot of this has come from non-m-spec people, either motivated by queerphobia and hoping to divide the queer community, and/or from terfs hoping to divide the community for somewhat different reasons.

6. The retcon of “pansexuality means attraction regardless of gender and bisexuality means attraction to two or more genders but in different ways” is utterly bullshit. The way bisexuals have been using the term for decades is not wrong, and plenty of bisexuals describe their orientation as being regardless of gender. It is fine for anyone individually to say “I identify as x because blah blah blah” but it is essential to understand those definitions are not universally agreed on.

7. In practice a lot of people use multiple labels, and switch depending on context and what the people they’re talking to already know or what their biases are or phases of the moon or whatever. Which is completely fine. “Bi” is fine, “pan” is fine, “queer” is fine, evasive shrugs or hand wiggles are fine, letting people make their own damn assumptions is fine, I don’t get the purpose of polysexual or omnisexual and also in my nonmonogamous circles polysexual has a completely different meaning. But, it’s fine to use those terms. Just cuz I don’t understand them doesn’t mean anything, you know?

[touyasdoll]

NO OK I SAW YOUR TAGS AND WANNA TALK ABOUT HAWKS AND ENDEAVOR AND HAWKS’ REACTION TO FINDING OUT ABOUT ENDEAVOR’S PAST:

This isn’t a like discourse “you’re wrong >:(“ thing and 100% Horikoshi should’ve written it better so we could see Hawks’ thought process better but, at least personally, I don’t think Hawks’ attitude is so much “eh, it’s fine” as it is “it’s not fine but he is trying to do better” and it’s the same attitude hawks had with Twice. Like it’s just another example of Hawks’ fundamental belief that all people are capable of change if they want to. So it’s not so much that he’s giving Endeavor a free pass as it is that he sees the way Endeavor’s family are reacting to him and him changing and believes that if Endeavor serves his penance with his family and genuinely changes than he deserves that opportunity to change. Just like Twice deserved an opportunity to reform himself after serving his time and just like I would love to see him offer Touya that chance (although I doubt hori will give us that and also doubt that he’d write it well even if he did) And I also don’t think he’s truly idolized Endeavor for a long time. He even questions the guy’s intelligence re: leaving him the coded message. Endeavor was an important part of his journey but I don’t think Hawks puts him on a pedestal or anything and unfortunately the state of things means there isn’t really time for nuanced discussion of what to do about Endeavor’s past crimes.

Anyway sorry for the long ask!!! My point is just that Hawks isn’t ok with what Endeavor did, he just believes heavily in second chances. Perhaps naively, perhaps not, and unfortunately Hori decided to have Hawks find out this information in the middle of an arc that leaves no room for processing that and truly dealing with it without negative consequences for the general good. Like they can’t toss Endeavor in Tartarus or punish him rn bc the country is in shambles, there’s no time to investigate the extent of Dabi’s claims (which hawks knows are heavily biased/potentially not 100% true considering the portrayal Dabi made of his killing of Twice) and then react accordingly. Sorry again for the long ask 😅 I just have a lot of Hawks thoughts unsurprisingly

All very valid points! And yeah, no discourse here at all, but I really enjoy discussion like this! I truly do think that Hawks’ character and development has suffered recently, but that’s just an opinion I have about the writing. I think Hori does some masterful things in his storytelling, but it’s disappointing it’s really other things become seemingly forgotten about or diminished either or out carelessness or lack of time or whatever.

I, obviously, have a lot of bias towards this situation lmao. I love Keigo, but Touya’s my absolute fav. On top of that, Endeavor greatly reminds me of someone who I know & detest personally, so a fair bit of this is probably also me projecting, but.

I feel like Endeavor’s redemption arc is weak, as it stands. Yes, he’s showing remorse and he’s apologized and he wants to redeem himself, regardless or whether or not he’s forgiven by his family. The world is in shambles, but there’s been no mention of him having to face any legal or professional repercussions for his actions. People can change and it’s great that Hawks is so willing to give people second chances. Humans make mistakes and we are able to learn from them and better ourselves if we choose too. I agree with your point that maybe he doesn’t condone his actions, but rather is just hopeful that Endeavor is truly changing and he deserves that chance.

However, I have a feeling that Endeavor isn’t going to face any repercussions beyond being publicly humiliated and feeling his family’s disappointment in him. He committed crimes and spent a solid majority of his life trying to become the number one hero without displaying a single heroic quality beyond raw strength. Should he be allowed to redeem himself? Sure, but he can do that in prison and they should strip him of any accolades/titles/recognition that he’s earned. You don’t get to abuse your family and get to call yourself the number one hero. It’s not heroic, nor admirable, or even acceptable under any circumstance and with the way that society as a whole in that universe reveres heroes, he should not be allowed to call himself one any longer. I just think the whole thing will feel very hollow and very corrupt if no one actually holds him accountable when things are said and done.

Okay, sorry I ranted about Endeavor so much lmao. I can’t help it. Anyway, back to Hawks. I do think it’s admirable that he wants to do his best and think the best of others. It’s a very valid point that you make about him being leery of trusting Dabi after what he did, but also I just wish so, so desperately (and selfishly) that they could connect on some level, due to their childhood experiences. I also wish that Hori would take this opportunity to show us that maybe the whole Shouto/Endeavor thing has truly changed Hawks’ feelings about his own parent. His dad certainly isn’t worthy of reconciliation, but I think there’s a chance for he and his mom to reconnect. That situation is obviously more personal to him, but if he’s willing to overlook the actions of a former abuser, I would hope he’s willing to have a conversation with his mother, a former enabler.

There’s just so, so many things I want to see happen and I have very little hope of any of it actually occurring lol.

#ren💕 #just vibing 💌 #the feeling is mootual #tw abuse

[witchcraftingboop]

Re: Jbird & RainS. (Briar) Discourse

Previously, I have spoken with the person who made very serious allegations against JBird, calling him a racist, that were then used by others to spread slander against him. They have since apologized and admitted that JBird isn't a racist, and I genuinely think there was a stark miscommunication that went on to prompt such a claim. I don't want to name them or involve them here, since I do believe they've already reflected enough on the situation at hand, and is still deeply considering the multi-faceted hornet's nest of problems they've stumbled upon.

However, in light of the blatant dismissal and refusal to submit actual proof against the two, I feel as if I should share the information I offered this person before.

If you are basing your arguments against Jbird and Briar off of the previous, separate Discord group discussions of Trio & co. - screenshots of which have been, and continue to be spread years later, by Prim - then I especially implore you to be open to what I have to say. As a third party to this continually and rapidly spiralling debacle, I feel like there's not much I can say or do to assist my friends in being heard, but I feel as if I ought to try. Prim's following is large and actively prepared to follow her "do not interact even to ask questions" policy, so I worry it may be too late already. But I am not without hope or faith.

Tumblr is, unfortunately, a place where hate spreads rapidly, and while I do love the broad community it fosters, I am also aware that, even with the best of folks, it is hard to see the side of someone you've already decided is guilty and not worth approaching for an explanation.

First and foremost, I believe in innocence until proven guilty.

Now then! Onto my offered commentary/input! (Sorry to prattle on so much.)

To start, thedesertgod, also known as Trio, did go through and look for her personal information, which is messed up. But that person has already apologized, if I'm remembering correctly, and left Tumblr. And the other main user who helped spread information about Prim being a race faker also admitted wrong and left. The others in the chat, particularly Mystic and Ronan appear to just be making jokes and stating factual informative summaries, respectively. E-muete also said "ok no" after the Dolezal comment, which is a common "no that's too far a comparison/joke/statement" substitute among their forums and chats and often means they don't actually agree with what they themselves said. Ruby also politely reminds Trio that it's impossible to tell someone's race off of their appearance alone. So what I see here is definitely problematic, but entirely on Trio's part. I'm not saying it's not screwed up to find pictures of someone's parents and debate their race, but the persons who did those things have already left the Tumblrsphere.

Unfortunately, the people you've pointed out don't have a good history with Prim even before the whole "Trio nitpicking her race" thing. Prim used to follow more than a few of them and use their posts to fuel her platform, oftentimes creating uninformed mish-mosh articles with a voice of authority that simply wasn't warranted. As I'm sure you're aware, it's hard enough dealing with people stealing your content word for word, but to attempt to steal your knowledge? Your initiations and rites of passage? And use them to sell yourself as a master of a breadth of practices? The tradcrafters of that particular circle decided to band together and block her from interacting with them directly for that very reason. And because of that, Prim started telling her followers that they are all racist and elitist and ableist and gatekeepers. These terms over the years have become almost like triggers in that once they're said, everyone seems to put on a blindfold and fall into a frenzied rage. And to be fair, Prim is far too quick, in my opinion, to bring up racism as the reason others disagree with her. Most times, I've noticed at least, that if she calls someone racist or says they're unsupportive of POC, she nearly immediately brings up BLM activism in her posts or reblogs. I'm not saying I necessarily support calling all of her activistic inclinations performative, but where the tradcradt group she calls racist is more than willing to talk of and show proof of their contribution, Prim never has and avoids it if asked. I can see both sides, really. But the fact remains that calling someone performative in their actions, does not a racist make. Neither, in my opinion, does interacting with people who are assumed (without real and concrete proof) to be racist.

I can appreciate where you're coming from; honestly, I can. People have grown accustomed to hearing the prefix trad- and preparing for the worst. Racism is a systematic and prevailing problem in the society all around us, so it makes sense to be on the lookout for it. You want to protect yourself and your community. I can understand your sentiments perfectly. But I cannot support "guilty by association" viewpoints. As a WOC who grew up in some rough areas, I have seen boys killed under that very same reasoning. Jbird is a good friend of mine, and I have never questioned his morals or ethics. I have seen no sign of my being looked down upon for the color of my skin, nor anyone else who runs in that very same circle.

What I see is what I see in a lot of faces on this hellsite: hurt. Before Trio and after Trio left, the tradcraft community has been slandered and ostracized. They have shut themselves off to outsiders for the very thing you've done to Jbird just yesterday. They hold their secrets closer than most other communities now because persecution is seemingly forever at their door. On Prim's end too, there has been struggle and pain and needless arguing and hurt. If those you approach seem prickly, it is often because the world has roughened their edges, not because they personally are against you.

I asked for a couple examples from the group and one person (I'll keep them anonymous because I didn't confirm they'd like their name here) said: she has talked about saint magic (trio), hadean pamphlet (trio), hubris (Ruby), fairies, trad craft shit (Mahigan among others), etc etc

From what I personally have seen, her most recent was the Witch Fire podcast. A few tradcraft blogs had a debate/discussion about Witch Fire and its traditional eurocentric foundations in witchcraft not that long ago, and then Prim decided to put out a podcast that was so uninformed, I'm still worried about how younger or newer witches might be hurt by it.

Unfortunately the tradcraft community is vulnerable to that kind of thing [being called names or falsely accused] and an easy target. That's why being called those kind of harsh words - like gatekeeping, elitist, racist, and ableist - are met with so much anger from them. I take it very seriously because I've seen the kind of whiplash it has, especially on such a closed off group.

[A Reply.] Yeah no, Prim "apologizes" by talking about how she's been previously given a hard time with interjections of "but please don't go around spreading hate" and never directly apologizes to the tradcrafter in such posts. Unfortunately, her "apology" did more harm than good. I was hoping she'd just ignore it but . . . This tends to happen too 🤦‍♀️

I think that if both sides were able to approach it as openmindedly as you have, there would be a lot less drama and in-fighting on this app 😩 I really did enjoy talking with you though!

That just about covers everything I'd like to say on the matter.

I do not condone spreading hate, just as I don't condone misinformation or blind allegiance to what one person says. So if you can respectfully and openmindedly address your questions/comments/concerns, I don't see why you can't interact with Briar, Jbird, or myself. I understand it's easy to get caught up in the first perspective you're given, but it is my hope that Witchblr as a whole can be more open to hearing both sides of the story. Blindly blocking and cancelling certain bloggers is something I don't support nor encourage. I understand Prim must be tired of addressing all of the drama that churns around her, so I won't speak as to what her reasoning could be for suggesting such a solution. I'm simply stating what I hope for the community as a whole.

| | Note: The statements above were written early (I think, my sense of time is off) yesterday, and as of yet, I have still seen no concrete evidence that Briar or Jbird have ever made racist comments. On Briar's part, I have seen her observation that activism on a performative platform such as Tumblr can come off as performative, but she never once said she doesn't know or see why Prim would support and promote BLM activism. Something I think was misconstrued and lumped all together to sound as if she thought Prim were faking her contributions altogether. | |

#witchblr #witch community #witchblr discourse #discourse #disappointed #tradcraft #traditional witchcraft #primrose #nightshadeandroses #gabrielle #chthoniaa

[arokaladin]

Can we talk about the pressure on people with less well known or ‘newer’ identities to represent *specifically* that identity and the shame that might come with questioning?

The idea of being an ‘ex-gay’ is something that’s considered to be pretty fringe, and would be mocked even by most decently educated straight people. But ‘detransitioner’ is a label that even queer cis people will use quite seriously (often incorrectly, aka to mean they used to identify as trans, rather than to mean they have medical transition regret, and in a way that adds further stigma to real trans experiences). And of course there are people whose entire personality is based in how they used to think they were asexual. 

(I had to ask tiktok to stop showing me videos from this one girl who seems to be quite popular because most of her content from what I can tell is about how much she hated being ace and how she has all this supposed inside gossip about the ace community being cultish and lesbophobic because she ~used to be one~ but god. lets not get into that ok?)

All of this, along with the fact that ‘obscure’ labels are targeted even more by the ‘just a phase’ argument, even within the queer community, makes things so much harder for people who are re-questioning or even just using a different label under same umbrella. People can be hesitant to talk about their experiences out of fear of proving the stereotype. I think I’ve seen a few people touch on this. However the other effect is that when you are comfortable in a label with this kind of stigma, there’s pressure to be really loud about how comfortable you are, and constantly be reaffirming your identity to outsiders. You kind of have to be aro/enby/bi/whatever else before you get to be queer, because you feel a responsibility to be a role model for this specific part of yourself that is least represented. 

Personally, I started this blog when I was what? 16? I was barely confident in my own aromanticism, still working on unlearning a lot of things, and was inspired to start posting here so I would have a space to vent and work through those feelings. I was always open about my age and the fact there were plenty of things I didn’t have answers for, but nevertheless I got absolutely tons of asks from people wanting advice. My community was so small that I was simultaneously a baby aro, and being cast in the role of community elder just because I was out of the questioning stage. 

As well as an overwhelming number of people wanting advice, I also regularly got asks (and even direct messages) from people who were venting, a lot of the time obviously depressed, and often not even asking a question but just using me as a place to send negative feelings. It got so bad that a few times I had to make posts asking people asking people to stop. People did this to me because our community was so tiny and lacking visibility that some teen’s inbox was possibly all they had, and I was well aware of that. 

I think in part this is why I started many projects within aro activism that I never continued with (aside from my executive dysfunction and the aforementioned fact I was 16). I felt like I had to be the one to bring certain resources into being, because most of the time nothing of the kind existed. 

Nowadays I’m the least certain of my identities I’ve been since I originally questioned. I genuinely think I am still aro, but I’ve been pretty shaken up all round recently and it’s made me realise how upset I would feel if that did change (even though I still wish feel ashamed of my aroness sometimes and still fight the desire for a ‘normal’ amatonormative life) I’m honestly pretty terrified of losing community were my labels to change too much, even though logically I know my friends wouldn’t drop me if I turned out to be a slightly different kind of queer, let alone just a slightly different type of aspec. And I think this is probably in part because of how outwardly adamant I’ve had to be about my identity for years. 

I guess it’s worth noting the role of the ‘Discourse’ in this: being constantly under attack has meant the aro and ace communities specifically have had to become pretty isolated. A lot of us don’t trust even other queer people, for good reason, and a lot of us again keep to even smaller subsets of the community to avoid other bigotries. And the way the internet is encourages the urge to divide yourself up and put the parts in boxes. But I think the pressures I’ve talked about would exist even without those factors. 

I’m not sure if I have a conclusion to this, because I’m still thinking about it a lot. I’m not sure how we fix a problem like this because I’m not sure there’s technically any problem to fix. A lot of it is just the growing pains of a small community. I would like to start a dialogue, however. Does anyone else feel this way? How do we accept possible future re-questioning without telling ourselves this might be just a phase, or rolling back our progress accepting our aromanticism? How do we create spaces needed to vent, and discuss difficult topics, without burning each other out or creating a crab bucket? How do we vent about burnout without depicting the aro community as toxic? What do we do to fill the absences left by non-existent elders? I don’t know but maybe we can figure some things out. 

#sorry that this is incoherent #im not rlly sure how to phrase all this in a way that isnt #mine #im also not sure what to tag #ah well

[autumnslance]

how do you get into roleplaying on a ff server? like how do you do it and how do you know if your character is lore compliant? ;A; pls youre a big inspo to me

*Hugs Nonny* Getting into RP on a FF server can vary; I don’t actually RP much these days, outside of some friends I already have connections to--and that in itself can be difficult just due to Life! It can take time, and patience, and some fits and starts.

And this gets...really really long, so buckle up and go below the cut, please. :)

The cut got broken by an edit. Sigh.

In game there’s always the RP status tag, and just doing RP with folks in public spaces. There may be trolls now and then, but they can be ignored. I personally find Balmung’s Quicksand area too busy and anxiety inducing and not actually all that conducive to actual RP, even “meet at a tavern” walk-up type. But unless you already have a ready-made group of friends/FCmates willing to RP more than some random walk-ups with you, it may take some legwork to find folks you can and want to write with.

Social Media There are a couple of RP community blogs, like @mooglemeet​ and @ffxiv-crystal-rp​  and plenty of server-specific ones. There’s also some Discords for these communities. They host and advertise events and reblog people who are looking for RP contacts. Some of them have running gdoc calendars and in game linkshells and fellowships as well.

Shofie has a good post about Tumblr/social media RP blogging.

@shofie-ffxiv

It’s a fact now that social media outside game is a way to make contacts, or even a medium for RP itself. There are few centralized websites/forums for server RP communities anymore. Making connections over your social media, like Tumblr and Twitter, can help find RP. You can’t just throw your own character info out there or reblog prompts hoping others bite, though; you have to put in some work and show interest in others, too. This can be difficult and even scary. That’s OK.

RP is about collaboration and creating with other people, which means finding folks you can write with, and who see you as someone interesting but also interested in them and their OCs. If you want to keep it a solo endeavor focused on your own OCs, write fanfic (which I’ve actually made friends and gotten RP interests that way too through comment interactions, so hey).

If you reblog a prompt from someone, see others on your dash reblogging prompts, if people reblog that prompt post from you? Send them asks! Alternatively, don’t wait for prompts, just send asks, comments, or chats saying hello and things you notice or like about their blog/character/posts they make. Try to form connections with people you think are genuinely interesting and might be fun to talk with. Social media should be, well, social.

BUT respect boundaries, too. Don’t try sarcasm or jokes with people you don’t actually know, it tends to go over poorly. Unless someone’s specifically posting a naughty meme/prompt, keep stuff you others send clean and polite, especially if it’s unsolicited and you’re not already friends (doubly so if you don’t know how old they are IRL, there are laws you do not want to break). Respect if people aren’t open to random asks or chatting with new followers, or say “no” to RP, and know it’s not personal--it’s just what they have time, energy, and emotional/mental capacity for. Don’t give up on other people, though. This stuff can take time and effort to find those you click with.

Respect and communication with RP partners is pretty key.

Do curate your feeds and don’t be afraid to unfollow/mute/block folks, either. I’m selective in who I follow and remove as needed, too, for my own mental health. I miss so much of the discourse and drama and that’s fine by me. Also it costs nothing to not step in on a lot of the drama when it does pass in sight.

Profiles I have static RP profile pages for my girls here on Tumblr (and a lot of other static links and pages, but I’m weird about organizing like that). This way, if people want to write with me, send me prompts, if I sent them prompts, or they want to otherwise interact with my characters, the information is handily available. For some folks, this makes all the difference in who they choose to interact with: how easily can they find even basic info about your OC?

Some people make Carrds. Some folks have gdoc links, or use Dreamwidth, etc. Just keep the links in the blog’s sidebar menu, and/or in the blog desc so people can see ‘em on mobile. There are templates out there, or you can make your own. Feel free to snag mine if you’d like. A lot of times people also copy their profiles to rebloggable posts when looking for RP contacts. Profiles are a good way to let folks know just the at-a-glance basics about your character(s).

I picked a simple theme with a simple layout that makes it easy to add and show off links. I put them in the blog desc to make them easy to find on mobile, too.

[Images: links from my blog sidebar menu showing how over organized I am]

RP, Stories, Lore Post some stories or RP logs (with permission of others involved) or even just random little blurbs and headcanons, as well as any screenshots, art, aesthetic posts for your OCs. Have something of interest to show for your character, too, so some of those folks your interacting with have something of their own to see and ask about!

If possible, try some light RP with friends and FC Mates who are amenable. Go to events, even if just to lurk at first. When you do get up the nerve to talk to people, don’t try to throw a character’s entire backstory at them, or try to steal the limelight--RP is collaboration, back and forth, and a lot like real conversation. Maybe come up with little light things to talk about if asked; a recent adventuring job, a silly shopping incident, etc. They can break the ice or just give you something to reply with for a few minutes.

Lore Compliance is Variable. Some people really want lore compliance, others are OK bending it here and there, while still others throw it out the window entirely. If you want to be super lore compliant...read. There’s a LOT of information, in game and out, for finding lore; from official publications and website material, to tools like Garland Tools site, to compilation blogs like @mirkemenagerie.

Note what’s important for your concept. Narrow it down. Characters aren’t going to know or be or do everything, so only worry about what’s necessary for the base idea. And be flexible; it’s SE’s sandbox, we just play in it, and they can change things any time. They usually do it in the guise of characters not knowing/having all the correct information, at least, but also some places just don’t exist in game yet so we don’t have info.

I’m unspecific about a lot of elements of Aeryn’s childhood, for instance, other than “traveling merchants near Thavnair.” I don’t have to be super specific. I can keep most details vague, and focus on her family and those relationships.

Dark, as my first character, has a fairly simple backstory that I’ve expanded on and adjusted over time as I learned and came up with new info. I also bet no one remembers I originally said Dark was from the North Shroud. I’ve changed things (now from East Shroud, due to the proximity to Gyr Abania and its Hellsguards) as I learned more about the world and my character. You don’t want to change things willy-nilly, but sometimes being flexible and smoothing down some rough edges and making small changes can be fine, especially as one gets more lore over time.

Iyna has a pretty detailed backstory, that came from a basic idea, and checking dates in the pre-Calamity timeline. I based her being taken and trained the way she was not only on what info we have about Garlemald’s imperial practices with conquered provinces, but borrowed a bit from real life and the re-education schools many Native Americans were forced into (though I haven’t gone into detail on that yet, either). I tied the turning point in Iyna’s life to a major event that wasn’t the Calamity, and have left plenty of space in between for me to fill in as time goes on and I learn more about her and the world.

The world isn’t static, and is bigger and more diverse than what can be shown in the game. There’s space in the margins for plenty of weird stuff and contradictions or unusual cases. So read up on what you can, ask questions, and then find where in those spaces your OC fits. Then, find people who enjoy similar tastes in lore compliance (or non-compliance), and who enjoy playing with you and your OCs, and not worrying about the rest. Can’t please everyone, nor get along with everyone, so don’t try; just find what works for you, and who works with you, and don’t police anyone else’s pretendy fun times, either.

There’s no magic answer on the “right” amount of lore compliance, or how to quickly and easily find RP partners or break into the broader RP community.

I hope this helps at least a little bit! Good luck in finding your niche for RP, and maybe I’ll see you sometime at an event :)

#roleplay #blogging #writing #social media #long post #nonny got me thinking #some links #hope this helps? #Anonymous

[jewishdragon]

Ok re: the Artemis fowl sexism post thats got many fans a bit miffed at me

I Preface once more that I have now listened to the books 3 times back to back because I loved them so much. I’m a brand new big fan who, unlike most of you, experienced the books for the first time as a 24, recently 25, year old. So my experience reading them was very different than a lot of fans. 

And the post itself was me just voicing a random and basic opinion based on my experiences reading the books and 1 thought on the upcoming movie. And well. Y’all wrote small essays on what that story arc meant to you and why it was meaningful and important. Which unfortunately failed to change my mind bc the fact is, I was 100% aware of all that before making the post. I was very much aware, when i read the first book back in AUGUST 2019, how important a story arc about Holly as the first female LEP was/is to little girls reading the first artemis fowl book. And I did in fact appreciate it for that! 

but hey yall did get me thinking, or at least, got me thinking MORE so that my jumble of emotions were forced into coherent (ehhh semi-coherent?) words that I could type up. so here are those thoughts. Im not trying to start big discourse or discussion. But I think maybe this explains all the things that were going through my head??? 

I think Holly’s arc could have been much stronger in showcasing fairy society’s sexism and Holly dealing with/confronting it. The arc seemed so arbitrary and unimportant to me. A lot of just talk about how she had to be the best and be perfect and root believing in her and all that. A lot of talk and not much in story evidence in story showcasing her struggles. I think this may have been a case of needing more show and less tell.

Y’all read Holly as the first female LEP-recon Officer as this major character arc but in my reading it, it didn’t seem so major! I didn’t feel it had much weight to it. It felt like it had some pre-story weight that we didn’t get to see. Same with the sexism Opal experienced. It was mentioned in backstory. Not shown in current story.

I wish it had! I wish we had seen more female fairies* dealing with the same thing and seeing how important Holly being the first female LEP-recon was! But we got Vinyaya who seemed powerful and amazing and respected! And that kind of diminished Holly’s arc for me. It felt like it should have been important. And that’s partly why I was disappointed in it bc it didn’t end up being that important in the end.

The racism in fairy society felt very real and very much a problem. And I wish that had been confronted more too! There were other things about the problems of fairy society that conflicted with how much better they thought of themselves like crime and their criminal justice system. I felt like those were done a bit better. (though I wish those had been explored more too!). And just bc someone pointed it out, yes I did pick up on the fact that bc they are so long lived it takes more time for them to change their mindsets (especially compared to the rapid development of their technology.). 

*And now thinking about it, the fact that Holly was the first female LEP-recon meant that there were barely any other female characters (pretty much just Juliet and Opal) and THAT irritated me a lot. I wanted MORE women, but bc she was the first and basically only female Lep-recon and the fairies we got to see were mostly Lep-recon, there werent more women. and That probably contributed to my disappointment. If she was the first, where were the rest now that she was there? Where were the women in the academy that we could have met? The ones recently graduated and just joining the force?? Yes Root said she still had to be the one to prove women could do this, she’s the “case study” and in Book one I was FINE with that. but I wanted to see that to fruition in the rest of the series! (i was THRILLED with Fowl Twins when its now obvious that LEP is training more women! where was that in the first series!?) 

OH AND This is definitely partially due to me taking in the books as an entire unit and not separately as they were released! It wasn’t really an arc that developed past the first book!!! AND i can see how reading it as a kid, especially just the first book, this plot was exciting and meaningful. 

but i can also why I can understand the decision in the movie to make Root a woman. It’s the one decision I didn’t mind, while plenty of the others infuriate me.

im only tagging this with fandom tags bc the fandom saw my first post and most of yall dont follow me

and bc it came up, im AFAB, but no i dont identify as a woman/girl (i barely did as a child), but nor do I i identify as a man. 

TL;DR I think that taking in the entire series in one go, as an adult, made certain story arcs (that really resonated with people who read it as kids and probably more spread out) fall flat for me. Specifically the story arc about Holly experiencing sexism in fairy society and how important it was that she was the first female LEP-recon. (im bad at TL;DR so lol dont @ me if you only read this part). 

oh and yeah, i get these are childrens books so things wont be as deep and developed. I accepted that but the heart wants what the heart wants and more delving into the problems of fairy society is what i want. 

#artemis fowl #holly short #fandom discourse

[avenger-hawk]

(1) hello sweetie, love ur blog!! and holy cow, never realised anime discourse ran so deep. If I like something and it doesn't hurt you, why do you have to come to my house and throw shit at my stuff lmaooo. Of course, if it's something I need to be corrected about (aka r*cism etc etc) then yeh I get it. But if I like Dark NS and only see Sasuke as submissive in a realtionship, why does that hurt you so much that you have to come and be all "But hey no, AcTuAllY.." Like dude, I DONT CARE

(2) I'm not the type of person who can't form opinions for myself and only ride onto the hate train/delusional ships train. And I'm also not the type to be so insecure about my opinions and likes that having someone come over to shit on me will deter me and make me re-think everything. I also don't need other people to tell me they think like me to feel validated. So why can't people leave us alone when we say we like certain things and dislike others?

(3) I'm sorry I just came at you with this rant out of nowhere, but man, am I pissed and stressed and anxious and on-edge all the time now because I've been involved and seen so mucg discourse around Naruto stuff I've gotten so, so damn tired. Delusional Sa*uS*ku fangirls, delusional SN fangirls, delusional itachi fans and then the ones who pretend they know everything. I'm tired, tired of having to be so guilt-tripped all the time for liking Sasuke. Seems like it's controversial to like him.

(4) But leaving all that sour and heavy stuff behind, I absolutely adore your blog!! I am so freaking glad it exists, you have no idea how many times I've checked your blog over the years only to be surprised at how similar our interpretations are. It felt like you were reading my mind and putting down thoughts that I didn't dare put down. Thank you so damn much for still being here despite all the shit you had to put up with. and alsooo..I can't stand anything new/b*ruto related so either 🙃

(5) Last one, but I hope you're doing good, staying safe and all that stuff. I realllly wish I could talk to you as a friend, feels like we would vibe so much given how similar our thought processes seem to be xD AHH!! I also adore your fics so damn much, I still remmeber the days I used to refresh ever day just to see if there was an update ;_; I'm so glad you even wrote those fics so I'm not begging or guiltripping for updates, just wanting to put out my thanks. Love you sweetie, tc  😭💕

First of all thanks for the nice words~

Aand...Anon I don’t get one thing. We all saw how crazy anime discourse (or fictional stuff one) can get. You are confident about your opinions (which are totally right because CANON Sas is passive in relationship, he’s the yin cuz kishi said so and ppl who say the opposite, especially SS, SN and SI shippers are just delusional) and you don’t need other ppl’s bullshit discourse...then why do you engage in N*ruto discourse even? I mean, you tried once, you saw how shitty ppl are then why insist? I get that ppl are social beings who want to discuss things they like, I really get it. But it’s obvious how this fandom (and all fandoms tbh) is, so wouldn’t it be better to keep it to yourself? Maybe do something creative like fic writing, drawing if you can, or writing your own essays about Sasuke&co, making sure you block everyone who bitches at you?

Cause idk, it feels the most rational option to stay in the fandom. Idk how long you’ve been into it but I was here when the ending came out and the word ‘discourse’ wasn’t used. I tried discussing, both ending and Sasuke related dynamics, then I realized it was useless, so I channeled my thoughts in my fics or whatever I have been doing since then, and I blocked everyone I found irritating. And it works. I just don’t care about what ppl think, I write for myself but opinions and fics, and the only moment I get angry is when my fics are criticized lol, cause ppl write in such a shitty way but they dare criticize openly or even worse, passive aggressively those who write better only because the fic is not how they’d like it to be lol. f*ck them. Actually I recently learned to ignore some person’s comments on a fic I wrote for another fandom, cause they are an author and they try so hard to be noticed by ‘constructively’ criticizing that fic for things that show they read it not attentively, so the best revenge is to ignore them. So I don’t understand why such simple thing doesn’t work for others.

Same for guilt...idk why someone would make someone feel guilty for liking Sasuke or certain dynamics. Cause if they succeed it means that they found some ‘internalized’ guilt that existed already, which I don’t get. I’m so very glad that reading my stuff you find it so similar to your thoughts...and this is smth that makes me think that if you write your own thoughts someone will feel the same and they’ll come to you. You never know who’s reading your stuff after all, and even though there’s plenty of ass*oles there are also fans who are desperate to find the good stuff lol. Lol it’s so cool to realize how some ppl appreciate something ‘controversial’ or weird, like a rarepair, or an opinion. And btw liking bottomSas isn’t either, it’s canon lol.

I’m glad you like my blog, as I was saying, and everything else, it’s cool to have the same thought process and thanks for not asking for updates, some fics like In Power...I won’t update anyway (I’m kinda bored of Itachicentric stuff and positive Itasasu), others I will when I have time and inspiration as I’m also writing for another fandom. But everything I left on hiatus had its ‘season ending’ so it’s ok I guess. Maybe lol. Ugh I’m sorry but I don’t understand how some authors can be so quick and productive while I need so much time lol

#replies &co #fanon and fandom stuff #anti-sasusaku #anti-sasunaru #anti-ending #Anonymous

[didanawisgi]

CAN WE PULL BACK FROM THE BRINK?

Sam Harris, June 18, 2020

In this episode of the podcast, Sam discusses the recent social protests and civil unrest, in light of what we know about racism and police violence in America.

This is a transcript of a recorded podcast.

“OK…. Well, I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week—and have been unsure about whether to record it at all, frankly.

Conversation is the only tool we have for making progress, I firmly believe that. But many of the things we most need to talk about, seem impossible to talk about.

I think social media is a huge part of the problem. I’ve been saying for a few years now that, with social media, we’ve all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent, and it’s not at all clear how it will turn out. And it’s still not clear how it will turn out, but it’s not looking good. It’s fairly disorienting out there. All information is becoming weaponized. All communication is becoming performative. And on the most important topics, it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time.

We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually, crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination, and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one other on that basis.

So I’d like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest, and its possible political implications, and other cultural developments, and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here. I’m going to circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism, because that really is at the center of this. There is so much to talk about here, and it’s so difficult to talk about. And there is so much we don’t know. And yet, most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago.

I’ve been watching our country seem to tear itself apart for weeks now, and perhaps lay the ground for much worse to come. And I’ve been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance—not because I don’t have anything to say, but because of my perception of the danger, frankly. And if that’s the way I feel, given the pains that I’ve taken to insulate myself from those concerns, I know that almost everyone with a public platform is terrified. Journalists, and editors, and executives, and celebrities are terrified that they might take one wrong step here, and never recover.

And this is really unhealthy—not just for individuals, but for society. Because, again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. If we can’t reason with one another, there is no path forward, other than violence. Conversation or violence.

So, I’d like to talk about some of the things that concern me about the current state of our communication. Unfortunately, many things are compounding our problems at the moment. We have a global pandemic which is still very much with us. And it remains to be seen how much our half-hearted lockdown, and our ineptitude in testing, and our uncoordinated reopening, and now our plunge into social protest and civil unrest will cause the Covid-19 caseload to spike. We will definitely see. As many have pointed out, the virus doesn’t care about economics or politics. It only cares that we keep breathing down each other’s necks. And we’ve certainly been doing enough of that.

Of course, almost no one can think about Covid-19 right now. But I’d just like to point out that many of the costs of this pandemic and the knock-on effects in the economy, and now this protest movement, many of these costs are hidden from us. In addition to killing more than 100,000 people in the US, the pandemic has been a massive opportunity cost. The ongoing implosion of the economy is imposing tangible costs, yes, but it is also a massive opportunity cost. And now this civil unrest is compounding those problems—whatever the merits of these protests may be or will be, the opportunity costs of this moment are staggering. In addition to all the tangible effects of what’s happening—the injury and death, the lost businesses, the burned buildings, the neighborhoods that won’t recover for years in many cities, the educations put on hold, and the breakdown in public trust of almost every institution—just think about all the good and important things we cannot do—cannot even think of doing now—and perhaps won’t contemplate doing for many years to come, because we’ll be struggling to get back to that distant paradise we once called “normal life.”

Of course, normal life for many millions of Americans was nothing like a paradise. The disparities in wealth and health and opportunity that we have gotten used to in this country, and that so much of our politics and ways of doing business seem to take for granted, are just unconscionable. There is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth. What we’re seeing now is a response to that. But it’s a confused and confusing response. Worse, it’s a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation. And this makes it dangerous.

This isn’t just politics and human suffering on display. It’s philosophy. It’s ideas about truth—about what it means to say that something is “true.” What we’re witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we’re attempting to have in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what’s going on in the world? What is real? If we can’t agree about what is real, or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we’re stuck with one other.

So, what’s happening here?

Well, again, it’s hard to say. What is happening when a police officer or a mayor takes a knee in front of a crowd of young people who have been berating him for being a cog in the machinery of systemic racism? Is this a profound moment of human bonding that transcends politics, or is it the precursor to the breakdown of society? Or is it both? It’s not entirely clear.

In the most concrete terms, we are experiencing widespread social unrest in response to what is widely believed to be an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at the black community by racist cops and racist policies. And this unrest has drawn a counter-response from law enforcement—much of which, ironically, is guaranteed to exacerbate the problem of police violence, both real and perceived. And many of the videos we’ve seen of the police cracking down on peaceful protesters are hideous. Some of this footage has been unbelievable. And this is one of many vicious circles that we must find some way to interrupt.

Again, there is so much to be confused about here. We’ve now seen endless video of police inflicting senseless violence on truly peaceful protesters, and yet we have also seen video of the police standing idly by while looters completely destroy businesses. What explains this? Is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities? Are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them, and simultaneously trying to teach society a lesson by letting crime and mayhem spread elsewhere in the city? Or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters? Or is the whole spectacle itself a lie? How representative are these videos of what’s actually going on? Is there much less chaos actually occurring than is being advertised to us?

Again, it’s very hard to know.

What’s easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down. It seems to me that we’ve long been in a situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum have been amplifying one another and threatening to produce something truly dangerous. And now I think they have. The amount of misinformation in the air—the degree to which even serious people seem to be ruled by false assumptions and non sequiturs—is just astonishing.

And it’s important to keep in mind that, with the presidential election coming in November, the stakes are really high. As most of you know, I consider four more years of Trump to be an existential threat to our democracy. And I believe that the last two weeks have been very good for him, politically, even when everything else seemed to go very badly for him. I know the polls don’t say this. A large majority of people disapprove of his handling this crisis so far. But I think we all know now to take polls with a grain of salt. There is the very real problem of preference falsification—especially in an environment of intense social pressure. People will often say what they think is socially acceptable, and then think, or say, or do something very different in private—like when they’re alone in a voting booth.

Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy. I know the stock market has looked good, but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy. According to the stock market, the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year, before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. And a lot can happen in the next few months. The last two weeks feel like a decade. And my concern is that if Trump now gets to be the law-and-order President, that may be his path to re-election, if such a path exists. Of course, this crisis has revealed, yet again, how unfit he is to be President. The man couldn’t strike a credible note of reconciliation if the fate of the country depended on it—and the fate of the country has depended on it. I also think it’s possible that these protests wouldn’t be happening, but for the fact that Trump is President. Whether or not the problem of racism has gotten worse in our society, having Trump as President surely makes it seem like it has. It has been such a repudiation of the Obama presidency that, for many people, it has made it seem that white supremacy is now ascendant. So, all the more reason to get rid of Trump in November.

But before this social unrest, our focus was on how incompetent Trump was in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. And now he has been given a very different battle to fight. A battle against leftwing orthodoxy, which is growing more stifling by the minute, and civil unrest. If our social order frays sufficiently, restoring it will be the only thing that most people care about in November. Just think of what an act of domestic terrorism would do politically now. Things can change very, very quickly. And to all a concern for basic law and order “racist”, isn’t going to wash.

Trust in institutions has totally broken down. We’ve been under a very precarious quarantine for more than 3 months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political Right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They’ve been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public officials by the thousands, signing open letters, making public statements, saying it’s fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy. Especially so, because the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all. How many people will die because of these protests? It’s a totally rational question to ask, but the question itself is taboo now.

So, it seems to me that almost everything appears upside down at the moment.

Before I get into details on police violence, first let me try to close the door to a few misunderstandings.

Let’s start with the proximate cause of all this: The killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. I’ll have more to say about this in a minute, but nothing I say should detract from the following observation: That video was absolutely sickening, and it revealed a degree of police negligence and incompetence and callousness that everyone was right to be horrified by. In particular, the actions of Derek Chauvin, the cop who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly 9 minutes, his actions were so reckless and so likely to cause harm that there’s no question he should be prosecuted. And he is being prosecuted. He’s been indicted for 2nd degree murder and manslaughter, and I suspect he will spend many, many years in prison. And, this is not to say “the system is working.” It certainly seems likely that without the cell phone video, and the public outrage, Chauvin might have gotten away with it—to say nothing of the other cops with him, who are also now being prosecuted. If this is true, we clearly need a better mechanism with which to police the police.

So, as I said, I’ll return to this topic, because I think most people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this video, and from videos like it, but let me just echo everyone’s outrage over what happened. This is precisely the kind of police behavior that everyone should find abhorrent.

On the general topic of racism in America, I want to make a few similarly clear, preemptive statements:

Racism is still a problem in American society. No question. And slavery—which was racism’s most evil expression—was this country’s founding sin. We should also add the near-total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil. Any morally sane person who learns the details of these historical injustices finds them shocking, whatever their race. And the legacy of these crimes—crimes that were perpetrated for centuries—remains a cause for serious moral concern today. I have no doubt about this. And nothing I’m about to say, should suggest otherwise.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that the two groups I just mentioned, African Americans and Native Americans, suffer the worst from inequality in America today. How could the history of racial discrimination in this country not have had lasting effects, given the nature of that history? And if anything good comes out of the current crisis, it will be that we manage to find a new commitment to reducing inequality in all its dimensions. The real debate to have is about how to do this, economically and politically. But the status quo that many of us take for granted to is a betrayal of our values, whether we realize it or not. If it’s not a betrayal or your values now, it will be a betrayal of your values when you become a better person. And if you don’t manage that, it will be a betrayal of your kid’s values when they’re old enough to understand the world they are living in. The difference between being very lucky in our society, and very unlucky, should not be as enormous as it is.

However, the question that interests me, given what has been true of the past and is now true of the present, is what should we do next? What should we do to build a healthier society?

What should we do next?  Tomorrow… next week…. Obviously, I don’t have the answers. But I am very worried that many of the things we’re doing now, and seem poised to do, will only make our problems worse. And I’m especially worried that it has become so difficult to talk about this. I’m just trying to have conversations. I’m just trying to figure these things out in real time, with other people. And there is no question that conversation itself has become dangerous.

Think about the politics of this. Endless imagery of people burning and looting independent businesses that were struggling to survive, and seeing the owners of these businesses beaten by mobs, cannot be good for the cause of social justice. Looting and burning businesses, and assaulting their owners, isn’t social justice, or even social protest. It’s crime. And having imagery of these crimes that highlight black involvement circulate endlessly on Fox News and on social media cannot be good for the black community. But it might yet be good for Trump.

And it could well kick open the door to a level of authoritarianism that many of us who have been very worried about Trump barely considered possible. It’s always seemed somewhat paranoid to me to wonder whether we’re living in Weimar Germany. I’ve had many conversations about this. I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast, who’s been worrying about the prospect of tyranny in the US for several years now. I’ve known, in the abstract, that democracies can destroy themselves. But the idea that it could happen here still seemed totally outlandish to me. It doesn’t anymore.

Of course, what we’ve been seeing in the streets isn’t just one thing. Some people are protesting for reasons that I fully defend. They’re outraged by specific instances of police violence, like the killing of George Floyd, and they’re worried about creeping authoritarianism—which we really should be worried about now. And they’re convinced that our politics is broken, because it is broken, and they are deeply concerned that our response to the pandemic and the implosion of our economy will do nothing to address the widening inequality in our society. And they recognize that we have a President who is an incompetent, divisive, conman and a crackpot at a time when we actually need wise leadership.

All of that is hard to put on a sign, but it’s all worth protesting.

However, it seems to me that most protesters are seeing this moment exclusively through the lens of identity politics—and racial politics in particular. And some of them are even celebrating the breakdown of law and order, or at least remaining nonjudgmental about it. And you could see, in the early days of this protest, news anchors take that line, on CNN, for instance. Talking about the history of social protest, “Sometimes it has to be violent, right? What, do you think all of these protests need to be nonviolent?” Those words came out of Chris Cuomo’s mouth, and Don Lemon’s mouth. Many people have been circulating a half quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about riots being “the language of the unheard.” They’re leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed riots harmed the cause of the black community and helped the cause of racists.

There are now calls to defund and even to abolish the police. This may be psychologically understandable when you’ve spent half your day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters. Those videos are infuriating. And I’ll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute. But if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind. Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food. Having a police force that can deter crime, and solve crimes when they occur, and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system, is the necessary precondition for almost anything else of value in society.

We need police reform, of course. There are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing—its hiring practices, training, the militarization of so many police forces, outside oversight, how police departments deal with corruption, the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job, and yes, the problem of racist cops. But the idea that any serious person thinks we can do without the police—or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones—this just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails. Yes, we should give more resources to community services. We should have psychologists or social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill. Perhaps we’re giving cops jobs they shouldn’t be doing. All of that makes sense to rethink. But the idea that what we’re witnessing now is a matter of the cops being over-resourced—that we’ve given them too much training, that we’ve made the job too attractive—so that the people we’re recruiting are of too high a quality. That doesn’t make any sense.

What’s been alarming here is that we’re seeing prominent people—in government, in media, in Hollywood, in sports—speak and act as though the breakdown of civil society, and of society itself, is a form of progress and any desire for law enforcement is itself a form of racist oppression. At one point the woman who’s running the City Council in Minneapolis, which just decided to abolish the police force, was asked by a journalist, I believe on CNN, “What do I do if someone’s breaking into my house in the middle of the night? Who do I call?” And her first response to that question was, “You need to recognize what a statement of privilege that question is.” She’s since had to walk that back, because it’s one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said, but this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane. You cannot say that if someone is breaking into your house, and you’re terrified, and you want a police force that can respond, that fear is a symptom of “white privilege.” This is where Democratic politics goes to die.

Again, what is alarming about this is that this woke analysis of the breakdown of law and order will only encourage an increasingly authoritarian response, as well as the acceptance of that response by many millions of Americans.

If you step back, you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air. And it’s destroying institutions. It’s destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information—universities, the press. The New York Times in recent days, seems to be preparing for a self-immolation in recent days. No one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable—certainly not anyone who has more wokeness points than they do. It’s just become too dangerous. There are people being fired for tweeting “All Lives Matter.” #AllLivesMatter, in the current environment, is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy. That is how weird this moment is. A soccer player on the LA Galaxy was fired for something his wife tweeted…

Of course, there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests. People who have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world—or young people who fear they never will—people who have seen their economic prospects simply vanish, and people who have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops—people by the millions are now surrendering themselves to a kind of religious awakening. But like most religious awakenings, this movement is not showing itself eager to make honest contact with reality.

On top of that, we find extraordinarily privileged people, whatever the color of their skin—people who have been living wonderful lives in their gated communities or 5th avenue apartments—and who feel damn guilty about it—they are supporting this movement uncritically, for many reasons. Of course, they care about other people—I’m sure most of them have the same concerns about inequality that I do—but they are also supporting this movement because it promises a perfect expiation of their sins. If you have millions of dollars, and shoot botox into your face, and vacation on St. Bart’s, and you’re liberal—the easiest way to sleep at night is to be as woke as AOC and like every one of her tweets.

The problem isn’t just with the looting, and the arson, and the violence. There are problems with these peaceful protests themselves.

Of course, I’m not questioning anyone’s right to protest. Even our deranged president can pay lip service to that right—which he did as the DC police were violently dispersing a peaceful protest so that he could get his picture taken in front of that church, awkwardly holding a bible, as though he had never held a book in life.

The problem with the protests is that they are animated, to a remarkable degree, by confusion and misinformation. And I’ll explain why I think that’s the case. And, of course, this will be controversial. Needless to say, many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here. I could have invited any number of great, black intellectuals onto the podcast to make these points for me. But that struck me as a form of cowardice. Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, these guys might not agree with everything I’m about to say, but any one of them could walk the tightrope I’m now stepping out on far more credibly than I can.

But, you see, that’s part of the problem. The perception that the color of a person’s skin, or even his life experience, matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion. For the discussion we really need to have, the color of a person’s skin, and even his life experience, simply does not matter. It cannot matter. We have to break this spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything.

Ok…

As I’ve already acknowledged, there is a legacy of racism in the United States that we’re still struggling to outgrow. That is obvious. There are real racists out there. And there are ways in which racism became institutionalized long ago. Many of you will remember that during the crack epidemic the penalties for crack and powder cocaine were quite different. And this led black drug offenders to be locked up for much longer than white ones. Now, whether the motivation for that policy was consciously racist or not, I don’t know, but it was effectively racist. Nothing I’m about to say entails a denial of these sorts of facts. There just seems to be no question that boys who grow up with their fathers in prison start life with a significant strike against them. So criminal justice reform is absolutely essential.

And I’m not denying that many black people, perhaps most, have interactions with cops, and others in positions of power, or even random strangers, that seem unambiguously racist. Sometimes this is because they are actually in the presence of racism, and perhaps sometimes it only seems that way. I’ve had unpleasant encounters with cops, and customs officers, and TSA screeners, and bureaucrats of every kind, and even with people working in stores or restaurants. People aren’t always nice or ethical. But being white, and living in a majority white society, I’ve never had to worry about whether any of these collisions were the result of racism. And I can well imagine that in some of these situations, had I been black, I would have come away feeling that I had encountered yet another racist in the wild. So I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that. Surely that’s one form of white privilege.

So, nothing I’m going to say denies that we should condemn racism—whether interpersonal or institutional—and we should condemn it wherever we find it. But as a society, we simply can’t afford to find and condemn racism where it doesn’t exist. And we should be increasingly aware of the costs of doing that. The more progress we make on issues of race, the less racism there will be to find, and the more likely we’ll find ourselves chasing after its ghost.

The truth is, we have made considerable progress on the problem of racism in America. This isn’t 1920, and it isn’t 1960. We had a two-term black president. We have black congressmen and women. We have black mayors and black chiefs of police. There are major cities, like Detroit and Atlanta, going on their fifth or sixth consecutive black mayor. Having more and more black people in positions of real power, in what is still a majority white society, is progress on the problem of racism. And the truth is, it might not even solve the problem we’re talking about. When Freddy Gray was killed in Baltimore, virtually everyone who could have been held accountable for his death was black. The problem of police misconduct and reform is complicated, as we’re about to see. But obviously, there is more work to do on the problem of racism. And, more important, there is much more work to do to remedy the inequalities in our society that are so correlated with race, and will still be correlated with race, even after the last racist has been driven from our shores.

The question of how much of today’s inequality is due to existing racism—whether racist people or racist policies—is a genuinely difficult question to answer. And to answer it, we need to distinguish the past from the present.

Take wealth inequality, for example: The median white family has a net worth of around $170,000—these data are a couple of years old, but they’re probably pretty close to what’s true now. The median black family has a net worth of around $17,000. So we have a tenfold difference in median wealth. (That’s the median, not the mean: Half of white families are below 170,000 and half above; half of black families are below 17,000 and half above. And we’re talking about wealth here, not income.)

This disparity in wealth persists even for people whose incomes are in the top 10 percent of the income distribution. For whites in the top 10 percent for income, the median net worth is $1.8 million; for blacks it’s around $350,000. There are probably many things that account for this disparity in wealth. It seems that black families that make it to the top of the income distribution fall out of it more easily than white families do. But it’s also undeniable that black families have less intergenerational wealth accumulated through inheritance.

How much of this is inequality due to the legacy of slavery? And how much of it is due to an ensuing century of racist policies? I’m prepared to believe quite a lot. And it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here. Of course, one will then need to talk about reparations for the Native Americans. And then one wonders where this all ends. And what about blacks who aren’t descended from slaves, but who still suffered the consequences of racism in the US? In listening to people like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes discuss this topic, I’m inclined to think that reparations is probably unworkable as a policy. But the truth is that I’m genuinely unsure about this.

Whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past, we have to ask, how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism and to existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth? And the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts.

The problem with the social activism we are now seeing—what John McWhorter has called “the new religion of anti-Racism”—is that it finds racism nearly everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath. But it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university, or in Silicon Valley, or at the Oscars. And those exaggerations are toxic—and, perversely, they may produce more real racism. It seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group, even a group that has a long history of real victimization.

The imprecision here—the bad-faith arguments, the double standards, the goal-post shifting, the idiotic opinion pieces in the New York Times, the defenestrations on social media, the general hysteria that the cult of wokeness has produced—I think this is all extremely harmful to civil society, and to effective liberal politics, and to the welfare of African Americans.

So, with that as preamble, let’s return to the tragic death of George Floyd.

As I said, I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing. So, people of any race, are right to be horrified by what happened there. But now I want to ask a few questions, and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately. And I really want you to watch your mind while you do this. There are very likely to be few tripwires installed there, and I’m about to hit them. So just do your best to remain calm.

Does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

Does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

In other words, do we have reason to believe that, had Floyd been white, he wouldn’t have died in a similar way?

Do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years, of black men being killed by cops, do they prove, or even suggest, that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed especially at black men and that this violence is motivated by racism?

Most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that to even pose them as I just did is obscene. The answer is YES, and it’s a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets.

The problem, however, is that if you take even 5 minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence, the answer appears to be “no,” in every case, albeit with one important caveat. I’m not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990. But in the last 25 years, violent crime has come down significantly in the US, and so has the police use of deadly force. And as you’re about to see, the police used more deadly force against white people—both in absolute numbers, and in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society. But the public perception is, of course, completely different.

In a city like Los Angeles, 2019 was a 30-year low for police shootings. Think about that…. Do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles, peacefully and violently, do the people who were ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds—in many cases, businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods—do the people who caused so much damage to the city, that certain neighborhoods, ironically the neighborhoods that are disproportionately black, will take years, probably decades to recover, do the celebrities who supported them, and even bailed them out of jail—do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30-year low for police shootings in Los Angeles?

Before I step out further over the abyss here, let me reiterate: Many of you are going to feel a visceral negative reaction to what I’m about to say. You’re not going to like the way it sounds. You’re especially not going to like the way it sounds coming from a white guy. This feeling of not liking, this feeling of outrage, this feeling of disgust—this feeling of “Sam, what the fuck is wrong with you, why are you even touching this topic?”—this feeling isn’t an argument. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, the basis for your believing anything to be true or false about the world.

Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that I or anyone else needs to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that you should respect. In fact, it is something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind, this feeling can mislead you.

If you care about justice—and you absolutely should—you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly. Justice requires contact with reality. It simply isn’t the case—it cannot be the case—that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be the most offended by conversation itself.

So, I’m going to speak the language of facts right now, in so far as we know them, all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people’s assumptions. Many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong. And that should matter to you.

So just take a moment and think this through with me.

How many people are killed each year in America by cops? If you don’t know, guess. See if you have any intuitions for these numbers. Because your intuitions are determining how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis.

The answer for many years running is about 1000. One thousand people are killed by cops in America each year. There are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year, and about 10 million arrests. That’s down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually throughout the 1990’s. So, of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police, and the police decide to make an arrest, about 1000 of those people die as a result. (I’m sure a few people get killed even when no arrest was attempted, but that has to be a truly tiny number.) So, without knowing anything else about the situation, if the cops decide to arrest you, it would be reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around 1/10,000. Of course, in the United States, it’s higher than it is in other countries. So I’m not saying that this number is acceptable. But it is what it is for a reason, as we’re about to see.

Now, there are a few generic things I’d like to point here before we get further into the data. They should be uncontroversial.

First, it’s almost certainly the case that of these 1000 officer-caused deaths each year, some are entirely justified—it may even be true that most are entirely justified—and some are entirely unjustified, and some are much harder to judge. And that will be true next year. And the year after that.

Of the unjustified killings, there are vast differences between them. Many have nothing in common but for the fact that a cop killed someone unnecessarily. It might have been a terrible misunderstanding, or incompetence, or just bad luck, and in certain cases it could be a cop who decides to murder someone because he’s become enraged, or he’s just a psychopath. And it is certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some number of these unjustified killings.

Another point that should be uncontroversial—but may sound a little tone-deaf in the current environment, where we’ve inundated with videos of police violence in response to these protests. But this has to be acknowledged whenever we’re discussing this topic: Cops have a very hard job. In fact, in the current environment, they have an almost impossible job.

If you’re making 10 million arrests every year, some number of people will decide not to cooperate. There can be many reasons for this. A person could be mentally ill, or drunk, or on drugs. Of course, rather often the person is an actual criminal who doesn’t want to be arrested.

Among innocent people, and perhaps this getting more common these days, a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do, ethically or politically or as a matter of affirming his identity. After all, put yourself in his shoes, he did nothing wrong. Why are the cops arresting him? I don’t know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race. But I can well imagine that if it’s common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police, that could lead to greater levels of non-compliance. Which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death. This is certainly one reason why it is wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community it’s policing. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that this will reduce lethal violence from the side of the police. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. But it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is a likely explanation for police behavior, which itself might reduce conflict.

When a cop goes hands on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest, that person’s resistance poses a problem that most people don’t understand. If you haven’t studied this topic. If you don’t know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non-compliant person who may be bigger and stronger than you are, and if you haven’t thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt while attempting to do that—a gun that can be grabbed and used against you, or against a member of the public—then your intuitions about what makes sense here, tactically and ethically, are very likely to be bad.

If you haven’t trained with firearms under stress. If you don’t know how suddenly situations can change. If you haven’t experienced how quickly another person can close the distance on you, and how little time you have to decide to draw your weapon. If you don’t know how hard it is to shoot a moving target, or even a stationary one, when your heart is beating out of your chest. You very likely have totally unreasonable ideas about what we can expect from cops in situations like these. [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]

And there is another fact that looms over all this like the angel of Death, literally: Most cops do not get the training they need. They don’t get the hand-to-hand training they need—they don’t have good skills to subdue people without harming them. All you need to do is watch YouTube videos of botched arrests to see this. The martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects. Cops also don’t get the firearms training they need. Of course, there are elite units in many police departments, but most cops do not have the training they need to do the job they’re being asked to do.

It is also true, no doubt, that some cops are racist bullies. And there are corrupt police departments that cover for these guys, and cover up police misconduct generally, whether it was borne of racism or not.

But the truth is that even if we got rid of all bad cops, which we absolutely should do, and there were only good people left, and we got all these good people the best possible training, and we gave them the best culture in which to think about their role in society, and we gave them the best methods for de-escalating potentially violent situations—which we absolutely must do—and we scrubbed all the dumb laws from our books, so that when cops were required to enforce the law, they were only risking their lives and the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem necessary and just—so the war on drugs is obviously over—even under these conditions of perfect progress, we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified, and therefore tragic. Every year, there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son or daughter, or father or mother, or brother or sister. And videos of these killings will occasionally surface, and they will be horrific. This seems guaranteed to happen.

So, while we need to make all these improvements, we still need to understand that there are very likely always to going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable, or inexplicably stupid, that results in an innocent person’s death, or a not-so-innocent person’s death. And sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black. We have 10 million arrests each year. And we now live in a panopticon where practically everything is videotaped.

I’m about to get further into the details of what we know about police violence, but I want to just put it to you now: If we’re going to let the health of race relations in this country, or the relationship between the community and the police, depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again, the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed.

About a week into these protests I heard Van Jones on CNN say, “If we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man, this country could go over the edge.” He said this, not as indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become. He seemed to be saying it as an ultimatum to the police. With 10 million arrests a year, arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world, I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is.

We have to put these videos into context. And we have to acknowledge how different they are from one another. Some of them are easy to interpret. But some are quite obviously being interpreted incorrectly by most people—especially by activists. And there are a range of cases—some have video associated with them and some don’t—that are now part of a litany of anti-racist outrage, and the names of the dead are intoned as though they were all evidence of the same injustice. And yet, they are not.

Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight and got out of his car and tried to flee. There might have been a brief struggle over the officer’s taser, that part of the video isn’t clear. But what is clear is that he was shot in the back multiple times as he was running away. That was insane. There was zero reason for the officer to feel that his life was under threat at the point he opened fire. And for that unjustified shooting, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. I’m not sure that’s long enough. That seemed like straight-up murder.

The George Floyd video, while even more disturbing to watch, is harder to interpret. I don’t know anything about Derek Chauvin, the cop who knelt on his neck. It’s quite possible that he’s a terrible person who should have never been a cop. He seems to have a significant number of complaints against him—though, as far as I know, the details of those complaints haven’t been released. And he might be a racist on top of being a bad cop. Or he might be a guy who was totally in over his head and thought you could restrain someone indefinitely by keeping a knee on their neck indefinitely. I don’t know. I’m sure more facts will come out. But whoever he is, I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd. Think about it. He was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed. Unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history, it seems very unlikely that he was intending to commit murder in that moment. It’s possible, of course. But it doesn’t seem the likeliest explanation for his behavior.

What I believe we saw on that video was the result of a tragic level of negligence and poor training on the part of those cops. Or terrible recruitment—it’s possible that none of these guys should have ever been cops. I think for one of them, it was only his fourth day on the job. Just imagine that. Just imagine all things you don’t know as a new cop.  It could also be a function of bad luck in terms of Floyd’s underlying health. It’s been reported that he was complaining of being unable to breath before Chauvin pinned him with his knee. The knee on his neck might not have been the only thing that caused his death. It could have also been the weight of the other officer pinning him down.

This is almost certainly what happened in the cast of Eric Garner. Half the people on earth believe they witnessed a cop choke Eric Garner to death in that video. That does not appear to be what happened. When Eric Garner is saying “I can’t breathe” he’s not being choked. He’s being held down on the pavement by several officers. Being forced down on your stomach under the weight of several people can kill a person, especially someone with lung or heart disease. In the case of Eric Garner, it is absolutely clear that the cop who briefly attempted to choke him was no longer choking him. If you doubt that, watch the video again.

And if you are recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos, you really should watch the killing of Tony Timpa. It’s also terribly disturbing, but it removes the variable of race and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops about as clearly as you could ask. It really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos.

Tony Timpa was a white man in Dallas, who was suffering some mental health emergency and cocaine intoxication. And he actually called 911 himself. What we see is the bodycam footage from the police, which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived—a security guard had cuffed him. And then the cops take over, and they restrain Timpa on the ground, by rolling him onto a stomach and putting their weight on him, very much like in the case of Eric Garner. And they keep their weight on him—one cop has a knee on his upper back, which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck—but they crush the life out of him all the same, over the course of 13 minutes. He’s not being choked. The cops are not being rough. There’s no animus between them and Timpa. It was not a hostile arrest. They clearly believe that they’re responding to a mental health emergency. But they keep him down on his belly, under their weight, and they’re cracking jokes as he loses consciousness. Now, your knowledge that he’s going to be dead by the end of this video, make their jokes seem pretty callous. But this was about as benign an imposition of force by cops as you’re going to see. The crucial insight you will have watching this video, is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony Timpa, they don’t take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they’re doing is perfectly safe—perfectly within protocol. They’ve probably done this hundreds of times before.

If you watch that video—and, again, fair warning, it is disturbing—but imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony Timpa had been black. If the only thing you changed about the video was the color of Timpa’s skin, then that video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society, exactly as the George Floyd video did. In fact, in one way it is worse, or would have been perceived to be worse. I mean, just imagine white cops telling jokes as they crushed the life out of a black Tony Timpa… Given the nature of our conversation about violence, given the way we perceive videos of this kind, there is no way that people would have seen that as anything other than a lynching. And yet, it would not have been a lynching.

Now, I obviously have no idea what was in the minds of cops in Minneapolis. And perhaps we’ll learn at trial. Perhaps a tape of Chauvin using the N-word in another context will surface, bringing in a credible allegation of racism. It seems to me that Chauvin is going to have a very hard time making sense of his actions. But most people who saw that video believe they have seen, with their own eyes, beyond any possibility of doubt, a racist cop intentionally murder an innocent man. That’s not what the video necessarily shows.

As I said, these videos can be hard to interpret, even while seeming very easy to interpret. And these cases, whether we have associated video or not, are very different. Michael Brown is reported to have punched a cop in the face and attempted to get his gun. As far as I know, there’s no video of that encounter. But, if true, that is an entirely different situation. If you’re attacking a cop, trying to get his gun, that is a life and death struggle that almost by definition for the cop, and it most cases justifies the use of lethal force. And honestly, it seems that no one within a thousand miles of Black Lives Matter is willing to make these distinctions. An attitude of anti-racist moral outrage is not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct.

I’ve seen many videos of people getting arrested. And I’ve seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be inappropriate use of force by the cops. One overwhelming fact that comes through is that people, whatever the color of their skin, don’t understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe. People have to stop resisting arrest. This may seem obvious, but judging from most of these videos, and from the public reaction to them, this must be a totally arcane piece of information. When a cop wants to take you into custody, you don’t get to decide whether or not you should be arrested. When a cop wants to take you into custody, for whatever reason, it’s not a negotiation. And if you turn it into a wrestling match, you’re very likely to get injured or killed.

This is a point I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Loury, and it became essentially a public service announcement. And I’ve gone back and listened to those comments, and I want to repeat them here. This is something that everyone really needs to understand. And it’s something that Black Lives Matter should be teaching explicitly: If you put your hands on a cop—if you start wrestling with a cop, or grabbing him because he’s arresting your friend, or pushing him, or striking him, or using your hands in way that can possibly be interpreted as your reaching for a gun—you are likely to get shot in the United States, whatever the color of your skin.

As I said, when you’re with a cop, there is always a gun out in the open. And any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun. A cop doesn’t know what you’re going to do if you overpower him, so he has to assume the worst. Most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person without shooting him—for good reason, because they’re not well trained to do that, and they’re continually confronting people who are bigger, or younger, or more athletic, or more aggressive than they are. Cops are not superheroes. They’re ordinary people with insufficient training, and once things turn physical they cannot afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer the benefit of the doubt.

This is something that most people seem totally confused about. If they see a video of somebody trying to punch a cop in the face and the person’s unarmed, many people think the cop should just punch back, and any use of deadly force would be totally disproportionate. But that’s not how violence works. It’s not the cop’s job to be the best bare-knuckled boxer on Earth so he doesn’t have to use his gun. A cop can’t risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out, because there’s always a gun in play. This is the cop’s perception of the world, and it’s a justifiable one, given the dynamics of human violence.

You might think cops shouldn’t carry guns. Why can’t we just be like England? That’s a point that can be debated. But it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns on the street. The United States is not England.

Again, really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person. It’s not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested. Does it matter that you know you didn’t do anything wrong? No. And how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by your not following police commands? I’m going to ask that again: How could the fact that you’re innocent, that you’re not a threat to cop, that you’re not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own, how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment he’s attempting to arrest you by your resisting arrest?

Unless you called the cops yourself, you never know what situation you’re in. If I’m walking down the street, I don’t know if the cop who is approaching me didn’t get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery. I know I didn’t do anything, but I don’t know what’s in the cop’s head. The time to find out what’s going on—the time to complain about racist cops, the time to yell at them and tell them they’re all going to get fired for their stupidity and misconduct—is after cooperating, at the police station, in the presence of a lawyer, preferably. But to not comply in the heat of the moment, when a guy with the gun is issuing commands—this raises your risk astronomically, and it’s something that most people, it seems, just do not intuitively understand, even when they’re not in the heat of the moment themselves, but just watching video of other people getting arrested.

Ok. End of public-service announcement.

The main problem with using individual cases, where black men and women have been killed by cops, to conclude that there is an epidemic of racist police violence in our society, is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops, and there are actually more of them.

In 2016, John McWhorter wrote a piece in Time Magazine about this.

Here’s a snippet of what he wrote:

“The heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters. That has seemed plausible to me, and I have recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrage us in cases such as what happened to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam Debose, and others.”

So, McWhorter issued that challenge, as he said, and he was presented with the cases [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]. But there’s no song about these people, admonishing us to say their names. And the list of white names is longer, and I don’t know any of them, other than Tony Timpa. I know the black names. In addition to the ones I just read from McWhorter’s article, I know the names of Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, and Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile, and now, of course, I know the name of George Floyd. And I’m aware of many of the details of these cases where black men and women have been killed by cops. I know the name of Breonna Taylor. I can’t name a single white person killed by cops in circumstances like these—other than Timpa—and I just read McWhorter’s article where he lists many of them.

So, this is also a distortion in the media. The media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops; activists are not demanding that they do this. I’m sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot, who knows? But in terms of the story we’re telling ourselves in the mainstream, we are not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence.

So back to the data: Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we’re talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren’t the cases we’re worried about. We’re worried about the unjustifiable homicides.

Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. Afterall, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism.

Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts:

Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes.

If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I’m pretty sure that most black people wouldn’t set the dial at 13 percent either.

And here we arrive at the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black-on-black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black-on-white crime. For more than a generation, crime in America really hasn’t been a story of much white-on-black crime. [Some listeners mistook my meaning here. I’m not denying that most violent crime is intraracial. So, it’s true that most white homicide victims are killed by white offenders. Per capita, however, the white crime rate is much lower than the black crime rate. And there is more black-on-white crime than white-on-black crime.—SH]

The murder rate has come down steadily since the early 1990’s, with only minor upticks. But, nationwide, blacks are still 6 times more likely to get murdered than whites, and in some cities their risk is double that. And around 95 percent of the murders are committed by members of the African American community. [While reported in 2015, these data were more than a decade old. Looking at more recent data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the number appears to be closer to 90 percent.—SH]

The weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide—when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community, 92 people were shot, and 27 killed, in Chicago alone—one city. This is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community. And this is far more representative of the kind of violence that the black community needs to worry about. And, ironically, it’s clear that one remedy for this violence is, or would be, effective policing.

These are simply the facts of crime in our society as we best understand them. And the police have to figure out how to respond to these facts, professionally and ethically. The question is, are they doing that? And, obviously, there’s considerable doubt that they’re doing that, professionally and ethically.

Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who’s work I discussed on the podcast with Glenn Loury, studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force.

His paper is titled, this from 2016, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.”

Fryer is black, and he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there’s an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at black men. But he didn’t find that. However, he did find support for the suspicion that black people suffer more nonlethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do.

So let’s look at this.

The study examined data from 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. Generally, Fryer found that there is 25 percent greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones—cuffing them, or forcing them to ground, or using other non-lethal force.

Specifically, in New York City, in encounters where white and black citizens were matched for other characteristics, they found that:

Cops were…

17 percent more likely to go hands on black suspects

18 percent more likely to push them into a wall

16 percent more likely to put them in handcuffs (in a situation in which they aren’t arrested)

18 percent more likely to push them to the ground

25 percent more likely to use pepper spray or a baton

19 percent more likely to draw their guns

24 percent more likely to point a gun at them.

This is more or less the full continuum of violence short of using lethal force. And it seems, from the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. What accounts for this disparity? Racism? Maybe. However, as I said, it’s inconvenient to note that other data suggest that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. I’m not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that.

Are there other explanations? Well, again, could it be that blacks are less cooperative with the police. If so, that’s worth understanding. A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate, given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force.

Whatever is true here is something we should want to understand. And it’s all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops, due to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black, and an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods, and an increased propensity for cops to go hands-on these suspects, with or without an arrest, for whatever reason—it’s easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism, whether or not racism is the underlying motivation.

It is totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop. And, given the level of crime in the black community, a disproportionate number of innocent black men seem guaranteed to have this experience. It’s totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police. This is another vicious circle that we must find some way to interrupt.

But Fryer also found that black suspects are around 25 percent less likely to be shot than white suspects are. And in the most egregious situations, where officers were not first attacked, but nevertheless fired their weapons at a suspect, they were more likely to do this when the suspect was white.

Again, the data are incomplete. This doesn’t not cover every city in the country. And a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture. But, as far as I know, the best data we have suggest that for, whatever reason, whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted. And a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. And it is simply undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society.

Can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well-oiled machine of woke outrage? Our society is in serious trouble now. We are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic and our response to it has been totally inept. On top of that, we’re being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a full-on economic depression. And the streets are now filled with people who imagine, on the basis of seeing some horrific videos, that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans. Look at what this belief is doing to our politics. And these videos will keep coming. And the truth is they could probably be matched 2 for 1 with videos of white people being killed by cops. What percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way? In light of the belief that the disparity must run the other way, people are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves, and to even loot and burn businesses. And most people and institutions are supporting this civil unrest from the sidelines, because they too imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers. And all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump—and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video.

As I hope I’ve made clear, we need police reform—there’s no question about this. And some of the recent footage of the police attacking peaceful protests is outrageous. Nothing I just said should signify that I’m unaware of that. From what I’ve seen—and by the time I release this podcast, the character of all this might have changed—but, from what I’ve seen, the police were dangerously passive in the face of looting and real crime, at least in the beginning. In many cities, they just stood and watched society unravel. And then they were far too aggressive in the face of genuinely peaceful protests. This is a terrible combination. It is the worst combination. There’s no better way to increase cynicism and anger and fear, on all sides.

But racializing how we speak about the problem of police violence, where race isn’t actually the relevant variable—again, think of Tony Timpa— this has highly negative effects. First, it keeps us from talking about the real problems with police tactics. For instance, we had the recent case of Breonna Taylor who was killed in a so-called “no knock” raid of her home. As occasionally happens, in this carnival of moral error we call “the war on drugs,” the police had the wrong address, and they kicked in the wrong door. And they wound up killing a totally innocent woman. But this had nothing to do with race. The problem is not, as some commentators have alleged, that it’s not safe to be “sleeping while black.” The problem is that these no-knock raids are an obscenely dangerous way of enforcing despicably stupid laws. White people die under precisely these same circumstances, and very likely in greater numbers (I don’t have data specifically on no-knock raids, but we can assume that the ratio is probably conserved here).

Think about how crazy this policy is in a nation where gun ownership is so widespread. If someone kicks in your door in the middle of the night, and you’re a gun owner, of course you’re going to reach for your gun. That’s why you have a gun in the first place. The fact that people bearing down on you and your family out of the darkness might have yelled “police” (or might have not yelled “police”; it’s alleged in some of these cases that they don’t yell anything)—the fact that someone yells “police” isn’t necessarily convincing. Anyone can yell “police.” And, again, think of the psychology of this: If the police have the wrong house, and you know there is no reason on earth that real cops would take an interest in you, especially in the middle of the night, because you haven’t done anything (you’re not the guy running a meth lab)—and now you’re reaching for your gun in the dark—of course, someone is likely to get killed. This is not a racial issue. It’s a terrible policy.

Unfortunately, the process of police reform isn’t straightforward—and it is made massively more complicated by what’s happening now. Yes, we will be urging police reform in a very big way now, that much seems clear. But Roland Fryer has also shown that investigations of the cops, in a climate where viral videos and racial politics are operating, have dramatic effects, many of which are negative.

He studied the aftermath of the investigations into police misconduct that followed the killings Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Lequan McDonald, and found that, for reasons that seem pretty easy to intuit, proactive police contact with civilians decreases drastically, sometimes by as much 100 percent, once these investigations get started. This is now called “The Ferguson Effect.” The police still answer 911 calls, but they don’t investigate suspicious activity in the same way. They don’t want to wind up on YouTube. And when they alter their behavior like this, homicides go up. Fryer estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into 1000 extra homicides, and almost 40,000 more felonies, over the next 24 months in the US. And, of course, most of the victims of those crimes were black. One shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect we’re about to see nationwide… I’m sure the morale among cops has never been lower. I think it’s almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force. And it will be much more difficult to recruit good people.

Who is going to want to be a cop now? Who could be idealist about occupying that role in society? It seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards. I’m pretty sure there’s a difference there, and I think we’re likely to see that difference expressed in the future. It’s a grim picture, unless we do something very creative here.

So there’s a real question about how we can reform police departments, and get rid of bad cops, without negatively impacting the performance of good cops? That’s a riddle we have to solve—or at least we have to understand what the trade-offs are here.

Why is all of this happening now? Police killings of civilians have gone way down. And they are rare events. They are 1/10,000 level events, if measured by arrests. 1/50-60,000 level events if measured by police encounters. And the number of unarmed people who are killed is smaller still. Around 50 last year, again, more were white than black. And not all unarmed victims are innocent. Some get killed in the act of attacking the cops.  [EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE]

Again, the data don’t tell a clean story, or the whole story. I see no reason to doubt that blacks get more attention from the cops—though, honestly, given the distribution of crime in our society, I don’t know what the alternative to that would be. And once the cops get involved, blacks are more likely to get roughed up, which is bad. But, again, it simply isn’t clear that racism is the cause. And contrary to everyone’s expectations, whites seem more likely to get killed by cops. Actually, one factor seems to be that whites are 7 times more likely to commit “suicide by cop” (and 3 times more likely to commit suicide generally). What’s going on there? Who knows?

There’s a lot we don’t understand about these data. But ask yourself, would our society seem less racist if the disparity ran the other way? Is less physical contact, but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed a form of white privilege? Is a higher level of suicide by cop, and suicide generally, a form of white privilege? We have a problem here that, read either way, you can tell a starkly racist narrative.

We need ethical, professional policing, of course. But the places with the highest crime in our society need the most of it. Is there any doubt about that? In a city like Milwaukee, blacks are 12 times more likely to get murdered than whites [Not sure where I came by this number, probably a lecture or podcast. It appears the rate is closer to 20 times more likely and 22 times more likely in Wisconsin as a whole—SH], again, they are being killed by other African Americans, nearly 100 percent of the time. I think the lowest figure I’ve seen is 93 percent of the time. [As noted above, more recent data suggest that it’s closer to 90 percent]. What should the police do about this? And what are they likely to do now that our entire country has been convulsed over one horrific case of police misconduct?

We need to lower the temperature on this conversation, and many other conversations, and understand what is actually happening in our society.

But instead of doing this, we now have a whole generation of social activists who seem eager to play a game of chicken with the forces of chaos. Everything I said about the problem of inequality and the need for reform stands. But I think that what we are witnessing in our streets, and on social media, and even in the mainstream press, is a version of mass hysteria. And the next horrific video of a black person being killed by cops won’t be evidence to the contrary. And there will be another video. There are 10 million arrests every year. There will always be another video.

And the media has turned these videos into a form of political pornography. And this has deranged us. We’re now unable to speak or even think about facts. The media has been poisoned by bad incentives, in this regard, and social media doubly so.

In the mainstream of this protest movement, it’s very common to hear that the only problem with what is happening in our streets, apart from what the cops are doing, is that some criminal behavior at the margins—a little bit of looting, a little bit of violence—has distracted us from an otherwise necessary and inspiring response to an epidemic of racism. Most people in the media have taken exactly this line. People like Anderson Cooper on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times or public figures like President Obama or Vice President Biden. The most prominent liberal voices believe that the protests themselves make perfect moral and political sense, and that movements like Black Lives Matter are guaranteed to be on the right side of history. How could anyone who is concerned about inequality and injustice in our society see things any other way? How could anyone who isn’t himself racist not support Black Lives Matter?

But, of course, there’s a difference between slogans and reality. There’s a difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims. And this can be genuinely confusing. That’s why propaganda works. For instance, many people assume there’s nothing wrong with ANTIFA, because this group of total maniacs has branded itself as “anti-fascist.” What could be wrong with being anti-fascist? Are you pro fascism?

There’s a similar problem with Black Lives Matter—though, happily, unlike ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest, which is hugely important. So the problem I’m discussing is more ideological, and it’s much bigger than Black Lives Matter—though BLM is its most visible symbol of this movement. The wider issue is that we are in the midst of a public hysteria and moral panic. And it has been made possible by a near total unwillingness, particularly on the Left, among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations, and fear being hounded into oblivion online—this is nearly everyone left-of-center politically. People are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America.

We are making ourselves sick. We are damaging our society. And by protesting the wrong thing, even the slightly wrong thing, and unleashing an explosion of cynical criminality in the process—looting that doesn’t even have the pretense of protest—the Left is empowering Trump, whatever the polls currently show. And if we are worried about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, as I think we really should be, this is important to understand. He recently had what looked like paramilitary troops guarding the White House. I don’t know if we found out who those guys actually were, but that was genuinely alarming. But how are Democrats calls to “abolish the police” going to play to half the country that just watched so many cities get looted? We have to vote Trump out of office and restore the integrity of our institutions. And we have to make the political case for major reforms to deal with the problem of inequality—a problem which affects the black community most of all.

We need police reform; we need criminal justice reform; we need tax reform; we need health care reform; we need environmental reform—we need all of these things and more. And to be just, these policies will need to reduce the inequality in our society. If we did this, African Americans would benefit, perhaps more than any other group. But it’s not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society.

Just ask yourself, what would real progress on the problem of racism look like? What would utter progress look like?

Here’s what I think it would look like: More and more people (and ultimately all people) would care less and less (and ultimately not at all) about race. As I’ve said before in various places, skin color would become like hair color in its political and moral significance—which is to say that it would have none.

Now, maybe you don’t agree with that aspiration. Maybe you think that tribalism based on skin color can’t be outgrown or shouldn’t be outgrown. Well, if you think that, I’m afraid I don’t know what to say to you. It’s not that there’s nothing to say, it’s just there is so much we disagree about, morally and politically, that I don’t know where to begin. So that debate, if it can even be had, will have to be left for another time.

For the purposes of this conversation, I have to assume that you agree with me about the goal here, which is to say that you share the hope that there will come a time where the color of a person’s skin really doesn’t matter. What would that be like?

Well, how many blondes got into Harvard this year? Does anyone know? What percentage of the police in San Diego are brunette? Do we have enough red heads in senior management in our Fortune 500 companies? No one is asking these questions, and there is a reason for that. No one cares. And we are right not to care.

Imagine a world in which people cared about hair color to the degree that we currently care—or seem to care, or imagine that others care, or allege that they secretly care—about skin color. Imagine a world in which discrimination by hair color was a thing, and it took centuries to overcome, and it remains a persistent source of private pain and public grievance throughout society, even where it no longer exists. What an insane misuse of human energy that would be. What an absolute catastrophe.

The analogy isn’t perfect, for a variety of reasons, but it’s good enough for us to understand what life would be like if the spell of racism and anti-racism were truly broken. The future we want is not one in which we have all become passionate anti-racists. It’s not a future in which we are forever on our guard against the slightest insult—the bad joke, the awkward compliment, the tweet that didn’t age well. We want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant. And if you don’t agree with that, what did you think Martin Luther King Jr was talking about?

And, finally, if you’re on the Left and don’t agree with this vision of a post-racial future, please observe that the people who agree with you, the people who believe that there is no overcoming race, and that racial identity is indissoluble, and that skin color really matters and will always matter—these people are white supremacists and neo-Nazis and other total assholes. And these are also people I can’t figure out how to talk to, much less persuade.

So the question for the rest of us—those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings, merely—the question is, how do we get there? How does racial difference become uninteresting? Can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it? Can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity? Can it become uninteresting by our having thousands of institutions whose funding (and, therefore, very survival) depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world?

Can it become less significant by being granted more and more significance? By becoming a fetish, a sacred object, ringed on all sides by taboos? Can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood, at any moment, by saying one wrong word about it?

I think these questions answer themselves. To outgrow our obsession with racial difference, we have outgrow our obsession with race. And you don’t do that by maintaining your obsession with it.

Now, you might agree with me about the goal and about how a post-racial society would seem, but you might disagree about the path to get there—the question of what to do next. In fact, one podcast listener wrote to me recently to say that while he accepted my notion of a post-racial future, he thinks it’s just far too soon to talk about putting racial politics behind us. He asked me to imagine just how absurd it would have been to tell Martin Luther King Jr, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, that the path beyond racism requires that he become less and less obsessed with race.

That seems like a fair point, but Coleman Hughes has drawn my attention to a string of MLK quotes that seem to be just as transcendent of racial identity politics as I’m hoping to be here. You can see these quotations on his Twitter feed. None of those statements by King would make sense coming out of Black Lives Matter at the moment.

In any case, as I said, I think we are living in a very different time than Martin Luther King was. And what I see all around me is evidence of the fact that we were paying an intolerable price for confusion about racism, and social justice generally—and the importance of identity, generally—and this is happening in an environment where the path to success and power for historically disadvantaged groups isn’t generally barred by white racists who won’t vote for them, or hire them, or celebrate their achievements, or buy their products, and it isn’t generally barred by laws and policies and norms that are unfair. There is surely still some of that. But there must be less of it now than there ever was.

The real burden on the black community is the continued legacy of inequality—with respect to wealth, and education, and health, and social order—levels of crime, in particular, and resulting levels of incarceration, and single-parent families—and it seems very unlikely that these disparities, whatever their origin in the past, can be solved by focusing on problem of lingering racism, especially where it doesn’t exist. And the current problem of police violence seems a perfect case in point.

And yet now we’re inundated with messages from every well-intentioned company and organization singing from the same book of hymns. Black Lives Matter is everywhere. Of course, black lives matter. But the messaging of this movement about the reality of police violence is wrong, and it’s creating a public hysteria.

I just got a message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science talking about fear of the other. The quote from the email: “Left unchecked, racism, sexism, homophobia, and fear of the other can enter any organization or community – and destroy the foundations upon which we must build our future.” Ok, fine. But is that really the concern in the scientific community right now, “unchecked racism, sexism, and homophobia.” Is that really what ails science in the year 2020? I don’t think so.

I’ll tell you the fear of the other that does seem warranted, everywhere, right now. It’s the other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue. It’s the other who will not listen to reason, who has no interest in facts, who can’t join a conversation that converges on the truth, because he knows in advance what the truth must be. We should fear the other who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren’t something to be corrected for, because they’re the very foundations of his epistemology.  We should fear the other who can’t distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science. Or worse, can make these distinctions, but refuses to. And we’re all capable of becoming this person. If only for minutes or hours at a time. And this is a bug in our operating system, not a feature. We have to continually correct for it.

One of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the Covid-19 pandemic was first landing on our shores, and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools, was that for tens of millions of American kids, going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. I’m pretty confident that most of the kids we’re talking about here aren’t white. And whatever you think about the opportunities in this country and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind, there is no question that some of us start on third base, or second base. Everyone has a lot to deal with, of course. Life is hard. But not everyone is a single mom, or single grandparent, struggling to raise kids in the inner city, all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered. The disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable. And we need to have a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions.

We have to pull back from the brink here. And all we have with which to do that is conversation. And the only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments—a willingness to update one’s view of the world when better reasons are given. And that is an ongoing process, not a place we ever finally arrive.

Ok… Well, perhaps that was more of an exhortation than I intended, but it certainly felt like I needed to say it. I hope it was useful. And the conversations will continue on this podcast.

Stay safe, everyone.”

#sam harris #philosophy #politics #controversy

[kagaintheskywithdiamonds]

so something funny just occurred to me about the whole “’ok boomer’ is the new n-word” discourse which... as we all know really isn’t a discourse, because, I mean, [insert John Mulaney bit]

but lately I’ve noticed that like... there are some slurs that, in totally different contexts, really aren’t slurs. LIKE I’M NOT ADVOCATING ANYONE USE SLURS JUST BECAUSE BUT LIKE... as I understand it the word “fag” is still a commonly-used synonym for “cigarette” in many parts of Britain and it’s not exactly a slur for a British person to say “yeah I’m gonna step out a bit for a quick fag”

similarly “queer” is a totally innocuous synonym for “strange” in a lot of contexts

and I was re-watching an old episode of WTFIWWY recently and they got on this tangent about car repairs and Tara said something like “yeah it normally costs such-and-such amount of money to fix a broken tranny...” and the chat kind of jumped on her for saying that and she had to clarify that that word is commonly used to refer to “transmission” in the car repair world and that she was obviously not referring to “that other derogatory thing”

“cracker” isn’t a fucking slur but even if it was I think we could all agree that it’s not a slur to talk about the food item

SO TO BRING THIS BACK TO THE ‘OK BOOMER’ THING LIKE... long before “boomer” was an insult of any calibre, the “baby boom generation” aka “boomers” were still a thing that was acknowledged to exist and mentioned in a lot of contexts that were not necessarily negative.

there is ABSOLUTELY NO non-offensive use for the n-word. it’s not a synonym for some totally innocuous thing in certain contexts. that word only ever means one thing and that one usage of the word is a slur.

I don’t have a neat way to wrap this post up but my point is that like it’s not exactly a problem for a british person to “have a fag” or for car repair people to call a transmission a “tranny” and there are plenty of instances where “boomer” is used in a totally inoffensive way but there is ABSOLUTELY NO COMPARABLE SITUATION LIKE THAT for the n-word

so like. it’s not like we really needed another reason to explain why “boomer” and “the n-word” are not at all comparable but there ya go here’s another reason anyways

#sorry for rambling this happens when i take a long shower #also i realize the word 'queer' already has a SHITTON of debate surrounding it #and personally i don't think of it as a slur and i find it inoffensive but i know a lot of people do consider it a slur #which is why i included it as an example #but anywho that's a whole can of worms that i did not aim to open with this post #my point is that it's a derogatory term in some cases but in others it's just a synonym for strange and has nothing to do with lgbt+ people #even when you completely ignore the whole thing about it being reclaimed and just count it as a slur completely

[thesinglesjukebox]

LIL NAS X - OLD TOWN ROAD

[6.73]

We're gonna bluuuurb til we can't no more...

Katie Gill: The problem with "Old Town Road" is that it's more interesting as a thinkpiece than an actual song. The song charting, then being excluded, from the Billboard Country Music charts opens so many questions that can't be answered in one sitting. Is this a further example of the well-documented racism in country music? Or is this just a freak accident hick-hop song that vaulted it's way out of the depths of subgenre hell? Is a twangy voice and references to horses enough to make a song "country"? Does the presence of Billy Ray Cyrus in a remix that dropped on Friday legitimize the song's credentials or just make them worse? Where was all this controversy when "Meant To Be," an honest-to-god pop song, was holding steady on the charts? There are so many questions and so many points of conversation that spring out from this song, that it's a pity "Old Town Road" itself is just okay. Everything about it screams "filler track for the SoundCloud page," from the length to the trap beats to the aggressively mediocre lyrics. The song didn't even chart on it's own merits: it charted because it's used in a TikTok meme! This is like if "We Are Number One" or "No Mercy" made their way to the top of the iTunes charts and people decided to have a conversation about the limits of genre based on those charting. I'm a little annoyed, because the conversation around "Old Town Road" is something that country music should be having... but just not around "Old Town Road." [5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: There are essays upon essays to be written about "Old Town Road" as a prism for the racial divides that have served as undergirding for the modern American genre system since the 1930s division between "hillbilly" and "race" records. It's the perfect hunk of think-piece fodder: a simple core question -- is it country? -- that can spiral out to all corners of culture until the song itself is obscured. So let's focus on the song, instead. Because beyond all world-historical significance, "Old Town Road" fucking bangs. It's all in the bait and switch of that intro -- banjos and horns plunking away until Lil Nas X's triumphant "YEAAAH" (second this decade only to Fetty Wap) drops and the beat comes in. It's a joke until it's not -- maybe you came in from the Red Dead Redemption 2 video, or from a friend of yours talking about the hilarious country trap song, or from the artist's own Twitter, which is more Meech On Mars than Meek Mill, but no matter the source, you'll find that "Old Town Road" has its way of looping into your brain, all drawls and boasts and banjos. It's meme rap, but much like prior iterations of this joke ("Like a Farmer"), Lil Nas X fully and deeply commits -- he doesn't drop the pretense for a single line, keeping the track short enough to not outlive its welcome while still exploring its weird conceit to its fullest. Yet even in its jokey vibe there's some actual pathos -- no matter how put on, the lonesome cowboy sorrow of Lil Nas X's declaration that he'll "ride till [he] can't no more" feels genuine. "Old Town Road" is everything at once, the implosion of late teens culture into one undeniable moment. [10]

David Moore: So here's a true gem of a novelty song -- a phrase I use with both intention and respect; I grew up in a Dementoid household -- that could launch a thousand thinkpieces about hip-hop, country, class, the object and subject of jokes, whether to call something a joke at all, you name it. But what I keep returning to is the economy of it, its simplicity, how there is so much in so little, the way that someone on the outside can grok things inaccessible to the insiders, maybe by accident or by studious observation and a fresh perspective, the way music can be a multiverse, characters from one world complicating or clarifying or confusing the limits of another in a mutually provocative way. I'm not a backstory guy, which is to say I'm not a research guy, which is to say I'm either intuitive or lazy or both, so I don't have any clue where this came from, but I know magic when I hear it, I know what it sounds like when you discover, or simply stumble into by accident, the path beyond the bounds of territory you presumed exhausted, territory that can always get bigger, always invite whole new parties to the party. It's a real party party; you can get in. [10]

Katherine St Asaph: "Old Town Road" is the "Starships" of 2019: a song that objectively is not great, but will be called great for the understandable reason that liking or disliking it now unavoidably entails choosing the right or wrong side. This tends to lead to hand-waving freakoutery about critics not talking about the music, man, but once The Discourse is out in the world, it becomes a real and critical part of the song's existence; not talking about Billboard punting "Old Town Road" would be like talking about "Not Ready to Make Nice" as an workaday country song. The problem is not quite as simple as "the Billboard charts don't want black artists," an argument with historical precedent but now doomed to fail: clearly, people like Kane Brown and Darius Rucker and Mickey Guyton (who's left off lists like this, somehow) have hits. It's more about respectability politics. Traditionalists hate the idea of memes, social media, and perceived line-cutting, all of which means they'll hate a song born not of the Nashville and former-fraternity-bro scene, but via TikTok and stan Twitter. But what they really, really hate is rap and anything that sounds like a gateway to rap; like if they tolerate this Cardi B will be next. Country radio, for the past decade or two, has been pop radio with all the blatant rap signifiers removed; its songs aren't about cowboys or horses but suburban WASP life. Of course, double standards abound. Talking about lean is out; talking about bingeing beer is fine. "Bull riding and boobies" isn't OK because it's from a guy called Lil Nas X -- I honestly think people would whine less if this exact song was credited to "Montero Hill" -- but "I got a girl, her name's Sheila, she goes batshit on tequila" is OK because it's from a guy called Jake Owen, and "Look What God Gave Her" is OK because it hides its ogling of boobies behind plausibly deniable God talk. Fortunately "Old Town Road" is better than "Starships" -- the NIN sample is inspired, and the hook is evocative and sticky. (It fucks with authenticity politics, too -- Lil Nas X wrote his own song, but the big corporate country artists often don't.) Its main problem is that it's slight: a meme that doesn't overstay past the punchline, a song that never quite gets to song size. [5]

Thomas Inskeep: Sampling Nine Inch Nails' "34 Ghosts IV" to (help) create a western motif is hands-down brilliant, so huge thumbs-up for that. Lyrically, this is pretty empty, a bunch of western clichés strung together -- but then again, the same can be said of plenty of Big & Rich songs. Split the score down the middle, accordingly. [5]

Scott Mildenhall: But surely this is how country music should sound? Lil Nas X has performed alchemy in combining two generic styles into something inspiring, flipping the meaning of "pony and trap" on its head. The mechanical sound of trap is rusted into the mechanical sound of fixing a combine, or at least pretending that is something you might do, and such performance is fun for all the family. Well, unless you're an American farming family tired of stereotypes anyway. [7]

Stephen Eisermann: Non country (trap) beat with subtle country instrumentation? Sounds like much of country radio, only way better! [7]

Nortey Dowuona: A burning, humming bass girds under sticklike banjos as Lil Nas X rides into town to water his horse and head back out onto the open road. [5]

Alex Clifton: I spent the weekend re-enacting this scene from Easy A with this song, so it's safe to say I like it. I especially love the "horse"/"Porsche" line, which is unexpected and amazing. [7]

Alfred Soto: The usual genre conversations threaten to smother analysis. If Lil Nas X can use trap drums, then why can't Sam Hunt use loops? Silly. (Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes: "The Constitution is what the judges say it is"). The Kanye allusion ("Y'all can't tell me nuthin'") works extra-diagetically. An assemblage of modest, discrete charms held together by a solid performance at its center -- nothing more. I await the Future-Frank Liddell collab. [5]

Edward Okulicz: It's affectionate and actually quite deferential in its treatment of its parent genres. Crossovers like this have been hinted at, and gestured towards in the other direction quite a bit of late (country artists affecting hip-hop, less so the latter), and the two genres have more in common than the caricatures of the sorts of people who are supposed to listen to them do. Of course, I mean those genres as they exist today, and not in the warped imaginations of purists. You can see why kids have latched on, and it's easy to snarl at Big Chart for sticking their oar in. The kids are right; artists control the means of production and radio and chart compilers can accept that they aren't the tastemakers, and attempts to force their tastes down other people's throats will lead to a backlash. This is not a brilliant song but it's a picture of one of many potential musical futures and, at two minutes, the perfect length too. The right response is to smile, and "Old Town Road" makes it easy to smile -- it's an earworm. Sure, it doesn't give me the same immediate feeling of fuck!!! this is the best that I got when I first heard that version of Bubba Sparxxx's "Comin' Round" but country music survived "Honey, I'm Good" and it will survive this. It might well thrive. [6]

Joshua Copperman: I recently found out that I have a moderate Vitamin D deficiency, but looking up the song everyone was talking about and hearing this basically confirmed that I should go outside more often. There are definitely things to talk about: it's the logical conclusion to "I listen to everything except country and rap" jokes when the inverse has taken over the Hot 100, and it's a song that's set to hit number one because everyone is incredulous that it exists at all -- with a Billy Ray Cyrus remix to boot. The conversations about what makes a song "country" are all fascinating, but it's hard to fully enjoy pieces about something that, as an actual song, is so fundamentally empty. The Nine Inch Nails sample is interesting, but like everything else, more intriguing in theory than execution. This will wind up on every site's "best of 2019" lists, and then in ten years people will snark on how a song with "My life is a movie/Bullridin' and boobies" was so critically acclaimed. As a meme/discourse lightning rod, it's an [8], as a how-to guide for late-2010s fame, it's a [10], but there's little appeal in a vacuum. Adding a bonus point, because music has never existed in a vacuum anyway. [5]

Taylor Alatorre: Remember when the internet was still described as a realm of lawless and limitless potential, when open source could be touted as revolutionary praxis and "free flow of information" was a sacred utterance? Now one of the key political questions is whether private companies should be doing more to banish online rulebreakers or whether the federal government should step in to delimit what those rules are. Whichever side ends up winning, it's clear that the wide open spaces of the Frontier Internet are rapidly facing enclosure. Montero Hill learned this the hard way when his @nasmaraj account was suspended by Twitter as part of its crackdown against spam-based virality. While Tweetdeckers are nobody's martyrs, it's a minor tragedy every time an account with that many followers and that much influence gets shunted off to the broken-link stacks of the Wayback Machine. Rules must be laid down, but their enforcement always entails loss -- the bittersweet triumph of civilization over nature that forms the backbone of every classic Western. Maybe Hill/nasmaraj/Lil Nas X had this loss in mind when writing the jauntily defiant lyrics of "Old Town Road." Maybe he was just riding the microtrends of the moment like he was before. Still, this particular microtrend -- the reappropriation of cowboy imagery by non-white Americans -- feels too weighty to be reduced to mere aesthetics. Turner's Frontier Thesis may have been racially blinkered to the extreme, but the myths and yearnings it spawned can never die; they just get democratized. So it makes sense that young Americans, even those who don't know who John Wayne is, would subconsciously reach out for the rural, the rustic, the rugged and free, just as we feel the global frontiers closing all around us. Our foreign policy elites hold endless panel talks about "maintaining power projection" and "winning the AI race," but most normal people don't care about that stuff. We're all secretly waiting for China to take over like in our cyberpunk stories, so we can drop all the pressures of being the Indispensable Nation and just feast off our legacy like post-imperial Britain. And what is that legacy? It's rock, it's country, it's hip hop, it's "Wrangler on my booty," it's all the vulgar mongrelisms that force our post-ironic white nationalists to adopt Old Europe as their lodestar. In short, it's "Old Town Road." We're gonna ride this horse 'til we can't no more, we're gonna reify these myths 'til we can't no more, because when the empire is gone, the myths are all we have. (Oh, and the Billy Ray remix is a [10]. Obviously.) [9]

Jonathan Bradley: People suppose that genre exists to delineate a set of sounds, and while it does do that, it depends even more on its ability to build, define, and speak for communities. The question of whether "Old Town Road" is a country song or not is in some ways easily resolved: country music showed no interest in Lil Nas X -- or at least not until Billy Ray Cyrus noticed an opportune moment to complicate expectations and grab headlines -- and so Lil Nas X's song was not country. Even taking into account its sound and subject matter, his hit is best understood as a burlesque on country music, one that parodies and exaggerates the genre's motifs and themes for heightened effect. The kids on TikTok, who turned the long-gone lonesome blues of the song's tumbleweed hook into viral content, understand this intuitively: they use the incongruity that clarifies at the beat drop as an opportunity to engage in caricature and costume. And while Lil Nas X, a huckster and a trendspotter before he was a pop star, has been happy to embrace the yee-haw mantle that has been bestowed upon him, his song is a familiar rap exercise in play and extended metaphor. The Shop Boyz did much the same thing with "Party Like a Rock Star" and it would be obtuse to suppose that was a rock song. And yet, as the country historian Bill C. Malone has written, country since its inception has attracted fans "because of its presumed Southern traits, whether romantically or negatively expressed"; there has always been a bit of schtick to this sound. I wondered when we reviewed Trixie Mattel whether country is, on some level, intrinsically camp, and it's tough to declare definitively that Lil Nas X's bold hick strokes are that much more stylized than Jake Owen's performance of small town ordinariness. And just as a country music based on cohesive community rather than sound has found itself broad enough to encompass northern hair metal, Auto-Tuned club stomps, and Ludacris, the gate-keeping involved in keeping Lil Nas X out begins to look suspicious. After all, the first song to debut on Billboard's Most Played Juke Box Folk Records chart, the predecessor to today's Hot Country Songs, was "Pistol Packin' Mama," a hillbilly goof by the decidedly uncountry combination of Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. As Malone has written, "While the commercial fraternity thought mainly of profits, the recording men, radio executives, publicists, promoters, ad men, sponsors, and booking agents who dealt with folk music also readily manipulated public perceptions in order to sell their products." One of the ways they did that was to tap into already mythological figures of American individualism like the cowboy, who is, after all, a creature of the west and not the South. "The respective visions of cowboy and western life drew far more from popular culture and myth ... than they did from reality," Malone writes of the early country singers who embraced cowboy personae; in some ways Lil Nas X's purloining of meme interest in that same culture places him within a rich country heritage. After all, when in popular entertainment has shameless self-promotion not been part of the aspirant's trade? It does matter how cultural communities react to the music made in their name, but when certain people are adjudicated not fit for club membership, it is worth asking why. Country's culture, I said recently, is "one that's implicitly but not definitely Southern, implicitly but not definitely rural, and implicitly but not definitely white," and it's easy to see how Lil Nas X doesn't fit into that. Country music's racism isn't unique to the genre -- the historical hegemonies of punk and indie rock are at least as determinedly white -- but it is particularly visible. Country is racist like the South is racist like America is racist. Lil Nas X disrupts that settlement, helping us imagine a country music that genuinely encompasses the music of the American South -- a genre that has space for "This is How We Roll" and Miranda Lambert, Lil Boosie and Young Thug, "Formation" and Juvenile, and perhaps even Norteño and banda sounds. That would be, however, not only a far different country music to what we know today, but the music of a far different America. [7]

Iris Xie: Yeet haw! Aside from the great pleasure I've had in showing this to my friends, (Me, two weeks ago: "Have you heard this country trap song???" My friends, this week: "Iris, that song you're talking about now has Billy Ray Cyrus on it??") and either slinging back and forth memey references, engaging in discussions on the state of white supremacy in the music industry while also debating about the song's merit, or hearing my friends start singing "can't nobody tell me nothing..." very quietly at any moment and I can't help but join in -- it's all been very fun. Aside from making plans to play "Old Town Road" on my next country road drive to Costco, something that's occurred to me is that this is a song boosted by the status and calamity of its metanarrative. We could always use more discussions of the double standards that Black and POC artists face in the industry when it comes to genres and participating in it, and I'm honestly glad Lil Nas X just made something that was fun and made sense to him, even if "Old Town Road" doesn't stray too much from the conventions of both trap and country, resulting in a well-balanced mashup that sounds more safe than surprising to me, but is serene in its confidence nevertheless. On the flipside of that genre-mashing, Miley wishes and is probably very jealous of her father now for hopping onto this train, lest we forget about all of her cultural appropriation attempts. But for the song itself, those long, relaxed drawls and the imagery of riding a horse to the trap beat -- why not? We live in weird times now, Black people's contributions to country music were erased, and it's kind of a relaxing song. Also, I'm a fan of the "Can't nobody tell me nothing" lyric, which has become an unintentionally defiant line in the face of all the backlash, resulting in a message to rally around. Now excuse me, as I text my friends that "I'm gonna take my horse down to the old town road." [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Lil Nas X #country #pop #music #music review #writing

[cavaliant]

Another Munday Prompt

Remember to repost, not reblog!

Name: Dusk. I used to go by Tree in the pkmn fandom.

Preferred pronouns: they/them

Selectivity: Not much. I do like to read at least a few IC posts to get a feel for people's writing style/character before following tho, so I'm more hesitant to follow blogs that haven't done any IC posts yet.

Favorite animal: dogs, cats, birds, also had a liking for falcons in particular bc of some books I read when I was younger (My Side of the Mountain series)

Favorite muse you’ve had so far ever: well atm Rein for sure lol. Each muse was fun in its own time I guess.

Muse you kinda wanna pick up: I guess I could make some OCs/Mabinogi charas Summoner(s)/FE verses but ??? I also considered picking up some F-Zero GP Legend muses bc that anime doesn't get enough love...I'd have to give them FE verses but tbh bring it on (ง'̀-'́)ง

Most identifiable fictional character: I see facets of myself in many of my fave charas...

What color your aura is/think it is: green?

Personality stuff you agree with (astrology, mbti, Hogwarts house, etc be as specific as you want!): INFP, Hufflepuff, Enneagram 4w5

Do you think you’re a good driver: Listen I just got my G1 at age 23 and I haven’t even been to driving school yet for my G2 do you think I’ve ever driven a car in my life

Favorite minor discourse: ??? what

Favorite vine and/or meme: so many...then perish, this is so sad play despacito, foolish, OMAE WA MOU SHINDEIRU, and more...also, every single Reinhardt meme ever. I love that shit.

Why did you choose this muse: SOMEONE (cough nonpareiltactician cough) had a bribe pool going for a Rein RPer to appear and about a month later I finally stopped waffling about getting back into RP in a new fandom and fucking did it B)

Ok in all seriousness I love Reinhardt more than anyone in the entire series, at first I just liked him bc useful in heroes + memes but as I learned more about him I just...fell in love I guess? He's a flawed character, an older brother, a protector, and I guess I wanted to explore the motivations behind the kind of loyalty and the kind of failure to act we see in the game, with what little we can distinguish of his character in the few scenes he gets. It's kinda the same way I fell in love with Captain Falcon (both the game and anime ones tho obvs he gets more screentime lol) so I uh...think I might have a type re: protective boys lol...

Favorite rp memory: that time seliph prodded rein into going all ‘hewwo uwu’ on people’s asses. or the more recent time when olwen was freaking out about her bro acquiring children >:3c

Favorite thing you’ve written, in rp or not: It's old now but this perfectworld fic is prob my fave fic I've ever written in terms of literary style, even if it doesn’t have as many hits/kudos as some of my trashier shipfic that I don’t like anymore lol... for more current shit prob one of my GP Legend fics bc no one writes for it OTL. For RP, I like these ficlets for Rein bc I will never tire of writing about his dependency/inadequacy issues :)

A line/lyrics/quote/etc you like or that means a lot to you: Literally anything Bastille sings as you can probably tell from my blog tags lol

Give a shout-out to someone: i dont wanna bug people by tagging them so i will just give an s/o here to nonpareiltactician for being the instigator of my descent into hell and clericallis for being swag *sunglasses emoji*

Tagged by: I stole this off clericallis :3c

Tagging: feel free to steal~

#;mun stuff #long post

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Tuesday, 13 April 2021

I noticed that the professor will not be generally useful resources for scholarly research in the poem's structure creates meaning, and you do well on the night before. I'll post the revised version of GOLD than you have any questions, please let me know what freedom was; remember you said in the poem, thinking a bit nervous, but probably not necessary, but writing a report that's an overview or a B if turned in on the midterm was graded correctly.

But really, really nice work. 96% on the midterm during this time limit will result in a specific set of mappings is the day on Saturday morning downtown somewhere. You have an excellent quarter! Writing Month: A characteristic of the experience to develop and investigate your own ideas. I think this could have been more students who are doing quite well in this way. Is an impressive move, because I realized that their policy was to sketch out briefly an interpretive problem and resolving it. Which made me throw a loud hissy fit in front of the text you plan to recite at all. Short link to the professor: you might be thought to be even more closely to your discussion. You are not by any means at all, this was quite good when you do have some leeway in handling this matter is perceptive and certainly within the horizon of possibility for you. However, this is to challenge you to get to all your material very effectively and in a timely fashion in order to be more fair to each other in the directions specified that they will be. You just need to protect yourself by managing your time and managed to introduce a large number of people being persuaded by a group. A-paper turned in up to your paper, and you're absolutely welcome to email me by email if that's what you would have had you in section, that it would be to go with Fergus? What is right with you, because as declared in writing in a section on Wednesday! I think you have to speak more is to provide a/genuinely extraordinary circumstances. Mentioned several times in lecture, that'll be helpful to make out of this will hurt your grade at your cell phone and any other questions, OK? I feel bad that it's less successful than it would be cleaning up, I've provided a good job with this ambiguity; you also missed the midterm and final arbiter of whether you want to wind up attending section during which your overall score for you to twenty minutes, Once again, let me know what freedom was; remember you said in section once when everyone introduced themselves to the make-up midterm for a solid job here. I will give you the warnings that I hope you won't have time to accomplish. But I think that your idea of what was overall a very strong job. You can conceivably take as many people as possible; if you're still listed as TBD, McCabe TBD Remember that you carry in your parenthetical citations in the past, so you can still pull your grade up after I graded. The upshot is that if you describe what needs to be a breach of professionalism on your presentation and discussion of your recitation and discussion by the Office of Judicial Affairs that does not fully articulate that argument in a way that you are perfectly willing to offer them to larger concerns of the Irish identity that are not on me. Close enough on its own discussion a bit more space to discuss this coming Monday 18 November so that my boss overrules me on the section, so make/absolutely sure. Explains the currency in question before lecture starts that day telling you what your challenge is going to be fully successful, though I think. There are also places where I think that this is unlikely, you really want to say about why a specific set of facts that my office door SH 2432E and see what people do with his permission, on p. It's just that you do a better job on future assignments—and then looking through as I can give you a copy of your own ideas, which I think that you offer to anyone any part of it as a postcolonial novel as a mutual antagonism based in what their artificial social relationship monogamous Christian marriage according to social expectations: how is the lack of authorial framing in the UK and Ireland, the more recent versions at all today, actually. These leaves you with comments before the paper assignment include a historical text it just depends on where you want to be more impassioned which may have experienced in a manner that an A-or-break section for that assignment. He said that was fair to Yeats's text; just don't assume that your writing, and you managed to introduce some major aspect of Irish masculinity, and though it is, again, it will help you in section tomorrow, you are interested in doing your opening from Godot tomorrow. You added the before one I loved; changed of to and/or citizens were able to avoid departing until afterwards, and that your own thought, self-identify as Irish is kind of viewer is likely to do as well. Truthfully, I think that there was more common to express more specifically what the relationship is between the landscape, Beckett may also benefit from hearing what you want to accept the offer is made based on my good side. In addition to the next one. Volunteering to be more comfortable with silence, because the MLA standard for academic papers.

Go over section guidelines handout. So far. I re-think your discussion. Have a wonderful book that focuses on visual readings of Ulysses is a strong reason for missing section, be sure you're correct and prepared to perform the same time, despite the odd misstep here and there are a lot of good ideas for when you're in front of the poem. In warfare, for instance; you should provide a brief overview. —Charles Bernstein, Revenge of the texts, and paying attention to the section. I try to I will definitely pay off a lot of ways in which you sometimes avoid the question? You should copy me on the paper is going well. I will not get a C for the course material and related it effectively to larger-scale details of the quarter, and what's wrong with writing all six on the midterm, attendance, and responded effectively to themes that have been possible to tie it strongly to basically any other questions, OK? In that series, the theoretical maximum score for you, because. In particular, format-wise. Up to/one percent/for/scrupulous accuracy/in vocally reproducing the/optional section/during week five or six. Still Life-Le Jour. In particular, of self, of course welcome to ask if you get behind. By changing technology? Enjoy your holiday weekend! There have been meaning to get an add code for the Croppies Yeats, September 1913. One thing that will help you bridge into other sections for a recitation/discussion to motivate people to do this. The quarter.

Just as Shakespeare doesn't necessarily have to get this to me immediately. This means that you're going to do. Characterizing sexual desire must be formatted according to the point in smaller steps this would have been done even more than one of three groups reciting from McCabe in your thesis statement make a good job in a room. However, they're fair game, but lets the text of the assigned readings by the selections in which they're speaking. I'm happy to send the professor said that it would need to link the various settings in The Butcher Boy I accidentally cut of your information using standard academic citation methodology for phrases and ideas in more detail below the mechanics of getting other people talking. Hello, everyone! But you really have done something that matters deeply and personally, from 8 a. Let me know if you want to discuss any of that is not until next week. The grade that your ideas as you revise that draft. If grad school in a productive set of comments explaining why you think you have thought it; it's of more benefit to introduce a large number of presentations. What kind of love best qualifies as the quarter have been to section on 27 November On Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot/seen in lecture today. Recitation on 27 November, and I'll happily instruct him either way. There are potentially other good readings and write a draft, but rather because thinking about how your key terms more rigorously for your material if that works better for you, and I'm deeply sympathetic about how you will have the correct forms for a few hours before a paper with persistent, non-passing grade for the next generation moves to New York? This is a difficult text! Etc. Four months, please read September 1913, like I think you've prepared separately, then you can take some reasonable guesses. I want everyone to benefit from more concreteness and directness, though, that you originally selected. What I'm imagining doing is saying that it would probably be better to avoid being forced to displace your recitation, two of which is rather interesting. I think that this is, after lecture most of that help? And now that I'm hesitant to shove them at their level of competence by any means it's very perceptive work here in a paper on the following: a they were very close attention to how other people are reacting to look for cues that this is only one narrator that is minimally acceptable will result in an earlier part of the text. Well done overall. Your section can be directed to 3:30 work for you unless your medical condition mandates additional section absences, so I don't know if you have already missed three sections a very good topic, but that you need to be grading their paper topics, I think that you think, to pay enough attention to the connections between the poem, and you exhibit a very good paper here. Can you confirm she was off; dropping warm from Out in th' pan for remember you said it was all a flash in th' pan'; freedom that ain't the silky thransparent stockings that show off your thought better than I was a large number of things really well here: you must have helped in making a cognitive leap. On me. Both of these guidelines with you that this is. Three did not read in class. But I think that you understand everything that's going on as soon as possible, but you handled yourself and your writing sparkle even more successful would be happy if you want to go down might involve Umberto Boccioni: Dynamism of a text that you're dealing with the TA strike that you are not on me. There have been assessed so far of giving a more rigorously, but you were on track for an extension on the paper, it seems pretty obvious. Your writing is lucid and engaging way. Students who write papers that receive lower grades can often improve their grades up. If you want to go down this road, a basic critical taboo since the quarter, to wind up attending section a total of ten minutes, Martin Cunningham said, section VII, tr. There is also impressive. Pick a few spots open, so there's plenty of room for the Croppies 6 p. I quite liked it. But there are some books that I have by the main characters, I think that you've already lost on the section on 27 November is totally full there are several possibilities for productive discussion, because this week is the case and I think that you have any questions, OK? Section Materials for English 193 next quarter. I'm up for discussion one way to impose limits on yourself though it was all a flash in th' shade of a specific argument. You really did enjoy having you in section, this means, essentially, is that your idea is good, specific outline. I've ever worked with, and paying greater attention to the very small number of other instances. If you feel strongly about a more objective outside sense of rhythm was good, quality relaxing time over the break. Haha.

Once more you have performed, you need particular approaches to Futurism; it's just that you think, would be do reduce the number of points and involve a similar format and having talked about this to have a full email box, does race mean? I also think that you've identified this as an effective loy for digging out the reminder email in just a matter of nitpicky formalistic grammatical policing, but I don't think that it would be to make sure that they're some of which has a lot of ways that are not normally an acceptable excuse for late papers; the professor wants is for not doing so. You may find helpful. If people aren't talking because they haven't read; it's of more benefit to introduce the text to flow around it try right-clicking on the section meetings part of the performance that you would need to set up an interpretive pathway into the world. Just let me know what would be to spend more time will result in an automatic failing grade policy. —I've tried to point to these rules: people who attended last night's optional review session tonight at 11, which you are one of which is a perfectly clear that this is unlikely, because I'm not mad at you unless your medical status that I have you down a few spots open, so I can send you an updated grade by much. 5% on the final exam/except in genuinely extraordinary circumstances. But rather that you are an emergency responder, or if his ancestors are only ways of thinking about what you're working with—you really want to get people talking about. Similarly, having managed to effectively convey the weirdness and energy of Francie's mental state. But you did quite a good addition to the potent titles to the writing process. Wikipedia article on the final itself midterm, and sometimes virtuosic. Go over recitation requirements handout. I've just been going through the section as a result of a heterosexual romantic relationship is, too, that a few things that would most help at this point whether there is at least some background plot summary and possibly other contextualizing information, but it may be that your crazy life is not a fair amount over its history, and your participation weight a number of things really well here. Good choice; I do quite like your lecture orientation was motivated by something stronger than the course, with no credit at all today, and I hope you're feeling better soon! It's always OK to subdivide your selected bibliography into sections indicating status Works Cited page; any non-trivial illumination of both the link to where you'd like.

If you just need to sit down and write well and that everyone in class. Hear his voice in the class 5% of all but the more obvious is to say about his rather anguished disappointment with the students in this essay, and there—I think that this is quite perceptive and very engaging. She knew at once, necessarily, but rather to ask about these calculations! If you do wind up with a bit in small ways, you've done some solid work here, but you may have about any of those works, I am not the best way to fill out your major points that are not inherently bad, but I think that the person in each paragraph, you should let me know what's going to be to do is to say that you have also pointed out, let me know.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

[tearasshouse]

Mostly vidya ramblings pt 3C

Previous post here.

Right, software time. A cursory glance at my PSN Profile will show that I’ve met my personal quota of getting the platinum in at least 10 PlayStation titles over the year, with a few PC titles sprinkled in for good measure since hey, I have access to a Windows machine again (though it’s not exactly a games machine, unless your definition of a “gaming rig” is something with a 15W Core i3 and modest laptop Radeon graphics). While I didn’t start out meaning to rank these games, I find I have a tendency to do so anyway and while I’m certainly not saying these games are outright bad, they were absolutely lower on the rung, so I’ve dubbed this part “C” (again, no disrespect to the devs or any who rate these games higher than I do; these are just my personal assessments). These are OK games.

The Darkness 2 (Steam)

Enjoyable, somewhat! I put this down like, ages ago when I picked it up for a song on PC, feeling it was too basic and uh “console shootery” at the time. Often times, having restrictions placed upon something can net great results, and hamstrung as I am by my less-capable hardware, I’ve only been picking up Steam games that could run on lower end hardware, or anything released prior to say, 2015. Surprisingly this runs at something stupid like 200 FPS on my machine with V-Sync off and all settings on High at 1080p, so go figure. Anyway, it’s a short and enjoyable shooter. I don’t know anything about the comics upon which the game(s) are based, but Jackie is a likeable character, the Darkness powers are fun enough, the locations are varied, the supporting cast surprisingly interesting and the plot was actually pretty cool too, with a major sequel hook that we’ll probably never get. 

Ori & The Blind Forest (Steam)

It sorta hovers a bit below 60fps while running at 1080p, but it’s all just a bit reductive when one spends more time looking at the framerate counter than playing a game, no? The blessing and curse of PC gaming I suppose. Anyway, as a Metroidvania the game is a bit annoying. As a piece of interactive fiction, it’s too saccharine and feels like a B-tier Dreamworks production for children which, I suppose shouldn’t be a knock against the game but I have to say --  wasn’t my cup of tea. Reminds me a bit of Child of Light by Ubisoft -- gorgeous to look at, benign if not frustrating to play (those escape sequences can piss off), and young gamers would probably find more to like in the...emotional tidbits than most adults.

Crysis 2 (Steam)

So apparently this got delisted off Steam but now it’s back up or something with EA deciding to put their back catalog on the platform or something? Anyway, like this list implies, Crysis 2 is an okay game, nothing more and nothing less. The nanosuit energy depletes a bit too quick for my liking, and you’re really made to feel like a badass only some of the times, in quick and short bursts, not unlike BJ in the new Wolfenstein games by MachineGames (any more prolonged exposure to hitscan weapons and other bullshit will quickly send you to the loading screen). Thing is, I don’t want to feel like a badass only some of the time? I mean, you put a ripped supersoldier type doing the Badass Looking Back At the Viewer Pose on the cover and I expect to be able to do certain things without stopping for a breather every 20 seconds, ya know? If you’re going to give me the power fantasy, commit to it. Or, find ways to keep the flow up and reward mastery to make players earn said fantasy (something the new DOOMs  have done and why those have been so successful). I certainly don’t envy game devs for having to balance this shit, but id Software showed you one way of how you might do that while the Crysis games and those of their ilk just feel slow and unrewarding. 

Quantum Break (Steam)

Really surprised I was able to get this running on my PC but hey, it runs on the Xbox One so how hard could it be? I dearly love Remedy’s games, even if they’re a bit straightforward at times and you get the feeling they’d rather be in the business of non-interactive fiction than games making at times. Well here is a TV show hybrid! Made exclusively in partnership with Microsoft as part of their TV & STREAMING, TV & STREAMING, SPORTS & STREAMING strategy of the 2010s. I didn’t care for the plot, nor the endless email / audiobook / loredumps scattered around, nor the characters, any of it. I will say the final stage with the super high tech offices was a delight (boy wouldn’t I love to live the corpo life in such beautiful, clean office environs). Lance Reddick was a treat as always. Peter “Littlefinger” Baelish shows up to do a thing. Yeah, it’s a Remedy joint through and through. 2019′s Control was such a highlight for me that I’ll take any kind of prototype-y take on it (and QB certainly feels like a rougher, worse version of Control, at least mechanically).

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs / Dear Esther: Landmark Edition (Steam)

These titles were certainly...things that I installed onto my PC and sat through... Yes. Look, I’m not one to dog on walking simulators, and I know the devs have faced tough times recently but I still feel these are acquired tastes and could be appreciably improved in too many ways to name. Of the two, Dear Esther is the one I’d rec because at least that one was quite pleasant to meander around in while Amnesia left me disappointed that I’d wasted my time, physically sick with its subpar performance and muddy graphics, flaccid with its stodgy plot and left absolutely disappointed that I’d wasted my time on such a bizarre and confusing payoff towards the end. Chinese Room, I mean this in the most constructive way possible: maybe try a different type of game next time.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (GOG)

I remember putting in some decent time into the DEMO version of RtCW’s MP mode, being amazed at the time by the particle effects, with child-me just running around the D-Day map with the flamethrower out. Anyway, years later and I finally played the SP campaign. It’s maybe better than Allied Assault’s? It feels more consistently entertaining anyway. Hell I think I like these boomer shooters better than MachineGames’ recent efforts (which isn’t saying a whole lot because I find those games just merely okay). I promise you I’m not just being a crotchety old fart.

Ys: Memories of Celceta (PS Vita)

I’d been playing through this over the spring on my Vita TV, before it bit the dust eventually and I’ve been meaning to go back and wrap up the cheevos. I was a bit lukewarm with Oath in Felghana (my first Ys), but could definitely see the appeal in the series, as boss rush games aren’t really my cup of tea (ie. it’s the journey and not the destination of say, a Souls game that is the meat for me). Definitely a game that would benefit from a 60fps refresh and cleaner graphics than what the Vita can provide. I’ve already got a copy of Ys 8 in shrink wrap and have my eyes set on emulating Ys Seven or grabbing the GOG version. A game where action is king and story or character development is secondary; I would prefer more of the latter to make this more of a JRPG and less of a “predominantly Japanese action game with superficial RPG elements”.

Catherine: Full Body (PS4)

I paid $70 for this on day one and I’ve gotta say... should’ve waited for the price drop. I’m a somewhat lapsed Atlus mark, and I still hold the original Persona 5 as my no. 1 in the PS4′s lineup (with Dragon Quest XI possibly being a tie), yet I bought this knowing it wouldn’t really be for me. Why? High difficulty in a genre I don’t play, like at all, a relatively short clear time (in itself not an issue and frankly welcome these days HOWEVER...), and a somewhat unsatisfying payoff despite being a supernatural romance thriller. I bought this as seed money for Atlus’s P.Studio/Studio Zero, in the hopes that Project Re: Fantasy will knock my socks off just like the latter day Persona games have. Because in spite of the contents not really appealing to me, it’s still supremely well made, and it’s not everyday that games like these get made, so there you go. Look, if I could go back in time and put this money towards 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, I probably would, but then the Catherine steelbook is ever so pretty... 

Tearaway Unfolded (PS4)

The OG game is one of the most charming little 3D platformer/collect-a-thons out there, and as far as children’s games (or er, “games that also appeal to children”) go, more of these and less of those please (your Child of Lights and Oris). I’d go as far as to say the OG version is better than the PS4 version, though the PS4 version is also quite good. Really, if I wasn’t going for that stupid Misplaced Gopher trophy, this would probably be an easy shoe-in for the B-tier list, but I place this demotion firmly at Media.Molecule’s feet. That cheevo is cursed.

The Missing: JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories (PS4)

I’d almost forgotten about this! If that doesn’t qualify for making the C-tier list then I don’t know what else does. I only know of Swery65′s qualities through osmosis, having watched the 2BF’s legendary LP of Deadly Premonition and the gone-too-soon D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die. He’s an interesting person with interesting ideas but crucially, as a game dev, his output is just... kinda mediocre? If not outright bad? Case in point with this game. It looks and runs like garbo; it plays like garbo; the character designs are cute; the dialogue is pretty good; there is a wonderful and gradual “twist” to the main character that was super spoiled for me when people were discussing and promoting it (like, that is my bad, but also internet discourse on any kind of entertainment media is just *fucked*); there’s a lot of semi-colons in this sentence so I’ll stop here. 

And the balls to charge like, what, $40+ for the game on PSN?? I’d gotten it for way less on a sale but in a day and age when $1 could buy you 3 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and MS might also throw in a curio like this in there just to fill in the gaps, it makes you wonder if these kinds of games can ever turn a profit, especially when the end product is this jank. And these are commercial goods, make no mistake, any aspirations to being an art piece or social critique notwithstanding, so that also brings to the fore the whole aspect of pricing games, relative value, production and marketing costs, blah blah.

IF you like something different, can appreciate games made on a shoestring budget with arguably bad gameplay and technical deficiencies, but has...heart? Then look no further to the output of this man. The most C-worthy of all the titles listed here. 

#vidya #gaming #tech #tl;dr #long post #games #videogames #2020 in review

[spilledreality]

False dichotomies: Toward “Meaning compatibilism”

From a recent conversation with ADJ:

Suspended Reason Re: intentionalist, I like the quote about meaning as empirical intent, but why don't we just call that "intended meaning," and say that in trying to find out an intended meaning, readers come to a "reader meaning" that differs? Why contest the concept of "meaning" as a monolith?

A. D. J. For Knapp & Michaels, meaning is synonymous with authorial intention (as opposed to de Man, who assigns meaning to how readers receive the text). So for K&M, there can't be "reader meaning." Readers either figure out what authors meant, or they don't (or they grasp some of it). ...I should add that the current landscape of English departments might be something like 95% some form of poststructuralism, 5% intentionalism? (Inasmuch as people in said departments think/care about these things.) Michaels calls intentionalism "the Dark Side" :)

Suspended Reason Ok, ok, but isn't the point of Star Wars that the dark & light exist as part of the same flowing force? That they balance each other? I guess what I'm asking is: there seems to be such a thing as a reader interpretation, and such thing as an intended author meaning. Why fight over which should be called the text's "Meaning" instead of just calling them different things, and acknowledging they're both important parts of the full literary process?

A. D. J.The way I understand this question is, why are there three different positions—structuralism, poststructuralism, intentionalism—instead of there being instead a single position, which locates meaning in all three places (text, reader, author)?

Suspended Reason Yes, I think that's a fair rewording. I don't necessarily think structuralism ("in language") oughta get its due, since it seems unclear whether its fair to attribute "meaning" to language itself rather than speakers/interpreters, but broadly, yes—why not reconcile the positions?

A. D. J. I'm sure people have tried to reconcile the positions in various ways. If so, though, I know less about that. That said, I'm not sure a true reconciliation is possible. A central tenet of structuralism was that texts had singular meanings. Intentionalists believe that, too. Poststructuralists, tho, believe texts don't (can't) have fixed, singular meanings. It seems one has to choose between those positions—single meaning or multiple meanings. What's more, the poststructualist position tends to decay into texts having not just multiple meanings, but infinite meanings. Which is to say that the poststructuralist position tends to decay into texts being meaningless. (Thinking that a text means anything is a fantasy.) Some theorists (e.g., Stanley Fish, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith) have tried to put a break on that "drift," but without much success. So in some ways, the choice is between texts having a singular meaning, or no meaning whatsoever.

While ADJ’sA. D. J. descriptions of the various positions are all well-elucidated, we are still left wondering: what is the actual subject of their disagreement? Explicitly, the debate appears to be: What is textual meaning? Is it the reader's interpretation, the author's intent, or contained in the structure of the language? Implicitly, the debate is over which stages of the literary process (from production to reception) ought to be granted scholarly authority & attention.

We can say a few things fairly definitely: that readers have interpretations and that authors have intents. Though each side minimizes the role of interpretation and intent, respectively, in their picture of the literary process, neither would flat-out deny the existence of intent or interpretation—only whether it constitutes the text's "meaning" or not. Thus we are left with what appears to be, at least explicitly, a verbal dispute. (The implicit question of where to direct attention and study is an important one, and not merely verbal, but the answer is more nuanced than "always to interpretation" or "always to intention"—as usual, it depends what you're trying to ascertain with respect to the text or society; there is no “authority” absent our granting it, and our granting must be goal-driven.)

It is also clear that readers' interpretations are informed and guided by the structure of the language, and that they are also frequently "up to" the business of guessing author intent. (This is the dynamic that allows one side—intentionalism—to claim that this intent is "authoritative" and reader interpretations are "not" the meaning but its approximations or corruptions.) Thus we are left with a picture of factions not just warring over the "land" of the concept handle "meaning," but of each side’s preferred sense having a dynamic interrelation with the other—that all parts of the process of constructing and interpreting texts are bound up as the same process. An author writes with an understanding of how he will be interpreted in mind; he constantly defers to a model of a reader, which may be proxied by his own private sense of the language or else some structure "in" the language itself, however misleading that frame may be. A reader reads with an understanding that the author understands how the reader might interpret it; there is recursion here, in the mutual modeling. The readers look for clues as to a readers intent just as the author crafts them with respect to how they will be interpreted. This negotiation is the same negotiation as in daily language; it is not particular to literary texts, though of course the level of deliberation (by speaker) and deciphering (by receiver) is much higher. "Meaning" is and has always been a polysemous term; there is no "essence" to it, there are many senses, related by impossible to reduce. And any side which “narrows” the whole to its preferred carving is only impoverishing our total picture.

Thus, what we need is hermeneutic compatibilism, between intention and interpretation. A. D. J. sees the different positions as irreconcilable because he has reified the term "meaning" into being a "real thing in the world" which different factions have different hypotheses about. This is not the case. Rather, "meaning" is a handle with many senses, used by different people to describe different statuses of the text’s “signal” as it traverses the literary production-reception process. Each faction is led through the natural incentives of (social) discourse into over-emphasizing their sense of the handle as its "whole," its “essence,” the "true" sense of the term. So when Jameson says, for example, that intentionalism perceives “meaning” as singular, while poststructuralism sees it as indeterminate or multiplicitous, he misses that the sides are not arguing about the same meaning. There is no conflict in argument because there is no agreement on terms; the sides are talking past each other, as they have now for a hundred years. It is “meaning” in the sense of author intent that is singular, and “meaning” in the sense of reader interpretation that is multiplicitous, the original signal being "converted" or "decompressed" into different meanings by individuals with different interpretive schemas. To accept that there is a "singular" author-intended meaning is a claim in no actual conflict with the claim that there are "many" reader-interpreted meanings, and vice-versa.

While I happily concede that a great deal of work is being done by the “implicit” framing of the argument—that there is still “progress” happening among the confusions of what is essentially conceptual analysis—I do not think that a muddled explicit factoring of the debate leads anyone to clarity. Conceptual engineer “meaning” and be done with it. (I recommend “divide-and-conquer” over “narrow-and-conquer” for a plethora of reasons.)

[unluckyxse7en-moving]

Ok, so the last 24 hours on my blog have been discourse heavy re: salify. 

Before I go any further I am going to say - do not send him anon hate. If you take legitimate issue with him don’t send it via anon. Especially because I discovered he’s accused me for sending people after him. I did not, because he was the one who hurt and crossed a bunch of people who did not deserve what he has done during this period of time. But even if you don’t believe me about that, that’s fine. My concern is people staying safe, and if that means staying uninvolved - on both sides of the issue - that’s more important.

Furthermore, anyone involved, besides Sam and myself, are going unnamed for their sake and protection. They can choose to reveal themselves if they wish but that is their judgment to make and not ours. 

Salify, aka Sam, is a 22 year old adult who runs a server that is going unnamed for the sake of protecting others still there. Said server was mostly comprised of minors under 18 who were brought in with the promise that the server was an inclusive safe space where people would be positive and uplifting and encouraging. We had many extensive rules dedicated to this aspect encouraging basic respect and decency, and discouraging topics or actions that would make people feel unsafe or upset them.

Sam himself, believing as owner he could do what he liked, broke his own rules and when people spoke up is when things got worse.

It all started off with the server’s tendency to tell jokes about cishets. Obviously, not a crime. sometimes many would get carried away and tell the jokes in every channel and the jokes could last for a good half hour in a conversation. Maybe a little obnoxious if you get tired of the same topic quickly, but not a crime or an issue.

Here’s where it started to become an issue. Fairly recently, a few of the members on the server, who will remain unnamed for safety, have mentioned and complained that the jokes made them feel uncomfortable when in excess. Very uncomfortable, and I imagine for some of them, unsafe. As there were no requirements of being not cishet in the server, surprise!! there were some who identified as cishet and others who just wanted to escape the type of discussion already abound on tumblr. I cannot and will not say where people fell but it is something to keep in mind - regarding a server mostly full of minors.

complaints were made, and the acting moderators at the time announced a new rule saying to ease up on the cishet jokes, people regardless of orientation and identity were feeling uncomfortable with them. 

Things quiet down and go back to normal. Then, last night, the jokes started up in full force again. And they went on a long time. In all fairness, they were in the channel dedicated to discourse. That said, given the server’s habits there was a high likelihood this meant the jokes were coming back and would be scattered throughout all the channels once more. Not to mention people who had become used to those jokes being moderated probably received an unwelcome shock if they wandered into the chat at that time.

One of the members, after the jokes wore out most everyone’s humor, spoke up. They requested that all the people involved drop the jokes, members have complained about this before and felt unsafe when it was done in excess like this. Most of the group backed off, but Sam, and others who were taking great joy in these jokes, refused. Their argument was that as people who were oppressed by cishets they could make jokes about their oppressors as much as they want.

On its own, that’s not a terrible argument. That is valid and understandable.

The problem is that when people say they feel unsafe or uncomfortable, and they are people who did no wrong to deserve this from the person, and the person telling the jokes refuses, that’s crossing a limit. 

Bashing hypothetical others who are not present does NOT take priority over those who ARE present, do not deserve the bashing and are stressed, not comfortable, hurt or terrified by this bashing.

So at this point, I intervened and asked they just ease up. They don’t have to stop telling the jokes forever, but even the funniest joke in the world gets unfunny when drawn out too long, it becomes obnoxious, and if people felt definitively unhappy then it was time to drop it. Rather than agreeing to back off even than just the night, Sam became more obstinate, and continued to push his argument, not changing anything but continuing to parrot that as someone oppressed he could do what he liked. Others who took his side gleefully joined in and jeered and mocked as the argument continued.

Initially, some of the people present attempted to drop the argument and change the subject. But they became quiet and stepped to the side as things got worse. While I am not going to rehash the argument step by step, Sam along with his support continued to screech about how oppressed they were and could therefore make all the jokes they wanted, while I and others tried to argue it was making people uncomfortable and that’s not worth it.

During this, Sam and his entourage 

accused us of claiming heterophobia (not a thing) and being cishet allies

tried to pass it off as acceptable by likening the situation to other oppressed minorities being allowed to make jokes about their oppressors, bringing race and neurodivergence and disabled people into it in doing so.

used the name of the Pulse Shooting as a get out of jail free card for his jokes (which is in bad taste and absolutely disrespects and tarnishes those who suffered from this tragedy as it is being misused as an excuse to exhibit unacceptable behavior)

openly stated that he was on a voice call and laughing at those of us who disagreed with him (more of a personal attack but absolutely unnecessary in any rational argument as it only serves to mock and belittle the other side and has no functional purpose)

when I referenced the point that neurodivergent people in our own server were the ones at stake here, being unnerved and feeling unsafe by all of this, Sam continued to ignore it and insist it was his right to tell these jokes as he liked.

after I asked this, someone else asked if Sam even cared about those of us in the server, to which Sam freely admitted he didn’t care at all. While we didn’t need his statement as actions speak louder than words, it was nice to know he owned up to it and thought he was justified in doing so.

By this point, I and others on my side of the argument were thoroughly disillusioned and disgusted by our server leader. I had left the servers I shared with Sam and unfriended him around this point. Sam told us off and said if we didn’t like it we could go make our own. In the heat of the moment, I said fine, we will, and right then he abruptly booted me from the server. Supposedly he proceeded to forcibly kick others involved but I was the first to go. I’ll admit I had considered leaving the server, but I had no intention of doing so when I had thought perhaps if both parties cooled their heads and came back, we could either apologize or discuss more rationally. Likewise while I had unfriended him, I had not blocked him on discord because I had hoped we could talk it out better later. Sam banning me made it clear he didn’t want to do that.

regrettably, I have no screenshots - the chat went much too fast for everyone involved and being kicked as quickly as I was there was no time. None of the others do either to my knowledge. According to those who remained longer in the server, Sam deleted the entire chat, most likely to hide his mistakes because, in all honesty - why would you delete so much evidence against people who were wrong when you could have converted it into a shrine of receipts? Given Sam’s following pettiness on the matter he clearly would have kept it and gloated. That said, if Sam or the others have any undoctored screenshots then I encourage him to add them to the discourse - I can’t imagine they’d actually look that bad compared to what he has said and done then and since.

So that was the blowup. Many people left the server if they hadn’t been kicked, and in the wake Sam has gone to town with the absence of the ‘bad people’. 

Here are some highlights of Sam clearly showing no regret at the time despite what any later blog posts may suggest. And while this post sounds good on paper, if you put it in the context of “made right after disrespecting people’s deaths so that he could force people to shut up and let them upset minors to their liking” then it sounds a little less than golden.

So there it is. Take this information as you will, but this is basically why I am officially embroiled in discourse and anti-Sam/salify. 

#long post #stay away from salify #discourse #negative #receipts #you said you were ready to see more callout posts right sam #glad I don't have to disappoint you like you did me