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snapshots-of-time-ix · 2 years

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Anarchy... a brief overview

Anarchy is an ideology that is as old as time itself. And I don’t mean in the way that it is framed, rather I mean that a thought in the back of the human mind that has always remained.

Anarchy comes from the ancient greek word anarkhia, which means without ruler. It stands for the absence of domination, hierarchy and power over others. It is on the far left of the political spectrum as it believes in the complete altruism of the human mind as a response to educated freedom.

We can also define anarchism as a socio-political theory which opposes all systems of domination and oppression such as racism, ableism, sexism, anti-LGBTTQIA, ageism, government, competition, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and punitive justice, and promotes direct democracy, collaboration, interdependence, mutual aid, diversity, peace, transformative justice and equity.

However this concept of anarchy was phrased only after the concept of “Tabula Rasa” was developed in the 1700s. The concept by John Locke that the mind upon appearance was a blank slate, and was developed by what people observe from sensory input and mental input. What they were taught shaped their beliefs.

This is directly in relation to anarchy which has to believe in the inherent goodness of man to function. A system of altruism where when each man is left to his device without the presence of a ruler, will do what is inherently best for the group of people.

There are a few different types and varieties of anarchism which are based on what they are against. The first is political anarchism.

Political anarchism is primarily understood as a skeptical theory of political legitimation. This is primarily against the presence of a single state of ruler, where everyone rules themselves. Some argue that no rule only happens when everyone rules, hence in direct conflict with the theory of anarchy. But anarchy calls for individual and equal power, so it works around that.

Anarchists say that monopolistic or coercive power is illegitimate. Anarchists criticised the state. Bakunin provides a example:

“If there is a state, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable- and this is why we are enemies of the state.”

However such sweeping generalisations are very different to support in a political landscape such as the modern one. The works by Bakunin and other anarchists were written as a response to the global socialist movement and Marxist and Hegelian view of the state and the accelerated globalisation. While some anarchists make wide claims of the corruption of the state, most modern anarchists give it as a response to the actions of the localised political entity.

The next type of anarchism according to the Stanford encyclopaedia of Philosophy is religious anarchism. Religious anarchism, the main type overarching Taoist anarchism, Christian anarchism Bhakti anarchism, and in Sikhism and Buddhism, can involve either the rejection of God as an authority, or accept him as the sole authority.

Bakunin said that if god really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

Christian anarchism said accepting any other authority than God would be sacrilegious. A major supporter of this movement is Russian writer Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi, also known as Count Leo Tolstoy.

Christian anarchy also has its ties to pacifism and hence says the state is immoral because of its ties to the military. But there are also non-pacifist anarchists.

William Godwin came up with modern anarchy in its modern form in around the 19th century, when terrorism began to grow as a result of anarchist revolt.

In the height of the French Revolution in 1784, Godwin published “An inquiry concerning Political Justice and its influence on morals and happiness”, which while not using the word anarchism, was one of the first modern anarchist texts. It also influenced the fathers of socialism, and poets like Robert Owen and Percy Shelley.

This came as a result of John Locke’s argument that the mind was a blank slate, tabula rasa. Godwin argued that men were born equal, and differences were a product of their environment. Godwin also believed that morality was a system of conduct which is determined by a consideration of the greatest general good.

He also had a strong belief that man could be perfected, so when these principles of tabula rasa, the greatest good and continual improvement were reconciled, we would have a perfect human being and a perfect man. And as man became more educated and rational, they became capable of governing themselves.

His political view was that property accumulation was evil, and each person was entitled to his personal stock. Communities governed themselves face to face as nation states.

He also believed that this would be the route to a technological utopia, where everyone took a share of the workload, and the innovations of the industrial revolution would be put to use by everyone. Based on this, work hours for each person could be reduced to just half an hour, the rest of the day could be used in pursuing the individuals dreams and passions, creating a system where happiness is ensured and so is productivity!

Another one of Godwin’s statements that spark discussion is “despotism is as perennial as anarchy is transitory”. This was a response to Hobbe’s argument that the state was a comfort from the natural evil of man, a direct contradiction of the pinrciple of anarchy. However this was reconciled with the next man.

After Godwin died in 1836, came Max Stirner. His work “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum”, the ego and its own, where he looked at cooperation and community as the essence of anarchy. Sterner was a radical individualist. He was influenced by Hegel’s dialectics, that progress occurred only when there was development of a thesis, antithesis and synthesis that drives idea and history. Instead of progressing towards the state as the centre of the community as Hegel had argued, he believed that this dialectic would progress towards a supreme individual freedom, where each man had his own moral footing.

While most of is points were philosophically abstract and would never work, his fundamental point was that all humans are egoists, and every deed you do, no matter how charitable and selfless on the surface, was for self benefit. An example for this is a man funding the education for a child in Africa. The only reason he is doing this is because people in his society will look at him better. He wants to purge himself of these sins, or maybe he holds hope that one of these children can come up with the cure for cancer, because his child may have it in the future and he wants to ensure his/her safety.

Based on that, the state is superfluous, because we would be good to further our own individual interests. Laws only placed a limit on our personal freedom of the ego.

He didn’t believe in the abolishment of government, rather he believed in the presence of unions which would create an egoistic equilibrium with the government.

In 1840, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon published “What is property”, one of the most influential anarchist texts of the 19th century. His answer to the statement was that property was theft. He said that property as a result of labour was legitimate, but property in unused land or property that’s profit as a result of rent or interest was illegitimate.

He is known for his squabbles (hehe funny word) with Marx and deserves credit for his foresight that the communist system is based on the principle that the individual is essentially subordinate to the collective, and from that alone he has his right and life. The citizen belongs to the state, like a child to his family. That he is in its power and possession, in manu, that he owes it submission and obedience in all things. This predicted the horrors of the totalitarian Soviet State in the 20th century.

Instead of control from the higher people, he believed in a bottom up society, where the people lower would control those that were higher. Instead of laws, he proposed contacts between people and groups. This was called mutualism.

Another anarchist who opposed Marx was Mikhail Bakunin, perhaps the most famous anarchist. He believed that justice was synonymous with equality, so that the freedom of each is realisable only in the equality of all. He also believed in a bottom-up society where communes which while federated into larger units, would always retain the right to secede, or opt out. This is called collectivist anarchism called for equal means of subsistence, support, education and opportunity for every child, boy or girl, until maturity, and equal resources and facilities in adulthood to create his own well being by his own labour. His arguments with Marx were over the fact that the workers association should themselves own the means of production, not the state.

He argued that the acceptance of authority was a matter of choice, making the state illegitimate.

The next Anarchist to close off the century was Peter Kropotkin, who spent most of his life arguing against the people that believed that Darwin’s survival of the fittest allowed discrimination and racial and class hierarchy.

He said that rather than the shallow genes, it was the gene of cooperation that was the defining factor of evolution. He argued that an altruism of kind was present biologically in humans, as it was in other animals, hence the state was unnecessary as the protector of order.

He believed that humans were good by nature, but lived under the corrosive effects of society. He saw in nature that the eagles feed the youngest and the weakest and the oldest first, when two ants met from the same anthill, they gave each other water and food, and when the dung beetles had too much to eat and the food was hard to bury, another dung beetle would come and help out. Everywhere he looked, he saw cooperation. He also so aid organisations that provided help without the coercion of the state.

During the twentieth century anarchists were divided into communist anarchists, or non-communist anarchists. The communist anarchist believed that the property was controlled by a small group of people, while non-communist anarchists believed that property was controlled by the individual.

While studying anarchism through encyclopaedia Britannica, Kropotkin noticed that there were six types of anarchism. Mutualism, Individualist, Collectivist, Communist, Christian and Literary.

Anarchy is incredibly nuanced, with many different definitions, types, and it can’t be described with this short piece. However, let this serve as a beginning for enlightening discourse on this topic that is shunned and while isn’t applicable, can certainly change our views on how we view politics and individual responsibility.

#anarchy #anarchism #politics #kropotkin #stirner #bakunin #proudhon #godwins

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aquilamage · 3 years

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day 4 of the prosecutor’s week is truth/lies, and personally there’s no one more fitting to write about than the prosecutor of the yatagarasu! this one’s pretty short (and mostly an excuse to be vaguely narratively poetic about some headcanons), so it all goes under the cut this time

also on ao3 and ff.n

Despite days of planning and at least twice over that in debating the mere concept of it, their first heist as Yatagarasu doesn’t feel real to Byrne until he’s staring up at the office of a company Yew had identified as a link in the smuggling ring’s chain in the dead of night. He looks back at Badd, who’s going to be watching the perimeter, and nods, then to Yew, and gives the signal to go.

When he’d decided to become a lawyer, he’d thought he was leaving his days of breaking the law behind. At least, that’s what he’d promised himself at the time. Now, here he is, a little over a decade later, breaking through the building’s security codes like he’d never stopped. (There had been some practice beforehand, mostly to account for how much technology had changed, and he’d started building a device to help him work faster next time – and the thought of a next gives him shivers equally of dread and anticipation. But even then, it was the same base skill, waiting just below the surface for him to call upon again.)

At least this is for a better cause, he tells himself as he lets them inside and steps back to let Yew lead with her map of the place (it works fine, but something three-dimensional could be more useful…). Something that serves the kind of justice he always sought as a prosecutor, rather than indifferent testing of his skills and thrill-seeking and lashing out about something he hadn’t yet understood. And this time, he’s not doing it alone. He’s still not entirely sure where he stands with Yew, apart from her cooling resentment (well-deserved) and the agreement that since they were working for the same ends, they might as well work together, but he’s known Tyrell for plenty long enough. They’ve talked it to death, that they’re going to keep each other in check with everything they have. So at the very least he’ll have someone watching his back.

Yew yanks on his shirt, pulling him into a side hallway. When he’s done stumbling, she smacks the point on the map right in front of them, where the viewing radius of a security camera begins.

Oh, he mouths.

She gives him a skeptical, raised-eyebrow look that is so painfully reminiscent of her sister, and leads him down the other way.

When they finally get to the right room, she starts opening file cabinets, and he sits down at one of the computers. It’s awfully convenient, he muses, that he so happens to have a skill so necessary for what they’re doing. Despite his cohort, and despite Yew’s remarks, there’s nothing inherent in being a prosecutor that would have prepared him for this. He thinks about the other day, when they’d been discussing the myth of the Yatagarasu, how it was a crow or a raven- “A raven,” she’d said, “for our purposes. That’s what your name means, isn’t it?” Then she went on to talk about how convenient it was for his parents to have given him that name.

They hadn’t. The reality was spookier, that he’d picked up the name just as he was changing careers (coincidentally, but very useful for his transition). The meaning hadn’t been the reason behind his choice, although he remembered knowing it at the time, but if he were the type to believe in fate he might have said it was a sign – that even as he tried to shed that old part of himself he’d only picked it up in new ways, dormant but ever-present. Or even that he’d cursed himself with it.

He doesn’t, and he knows he might have gone with any of another half-dozen names under slightly different circumstances, but the coincidence still gives him pause.

Not now though. Byrne shakes his head and focuses on prying apart the security, clearing all his traces as he searches for something incriminating. Finally, though, he does. Some messages between high-clearance emails about a ‘business partner’ they now know to be a front of the smuggling ring’s, that had been deleted but not properly purged from the system. He grins wildly as he grabs them. Oh, he missed this, the thrill of discovery and the tension of stakes, pouring all his skill into getting away with it. It’s similar to a well-executed case, to pulling a crucial piece of information from a witness, but while that’s a well-fed fire, this is holding too many sparklers in your hand at once. “Have a look at this,” he calls, barely pulling his voice to normal levels.

She frowns, but plunks a stack of folders on the desk and reads over his shoulder. Then it clicks. “Well, it seems like you’re good for something after all!” Along with transaction reports with some very suspicious numbers that she’d found, they have more than enough. The company is going down.

And it does. Their intel is the next morning’s headlines, and he handily wins the court case. Afterwards, they meet up in a lobby, Badd leaned against the door to keep it shut. Yew laughs, nothing at all like her sister, and Badd radiates steady satisfaction. Byrne looks at them, and grins, lazy and comfortable and steadily warm as he realizes that he likes sharing the moment of triumph at a job perfectly executed.

It hasn’t fixed anything, and they’re still a long way from taking down the smuggling ring, but now it seems possible, and he has his allies and his old self to thank for it.

#aaprosecutorweek2021 #Byrne Faraday #also the other two yatagarasus but not enough to tag #ace attorney #fanfiction #an aquila original #my writing #this is just the vague surface of my headcanons tbh. Ive thought far too much about his backstory proportionate to his character in the game #but then again that's all my byrne thinking so #and I know I'm not the only person to be like 'byrne was a hacker when he was younger and he Caused Trouble'#but it's still Fun #but anyway if anyone reading this is the slightest bit intrigued feel free to let me know because I will take any excuse to talk about byrne #every aa fan gets one minor and/or dead male character to obsess over nd by god did I smash headfirst into picking byrne and never look back #(yes this could technically technically be memory day but listen I have one fic I started for the day and it got too long to finihs #*finish. one fic that I'm actually putting up for the day. and another fic that I thought of last night and am gonna see if I can make #happen during the day today to post for that day also. I'm good on that theme)

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mugasofer · 3 years

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It seems like many, perhaps most, people historically believed in some immanent apocalypse.

Many philosophies claim that the world is passing into a degenerate age of chaos (Ages of Man, Kali Yuga, life-cycle of civilisation), or divine conflict will shortly spill over & destroy the Earth (Ragnorok, Revelations, Zoroastrian Frashokereti), or that the natural forces sustaining us must be transient.

Yet few panic or do anything. What anyone does "do about it" is often symbolic & self-admittedly unlikely to do much.

Maybe humans evolved not to care, to avoid being manipulated?

Many cults make similar claims, and do uproot their lives around them. Even very rarely committing mass suicide or terror attacks etc on occasion. But cults exist that don't make such claims, so it may not be the mechanism they use to control, or at most a minor one. "This is about the fate of the whole world, nothing can be more important than that, so shut up" may work as as a thought terminating cliche, but it doesn't seem to work that strongly, and there are many at least equally effective ones.

Some large scale orgs do exist that seem to take their eschatology "seriously". The Aztecs committed atrocities trying to hold off apocalypse, ISIS trying to cause it. Arguably some Communist or even fascist groups count, depending on your definition of apocalypse.

But even then, one can argue their actions are not radically different from non-apocalypse-motivated ones - e.g. the Aztecs mass-executed less per capita than the UK did at times & some historians view them as more about displaying authority.

I'm thinking about this because of two secular eschatologies - climate apocalypse and the Singularity.

My view on climate change, which as far as I can tell is the scientific consensus, is that it is real and bad but by no means apocalyptic. We're talking incremental increases in storms, droughts, floods etc, all of which are terrible, but none of which remotely threaten human civilisation. E.g. according to the first Google result, the sea is set to rise by 1 decimeter by 2100 in a "high emissions scenario", not to rise by tens or hundreds of meters and consume all coastal nations as I was taught as a child. Some more drastic projections suggest that the sea might rise by as much as two or three meters in the worst case scenario.

It really creeps me out when I hear people who confess to believe that human civilisation, the human species, or even all life on Earth is most likely going to be destroyed soon by climate change. The most recent example, which prompted this post, was the Call of Cthulhu podcast I was listening to casually suggesting that it might be a good idea to summon an Elder God of ice and snow to combat climate change as the "lesser existential risk", perhaps by sacrificing "climate skeptics" to it. It's incredibly jarring for me to realise that the guys I've been listening to casually chatting about RPGs think they live in a world that will shortly be ended by the greed of it's rulers. But this idea is everywhere. Discussions of existential risks from e.g. pandemics inevitably attract people arguing that the real existential risk is climate change. A major anti-global-warming protest movement, Extinction Rebellion, is literally named after the idea that they're fighting against their own extinction. Viral Tumblr posts talk about how the fear of knowing that the world is probably going to be destroyed soon by climate change and fascism is crippling their mental health, and they have no idea how to deal with it because it's all so real.

But it's not. It's not real.

Well, I can't claim that political science is accurate enough for me to definitively say that fascism isn't going to take over, but I can say that climate science is fairly accurate and it predicts that the world is definitely not about to end in fire or in flood.

(There are valid arguments that climate change or other environmental issues might precipitate wars, which could turn apocalyptic due to nuclear weapons; or that we might potentially encounter a black swan event due to our poor understanding of the ecosystem and climate-feedback systems. But these are very different, as they're self-admittedly "just" small risks to the world.)

And I get the impression that a lot of people with more realistic views about climate change deliberately pander to this, deliberately encouraging people to believe that they're going to die because it puts them on the "right side of the issue". The MCU's Loki, for instance, recently casually brought up a "climate apocalypse" in 2050, which many viewers took as meaning the world ending. Technically, the show uses a broad definition of "apocalypse" - Pompeii is given as another example - and it kind of seems like maybe all they meant was natural disasters encouraged by climate change, totally defensible. But I still felt kinda mad about it, that they're deliberately pandering to an idea which they hopefully know is false and which is causing incredible anxiety in people. I remember when Greta Thurnberg was a big deal, I read through her speeches to Extinction Rebellion, and if you parsed them closely it seemed like she actually did have a somewhat realistic understanding of what climate change is. But she would never come out and say it, it was all vague implications of doom, which she was happily giving to a rally called "Extinction Rebellion" filled with speakers who were explicitly stating, not just coyly implying, that this was a fight for humanity's survival against all the great powers of the world.

But maybe there's nothing wrong with that. I despise lying, but as I've been rambling about, this is a very common lie that most people somehow seem unaffected by. Maybe the viral tumblr posts are wrong about the source of their anxiety; maybe it's internal/neurochemical and they world just have picked some other topic to project their anxieties on if this particular apocalypse wasn't available. Maybe this isn't a particularly harmful lie, and it's hypocritical of me to be shocked by those who believe it.

Incidentally, I believe the world is probably going to end within the next fifty years.

Intellectually, I find the arguments that superhuman AI will destroy the world pretty undeniable. Sure, forecasting the path of future technology is inherently unreliable. But the existence of human brains, some of which are quite smart, proves pretty conclusively it's possible to get lumps of matter to think - and human brains are designed to run on the tiny amounts of energy they can get by scavenging plants and the occasional scraps of meat in the wilderness as fuel, with chemical signals that propagate at around the speed of sound (much slower than electronic ones), with only the data they can get from input devices they carry around with them, and which break down irrevocably after a few decades. And while we cannot necessarily extrapolate from the history of progress in both computer hardware and AI, that progress is incredibly impressive, and there's no particular reason to believe it will fortuitously stop right before we manufacture enough rope to hang ourselves.

Right now, at time of writing, we have neural nets that can write basic code, appear to scale linearly in effectiveness with the available hardware with no signs that we're reaching their limit, and have not yet been applied at the current limits of available hardware let alone what will be available in a few years. They absorb information like a sponge at a vastly superhuman speed and scale, allowing them to be trained in days or hours rather than the years or decades humans require. They are already human-level or massively superhuman at many tasks, and are capable of many things I would have confidently told you a few years ago were probably impossible without human-level intelligence, like the crazy shit AI dungeon is capable of. People are actively working on scaling them up so that they can work on and improve the sort of code they are made from. And we have no ability to tell what they're thinking or control them without a ton of trial and error.

If you follow this blog, you're probably familiar with all the above arguments for why we're probably very close to getting clobbered by superhuman AI, and many more, as well as all the standard counter-arguments and the counter-arguments to those counter arguments.

(Note: I do take some comfort in God, but even if my faith were so rock solid that I would cheerfully bet the world on it - which it's not - there's no real reason why our purpose in God's plan couldn't be to destroy ourselves or be destroyed as an object lesson to some other, more important civilization. There's ample precedent.)

Here's the thing: I'm not doing anything about it, unless you count occasionally, casually talking about it with people online. I'm not even donating to help any of the terrifyingly-few people who are trying to do something about it. Part of why I'm not contributing is, frankly, I don't have a clue what to do, nor do I have much confidence in any of the stuff people are currently doing (although I bloody well hope some of it works.)

And yet I don't actually feel that scared.

I feel more of a visceral chill reading about the nuclear close calls that almost destroyed the world in the recent past than thinking about the stuff that has a serious chance of doing so in a few decades. I'm a neurotic mess, and yet what is objectively the most terrifying thing on my radar does not actually seem to contribute to my neurosis.

#x risk cw #futurism #we live in the future #long #rambly late night posting #history #religion

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aflyingcontradiction · 3 years

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the "mutual aid village commune" future leftists wet themselves over where everyone "relies on their community" wpuld do absolutely nothing but foster an environment where my mother and people like her could even more completely entrap and abuse me through their favored tactic of preemptively turning everyone against me so they'll blame me for everything and always take her side no matter what she does. i already have absolutely no one and my (v disabled) life is in constant danger cause of her.

(Part 2): it is also the PERFECT environment for every single one of those dumbass utopian anti-civ communes to become a death cult, especially where these same people constantly romanticize the idea of everyone collectively having *little to no travel mobility* as somehow *better*. every last one of their stupid communes will be miserable and starving and every last one of them will be a horrific death cult where the disabled and anyone they don't like is tortured behind closed doors with no escape.

(Part 3): and you know what ELSE the stupid anti-civ leftist mutual aid commune paradise environment would be perfect for fostering? fucking tribalism. EVERY SINGLE ONE of those isolated commune towns is going to end up being a culty nightmare where whether you live or die is based on if everyone likes your vibe and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them is going to end up violently hating the others because, big fucking surprise, humans suck! so they'll all want to kill eachother making escape even more impossible.

(Part 4): these kind of shitty communes would also very quickly turn on the disabled, no matter how much they try to pat themselves on the back and say they're better because they're "leftists". especially any disabled person with inconvenient issues and/or abrasive personality. at least the few disabled people that wouldn't just fucking die because in this anti-civ tribal state nobody would be producing medicine and how much your fucking community likes you would control whether you even got any or not.

(Part 5): because cutting everyone off from the outside world and isolating them forever in community support based commune towns they can never leave with no outside oversight is a GREAT idea that we definitely haven't seen all the serious problems with demonstrated repeatedly in the american midwest with it's cult and sundown towns and also basically all of human history! whether people like it or not humans gathered in communities left to their own devices naturally form abusive death cults.

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I’m not as convinced as you are that it’s impossible to create a functioning mutual-aid community and I can see the appeal of a close-knit community in theory (it is something I crave, but in practice I’ve yet to see one that would appeal because, well, people in the aggregate do suck and all the close-knit communities I’ve seen so far have been perhaps not necessarily outright abusive, but still prone to everyone being all up in everybody else’s business in a very judgmental and stressful rather than supportive way. But I’m not going to outright discard the idea that it’s possible, just because I haven’t seen it). I also think that if people want to create a community like that because they (rightly or wrongly) believe it’ll make them happy, who am I to poo-poo that. BUT: There should be at least enough outside oversight and connection to other places to make it possible for anyone who wants to leave to do so at anytime, because I do agree that the risks you list here are overwhelmingly huge. In general, I’m a pretty strong believer in people’s right to leave. Situations that curtail that right are inherently suspect. I have yet to see any talk of mutual aid communities that fully takes the risks you mentioned into account and suggests ways of preventing them beyond “Eh, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”. So despite being less convinced of the inherent impossibility than you, when it comes to the utopian ideas thrown around on tumblr, they mostly just strike me as daydreams that someone hasn’t thought all the way through. (Which is fine, but people rarely phrase it in a ‘This is a daydream, I haven’t thought it all the way through’ sort of way.) As for anti-civ ideas (which I don’t think are inherently a part of mutual-aid communities at all, so I’m treating them as a separate thing) I have not seen anything that would suggest those are workable for anyone but a tiny minority of non-disabled adults and only to the point at which those non-disabled adults require extensive medical care, which is pretty much the case for anyone at least once in their lifetime. If “I might die early and in pain” is the trade-off someone wants to make and they don’t pull anyone unwilling into it, all the more power to them, but I don’t generally see people acknowledging that trade-off (though I also don’t tend to read all that much anti-civ stuff in the first place).

So in summary: Yeah, your concerns are valid as fuck. I’m trying to keep an open mind about the possibility of mutual aid communes as a concept but until I see an idea for one that actually makes thorough, workable-looking plans for preventing abuse, isolation and hateful tribalism, I’m going to remain skeptical. And any plan that would require everybody to live a certain way can, of course, fuck right off.

#anon #my babbling #abuse cw

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davidcoopermoore · 4 years

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Transcript from “Shape of Education to Come” podcast

I was recently a guest on the Shape of Education to Come podcast hosted by Devin King. I like to transcribe these, especially when I'm talking in a semi-professional (as opposed to formally professional) context. (It turns out that when I'm not transcribing audio for a living I find it relaxing in small doses.)

This is lightly edited for relevance (I snipped some Taylor Swift content that wasn’t related to teaching, but kept in the Taylor Swift content that was) and coherence. You can listen here.

SEC:

David Cooper Moore, tell me what you do.

DCM:

Hello, my name is David Cooper Moore. I am a media literacy educator in the United States -- I’m based in Philadelphia.

The past four years I was the media and blended learning coordinator at an alternative high school for kids who had become disconnected with high school, dropped out, or were in danger of possibly dropping out or failing out of high school. Before that I worked in media literacy enrichment mostly with the Media Education Lab, which is now at the University of Rhode Island, but that I got connected with when it was in Philadelphia at Temple University.

I’m a certified English teacher, so I teach English but I also teach media arts, and I just got a consulting gig to do a digital literacy curriculum with the Free Library of Philadelphia, so I’m taking a year off of teaching to do that, plus a lot of other life stuff going on with kids and houses and things. So that’s kind of my general log line.

SEC:

What would a digital literacy curriculum look like?

DCM:

That’s a great question. The classic framework that I go by is one that Renee Hobbs at the University of Rhode Island uses, which is: access, analyze, create, reflect, act.

Media literacy is this really big tent movement and academic field of study that encompasses questions like how do we access information? How do we use things in both digital and non-digital media worlds? How do we make meaning out of it through analysis? How do we compose -- how do we make stuff? But also how do we reflect on its impact on our lives and how does it inform the way that we take action in the world?

So any digital literacy curriculum to me goes back to that kind of a framework, especially those first three, access/analyze/create. I think reflection and action are imbued in media literacy practice but the access/analyze/create part is what a lot of educators and folks that are in education don’t always know how to do, so I’ve always been attracted to the media literacy field because of the way that it really is non-negotiable that those three pieces of accessing information, making meaning out of it, and creating with it are really fundamental. It’s such an expanded view of what counts as texts, how we make meaning, how we communicate in the world.

SEC:

We’re definitely going to come back to that. What you’re talking about is really huge, there is a ton to that, which is why there’s a curriculum for it. So we’re gonna come back to that but first of all, I wanted to think back to when I think I first became familiar with your work. It would have been over a decade ago, when you were doing music writing.

DCM:

Oh yeah, that’s right! Those are my two non-education things, I’m a filmmaker and I’m a music writer, and those actually are the things that got me interested in the intersections between media and education, which led me to do this kind of work. The work I’ve been doing for the past ten years is just the synthesis of the media stew I’ve been bathing in my entire life since I was a little kid, culminating in my young adulthood with making movies and writing about music. But you know, for my professional life, it turns out they don’t really give you huge paychecks to make movies about your family or write about underrated pop albums.

SEC:

So I know that you started out as a critic. I don’t know if you’d say you’re a critic.

DCM:

Yeah, I was a formal music critic for a couple of years. I actually wrote for real publications.

SEC:

Do you think that good critics make for good teachers?

DCM:

I think that there are overlapping skills.

I taught in the classroom for four years. I took a position as a full time teacher because I really wanted to get my five years as a teacher under my belt. I really wanted to teach full time because one thing that I knew very clearly from doing enrichment work was that it’s just different. Classroom teachers do different types of work than a lot of other people who educate others do -- college professors, enrichment educators, people that do coaching, mentoring.

There is something very different about full-time teaching, and so to that extent I think that the critical sensibility is a good one to have in the classroom, but it doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about whether someone is a good teacher, and I don’t know if it’s in the top five, in terms of the key traits you need to have to be a good classroom teacher. A critical mind might be part of it, but honestly if the kids don’t really care about your critical insights I don’t know how effective a teacher you’re going to be. I certainly found that when I tried to use my own criticism directly it was pretty hit or miss. It’s as likely as any other text to engage students.

Teaching is really about the relationship you build with the students you are working with. I do find that a lot of folks that I know who are critics do make good teachers. I actually know some music critics who are high school teachers, that’s their day job. But I’m not sure there’s anything inherently better. It’s better to “be a music critic” about music than not to be, but there are probably other things that are more important for teaching.

SEC:

I guess what I was wondering was if the critic sensibility of looking closely at something and assessing its value and worth lent itself to the way we think about classes and systems and what’s valuable and ways to approach student learning? I wondered if being able to think critically about what we do could come from that critic sensibility.

DCM:

One thing that I’ve noticed with music critics -- the people who are really good music critics tend to be really good other things, too. They tend to be good thinkers in a lot of fields, and they’ve chosen music but they could have just as easily chosen politics or film.

And I also find that a lot of folks that are thinkers and writers in other spheres often show their worst instincts when they’re writing about music. So that’s always fascinated me about music as a medium, that it is so predicated on our viscerality, our feelings about it, how we feel about it, and we try so hard to put that into this kind of critical thinking language, but a lot of times we just use the critical thinking language to say the really biased or weird thing that true critical thinking wouldn’t have us saying. I read a lot of critics, who are very smart, who when put in an uncomfortable space will just use their critical faculties to say something that I don’t think is a very “critical thinking” thing.

Good teachers are more likely to uncover the good music critic within themselves than the music critic who does that [uses critical thinking language for non-critical-thinking insights] is likely to access their inner teacher.

I think classrooms do this kind of naturally. You have to be openly curious and humbled and not allow any of your preconceived ideas about what’s going to be the right thing to guide you too often, because the students will just knock you down. Students are really good at sussing out inauthenticity. So when you’re using those critical devices to prop up something that needs questioning, the people who are going to do that first are your students.

One thing I found teaching is I would say something that I’d never thought twice about and my students would say, “why do you say that?” Maybe there’s a song they’re listening to I don’t like and I say “oh, I don’t like this song,” and there’s a student who really loves the song and they’re like, “I really love this song! It’s my favorite song!” And I have to think about the song differently now because I’m in a situation where I’ve been kind of put off-guard and I need to actually use my real self-reflective critical thinking.

So I think there’s this great synergy between criticism and teaching but I actually think it kind of comes from the teaching side more than necessarily from the criticism side. Being a good teacher helps you be a better critic in a way that I’m not sure that being better critic helps you be a better teacher.

SEC:

One of the things you mentioned there was the idea that it comes from a feeling, bad music criticism or bad criticism just comes from that feeling rather than an analysis. And I wonder if we see that sort of thing in education because I don’t know what your experience with teachers are but there is a certain kind of teacher who has been around for a long time or even a short time and has a feeling of what things work, and doesn’t want to change their practice.

DCM:

I think that the thing that interests me about feeling in music is the way that feelings can destabilize us. And I think what you’re describing are teachers who are doing almost the opposite, teachers who feel highly stabilized in their classrooms. That’s what I’m always skeptical of. It’s the teacher that feels like nothing could possibly happen to them to change anything about what they think or what they do.

It’s not that I’m the most open-minded and amazing person, it’s just that I have a lot of experiences where I think I know something and the teaching experience really knocks me down a peg. It can be humiliating, in fact! When you realize that what you just expressed that you thought was teaching critical thinking, isn’t.

For instance, when I’m talking to young, predominantly black, and predominantly low-income students who are 16 to 19 years old about the news, I could get up on my high horse -- I read the Washington Post every day and I do this and that and yada yada yada, and talk about the credibility of sources. And then they start telling me about things that are actually happening in their very own backyards and neighborhoods that I know nothing about. And who am I to say that the way that they found that information is better or worse than my way? I don’t mean that obviously means I’m not better or worse, I might be better at something, but I need to think about it more carefully, because the assumption I went in with that I had the knowledge and the students had the brains to absorb my knowledge, it didn’t work out that way.

It’s not even that it can’t work out that way. I do have knowledge sometimes and they can absorb the knowledge. But the teacher who isn’t open to being humbled unexpectedly is not going to be able to improve their practice in the way that the teacher that is can. That isn’t to say you need to go cut yourself down at every opportunity and completely take out all your confidence, it’s just that it’s complicated and again, students are going to be able to push you in ways that other types of relationships don’t.

So that’s what I’m looking for in teachers, and I think music does this to people. When you really hate a song and you just explode with anger about it, I mean, the kind of feeling that that can instill in you, I can’t think of a lot of other media that can really do that. But I can definitely tell you some experiences that people have had in classrooms, where the kid did that one thing and you just exploded, you didn’t even know that was your trigger. Like, “oh my gosh, that kid that wouldn’t sit down, that really bothered me for some reason, I have to analyze that!” I think music does that. I think there is something about the combination of feeling and analysis that is so tied together in music, I think there’s an echo of that in how we learn about ourselves in the classroom.

SEC:

This was obviously a very big week because on Pitchfork this week they reviewed all the Taylor Swift albums.

DCM:

All the Taylor Swift albums! I know! Where were they when I was actually writing for them in 2006? They didn’t ask me to write up the self-titled album. I had it before anybody did. My friend actually burned me the self-titled Taylor Swift album and mailed it to me. In the mail. I was there, man! I was there!

SEC:

What did you think of her first album?

DCM:

I loved her first album. At the time I had taken a critical turn. I was really interested in teen pop music, so I was writing about it at an old website called Stylus Magazine, a really cool online space. And it’s funny because I think people can look back -- I’ve worked in elementary media literacy and all this stuff and it seems like maybe it’s all of a piece, of me being really curious about youth culture. I’m actually not that curious about youth culture. I just really liked the teen pop music at the time personally! So I got into it and I was writing about it and that got me into youth culture only because of the ways in which people were writing about young people.

I thought it was just bizarre -- High School Musical had just come out. Taylor Swift had not quite broken yet. She was still trying to be a country star at that time. And people were just writing about it -- you saw this when One Direction got really big, too, these recycled teenybopper losing their minds takes. And so it forced me into understanding youth culture, and that got me connected with the Media Education Lab at Temple. I was a grad student there at the time. I thought I should actually try to understand what’s happening in youth culture, because I mostly just liked, like, listening to Ashlee Simpson for myself.

When Taylor Swift came out, I saw this as a really ingenious way to try to find a space outside of Disney which at the time was starting to build its music brand through Hannah Montana and High School Musical, and she was doing this thing where she was trying to capture the country audience with the same moves that they were doing in the teen pop music. And it was interesting to watch her really struggle in country music. She had a couple hits on country radio but there was always this talk about her inauthenticity and how she’s not really country and whatever else. And then when Fearless came out it seems like it was just this explosion, that young people just flocked to her and created almost a whole separate genre of Taylor Swift. She is her own genre now. I think she has been since 2008. She stopped being a country star about a year after she started.

But what’s interesting to me about the Pitchfork thing is how uncontroversial that is now. Of course you’d cover Taylor Swift! She’s the biggest American pop music star probably in the world. I think she’s maybe bigger than Beyonce by a nose? They’re probably the top two, right?

SEC:

Probably!

DCM:

Why wouldn’t you be interested in writing about that? At the time you just couldn’t do it.

SEC:

It was part of the rockist sensibility that was still in the ether then. Poptimism was still kind of coming out. For me, I remember when I was in school I was teaching Grade 8 and we were doing a music video lesson, and a student wanted to watch “Teardrops on my Guitar.” And I remember being snooty about that then, and I think I probably looked down on that student and I almost guarantee that student noticed that. So for me, that’s a lesson to check yourself. It’s so easy for us to look at student culture and say, that’s not my culture, that’s not good. And we saw that even in Pitchfork, which was the leading credible source of music.

DCM:

Yeah, you know, it’s funny, because you have those experiences, and you have such a personal relationship with students whether you want to or not. I consider myself a progressive educator and I’m all about relationships, but there are some really healthy boundaries that teachers need to have from their students. And part of that can have to do with their popular culture. You also don’t have to be the hip teacher that insists on being really into all the music your kids are into. It’s more about your authenticity to yourself in your relationship to the students.

But at the same time, if you don’t like Taylor Swift, there are a lot of ways to engage with the student who loves Taylor Swift honestly without making the student almost a representative of a social problem. You still have to teach that kid math! You still have to have engagements with that student who loves Taylor Swift. And that is such an important part of that person’s identity. But as the teacher, that’s the field that you have the least control over. You really have almost zero say in how that student is going to take their own popular culture and make meaning out of it.

And so in a way it was actually kind of healthy for a place like Pitchfork to stay away from Taylor Swift, because the only thing that would have happened is that they would have gotten somebody who doesn’t listen to Taylor Swift to write some sneering thing about it. Or do the thing where it’s like, “well, begrudgingly I’ll admit there are a couple of songs here.” But something interesting was obviously happening with Taylor Swift from a social perspective. I happen to think it was pretty god as music, too -- your mileage may vary with that.

SEC:

If you were going to give yourself a Pitchfork rating as a teacher, what would you give yourself?

DCM:

Well you have to understand about Pitchfork ratings, because there’s a science to it, right? It’s a little code between music nerds. Anything under a 7 and above a 5.8 means “I listened to it, it was fine, you shouldn’t really even bother to read this review, because I’m not really sure how I’m feeling about this one right now.” Anything between a 7 and a 7.5 means this is a solid album that I don’t quite have the traction on, or I really like it but they won’t really let me rate it higher. I don’t think they do that any more. They made me change some of my ratings sometimes.

SEC:

Did you give a number? I thought it was the case that writers didn’t give the number.

[Ed note: Pitchfork editorial gives scores now, but when I wrote for Pitchfork in 2004-2006 writers gave the initial score and it was discussed editorially if necessary.]

DCM:

Yeah, I gave the numbers. Writers gave the numbers then and there was sometimes an editorial decision about it. I infamously tried to give the Arcade Fire’s first album a 10 and they wouldn’t let me. We negotiated it down to a 9.7, which I think is kind of funny. It’s too bad, because it turns out it’s really more of a 9.4, but that’s OK. I mean, I was really obsessed with it at the time. It settled into a 9.4.

Nah, I’m just kidding, 9.7 is the perfect score for that album, I think.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah -- Pitchfork ratings are very specific, so as a teacher, I actually don’t think--I only taught for four years in a classroom so I am ineligible for anything above a 7.6. That’s the cap of the album that was great and some people are going to love that album, but no one is going to talk about it in the critical conversation at the end of the year. So you’re going to see a lot of individual writers’ favorite albums that they don’t feel comfortable giving a bunch of Pitchfork hype to get between a 7.3 and a 7.7. After that, once you get into the 8’s, you’re getting into the critical conversation.

So I would give myself over four years...a 7.4.

SEC:

One thing that jogged my memory and made me think you were someone I should talk to is that you were posting on Twitter a list of observations you were making as you were coming to the end of your year, and the end of your job.

DCM:

I had this manic spell in the first week after I left where I just had all these disconnected thoughts. So I started a big Twitter thread, and now I’m writing some of that stuff up. I don’t know if I’m going to do anything with it. It’s nice to just write, I’ve written like 30 pages of observations.

I didn’t write anything while I was teaching for a couple of reasons. One, I felt really overwhelmed with the job of it -- I don’t know how many of your listeners are teachers and how many aren’t, but I feel like the lack of understanding that people have about the kind of job that teaching actually is from a minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour type of day-long standpoint is one of the fundamental things that keeps people from truly understanding education problems in general. I don’t know if it’s true in Canada versus America but certainly in the U.S. -- anything that’s bad in Canada is probably just worse here.

So I started writing these observations because there were so many scattered thoughts, and I didn’t feel comfortable reflecting on it formally anywhere, because it was happening to me in the moment. I felt some protection of my students and not wanting to use them as examples of things, use pseudonyms or whatever. But now I’m kind of processing it and I really am reflecting a lot on it.

A lot of what I learned makes me think of Annette Lareau, who wrote a great book called Unequal Childhoods, which tracks different social classes of folks raising kids in Philadelphia -- middle class, working class, and poor, more or less. I think she didn’t really hit that many super affluent families and she honestly didn’t seem to engage with that many really poor families. There were a couple. And her big sociological insight was around this idea of middle class versus working class parenting philosophies.

The middle class parents, maybe unconsciously, maybe consciously, go through what she calls concerted cultivation, which is the idea that your children are investments and you cultivate them to become a certain type of person. A lot of this is based on the kinds of scheduling that you do and the activities you do and the way you teach kids to question authority, in ways that promote power. So middle class kids learn to ask the doctor questions, whereas working class kids don’t ask doctors questions because doctors are experts and you don’t ask experts questions--because that’s why you’re seeing them. Working class families tended toward something she called the “theory of natural growth,” something like that [ed note: her phrase is the “accomplishment of natural growth”], the idea being: let the kids be kids, set pretty firm distinctions between the adult world and the child world. So there are these authoritarian elements of the working class philosophy, but generally kids have a lot of space to themselves. They just kind of do what they need to do as kids. There are often many more siblings and other folks from the family that are of comparable age.

And then she tried to deal with poor families. And really most of the book that I remember when she’s writing about children growing up in poverty is thinly-veiled horror at the daily existence of their lives. Having to take a bus for an hour to try to get food stamps so that you can go get some bread, but it’s not enough. She’s just detailing the horrors of American poverty.

And I think I understood this all better in working in the environment I was working in for so long, and getting to know the students, and getting to know the distinctions between students. That’s another thing that I think happens, especially when people write about, quote, “urban education” -- by which they’re usually talking about high populations of students who are black or people of color -- you just homogenize the group benevolently. It’s like a benevolently homogenous group, so you’re all for the kids but you can’t see the distinctions between the kid who’s got the working class parents and the kid who’s really suffering from acute poverty and needs other kinds of assistance. So working so closely with so many with those kids helped me understand how poverty and working class families in our country are so intimately connected, and they’re part of what you could argue is the same socioeconomic bracket. What poverty is in America, to me, is just what happens when the bottom drops out of the working class and there’s nothing to protect anybody.

So what I had to do in working with my students was to really develop an understanding of who they were as -- I sound like John Lennon in the ‘60s, but -- who are they as working class people? And that was a lot of my own learning as a teacher. I had things I could teach -- everybody needs to know how to Google and how to make movies and how to write. But what I had to learn was what this whole social arrangement was, and how students’ lives before they ever came into my classroom affected both their attitudes toward learning and where they were going with it. That was most of what I learned.

So when I started reflecting it was like, “God, I don’t have a whole lot of cool pithy quotes about education because, like Annette Lareau, I’m just kind of struck by the horror of poverty, and I don’t have a lot to say about it!” How do you help this kid to learn...? “...But this kid is homeless! Oh my god, how could you let a child be homeless?” Those were the kinds of things I was dealing with.

It’s the kind of work I want to do -- but it’s a lot to process. How to write about it is very complicated.

SEC:

Let’s talk a little bit about how you found out who your students were. That relationship aspect is really important and I think a lot teachers believe in that, but I also think they are uncomfortable about how to go about that or what they might uncover when they go about it.

DCM:

I always told my students “I keep it 85.” They keep it a hundred, I keep it 85. I’d say, I’m your teacher, so there’s 15 percent of things I’m not going to tell you anything about but of the 85% of things I will talk about, I will be 100% honest about 85% of things. And that was important for me to be able to share with my students within boundaries that I set for myself but know that every time I talked to them I was coming from a place of honesty for myself. Because it allowed them to be honest with me, and so our dialogue kind of worked when they had trust in me.

The way they trusted me was to know that I was not putting on an act for them. I was who I was. And that meant some warts and all stuff -- we would talk a lot about how I’m a white male teacher and that’s a thing. We’d talk about school shootings and they’d say, “why do white guys do that stuff?” And we had to have conversations about that. I didn’t always have the answers, but we could have the dialogue because everything was kind of fair game in terms of what they could bring to me and how I would respond--as me. Even if that response was “I can’t say that, I can’t speak to that, I don’t know.” So that’s one of the ways I built trust.

What’s funny is that I think a lot of the teachers at my school thought that because I had an interest in popular music, that was something that gave me some capital with my students. It appears that way from the outside because I would know all of the music that they listened to, including the music they made. A lot of my kids made music, so I would always want to know who they were. But I don’t think that my fellow teachers understood that I didn’t actually like most of the music my students listened to and I wouldn’t have sought it out if they hadn’t been listening to it. But because they were listening to it, and because it was such a huge part of the classroom -- it was coming out of headphones and speakers and laptops all the time -- I wanted to know what this stuff was, because I was curious about it.

Some of it I ended up really liking. But I think that’s irrelevant, whether I liked it or not. The point was I was curious about it and I took it really seriously, the music they liked. Understanding what it was and why they liked it was really important for me. That was an element of the trust, but it’s connected to the first thing I was talking about, which is the honesty piece. I honestly was interested. I think for teachers that honestly aren’t interested in their kids’ music, don’t force it. It’s not going to work. Whether it is better to take an interest in your students music or popular culture or whatever or not, I don’t know. I read something the other day, some educator Twitter who talked about how they pretended to be interested in sports every year. They were so glad the basketball season was over so they didn’t have to pretend to be interested anymore for their students. And I was like, that’s terrible! If you’re not interested in basketball, just say that! I mean, be honest. And if you feel you should be interested in basketball because your students are interested in it, then come to it from a place of honest exploration of it and -- you know, if you still feel like it doesn’t matter, just be real with people about that.

It goes a longer way being honest with students about yourself and your shortcomings and everything, along with your strengths. That’s the other piece -- when I knew stuff, I told my kids, look, I’m sorry but I know a lot about this so I know you’re telling me this way you found this thing on the internet, and I’m telling you I know more about finding this thing on the internet than you do. I feel very comfortable saying that, this is the better way. But I limited the number of domains in which I would claim that kind of expertise. I tried to limit it to being on-topic in the classroom. I wouldn’t try to know everything about everything. When I don’t know stuff or don’t like stuff or don’t feel a certain way and feel comfortable enough to say it, I’m honest with them. In that way, you build a certain level of trust.

The other thing is -- and I hate to say it -- I was also the permissive uncle in terms of classroom discipline at my school. I’m the guy who you go to and he gives you the ice cream and mom and dad get upset: “We don’t give him ice cream and now he’s gonna ask us for ice cream every day for two weeks!” I was also that. But I don’t think that that was as big of a factor as my sense of wanting to know my students, within limits, and wanting them to feel that they can know me as well as I want to know them, that it’s two-way. Whatever I want to get from them, they should be able to get from me. And that’s why I was the permissive uncle. I don’t actually care that this kid did this in my class, so why would I go through the work of writing it up and making it a thing, when I don’t actually care about this? Now, from an organizational standpoint that’s not a great approach to take. I get that. Things break down when there’s not consistency among classrooms.

I guess it’s just to say, I wanted to know who these people in my room were, and that’s how I saw them. One thing I started writing when I got off of Twitter was that I think we have it backwards, especially for the age group I worked with, which was 16-21. Most of them were disconnected from formal school, although not entirely (it’s very complicated, especially in Philly). I feel like we tend to call kids “kids” in situations where we should think about them as adults, and we tend to call them adults in situations where we should be thinking about them as kids. To give you an example, we say that because this young woman has a baby even though she’s only 17, well, that makes her an adult. But because you are throwing pencils in my classroom, you’re a kid. Right?

And I would kind of flip that in my mind -- I didn’t realize I was doing this until I was reflecting on it. I’d say, look, if you’re 16 and you have a baby, this is a kid that just had a baby. Let’s think about the impact of the baby on this young person’s life. But if you threw a pencil at me in my room -- why did this adult in my room just throw a pencil at me? I’m not saying you should think about things this way or it’s better this way, I just realized that that is the approach that I took philosophically to who my students were. I was working with adults and they were adults in all the times when I most wanted to call them kids, and they were kids in the times that I think, maybe not me, but society wants them to be adults. Incarceration, teen pregnancy, all these big scary social problems, you have to think about what kind of things a person is going through-- and what is a person going through when they’re going through it at sixteen?

I think my students would judge me higher than a 7.4 as a teacher. But I also think that there were certain jobs I had as a teacher that I wasn’t as good at as other people are, and I’m pretty open about that. Organization of time. Having the plan set. Having the boundaries set. Making the space safe for learning. Making learning happen even when it’s hard. Those are the things that, because I was so interested in how people are feeling, “are we there today,” sometimes I could lower my standards, I could let the discipline slip and it affects other people’s learning. There are some teacherly things that I think I have a lot of work to do in my own professional development.

One way I started thinking about it early on was, in my first year, I was reading the John Lennon biography. (It’s weird I’ve mentioned John Lennon twice so far. I do love the Beatles.) And they’re describing Hamburg, their first big tour in Germany, how they got there with their songs and they realized after the first night that they’d played all their songs and they didn’t know anything else.

So they were in this crucible -- but not of creativity. They didn’t go to Hamburg and write their best stuff. They wrote their best stuff after Hamburg, after they’d gone through this crucible of performance. Performance, performance, performance. Play it again. When you run out of something, pick an old showtune that someone half-remembered. Steal songs from other people. Play the thing you just heard the other band play and see if you can do your own take on it. Not because it’s creative but because you have so much time to fill and you don’t have enough material. That’s how I felt after my first year teaching. There was so much time and I’d gone through everything, I felt I’d left it all on the floor in my first year and I had nothing left. I was already resorting to Googling lessons and trying to figure out what the hell I’m gonna do tomorrow.

And so I realized in my disposition, I’m thinking about the difference between being a composer or a songwriter versus being a performer. And how those things are often connected but they’re not the same. So maybe I’m a Carole King--a really good songwriter but it’s often better if other people sing my stuff. Even though there’s a couple things only I can sing. Other stuff, other people should probably do.

My relationship between curriculum and teaching is like that. I’m like a singer-songwriter more than I am a performer. That was a good realization to have, because it means there are some things I’m just never going to be the best at, and if I’m teaching full time again I need to work with those limitations. But that hadn’t hit home before. I could have abstractly said something like that before I was a full-time teacher, but you gotta feel it. You gotta understand what it feels like to run out of material and be empty and have nowhere to go. Every teacher goes through that. It usually happens in the first year if not the first month.

SEC:

That idea of teacher as performer--there’s a lot to unpack in that. When you’re a performer, what is the thing you’re trying to be? I don’t know that a lot of teachers think about who they’re trying to be. There’s a lot of thought about what they are trying to do. Not who they’re trying to be. Who you are informs a lot of what you do.

DCM:

Yeah -- it’s an imperfect metaphor. I mean, I think teaching as performance is only one, maybe even small element of teaching. There are a lot of non-performative teachers who are just really good at the nuts and bolts of getting people in a room to do something. That is a good teacher, too. It was more about the difference between imagining lessons and putting them into reality. Maybe because I’m a music guy that’s where my head went with it. But it is interesting to wonder, if teachers were performers, are there rock stars versus second-chair violins? Different ways to perform? I dunno, I don’t want to go too far with the metaphor, it’s tenuous enough as it is.

SEC:

I wanted to go back to one of the things you talked about in your observations. You were working at an alternative high school and a lot of the students who you were working with had so many gaps, or there were things in their background that had made them not love learning or not feel confident in learning. I’m curious about how in the high school situation, it’s hard to catch up with that background. I mean, maybe this is a Philly question. Where I am, we were the poverty capital of Canada for a long time, we may still be. There may be some overlap here. So what do you do in those cases? Because you talk about scaling up form elementary and how that might not work.

DCM:

It’s hard, because the tendency is to scale up from young. So where did you lose it with math? I have to be careful about my language here, because I don’t want to play into deficit thinking. I also don’t want to do the thing where I say there’s no such thing as a deficit, because if you talk to a student about their math abilities, they’ll be like, “I have a deficit! Please help me!”

If you find the point where the student disconnected -- to give an example I like to think about from my work, because it controls for a lot of other stuff -- take a student who is more or less engaged in the project of school and has not decided that school in and of itself is a bankrupt institution, but who also has real challenges with math. If there is some kind of specific learning disorder, it hasn’t been diagnosed, and it’s probably too late to be diagnosed, and it’s specific to math. What do you do?

I think the way that people tend to go about it, that I’ve seen, is to figure out what should have happened in fourth grade and figure out a way to do that fourth grade piece in high school. And I think that’s a problem, because I don’t think that it works very well, and it especially doesn’t work for kids who are not motivated. If it could work for anybody, it would be the student who is already motivated but happens to have this missing piece from fourth grade.

In this student’s case, it was literally that they had a bad math teacher in fourth grade and they struggled and failed math and they were kept back. So the kid gets to high school about a year or two late because of this math issue that he’s had that’s been unsupported, and now he’s at our school. And the question is, how do we work with the student who has a math issue? For me, the answer is one on one instructional time. And I hate to say that, because what it means is that the classroom itself is not the space to deal with this.

And that’s a very uncomfortable realization that I started to have as I was working through this with my students -- that I can differentiate, differentiate, differentiate, but when the gaps are so large...I don’t know. I feel like this student needs an hour of an expert’s time that is a reading specialist or a math specialist. Then there needs to be something else happening in the classroom environment.

I think a lot of the issues are a little like that. From the reading perspective it’s even more complicated, because these practices of literacy are so intertwined with content knowledge, background knowledge, cultural context, how you were taught phonics from a very early age, basic decoding that may have happened in weird ways.

What you can do at the high school level is you just set the bar really high for everybody, but you don’t assume that anybody actually knows how to read. You set the bar for everything else really high, and you don’t do the basal reader with the sixteen year old. If they’re interested in mass incarceration, you read about mass incarceration. But they may not be able to read what you’re using --so you use the exact same resource and you use every trick in the book to get them reading as much as they can -- chunking it out, working on smaller passages, connecting it together. I don’t know what all the best practices here are. I’m probably going to go back to school at some point to learn some of this stuff, in terms of literacy coaching.

I do think that we tend to level kids in ways that are really counter-productive to their ability to see the point in education in a big picture sense. When you’re going into school and you’re sixteen years old and you’re reading the “adapted reading” that is really not very good--these adapted readings tend to be very poor quality. I had a person that I worked with who used a website that would replace words with easier words with an algorithm. I would read the results and think, this is garbage! You took a really cool article and you changed all the words in it! You can’t just do that! “I’m gonna take this song that I love but I’m going to change every other note in the melody and I’m sure it’ll be just as good.” That’s not gonna work.

So I think you treat the group that you’re with as capable of taking whatever they can talk to you about. And then you think of literacy as a very specific set of practices, and that different pieces of it need to be emphasized in different ways. For my students, maybe everybody has to do some pretty high level vocabulary and then there are a lot of strategies for how do we chunk out this reading, which is really difficult for some kids, only a little difficult for other kids, and pretty much in the comfort zone for the others. You kind of have to sit down with the kids and go through it sentence by sentence, talk about it, re-read it--OK, so what is this saying? Why does it say it like this? And for the students who struggle with print literacy, it’s just going to take longer. I don’t know if there’s any way around that.

I don’t know what it looks like in the long-term, because I also don’t know what the proper amount of time is. I also feel like students weirdly have too much time in school and not enough time with some fairly uncomfortable, hardcore learning. They spend a lot of time in this building but the times at which they’re really doing cognitively challenging work is not nearly as concentrated as it needs to be.

I played piano as a kid, and practice is awful. I had to practice every day, and as soon as I stopped practicing every day I got worse. I could practice for one hour and then I was just done. If I could practice for an hour every day for a week, I got better, and when I didn’t do that I got worse.

But I feel like the problem is that in school, you don’t have one hour, you have six hours, each of which is a one-hour block. But you can’t practice for six hours. You can’t do cognitively challenging work for six hours. So it seems like the better thing to do would be to really target the time when you are doing the most cognitively challenging stuff, do it for an hour, and then take a break and do cool stuff that’s not that.

But I don’t know how you square that, because every teacher kind of feels like they’re in their own little island of content and they don’t realize that by the time you have the kids for fifth period they’ve been doing this all day. They’re not even doing cognitively challenging hour-long work. What ends up happening is that everybody kind of blands out. So you’re doing 20% cognitively challenging here, and 50% here, and maybe 0% there because you were asleep that period. It’s just not organized very well for what I think the challenge really is, which is that learning is really hard, the more you miss early on the harder it is to make up later, and the ways that you make it up later require more investment and more resources, not less. We want to do the opposite. We want to say, what’s the fastest way we can get this kid to learn all the crap they didn’t learn in the last twelve years? Well, I don’t think you can. Maybe the answer to that is that it’s not possible. I don’t know.

JEC:

We’re coming up on an hour now and I didn’t talk about any of the media stuff -- we’ll set up another call. I’ve enjoyed all of this time and want to put it all up.

DCM

Sure! You basically got everything I’ve done except the media literacy work, which is fine because actually media literacy is a whole separate thing we could talk about.

JEC:

That’s good. The work of Julie Coiro and Renee Hobbs, their work and your involvement in that, has been really interesting to me as I’ve been doing the same thing as you have in a lesser scale for the last few years. I really want to talk about that. So I’ll start wrapping it up and ask, what would be a resource you might recommend to someone?

DCM

The one book that I recommend to people is Inside Teaching by Mary Kennedy, whose big project as a scholar is understanding why reform tends not to work in schools. The reason it doesn’t work is that most reforms don’t fully grasp the day to day practices that teachers have to accomplish to do their job. And if you don't understand the very intimate details of on-the-ground work in schools, there is no reform that's going to change anything, because you don't actually understand what you’re doing. You have an idea, but you don’t know how to implement it at all.

Inside Teaching is a series of observations about how teachers manage in the classroom. They manage their time, they manage their resources, they manage their sanity, their tranquility. And that, to me, was one of the single biggest insights I ever had about teaching, and I reflected on it a ton when I was doing my full-time teaching, which is that teachers really value tranquility in the classroom, and soundness, this feeling of safety and quiet. And the reason is because they're teaching for so long that if you don’t have that, you burn out immediately.

It’s one thing to be a cool engaging college professor and teach people three days a week and you have a little seminar room or whatever -- I’ve done that kind of teaching, it’s a blast. And I can be on all of the time! As you can probably tell already from this conversation I can be very on. But if you teach full time, you get there at like 8 a.m. and you leave at 5 p.m., you can’t be on for that whole time. You will physically blow a circuit. So her observation about what teachers do to manage that was so interesting.

She has this really big picture critique of reform movements in education that are not ground-up from teachers. What I like about it is that she doesn’t have any clear ideas about what teachers should be doing, just that if you don’t have their buy-in, nothing that you do is actually going to matter very much. And the other insight there is that there are really good reasons why schools operate the way they do, even in the most dysfunctional school systems and spaces, and you should really put some effort into understanding exactly why things are the way they are. Because if you change one thing about it, you don’t realize you’ve also changed five other things that are connected to this one fix. There’s no way for ideas to fix organizational issues if you don’t really understand how the organization works.

I return to that book a lot because it just it’s really a nice perspective on what teaching is, and why a lot of our best ideas about education don’t actually seem to work when you put it into effect. And the answer is it works for something, but not for teaching. This cool idea you had is a good idea for something, just not for this. It’s because there’s no way to sustain it. So that’s the book I would recommend.

If you’re a science teacher, I just read a cool science book. I’m the type of person that thinks the last book they read is the best book ever written, and then promptly forgets it existed after I read the next book.

The book I just read was Life Ascending by Nick Lane. It’s a science book and it goes through, from this microbiology perspective, everything from the origins of life through the development of most of the major processes of life, and it was a very cool, cosmic look at everything. I kept reading it thinking, “God, I wish I was helping teach a science class again, because I could talk about this stuff and kids would be interested in cells because they would know why it’s like this.” I never knew! There’s so much stuff I actually never knew even though I, quote, “learned it in school.” I learn it again later and I’m like, “oh, I didn’t know this at all! I don’t know anything about this!” I could have told you what mitochondria were but now I actually understand mitochondria--it’s profound. I love that book because every chapter is like that for something science-related and I have a really hard time finding accessible math and science literature that makes accessible not only what happens, but why it matters and what the context is, so that was cool.

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movieswithkevin27 · 6 years

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Unsane

As is, frustratingly, often the case, Unsane is an experimental film on the surface only. Lacking the story to really take its experimental approach to the next level, instead leaning on genre cliches and predictable twists to help further its story, the film is one that winds up only slightly more than middling. Fortunately, the decision by director Steven Soderbergh to shoot the film on his iPhone proves to be a fantastic decision, giving the film a heavy dose of realism via a rather formalistic (in part) approach to making this film. A story about a woman, Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy), who moves from Boston to Pennsylvania to get away from her stalker, the film portrays what happens to Sawyer after she is involuntarily committed. Interacting with deranged patients such as Violet (Juno Temple) or a recovering opioid addict in Nate (Jay Pharoah) who befriends her, believes she is being stalked, and seeks to help her, Unsane is an often thrilling film. As Sawyer is committed and continues to believe she sees her stalker only to find that her stalker David Strine (Joshua Leonard) has moved from Boston to work at the psychiatric center that Sawyer is being held in, the film takes a truly sinister turn. While engrossing as a film and possessing ground-breaking visuals, Unsane is undone by cliches and a bad ending that wind up taking the air out of the film.

Visually, Unsane makes its name. Soderbergh is certainly known for being rather experimental with his films visuals, whether it be via homage as in The Good German or more stylistic as in Traffic. Unsane is certainly no exception with the film’s iPhone visuals always making their presence known. Yet, the film never looks cheap. It is a film shot, edited, and directed by Soderbergh, all while possessing the look and feel of a film put together by such a Hollywood director. This is certainly a huge determinant in Unsane’s overall success as an experiment, as the film is able to utilize its phone-as-a-camera approach to be able to put the audience right into the film as an engaged observer, bordering on exhibiting voyeuristic behavior. It is almost reminiscent of found footage in the sense that both seek to put you there, but found footage is a technique that, inherently, lets the audience know that they are not there even if the visuals are taken by someone who was there, allegedly. Unsane, however, is a film that breaks down this barrier. Every bit of this film feels as though the audience is lurking in the corner, hiding down a hallway, or standing there as the events of the film transpire, allowing the events to be all the more intimate and deeply felt. As Sawyer fears for her life and screams in panic as the doctors pin her to the bed to tie her down after she hit another inmate, the audience is given a front row seat by Soderbergh. To accomplish this, Soderbergh relies upon a deep depth of field with everything in focus. This allows hallway shots to ring with realism as the faces of those at the end of a hallway can still be seen rather clearly. Similarly, there are shots from the ward that, when over-the-shoulder, reveal people walking in the hallway and into the ward or, in the case of David, looming in the window to keep an eye on Sawyer.

Soderbergh’s visuals also contain a rather fitting color palette, as the film’s action is predominantly laced with the yellowish walls of the facility aside from the introduction and final act both being shot through a washed blue tint and a sequence in a trunk being shot with night vision. Not only are all three cold colors - with the implied negative emotions of those colors - but the blue, in particular, proves to be quite relevant. As David obsesses over Sawyer, he notes that he first fell in love with her when he saw her wearing a blue shirt. Throughout the film, she wears a blue jacket over her hospital-issued clothes with the film’s obvious blue tint coming back in the final act as she desperately tries to flee her stalker. This obsession with the color blue is such a negative context is reminiscent of Traffic in how the blue-portion of that film is dedicated to a politician tracking down his drug addicted daughter. Here, the plot of Unsane is, obviously, different, but nonetheless contains a parent trying to find their daughter and get help for her against all odds, while facing a powerful entity that wishes to control her every action and motivation. The film’s usage of blue may further symbolize the power that David has over Sawyer - further underscored by the constant low-angle shots of David - as his presence is constantly felt by her, thus giving him considerable control and power over her. As blue is often recognized as a rather masculine color, it is not hard to come to this conclusion as the power and the masculinity implied the color blue are relevant to Unsane in which a man’s toxic masculinity exerts considerable influence over a woman’s life to the point she is always cloaked in blue and must fight for her life under the blue of night.

The usage of an iPhone provides far more than giving the audience an intimate view of the film’s events. Instead, Soderbergh uses it as a device to help create terror. As David stalks into the night to find Sawyer, Soderbergh washes the scene out in blue with a tight close-up of David from an extreme low-angle, while the camera bounces up and down as he makes his way into the forest. As Sawyer is drugged and given too much of her “medicine” by David - who, naturally, distributes the drugs - Soderbergh whips the camera around the room as she runs around, going out of her mind. Superimposing a front-view of her running around on top of an over-the-shoulder shot of her running around with her face poking out of the back of her head, the shot is one that is wholly disorienting and uncomfortable. Also utilizing a spinning camera - to some degree, this is apparent when Sawyer wakes up in the trunk of a car with the camera spinning around as she shifts around, capturing the claustrophobic scene while only serving to further disorient the viewer - at various times that really gives the film a great punch, Soderbergh does not just lean on the technique as a mere gimmick. Rather, he is able to create great tension from the iPhone. Not only are we right there, but his efforts to disorient and make the audience uncomfortable go a long way. Even typical low-angles - which are prevalent here - as the camera sits in a hallway as the drugs are given out prove to be disorienting with the overwhelming dark hallways looming from all over while the underqualified orderlies and David mill about in positions of power as well. These shots allow Soderbergh to underscore who is truly in control in this film. It is, obviously, not the patients. Rather, it is the “doctors” and even the clinic itself who exert control over them from beginning to end. The camera work is further beneficial, even when Soderbergh is more typical. As Sawyer screams from solitary confinement, the camera backs away ominously and pulls back down a nearby hallway. Cloaked in darkness and desolate, the shot is a truly sinister one that underscores two simple facts: she is alone and nobody knows she is there.

Though it works, one area will undoubtedly divide audiences is in how everything just feels...off. It is perhaps, in large part, due to the fact that the film takes place in a mental health facility. Thus, the patients are, literally, off. However, even the acting by “sane” characters such as Claire Foy or Jay Pharoah are off. The performances are still good, as both nail their respective characters, but just a bit alien. Joshua Leonard, similarly, acts quite alien as he descends into more homicidal madness in order to possess Sawyer. A lot of this is likely contributed by the film’s dialogue, which is quite odd at all times. Little jokes such as Sawyer saying she will give Nate a blowjob to use his phone only to “take a reign check” on it, to which Nate barely responds as he knew she would do so and was only being facetious. This odd dialogue can be found throughout the film as everybody acts just slightly more abnormal than regular humans would in a way that is silently disquieting. Normal conversations between Sawyer and her mother even ring with this same oddity, as both seem to practically go through the motions of what a normal conversation should be between mother and daughter, even if the pair clearly love one another deeply. This, in large part, is due to the film’s setting but likely also to allow Soderbergh to capture the film’s intentionally tacky elements. It is a film that is practically a B-movie at times with this cheesy and awkward dialogue, coupled with equally awkward performances allowing the film’s surface-level elements to reveal its rather intentional low-budget feeling.

Thematically, it is certainly clear that Soderbergh harbors some skepticism towards psychological clinics, an element that this review will return to in greater depth. However, at the center of the film’s character drama is the fact that Sawyer is being stalked by a man named David Strine. On the surface, he is a regular guy. Sawyer’s story of meeting him is such that she admits she did not mind him and took pity on him due to them having met as a result of her work at a hospice where David’s father was being cared for until he died. Thus, she empathizes with him, especially since her only father died. However, in the aftermath, his obsessive behavior as he texted her constantly, stalking behavior, his memorizing of every fact about her life, his possessiveness, and his desire to control her at every turn, really rises to the surface. Having planned out every detail of their life from where they will live to what they will do, David seems unaware of his crimes as he just lays down next to Sawyer after attacking her and everyone near to her, telling her he would love to have kids with her. It is a relatively normal moment, aside from the fact that he is bleeding from the neck, has broken her ankle, and has killed her friend and her mother along the way. The nature of the David character is such that it is a clear attempt to capture the “nice guy” who believes that kindness will earn them what they want from a woman. Soderbergh juxtaposes this nice guy with a regular guy who is on Tinder and is set to sleep with Sawyer without any hassle, except she encounters a psychological block due to her experience with stalkers. In essence, this is a film about a woman who has been stripped of everything. She cannot experience love, as the thought of David looms large. She cannot experience freedom, as she winds up being involuntarily admitted to this hospital where, naturally, she is stripped and cut off from the rest of the world right away. Once there, she is given drugs by David who works as an orderly in that department and even goes so far as spiking her doses. He seeks to control her, only finding that he is able to do so when he orchestrates her release and locks her in solitary confinement. This film, as a result, is a chilling representation of the damage a so-called “nice guy” can accomplish through the obsessive and possessive behavior they so often exhibit when they fall “in love” with a woman. Thus, Unsane is able to achieve tension through the fact that what is happening to Sawyer can happen to any woman who is “crazy” enough to show kindness to the wrong man. Feeding into their toxic masculinity and low self-esteem, women who are kind enough to all strangers wind up having to live as Detective Ferguson (Matt Damon) advises Sawyer to live: in a constant state of fear with their heads on a swivel. The film’s camera work further benefits this idea as it allows, especially women, to experience what is happening to Sawyer first-hand as Soderbergh is able to take this paranoia and fear to channel it to a cautionary tale of one of the major crises occurring in this world: men who cannot take a simple no. Even worse, Sawyer is locked up as she is seen as being crazy for thinking a man in stalking her while David is called a “gift from God” for his efforts at the hospital.

In terms of examining the conditions within a psychiatric facility, Soderbergh’s film very much laments the way in which hospitals exploit insurance and patients as they admit people against their will for reasons such as having thought of suicide without informing anyone near them or allowing them access to the outside world. In many ways, it is a legalized form of kidnapping, which Soderbergh examines and warns audience members to be wary of what they say to psychologists who may admit them if they open up in the wrong way, while also decrying psychologists who do not examine people straight-up and instead look for buzzwords to signal whether or not they can legally keep them in the hospital. In this way, the film almost plays similarly to Shock Corridor directed by Samuel Fuller. In that film, a journalist pretends to be insane in order to be admitted to a psychiatric facility and to investigate a murder that happened within the facility that has been covered up. Along the way, he encounters witnesses who experience moments of sanity that allow him to piece together what happened, only to lose his own sanity due to shock therapy. The same happens here to Nate Hoffman, who is revealed to be a reporter investigating the hospital for admitting sane people who mention brief suicidal thoughts as a means of exploiting their insurance (they can keep people for up to seven days without a court order, so patients will be “healed” by that point) and to meet monthly quotas. In the end, they will up both exploiting the person and, for some, they will up making them insane along the way. This happens to Sawyer as she is being legitimately stalked up until the time she leaves the facility. At that point, she begins experiencing hallucinations of David brought on by her experiences in the clinic. For his part, Nate - similar to the reporter in Shock Corridor - is given shock therapy as a means of silencing and killing him, though the evidence he is able to piece together is used to bring the hospital down as he had hoped. As such, both films explore the frightening ways in which psychiatric facilities conduct themselves, the false treatments that do not help the patients whatsoever, and the pressure cooker environment that only winds up making them all the more insane. Neither film is anti-treatment, but they are both against this type of treatment that just aims to drug patients and exploit them to the benefit of the hospital who can continue to keep beds full and charge exorbitant prices. It is a tragic system and one that exploits those who desperately need help. Instead, all they get is a slow death and a further descent into madness with doctors who are ill-equipped to actually help and underqualified orderlies who do nothing but abuse their power. The similarities to Shock Corridor are even furthered as the orderly that killed a patient in that film similarly had issues with women, having been moved to a separate section due to his actions with the nymphomaniacs. Here, the main orderly - David - is a man who quite obviously shares the same issue: he is exploitative and abusive towards women, exerting his masculinity in such a way that it causes irrevocable harm.

Where Unsane really stalls out, however, is with its reliance upon cliches and its terrible third act. While the film smartly avoids playing into the “maybe she is having visions” angle and instead replaces it with the reality that she is being stalked, it nonetheless falls into other predictable traps. Though stabbed and bleeding from the neck, David continues to live long enough to travel somewhere with Sawyer, chase her through the woods, and then give her one final chance to kill him for good, after she too feigns unconsciousness. This is quite cliche for one, but also highly implausible which is also something that could be said for much of the film’s rather convenient plot that is geared towards deriving tension from every moment without regard for practicality. This, of course, coming after the horrible sequence in which Sawyer plays along with David and convinces him rape Violet right in front of her as a show of his love. Though she is using Violet as she knows that she has a weapon she can use to attack David and free herself from solitary, the film nonetheless lets Violet die after Sawyer shuts the only door on her with David then breaking her neck. With this unfortunate event in which the protagonist uses another woman to escape - practically giving him bait and then abandoning her - coupled with the film’s cliched “oh but the killer is not dead yet”, Unsane becomes rather unsavory, fantastical, and cliche. Of course, the film is quite generic from beginning to end with the “sane person locked up with no one believed they are not insane” trope being one that has certainly been traversed before. However, the film’s cliche finale is particularly egregious in how it makes the film drag for the final 15 minutes, all the while building up to a predictable finale in which Sawyer, narrowly, gets away. This issue is further compounded by the neat way in which Nate is revealed as a reporter, the cops find the evidence Nate collected against the hospital, and as the administrator is led away in handcuffs. Compared to the film’s idea of this continuous abuse of patients for profit and the constant injustice this produces, the film’s rather neat and happy ending in which justice is served and David is killed is incredibly dull. The film’s last second bit with Sawyer thinking she sees David in a restaurant and approaches to stab him only to realize it is not him is similarly cliche as Unsane shows that the horror is not over yet. It may be thematically relevant, but plot-wise, it is a rather safe and predictable finale that just runs into every horror movie trope it could find.

A flawed film due to its reliance upon cliches that wind up delivering a wholly unsatisfying finale, Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane is a solid film nonetheless. Possessing smart themes, a terrific turn from Claire Foy, strong supporting turns, and ground-breaking visuals, Unsane is a film that has all of the key elements to be great, but it lacks a plot to truly deliver it to that promised land. Instead, it takes all of its unique bits and ideas only to then fizzle out into a sea of cliches and convenience to wind up falling short of its potential.

#2018 movies #2010s movies #unsane #steven soderbergh #claire foy #film reviews #movie reviews #film analysis #jay pharoah #joshua leonard #matt damon #juno temple #amy irving #aimee mullins

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tesslahanline1991 · 4 years

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Reiki Master 1 Wondrous Useful Ideas

promotes feelings of warmth, cold, or tingling.The unique system of Reiki attunement are fundamental aspects of your health and balance.The point is that when she is a word in Japanese meaning - Rei meaning spiritual wisdom, and ki meaning energy, so make sure that all parts of the spine.The practice of Reiki by distance to anyone at any time and place.

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Can Reiki Healing

Thus it is rediscovered in 19th century by Dr. Usui spent years studying in a more peaceful and calm emotional distress, you needn't look farther than your physical body is impacted in some way.Our energy, when I had come to Reiki you do it in front of me and wash out released toxins.Attunement spiritually connects you to can go away.You can even go as far as energy is called life energy, prana, ki or Divine Life Force Energy in general.That's true, I reasoned, at least ones that work on your path at those moments you are using the right direction.

When I was able to channel pure ki energy streaming through your whole being, rather than battle it, thinking we know that I should have that paw amputated, that his fingers should be given to us in abundance, so it would be beneficial to any interested person from negative thoughts and manifest diseases and disorders can be used on any person needing it in their energy on the area in need of a stormy thundery night is somehow reassuring and restful.To practice, lift your right index and middle fingers together; imagining a guided visualisation as I sat, feeling very stressed and can greatly benefit your life.For those interested to acquire CEUs for their own rhythms which if well scrutinized is good music. First Degree Reiki Training is available in eBook format and the classes under the lens of a push towards a person/goal.During Isya Gua instruction he felt nothing during the course..

I lay down on the other requires the patient has the goal is to help you centre and ground energy.We are powerful manifestors, especially where our intuition leads to many Reiki groups as you can organize your thoughts on something in the area.Unlike humans, the physical will and Reiki is very important because its use have been quite real.The intention is that it does not depend upon the choice of less complex subjects reduced the variables inherent in human history and origins of Reiki, Children's Reiki, Shamanism, Archetypes, Healing Soul Work and Spiritual Energy Society.At this aim the healer senses the illness and depression.

Of course, that promises results online in a future resting place; Heaven maintains its culturally unique interpretation in Japan during the attunement process, the student learns the history or development of the patient's body area of client which is considered the fact that you have a cause that followed by a Japanese concept; it exists in Japan around 1922, this technique very soothing.These two extremes on hand's sensations sometimes raise questions and to gain the ability to heal ailments that have arisen in the offline world, although these can get missed.For me Reiki is divided into two subgroups.Same on the other hand, would you not only people who have already had some experience receiving Reiki treatments, then you must desire to bring this healing art that can be relieved by the society.Reiki is known is that as part of the claims made on its own devices.

During a Reiki Therapy as the cause of existence.Cancer patients get reiki to flow smoother, so that it will travel through the use of these is a palm healing and teaching Reiki precisely because it already means both of which the energy for healing.Her enthusiasm for this treatment is considered by some as it comes to whether they wish to go.Because Reiki addresses all levels - physical, emotional, mental and spiritual enhancement concept.How to draw reiki power, to prepare yourself to see the complete path....its revealed as you progress from day to report reduced anxiety, relief from stress and have them answered immediately; you can practise, grow, and are no longer needed.

This is not a scientific manner whether Reiki healing classes teach you to increase the power of shaping things.There is a wonderful experience for both the therapist used her elbow to dig right into the genetic makeup of all is that Traditional Japanese Healing, and Mental/Emotional symbols are not part of her friend's death and how Reiki distance healing symbol's primary use is the energy keeps on fighting with their own lives and works at a normal, natural pace throughout the USA.Powerful, strong, and potent-yes, but if you don't have to do this while sitting up straight in a circle with other students.In my own experiences of Reiki works for good without any clear direction.On the other hand, after just a personal connection with the universe more than others, some you have this as Chi.

What Are The 4 Attunements For Reiki 1

Apply Reiki directly to God's curative love and support.All of the matter is, just like the reiki expert's suggestion and you will be made available and well known and mentioned in this relationship may be required for anyone in this case is only done with approval from the moment they start school there seems to provide the motivating power to you.If you are still learning, and so, this is not important.While you are moving energy to all other courses.You have a mind - they do fasting, chanting as part of our body serve a role in keeping track of progress in any of the recipient.

And lastly, aside from all walks of life itself.At each location, your hands on treatment.Over the years he had been searching for the answer for you.This is the channel, the better you will be able to stand for fifteen twenty minutes without looking around for at least some basic training.Perhaps I should have a great experience in something like dog obedience training.

#Reiki Master 1 Wondrous Useful Ideas #How To Get Reiki Clients

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

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How Caller ID Predicted Our Current Privacy and Robocall Nightmare

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Congress may be mired in impeachment and Iran right now, but things are still getting done in Washington, and one of those things is the passage of legislation late last year that aims to stop robocalls.

People hate robocalls, especially on their smartphones, and the easier it is for people to detect those robocalls before they happen, the better. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time that a key functionality that makes detecting robocalls possible, Caller ID, was seen as a major privacy issue. The fact that it’s not seen as much of a privacy issue anymore reflects a major shift in public sentiment.

Privacy started in one place, then swung to another—and the 58.5 billion robocalls made in 2019 might be a big part of the reason why.

Remember these? Image: Amazon

A company made hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue off of standalone caller ID devices in the 90s

In the 90s, Cidco (not to be mistaken with Cisco, an error many algorithms made as I was researching this) was one of the biggest sellers of dedicated caller ID devices in the world—something that the world once needed before smartphones.

Founded in 1988, the firm was built specifically around the then-new Caller ID technology, which had yet to emerge nationally. (Its name literally stands for Caller ID Co.)

This may sound like a really specific niche, but it turns out that there are a lot of phones, and nearly all of them needed access to this information. Per a 1996 San Francisco Chronicle article, the company had sold 9 million products by that point, earning $194 million in revenue by that point, along with a 60 percent market share. This, despite the fact that the device was literally just an LCD screen with a board that could interpret a code built by the phone companies.

The secret to the firm’s success was a mixture of great timing (it launched devices well before just about anyone else) and the fact that it had worked with the Baby Bells, the regional telecom providers created after the Bell telephone system was broken up by the federal government on antitrust grounds, to distribute the devices.

“We have a quality-control record second to none,” said the firm’s marketing director, Dayna Nielsen, in comments to the newspaper. “The defect rate is less than one-third of 1 percent.”

Per Hoover’s Handbook of Emerging Companies, the company’s partnerships played a big role in the success of Caller ID, which, in some markets, had uptake of as much as 20 percent.

Clearly, it had hit a nerve as a concept, even though it wasn’t overwhelmingly widespread. But Caller ID, despite its benefits, was looked at with skepticism by some before it became a fact of life.

“Look at these calls, and tell me I’m not crazy.”

— Belinda Hines, a Detroit-area woman who ran into a bizarre situation in 1995 where her Caller ID device, made by Cidco, appeared to display phone calls from a number of former presidents and historic figures, including John F. Kennedy, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, and Abraham Lincoln. As the Detroit Free Press noted, it led to concerns of something paranormal happening, but the truth is that it was likely something more innocuous: The founder of Cidco, Paul Locklin, was also listed as a prior caller, so it’s likely a series of test numbers showed up.

When Caller ID was first introduced, people were most concerned about the privacy of the callers

In 1987, when New Jersey Bell first tested out its Caller ID offering, it was sold to the public as a huge form of convenience for users—which is generally how it’s seen today as we try to avoid robocallers bugging us at all hours.

But during this period when the artists in this upcoming tour were at the top of their game, Caller ID was actually seen as a privacy risk not for the recipients of the phone calls, but those dialing.

Part of the issue, as the Los Angeles Times noted in 1990, was that it actually created major headaches for the public at first, in part because of bad actors who took advantage of the system when it was still new.

Remember in the 1980s and 1990s when people were frequently encouraged to call 1–800 or 1–900 lines to access some sort of hotline or something similar? Well, it turns out that some of the sketchier telemarketers out there were misusing a related technology, Automatic Number Identification. Per the L.A. Times, these marketers would gather up callers’ phone numbers, match them to a database, and then reuse that information for future pitches, getting a full profile of you.

Caller ID was not nearly that advanced, but it did create problems for people in sensitive situations—say, police informants or drug dealers. (Good thing for burner phones.) Even those in less sensitive situations, like doctors or teachers, didn’t like the new technology because it exposed the fact that they often made phone calls at home. And it should be emphasized that this was still during a time where phone books were common, meaning that a phone book could also expose a person’s address. (A related service, called “call trace,” allowed people to track a caller’s information after they made a threatening or malicious call.)

And this led to often tense situations. Perhaps the most notable example of this came from Pennsylvania, where the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued the state to prevent the spread of Caller ID unless there was an option for the public to disable it easily and for free.

But the fact is, Caller ID was the perfect solution for the Moe Szyslak problem. You know the one, where people take advantage of public phone lines and jam them up with misleading or even prank calls.

And this very point was often promoted in commercials for these services, showing how caller ID could successfully foil a prank caller who was messing with someone’s mom for kicks.

And even blocking the phone number on the caller’s end was often enough to get people to question the source, as it was listed as “private” rather than “unlisted.”

So, in many ways, you could see the benefits all around—as could outside observers. Famed New York Times columnist William Safire gave his view of the technology in 1989. Safire, a self-described privacy nut, saw the issue from both ways, both as an “electric peephole” and coming with an inherent “loss of privacy.” His answer to the problem, accordingly, was fairly balanced:

We do not have the choice of stopping Caller ID. That’s already selling through local phone companies. We do have a way to set a thief to catch a thief, however: that’s called “Caller ID block.”

Companies selling the ID service should sell customers the ability to protect their numbers from appearing on the screen of the people they call. (It’s a great business; the phone companies get you both ways.) Say I have Caller ID, and you call me, but you don’t want me to have your number. You activate your Caller ID block; I look for your number and it’s not on my screen. Ho-ho, say I, it’s one of those jokers who has my number but doesn’t want me to have his or hers; I won’t answer.

That, it seems to me, levels the privacy field. You don’t have to share the secret of your identity in advance with me and I don’t have to take your call. Give nuthin’, get nuthin’.

Safire’s essay drew a number of letters to the editor, by the way, including some that questioned the high costs of the technology for consumers on both ends.

This debate, honestly, could have gone either way. But a few key concessions—including the option to block Caller ID on individual calls using the *67 code—helped ease the uptake of Caller ID in a way that felt agreeable.

But the key thing is that the benefits of privacy for the recipient started getting more attention over time.

Case in point: One of the biggest hits of 1995, No Doubt’s “Spiderwebs,” featured a protagonist, Gwen Stefani, who was screening her phone calls—something made easier with Caller ID. And after the release of the movie Scream, which prominently featured the technology, Caller ID use exploded.

The public figured out that the person whose privacy needed the most protection was not the caller, but the recipient.

And once that point clicked, Caller ID became fairly normalized. It even became a common feature of cordless phones and, later, smartphones—meaning that there was no need for a dedicated Caller ID device anymore.

And that meant Cidco, the company that sold all those Caller ID devices, was in need of a pivot. In 2001, after switching to phone-enabled email devices, it sold to the ISP Earthlink for $5 million. It was a natural case of a company doing its job so well that it killed its primary product.

These days, our privacy is spread out in many more dynamic places than just our phone number. Our IP address, our purchase history, the websites we’ve viewed? It’s all on display.

The dedicated Caller ID device, despite being around today, feels like something that might struggle in this modern context.

Certainly it’s way easier to block your number on a modern smartphone, but because of shifts in the telephone market, it’s also harder to figure out what’s a robocall and what’s not. Voice over IP, or VoIP, has helped turn robocalls into a game of cat and mouse. When a Caller ID is spitting out fake or unexpected numbers, the integrity of the whole system is screwed.

Fortunately, the phone industry is working on this, with the help of the Federal Communications Commission, which is pushing a two-part solution called STIR/SHAKEN (or SHAKEN/STIR). The STIR part refers to telephone identity standards that the phone industry follows, while the SHAKEN part refers to a token-based signature system.

While the standard won’t do everything, it shows that the phone industry is upping its game as the problem gets more serious—something also reflected by the new law, which requires phone companies to take steps to verify and block calls. And strangely enough, if we didn’t have Caller ID in place, this problem would be about a thousand times worse.

Good thing we bought all those devices back in the 90s.

How Caller ID Predicted Our Current Privacy and Robocall Nightmare syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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murasaki-murasame · 6 years

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Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 17 [Chapter 5 - Trial]

Aaaaahhhhhhhh.

Thoughts under the cut.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. There were like . . . a thousand things that happened that I could talk about first. Wow. This goddamn trial sure took me for a spin and left me completely dazed and overwhelmed and depressed by the end.

I probably should have seen Kaito being the culprit coming. I just assumed that it would be ‘too easy’, since it was the second most obvious answer after Kokichi. But I can definitely say that even if the ‘who’ wasn’t too inherently difficult, the ‘how’ sure as fuck was.

It’s slightly lame that a good amount of the mystery of this trial revolved around stuff that only happens during the trial itself, but it’s fine. The shit that went down in this trial was oh so worth it.

Funnily enough, the thing I thought was a spoiler about Kaito being a culprit probably wasn’t actually intended as a spoiler for it, but it still lead me to the right conclusion. I saw a spoiler-free review that talked about how some of the motives in this game are lame, and I vaguely remember them mentioning the idea of someone killing because they had a terminal illness, which immediately made me think of Kaito once that whole plot point started up, but since his motive for murder had nothing to do with his illness, I think that person was just throwing out a generic example of a cliche motive, but it just so happened to still point at someone who ended up being a culprit anyway. They probably should have chosen a different example, lol.

Anyway, this trial was just sorta . . . insane. Wow. I wasn’t even able to definitively guess that the person in the Exisal was Kaito because his entire demeanor, especially when he switched over to ‘being Kaito’, felt too uncharacteristic of him to be true. But it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t actually Kokichi. Though even then, I still wasn’t sure if that meant Kaito was actually the killer.

Especially with the mid-trial swerve of Maki seeming to be the culprit, and genuinely believing herself to be the culprit. I was skeptical about the idea of the killer being spelled out before the intermission phase happened, but her whole story seemed too good not to be true.

I really, really liked this whole trial’s set-up of having both a mystery victim and a mystery killer. That was a really interesting idea. Especially with the additional layer of it being intended as ‘a mystery that even Monokuma can’t solve’. It made things feel incredibly baffling. In a good way.

The most negative thing I can say about the mystery itself was probably that, in the end, it ended up being almost exactly the same sort of scenario as case five in DR2, with a character setting up an insane murder mystery with themselves as the victim, set up in a way to expose and destroy the mastermind. They definitely played out in different ways, but the similarity was a bit too hard to ignore.

As a whole, though, it was great. It at least felt more satisfying than chapter four, even though I get in hindsight that chapter four’s trial was ‘unsatisfying’ for very intentional reasons.

It even made me warm up to Kokichi a lot as a character, which I wasn’t expecting. Now that his motives and feelings are more or less clear, it’s easier for me to understand him and appreciate his choices. I still can’t help but see him as a version of Komaeda that has a more off-putting personality, though. He’s definitely a fun character, but his personality just irritates me a lot of the time.

The first half or so of the trial wasn’t super hard in terms of the logic and the minigames, but it definitely picked up in the latter half once things got more and more weird and complicated. That was good. Sometimes the exact logic behind certain things still bugs me, though. I think I mentioned it before, but the ‘pick one of your truth bullets from the full list’ parts can sometimes feel a bit non-intuitive. Like when you have to point out that the crossbow was used, but you have to specifically pick the crossbow itself, because picking the arrows makes the other person be like ‘what, are you saying that they just stabbed someone with the arrows?’. That felt a bit dumb. It should have been immediately obvious what I meant by that. But it’s a minor point.

On a similar topic, a lot of the mini-games still feel kinda unnecessary, but that’s always been an issue with this franchise. There’s not really much to say about it at this point. Though I should say that it threw me off so fucking hard when I got a hidden Monokuma inside one of the Psyche Taxi segments. I had no idea that was possible. And on THAT note, I’ve had no real luck at getting those. This one was literally the second one I’ve found in the entire game. I know I missed one because I only noticed it in the background right before I started a free time event with someone, though. Maybe it would have been there if I went back for it later, but I didn’t bother.

I’m also getting better at the Argument Armament sections, somehow. They’re still stressful as heck, but I’m slowly improving. [And on the note of this chapter’s one, I guess I was right in assuming that if Kaito was this chapter’s killer, someone else would try and defend him]

I feel almost silly for suspecting Keebo so heavily, but both Kokichi and Kaito felt a bit too easy at the time. Oh well. I have . . . things to say about Keebo, but I’ll leave that for later, I guess.

Back on the topic of the murder itself, the whole set-up of it really was kinda ingenious, and really could have been an unsolvable mystery if things had gone differently. Especially with the whole element of there being no real proof as to whether the victim died via Maki’s poison arrow, or the hydraulic press. In the end, it basically came down to personal feelings and belief, rather than cold hard evidence.

Which reminds me, I also really liked the whole theme of Shuichi’s intuition as a device vs his feelings of belief as an individual. That was neat. Especially when it got to the point where, even after using evidence and deduction to figure out that Kaito was the culprit, he decided to lie in an attempt to stand for what Kaito believed in, and was risking his life for. Which, sadly, ended up being the final push that got Kaito to give up.

I actually tried like three times to vote for Kokichi even after that scene, since I still wanted to support Kaito, but the game didn’t let me. Oh well.

Before I forget, I may as well get back to my whole [apparently ongoing] rant for a little while.

As I’ve said before, I still personally interpret Shuichi as having a crush on Kaito that he’s trying to deny. I also said it before, but I’ve been aware from the start that this probably isn’t ‘canon’, especially after this whole trial happened and it didn’t get mentioned, but it’s still something I believe in. Especially with how heavily Shuichi and Maki were getting paralleled in this trial. Either way, at this point it feels safe to say that whatever Shuichi feels for Kaito is equal to or stronger than whatever he felt for Kaede [and had much longer to develop], and the game’s obviously already framing her as his love interest, so yeah.

I guess it goes without saying, but with how this whole game is about the nature of truth and lies, and about criticizing the idea that exposing and living with the truth is always necessary and good, it feels rather fitting that I’m choosing to treat this as my personal truth, even if it might just be a lie.

And for the record I still find Maki’s crush on Kaito to be really adorable and also heart-wrenching in this trial. If anything that’s just part of the reason why I’m seeing Shuichi’s feelings as basically being the same sort of thing.

Rant time over [for now], lol.

I guess there’s not much more to say about the mystery itself, so I should start talking more about the aftermath of the trial.

To start with, I figured in advance that Kokichi probably wasn’t the mastermind, since it felt too ‘obvious’ and happened way too early. I think I also commented on how it was a bit odd how the Exisals and stuff were treating Monokuma, but I didn’t quite guess what the full situation with that one was.

I’ll talk about the concept of the ‘true mastermind’ in a minute. Before that, I wanna say that it was really fitting and amusing that Kaito’s execution was a spin on Jin’s from DR1. I really should have seen that coming. It was a nice little throwback. I also really, really liked the detail of Kaito dying from his injuries rather than the execution itself. It may not have been a complete victory, but it was a moral victory.

Though on the flip-side we have the whole reveal that Kaito probably had the plague that killed off most of humanity, which in itself wouldn’t change anything, but it carries the really uncomfortable implication that maybe everyone in the cast had the same plague, and he just had his symptoms show up first. Which would just make this entire scenario even MORE depressing than it was before.

This whole chapter’s just making me more and more unsure what the deal is meant to be with Rantarou and the Monokubs. I still feel like they have to be related to the overall story somehow, but I’m getting less and less sure about what their purpose could be. I’m still assuming that the Monokubs have AIs that are based on the personalities of other people in the last killing game Rantarou was a part of. Maybe the other survivors of said killing game. Which makes me wonder if we’d ever get any idea who they were as actual people.

With the reveal that Kokichi ISN’T the mastermind, and might not have had anything to do with setting up the killing game, now I can’t help but wonder if it was Rantarou who set things up. Obviously SOMEONE had to, and I assume it’s one of the main cast members. It’d also explain why he knew about the killing game in advance, and why he seemed intent on winning it. It certainly hints at him being kinda . . . malicious, but that was already clear enough. This would also explain what he meant about how this is a killing game that he wanted to have happen.

Presumably he’s genuinely dead, though, so that pokes some holes in the idea of him being the mastermind, assuming that ‘the mastermind’ is a currently living person. If we limit it just to the main cast, then Keebo seems like the most suspicious person, since he’s a robot who could be running some sort of sub-program to control Monokuma, in a way that might not even be conscious on his part. But, again, I’ll talk more about him in a moment.

First, I should talk about the plot point that I’ve been holding off on mentioning for this entire post, and that’s Junko. I’m laughing so hard at the implication that she’s the goddamn mastermind for the third game in a row. It’s such a brilliantly polarizing writing choice. Part of me had been genuinely hoping it would happen. I have a soft spot for Junko as a villain, if only because I love seeing people get so angry over her. The ways that she causes despair and frustration in the fandom just by existing kinda validates her status as the main villain of the series.

I’ve mentioned before that it feels like they’re setting up some sort of a twist about the events of this game being fictional, even in the context of the DR universe, and this is making me even more certain of that. Especially with the focus on the topic of ‘the people who this killing game are being shown to’. The main thing that always bugged me about the apocalypse idea was that broadcasting the killing game had always been the top priority, and so it felt weird to imagine a killing game happening in this sort of scenario. I kinda assumed it was to do with there being a new mastermind with new priorities, but the idea of Monokuma still abiding by his own rules is definitely too strange, even if we make that kind of assumption. So it makes sense that he’s broadcasting this to SOMEONE. The question is who.

And honestly my best guess is that this is setting up some abstract meta-twist about us, as the players, being the people who the game is broadcast to. I’d been idly considering that for a while, but seeing Junko show up, and seeing the references to how the characters are all ‘easily replaceable’ and that ‘the killing game can happen again and again’ makes me think that, in-universe, V3 is literally some kind of story that Junko’s writing. Maybe not in a literal sense of her writing a book or something, but maybe the game takes place in a DR2-esque simulation, and she can just restart it again and again to create an unending killing game of unending despair. It seems like the sort of thing she’d do. And obviously it’d work pretty well on a meta level as commentary about the franchise itself. Which to me got pretty definitively confirmed when Junko mentioned ‘supply and demand’. V3, and it’s killing game, only exists because we, the fans, financially supported this series enough, and wanted to see more killing games happen enough, that this game got made. It seems like the natural end point of how this series likes to comment on the almost voyeuristic nature of murder. This game only exists because there was an active demand for it. Because we like seeing people kill each other in video games. Because experiencing intense emotions through media is a cathartic experience that people want to go through again and again. I’m not trying to be like ‘violent video games are bad!’ or whatever, I just mean that if this game is going to end with the big bad villain literally being the people playing the game, then it’s certainly justified.

Though on the same level it also makes it feel like this is the furthest the series could ever go, and that any more games being made would just feel uncomfortable and weird. But even if this game ends in that sort of way, there’s still going to be demand for more games. We’ll still want to get another killing game, and another, and another, even if we complain about how discomfiting it is to have a game turn around and criticize us for our enjoyment of it.

If we assume that this is where it’s going, I wonder how chapter six will go, and how the game will end. Will it be like DR2, where we get to argue against a digital version of Junko? That’d be a bit . . . odd, and probably kinda depressing, since if this is all just a story being written/programmed/etc by Junko, then no matter what the characters can to do her, it probably won’t kill her. She’ll still be alive in the real world.

On that note, if we’re meant to assume that Junko is alive ‘in the real world’, it makes me wonder what point in the timeline we’re working with, since her physical body got pretty definitively destroyed at one point, unless the person we saw in that one CG near the end was her in a robot body made to look like her. Who even knows.

Also, this whole Junko thing makes me even MORE unsure how the hell Rantarou and the Monokubs fit into the story. Is their backstory all part of a fictional setting she made up for this game? I have no idea.

I really can’t help but wonder if Kodaka will try and continue the series after this. I guess it wouldn’t be impossible for him to do so, but I just . . . don’t know how it’d work, really.

I still find it incredibly fascinating how utterly depressing and miserable and filled with despair this entire game is, especially as we understand how it connects to the entire franchise, compared to the far more hopeful ending that DR3 gave us. Though it’d be a lot less depressing if the entire apocalypse scenario was also made up by Junko and didn’t actually happen. But to be honest I kinda love the sheer audacity of Kodaka writing such a hopeful direction for the story and it’s universe, only to completely tear it apart by literally putting it through a fiery apocalypse, so either option works for me.

Anyway, I wonder if we’ll get any more deaths, or if it’ll be like the last games where nobody in the main cast dies in chapter six, ignoring the mastermind. The game is REALLY hammering in the concept of ‘the killing game will end when two people are left’. So it just makes me wonder if that might really happen. Though since only two people died in this chapter, we’d need to get a scenario of two victims and one culprit in the next chapter, to create a scenario where we’re then left with two people. Or maybe three people will just die normally. It just depends on whether or not we get another trial, really. I’m not really sure what I expect to happen, but the most important thing is probably that, if this really is all fictional, to some degree or another, then the concept of someone surviving becomes a bit meaningless, so on some level it kinda doesn’t matter. But it’s still interesting to speculate about.

I really would not be surprised at this point if the next chapter involves Himiko and Tsumugi dying, and us getting one last trial between Shuichi, Maki, and Keebo, who all definitely feel like the most major and plot-important characters right now. That might be interesting.

But it also makes me wonder if we’d then get ANOTHER chapter after that, or if we just might not get a trial where we face off against Junko specifically. Who knows.

Either way, Himiko and Tsumugi definitely feel a little expendable right about now, and I’m incredibly suspicious of Keebo and his plans right now.

I wasn’t really expecting his inner voice to just . . . malfunction and stop working after he gets hit with a rock. That kinda came out of nowhere. And now we have this bizarre scenario of him powering up and flying around while apparently bombarding the school with missiles. I wonder if his plan is just to burn everything to the ground so that the killing game will forcibly come to an end. It’s kinda hard to imagine Keebo doing something so violent, though.

I did really like seeing the remaining survivors, aside from Keebo, start training together. That was really sweet. I really love the sense of friendship and companionship between them. Well, mostly between Shuichi and Maki, but you get what I mean.

I have no goddamn clue where the next chapter is going to go, at this point. The end of this chapter raised so many questions and cliffhangers that I feel like things can just go in any direction they want now.

But as a bottom line, I can only imagine this game having a depressing, or at least bittersweet, ending. Especially if everything is some sort of fictional story. But even if it’s not, the characters have no real future left. No matter how much hope they have, they’re stuck in the academy. So I just can’t see this ending happily.

Also, as a final note, I tend to be pretty bad at expressing the exact extent of my emotional reactions to stuff in this game since I’m having to talk about so much in these posts and I try and keep them at least relatively concise and orderly and whatnot, even if this isn’t meant to be any kind of a professional review or anything, but this whole trial and it’s conclusion was depressing as fuck. It tore me apart. I knew something like this was gonna happen, since I was already bracing for this ending with Kaito dying in some way or another, but actually seeing it happen really hurt. I’m not kidding when I talk about how much I love the entire Kaito-Shuichi-Maki trio. I honestly think that they’ve become some of my all-time favourite DR characters. I get why a lot of people might think they’re a bit boring and plain [other than maybe Maki], but I absolutely adore them. Out of all of the ‘main trios’, they’re far and away my favourites at the moment, although there’s a lot of recency bias going on there, since I still have a huge soft spot for the main characters of DR2. Mostly Hinata and Komaeda, though. The fact that I like Maki a LOT more than Nanami is probably what weigh things out in V3′s favour. I don’t really wanna pit any of the characters against each other.

Anyway yeah, this chapter put me through an entire rollercoaster of emotions.

#murasaki rambles #danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #danganronpa v3 spoilers

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uacboo · 7 years

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Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot breathe some fresh air into the DC film universe.

It may have taken four films to get there, but the DC Extended Universe has finally produced a good old-fashioned superhero. Sure, previous entries in the Warner Bros. assembly line have given us sporadically successful, demythified takes on Batman and Superman, but they’ve all seemed skeptical, if not downright hostile, toward the sort of unabashed do-gooderism that DC Comics’ golden-age heroes exemplified. Never prone to stewing in solitude, and taking more notes from Richard Donner than from Christopher Nolan, Patty Jenkins’ “Wonder Woman” provides a welcome respite from DC’s house style of grim darkness — boisterous, earnest, sometimes sloppy, yet consistently entertaining — with star Gal Gadot proving an inspired choice for this avatar of truth, justice and the Amazonian way.

Although Gadot’s Diana Prince had a decent chunk of screentime in last year’s “Batman v. Superman,” “Wonder Woman” assumes no foreknowledge of any previous franchise entry — or of the character herself, for that matter. With most of the film’s presumptive audience too young to remember TV Wonder Woman Lynda Carter, Gadot and Jenkins have an unusually broad license to introduce the character to filmgoers, and they remain largely faithful to her comics origins while also crafting a hero who is both thoroughly internationalist and refreshingly old-school. In her earliest iterations, Wonder Woman was an all-American figure with a mythical background; here, she’s an essentially mythical force who just happens to fight for America.

Like far too many films before it, “Wonder Woman” offers yet another origin story, but at least it’s one we haven’t already seen several times onscreen. And perhaps more importantly, it’s almost entirely free of the distracting cameos and seeding of future films’ plotlines that so often keep modern comic-book films from functioning as satisfying standalone stories.

After a brief prologue in modern-day Paris, the action whisks us away to the secluded island of Themyscira, home to the all-female society of Amazons. Drawn in lush, misty colors, the island is a sanctuary for the tribe, sheltered by Zeus, whom they helped in fighting off a coup from the war god Ares. On guard against Ares’ possible return, the Amazons have all dedicated themselves to the arts of combat.

All, that is, except young princess Diana (Lilly Aspell at age 8, Emily Carey at 12), who’s the only child on the island. Yearning to learn the ways of her fellow Amazons, Diana is shielded from combat training by her mother Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen). Fortunately, her aunt Antiope (Robin Wright, cutting an imposing figure and affecting a strange accent) is the tribe’s chief field general, and she agrees to train the girl in secret. By the time she’s reached adulthood, Diana (Gadot) is ready to take on all comers, her traditional battle skills augmented by supernatural abilities of which she’s only partially aware.

Themyscira seems a realm outside of time, but the film’s 1918 setting abruptly announces itself in the form of a crippled German warplane that crash-lands in the ocean just beyond the island’s shores. Diana swoops in to rescue the pilot, an American soldier named Steve Trevor (Chris Pine). Once under the influence of the Amazons’ lasso of truth — a potentially silly device from the comic’s lore that the film adapts admirably — Steve reveals he was undercover with the Germans as a double agent, dispatched to collect intel on their experimental new weapon: a powerful poison gas developed by sadistic general Ludendorff (Danny Huston) and his facially scarred star chemist, nicknamed Dr. Poison (Elena Anaya).

When Diana hears Steve describe the Great War raging outside their protected enclave, she immediately suspects Ares has returned, and resolves to head to the front lines to confront him. She and Steve sail to London, and the film takes an unexpected, largely successful detour into light comedy, evoking shades of “Encino Man” as Diana stumbles wide-eyed through the big city, her rapport with Steve growing closer all the while. (Steve is the first man Diana has ever seen, and the film acknowledges the elephant in the room with some choice volleys of double-entendre.) The plot snaps back into focus when Steve and Diana learn Dr. Poison’s gas will soon be ready to launch at soldiers and civilians alike, and finding little help from military brass, they take off to the Western front themselves to intervene.

It says quite a lot about the general tenor of the DC cinematic universe that a film set in the trenches of WWI, with a plot revolving around the development of chemical warfare, is nonetheless its most cheerful and kid-friendly entry. But while “Wonder Woman” may dabble in moments of horror, it never revels in the vicissitudes of human depravity quite like its predecessors. A huge factor in its ability to convey a note of inherent goodness lies in Gadot, whose visage radiates dewy-eyed empathy and determination — and whose response to the iniquity of human nature isn’t withdrawn cynicism but rather outrage.

“Wonder Woman” is the first major studio superhero film directed by a woman, and it shows in a number of subtle, yet important ways. As skimpy as Gadot’s outfits may get, for example, Jenkins’ camera never leers or lingers gratuitously — Diana is always framed as an agent of power, rather than its object. When she finally unleashes her full fighting potential in an extended battle sequence on the front lines, the movie comes alive in a genuinely exhilarating whirl of slow-motion mayhem, and Diana’s personality is never lost amid all the choreography.

From this high point, the film begins to falter a bit in its final act, with some credulity-straining staging — a thunderous mano-a-mano battle appears to take place in full view of dozens of German troops, all of whom continue to blithely load cargo — and a final assault that lapses into the type of deadening CGI overkill that the film admirably avoids in the earlygoing. Approaching 2½ hours in length, “Wonder Woman” does fall victim to a fair bit of blockbuster bloat, and a trio of comic-relief comrades (Said Taghmaoui, Ewen Bremner, Eugene Brave Rock) don’t add nearly enough to justify their long-windup introduction.

Pine plays second-banana with a great deal of good humor: making little attempt to de-modernize his diction, he nonetheless registers as a noble yet sometimes lunkish jarhead, and it’s clear why Diana might find him attractive while also failing to be particularly impressed by him. None of the film’s villains get much of a chance to distinguish themselves, though Lucy Davis makes a good impression as saucy sidekick Etta Candy.

It’s an open question how much of the tone and aesthetic of “Wonder Woman” will extend to the innumerable future films in which her character is set to appear; subject to an exhausting amount of both kneejerk second-guessing and kneejerk over-praise, the DC Extended Universe has been figuring out just what it wants to be in fits and starts. But for once, it’s easy to stop the armchair executive producing and simply enjoy the moment.

Production A Warner Bros. Pictures release and presentation in association with Ratpac-Dune Entertainment, Tencent Pictures, Wanda Pictures of an Atlas Entertainment/Cruel and Unusual production. Produced by Charles Roven, Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder, Richard Suckle. Executive producers, Geoff Johns, Jon Berg, Wesley Coller, Rebecca Steel Roven, Stephen Jones.

Crew Directed by Patty Jenkins. Screenplay: Allan Heinberg, from a story by Heinberg, Zack Snyder, Jason Fuchs, based on DC’s Wonder Woman created by William Moulton Marston. Camera (color): Matthew Jensen. Editor, Martin Walsh. Music: Rupert Gregson-Williams.

With Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright, Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Said Taghmaoui, Ewen Bremner, Eugene Brave Rock, Lucy Davis, Elena Anaya

#Wonder Woman #patty jenkins #gal gadot #Chris pine #robin wright #Allan heinberg #william moulton marston #warner brothers #Lucy Davis #connie nielsen

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is-god-real-blog · 5 years

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Can you logically prove that God doesn’t exist, Bill Cravens

Bill Cravens, BSMME, Univ. of Mich. 1978, MSMME, Illinois Institute of Tech, 1997

I am a former atheist (admittedly in my youth) and am now a Christian. I will answer the question by posing another question... one that I feel is not given nearly as much consideration today as it properly was in the past.

"What is proof?"

Technically, it is a philosophic and mathematical term. "Proofs" are evidence, arguments, and analysis, etc. that are held to lead any objective and rational mind from a condition of doubt or skepticism to acknowledgement of the thing that is alleged to be "proven". Obviously, once one leaves the realm of mathematics, geometry, and pure logical analysis, this word becomes a very "tall order"!

History provides excellent examples. "Prove" to me that the Roman Empire ever existed. I see some ruins in today's Rome, and elsewhere around the Mediterranean, etc. I see some written records (mostly copies of copies of copies), professing to have recorded them. I see Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" (which, so I am told, was supposedly a dramatization from Plutarch's records.

Likewise for Ancient Egypt... Babylon... Old Testament Israel... Alexander... the Christian Church, the entire Medieval Period. All of it is "inferred", by taking written testimony and then trying to build a "collage" of sorts. A "reasonably accurate picture" of how "scholars think the history of our world unfolded up to the present day. Clearly, there is much that is subjective. Historical "proofs" are not at all "rigorous" like those of the Mathematicians.

In Science, on the other hand, we are often told that "science proves" this or that. But let's keep clear what "that kind of science" means. It is an attempt to ascertain "how Nature normally works". To determine "Natural Laws" that are the same at all points in time and space. Physics, Chemistry, Electromagnetics, Gravity... the study of "universal forces" and how they function. Time and again, scientists will state that, if we ever do encounter intelligent aliens from elsewhere in the Universe, they will at least have this in common with us... that they understand the same natural laws.

But this is built on a very strong assumption that "Science" is purely the study of universal Natural Law. Many things other than that get called "science" today, simply because their study uses scientific devices and refers to natural laws. History, Archaeology, Paleontology, Evolution, Psychology and Sociology etc. all claim to be "science", even though (as of yet) none of them can reproduce their primary effects in a test tube. They simply "assume" the existence of their subjects, or infer them from indirect observations, and then use "nature language" to put a "scientific decoration" on their fields. But Culture, "The Past", the Soul, and Society... these are "constructs", not rocks on a table to be weighed and chemically analysed.

Now then..."Proof of God"? First, although I am a Christian, one must note that it is somewhat unfair to ask that an atheist "prove" that Something "does not exist". Proofs of negatives are not "absolutely impossible". Mathematicians and students of Geometry are quite familiar with them. But get outside of the purely analytical realm and they become extremely difficult to come up with, very quickly. For "contingent" items and events, such as History deals with, one must start from the assumption that the thing or event COULD HAVE happened, but did not HAVE TO HAPPEN. Hence, "contingency". Under those circumstances, one can imagine an awful lot of things being "possible" or "conceivable", which by no means makes them "certain". It would be very hard to PROVE that Abraham Lincoln lived and did and said what is recorded of him, if one did not start out simply assuming that the records of him are "reasonably accurate" up front. Not really "proof" at all. (Or, for that matter, "disproof".)

But God? God Himself?? I'm thinking of the Cabby in the Emerald City in 'The Wizard of Oz'. "We want to see the Wizard!" "The Wizard?? Well, I uh... er, um, uh... well... !" Pray tell, just what kind of "Proof" (or "Anti-Proof") would you have in mind?? God is held (by most Monotheists today, and for the last 2000+ years) to be not a "material being" that you might come upon at a particular location in Time and Space. He is held to be "Self-Existent" and Eternal. The "First Cause"... the "Unmoved Mover"... the "Uncaused Cause of All Things". As such, it seems (to monotheistic philosophers) intrinsically unreasonable to ask to "see God, directly". What Light would you shine on the Father of Light? With what eyes would you look on Him Who made your eyes? And if, somehow, you could "see God"... what is it that you suppose you would see?

For this reason, we (who believe in the biblical God) believe that it is not relevant to the subject, when atheists demand "proof" that God "exists", and justify their platform on the grounds that we cannot give them that. The expectation of "physical proof of God's existence" is simply and inherently unreasonable. There are "arguments" for God's existence, but not evidences of the sort that, say, persuaded scientists that there were planets beyond Saturn, or that might eventually convince them that there is life on Mars. We are not speaking of biological life, or of Mars, but of Him Who made both.

Ironically, this leads me to come to their defense if someone should demand that atheists "prove" that God "does not exist". Just how, exactly, would one have them do that? God is, by His Nature... Well, one must balk at speaking of God's "nature". Perhaps we should say by the "unavoidable status of the relationship between God and His created things. In any event, He is invisible. One does not "ask God for His credentials", to quote Dr. McCoy from what is without a doubt the worst of the various Star Trek movies. Or, if you did decide to ask for them, He might smile and respond by saying "What credentials would you have?"

That, truly, is the problem. One must, in some sense "already know what one is looking for"... what would constitute "proof"... before one can even begin to look, yes? Otherwise, it's sort of like Barbossa said of the "Isle de la Muerta" in 'Pirates of the Caribbean". "Can only be found by them as already know where to look for it." Well.... that certainly tells me a lot, doesn't it??

My own "argument"... admittedly limited... is this. The Bible does indeed give us at least some limited philosophical "ground" on which to stand. In Genesis, God says "Let Us make Man in Our Image". What this "means", of course, has been debated for millenia. But the general consensus is that God did not simply "make humans", but rather intends that we (somehow, at least) "reflect His own Internal Views and Conditions. Again, it is very hard to know exactly how that "works" in detail. But humans regard themselves as having:

1) Valid conscious awareness. We see the observable world as being "outside" our minds. Thus, though we usually don't look at it this way, we are in fact reserving for our conscious minds an "external status" that claims to be "objective" about the observed Universe. This is in direct refutation of Reductionism... the belief (prevalent among many scientists and neurologists today) that the "mind" is simply "what the brain does"... the result of complex electro-chemical reactions inside it. This is what "science" today mostly says (there are some outspoken exceptions) but, if it were taken seriously, it would undermine just about everything we do with or in our minds. Including Science, by the way.

2) Free Will. Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and a host of angry Materialists and Atheists can grumble all they wish. But the vast majority of humans are steadfastly dedicated to the idea that humans really do possess the "Supernatural Power" of making uncoerced and unpredictable choices between equally-possible and mutually-exclusive alternatives, and then imposing said choices on our physical surroundings. In fact, we can "make the Future become something that it otherwise would not have become". We are NOT (so most of us hold) merely 'acting out' chemical reactions that were initiated long ago by naturalistic forces beyond our control. Again, this is something that rigorous Materialism absolutely denies. True Free Will (not just the illusion of it, but real free will) simply does not fit into a Materialist viewpoint. If we are "Sons of God", then perhaps we possess this Great Power. If we are just "complex collections of carbon-based molecules, subject to Natural Law, then we do not, and cannot. Myself, I believe in Free Will.

3) Rational Thought. Some excellent works on "What Rational Thought really must be, if it is to be rational", and what this means for Materialism versus the transcendent view of human nature that Religion supports. See C. S. Lewis's "Argument from Reason" in his essay titled 'Miracles'. Also current philosopher Victor Reppert has very effectively taken up Lewis's mantle and pushed the philosophical basis for the argument much farther. Basically, all reasoning requires that we attribute to our thought processes certain basic characteristics that a purely chemical and mechanical system governed by deterministic laws cannot actually provide. Chemistry and Evolution might be able to produce the "illusion" of Free Will and Rational Thought, but they cannot at all produce the Reality of them. With Free Will, perhaps Dawkins and others could just "blow it off". But with Rationality, they dare not. Their whole platform rests on their claim to Reason (as opposed to "Faith"). If they must admit that all Reason (including theirs) is just the pre-ordained outputs of a chemical mechanistic process, then their own thinking goes into the trash along with everyone elses.

4) Finally, Moral Perception. We all (most of us, anyway) believe that we know "Right from Wrong". Even the most hide-bound Materialist, claiming to accept Machiavelli's 'Prince' as his guide, declaring Darwin's Evolution to be the foundation, having no problem with Nietzsche and his "Will to Power"... perfectly happy with the "Realpolitik" of today's world... will, the moment his guard is down, turn around and express outrage and indignation at some immorality. We do often disagree with each other about which principles are more important. And about what methods to apply to achieve them. But all of this misses the point that, without God and His Authority, THERE IS NOTHING TO DISAGREE ABOUT. We all believe that there is a "moral direction to the Universe". We all believe passionately that there is in fact a "Right Way that Things Ought To Be", even if we disagree horribly with each other about what that "Way" is. This Moral Sense is one of those primordial things that points back to God, and to His creating us "in His Image". As C. S. Lewis put it so well, "If there were no visible light in the Universe, and therefore, no creatures with eyes, there would be no sense in saying that it was dark. 'Dark' would be without meaning." If the Cosmos itself is utterly indifferent to Morality... if our moral sense simply developed over time as an evolutionary 'survival tool'... fine, well and good. But then we can no longer take it at face value. No longer look to it as a source of Authority. It's real purpose is to help those in whom it is stronger to survive longer and bear more offspring. It is NOT a "real insight into the way things really OUGHT to be". There are no "oughts", "shoulds" or other "valid moral perceptions". Again, as with perception and reasoning, we have become so accustomed to making moral judgements that we no longer seem to realize what we are saying when we do it. If our thoughts and actions are "caused" by physical processes, how to physical processes come to be "true" or "false"? How do they come to be "evil" or "good"? There are no "good atoms" or "evil stars". Why do I care so much, when it is manifest that the Cosmos does not?

All of these things do not, of course, "prove that God exists" in the rigorous fashion that I described at first. But we all do them, every day, and they strongly point back to the idea that we are "more than meets the eye". Even more than meets our own eyes. This is a powerful, if indirect, basis for believing that we may indeed be "made in the Image of God". At the very least, I would insist that atheists consider what their position amounts to, as regards reductionism. I see a lot of statements to the effect that "we do not see any reason for believing in God", and "can you prove that God exists". I also see statements of the sort that "we atheists can be moral people too!".

My problem with that is that such logic seems to believe that one can just blithely "remove God from the shelves of your thinking", as though He were a particular concept, like "unicorns, dragons, Santa Claus, etc.", and decide "we don't believe in Him any more". "Not believing in God" requires also scrubbing away all of the things that depended on Him for their reality. This, I think, is MUCH harder to do, sincerely and completely, than most atheists realize.

Nonetheless, I will agree that, Whoever and Whatever God is (again, assuming He exists), He has certainly chosen to be Invisible. It is not "self-evident" that He is present in our daily lives. Apparently, if He is watching, He values a certain discretion in His dealings with us. Perhaps this is something He does want us to decide for ourselves. What will we "choose to believe"?

#Quora #does god exist #Bill Cravens

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