#religious zealots in the U. S.

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/a-lawless-supreme-court-majority/

A Lawless Supreme Court Majority

We know good intentions can go wrong.  The relatives of a 3-year-old girl recently beat and choked her to death in their efforts to exorcise the devil they assumed possessed her. Authorities found the child’s crumpled body on the floor of the church her family attended. As might be expected, the police charged the mother, grandfather, and uncle with murder. (FreeThought Today, June-July, pg. 5) The accused not only violated the child’s individual rights according to civil law, but they also violated her human rights. Human rights are those of personhood as listed in the fifth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.  They are conferred not by the government but are the inalienable rights of all humans because they are human. Primary are the rights to life, liberty, and property. The government’s charge is to preserve those rights through its laws and with the consent of the governed. In other words, individual rights derive their authority from human rights.  Human rights may be narrowly curtailed to protect the general good. The internment of Japanese citizens during World War 11 is one example. Earlier in our history, Native Americans suffered similar curtailments.  Slavery skirted the issue because slave owners successfully argued that Africans captured to work on plantations were property and not entitled to human rights.  For a time, American women suffered the same fate, having been defined as chattel. The Catholic Church attempted to set that precedent centuries earlier. Largely, In the course of our history, human rights have been the preserve of white males. When Samuel Alito declared women had no Constitutional right to an abortion, he reflected that patriarchal view. It allowed him to overturn 50 years of precedent established by a previous Court. That earlier Court had concluded the right to privacy was inalienable, as implied by the 14th Amendment, and that it pertained to women as well as men:  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law; nor deny any person within its jurisdictions the equal protection of the laws. Alito saw no evidence that the right to privacy pertained to reproductive freedom under the Constitution. He rejected the previous court’s extrapolation which argued the right was drawn from references elsewhere in the document. Instead, the absence of an overt statement led Alito to reason that the degree to which a woman can control her body should be left to individual states.  Imagine! The right to privacy as it applies to women is now subjected to a vote. The decision is stunning and weighed against society’s greater good is ludicrous. To abort a fetus the size of a pea poses no threat to the culture. When Alito sacrifices a woman’s inalienable right upon the altar of his opinion, he and those who agree with him deny equal treatment under the law to half the population. What’s more, their decision poses another Constitutional question that threatens a woman’s right to privacy.  The question is personhood. When do human rights apply? Among conservative religious groups, the answer is human rights apply at the moment of conception, giving preference to the fetus over the pregnant woman. They argue all human life is sacred and must be protected. “Sacred” has no meaning in civil law, however. It is a religious concept and implies the existence of a soul.  These concepts lie outside the purview of legislative law.  Nonetheless, the Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade and leave the abortion issues to the states opens the door for Christian zealots to codify their narrow views into civil law. The consequence for women is to obliterate the distinction between individual rights and human rights. Already, we have seen the Court’s recent tendency to expand Christian rights. Their latest ruling on prayer makes no pretense about their disregard for the separation of church and state.  At a time when the country suffers irreconcilable differences on many levels, the Court’s declining credibility among many put the country in peril. For women, being forced to demand human rights through the ballot box is a step backward. Even so, we can be grateful that suffrage is the one Constitutional provision that is unamendable. The challenge ahead is that  1 million people have changed their voter registration from Democrat to Republican in time for the 2022 midterms. Many of them are suburban women who gave Congress its slim Democratic majority in the last election. If they put their concerns about inflation above their freedom and the freedom of their daughters, then hope for women’s equality suffers a blow from which it will be slow to recover. (Republished from 6/20/22)  

#a woman's right to privacy #curtailments in human rights #individual vs. humn rights #Rove v. Wade #Samuel Alito #suburban voters in the 2022 election #the crime of human rights being put to a vote #the high Court violates women's human rights #The Trail of Tears #World War 11 and Japanese internment

[vitosscaletta]

>:) Personality + Background for Helena, Basics + Appearance for Erin

YES thank u... vampire time

Helena

PERSONALITY

What’s their alignment?

Probably neutral good ehehehe

What are their hobbies and interests? Do they have any particular “favorites” (food, books, and so on)?

Her number one passion is acting, it’s not really a hobby since she does it professionally (or is trying to lol).. She enjoys learning history though, especially the mid-18th century :^) Also music, corny movies, she’s also a huge sims fan >:)

As for her favorites uhhh her favorite band is My Chemical Romance DUH, fav movies are Shakespeare in Love, Valley of The Dolls (yeah ik it sucks),... Shark Tale.... aaaaand her favorite food is fries. Or it was, she can’t eat it anymore :(

What are they bad at?

Within the game’s mechanics and all that.. she’s not much good in a fight (thank u faelike background). She’s still significantly stronger than the average human of course, but very fragile for vampire standarts :/ Noodle arms bitch

Do they have any vices/addictions/mental illnesses?

None that I can think of

What are their goals and motivations?

Before her embrace it was to become a famous actress.. which isn’t possible anymore, she’s still craving that kind of lifestyle though. She grew up not being very well off and not being very popular either, so it’s kinda... wanting to be someone important? Like that Will Smith fish from shark tale :)

What are their manners like? Any habits?

She’s rather well-mannered, not exactly posh but she doesn’t do anything weird in public either.. usually.

What are they most afraid of?

irrelevance... something like that :/

BACKGROUND

Where were they born? What was their childhood like?

She’s originally from San Francisco, grew up with a single mom and her younger sister. They weren’t very well off so her mom had to work a lot, it was pretty much just her and her sister :/ She wasn’t very popular either so she made only few friends in school, it was lonely :(

What’s their family like?

Her mom Jenny is a nice lady, very goal-oriented.. she was very popular in high school, which is how she met Helena’s dad. He’s originally from germany and comes from a long line of vampire hunters and religious zealots (Society of Leopold hoes..), doesn’t really know anything about it though. His family are just a bunch of weird catholics. They had two children, miss Helena & her little Sister, Elizabeth before he divorced his wife and fucked off 👋. He cut off all contact and doesn’t pay child support bc he’s a freak. Also Elizabeth is currently studying law somewhere, their mother insisted they make something of themselves >:(

What factions or organizations are they a part of? What ranks and titles do they hold?

She’s with the camarilla, mostly due to the fact that Christian is in it too. She came to them all starry-eyed because the other members were all sexy, powerful and rich vampires which is pretty much what she wants to be like lmao.. She works directly for Lacroix, kinda like the fledgling except with better pay, slightly less shitty jobs and a tiny bit more respect (only a tiny bit everyone still thinks she’s dumb af). She just has to run small errants lol. There’s no official rank or title though lol.

She’s not really loyal to them or anything and quickly becomes disillusioned by it all. Vampire society is fucked up... she kinda starts spending more time with the Hollywood anarchs because toreador solidarity, doesn’t join their cause though. The anarchs can’t stand her lmao. She’s really mostly independent...

How do they fit into their “story”?

She’s just your good ol’ regular La Croy foundations employee, she was initially my fledgling but I don’t want Christian (her sire) to die, I suppose she’s just like.. there.. idk its kind of a wip

Where do they currently live? What’s their place like?

She has that little apartment in downtown LA during the events of bloodlines :^) It’s a nice place, modern interior and all that... she does miss her old apartment with the victorian furniture though :(( Post bloodlines she probably leaves LA after the whole thing with Lacrosse lol... she’s friends with Ash now they can go on a road trip or something

How do they eventually die?

she doesn’t... shes a vampire >:)

Erin

BASICS

What’s their full name?

Cassandra Erin Winters :~)

What does their name mean? Why were they named that?

Cassandra (from greek “to excel, to shine “) is a little nod to the seer Cassandra, who appears somewhere in her bloodline :^) In-universe it’s one of those names that appear throughout her family.. there are a bunch of important great-grandmothers, aunts and other relatives so her parents named her that to make it look like they’re an important dynasty or something. Rich people bs. Erin is an english derivative of the irish word for.. Ireland lmao. It was just one of those names that were popular in the early 80′s and her mother liked it, there’s no real reason behind it!

Do they have any nicknames?

jhdfjhfd Cammy by Damsel even though she helped them out 😒 also “Newbie” by her bf sdkjskjdf romance ❤

How old are they?

22 in 2004, I suppose she’s 37 in 2020 aka during the events of bloodlines 2

When’s their birthday?

December 13th, 1982

What’s their zodiac sign/element/birthstone/etc.? Do they believe that holds any significance?

I had to take a whole quiz for this but she’s a Sagittarius 😌 I’d say it definitely does lol... she reads her horoscope almost daily

What’s their species/subspecies? Do they have any special/magical abilities?

Vampire lol... specifically of clan Malkavikan. As for magical abilities yknow, typical vampire stuff, plus the voices & Malkavian insight and all that. Her abilities are Auspex and Obfuscate :^)

What “class” do they belong to (for fantasy characters)? If none, what weapon do they favor?

No class but her favorite weapon was the axe she found in the haunted hotel

APPEARANCE

What do they look like?

goddd.... small, pretty blonde, pale skin bc she’s dead, yellow-ish eyes (used to be blue)... big eyes, sliightly overplucked eyebrows bc it’s 2004 :( she’s still cute though

Do they have a face claim?

Mostly Bella Heathcote and Christina Ricci in one image I found on pinterest lol.. I never have faceclaims that are 100% what they look like :(

What’s their style like? Clothes, hair, makeup?

goddd jt was pretty much regular late 90s/early 2000s popular girl before her embrace.. short skirts, juicy tracksuits, tube tops, those awful tinted glasses, coats with fake fur. Her hair was often in those late 90′s updos with a few streaks hanging loose in the front... makeup is just regular looks from the time, lipgloss, frosty eyeshadow and all that 🤢 she’s a big fan of turtleneck sweaters though 😌

It’s still the same but a bit more fucked up post-embrace because she’s just like go crazy aaahh go stupid aaahhh and digs out some of her weirder clothes because half of these vampire bitches wear dumber clothes than her anyway... an old white lace dress that looks like it’s from the early 1900s or something like that... her standard outfits are still low-rise jeans with tank tops and those giant early 2000s shoes though, she just adds in a few weird looking clothes for fun sometimes

How do they carry themselves? What’s their default expression?

Honestly she looks like this emoji 😳 most of the time, Malkavian voices, weird doomsday visions and all that... She had a very cheerful attitude before her embrace and it still shows sometimes, most of the time it’s kinda weird though :(

Do they have any physical ailments or disabilities?

nope!

#jennystahl #thank u hehe... #c: helena #c: erin #miss helena..

[crowleplays]

Phobos Deimos

Basics

Name ► Phobos Deimos Nickname[s] ► Pho, PD, Cinders (she does not enjoy this one at all) Blood Color ► Yellow Age ► 14 sweeps Voiceclaim ► Angel Coulby D.O.B. ► March 20 Astrological Sign ► Pisces/Aries cusp Alignment ► Chaotic Neutral Gender ► Female Height ► 5’2” Weight ► 142 lbs Body Type ► Pear shaped, toned but still soft Orientation ► Pansexual but good luck getting her to open up romantically Occupation[s] ► Witch and owner of an occult shop, which sells items of varying magical legitimacy and safety Lusus ► Springbok Antelope Abilities Psionics ► Spiritual & Arcane Perception – Phobos is able to pick up on spiritual and arcane activity and energies, the latter of which she’s generally able to identify the type for. She’s also able to see most ghosts. Other Abilities ► Fire, Sand, Light, and Healing/Growth Magic – She’s a witch it’s her MO. Not obscenely powerful, but enough to be on par with a gifted psionic. Flight – She has wings structured like a hummingbird hawk moth’s, which allow her to fly for short amounts of time. Astral Projection – Her soul was jiggled a little loose during her near-death experience, so she’s able to tug it out and let it roam. The further distance she travels, the more it drains her, and while she’s able to perceive things on both ends if she wants to, it works better if she focuses on the projection fully and zones out physically. Strife Specibus ►  x2 Haladiekind – They are mainly her foci for magic, but can also be used for physical attacks. Doubled edged, double bladed daggers with a central grip and knuckle dusters on the outside. Pistolkind – Sometimes it’s better to not be flashy and just shoot a bitch. PC Info Trollian Handle ► reawakenedTheurgist Typing Quirk ► Replaces L’s with £, stutters when upset/scared/flustered/ect Example ► Tends t'speak with a regiona£ accent an' c£ips the endin' off certain words. I-I-If sh-sh-she's u-upset o-or s-s-s-scared sh-she s-s-stutters.

 ▼ Personality ▼ Formerly a very open, trusting, and bubbly individual, the past few sweeps haven’t been kind to the mindset that Phobos once held. She comes across very blunt, only dancing around her genuine opinions of people and what she thinks when she’s around someone she perceives to be a threat. Even then, she’s not above pushing her luck in certain situations, as should things turn violent she has a considerable amount of magic she can rely upon to take care of what faces her. Or, well, a decent amount of what faces her. At the end of the night, Phobos is focused on one thing and one thing only: survival. If she has to run to save her skin, she’ll do so, and unless someone has endeared themselves to her (or she is required to act otherwise), she’ll leave them behind in the dust. However when it comes to the fight vs flight ratio, Phobos is absolutely someone that will throw down first. Combat is something that she’s grown from hating to enjoying a lot, as it allows her not only to exercise but vent her emotions in a…”productive” manner.

That’s not to say she doesn’t care about other people, of course. She’s just very reluctant to allow herself to be open with people, especially considering the very recent mutation she’s had to hide. Anxiety over many of her past relationships failing also hasn’t helped at all, as she sees herself as an irresponsible and unhealthy individual to be quadrants with. Friends are a possibility, but Phobos requires a lot of reassurance and proof that someone is not only patient enough but can emotionally handle all the chaos that comes along with her life. If she doesn’t think the relationship will work out and could potentially hurt someone, she’s quick to say so and warn them of that fact. She struggles with not cutting people off out of fear of hurting them, often dropping contact with nothing but her first warning to go off of.

Should you ever gain her friendship, though, she’s incredibly nurturing and caring, as well as unshakably loyal once you’ve earned her faith. While she’s struggled with following it, Phobos is also fairly good at dispensing advice and can dip into more pale or ashen tendencies if she believes someone needs that. Of course this is paired with her regular amounts of cynicism and sarcasm; it’s recommended not to have too-thin skin around Phobos. She’ll compliment just as much as she’ll playfully rag on you, likely swearing up and down the entire Alternian language the whole way. She has a filter for this when she’s around children, as she was a teacher in her former life, but the moment she catches them swearing casually it’s gone. Her “old demeanor” is still very much present despite what she’d like to think or say, it’s just hidden behind a lot of walls, suspicions, and anxiety.

Most of what other people get to see, though, is the witch behind the counter of an occult shop. She really likes to play up the mystical aspect and spooky vibes of her job. Helps convince people to buy stuff and spreads the word to bring in more customers. Whether or not they believe her magic is real doesn’t matter; it sells when you make it flashy enough.

▼ Strengths VS Weaknesses ▼

Strengths ► Perceptive | Driven | Honest

Weaknesses ► Cynical | Stubborn | Flighty

 ▼ Likes ▼

✔ General “witchy” paraphernalia ✔ Relaxing near fireplaces ✔ Loose, comfy scarves ✔ Libraries ✔ Incense (Dragon’s Blood and Cedar are favorites) ✔ Bird watching ✔ Anything with an autumn aesthetic ✔ Handmade clothes ✔ Walks in the woods ✔ Honey candy ✔ Cats

 ▼ Dislikes ▼

✘ Subjugs ✘ Too much noise ✘ Sudden movements ✘ Being touched without warning ✘ “Unnatural” silence ✘ Uppity trolls ✘ Generally most trolls blue and above on principle ✘ Any kind of religious zealots or evangelists ✘ Dealing with her bosses ✘ Cheap liquor ✘ Centipedes, to the degree that she’ll panic and shoot at them

 ▼ Extra ▼

 ► While she’s far better at using her magic in combat than to heal, she’s recently been practicing to try and get better at it. It’s a skill she let atrophy after moving away from home, which she regrets doing now that she has to relearn what she was once really fucking good at.  ► She’s willing to tolerate most people if it benefits her, but highbloods will have a harder time gaining her trust.  ► She has a very hard time sleeping fully through the day, usually due to her psionics allowing her to see and hear ghosts.  ► Her wings are bound most of the time, though the way they’re structured allows her to lay them flat against her back naturally and prevents the binding from damaging them too much.  ► Flying takes a lot out of her. She’s only had her wings for 4 sweeps and they’ve only been fully grown for 2.  ► She’s more in-shape and toned than you’d expect for a lowblood. One of her old teachers was ex-fleet and made her do basic training exercises nightly, which is a routine she tries to keep up.  ► That being said, she has very little love for the fleet and is suspicious of anyone she finds bearing the emblem.  ► Before everything started to fall apart, she planned to dodge the draft with her ex-moirail and just travel through space with her.  ► Now she’s set up an occult shop and sells minor enchantments and crystals to goth kids and hipsters. Also some cursed items and magical advice. Really anything that’ll sell, honestly. She needs the money.  ► There’s always at least some kind of notebook on her. She’s very diligent about recording information that she feels is important. It also gives her a way to voice her thoughts without talking to anyone.  ► She grew up with very little exposure to modern Alternian technology for the most part, which has driven her to learn as much as she can about it. The prospect of technomancy fascinates her, though she’s not able to perform any herself.

▼ Quadrants ▼

 ► Moirail: N/A  ► Matesprit: N/A  ► Kismesis: N/A  ► Auspistice: N/A

▼ Other Relationships ▼

Eeleth Kuvlew [Pure Hope] ► Your ex-matesprit and the source of a never-ending flood of complicated emotions. You hurt him deeper than anyone ever could or has, which haunts you worse than any ghost. Recently, you spoke with him after a sweep of silence, though had your hands not been tied it would’ve been much sooner. Things are still complicated, and you doubt he’ll respond to any of your letters or online messages, but that won’t keep you from writing him about important things. You don’t want to give up talking to him.

Marcel Bradik [Lowered Humanity] ► Your other ex-matesprit, though one of a much shorter time. You don’t blame him for anything that happened; all of that was on you. He taught you a fair few things while you dated, the most important being how to shoot a gun and to carry one on you at all times. The thought has crossed your mind to try and seek him out, but you’ve decided against it due to the fact that he’s a shadowdropper and prone to having a temper. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

#Troll Bio #Phobos Deimos #fINALLY SHES DONE AAAAAAAA

[momtaku]

Hi ! Do you think homosexuality is accepted in SNK world ? I mean I know this manga doesnt talk about romance, but i still wondering how the society inside the walls work. It seems like a medieval societiy with many taboos (about the outside world etc.) but Ymir talk about marrying Historia (love these two) + same sex relationship are a non offensive way to reduce the pop, so perhaps it's accepted ? If you have things to say about this topic Im curious to hear ! If not srry if I bother u

This is a great question but I might be the worst person to answer it. Picking apart the world building in Attack on Titan has always been a weak point for me. I’m not that imaginative. I can only tell you what I see in canon.

Technology places Paradise as mid-1800's Europe. We’ve seen religious zealots in the streets but they seem far more concerned about the walls than any morality. 

Ymir and Historia’s feeling for each other are accepted. No one side eyes Ymir’s marriage proposals. Connie talks about their relationship warmly. I’ll add that Reiner and Ymir’s conversation over the canned herring is said in a teasing tone, but neither the accusation nor the responses appear to be tinged with any shame or taboo.  Based on that, I’d say homosexuality is a-ok among the kiddos.

I have no ideas about Paradis society as a whole but I really like your thought about population control being a factor in influencing public opinions. 

tbh, I’d love to toss this topic over to @julystorms​  if she has time. Her world building meta is among the best and most detailed. For instance, her post on on unplanned pregnancy in the survey corps  this week was excellent. Sexuality and the Survey Corps is a topic fresh on her mind. (Ack! no pressure July!!! Only if you wanna!)

Thanks for the ask! You’ve got me curious now too!

#chatting with friends #yumikuri #homosexuality in the snk world #worldbuilding issue #little known fact #I am the world’s most presumptuous friend #demanding meta and fic from friends #i am the worst #Anonymous

[gasaehmsan-blog]

THINGS YOUR CHARACTER ABSOLUTELY CANNOT STAND

bold = your character does not enjoy this italic = your character is begrudgingly okay with this, used to it or will at least look the other way strikethrough = your character displays this trait, approves of and/or engages in this behavior (or item). repost, do not reblog!

swearing/profanity | being petted | certain colors | nail-biting | quiet environments or people | loud environments or people | slang usage (in thai) | mumbling | tapping | knocking | rocking back and forth | humming | twiddling their thumbs | nails on a chalkboard | hedonism | offkey singing | obnoxiousness | overconfidence or cockiness | crying | shyness | scratching | proper grammar/formal speech | not chewing with their mouth closed | belching | unshaven/unkempt people | poor hygiene | yelling | certain smells | religious people | non-religious people | zealots | hypocrisy | arrogance | ignorance | defiance | racism | prejudice | assumptions being made about them | rumors | arguing | infidelity or cheating | backstabbing | routines | gluttony | laziness | procrastination

TAGGED BY : stolen from top babe @seekesotsibteadmist TAGGING : u

#❛ สาเหตุ ❪ headcanons. ❫

[hail-to-the-republic]

dailyfeed reports new and opinions

Menu Bizarro-World Media It’s obvious that the media abides an institutional racial double standard in how mass shootings and terrorist acts are reported. This double standard has the appearance of a coordinated operation, but it needn’t be to achieve the same effect. All you’d require is a media vastly overstaffed with shitlibs who think alike. Over at Sailer’s, Anonymous[396] calls this Bizarro-World media, Watching the MSM reaction to the Christchurch Massacre is like watching the Bizarro-World reaction to Islamic Massacres. 1) As soon as it happened everyone started calling the perpetrator a terrorist, which was 100% accurate given his elaborate streaming setup. But a Muslim can hack people to death while shouting Allahu Ackbar and we really need to wait until all the facts are in, preferably until people forget about it. 2) Muslim terrorists are lone wolves who have nothing to do with Islam but any time a white(or even partly-white guy) engages in terrorist behaviour, it’s part of a worldwide movement that somehow combines Islamophobes, White Nationalists, incels and 4chan, no matter how tenuous the links are. In fact, many Islamic terrorists in the west are the exact equivalent of Breivik and apparently this guy-people who got all their ideas from a specific messed-up corner of the internet but never attended a training camp of any kind or are part of a large network of co-conspirators. 3) MSM gatekeepers are doing their best not to give viewers any information that might cast Islam in a negative light. During a Canadian round-table on the CBC, the talking heads pointed out the unmistakable reference to Alexandre Bissionette on the terrorist’s gun case, while leaving viewers to wonder what “For Rotherham” meant. I find that the reporting on these mass shootings follows a trend. If shooter was nonwhite, it’s a news blurb then quickly forgotten. If the shooter was white, it’s a few days of “diversity & inclusion” sanctimony and goodwhite virtue signaling, plus candlelight vigils, but no in-depth, exploratory reporting of motives. The media isn’t keen for normies to know too much about what motivates White vengeance shooters. (In the case of the NZ shooter, he was motivated in part to avenge the death of a Swedish girl who was cut in half by a truck driven by a moslem terrorist. Steve Sailer thinks the shooting may have been blowback from the illegal Kosovo War from 20 years ago.) The media DOES NOT WANT anyone to know that the Whites who died at the hands of moslem terrorists is what motivated the NZ shooter. That muddies the anti-White narrative more than a bit, because it calls attention to a fundamental question: If there wasn’t so much moslem terrorism, there wouldn’t be an occasional White backlash. Likewise, if there weren’t so much diversity forcibly imposed on Whites in their own nations, there might not be so much intertribal violence. Normal Whites might begin to reasonably wonder about this whole forced diversity project. Just think how many lives would be saved if White nations were left to be homogeneous. All of anon’s points are spot on. The media gives the benefit of the doubt to nonwhite perps even after all the facts prove otherwise but is quick to indict White perps even before a single fact is known. The media excuses the nonwhite collective for the violent actions of many nonwhites, but blames the White collective for the violent action of one White person. The media hides evidence that undermines the anti-White narrative, but concocts smears to bolster that narrative. We dissident renegades know the score; now we just wait for the great bloated mass of inert normies to catch on to what is already very clear to us: Mass media is the enemy of White people. Polling over may years clearly shows that a significant minority to an outright majority of moslems all over the world say in surveys that they support the actions of islamic terrorists who target infidels. In stark contrast, there is barely a tiny fraction of a percent of Whites who support the actions of lone wolf White terrorists. Islamic terrorism feeds off a vast network of social support and leaders who will excuse their violent foot soldiers. Many islamic terror operations are the result of coordinated operations involving multiple family and clan members and even state level support, occurring within a social context that tolerates violent extremists when not outright arming them up and encouraging them to attack westerners. White reactionary terrorism enjoys none of that. They are almost entirely lone wolf attacks with no support from kin or clan, and no supportive social structure or tacit state encouragement to energize them. Therefore, it’s far more accurate and truthful to blame islamic terrorism on the moslem collective than it is to blame White reactionary terrorism on the White collective. But shitlibs do the opposite, because it’s not about accuracy or truth, it’s about scapegoating Whites for the dysfunction of nonWhites. J. Ross exposes the dark intentions of bizarro-world media, They are moving very strongly to censor social media and criminalize speech. BBC Radio in the immediate aftermath talked about the need to monitor thought in almost those words. No one considers that people might be reacting to what they see around them with their own eyes — there is always this faith that folks are captured by some conjuration and mighty magic, in other words, the thoroughly trashed premise of the SPLC and the ADL which led them to attack Gibson’s Passion of the Christ and Bavarian Easter celebrations. The mainstream national and international news already censors crimes against whites, and police agencies across Western Europe spent about half a year pretending that nothing happened on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. They must be looking at places like this next. Left-wing censorship, exemplified by media whorenalists calling for speech restrictions, is another case of psychological projection. Media shitlibs accuse their foes of fooling people with agitprop that media shitlibs themselves engage in to force an unnatural conformism to their anti-White worldview. The media cries out for censorship of political dissidents because they know the power of propaganda; they’ve been doing it for decades and have largely succeeded, until now, at keeping certain topics of discussion out of mainstream discourse. But the pressure built up way too much; the safety valves are blowing all over the anti-White hate machine. Media shitlibs know normies are “captured by [the media’s] conjuration and mighty magic”, and they want to keep that power out of the hands of the people and for themselves. Thus, Globohomo’s ramped up calls for tyrannical speech restrictions and Big Brother thoughtcrime censorship. By the commutative property of psychological projection, when the media says that dissidents must be monitored, what they’re really saying is “the media must be monitored”. Share this: Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)2Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)2Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Related That's An Imam, Baby!In "Beta" Yes We Khan....Send Them BackIn "Current Events" Freelance Comment Of The Week: The Jihad-Hashtag CycleIn "Comment Winners" March 17, 2019 54 Replies « Previous Next » Leave a Reply Your email address will not be published. Comment Name Email Website Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. stg58animalmother on March 17, 2019 at 4:07 pm My dad was calling them the Prostitute National Press in the 60’s. They’ve been at it a while. Liked by 4 people Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 6:40 pm Your ol man is(was?)BASED AF bro! Liked by 2 people Reply stg58animalmother on March 17, 2019 at 11:25 pm Yes he was Like Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 11:35 pm Did u not make it to being professional Athlete? Did he go out hard? Like Looch El Sicario on March 17, 2019 at 4:23 pm I doubt normies will ever have a sense of racial solidarity as long as whites are a majority. Liked by 1 person Reply P.K. Griswold on March 17, 2019 at 5:56 pm Normies won’t have a sense of racial solidarity until they are *scared*. Becoming a minority in your own country might do that. Then again it might not. Like Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 6:42 pm You’ve seen these twats…..they won’t. Like Jay in DC on March 17, 2019 at 7:00 pm What he said… there is already precedent well established. Every single one that has been killed even children, the family members put up their tail feathers with the bright virtue signaling plummage. They sacrificed their own flesh & blood on the altar of die-versity to wash the original sin of RAYCISS off of them. The brainwashed are religious zealots more than willing to die for their faith. This is nothing new and has repeated many times in history under different radical banners. Mass culling is the play here. Like NeoChronopolis on March 17, 2019 at 8:37 pm The most bizarre part of all is the ritual of self-abasement parents go through when their kids are slaughtered. Explained as an actual Jonestown-level psychosis actually explains alot. It’s remarkable that these killers haven’t, by sheer coincidence, killed a kid of an Ellie Nesler-type. Only a matter of time, I guess. Like Lichthof on March 17, 2019 at 8:10 pm White babies born today in the US are a minority Like Reply snarkwolf on March 17, 2019 at 4:37 pm It is worth noting that the perp shot nine people in the first mosque, then moved on the second mosque. Why did he switch? There must have been plenty more congregants! Then, at the second mosque, he killed about 40 people. Why the early switch??? Anser: Because one of the congregants at the first mosque starting shooting back. Liked by 3 people Reply Mr Meener on March 17, 2019 at 5:01 pm who cares Liked by 1 person Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 6:44 pm I do. It shows that an UNcucked populous FIGHTS BACK. We can despise them all we want, but we can’t call them cucked……… Theres a lesson in that. Liked by 1 person Lichthof on March 17, 2019 at 8:12 pm Snark…did you watch the video? Like Reply LOL on March 17, 2019 at 4:38 pm I don’t want to sound alarmist here, but it’s plainly obvious to me that the *only* thing that will shut Islamic forces up is more force. Even after 9/11, No-one dared respond with force (in the states at least). Force – even in its mildest form: academic critique -was actively condemned. in the absence of any force these fucks grew bolder. For the first time in years, these fucks are shitting their bitch pants. Rightfully so. Liked by 1 person Reply Corinth Arkadin on March 17, 2019 at 5:57 pm I think that’s only a taste of what’s to come. The genie’s out of the bottle. NZ, Australia…Europe? Or perhaps some enterprising American decides that enuff, no more. Liked by 2 people Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 6:48 pm Explaining his rage to a(((well placed))) nigress….this is why we lose. Liked by 1 person Corinth Arkadin on March 17, 2019 at 8:46 pm It’s just a clip. Context of the stream is what I was going for Like dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 6:45 pm YUUUUUPPPPP Like Reply NeoChronopolis on March 17, 2019 at 8:40 pm No one dared? Tom Tancredo used the bully pulpit of a congressional seat to call for the nuking of Mecca in retribution and even Ron Paul called for the issuing of letters of marque and reprisal (an excellent idea BTW). (((Someone))) muzzled, drugged and threw the raging momma bear down a well – and we’ve been there ever since. Well, until Brievik… Like Reply Ironsides on March 17, 2019 at 4:53 pm Well, the jews, the left, and the invaders have been sowing the wind for decades now. Can’t be surprised when the seeds eventually yield a harvest. And the original suggests the nature of what will grow. Liked by 1 person Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 6:49 pm H3il V1KTORY!!!!!! Like Reply Captain John Charity Spring MA on March 17, 2019 at 5:03 pm Brenton Tarrant did what Breivik didn’t do. He created a live stream of his terrorism and that means the press have literally no story to report and no ability to lie about. Liked by 3 people Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 6:49 pm You underestimate our foe, sir. Like Reply Mr Meener on March 17, 2019 at 5:16 pm I wonder if the muslims will get billions from homeland security like the jews get Liked by 1 person Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 6:50 pm Count on it. Like Reply NeoChronopolis on March 17, 2019 at 8:42 pm A millions Somalis in the Twin Cities and Fargo say “DurkaDurka amawahnajihad” which means “Yes” in Skinny. Like Reply Jack Archer on March 17, 2019 at 5:23 pm Do you really believe people are so inattentive so as to fall for media misdirection? C’mon, goys, that all nonsense… Liked by 1 person Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 6:54 pm WELL PLAYED, JA! Bet that guy gets endless puddy. Like Reply Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 7:19 pm Talked so many orders so fast Touched him so many Times Had him jumping through his own Asshole Liked by 1 person Reply P.K. Griswold on March 17, 2019 at 6:10 pm “They are almost entirely lone wolf attacks with no support from kin or clan, and no supportive social structure or tacit state encouragement to energize them.” Total paradigm shift with Brenton Tarrant. I was personally stunned by the general indifference so many people expressed and even outright support the guy received from A LOT of people. Liked by 2 people Reply Lichthof on March 17, 2019 at 8:15 pm Yep. Shitlib media sites had to disable comments. The scum at the Guardian never opened a comment section. I read the manifesto and did not see Trump mentioned. Did I miss it? Like Reply NeoChronopolis on March 17, 2019 at 8:47 pm Totally surprised this Christmas talking to a certain Boomer of my acquaintance. He asked “Ever heard of Anders Breivik? What do you think of him.” “Meh, did what needed to be done, it seems,” says I. “Norway’s in better shape than other Scandi nations, now.” I was surprised when he said “I can’t really disagree with any of that.” His churchmouse wife was nodding silently in the background. Former hippies, a Unitarian and Catholic schoolgirl, earlier in life. We’re in a shift for sure. Gen Zyklon will bring the fire whether we’re ready for it or not… Liked by 1 person Reply Blue pill society on March 17, 2019 at 6:15 pm Attitudes are shifting regarding this. People in public are scared to speak their minds for fear of reprisal of loss of employment. The whispering voices supporting this are growing. Western civilization is starting to see through the BS. When you force a nation to accept multiculturalism it usually leads to a resurgence of nationalism. When the west rises this time we may not stop like in previous instances where we had enough. Liked by 2 people Reply Jay in DC on March 17, 2019 at 7:03 pm “When the west rises this time we may not stop like in previous instances where we had enough.” This must occur and in the ways most people are very uncomfortable with which includes women and children. In the same way that you wouldn’t look at a roach carrying an egg sac and think ‘well, they haven’t had a chance yet’. This is no different. They outbreed us geometrically and their women are the vector of that. The next generation will simply be more of the same. If this were to pop off it would have to be scorched earth until none remained. Liked by 2 people Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 7:51 pm You are welcome in my foxhole bro. Liked by 1 person NeoChronopolis on March 17, 2019 at 8:49 pm Balkans c. 1990s were the pregame. We’re in the top of the first inning of a global-scale Rourke’s Drift now. Like dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 6:38 pm “Mass media is the enemy of White people.” My stupid cunt of a daughter in law has a home tee-shirt applique machine and this WILL BE printed and worn by me out n about. OT buuuuuuutttt…… MAD PROPS to the Proprietor for scouring his bl0gs kk0mments section and recognizing his pupils greatness. Like Reply Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 7:08 pm The enemy of all people Liked by 1 person Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 7:17 pm I get your point GSG but I only care about my own kin and kitlth Like walawala on March 17, 2019 at 6:42 pm First thing Western YTs do is try to separate themselves from this act. First thing Muzzies do following an attack or when a child sax grooming trial is revealed is cry wacism. Like Reply Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 7:28 pm Nogs give a bitch crack heroin Then cut them off till do what they want No grooming needed really Drugs perfected pimping Like Reply JOSEPH ANGEL on March 17, 2019 at 7:41 pm So, when you say ‘Media’, you are trying to tell us something? It was on the tippy-tip of my tongue. It will come to me. Liked by 1 person Reply Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 7:47 pm Not all jews in media Just some of them Like Reply dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 7:54 pm GSG, you’ve seen too much and give too many a pass bro Like Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 7:56 pm Not all of the jews are in media Like dblr619 on March 17, 2019 at 7:53 pm Jooing intensifies….. Like Reply Pingback: Bizarro-World Media | Reaction Times X on March 17, 2019 at 8:15 pm “I find that the reporting on these mass shootings follows a trend. If shooter was nonwhite, it’s a news blurb then quickly forgotten. If the shooter was white, it’s a few days of “diversity & inclusion” sanctimony and goodwhite virtue signaling, plus candlelight vigils…” In either case, the “trend” also includes the inevitable demands to ban and confiscate guns from the white population, leading them disarmed and defenceless against the brown hordes… Like Reply Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 8:55 pm Yea Better take up swordfighting and buy bulletproof armour Its pretty cheap online Put rock filled cement Plates n Bullets richoche off Like Reply Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 8:58 pm Bout three inchi cement rock combined Try it at range Like Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 9:02 pm Used to shoot cement trashcan like the with ak rounds when young Made little dents in it didnt come close to Going through now a car door yea go through Metal go through But not prob three inches Not Eastwood ahead of its time when he put metal plate over his chest to detect bullets A rope and piece of metal Of world can create own bullet proof body armour by hand Make knights great again Like Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 9:06 pm Hollywood told US how to defend in a western a long time ago Ironic shit Like Gunslingergregi on March 17, 2019 at 9:24 pm The army didnt really teach me shit bout Fighting i taught myself Just like i taught myself computers Excel and shit Up to other people id of been a moron Just like them lol Like Copyright © 2018. 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[how2to18]

EXCEPT FOR SOME steamy pages of Leaves of Grass, sex is probably the last thing that comes to mind when thinking about the 19th-century United States. The bloody Civil War, the opulent Gilded Age, the railroads and smoke-belching factories don’t seem to allow much room in the imagination for eroticism, much less anything as blatant and gleefully shameless as pornography. Yet those phenomena did coexist, of course. Even Mark Twain wrote (anonymously) a few scraps of comical and downright forensic porn that would likely shock you.

Amy Werbel’s Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock is the biography of a self-appointed champion of moral “purity,” a man who fought against such unwholesome horrors as Old Master paintings of naked women. Comstock was the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and chief architect of the Comstock Act of 1873, a federal law that made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd and/or lascivious” material or “any drug or medicine […] for the prevention of conception” through the US mail. Lust on Trial conveys the amazing hold that Comstock, “chief if not sole arbiter of obscenity in the country,” had on the United States’s culture and laws, from the NYSSV’s founding in the late 1870s until roughly the end of World War I, when such Victorian-era absurdities were finally overthrown by an exhausted nation.

Comstock was that most unfortunate freak of nature, a born censor. His religiously warped hatred of the human body was so extreme that a nude statue could send him into paroxysms of rage. He was, in other words, a sick-minded son of a bitch. The hell of it is that this anti-humanist zealot was given legal authority to personally search out and destroy printers’ stocks of “lewd” material, to literally burn “offensive” books by the thousands, to enter galleries and demand that “obscene” artworks be taken down under threat of prosecution (Comstock once issued such an order to a New York barbershop for displaying a picture of a ballerina in tights).

Reading Werbel’s dense and enjoyable book, one gets the feeling that this deeply twisted man wanted the United States reduced to the cultural level of a kindergarten. Thankfully, the author shows that, although Comstock had many followers (religious folks, mostly), he also faced numerous detractors and enemies at all levels of society. As with a shrewish spouse, the general public initially put up with the dictatorial censor, until finally realizing that they couldn’t stand him. By the 1890s, Comstock was subjected to constant, mocking ridicule by The New York Times.

Werbel details the NYSSV’s overbearing censorship campaigns, directed against purveyors of anything that smacked of lust, “vice,” or any overly revealing imagery likely to “inflame the passions.” These campaigns could be sickening in their cruelty, but it’s gratifying to learn of the increasing resistance to Comstock, especially when the condemnations came from prominent persons. In a chapter entitled “Artists, Libertarians, and Lawyers Unite: The Rise of the Resistance, 1884-1895,” Werbel notes that the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase

supported a proposal to raise money to send Comstock to Europe for a “careful tour of the great galleries” that would improve his “taste and judgment.” [Sculptor] Augustus Saint-Gaudens also chimed in, insisting that “the decision as to the morality of a work of art should not be left to a man like Comstock.”

After a while, Werbel adds, “the Times dropped any pretense of neutrality and concurred […] that Comstock exemplified ‘persons of a low grade of intelligence and a prurient turn of mind.’” The Springfield Daily Republican called Comstock “the most preposterous ass that walks on two legs,” while the Chicago Tribune surmised that the “utterly hopeless task of regulating the morals of New York” had rendered him “insane.” There’s no doubt H. L. Mencken had Comstock in mind when he wrote his famous essay “Puritanism As a Literary Force,” in which he commented on “the astoundingly ferocious and uncompromising vice-crusading of today. […] The new Puritanism,” he wrote, “is not ascetic, but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to knock down sinners.” Mencken praised so-called “immoral” American novelists like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser as exemplars of artistic freedom, realism, and art-for-art’s-sake.

“At middle age,” according to Werbel, “Anthony Comstock was one of the most unpopular men in America.” And why not? He helped to jail publishers, printers, gallery owners, and merchants by testifying against them in court. He ruined lives for nothing. He was a scourge and a terror, backed by the narrow-minded and feared by the timid, a kind of Joe McCarthy of his day.

Lust on Trial has its fun side, documenting the long-forgotten netherworld of post–Civil War erotica, both artistic and literary, and the surprising underground popularity of “rubber goods” such as condoms, sex toys, dildos, S&M devices, and other carnal amusements. These objects served a no doubt good-humored, snickering, perhaps guilt-ridden clientele, both male and female. We learn too the names of purveyors of risqué items, like the printer Thomas Scroggy, “whom Comstock relentlessly pursued between 1874 and 1884” for sending obscene materials through the mail. This unsung pioneer of what we would now call “gags” advertised his funny joke items in the Grand Fancy Bijou Catalogue of the Sporting Man’s Emporium (“sporting” was a euphemism back then for horny). The Catalogue sold adult sex toys side-by-side with joy-buzzers, sneeze powders, and whoopee cushions; over time, the sex aids fell away from the more easily marketable “gag gifts,” which ended up in crime magazines and comic books. Unearthing this history is an amazing feat of pop-cultural scholarship.

In the end, Comstock reaped the whirlwind. Werbel documents “the eagerness of (male) reporters to call him out as an unwelcome brother.” He received a constant stream of hate mail, including “a collection of smallpox scabs, labelled as such,” which sent him off panicking to the doctor. He was “unwelcome in male spheres that embraced exactly the type of humor and culture he spent his […] life trying to suppress and even eradicate,” Werbel writes, adding that “[u]nlike most of the men he worked with and prosecuted, Comstock had no obvious circle in which to fraternize.” It’s hard to sympathize with the man since he brought this well-deserved isolation upon himself through his sheer bloody-mindedness.

Not surprisingly, he was also a horrible husband. A neighbor of the Comstocks in Summit, New Jersey, reported that his wife Maggie “worried about her husband, that her life [was] a tense and protracted agony of anxiety. […] He was always provoking quarrels, this mad, obstinate husband of hers, always running his opinionated head into something that was not his affair.”

Upon his death in 1915, The New York Times noted with sly accuracy: “Where public opinion and the courts held that Mr. Comstock had been wrong in finding evil in what purported to be art, the controversy was the finest of advertising.” “[D]espite Comstock’s best efforts,” Werbel writes, “American lust did not diminish.” (Thank God for that or we wouldn’t be here!) Werbel’s research into the life of this flesh-hating, statue-draping, cross-bearing, book-burning zealot should serve as a warning against fanaticism of any kind, especially in this age of ideological extremes. “[W]hile it is certainly possible to put lust on trial,” Werbel notes, “the effort is ultimately fruitless.”

¤

Anthony Mostrom is a journalist living in Los Angeles. He was formerly a Los Angeles Times columnist and is a book reviewer and travel writer for the LA Weekly.

The post An Unwelcome Brother appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[boystownbirdie]

LMWTV4U: GOT S7E3

Welcome back!  In case you’re new, this is LET ME WATCH TV 4 U (?), the blog where I watch tv so you don’t have to! If you missed it, I wrote a special mid-week post this past week which broke down the main characters called: new phone who dis? Check it out here. 

Also reminder that I have a new feature called “Why does this scene even matter?” (WDTSEM) for those seemingly useless scenes which may or may not actually be important later.

Tonight’s episode featured the FIRST EVER meeting of Bae and Khaleesi, so let’s get into it!

************************SPOILER ALERT************************************

We start off on Dragonstone….

...which is the island where Khaleesi and co have posted up. Bae rows up with no-knuckles in a tiny rowboat and meets his old pal Tyrion on the sand. T is like remember when we met in season 1 and I peed off the edge of the wall that you were guarding lol jk lol jk? And Bae is like yep you were so wasted, bro. They also meet Khaleesi’s hottie translator with the good hair who’s like welcome, please hand over all of your weapons. And Bae’s like BUT I THOUGHT I HAD TSA- PRE CHECK! And T’s like naw, we’ve really had to tighten up our policies here. Some horse-dudes also take their little rowboat away.

As Bae and No-Knuckles (NK) are walking up to meet Khaleesi, her dragons do a quick perimeter sweep and really freak out poor little bae (see gif above). Watching all of this unfold from a creepy high-up-spying-spot is the Red Witch Lady who brought Bae back from the dead but then got kicked out and also Sleevey. The Red Witch is like I did my part, I brought Khaleesi and Bae together. And Sleevey’s like… don’t you want to see their first meeting? I think it might be like the Hamilton-Burr meeting in the musical Hamilton? And she’s like nope I got kicked out for burning a kid alive so not really welcome around him or NK. And he’s like ya you better get to steppin’ back East. And she’s like NO YOU better get to steppin’ back east.

WDTSEM? Truly no idea. I guess we’re supposed to be reminded that Sleevey hates religion because a religious zealot cut off his who-ha and ho-ho’s and therefore they do NOT get along?

Now, if you’ll recall Khaleesi is a pretty kewl lady. She campaigned on an anti-slavery platform back in the East and brought together a bunch of different groups of people all while keeping dat hair and dem outfits on point. And Bae is also a pretty kewl dude. He supports refugees and fights for the underserved and also looks fly as hell doing it. I know what you’re thinking, ARE THEY BOTH SINGLE? THEY SHOULD BONE? Well, unbeknownst to both of them, they’re actually related; she’s his aunt. But considering this episode featured a sex scene between a man and a woman who happen to be TWINS, I feel like aunt-nephew is not too weird for GoT-land. Back to the point, this is the first time Bae and Khaleesi are ever meeting and due to their similarities on paper, you’d think they’d get along. But turns out they do not.

Khaleesi is basically like #bowdownbitches and Bae is like naw dawg. They go back and forth for awhile, with Khaleesi explaining how/why she should overtake Queen Pixie Cut (QPC) and Bae basically agreeing but saying his real concern is the giant army of ice zombies. And she’s like lol wut? Ice zombies? Nice try, dude. Next thing you know, Sleevey rolls up and is like ruh-roh! Remember last episode when our pals Previously-Traumatized Theon (PTT), his sis Yara aka the Kween of the Iron Islands, and the Sand Queen lady sailed off to Southern shore to be mobilize our forces down South? Well PTT and Yara’s uncle, Uncle-Crazy-Pants (UCP) attacked them, burned most of their ships, and took Yara and the Sand-Queen lady hostage.

Next, we get a shot of PTT washing up and getting pulled into a boat where he reports that his sis was taken hostage and no, sorry, he wasn’t able to get her back. His peeps are like ugh what’s your deal, bro? But poor bb PTT has been through a lot so give him a break, ok?!?

WDTSEM? Well the Sand Queen and Yara were supposed to bring together all of Yara’s fleet of ships (which was approx. a buttload) and then head to Sand Queen’s home (Dorne) and bring together that whole army and then march up to King’s Landing, where QPC is sittin’ on dat throne. Now that they’re captured and their ships are burnt, this is a huge loss to Khaleesi.

Speaking of Uncle-Crazy-Pants, let’s check in on him in King’s Landing…

UCP is marching down the streets of King’s Landing doing a pretty good impression of Aladdin during the “Make Way for Prince Ali” scene. The difference here is that he is dragging along his niece, Yara, as well as the Sand Queen (SQ) lady and one her Sand Snake daughters. He struts up to QPC on his horse and “delivers” her the gift of SQ and her daughter. Now if you’ll recall, one of QPC’s kids, her daughter Myrcella, got kissed on the lips with poison by SQ a few seasons ago and proceeded to die on a lovely boat trip in which her dad/uncle (Jaime) confessed that he was her real dad. So needless to say, QPC and Jaime are NOT FANs of this lady.

UCP is like here, QPC, I brought you these prisoners, can we get married and/or bone now? And QPC is like yep, sure can! But first let’s beat Khaleesi in this giant, ongoing war. She tells him he’s in charge of her naval forces and that her bro is in charge of the Lannister army. And since UCP is cuckoo, he’s like hey Jaime, can you give me sex tips for when I do it with your sister (honestly, fair question) and obvi Jaime is like NOT KEWL BRO but he has to pretend to like this guy so he bites his tongue.

Then QPC makes a big deal of locking up SQ and her daughter and then kissing the daughter on the lips with poison to be like #reciprocity I guess? And she’s like SQ will have to watch her daughter die and then also hang out in this cave forever. I guess all this torture is really a turn-on because next thing we know, she’s making out with her brother and giving him a blowie right there.

The next morning, they’re all post-coital and he’s like I should...go? And she’s like naw, I’m the kween we can do whatever! And her maid sees them in their nudididity and is like eww?

Then QPC takes a meeting with an important banker who’s like…bitch...you broke. And she’s like gimme a minute, I got dis.

We stop back by Dragonstone to catch Bae bein’ Bae…

By which I mean he’s brooding by a cliff. And Tyrion is like damn I was trying to brood but you look hawter doing it, which is v. true really. They chat about what went wrong back at that meeting between Khaleesi and Bae. Tyrion tells Bae to take a chill pill and think about how crazy he sounds talkin’ bout ice zombies and whatnot. He also tells Bae about all the good things Khaleesi has done and how she’s actually a pretty cool lady. Then he goes and does the same with Khaleesi, basically. He’s like Bae’s a cool guy and all he wants from you are these rocks that you have under your castle that you’re NOT EVEN USING so just let him do that. And she’s like ok fine.

So then we get to Bae-Khaleesi-meeting 2.0 where it’s just the 2 of them, standing on this cliff chatting kween-to-king. She agrees to let him mine the “dragonglass” (rocks that kill ice zombies) under her castle and he kind of agrees to support her in her campaign against QPC? Well mostly he agrees that QPC is no good and Khaleesi would be a better kween. Then Bae’s like… does this mean you believe me re: ice zombies? And Khaleesi is like… no comment.

We head North to Winterfell, where Bae’s sis Sansa was left in charge

And boy is she doing a good job! Which is kind of surprising, only because we’ve never seen her utilize these skills before. She’s walking around telling people to start storing their barley for winter and telling the metal-workers to line their breastplates with leather and generally being a BOSS. Littlefinger, AS ALWAYS, is creeping around behind her doing nothing helpful. He stops to give her some advice about imagining every possible scenario at all times which is like, sure, a good idea in theory but who has time for that?!?

Suddenly her little bro, Bran, who she was told was maybe dead, shows up in Winterfell. She’s like OMG YASS KWEEN YOU’RE ALIVE! And Bran is just sitting there (to be fair he is paraplegic so he couldn’t get up) staring straight ahead and is acting all robotic. I guess it’s because he’s been through some trauma but at this point so has almost every character on GoT and they still manage to register human emotion.

They proceed to have a heart-2-heart by the old-family-magic-face-tree and she’s like so...what’s been going on in the last 6 seasons? And he’s like I am the three-eyed-raven now I can see the past and the present and all scenarios at all times (hmm interesting that this is exactly what littlefinger just advised her to do...) And she’s like cool….so….do you want to be in charge now since you are the oldest living official Stark male and gender roles are apparently still a BFD up North? And he’s like can’t… I have to prophesize. Btw where’s Bae? We know as savvy viewers that he’s looking for Bae because he needs to tell him about the paternity results. 

And then he vividly describes the night she was married off to her psychopath-ex-husband who then proceeded to rape her. He keeps talking about it, too, which I guess is to prove that he can see the past but also NOT trauma-informed and not a welcome conversation. It’s weird.

We stop by Old Town which is more and more like Hogwarts every day…

Mostly because Jim Broadbent is there and because people are getting miraculously cured from turning-to-stone-diseases. Sam, Bae’s bestie, is still interning at the “maester” academy, learning to be a doctor/librarian and you’ll recall that last week he did some under-the-radar experimental surgery to treat Stoney, who happens to be one of Khaleesi’s besties. Now get this, STONEY IS CURED! The artist-formerly-known-as-Stoney is like thanks, Sam, I gotta get back to Khaleesi! And Sam’s boss is like I know you did that amateur surgery and you’re in big trouble but also good job I’m proud of you.

Our last scene is really a montage of scenes so let’s get into it…

I have to admit that even I, GoT-viewing-expert (lol), was confused and overwhelmed by this last scene. So I’ll try to break it down as clearly as I can, but bear with me. We start with Tyrion laying out the current battle plan. Since Khaleesi is pretty ticked that their ships (well technically Yara’s ships but under her direction) were all destroyed by UCP, she mentions finding UCP’s ships and burning them up. How? Well duh, she got dem dragons! It’s strange because I’m pretty sure she’s talking about riding them and commanding them while at the helm, but she never really says this clearly. And Tyrion is like no that’s too dangerous, someone else should do it. Does he mean himself? MAYBE? TBD...

But for now, let’s get into the current battle zones:

Greyworm (fresh off his recent sex scene from last week) and the rest of the “unsullied” army, were sent by Khaleesi and Tyrion to overtake T’s family home, Casterly Rock. There’s this whole montage that Tyrion helpfully narrates about how if the unsullied were to attack Casterly Rock by just popping up on the fortress, they’d be crushed since it was built so well. BUT since Tyrion used to sneak in his sex ladies and booze and other “unsavory” things through the sewer system, he knows it very well. So he instructs Greyworm and a small group to come in through the back and engage in sneak-attack-warfare. They successfully take Casterly Rock, but they’re like...that’s funny...there were supposed to be a lot more people here? And they look out to the sea where it looks like UCP’s ships are burning up all of the ships they rode in on. Which is a real bummer.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Lannister army (all the people who were missing when Greyworm and co. attacked)  led by Jaime, is shown marching on “Highgarden” which is where Grandma Tyrell (Gma) lives, apparently completely alone. Remember that Gma’s son and grandkids all got burned up in that church-explosion by QPC last season and then she decided to back Khaleesi? She also told Khaleesi not to trust Tyrion and to “be a dragon.” Gma is looking out at this whole army of Lannister dudes and is like well...IDGAF at this point, really. Important to note that Sam’s Dad (who is a major dick) and Sam’s bro (who’s actual name is Dickon) as well as Tyrion’s old pal Bronn are on the front lines with Jaime, even though last week Sam’s dad was like I could NEVER betray Gma Tyrell.

WDTSEM? Remember when QPC said she’d pay back all of her debts to the banker? Well Highgarden is famously wealthy and has lots of important exports (like grains, for example). So with Jaime and QPC in possession of all of that, as well the coffers of Casterly Rock which he says he cleared out, they can now pay them back, theoretically. Also, Highgarden is down South so now QPC and co have a stronghold down there.

Jaime meets Gma in her study for some light refreshments and death threats. Gma is like well… shoulda seen this coming. Also, did you know your sister/lover is the worst human ever? Like seriously a sociopath? And Jaime is like, oh you think she’s so bad? Well how about this? She is going to let you die from poison rather than torture- isn’t that sweet?!? And gma is like ugh whatever give me the poison, put it in my wine plz. She drinks it in one gulp and then she’s like oh, BTW, I know that Joffrey (the evil little prince dude who was poisoned and killed at his wedding to Gma’s granddaughter, Queen Makeunder) is your son cuz of incest and also, I’m the one who poisoned him. And Jaime is like maybe mad or maybe not? Maybe just surprised? Gma is like tell QPC that it was me who killed Joffrey, k? Ps I hate QPC ok bai, time to die. 

WDTSEM? For so long QPC’s only redeeming quality (as told by all of the other characters) was her love for her children. After all 3 had died, she took over the throne and started in on this crazy reign of terror. Now she has SQ captive and is torturing her for killing her daughter and with this admission, she’s also killed the person responsible for one of her son’s deaths. Will ticking off those responsible for killing her main motivation in life help her find closure or make her more of a monster? I’d guess the latter.

Now let’s break it down:

Biggest surprise this ep: The attack on Highgarden! I did not see that coming and also did not fully understand at first. The way the scene was shot, it seemed like gma was in on this invasion, but obviously she was not, as she was later killed by said invaders.

Biggest letdown: Bran was so lackluster and un-enthuz’ed about finally seeing his sister and his hometown again. It’s like we get that you have magic powers now but could you show some effort here?

Important fashion moments: Bae’s meeting-the-kween-but-I-also-have-armor-on look was pretty fly and even though she is THE WORST, I was feeling the red-witch-lady’s linen-y red scarf/cape 

Who died this ep? The Sand Queen’s daughter (the last of the “Sand Snakes”), a bunch of unsullied soldiers out at sea, and Olenna Tyrell (aka gma Tyrell) RIP. 

Check in this time next week for more LMWTV4U and thanks for reading. Tell your friends!

Correction: I’ve recently discovered that I’ve been spelling Jaime Lannister’s name wrong for my entire blog-writing career. My apologies. 

Also, you might IDGAF this but just to lay it out there, I purposefully avoid all other recaps/reviews/think-pieces about the latest episode in the time between watching the ep and writing this recap. Sometimes I will hop on to the GoT wiki page to find out a character’s name or check a fact but mostly it’s just my own notes that I reference. 

WHY AM I EVEN SAYING THIS? I often will read other recaps/reviews after writing and posting this one and I’m like OMG WE HAD THE SAME REACTION/ SAID THE SAME THING about a scene or a character. So I guess I just wanted to say that any similarities between this recap and any other recap are unintentional and coincidental. 

I know what you’re thinking: PROVE IT. Well, much like Bae trying to prove the ice zombies are real, I can’t prove it, I can only state the facts and hope that my time-worn face and honest peepers will be enough :) 

#LMWTV4U #got #gots7e3 #the queen's justice #khaleesi #jon snow #tyrion lannister #olenna tyrell #jaime lannister #game of thrones #game of thrones recap #the queens justice recap #game of thrones review #game of thrones season 7 episode 3

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/how-to-love-a-wall/

How To Love A Wall

My high school math teacher, Mr. Crawford, taught me a great lesson in life. I don’t remember much about the right angles of an isosceles triangle, but I do remember his adage: Your freedom stops where somebody’s chin begins. Personal freedom isn’t absolute. If I am to have it, I must respect the freedom of others. That respect generates diversity and enriches our lives. Resist diversity and inbreeding follows, a state nature abhors. Humans tend to encourage conformity and sameness, despite nature’s heeding.  Religion is remarkable for its ability to resist change. The devout would rather fight “holy” wars than alter their precepts.  Consider the number of bloody clashes throughout human history. Aware that dogma is the antithesis of democracy, our founding fathers wrote the Establishment Clause and inserted it into the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution. They intended to  create a wall between church and state. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito disagrees with their purpose, employing sophistry to convince us the founders meant otherwise. He frets about religious freedom as if the country was meant to be a theocracy and blames those who are without faith for its neglect.  It is hard to convince people that religious liberty is worth defending if they don’t think that religion is a good thing that deserves protection. (FreeThought Today, September 2022, pg. 7.) Though it favors none, the Frist Amendment does respect an individual’s right to have a religion. That, however, is a far cry from advocating for one. What’s more, the judge’s claim that heathens, like me, threaten religious freedom is the stuff of bad dreams. If history serves as evidence, non-believers have suffered much at the hands of zealots and not the reverse.   Alito’s language is coercive in that it casts non-believers as evil-doers. I would argue that one man’s decision not to pray in no way impedes the rights of the multitude who do. When he insists the way to protect religious freedom is the teach non-believers to care, Alito opens the door to the forced conversions we’ve seen in the past. As an atheist, I am indifferent to the means people employ to satisfy the question, “Why does the universe exist?” Much of the argument strikes me as sound and fury. Despite the many holy wars that have been fought, global religions appear to have sprung from a common root.  As far back as ancient Egypt, tablets tell the story of Horus, a god born of a virgin on December 25, who died and was resurrected after 3 days.  Religious apologists resist the comparison.  Nonetheless, Egypt’s god casts a long shadow that speaks of a common origin. Today’s conservative high court seems blind to the common precepts of many faiths. Instead, they behave as if Christianity was the one true belief and seem intent on tearing down the wall between church and state. I doubt their notion of religious freedom would create a more tolerant and perfect union. I fear that once they have cleared away the rubble of the Establishment Clause, they would dedicate themselves to codifying Christian dogma into civil law.  Doubtless, members of the religious right stand ready to cheer them on.   That concern brings me back to my math teacher’s stricture, wisdom to which I’ve added over time.  The limitation he identified I’ve come to see as a form of liberation–which is good because directing other people’s lives is beyond my capability. I spend much of my time watching my feet to keep from falling. Boundaries like age, a chin, or a wall are crucial to the landscape. Not only do they mark perimeters but they also identify the open spaces where I have a right to be free.  

#Atheists #benefits of diversity #boundaries as freeing #Christian Dogma #Egyptian god Horus #Freethought Today #religious freedom #resistance to change #Samuel Alito #shared religions myths of deity #The Establishment Clause #the wall between church and state #U. S. First Amendment

[iofferwith-blog]

Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are!

New Post has been published on http://iofferwith.xyz/come-out-come-out-whoever-you-are/

Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are!

Review

Nathan Tipton

Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet Homosexuality and the Horror Film. (Manchester: Manchester U P, 1998.) $18.95.

  Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are!

     1. “The plot discovered is the finding of evil where we have always known it to be: in the other” (97). So wrote Leslie Fiedler in The End of Innocence (1955), his summation of the McCarthy-era horrors. Although ostensibly referring to the 1953-54 McCarthy hearings, Fiedler discloses the societal fear of difference operating within the “Us versus Them” dialectic. Moreover, by finding evil in an Otherness “where we have always known it to be,” he acknowledges both the historical construction and destruction of the Other and, in effect, explains society’s genocidal predilections in the name of moral preservation. Nevertheless, Fiedler’s comment leaves larger questions unanswered. How, for instance, does society arrive at this conflation of evil and “other?” And does society need to create monsters for the sole purpose of destroying them?

     2. Harry M. Benshoff “outs” his Monsters In the Closet with the conceit of a “monster queer” universally viewed as anyone who assumes a contra-heterosexual self-identity, including those outside the established gay/lesbian counter-hegemony (“interracial sex and sex between physically challenged people” [5]). For the sake of brevity, his work focuses on homosexual males and their presence, either tacit or overt, in the modern horror film. In so doing, Monsters also proposes (with more than a passing nod to gay historiographer George Chauncey), an extant gay history created through the magic of cinema. For Benshoff, however, the screening room quickly morphs into a Grand Guignol-styled Theatre of Blood, and gays become metaphorical monsters whose sole purpose in horror films is to subvert society before meeting their expected demise.

     3. Benshoff draws a provocative, decade-by-decade timeline to illuminate his thesis. He begins in 1930s Depression-era America, the “Golden Age of Hollywood Horror.” In a chapter entitled “Defining the monster queer,” the cultural construction of the modern homosexual is placed alongside (and within) classic horror films such as Frankenstein and Dracula (both 1931). Benshoff notes the decade’s movement from viewing homosexuals as gender deviants to those engaging in “sexual-object choice (48),” thus underscoring the ideological shift from Other-as-Separate to Other-Among-Us. This, then, becomes his foundation motif for the modern horror cinema: the fears within us are the fears of us.

     4. While the chapter concentrates heavily on the actors and their presumed sexuality (including “name” stars such as Charles Laughton and Peter Lorre) rather than the films, Benshoff highlights an obvious thread of filmic homosociality, particularly in the films pairing Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. For example, 1934’s The Black Cat features two “mad” scientists ostensibly competing for one female (although she is later revealed to have been dead all along). Benshoff convincingly reads this arrangement as a homoerotic love triangle, with Poelzig (Karloff) and Werdegast (Lugosi) engaged in teasing flirtation, and finally sado-masochistic torture. The torture scene includes bare-chested Karloff being menaced by scalpel-wielding Lugosi, who threatens (and then proceeds) to “flail the skin from [Poelzig’s] body, bit by bit”(64). Though Benshoff reads the film’s homosociality as a positive step, he nonetheless fails to critique the rather obvious, time-honored homosexual tropes of sado-masochism and murderous psychosis.

     5. “Defining the monster queer” also includes a surprisingly short section on director James Whale (on whose life the current film Gods and Monsters is based). Benshoff notes, “A discussion of homosexuality and the classical Hollywood horror film often begins (and all too frequently ends) with the work of James Whale, the openly gay director who was responsible for fashioning four of Universal Studio’s most memorable horror films: Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935)” (40). While Frankenstein is arguably the most recognizable film in this quartet, Benshoff instead contextualizes Whale’s work through his most explicitly homosexual film, The Old Dark House, in which Whale parodies and, ultimately, subverts the above-mentioned stereotypical cinematic tropes.

     6. This film, like many “clutching hand” horror films of the period, uses the device of “normal” people trapped in a defiantly non-normal mansion peopled with maniacs and monsters. The Old Dark House is occupied by the Femm (!) family members, who each have gayly-coded personas. Patriarch Roderick Femm is enacted by a woman (actress Elspeth Dudgeon); son Horace is played by known homosexual Ernest Thesiger in, Benshoff wryly notes, a “fruity effete manner” (43); and sister Rebecca (Eva Moore) is a hyper-religious zealot who is, nevertheless, a closet lesbian. The heterosexual Wavertons (Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart), along with their manservant Penderel (Melvyn Douglas), spend the vast majority of the film trying to fend off none-too-subtle homosexual overtures from the Femms, although they too are viewed queerly as an “urban ménage à trois” (44).

     7. The story is further complicated by Morgan (Boris Karloff), the drunken butler who “may or may not be an illegitimate son of the house” and Saul (Brember Wills) “the most dangerous member of the family” (45), who is understood as a repressed homosexual. Saul sees in Penderel a kinship but, because of his paranoid repression, must instead kill this object of his desire (with, Benshoff points out, a “long knife” [45]). In the ensuing tussle, Saul falls down the stairs, dies, and is carried off by Morgan, who “miserably minces up the steps, rocking him, his hips swaying effeminately, as if he were some nightmarish mother cradling a dead, horrific infant” (45).

     8. Benshoff convincingly hints that the film’s over-the-top depiction of homosexuality was the primary cause of its being “kept out of circulation for many years . . . for varying reasons (legal and otherwise) . . . [and] it was not released on commercial videotape until 1995” (43). In fact, the Production Code established in 1930 forbade any openly (or, Benshoff adds, “broadly connotated”) homosexual characters on-screen and, subsequently, “banished [them] to the shadowy realms of inference and implication”(35). But the problem still remains that even in their connotative presence, homosexuals are portrayed as monsters. Although Whale’s Dark House attempts to imbue some non-normals (such as Morgan) with a sympathetic aura, it does so at the expense of Saul, whose death seems to connote a reinforcement of normality. This status quo death-by-design, indeed, becomes a decades-long device in horror films.

     9. As the book progresses, Benshoff moves from homosocial film “outings” to socio-filmic movie interpretations and, in this area, he is clearly more comfortable. In particular, the chapter entitled “Pods, Pederasts and Perverts: (Re)Criminalizing the Monster Queer in Cold War Culture” casts a probing look at the so-called “perfect” 1950s. This decade becomes a touchstone for Benshoff because of the close interrelationship between oftentimes-surreal politics (the McCarthy/HUAC hearings) and “real” cinema. Early films such as Them and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (both 1954) exemplify the dialectic between Us and Them while exploring the dynamic of social denial. Benshoff notes, “As for the closeted homosexual, the monster queer’s best defense is often the fact that the social order actively prefers to deny his/her existence” (129) and thus keep its monsters safely in their closets. His queer reading of Creature, while effective, does not approach the astute discussion of the later films I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) and especially the Black Lagoon sequel, The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), which not only riff on the Marxist dialectic but present the more insidious scenario of the “incorporated queer.”

     10. The title of The Creature Walks Among Us, for example, serves as an overt play on people’s paranoia, both of Communists and Queers (terms which, during the McCarthy hearings, were used synonymously), and the film focuses on intense male rivalries, ostensibly over one woman, Helen Barton. However, her husband, Dr. Barton, has paranoid fantasies about her sleeping with Captain Grant, the hunky captain of Barton’s yacht (which, Benshoff notes, is based in San Francisco). Benshoff easily reads Dr. Barton as a repressed homosexual who would much rather be sleeping with Grant. At the film’s climax, he murders Captain Grant (thus killing the object of his desire) and is, in turn, killed by the Creature. Helen reflects on the sad scene by trying to explain her husband’s rather obvious sexual repression. She states, “I guess the way we go depends upon what we’re willing to understand about ourselves. And willing to admit”(136). But her words also can be read as a plea for societal tolerance of “Them,” in whatever form they appear.

     11. Benshoff furthers his discussion of Them Among Us by exploring the phenomenon of the “I Was a . . .” films, which “purported to deliver subjective experiences of how political deviants operated” (146), again through horrifically-packaged political treatises such as 1951’s I Was a Communist for the FBI or “real-life” horror films along the lines of I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). These films seek not only to uncover the hidden queer but to expose their insidious agenda of pederastic recruitment. However, for the quintessential 1950s homo-cruitment film Benshoff chooses How to Make a Monster (1958) which, despite its menacing tagline “It Will Scare the Living Yell Out of You,” is viewed as remarkable for “the wide range of signified to which the signifier ‘monster’ becomes attached, and the complexity with which it manipulates these signifiers” (150-51). Translation: How to Make a Monster contains many not-terribly-subtle queer-friendly images that are visible the typical moviegoer, hetero- or homosexual.

     12. Benshoff pulls out all the stops in his filmic exploration of How to Make a Monster by deploying a Laura Mulvey-esque theoretical pastiche of deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, cultural criticism, and Marxism. He concludes that “the film hints at the revolutionary potential of ‘making monsters’ against those same ideological forces . . . which simultaneously create and demonize the monster queer” (151).

     13. So what exactly marks this particular Monster for greatness (indeed, a detail of the movie’s poster is part of the book’s cover art)? For starters, the film contains all the elements of a perfectly queer horror flick: a homosexually-coded mad scientist couple Pete and Rivero (complete with “requisite butch/femme stereotyping” [151]) who are, as an added bonus, also tacit pederasts. They are balanced by two “normal” heterosexual teenage All-American boys, Larry and Tony, who nevertheless get “made up” and engage in a clearly homoerotic “Battle of the Monsters.” The story is further complicated by a Marxist interlude during which capitalist movie studio executives arrive and sever their ties with the monstrous director and his makeup-artist-partner. Benshoff observes, “The scene explicitly links the patriarchal order with capitalism, and Pete [the now fired director] and his monstrous world as opposing it. As Pete turns down the offer of severance pay, one of the studio executives clucks ‘Turn down money — maybe you’ve been living too long with monsters'” (153). Pete, rather than accepting his fate, formulates a revenge plot against the capitalist studio executives, and herein invokes another horror film trope — “that which is repressed (in this case the Hollywood monster movie) must eventually return.” However, Benshoff continues, “these particular monsters are not going to be of the imaginary/Make-Believe/Movie/ Sexuality kind; they are going to be deadly” (154).

     14. While this revenge plot is a precursor to the spate of 1980s “Everyman” horror films, both heterosexual (Falling Down) and homosexual (The Living End, Swoon), How to Make a Monster utilizes a novel approach for its monstrous aims. As Benshoff explains, “Back in the make-up lab, Pete tells Rivero of his plan to control the young actors through a special novocaine-based make-up: ‘Now — this enters the pores and paralyzes the will. It will have the same effect chemically as a surgical prefrontal lobotomy.1 It blocks the nerve synapses. It makes the subject passive — obedient to my will.'” (154). Ignoring for the moment the clearly Freudian implications of Pete’s speech, the special make-up also predicts date-rape drugs such as “mickeys” or “roofies,” thus adding another sinister aspect to the scene. Moreover, because Pete and Rivero are coded pederasts, the make-up also predicates accusations of “homosexual agenda” brainwashing leveled by the present-day Religious Right.

     15. Of course, Freudian phallocentrism is never far away. Benshoff notes, “Rivero attempts to tell Pete that he thinks Pete has made a mistake in bringing the boys to his home. Pete cannot accept Rivero’s taking an active (vocal) role in the proceedings and stabs Rivero in the belly with a knife, asserting his dominance within the active/passive nature of their relationship” (156). The knife, which naturally is read as a phallus, “sends the boys into a homosexual panic: a struggle ensues and the room is set on fire. Pete dies with his melting creations á la Vincent Price in House of Wax (1953), and the cops break down the door and rescue/apprehend Larry and Tony” (156).

     16. All’s well that ends well? Benshoff hedges his bets on Larry and Tony, thinking that they have probably been assimilated (he wryly adds that, before the struggle, the boys try to escape by telling Pete, “Larry and I have sort of a dinner date” [156]), but more because they have been repeatedly tainted by the monster queer. Although his overall critique of the film is favorable by citing its pleas for tolerance, he nevertheless condemns it on Marxist grounds for remaining first and foremost a product of the capitalist system. Benshoff argues that, even though How to Make a Monster attempts to subvert society’s view of homosexuals, it remains a product of a system that routinely exploits women and homosexuals. It does so by constructing their images in stereotypically specific ways and, he writes, “As such, the film contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction” (157).

     17. This particular critique is borne out in his viewing of 1960s and 70s horror films, which, even with the advent of both the women’s and gay liberation movements, as well as the weakening of the Production Code, still resort to the same “tired” tropes. He selects productions from the UK’s Hammer Films (which produced horror films from the 1950s until 1973) for scrutiny, noting that “the weakening Production Code’s loosening restrictions on sex and violence helped the horror film define itself in new and explicit terms” (177), and singling out Hammer for capitalizing on this new openness. He further adds, “For the first time in film history, openly homosexual characters became commonplace within the genre, sometimes as victims . . . but more regularly as the monsters themselves (the lesbian vampire)” (177).

     18. This lesbian vampire becomes a recurring motif in late Hammer films including the “first overtly lesbian film, The Vampire Lovers (1970)” (192), in which hyper-feminine women seduce and destroy other hyper-feminine women. While this is a welcome change from the stereotypical “butch lesbian” seen in earlier horror films, Benshoff cites Bonnie Zimmerman in his enumeration of Hammer’s sins: “lesbian sexuality is infantile and narcissistic; lesbianism is sterile and morbid; lesbians are rich, decadent women who seduce the young and powerless” (23). The Vampire Lovers, for example, features Carmilla (taken from J. Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 vampire novel of the same name) seducing a bevy of “young nubile women in diaphanous nightgowns” (193) and then draining their blood. Her victim Emma, a “rather dim-witted ingenue . . . who, in all of her innocence, tumbles into bed with Carmilla after romping nude together through the bedroom” (193), is nevertheless a heterosexual. After Carmilla expresses love for her, Emma (who doth protest too much, methinks) refuses and instead asks, “Don’t you wish some handsome young man would come into your life?” to which Carmilla replies, “No — neither do you, I hope” (193). Naturally, Carmilla must be and is destroyed by, Benshoff notes, “patriarchal agents” (194) (although he doesn’t specify who these agents are) and Emma and her boyfriend Carl are reunited.

     19. Benshoff astutely comments on Hammer Films’ success among heterosexual males by noting, “the appeal of these Hammer films was ostensibly directed to the straight male spectator through soft-core nudity and sexual titillation” (196). The film(s), rather than focusing on the lesbianism (although this is a significant, though unspoken, “guilty pleasure”), instead rely on “ample cleavage and sheer peignoirs” (194), and therein lies their appeal. While these nymphet vampire lesbians faded from view in the later 1970s, the scantily-clad “screaming Mimi” victims remain firmly entrenched in postmodern horror films of the 1980s and 90s, although they are primarily coded as exclusively heterosexual.

     20. The advent of the postmodern horror film in the 1980s and 90s heralds a new look at old tropes, particularly the monster among us. In “Satan spawn and out and proud: Monster queers in the postmodern era,” these films, repeatedly deploying overt homoeroticism, riff on the perils of difference, repression, and (not surprisingly) coming-out, thus giving Benshoff fertile ground for exploration. For example, 1981’s Fear No Evil, a Religious Right-esque shockumentary, pits Lucifer (portrayed initially as Andrew, a shy, effeminate high-school senior before “coming out”) against the forces of Absolute Good (read: “normal” heterosexuals). The film is highlighted by a nude gym shower teasing/quasi-seduction scene involving Andrew and Tony, the requisite high-school bully figure, in which “Tony mockingly asks [Andrew] for a date, and then a kiss. Rather improbably, Tony does kiss Andrew, to the accompaniment of a rumbling, reverberating, grunting sound-track and swirling camerawork” (239, emphasis added).

     21. Fear No Evil further exacerbates the thematic homosexual menace with what Benshoff terms a “retrograde ideology,” in that “When the Devil/Andrew again kisses [him,]Tony . . . manifest[s] female breasts. The implication here is unmistakably clear and totally in line with traditional notions of gender and sexuality: Devil = homosexuality = gender inversion. Upon manifesting the breasts, Tony does the only decent thing he can do . . . and stabs himself to death” (239). Stabbing, indeed, seems to be the preferred method of dispatch in horror films, and it is easy to see Tony’s action as a phallic impaling. Furthermore, it also reflects back to Larry’s and (another!) Tony’s homosexual panic in How to Make a Monster, although the postmodern Tony, who has tacitly “given in” to his homosexuality, must die.

     22. Two problems, however, immediately arise in Benshoff’s reading: his use of the word “traditional” and the ignorance of the multiple kisses. His pronouncing the pairing of homosexual panic and gender inversion as a “traditional notion” would be acceptable for 1950s films but becomes highly suspect for postmodern-era films. While not to denigrate audiences of 1950s schlock-horror, audiences in the 1980s and 1990s are imbued with a cynicism that, upon viewing this ridiculous scene, would manifest itself in guffaws. Moreover, Benshoff misses or fails to comment on the view of latent homosexuality apparent in Tony. What, then, does it really say about Tony that he asks (teasingly?) Andrew for a date and then kisses him not once but twice, apparently of his own free will? Benshoff reads the scene as an overt metaphor for homosexual panic as gender inversion but fails to see the potential (positive?) societal comment that any homophobic bully is likely acting against his own homosexual feelings.

     23. Additionally, given the “rumbling, reverberating, grunting sound-track and swirling camerawork” in Fear No Evil, it is surprising that Benshoff doesn’t draw a correlation between the postmodern horror film and outright pornographic films — other than the snide comment, “Apparently, the Devil really knows how to use his tongue” (239). His “Epilogue,” however, does comment on gay porno’s appropriation of vampiric themes immediately following the release of Interview With the Vampire. Indeed, these films acknowledge a number of gay pornographic productions including Does Dracula Really Suck? (1969), Gayracula (1983), and the non-porno (read: sans explicit sex) Love Bites (1988) which, Benshoff notes, “approached the generic systems of gothic horror in an attempt to draw out or exorcise the monster from the queer” (286).

     24. While this reading is plausible, it problematically equates gay porno audiences with those of “conventional” cinema. The reading elides the fact that the ostensible “motivation” for any porno film is a memorable climax (and not necessarily from the film’s actors). Benshoff, however, cites Love Bites as exemplary, not for escaping the confines of porno, but for rewriting “generic imperatives from a gay male point of view” and “allow[ing] both Count Dracula and his servant Renfield to find love and redemption with modern-day West Hollywood gay boys” (286). The film, therefore, both creates a “positive” monster and aspires to mainstream appeal.

     25. Benshoff concludes that mainstream postmodern horror films also show remarkable progress in the area of homosocial qua homosexual cinematic portrayals. Fright Night (1985), gay author Clive Barker’s Night Breed (1990), and “straight queer” Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (also 1990) receive especially high praise for their positive attempts at positing an “alternative normal” while not resorting to stereotypical queer tropes. However, the films share the common subversive element of camp, and it is through this humor that they ultimately succeed in humanizing the monster queer. Benshoff quotes Clive Barker as stating, “We should strive to avoid feeding delusions of perfectibility and instead celebrate the complexities and contradictions that, as I’ve said, fantastic fiction is uniquely qualified to address. . . . But we must be prepared to wear our paradoxes on our sleeve” (Jones 75) and indeed, camp manifests itself as a paradox.

     26. Again, however, Benshoff surprisingly misses an opportunity to view the films as critiques of suburbia and inbred suburban intolerance, for many of the postmodern films concern themselves with spinning a new urban/suburban dialectic. The urban, ostensibly viewed as the dangerous inner city (and exclusively home to black and gay ghettos) is contrasted with the idyllic (read: white heterosexual and, paradoxically, nostalgically 1950s-esque) suburban landscape.

     27. Fright Night riffs on this suburban Invasion of the Body Snatcher motif, but this time the queers are clearly “out” and bent on infiltrating Fortress Suburbia. In the film, Chris Sarandon’s vampiric alter-ego Jerry Dandridge is posited as a tacitly gay antique dealer, replete with bourgeois trappings and attitudes. In other words, Jerry is tailor-made for the postmodern suburbia that Benshoff negatively reads. He subtly voices the same problematic anti-assimilationist view held by many quasi-Marxist queer theorists and activists (Urvashi Vaid, former head of NGLTF — the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, being the most prominent) that has subsequently led to fracturing, rather than unifying, the gay “body politic.” This view is further exacerbated by Benshoff’s resigned comment that the film, “despite its fairly realistic representation of what a gay male couple in the suburbs might look like . . . nonetheless still partakes of the same demonizing tropes as do less sophisticated horror films: queerness is monstrous” (252, emphasis added). I accept Benshoff’s statement within the book’s context, but am troubled by its pessimistic implication that homosexuals can never rise out of their monstrous otherness.

     28. Monsters in the Closet is by no means a perfect book. There are flashes of brilliance, humor, and dead-on cinematic readings and critiques. It is, however, balanced by often pedantic (or worse, supra-academic) jargon, generalizations, and sometimes far-fetched film interpretations. More often than not, his cinematic evidence comes through “close readings” of these horror films but reaches problematic status when he draws tenuous connections with exploitation (especially blaxploitation) and quasi-horror films (such as 1974’s Earthquake).

     29. Benshoff also deploys an authorial predilection for outing that, at times, repeatedly belabors the queerness of the films. This is particularly troublesome in the first chapter, which seems more concerned with the sexualities of the stars than how they performed their roles. In later chapters, he occasionally indulges in outright finger pointing as illustrated by his noting that “many gay fans considered Tom Cruise’s acceptance of the role of Lestat [in 1994’s Interview With the Vampire] more or less a coming-out declaration” (273). While Cruise’s sexuality has been subject to continual speculation in the gay community, Benshoff’s comment adds nothing to his overall critical appraisal of the film and reads more as his own wistful and wishful fantasy. Moreover, in “Pods, pederasts and perverts,” he perplexingly hides behind the wall of murky Hollywood history when discussing older “stars like James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Farley Granger, Sal Mineo, Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, and Marlon Brando” whose sexualities Benshoff cautiously defines as “non-straight” (173). No Signorile he, Benshoff’s evident conflating of the terms “non-straight” and “queer” as anything outside the norm becomes problematic because it denies the definitively gay identities of Clift, Mineo, Hudson, and Perkins, thereby lessening any possible socio-political ramifications.

     30. In these respects, it is ultimately weak as film criticism. However Monsters is, despite its drawbacks, a worthy entry into the field of Gay and Lesbian historical constructions. Its decade-by-decade “timeline” deftly illustrates, through the medium of film, a recurring queer presence that survives, transforms, and, against all odds (much like its monstrous counterparts), keeps popping up in the most unexpected places.

    Note

1 Interestingly enough, this “device” was also used in another 1950s “real-life horror film,” Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer (1959), about which Vito Russo notes, “Sebastian Venable is presented as a faceless terror, a horrifying presence among normal people, like the Martians in War of the Worlds or the creature from the black lagoon. As he slinks along the streets of the humid Spanish seacoast towns in pursuit of boys (‘famished for the dark ones’), Sebastian’s coattail or elbow occasionally intrudes into the frame at moments of intense emotion. He comes at us in sections, scaring us a little at a time, like a movie monster too horrible to be shown all at once.” (117).

  Works Cited

Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester U P, 1997.

Fiedler, Leslie. “McCarthy as Populist.” An End to Innocence. Boston: Beacon, 1955. Rpt. in The Meaning of McCarthyism, 2nd ed. Ed. Earl Latham. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1973.

Jones, Stephen, ed. Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden. Lancaster, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1991.

Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. Rev. ed. New York: Harper, 1987.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampires.” Jump Cut 24.24 (1980): 23-24.

  Contents copyright © 1998 by Nathan Tipton.

Format copyright © 1998 by Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1998.

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U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos Issues Statement on New Title IX Guidance

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy Devos  a responsibility to shield each student in America and ensure that they’ve the freedom to education and thrive in a safe and trusted environment Guidance.

This isn’t merely a federal mandate, however a moral obligation no person, school, district or state can abdicate. At my route, the Department’s Workplace for Civil Rights stays committed to investigating all claims of discrimination, bullying and harassment against those who are maximum susceptible in our schools.

The steering issued by using the preceding administration has given upward push to numerous prison questions. As a end result, a federal court docket in August 2016 issued a nationwide injunction barring the Branch from implementing a part of its software. On the grounds that that time, the Branch has no longer enforced that part of the steering, accordingly there’s no instantaneous effect on students by means of rescinding this guidance.

This is an trouble exceptional solved on the nation and local degree. faculties, groups, and households can locate – and in lots of instances have discovered – solutions that shield all students.

I’ve dedicated my profession to advocating for and fighting on behalf of students, and as Secretary of Training, I remember defensive all students, including LGBTQ college students, now not only a key precedence for the Branch, however for every school in America.

We owe all college students a commitment to make sure they have get admission to to a mastering environment this is free of discrimination, bullying and harassment.

Pay attention Put together to face up to: The Trump management Is Taking Us Down a Slippery Slope Into Theocracy

I propose it. I suppose it was accurate. Opposite to what many have stated, it sought to outlaw neither prayer nor perception in God. In a pluralistic society including ours, who is to determine what prayer shall be spoken, and via whom? Legally, constitutionally or otherwise, the state clearly has no such proper. I’m strongly opposed to the efforts that have been made to nullify the selection. They have been encouraged, I suppose, by using little more than the desire to embarrass the Supreme court. After I saw Brother Wallace going as much as Washington to testify in opposition to the selection at the congressional hearings, it best reinforced my conviction that the choice changed into proper.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Playboy interview, 1965. [About the Supreme Court’s decisions striking down prayer in public schools.]

On January 20, in his first hours as president, Mr. Trump issued a proclamation putting forward that there can be no peace wherein the human beings do not pray for it. Honestly?

Who satisfied him to trouble one of these proclamation? One of the five preachers or the rabbi invited to hope at his inauguration? Do not People pray sufficient? changed into there a shortage of prayers for peace earlier than World Wars I and II-and every struggle centuries earlier than and Seeing that 1945? What warfare happened due to inadequate prayers? I consider the Vietnam generation whilst draft eligible college students were praying for peace up the yin yang. Those prayers did now not have a great deal effect, both.

This proclamation is a representative example of the crazy communicate of politicians who insert their religious ideals into the discharge of their secular responsibilities, though in Trump’s case it turned into possibly more pandering to the evangelical base. God-hasn’t he finished sufficient of that already together with his appointments?

Properly, perhaps now not, in his thoughts.

That thought brings with it subject for the liberal democracy We’ve enjoyed in The us since the USA’s founding. Trump has created a cabinet of theocrats. What’s greater, he has pledged to appoint extra non-secular zealots to the excessive courtroom, in addition to additional key posts.

Horrific Moon at the upward thrust

Are we in threat of turning into a theocracy? extra so than ever, IMHO.

Trump and pals are equating patriotism with piety. How I would really like to place earlier than the president a statement from a Supreme court justice in Wisconsin more than a century ago concerning intermingling authorities with faith:

there’s no such source and motive of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, battle, and all evil in the kingdom as religion. Let it once input our civil affairs, our government might quickly be destroyed. Allow it once enter our common colleges, they might be destroyed… those who made our Charter noticed this, and used the most apt and complete language in it to save you such a catastrophe.

Susan Jacoby mentioned that even as the new president is himself indifferent to religion, he used the evangelical segment of the voters to get to the White Residence. In appreciation, he appears to have delegated his cabinet choices to zealot-in-waiting Mike Pence, the featured speaker at the approaching anti-abortion rally in Washington, D.C. Whose fanaticism makes the average fundies seem agnostic by means of comparison. Deliver Trump credit he has now not (so far) nominated Michelle Bachman, Herman Cain, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin for government jobs. That’s the coolest information. (I’m trying to appearance on the intense side here.)

The Bad information is that he is nominated a lineup of god-besotted extremists, inclusive of Rick Perry, Jeff Periods, Betsy DeVos, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Sonny Perdue, Jeff Periods, Scott Pruitt, Tom Charge and OMG!-Ben Carson. Those nominees are Christian zealots beyond the pale and outspoken combatants of church/nation separation. Every may want to seamlessly fill any Sunday morning as a substitute preacher for the five ministers who offered superstitious babble on the Trump Inauguration.

At the side of Mr. Pence, These new leaders of the very best government offices will carry their spiritual perspectives and lifestyle battle schedule, to the vanguard in their secular workplaces.

Can a theocracy be far in the back of? Will they endorse for an change to our godless Charter affirming that America of The us is a Christian nation? It’s now not so farfetched a few years ago, a YouGov Omnibus poll observed that 34 percent of Americans would prefer establishing Christianity as the reputable kingdom religion of their nation. Another barely vivid side observe-best 32 percentage might cross all the way and do the identical with the U.S. Itself. Small consolation. (This is a mean percent-imagine what the assist level need to have been in Alabama and Mississippi!)

Hallmarks of a Theocracy

at the danger of horrifying a few readers, recollect some of the ideas and policy agendas of those new leaders of key national workplaces, which include the Legal professional Widespread and directors/secretaries of H&HS, HUD, Power, Education, CIA, EPA and Agriculture. You may discover perception in and guide for:

Numerous biblical prophecies, not excluding The Rapture or give up-times. The suppression of important thought, investment for religious charter faculties, technology-denying initiatives from weather alternate to evolution and greater non-secular extremists appointed to fill critical positions in any respect degrees of government. Vehement competition to marriage equality and a lady’s choice to be a mom or not (i.E., felony abortion and different reproductive rights). Disdain for separation of church and kingdom-The Donald may be building one wall in which It is no longer needed and tearing down Another wherein it is. Converting the Charter from a mundane Republic to Christian nation theocracy-in part because they agree with That is a circumstance for the second coming of Christ. Sponsorship and passage of extra payments like H.R. 7, the “No Taxpayer funding for Abortion and Abortion Coverage Full Disclosure Act.” every House Republican voted for this bill. If it clears the Senate (Trump will signal it), the Act will deny extra than 28 million ladies access to abortion coverage. remember the person rumored to be Trump’s first preference for the vacant seat in the U.S. Ultimate courtroom, William Pryor. This outspoken opponent of secular standards within the Charter and the bill of Rights has as compared the ACLU and its plaintiffs to terrorists.

He has railed against gay rights, the teaching of evolution, courtroom choices legalizing abortion and barring college prayer even as selling presentations of the 10 Commandments on government belongings. He has compared homosexuality to “necrophilia” and “bestiality” and known as Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional regulation.” He has long supported the notorious Roy Moore, the Alabama Ideal court jurist who positioned a Decalogue plaque in his courtroom and forced jurors to pray.

Recommendation from an Unlikely supply

The Christian Poet and novelist C.S. Lewis embraced the view that all strength corrupts. I’m wondering if Messrs. Trump and Pence are familiar with The sector’s Final Night time?

I absolutely embody the maxim that every one electricity corrupts. I’d pass further than all strength corrupts. The loftier the pretensions of the electricity, the extra meddlesome, inhuman and oppressive it will be. Theocracy is the worst of all feasible governments. All political strength is at excellent a vital evil: however it’s miles least evil whilst its sanctions are maximum modest and not unusual, whilst it claims no extra than to be useful or convenient and sets itself strictly restrained goals. Something transcendental or spiritual… In its pretensions is dangerous and encourages it to meddle with our private lives… Theocracy, I admit or even insist, is the worst corruption of all.

however, to no reader’s marvel, I assume Robert Green Ingersoll deserves the very last phrases. This is however the beginning of one among his speeches at the horrors of theocracy.

The authorities of God has been attempted. It changed into tried in Palestine numerous thousand years ago, and the God of the Jews turned into a monster of cruelty and lack of information, and the people ruled by means of this God misplaced their nationality. Theocracy was tried through the Center A while. God became the Governor the pope become his agent, and each priest and bishop and cardinal turned into armed with credentials from the most excessive and the end result became that the noblest and quality had been in prisons, the best and grandest perished on the stake. The result became that vices were topped with honor, and virtues whipped naked through the streets. The result became that hypocrisy swayed the sceptre of authority, even as honesty languished inside the dungeons of the Inquisition…

If God is allowed in the Constitution, guy should abdicate. there is no room for both. If the people of the wonderful Republic grow to be superstitious sufficient and ignorant enough to put God in the Constitution of America, the experiment of self-authorities could have failed, and the notable and remarkable assertion that ‘all governments derive their simply powers from the consent of the ruled’ will were denied, and in its region may be determined this: All power comes from God; monks are his retailers, the people are their slaves…

first-rate needs, stay Well and don’t forget factors of view: 1) There are no alternative records; and a couple of) there is no better authorities for The united states than a secular democracy.

May also this essay arouse your will to assist the insouciant loads in shielding their liberties. As RGI stated in phrases that represent the mild, air and love at difficulty-“liberty is the blossom and fruit of justice, the perfume of mercy. it’s miles the air and mild, seed and soil, dew and rain of development, love and pleasure.”

Guiding Innovation – An Technique from the Epistle of James

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are New Testimony names that Christians fast understand as authors of the four Gospels. Christians additionally identify Paul because the most prolific writer to the new church buildings he installed at some stage in the Mediterranean. However, there’s a group of seven letters no longer addressed to individual churches. These letters, of the apostolic age, every so often known as catholic letters, testify to apostolic religion and constitute canonical scripture.

The Letter of James is this type of letters and appears first within the series. Douglas Moo introduces the Letter of James as intensely sensible. James offers steering for Christian lifestyles in phrases that inspire followers and, on the same time, admonishes. The Letter of James is direct. The encyclopedic New American Fashionable Version (NASV) of the Bible places James in the style of parenesis or exhortation and within the fashion conventional Jewish awareness. Even though written as “very Jewish paintings” (NASB pg. 1201) it’s far in an top notch Greek fashion that is among the exceptional inside the New Testament.

James concentrates his letter “to the twelve tribes in dispersion” (1:1). Some Biblical texts use “scattered anywhere.” This greeting refers to Jews, followers of Jesus, residing outdoor of Israel. To answer why James wrote this letter, an information of the Pentecost event is vital. Jesus promised the Holy Spirit (Luke 24:49) and on Pentecost, the promise became fulfilled (Acts 2). The Jesus sect grew with the conversion of 3,000 Jews visiting Jerusalem from across the known International. Acts does not percentage that Those newly converted lower back to their home international locations and cities to inform the tail of Jesus and His followers, yet it is viable to deduce that new converts did percentage the story.

The number one message of his letter is moral behavior among fans of the new religion. The manner introduces this letter with succinct phrases. “The e-book of James describes a rugged every so often painful sort of Christian residing. James is practical, gutsy, and crystal clear in which means – even though we would like to avoid its impact.”

Even with the caution that the manner can be difficult (1:3), James presents a imaginative and prescient for fans who continue to be affected person, “…you will be prepared for Whatever, strong in character, Full and whole” (1:4).

James writes his letter at a time of persecution while many followers find adhering to the brand new teachings hard. Many have fallen from the faith however James calls them to be patient, that deliverance comes via faith in God, and they can searching for non-secular nourishment in prayer and excellent deeds. James’ letter tells the dispersed Jewish Christians to be robust in religion in a manner that echoes Matthew 5:eleven,12 “due to the fact amazing is your reward in heaven.”

James instructs Jewish Christians on many topics. But, the theme is the significance of faith and precise works in the whole lot.

James and a Message of Contradiction

There are individuals who argue that James and Paul contradict each other in their writing. Paul wrote in Romans 3:28 that men are justified through faith without deeds of the regulation. Obvious contradiction exists in James 2:24 in that James includes that both works of fellows and religion justify us to God. Another Obvious contradiction exists in Romans four:1-3. Paul concludes that Abraham glorified himself to God through his religion. James 2:21-23 concludes Abraham glorified himself to God by both faith and works in supplying his son, Isaac on an alter. Paul makes use of phrasing in Romans 1:five and 16:26 to inform Romans they must be obedient to faith. In Galatians 6:7, Paul writes of sowing and reaping, sowing Nicely returns properly to the shower.

In search of deeper information, both supplement the opposite in In search of justification in the sight of God. guy would condemn Abraham for supplying Isaac to God. However, God glorified Abraham for his religion and suitable works. James wrote his letter to dispersed Jewish Christians to teach that faith, Although intangible will display itself in Some style. James was no longer looking to outline faith; he wanted to set the criteria for conduct among The ones claiming to be of the religion.

James and Creativity

James 1:21-23 troubles a command to be a doer of the work, no longer just a listener. Greek texts use the paintings poiesis. In place of the door, poiesis approaches the innovative work of artists . James foresight in the use of this Greek phrase tells the Christian populace to be inventive, get off the trails of predecessors and blaze new trails simply as artists create new photos of their artwork.

Robert Cummings Neville defines the that means of a door as expressing God’s divine creativity “…not [by] what goes into you but [by] what comes out that counts.” it is God’s creativity beckoning us to paintings. James teaches the dispersed to grasp the gift of life given via God making something of it.

James sees making something of God’s gift and doing proper works with a compound Greek word prosoopoleempsia. This phrase consists of promotion, the front of Something, linked with Lamba noon, to understand or understand. The ethical moral lesson from this compound phrase is human beings decide us by way of our moves and our moves replicate our internal being. James affords know-how to aid outward actions with inward being. Chapter 2:1-4 James tells fans no longer to judge others through look and admonishes them (2:8) to love their buddies as they love themselves.

Cutting-edge Challenges

It is not radical to nation The arena is present process dynamic changes; perhaps it’s miles an understatement. Modern-day commercial enterprise and verbal exchange pupils liked the degree of alternate these days to innovations of the past. Guttenberg’s printing press altered the power of clergy via making the Bible available to all who should examine. Interrupting the Bible turned into no longer the area of clergymen and spiritual leaders. Moreover, books on any subject could be set in type and published for the literate loads.

With the discovery of telegraph and later smartphone, communique across significant territories changed into possible. business verbal exchange now occurred over cord with fewer time constraints, humans interconnected with developing interdependencies . Proliferation of computers and Internet technology now hyperlink us over invisible connections at real-time pace. Worldwide conversation through telephone, email and instant messaging connect employees inside the next room to employees on the following continent. Proposed with the aid of Camrass and Farncombe (2003), is that amongst 10,000 people, they may have as many as 5 million points of contact .

Coping with conversations throughout networks as sizable as 5 million humans calls for care. If the context of conversations is low, the end result becomes one among each person for themselves without a sharing. The want for records on one side needs repayment for the statistics on the other aspect. But, if the context of conversations is high, helping and sharing happens and people feel a feel of joint ownership collectively .

The Letter of James – Meet the Challenges

Printing presses and telephones merging into on the spot International conversation causes pressure on business because it adapts to fulfill the Challenges of alternate; meeting the undertaking is not smooth. Present day Global business is widely dispersed, as were the early Christian Jews that James wrote to in dispersion. Leaders of worldwide business have an opportunity to research from the instructions James shares.

James wrote a totally sensible letter imparting instructions and admonitions. commands and admonitions to Christians commonly parallel corporate policy and approaches. They offer proof of leaders’ vision for an employer, offer samples of predicted behavior, and provide warnings towards violations of true order.

A hit companies are trying to find leaders and followers who are doers. James told Christians to be doers, be inventive in their creativity. organizations want artistic creativity to remedy troubles and preserve pace with alternate. In an unscientific observer carried out on Fb.Com 14 humans responded to “could you as an alternative take the path less traveled or stick to what .” Ten humans selected the route much less traveled. To Another, 12 humans answered to taking a sure component or take a danger. Nine checked take a threat. Organizational leaders who searching for the destiny also are looking for people willing to take dangers and adventurous sufficient to take a new route.

In Every other manner, James gives Modern-day businesses with skill sets for leaders and fans. corporations, their leaders, and workers do no longer exist and paintings in a vacuum. External observers see agencies primarily based on how organizational participants behave amongst themselves and inside the network. ethical behavior for early Christians is an instance of The ethical behavior anticipated in business. In Another Fb.Com “could You as an alternative,” query, ten humans answered to “could you as an alternative be proper or morally right.” Seven answered be morally right.

James’ letter addresses Christian Jews advising them to be doers of their faith and be ethical and moral in conduct. The Fb.Com questions responded via each person using the “would you rather” subroutine suggests that among 70 and seventy five percentage might follow a direction much less taken, take risks, and, curiously, opt for being morally proper versus just being proper. without similarly clinical studies, there’s no declare to statistical accuracy of those numbers. But, there is an uncanny feel that the general public is ethical and threat taking.

creative agencies searching for ideas from all regardless their position in the employer or outdoor it. James writes that Christians should receive each other no matter their region on society. This parallel proposes that commercial enterprise Might also receive innovative ideas from sudden sources. on the face, a manufacturing worker won’t have an accounting background; However, this employee might have thoughts to simplify production and decrease expenses thus having an effect on accounting.

In commercial enterprise, leaders are activists of know-how; they may be catalysts of knowledge, coordinators of knowledge, and traders of foresight . there is little difference among Current Worldwide leaders and the leadership of James as catalyst, coordinator, and foresight merchant. Even though one-of-a-kind instances and one of a kind organizational needs, disciplined management aids preserving the vision alive.

Conclusion

The Epistle of James isn’t prolonged; However, the message is succinct imparting perception into the early lives of Christian Jews dispersed across the Mediterranean. it’s miles a sturdy coaching tool reminding fans to recognition on the imaginative and prescient. in addition, it presents a glimpse into the methods and policy fans have to adhere to.

This hub of this dialogue is predicated on three spokes, 1 – innovative doing, 2 – doing morally, and three – attractiveness of others. James told early Christians to be energetic of their faith and do true works that creatively confirmed their religion. James taught them the importance of moral moral conduct. Finally, he made it clear that social popularity does no longer make one person higher than Every other in the religion.

The leadership lesson to draw from These three spokes is that everyone contributors of any business enterprise are a part of the whole irrespective of the placement. Leaders should set the tone, establish vision and set regulations in area that guide employees towards the imaginative and prescient. Equally, leaders ought to have in vicinity approaches in location to correct conduct that strays. In the end, leaders need to just accept input from all.

Whether or not it is Christian leadership or secular leadership, faith in and faithfulness to the imaginative and prescient motivates leaders who encourage fans, but then need guidance. James diagnosed this and his became the primary of policy and process manuals for faith and faithfulness.

References

i. be aware: decrease case catholic refers to the universality of Christianity Rather than a reference to the Roman Catholic Church.

Ii. Moo, Douglas J. (2000). The Letter of James. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing company.

Iii. Rev. Gollner, Lawrence A. (Censor Librorum) & Pursley, Leo A. (Imprimatur) (1978). The manner: The living Bible – entire Catholic Edition. Wheaton: Tyndale Residence Publishers.

Iv. Miller, Earl (2008). The Epistle of James: element 1. Stewards Basis.

V. Ibid.

Vi. Neville, Robert Cummings (2003, August three). Running before God: 12th Sunday after Pentecost. Boston University, Marsh Chapel. Retrieved on February eight, 2008 from 

Vii. Camrass, Roger & Farncombe, Martin (2003). Atomic: Reforming the enterprise Panorama into the brand new Structure of The next day. Oxford: Willey.Sproull, Lee & Kiesler, Sara (1998). Connections: New Methods of Operating within the Networked corporation. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Viii. See vii.

Ix. Von Krogh, Georg, Ichijo, Kazuo & Nonaka, Ikujiro (2000). Allowing expertise Introduction: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit know-how and Launch the electricity of Innovation. By: Oxford College Press.

X. Hoffman, Paul (2008). Facebook profile of Paul Hoffman: would You instead subprogram

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↪ b a s i c s ;

N A M E: Jerusalem “Salem” Nathanael Methuselah Isaac Weigand A G E: 25 P L A C E   O F   O R I G I N: Western Wyoming (the nearest town is Wapiti) G R O U P: None F C: Steven R. McQueen

❝ If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go and hide in the closet for three or four hours. They get down on their knees and pray for you to return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible. ❞

↪ p e r s o n a l i t y ;

P O S I T I V E   T R A I T S: amiable ; adroit N E G A T I V E   T R A I T S: uneducated ; ingenuous

↪ b i o g r a p h y ;

L I F E   B E F O R E   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

Go ahead, look for Jerusalem Weigand in census records, a school registry, on a god damn library card. He’s not there. Try a birth certificate or a social security number, you’ll come up empty. According to the United States government, Jerusalem Weigand does not exist. Now, maybe if you looked for Adam Blumenschein, you might find something. You could find a flimsy, faded copy of a birth certificate with that name hidden in the file room of an old hospital on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming. You could find it, but really, the name Adam Blumenschein is barely a memory even in the mind of the doctor who delivered him and his twin sister, Eve. Their parents are barely memories in the minds of their loved ones. One day, just gone, a husband and wife from the streets of Cody, Wyoming. Gone were Daniel and Tiffany, with their twins Adam and Eve, into the forests of Shoshone.

Just two days old, Daniel and Tiffany — now called Abraham David Uriah Abel and Ahinoam Sarah Bethsheba Ruth Weigand, or just Vater and Ma to their children, disappeared into the Western Wyoming national forests, hidden in the tall trees and treacherous terrain of the mountains for decades. Jerusalem, or Salem as he prefers, and his twin sister grew up in isolation; the few times a hiker accidentally wandered upon their family property, they were immediately threatened with a double barrel shotgun and a warning shot at their feet. Cougars, moose, and bears were his only neighbors, wandering freely around the small cabin that housed four. Hunting season was all year, target practice never ended, and Jerusalem knew how to kill and skin an elk by the time he was four. It was a hostile childhood, one driven by the looming fear of Armageddon and the constant looking over their shoulders for outsiders – agents of the Devil, probably.

The boy with the freaky deaky long ass religious name? Of course his parents believed Satan was coming for them, believed in the second coming of Jesus to fight the son of the Devil and bring true peace upon the world. The Weigand twins were born and bred to be true soldiers of Christ, FOR Christ in the Great Tribulation. They were to aid Jesus in his seven year fight against Satan and his son, be loyal servants to Christ and loyal warriors (hence the name WEIGAND) against the Antichrist. From the time he was born, Jerusalem was trained for a war he slowly believed was never going to come. With only his sister and his parents to socialize with, Jerusalem yearned to join the slave pit of SIN known as the real world.

After twenty two years of living in isolation, the last hiker to wander onto the Weigand yard was met with a begging adult man and a hand grabbing theirs in an effort to run away from the parents inside before they saw him try to leave. The hiker was scared of him, naturally, but they took pity on him and once they arrived back at the hiker’s camping ground, Jerusalem hitched a ride to ANYWHERE.

That anywhere was Ten Sleep, Wyoming, a small little town of 290 (now 291) in central Wyoming. 290 people isn’t a lot, but it was 287 more people than Jerusalem had ever met before. He didn’t get to enjoy life in Ten Sleep for long, however.

L I F E   D U R I N G   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

That war he didn’t believe would ever come? Turns out it did – just a little bit different than the war his parents spent his life preparing him for. Jesus and the Antichrist it was not, the undead and society it was. He did not find people lifted to the heavens, did not witness the great rapture (he wasn’t too shocked by that, though, Jerusalem always doubted that he was a true believer worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven), only witnessed walking corpses trying to eat the small population of Ten Sleep.

The little boy who ran away, far from the religious zealots that he called his parents, returned home with his tail in between his legs, a sheepish smile and a head hung in shame as he walked through the front door. The little boy, the prodigal son, did not find his parents in his home, the epicenter of his entire life. Of course the only logical answer is that his parents were raptured, the true few ascended to Heaven while the rest of sinful society had to live in the end times. His sister? Gone as well, though Jerusalem doubted she was allowed into the Kingdom of Heaven, shockingly far more stubborn and defiant than he had been.

Jerusalem tried staying in his childhood home, tried to wait for the second coming, tried to wait to be God’s loyal solider, but the small log cabin felt suffocating. Hell was on Earth, yet Jerusalem felt the small urges of freedom within his stomach. Really, he had been free of his parents in Ten Sleep, but he had always worried they were just around the bend, ready to drag him back to the Shoshone forest and repent for his betrayal. His parents now with God and his sister no doubt fighting off demons like the better, stronger warrior she was, Jerusalem could finally taste TRUE freedom.

L I F E   A F T E R   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

This taste for FREEDOM led Jerusalem out of the mountains, a years long hike to any town with people still around. Now free to roam the earth, Jerusalem bides his time until the Antichrist shows and he’ll have to get to work. For now? Jerusalem can talk to whoever he wants, do whatever he wants, live however he wants – until Armageddon, of course!

#steven r. mcqueen #rp #rpg #zombie rp #zombie rpg #zombie roleplay #a. #m. #20 #rogue. #rachel. #jerusalem weigand.

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/a-lawless-supreme-court-majority/

A Lawless Supreme Court Majority

We know good intentions can go wrong.  The relatives of a 3-year-old girl recently beat and choked her to death in their efforts to exorcise the devil they assumed possessed her. Authorities found the child’s crumpled body on the floor of the church her family attended. As might be expected, the police charged the mother, grandfather, and uncle with murder. (FreeThought Today, June-July, pg. 5) The accused not only violated the child’s individual rights according to civil law, but they also violated her human rights. Human rights are those of personhood as listed in the fifth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.  They are conferred not by the government but are the inalienable rights of all humans because they are human. Primary are the rights to life, liberty, and property. The government’s charge is to preserve those rights through its laws and with the consent of the governed. In other words, individual rights derive their authority from human rights.  Human rights may be narrowly curtailed to protect the general good. The internment of Japanese citizens during World War 11 is one example. Earlier in our history, Native Americans suffered similar curtailments.  Slavery skirted the issue because slave owners successfully argued that Africans captured to work on plantations were property and not entitled to human rights.  For a time, American women suffered the same fate, having been defined as chattel. The Catholic Church attempted to set that precedent centuries earlier. Largely, In the course of our history, human rights have been the preserve of white males. When Samuel Alito declared women had no Constitutional right to an abortion, he reflected that patriarchal view. It allowed him to overturn 50 years of precedent established by a previous Court. That earlier Court had concluded the right to privacy was inalienable, as implied by the 14th Amendment, and that it pertained to women as well as men:  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law; nor deny any person within its jurisdictions the equal protection of the laws. Alito saw no evidence that the right to privacy pertained to reproductive freedom under the Constitution. He rejected the previous court’s extrapolation which argued the right was drawn from references elsewhere in the document. Instead, the absence of an overt statement led Alito to reason that the degree to which a woman can control her body should be left to individual states.  Imagine! The right to privacy as it applies to women is now subjected to a vote. The decision is stunning and weighed against society’s greater good is ludicrous. To abort a fetus the size of a pea poses no threat to the culture. When Alito sacrifices a woman’s inalienable right upon the altar of his opinion, he and those who agree with him deny equal treatment under the law to half the population. What’s more, their decision poses another Constitutional question that threatens a woman’s right to privacy.  The question is personhood. When do human rights apply? Among conservative religious groups, the answer is human rights apply at the moment of conception, giving preference to the fetus over the pregnant woman. They argue all human life is sacred and must be protected. “Sacred” has no meaning in civil law, however. It is a religious concept and implies the existence of a soul.  These concepts lie outside the purview of legislative law.  Nonetheless, the Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade and leave the abortion issues to the states opens the door for Christian zealots to codify their narrow views into civil law. The consequence for women is to obliterate the distinction between individual rights and human rights. Already, we have seen the Court’s recent tendency to expand Christian rights. Their latest ruling on prayer makes no pretense about their disregard for the separation of church and state.  At a time when the country suffers irreconcilable differences on many levels, the Court’s declining credibility among many put the country in peril. For women, being forced to demand human rights through the ballot box is a step backward. Even so, we can be grateful that suffrage is the one Constitutional provision that is unamendable. The challenge ahead is that  1 million people have changed their voter registration from Democrat to Republican in time for the 2022 midterms. Many of them are suburban women who gave Congress its slim Democratic majority in the last election. If they put their concerns about inflation above their freedom and the freedom of their daughters, then hope for women’s equality suffers a blow from which it will be slow to recover.  

#a woman's right to privacy #curtailments in human rights #individual vs. humn rights #Rove v. Wade #Samuel Alito #suburban voters in the 2022 election #the crime of human rights being put to a vote #the high Court violates women's human rights #The Trail of Tears #World War 11 and Japanese internment

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/the-world-according-to-charlie-brown/

The World According To Charlie Brown

I’d lost touch with the world of fashion and celebrity for a while because I failed to renew a magazine subscription.  Having corrected my error, the publication soon arrived.  What I discovered is that elites are escaping Covid-19 restrictions by flocking to private clubs.  (“Privacy Is Not Dead,” by Marshall Heyman, Town&Country, 9/21 pg. 57.) Membership is pricey, though, enough to makes me think owning a private island would be cheaper. In any case, for those with cash to burn, luxury services continue to flourish and aren’t confined to zip codes.  Telecommunication transports people anywhere without the need for a mask. A Zoom consultation for “skin laxity” with a New York salon means anyone anywhere—even the Pasha of Marrakesh—can enjoy expensive creams to ward off bags and sags. (“Look Ma, NO HANDS!” by Fiorella Valdesolo, Town&Country, 9/21, pg. 72.)   Of course, for clients who live in the Big Apple, salons offer other services that don’t expose them to Covid-19. A robot manicure is one.   (Ibid, pg. 72)  For a bit of gossip, however, be prepared to pay extra. China frowns on these extravagancies designed to escape the virus. The country gave birth to the disease, after all.  What’s more, leader Xi Jinping is worried about a growing appetite for western decadence among the elite. To him, a cultural pandemic is worse than a viral one. As such, he has vowed to “…control all the cultural chaos and build a lively, healthy, masculine, strong and people-oriented culture. “   Where women will stand in this renewed “masculine” culture, I don’t know. Maybe women aren’t people. If so, they gain an advantage. Since no one cares why a chick crosses the road, she might go for a robot manicure.  To its credit, technology seems eager to serve humans. But where will it lead? The more it teaches us about other cultures, the more we dislike one another. Women in Afghanistan enjoyed a few western freedoms for a time. Thanks to a hostile Taliban, they’ve been whiplashed to the stone age.  American women face a homegrown Taliban, too. These are religious zealots who seek to overturn the Bill of Rights’ Establishment Clause. The Texas legislature, for example, most of them males, aims to end a woman’s right to an abortion after 6 weeks. By then, they argue, an embryo has a heartbeat and is entitled to the legal protections of personhood. I doubt that fertilized eggs are people. At least, I’d never want to date one. Even so, what’s troubling is that Texas legislators know nothing about “birthin’ babies.”  The human embryo develops heart valves at 9-10 weeks. Maybe those who wrote the law were thinking about fruit flies. It wouldn’t be the first time men have declared females a sub-species. Foolishness isn’t confined to Texas, of course. Larry Elder, a conservative talk show host, and California politician comes to mind. An African American, he’s all for slavery reparations. He just wants it to go to the descendants of slave owners.  They are the folks who “lost their property,” he reminds us. Hearing talk about people as property never fails to make my jaw drop. Even so, I won’t moralize but will stick to the facts. Slave owners were compensated.  Elder’s history is flawed as is, I fear, his brain. If he doesn’t win his California race, he might want to move to Texas. Recently, a friend sent me a Peanuts cartoon that sums up my take on the world at this point. Charlie Brown is tucked in his bed with his dog. Having come to a decision, he turns his head toward his pal. “We’re not going outside anymore, Snoopy.  It’s too peopley.”  

#Charlie Brown #Establishment Clause #Fiorella Valdesolo #Larry Elder #Marshall Heyman #religious zealots in the U. S. #robot manicurists #slavery reparation #Snoopy #Taliban #Texas 6 weeks abortion law #Xi Jinping #Zoom