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agape-philo-sophia · 3 months

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➝ Do The Unthinkable — Think For Yourself. 🔑

Do not accept what you have been spoon-fed without question. Question the parents, policy enforcers, professors and politicians. (and keep in mind many are regurgitating their own opinions and beliefs.) You should even question yourself!

REMEMBER: Hand-me-down beliefs and opinions are not necessarily truths. In the past, some of the greatest minds were ridiculed for their theories and discoveries because society wasn't ready to shift to a new paradigm. Whether it was accepting that earth was not the center of the universe, or that illnesses were caused by viruses and/or bacteria, we have to remain open-minded in order to evolve as both individuals and as civilized beings.

Be inquisitive. Beyond asking who, what, when and where, one of the most important questions begin with "why". Remember that life on the screen is edited. Perception is more important than reality because perception creates realit. Keep in mind that one's perception can be manipulated. Ask yourself WHO benefits when considering any truth presented to you. People will lie, cheat, and steal for the sake of profit, power and control. Agendas can and do exist.

Religion can be used to control, just easily as education can be used to indoctrinate. Food can be used to poison, as easily as can be used to medicate. Media can be used to manipulate, as easily as it can be used to entertain.

We've forgotten who we are. You are not just a citizen in a state, living in a county, on a continent.

You are not just an employee with a job title or a business owner with a bank account. You are not a piece of paper, a birth certificate, a social security number, or a driver's license. If none of those things existed, wouldn't you still exist?

You are a sentient human being. You are an individual that is also part of a collective. We are all citizens of a planet called earth, and there is really no such thing as cities, countries, or continents when you step back and look at THE BIGGER PICTURE. They, just like the borders and boundaries that 'exist', are nothing but a construct of the mind.

No one would agree that profit is more important than taking care of the environment, let alone their own bodies. No one would reject free energy technology that would end the hunger and suppression of people of all nations.

Anyone can see that the world needs change. Who is to blame? The Government? Secret Societies? The wealthy elite? What if it's us? What if we're at fault for becoming misguided, turning a blind eye, falling for propaganda, being closed-minded, or becoming complacent?

If it requires your belief to 'exist'.. but it can not be brought before you, how is it real?You cannot point to "Government", just buildings and humans beings.

You cannot point to "law", just books filled with words composed of letters. You cannot point to "police", just a man or woman in a uniform wearing a badge. You cannot point to 'education', just books, classrooms, tests, and people called teachers. You cannot point to money, just paper, or numbers on a screen. You cannot hold in your hands the TIME you SPEND working for that so called money. How can these things have any control or power over you or your life? Belief. In a sense, it is all an illusion. They are 'CONSTRUCTS OF THE MIND'

What we believe, we create. What we create is based entirely on what we believe.

The 'representatives' we elect should be a reflection of US, and not that of corporate greed and any individuals lust for power and wealth. The men and women of government were only given authority that you delegated to them. It is an authority they could not have over you, if you did not have that power in the first place, in order to give it away. They are supposed to work for YOU, and not for mega corporations or billionaires. Dark money and corporate lobbyists should NOT have more influence over politics, which has a major influence over almost every aspect of our lives. It's time for change.

Corporate billionaire and their "donations" should not be able to buy an election, or buy votes on the Senate floor. OVERTURN CITIZENS UNITED.

NO ONE SHOULD BE ABOVE THE LAW - Equal treatment for ALL: Police, politicians, and the wealthy should be treated just like anyone else, especially when it comes to "law and order"

Corporations shouldn't receive government welfare, bailouts, etc, when there are millions of people living in poverty!

It all starts in our minds. What we agree, what we believe, we perceive; we conceive.

Money is a construct of the mind. It 'represents', to the average individual, a means of survival. You trade it for a roof over your head, food on the table, heat and water, and gas in the car. (How much do you spend on transportation to and from work, and why should any portion of your paycheck go towards that commute?) You cannot point to money. You can point to the house, the clothes and the food. You cannot point to 'utilities'. You can only point to a gas stove, a furnace, a light bulb, a shower, etc. Money is not the house, or the food, or the utilities though. What is money?

MONEY IS YOUR TIME AND YOUR ENERGY EXCHANGED FOR BUYING POWER (in the form of paper or electronic digits.)

Do you feel you were meant to work to live, and live to work? Maybe it doesn't bother you because you've climbed the top of a corporate ladder. You worked hard to get there and you love your job. Or maybe your job is just a means to survive, with the hopes of also being able to thrive as well. Maybe you were born into wealth, and cannot fathom what it is like to trade your time and energy for the means to live at least somewhat comfortably. For the rest of us who have to work hard day in and day out, it can be frustrating to lose so much of our time because we are SPENDING IT to "MAKE MONEY" so we can keep on surviving, and just to live another day to do it all again.

Some of us are fortunate enough to make enough and have money to spare. But the truth is without money you will not perish. It is without food, shelter and water that you may cease to be. Why are these things simply not provided? Who loses when someone else gains? Who believes in their hearts that every one should suffer to survive? Yet we live in a world that allows people to DIE EVERYDAY because they do not have the 'means' to survive. Is this okay? It is supposed to be a Dog-Eat-Dog world? Is it survival of the fittest or are these phrases spoon-fed to us so that we will be complacent, and even be grateful to have the bare minimum. while there are those hoarding enough wealth to feed and house the entire world?

Our world has more than enough abundance to provide for everyone! For one example, there exists many technologies that would move us completely away from dependence on oil for energy. Free energy provided by mother nature itself. But "ain't nothing in this world for free" as they say. For the love of money is 'the root of all evil'. BUT THAT IS JUST PROPAGANDA!

The truth is that there is enough land to grow enough food to feed the world. There is enough abandoned empty homes to house every single human being on this planet. Yet if there is enough for everyone to have shelter and food, then why hasn't that happened? There are enough resources for everyone to have a home. Yet for some reason there is suffering and lack. Why is this what our world has become? Continue https://thegreatwork208716197.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/do-the-unthinkable-think-for-yourself-2/

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qqueenofhades · 3 years

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The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

#the green knight #the green knight meta #sir gawain and the green knight #medieval literature #medieval history #this meta is goddamn 5.2k words #and has its own reading list #i uh #said i had a lot of thoughts?

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nomadicism · 4 years

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Now that She Ra is over, what are your thoughts on it? What about that Catradora kiss?

Hi Anon! Thank you for the Ask!

ヽ(*⌒∇⌒*)ﾉ Where to start?

I have so many thoughts on the show, and I’ve had so many thoughts since season 1. I’ve not written much of anything about She-Ra because I keep coming back to this problem of ‘where to start,’ or how to structure my thoughts beyond a +1000 item list. I can’t even pick one or two thoughts to dive into, because they all end up connecting to everything else —> honestly, that’s the mark of a tight narrative, even the big pieces that can fully stand on their own are still leading through to another piece. I fail at every attempt to write something brief.

Section I: Short answer first.

I have a very short and subjective list of media where I not only love (for different reasons) nearly every character (main, secondary, background), but where I also feel that their individual places or moments or arcs concluded in a way that felt right from start to finish. It’s a short list of media where connections and conflict between characters never felt forced, out-of-place, out-of-context, or done for shock value. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power makes that very short and subjective list.

It’s not often that a story hits all the right notes with me, and it’s much more often that a story starts off strong like that, and then turns me off ½-⅔ of the way through. I’ve quit video games during the final boss fight because the story lost me in the lead-up and I wasn’t going to waste 10-20 minutes of my time for something that turned out to be ‘meh’. It ain’t got to be deep, or anything either.

I really loved the voice acting. Everyone is great. A post for another time.

I love the aesthetics, which I wasn’t sure of at first teasers, but won me over in less than 3 minutes of the first episode (season 1) because I love bright pastels, the character designs are fun (can I still gush over variety of body types? YES), so many opportunities to explore stylish takes on the characters, and those Moebius-inspired scenery/background designs are a special interest delight. Season 5 delivered a visual ‘end game’ for the aesthetics in many ways, Section III further down will get into that a bit.

Section II: “What about that Catradora kiss?”

I gotta preface this with, shipping is not my go-to for how I enjoy creative works. It’s not a hobby for me. Sure there’s a few I dig more than others, but I’m otherwise agnostic about ships, unless there is a really bad story-fit (and that’s usually a subjective thing), or involves tropes that are a deal-breaker for me (and those typically relate a lot to the story fit).

With that said, I’m really happy to see Catradora be pulled off so brilliantly, and I think the kiss is a bold and beautiful big deal in a way that might not be obvious when considered in a vacuum. I see it as passionate and heart-felt, but also, it’s achieving(?) a relatable outcome (for me at least) that’s hard to describe. It’s an outcome yielded by a story in which two women—a hero and a villain—are divided and fight bitterly and then reconcile through love, while fighting a purity cult whose founder-prophet-god-king forces subservience through a conversion designed to strip someone of their identity (e.g. names they’ve chosen for themselves), memories-and-motivations, and love for others.

Despite these conversions, love still remains, it can’t just be baptized or therapy-ed away. Controlling puritans and authoritarians wielding religion or peace-panaceas as a weapon have been the villains in the lives of countless women and LGBTQIA people for a very long time. So yeah, I’ve got some feels about that. The last time I felt anything similarly relatable, or as strongly, was the Utena and Anthy relationship in Revolutionary Girl Utena (and really, their kiss during the surreal sequence at the end of the film adaptation).

Section III: Thoughts on Cult Aesthetics and Clones (the rough cut)

(1) In the future scenes at the end, Adora’s white dress with gold tiara and accents have this kind of goddess-like or Pallas Athena feel to it, which is a great mirror of the design choices for the god-like Horde Prime, his Purity Space Cult, mechanics/ship, and flagship interior scenery. Not saying that was the intention, but that’s how it came across to me.

Of course, those colors would be used because She-Ra already wears white and gold with a bit of red accent, which complement how the princesses are bright and colorful (pastels and jewel tones). The bold and bright colors helps signify that Etheria is full of life. Etheria is verdant and magical, and that sets up a contrast to the Fright Zone and the darker colors found in Horde characters (Hordak, Shadow Weaver, Scorpia, Catra, Entrapta, etc).

So the first kind of contrast was with the Fright Zone standing out as a poisoned/toxic against the bright, lively colors of Etheria and the princesses. Season 5 introduces another take on that contrast as Horde Prime is the opposite, or antithesis of Etheria’s colorful life. He’s like anti-life with his shades of light-and-dark grays on white, and only glow-green as an accent. In some cultures and religious traditions, white is associated with purity, and in others it is associated with death.

When Horde Prime ‘purifies’ Hordak for the sins of individuality and emotion (emotion for others, for his own sake), Hordak is drained of the colors he chose for himself during exile. In addition to being a contrast to Horde Prime (and informed by the 80s cartoon design), Hordak’s dark blue (or blue-black) and red color palette reflects the traditional use of red as a color for evil (especially vampirism) from back when diabolism was a stand-in for ‘the Devil’ in many forms of visual media (comics, live-action, animation, etc). In place of diabolic red, Horde Prime has toxic glow-green.

I absolutely love the use of the glow-green accents. Color trends for villains and significations of evil come and go, and I’m glad to see the color green be used again, and used so well. The last time I saw that shade of glow-green used so well was in Sleeping Beauty (re: Maleficent’s magic and the orb on her staff) and as the Loc-Nar in Heavy Metal. In both films, there are connotations of evil as a poisonous and corrupting influence. Green, in the context of evil, almost always signifies poison (and sometimes envy). I also like that the glow-green color is used in ways that aren’t immediately saying ‘this is evil’, such as the green baptismal waters and flames from the purification scene, or the green amniotic protein fluid. The language of piety and trappings of the sacred can cloak a sinister purpose.

I don’t know if any of that was intentional, but Horde Prime feels like the perfect synergy of purity and death (which has additional connotations, but that’s a very personal interpretation).

(2) Horde Prime immediately gave me subtle cult vibes in his first cameo (Season 3), and the follow-through on that was perfect and exactly what I was hoping to see. The background music throughout the scenes aboard the flagship fits well (love the soundtrack), and has the quality of Ecstatic Experience without pulling directly from any specific religion. Horde Prime’s dialogue is a delightful bit of narcissism veiled with the language of piety.

A purity cult comprised of clone-brother-worshippers of the cult’s founder-prophet-god-king reinforces that narcissism and has all the fun-dark feels of shiny-techno-future-dystopias. It is also an interesting use of clones, especially in a story format that usually never has the time to really dive into the complexities of cloning. This is the sort of thing that you’d be more likely to see in a one-off episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, rather than the basis for a greater scope villain, or multi-season nemesis. (and yes, Star Trek: TNG had an interesting clone episode)

Clones in science-fiction tend to fall into just a few tropes, and I generally dislike seeing clones show up in a story because the execution nearly always feels sloppy (in small ways or big ways). I did not get that feeling from She-Ra, where, the clones occupy the “cog in the machine” trope, but it is not their existence as clones that make them that way, it is the Will of Horde Prime that does. They are simultaneously expendable and sacred in their unity. It’s a nice flip on “stronger by working together” that Adora and the others have to learn (and struggle) to do.

It seems like, despite their religious programming, the clones have a little bit of their own personalities until Horde Prime ‘inhabits’ them to exert his Will. I’m trying not to read too much into it, b/c what comes across as ‘inhabits’ to me (especially with the religious/cult context), was probably meant more literal like described in the dialogue as a hive-mind control kind of thing. The first time it happens—to post-wipe/death Hordak—felt to me like a possession scene from The Exorcist, but without the kind of horror visuals that would scare both adults and children. The quick-and-subtle amount of body contortion and sound is still gross and creepy (because it should be), but it also reminds me of Ecstatic Experience in the form of speaking in tongues, or snake handling, or being a medium for a spirit. Again, I’m not saying any of that is intentional, but that’s how I see it.

(3) Finally, there is Entrapta, Hordak, and Wrong Hordak. Clones rarely get to be ‘humanized’ through friendship or romance arcs. I can think of a dozen or more robots that get to be humanized in that way, but can’t recall any clones that have (excluding doomed clones whose friendship/romance only existed for the sake of selling the tragedy of their death). Hordak gets death, renewal, and romance in a way that worked really well, and the totality of it is unique. I was a bit surprised that they could work in another clone—and I love Wrong Hordak—who pulls triple-duty as (1) comedy; (2) relevant to moving various pieces of the story along; and (3) more humanizing of the clones, which, again rarely happens as most stories take the easy low road when it comes to clones.

For Entrapta’s part, she’s never put in the position of giving up who she is (‘weird’ by many standards) for a romance. Her passion for technology is both an amusing double entendre at times, and integral to who she is. A romance for Entrapta does not replace her passion for technology, she can have both. Dating myself but, I came up in a time where most media (for children or adults) would rob a woman of her agency or passions during the resolution of a romance arc. Maybe times have changed, but it’s still nice to see none of that nonsense happening here.

#catradora #entrapdak #spop #spop meta #spop asks #ask me anything #spop s5 spoilers

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cobieeliseforsh · 4 years

Text

I'm getting pretty annoyed with the amount of bullshit in the media right now. I just read an article about the "antisemitic" conspiracy theory Qanon. Calling Qanon antisemitic is like calling the KKK a group opposed to the career of Will Smith - technically true, but clearly a small subsection of a greater whole.

So, to remedy this...

COBIE'S FRUSTRATED GUIDE TO QANON FROM SOMEONE WHO LOVES CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND WISHES THIS ONE WOULD FUCK OFF BECAUSE IT IS BORING AS SHIT BUT NOT FIZZING WITH ENERGY, EVEN ON A MOLECULAR LEVEL, BECAUSE IT IS A DUMB AND LAZY REHASH FROM THE 80S OR EARLIER!

PART 1: DA FUCQ IS QANON?

Qanon is a grooming organisation for the Christian Far Right Death Cult that has held the Republican party in its sweaty hands since the ascent of Reagan in the 1980s. They believe in some bullshit I won't reprint here because I have no intention of spreading their ideology, but if you've heard of the Satanic panic, this is Satanic Panic 2: Now With Pizza!

Qanon is, by definition of their own supporters attacks on Muslim terrorism, a terrorist organisation. And, though it seems impossible, they're stupidier than ISIS ever were, because at least there was some twisted logic behind ISIS: poor young men fighting revolutionary wars against what they see as corrupt and immoral authorities and ideologies is nothing new. Qanon is literally the powerful declaring war on those without power out of fear that those without power (Satanists) live only to physically abuse their ugly, fat, prejudiced, stupid children. Despite the statistically most likely people to abuse them being them themselves, and there being plenty of evidence that many of these hypocrites have done that in the past (numerically many - one thing I believe Qanon followers on is that the majority are gullible Maud Flanders types, so statistically it won't be that many).

Donald Trump supports them over the "violent" Antifa (Antifa haven't killed anyone since 1993 (and that was a suicide), aren't actually an organisation, and are against facism, which Trump also claims to be against), despite Qanon followers carrying and firing weapons regularly, having shot up a pizza place in a terrorist act, refusing to wear masks, and other acts of violence designed to terrorise people.

PART 2 WHO DO THEY HATE?

Um... like, 98% of people.

Qanon is primarily an Apocalyptic Christian Far Right Death Cult. They believe in what they call SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse) which happens at such a low frequency as to make it as serious a problem as being invaded by pookas. You might find anecdotal evidence here and there, but the majority of cases are hearsay spread by people who weren't there who were a part of or raised by people who were a part of the Satanic Panic. If you hear about it, it's likely bullshit. Just look at the West Memphis 3: accused of Satanic Ritual Abuse, they were sent to prison for wearing black clothes and being teenagers without any evidence. Now, whoever killed those boys is still loose, because Qanon, like all right-wing groups, is about being obeyed, not about justice.

So, with Satanic Ritual Abuse being fucking vapour, they can accuse ANYONE. And if there is no evidence, they cry COVER UP. There is no way, at all, to prove this mindset is wrong as it always self corrects, because being religious in origin, it is driven by BELIEF, not evidence.

So, whoever they believe is evil, is, as far as their reality tunnel goes.

Muslims? Evil child abusers. "But there is no evidence of that. In fact, the Muslim community is actually very protective of their children and other children. They're amongst the kindest people you can meet, even if their political leaders in their own countries are jerks." Well, says Qanon, that's because their community covers up the abuse. There wouldn't be any evidence. But my cousin went to school with a girl who was groomed by a Muslim. It's clear it is something all Muslims do. "But that's stupid. That's like saying that because Ted Bundy, a heterosexual white Republican, murdered loads of women, all heterosexual white Republicans want to murder women!" Now, says Qanon, you are just being silly. Besides, I believe Muslims are bad and Republicans aren't. You can't question my beliefs.

But we can, and we should.

Qanon followers use this vague structure to create complex webs that link up various conspiracy theories, but they aren't a complex web. They're just a list of petty grievances they have from living in their own personal echo chamber.

They hate women, they hate girls, they hate boys who don't conform to their expectations, they hate men who vote left-wing, they hate gay people, bi people, really anyone who isn't heterosexual, they definitely hate trans people (see: trans people want to use bathrooms to abuse children as merely an extension of the Satanic Ritual Abuse claims), they hate people with coloured hair, bright clothes, they hate Jewish people, they hate Muslims, they hate anyone from a fringe religion that doesn't look right, they hate foreigners, black and brown people... anyone they define as different. And to back this up, they claim to be "the majority" being dictated to be a "minority" - they aren't. They're a minority of gobby cunts, a Karen of Nazis (Karen being the best collective noun to describe these childish crybabies who were so desperate to remain in a state of childlike innocence they embraced both religion and then keep insisting their imaginary friend, Jesus, is following them everywhere, like a psychotic stalker ghost).

PART 3 WHERE DOES THEIR BULLSHIT COME FROM?

This is probably the most important part. Not what they believe, but where these ideas come from, and why they aren't new.

Qanon is a mixture of young-and-edgy YouTube/8chan influencer, white supremacist religious manipulation, pro-Capitalist Protestant religious "life is shit, embrace misery" ideology, pedophile hysteria, and "we hate the idea people have rights because we're power mad, but we're going to frame this as a backlash, normal people making their voices heard, a culture war, or whatever else we can rebrand PREJUDICE because even we don't want to admit we are bigots".

So, first of all, the angry white online teenagers: have always existed, will always exist. Their parents don't give a shit about them unless they cause trouble. So, they learn quickly that the best way to get attention is to cause trouble, which leads to kinship with other troubkemakers, forming an echo chamber of escalating troublemaking. But they're also angry, and often poor (in their eyes, or in actuality), so they're drawn to outrage, and like causing it. They're attracted to movements like this because they believe it's a chance to get some attention, someone to notice them.

And who notices them? White supremacists are always on the lookout for recruits. They feed their need for outrage and attention by misrepresenting everything. They take puff-piece news articles and shoddy journalism and further twist them into movements around positions that have no basis in reality. Vaccines? Designed to hurt you. "Uhhh, no," you say. "That's literally the opposite of what a vaccine does." I don't believe that, they say, and you can't question my beliefs. BLM? Terrorism. "No, they just want to not be shot." No they don't, they want to take over and put the Jews in power, and you can't question my beliefs! "You have no evidence!" COVER UP! they scream.

So it goes, so it goes.

Meanwhile, the Protestan work ethic of, "If you didn't suffer, you don't deserve it," goes on and on. They believe that shit things just happen, you can't stop them. Capitalism is founded on this very, very relugious principle: work should be pain for it to have value. This justifies promoting assholes, and making things difficult. But it also promotes the idea that you can't do anything to combat inequality, as that is natural, and you can't do anything to stop bad things happening, they always will, so why try? This lends Qanon a specific pattern: complain, do nothing, complain nothing is being done, still do nothing, repeat. It's wrong to intervene, you see. This allows them to say racism is bad, but God wants us to suffer so we deserve phony-heaven, a paradise they think is built on bricks of human misery... does that sound glorious to you? And if you have something, clearly you did suffer to get it, and so you are worthy, which is why Trump is a hero to them and they believe his every utterance of verbal diarrhea about him being persecuted (to be fair, he is, but he deserves it because he's lazy and incompetent).

Pedophile hysteria is also generally religiously motivated. Children should be protected, but they are not innocent angels. I've worked with children. Some are nice, some are sneaky, some are violent bullies, and so on. The one thing that unites all children is that they are ignorant. That's why we send them to school. And there are people who want to prey on children. The world we usually use to describe those who most often hurt, abuse and damage children is, "family". Promoting the idea of gangs of rampaging pedophiles snatching children into vans and harming them in shadowy rooms, or murdering them in some Satanic ritual, is laughable compared to the epidemic of children being harmed by those parents terrified the pedophiles are out there. Such fear motivates them to do untold harm to children, restricting their freedoms and their growth, teaching them that all sex is bad so they never enjoy it, forcing them to be things they aren't, and turning a blind eye to obvious abuse because those doing it are not the model of abuse being put out by the press and Internet communities. In that last way, Qanon is a driver of child abuse: it actively encourages Apocalyptic Christian Far Right Death Cult members to nit even ask the obvious question: if Epstein was abusing kids, and Epstein was hanging out with Trump, was Trump maybe involved in some way?

And then there is just the prejudiced crowd, most notably the American-exceptionalism delusional whack jobs. Let me be clear, all forms of exceptionalism are prejudiced, as they suggest that those who are exceptional are better and mire deserving than others, and the real world does not contain such hierarchies, just stuff that happens until it stops happening. A monkey may be the alpha, but one day they won't be. It's not a hierarchy, it's just a thing that happens that we project a power structure onto. Who knows what monkey culture is like? Maybe to them deference is more honourable and respected than being in charge. No-one has asked monkeys for their views of ideology or power structures.

This often manifests itself in ideas of, "We shouldn't be ashamed!" and that movements they don't like are, "Against us!" Well, if you're setting out to hurt people because you believe you are better than them, you should be ashamed. That queer Pakistani girl you keep out of college could have been the one to cure cancer! She might have had the unique perspective to make that breakthrough. And, yes, some of us are against Qanon, because Qanon is hurting people. That is the point of the movement: to harm its enemies, by denial if freedom all the way up to outright murder. It isn't a Pride parade or BLM demanding equality and an end to deaths, its a hate movement driven by a desire to punch down, and ultimately perpetuate the very system that isn't even working for those who follow its own ideology.

It's based on fear of the new, even if that new place is better than the old one, change can be scary. They think equality will hurt them, the way collective bargaining would hurt them. But we don't live in a system where resources are so finite you have to do without, we live in a system where resources are finite but we throw away an excess because capitalism couldn't make rich people richer by giving it to those who need it, so they dispose of it and introduce scarcity to drive up the cost. Working together would force them to stop doing that, which is why movements like this exist: to perpetuate a form of exceptionalism more like a cult, where only the leaders reap the rewards.

PART 4 WHAT IS THE END GOAL OF QANON?

It doesn't have one.

Qanon is a right-wing movement. Right-wing movements are about winning arguments now, and then feeling smug, even when the damage is undone later. It's about a sense of self-satisfaction, and not anything else.

Plus, Qanon has so many stake-holders who hate each other that the movement will eventually descend into cannibalism as all these things do.

Finally, being primarily religious in its design, it won't take long for many religious types to realise Q is kind if a God-like figure, a false idol, and when that happens, plenty if their leaders will become worried that their followers are so focused on Q they might "stray from the path" of donating all their money to their church.

Unless it turns out that Q is Q from Star Trek, in which case their end goal is to test Jean-Luc Picard.

PART 5 SHOULD WE FEAR QANON?

Nah. It's a group of fringe lunatics whose time in the spotlight will be fleeting. As I've already said, even their ideas aren't original - this is the Apocalyptic Christian Far Right Death Cult version of Fortnite stealing dances: everyone goes crazy about it for a bit, but it's so insubstantial in its original form, nevermind the cover band version, that almost all people with a lick of common sense will dismiss it. Plus, it doesn't serve any agenda: Trump could easily find himself on the receiving end of it, that one Qanon politician just elected will likely be marginalised the moment Trump vanishes, and having a single person won't sway any votes in such divisive times, which means they'll be proclaimed ineffectual soon enough, and with Epstein it is already showing that it isn't something which helps the powerful, meaning a lot of people who do have secrets will want it gone sooner rather than later lest it bite their own hands. Plus, they are actually harming people - and say what you like about the Republicans, they don't tend to respond well to the PR disaster of groups they side with directly attacking or killing people unless they are their own ACAB stormtroopers.

Plus, it's a bunch of saddos on the Internet. Chances are if you see someone screaming about Qanon and waving around a gun, they'd have done the same and screamed about lizards had it never got started.

PART 6 WHAT SHOULD I DO?

Stop giving them attention. This is one of the most BORING conspiracy theories ever created. Seriously, since 9/11, conspiracy theories have really gone downhill. They used to be about aliens and subterranean kingdoms, and now they're just attempts to misdirect pedophile hunters from the right-wing types who have covered up child abuse, and tie it to phony "think of the children" and "Satan is out to get us" religious hysteria.

With covid-19, the press is having a very slow news cycle, so they're desperately grabbing at anything that can drive search engine algorithm clicks to their sites, so they're covering Qanon because they've seen it trending. I doubt most people involved with it really believe in it, but it is so directionless that it wouldn't matter if they did. Qanon Con would descend into bloodshed fairly quickly because everyone would be angry and arguing that the tater tots are secret SRA code for cannibalising children or that it reveals that Hilary Clinton buries children beneath fields of potatoes. It's stupid, the people involved with it are stupid, and the bigger question is what they believe that led them to this:

Disenfranchisement. Having to respect the beliefs of others. Prejudice. Anger.

Well, boo-fucking-hoo. If these shitbags actually want to stop harm to children, maybe stop supporting gun rights so kids aren't being gunned down in schools, and black kids don't keep getting gunned down everywhere. Until you do that, Qanon, you're the child abusers.

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bedazzlecat · 4 years

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My ideal #TheSims5 would be...

Create a World is base game included. It has fail safes and error guards to prevent causing problems with routing. You can shape the landscape with mountains, trees, rocks, bushes, landmarks, etc, and be able to place as many lots as you need. Would require a better program that Sims 3 CAW.

It comes with 3 basic built worlds like Sims 4

It's completely open world like Sims 3

Cars and boats and other vehicles are DLC options. If there are horses, we should be able to buy a wagon or carriage.

It comes with cats and dogs do start with and you can have DLC to add other animals if you want them. And if you want wild animals (to wander your world or to live in a preserve) this should be an option too. You should be able to choose only the items you need for your style of play.

Hunting should be an option. I don't even care if it's a rabbit hole like the bear hunt in sims medieval. I like there were steaks in Sims 3. Not everything has to be cute in the Sims .

Some grit and hardship without dying from embarrassment from peeing your pants like a toddler is required. Give the sims some dignity. Hypothermia? Fine. Drowning when you're so tired you pass out? Fine. Laughing yourself to death, stupid.

Gardening plants should have unique meshes that look like real plants. Dragon fruit does not grow on a bush and corn doesn't grow on a vine. I want to utilize all of my ingredients in something. It took several packs before I had a use for bluebells in my game other than simoleons. That's not acceptable.

Off the grid options should exist in base game. Roughing it in all forms should be base game. People love rags to riches challenges. Being poor should be base game, not take 10 packs to get a bush to pee in, an option to make candles, and live off the grid. Mansions should take 10 expansions. Cities should take 10 expansions Capitalism should take 10 expansions.

The ability to make swimmable water features that are not pools, like lakes, rivers, and waterfalls.

Lots of DIY activities for the sims, especially survival related. The woodworking table was good but it had so few items. The eco fabrication thingy was cool but big klunky machines is what I hate about sims 4. Like the telescope and microscope.

Population control. If I want an uninhabited island, I should be able to have one without mods.

Cars are DLC options on an individual basis. Otherwise you have to take public transportation. I hate yellow cabs in sims 3. A public bus, train, or subway. A transportation career should be an option.

There's like 10 different cars in sims 3 I didn't use because I prefer horses, broomsticks, boats, and motorcycles and the occasional cc car. It really bloats the game to have so much unusable stuff. Maybe an option to hide objects you don't use.

Variety in community lot types.

I love the lot traits in Sims 4.

I love the changing lot types like the seasonal community lot in sims 3 and the eco living community lot. More of that!

Sims should be able to join a religion as in sims medieval. Custom religions would be interesting, which would influence sim behaviors and feelings.

Babies grow into toddlers, grow into children, grow into tweens, grow into teens grow into young adults, adult, middle age, and elderly. Ghosts are optional.

Supernatural/occult sims should be DLC on an individual basis. If I want witches and ghosts but not aliens, it should be so.

Time periods in history can be adjusted in options. It limits what sort of items you can use or clothing.

Be able to change colors and textures like in sims 3.

Bunk beds are base game.

Weather should be base game.

Illness, injuries, and cures should be base game.

Individual adventure options should be DLC. Individual careers should be DLC.

So say I have base game, my sims can take plant remedies to get better, which requires a skill, but to get "better care" you have to buy the hospital expansion that comes with the career, but also can be adjusted to some kind of economic heathcare system that you can choose. Taxes vs deductables.

User created custom content can be part of the game. People can get paid and EA can get paid for making crazy good custom content.

Self employment should be base game.

I don't want to sell on plopsy. I did like selling on the market tables on sims 4 but it doesn't always work the way I want it too.

Risky and autonomous woohoo should be a thing as should birth control without an expansion. Like even, say my sim can eat a plant and have all the woohoo she wants without pregnancy. Moodlets can be like a honey moon period, or there could be conversational based moodlets. A couple could have a conversation to "try for baby" and they get autonomous action moodlets to encourage this behavior until pregnancy is achieved. A "fertility treatment" should be a temporary moodlet from a hospital, not a trait.

Recycling should be base game. Especially breaking down recycled materials such as metals, glass, and plastic for home building materials or diy materials (like bits and pieces from sims 4 eco lifestyle)

Lots of slots for clutter. I don't like having to cheat to place objects closer together or on top of a shelf.

Wall height adjustment to any size. Auto roofs, custom roofs curved roofs, different textures. stairs of all types including spirals and ladders included in base game. Free window and door placement. Clear roofs, clear floor tiles should be available if wanted. Ceiling tiles should be a thing.

Have a full range of gender expression and sexual characteristics.

Hide /unhide mailbox to have bills and items automatically delivered to your inventory. The ability to auto pay,

Cell phone should have an option to turn it off. Turn it on, get lots of calls, invites, opportunities, etc. That's fine. But the Sim gods give and take away when it's their game.

Consequences to your actions. Don't have a criminal career without crime and punishment in the world. And yes this should be a playable career.

Don't have fires without firefighters ever again.

Have the option to turn off public services like police and fire department if desired.

I hate rabbit hole careers but some people prefer them. Jobs should have all have rabbit holes and all have options to follow to work. Even school.

Pristine graphics.

A meaningful emotional/mood/trait system.

Favorites: music, color, genre (movies and books), food.

Custom music could tie in with a service like spotify.

Game music (build/buy, maps, and loading screens) is obnoxious. I like how in sims 4 you can turn it off.

I understand fish go bad but don't let me forget to put thing in my fridge. Store all harvestable and fish at once in a fridge.

Little pop ups that tell you about a book the sim is reading would be a nice touch. You should be able to buy books your sims wrote and edit these text pop ups so that they can be shared with the gallery.

Speaking of the gallery, there should be a Sims 5 gallery.

There should also be a virtual real time sims online community. Add friends and visit each other's houses, world, etc. Your sims social media account is on there too. You can share what your sim is doing with their blog posts, followers, videos, etc. Subscribe and let your sim watch them on any screen in the house or get updates on what they are doing or if they're throwing a party which you can be invited to or hear about later. It's all built into the game seamlessly. (I know. But... This is my fantasy sims game!)

I love what they did with the inventory in sims 4 with one of the updates. Keep that.

Every expansion should come with a world. And the builds should be worth buying the world. Otherwise give us the power to create and share our own so that people who can't build or don't want to spend the time can have access to quality creative content.

I know I'm kind of all over the place but this is the kind of game I want.

#Sims 3 #Sims 4 #Sims 5 #ea games

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x--daughters-of-darkness--x · 4 years

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THE PRETTY RECKLESS's TAYLOR MOMSEN On Singing 'Like A Stone' Days After CHRIS CORNELL's Death: 'I Could Barely Get Through It'

THE PRETTY RECKLESS singer Taylor Momsen, who has repeatedly named SOUNDGARDEN as one of her favorite bands, spoke to "Offstage With DWP" about the influence of the iconic Seattle alternative rock act on her music career and her songwriting approach. She said (see video below): "Their level of artistry and songwriting and musicianship is so above what I can even comprehend. It's so intricate, it's so detailed, it's so good and it's so smart that it takes a minute to understand SOUNDGARDEN. They're catchy, and everyone's heart the hits, but when you really investigate SOUNDGARDEN and get into it, it's like a religion — it's so in-depth and it's just superior to so much music that's out there.

"I've based my whole career and identity off of THE BEATLES and SOUNDGARDEN. They're two bands that I put next to each other, and I know that might sound crazy to some people. But they're so important. There's very few bands, I think, that needed to exist, and SOUNDGARDEN is one of those bands that there'd be a hole in the music world without their records."

Momsen also reflected on how the deaths of SOUNDGARDEN frontman Chris Cornell and longtime producer Kato Khandwala affected the making of THE PRETTY RECKLESS's new LP, "Death By Rock And Roll". Just days after Cornell's passing, Momsen, whose band was the opening act for SOUNDGARDEN's spring 2017 run of dates, paid tribute to the legendary singer by performing a cover of AUDIOSLAVE's "Like A Stone" at the Rock On The Range festival in Columbus, Ohio.

"That was a cover that we'd been doing for years, just because I love singing the song, but it certainly took on a different meaning at that show," Taylor recalled. "I could barely get through it. It was probably not my greatest moment. I was not in a very good place to be public, 'cause after that, I canceled all touring. I needed some time to clear my head, to process what had happened, or attempt to, so I went home after that. I couldn't get on stage and pretend that I was okay and that I was happy to be there. To put on a show and put on façade, I wasn't capable of doing that. So I left and went dark for a while to try to regroup. And then, unfortunately, as I started to put the pieces back together, I got the phone call that Kato, our producer, had passed in a motorcycle accident. So that kind of put the nail in the coffin. Not to get super heavy here, but I fell down a hole into such depression, substance abuse and a hole of grief that I didn't know how to get out of. And it took a while.

"To make a very long story short, it took music, rock and roll, to save my life again," she explained. "I know it sounds super cliché, but it's entirely true, 'cause I had nothing — I had given up on everything. I didn't know if I wanted to do this anymore, I just thought, 'What's the point?' And I turned to music, 'cause music, in my entire life, has been the one thing that's never let me down — it's always been my friend; it's always been my salvation. And listening to the records that I loved turned into me wanting to write — not even wanting to write, it just kind of became this outpour of writing without really… I didn't have to try to write this record; I kind of just poured it out. And then that led to figuring out how to record this album. So there was a lot of baby steps in trying to heal, but without music, I don't know how I would have made it through."

"Death By Rock And Roll", the fourth studio album from THE PRETTY RECKLESS, will likely arrive in early 2021. The LP will be released via Fearless Records in the U.S. and Century Media Records in the rest of the world.

Momsen recently confirmed in an interview that RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE guitarist Tom Morello guests on "Death By Rock And Roll". Morello appears on a track called "And So It Went".

Morello joins previously announced guests Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron from SOUNDGARDEN. The song with Cameron and Thayil, called "Only Love Can Save Me Now", was recorded at Seattle's legendary London Bridge Studios, where seminal LPs like PEARL JAM's "Ten" and SOUNDGARDEN's "Louder Than Love" were laid down.

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#Taylor Momsen #the pretty reckless #2020 interviews

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indianpolsoc · 4 years

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The Perception of Language and its Political Implications

The following is an opinion piece by guest writer Arman Hasan and does not reflect the views of the Indian Political Society. Arman is a first -year student studying Political Science at Ramjas College, Delhi University.

Sometimes memories emerge in your mind even when you are engaged in the most mundane activities. They have no structure or meaning, they are just glimpses from your past. For me, one of these is from my childhood, of a day when I was just staring at an illuminated manuscript of Persian calligraphy framed by my mother on the wall of our living room. Following some unknown inspiration, I decided to copy the calligraphy on a piece of paper. I ran to show my mother what I had achieved, and she responded enthusiastically, telling me how proud she felt. I could not comprehend why she felt so proud of me for merely copying down a text, a text that neither she nor I understood.

At the time, I could not make sense of this, and till this day, have never had a Eureka moment revealing to me the nature of that event. However, with every repetition of this piece of unstructured past in my mind, more and more depth began surrounding it.

I belong to a family of linguists and poets, so the privilege of learning the beauty of Persian, Arabic & Urdu was present in the meritocracy around me. Yet, when I see myself now, inept at speaking any one of these, it makes me introspect about the conscious decisions I took which deprived me of this privilege and the societal influences which shaped these decisions.

I remember my first day of primary school, with all the children bright with excitement and energy, waiting for their names to be called out by the teacher for a roll check. I was any other kid in uniform, with no way of distinguishing me from others, and yet when the teacher called out my full name - Arman Hasan- I could sense an ambiance of demarcation among the other children. A kid wearing the same uniform as the others was now somehow different. After some days had passed and I had finally made friends, one of them confessed a peculiar thing which confused my five-year-old self, "Arman, why don't you look like a Muslim?". I don't remember whether I responded to the query as I couldn't really comprehend what it meant, but it did sow the seed for future dilemmas I would face. As the years have passed, I've repeatedly been asked that same question, and each time the answer has kept evolving.

What others perceived of me began shaping how I perceived myself. There emerged a vehement need to distance myself from this perception- to do so my opinions about my language, culture and religion took the form of aversion. The second time I was asked this question by another one of my classmates sometime in middle school, I couldn’t stay silent. I had to show that I was different and not what they thought of me. I replied, "I am not like other Muslims, my family is very modern." The identity which others had prescribed to Muslims began shaping my opinions about my own community.

In school, I found myself developing an identity that my peers could relate more to. The Hindi dialect spoken at home was similar to Awadhi and was quite distinguishable from the Hindi spoken around Delhi. The word for 'Me' in Awadhi is 'Hamm,' but using that at school would bring mockery. So, I restricted the use of such phrases there. I thought I was successfully able to separate the two paradigms, but as time went by my vocabulary limited itself to what was taught formally at school.

Another subtle change that was occurring simultaneously was the shift in my opinions. I began mocking my mother for using 'Hamm' and became guilty of compromise, which I masqueraded as change.

Soon, my interest in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu began dwindling. Over the years, I've used different rationales to justify this- to be truly 'modern,' it was necessary to be fluent in English. English and Hindi were already taught at school, but to be even more modern, I opted for German as a third language. To be able to say 'Wie heißt du?' was a step towards modernity. Eurocentrism was being indoctrinated in my mind. My diminishing interest in Persian, Urdu & Arabic was inevitably due to structural problems as well- the popular Delhi school I attended didn't teach these languages, and so the belief that they are not modern or profitable became entrenched.

I tried many ways to rationalize my apathy towards the memory of me copying the Persian calligraphy. I began associating my mother’s happiness that day to her thinking that I was being religious. Modern society had established the notion that these languages are religion-centric, an identity I didn't want to confine myself to. Ironically, I later learnt that neither Persian nor Urdu are holy languages, and yet the association was made subconsciously. I was influenced to such an extent that as a kid, I used to argue with my relatives who knew no other language than Urdu, insisting that learning Urdu was useless, patronizing their entire existence.

In my search of identity within modernity, there was a dissonance in terms of the culture I was brought up with and the one which I strove to adopt. By merely learning my name, my peers could not unsee my Muslim identity, yet within my familial circles, I wasn't Muslim enough. Not knowing the Ramayana led to me being differentiated while not keeping a beard led to the questioning of my beliefs. Why was society not content with my synthetization of the two?

Reading Hannah Arendt's 'Origins of Totalitarianism,' gave me some insight as to why I felt this way. She gives a detailed analysis of the psychology of middle-class Jews in 18th century Europe who wanted to be seen outside of their Jewish identity for want of not being confined to the prejudices of Anti-Semites. But regardless of their struggle, society did not see them without ingrained Anti-Semitism while the Jewish community didn’t see them as Jewish enough. This paradox became the primary causality behind their dissonance.

I could finally see how a single question asked again and again over many years caused so much moral dilemma, shaped opinions, and formed subconscious hierarchies of religion, culture, and language. It took some time to realize the nature of the causality behind all this.

Media and Pop Culture play a major role in enforcing stereotypes and prejudices against minorities. Portrayals of minorities in their designated roles are successful both in creating prejudices and ghettoizing their communities. To see a Muslim outside of stereotypical clothing is for the person not to be Muslim anymore. Affiliation with Islamic languages cannot be classified as modern.

The base of my beliefs was shaped by stereotypes and prejudices and deconstructing such problematic associations became my primary task. I had to tell myself that language does not exist in a binary. To learn English, I did not have to give up Persian, Arabic or Urdu. Speaking these languages doesn’t make me any less progressive and the duty to define progress is up to me, not to how the society wanted me to perceive it.

I remember the last time I was asked the question, "Why don't you look like a Muslim?". After years of contempt and guilt brewing under the influence of this question, I finally took my time to carefully explain why the monolithic image of Islam was the one which the media wanted to portray, while being ignorant to the complexities and diversities which exist within the community, thus exacerbating the age-old stereotypes stemming from propaganda and hatred. The standardization of languages which had been coerced on me by society finally had to be dismantled. I realized that language and orthodoxy were highly political entities but separate from each other. Approval should not be a reason for me to sacrifice the experience of being mystified by richness of such languages.

As I recalled that vague memory slowly over a few years, acquiring some structure, I finally asked my mother why she felt so happy for me that day, receiving an answer I could not have anticipated. She felt pleased neither for society nor for our religion. She felt happy because she believed that I was privileged to have my forefather’s creativity in my possession, and not knowing what my father and forefathers wrote just because it was in a language I didn't understand would have truly been a tragedy. Over the years, society had made her conform and had shaped her views for which she often felt guilty as well. But I had an opportunity to transcend that guilt. For me, choosing to learn one language did not have to mean giving up the other. My act of noting down a single illuminated manuscript made her hope that the binary which society had reinforced, the prejudices it had exacerbated and the precarity it had caused could slowly but surely, be taken apart.

#politics #articles

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crlhs1984-blog · 4 years

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Personal Blog Entry Script

The various mediums of social sciences are often involving themselves in the intricate web that designs and drives the forces of collective action. Referring to situations in which groups of people work together towards a common goal of enhancing a status, an achievement, or a common objective, collective action has been adopted by the forces of today’s CMC platforms (Britannica, n.d.). According to ‘The Collective Action Problem’ (n.d.), website states that collective action problems involve, “A situation in which everyone (in a given group) has a choice between two alternatives and where, if everyone involved acts RATIONALLY… the outcome will be worse for everyone involved, in their own estimation, than it would be if they were all to choose the other alternative…” (Terminology).

In layman’s terms, a problem that classifies as a collective action problem involves a person’s individual desire to act selfishly, even when the collective good would require the group to cooperate as a whole in the opposite direction; which ultimately presents a conflict between an individual’s interests and the group’s interests. Collective action has always existed within the constructs of society, and the introduction of mobilized CMCs has served to personify the reach and effectiveness of some significant causes in society.

COVID-19 and CMC Motivated Collective Action

As the author of this piece searched her mind for a relevant and modern example of a CMC enhanced example of a collective action topic, her mind began to think back to recent events in her own life where her church group was faced with the hard realities and decisions of whether or not they should adhere to the World Health Organization (WHO) suggested guidelines for the shelter-in-place restrictions for the novel COVID-19 pandemic. The individuals within the church had a natural reaction of wanting to protect their constitutional rights to practice their religion and to gather peacefully, which could be interpreted as pursuing selfishly driven motivations. The alternative action would be for congregation members to consider the potential risks to the overall health of this small church body and adhere to the temporary guidelines proposed by the WHO.

CMCs Influence

Society cannot escape the realities of the novel COVID-19 pandemic. News, facts, updates, and stories revolving around the pandemic are blasted out on every social media outlet, television related app, network television commercial, and even radio adds and programs. The dilemma Cara’s church congregation was facing is part of the larger problem faced by both the nation, and the world population. Businesses, individuals, churches, and groups of people of all types are faced with the reality of deciding if they are going to continue ‘life as usual’ and pursue their natural desire to protect their personal liberties, or will they adhere to the social distancing, wearing of masks, business capacity restrictions, and other extreme alterations in order to help curb the spread of the virus? Due to the saturation of media attention that the world is experiencing, the WHO’s agenda to influence society to band together and do what they proclaim is necessary to protect the most vulnerable was significantly advanced.

Be it the Internet webpage advertisements, social media sites, or app-based television programming, people cannot go even a day without hearing an infomercial regarding how to properly wash one’s hands, who is at most risk, and how to help protect the vulnerable. Each of these messages were similar in their approaches, driven to influence the public to think of themselves, their loved ones, and society as a whole as they each proceed forward with their lives. The minor differences manifest in the lack of visual components on the radio, or the frequency of the emergence of information based upon the medium of transmission. For example, television apps, such as the Sling App, has a COVID-19 commercial every time there is a break in programming, whereas network television hosted about half as many informational pieces.

The mobilization of information has served to further the push of this information as adds pop up and are accessible to the average person as the day proceeds. Mobile tools also serve to give real-time updates on the orders of the State Governor and the WHO. This over-saturation of information has created an environment of trepidation and fear. Business who would otherwise consider themselves relatively “safe” in this pandemic are choosing to close for fear of civil action in the event that one of their customers contracts the virus on their company’s watch. Similarly, the church that Cara attends was not necessarily in fear of litigious ramifications but was instead concerned with the safety of their older congregation members. As a result, the communication between the ministry staff and their online communication methods served to successfully push the ministry staff to convert to 6 weeks of online only programming, and the slow progression after that of opening the church building back up.

Cara’s Personal CMC Consummation

Cara was not surprised by the unanimously voted decision that was the predecessor to the mass consumption of media by the ministry team. Cara typically receives her media consumption through apps on her phone. Algorithms are still a difficult concept for many people, but those algorithms also funnel pieces that they think the group needs for social responsibility. This is one of the many reasons that consuming news online differs form reading a newspaper, watching television or listening to the radio. This method of communication is instant and often is not committed to the time necessary for factually correct pieces of information.

As media and communication merge into the modern form that they are, personalization and facial expressions have been falsefully portrayed. Because of their ability to access the Internet, the mobilization and thoughts in regard to our situation is affecting all of today’s people. More harm is gained than not. CMC communications represent the significant shift in the media’s attempts to create actual connections. Mobile technology makes the consumption of articles are very easy to access for those who have created more mobile accounts. The lack of an ability to get away from the situations and is an excuse to act how he wanted. It is the perfect excuse for her to influence others by her actions. All in all, Cara’s church determined that it was in the best interest of the congregation to temporarily close doors, provide online programs baily, and more. However, they did listen to the warnings and shut down services that were less significant.

References

Britannica (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/collective-action-problem- 1917157

The Collective Action Problem. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://spot.colorado.edu/~mcguire/collact.html

The Collective Action Problem. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://spot.colorado.edu/~mcguire/collact.htmlge

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nai-has-jams · 5 years

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Day 33; No Sleep

Structures. What are they for? Population control? Self-identification?

Most feel more comfortable with the latter explanation. It gives them a sense of control.

The common man has no control when they see the very structures they’ve grown so accustomed and have abided by are not their own choice. Time allowed the lines of free will to be blurred. Am I drinking this tea because I’m thirsty or someone told me to? Who told me to? Was it me or someone else? How could I know I’m not being watched by someone I can’t see the very same way I do on a television. Watching a character, who’s been given lines of what to say from the minute they were born out of the creativity of someone else’s mind. The character itself was born into a structure. Everything for that character was decided for them; the setting, plot, their dreams, goals and desires. From start to finish, the character has already gotten a fate that’s been decided. In the creative medium, that character thinks all its choices are freewill… not knowing they’re actually a script. When you look at film and media from the lenses of blurred reality, it opens the door for comparisons to our own real life experiences.

From the day you are born, you are given a series of labels, followed by structures you will have to grow to mold yourself in. From day one, you are told your name, that you must live up to the actions of those bearing the same name, and fixated to a cult of family known as a bloodline and further fixated into a religion or lack thereof. You are decided to be poor, or rich. If you’re on the inside or outside of the socio-economic barriers called class. You’re given choices to make with consequences, whether they be dire or not. You grow to find people are easily manipulated, that you can commit acts of dishonesty and they’re none-the-wiser without proof other than your hearsay. It becomes easy to you. You’ve learned how certain people think. You are able to predict how they react in certain scenarios and then begin to craft scenarios for your benefit, hoping to get their reaction to go according to your plan. You’ve now eliminated them of freewill. They think their choices are their own. On a smaller scale, this type of manipulation is harmless. ‘A little white lie’. But on a gargantuan scale, this small like can grow from harmless to devastating.

Unbeknownst to them that you have been feeding them the very information they believed to have come up with on their own. You allow them to feel that sense of power while simultaneously stripping them of it. You are in control of what they say or do because you have an understanding of structure. How it’s not real. It’s only information you’ve been feeding them and they’re expected to conform because that goes with your plan. You’ve used the very structures that were given to you to keep you in line to keep the ones who’ve structured you in line. Act accordingly while simultaneously observing their nature. If I am dishonest about this and i am not caught, I have outsmarted the system because now, only I know the truth. Have you ever noticed what happens when you hide the truth from someone? They’re blissful until that truth has been unveiled. If you can keep the veil on, there is no other truth to their knowledge.

Maintaining that hidden truth proves difficult to do amongst a small group of people. They begin to talk and find inconsistencies with one another due to perspective. One’s own perspective influences their interpretation of the truth. Perspective allows for a system of belief. In other words. “I’ve seen this with my own two eyes, it must be true.” But if they’ve been seeing an illusion for most of their lives, they’ve attached themselves to their beliefs rather than their rationality. They become synonymous with the truth they’ve been fed. Reminding the control of this only reinforces the strength of the veil. Any moment they began to question if the information they’ve been fed is the only truth has been erased because they’re now self-righteous and belief oriented. Humans are very stubborn beings. Once their belief is challenged, they will do anything to convince others of their correctness. Why? The short answer is fear.

Fear of what would happen if they were wrong. That means having to confront a truth they’ve spent so long in the dark about. Not knowing what's on the other side of that truth they’ve been fed. To question one believe opens another door to question everything you’ve been told and have taken as fact. It destroys all your structures. What’s real and what’s not real? You come into this world belonging to someone or something. A structure has been made for you when you are born.

As I’ve grown older, the lines between fiction and reality become harder and harder to see. I notice the patterns in nearly everything. I try to ignore them and stay blissfully ignorant, but there’s no denying that some things are just… weird.

Some phrases repeated a few too many times, some shapes look a bit too familiar. Deja-vu over and over. I know I've been here before. Have i visited it in a dream? Have I been here in a different timeline and my consciousness is being shared with someone else? Is it narcissistic to think that said consciousness is an alternate version of me? What if it’s a completely different person born to a completely different structure and we synced because of our position under the stars or some bullshit like that. I could never be sure without allowing myself to give up this reality and explore endless possibilities and theories.

It started after I was addicted to playing games that allowed me to be fully in control.Prime example; Sims 4 I was the god in their world. I birthed these characters. Decided what I wanted them to look like, how I wanted them to act how I wanted them to be. Decided personality traits, where they would live, what kind of job they would have. How much money they’d make. Everything they ever did, I was in control of. I told them when to shit, when to eat, when to fuck. Everything. That kind of power allowed me to step outside of being myself and to be someone else. God. I didn’t understand why that felt so freeing. It wasn't until I began to question my own sanity outside the game. What if I don't actually want to play this game? What if I’m the actual Sim thinking i’ve got free will and someone else is controlling what I do or say? Then what? My power diminished. I was nothing more than a vessel. I’d never know unless I sought out the truth past the structures I've been given to live in.

Blurring those lines prove dangerous to me. I’m a black woman. A gay black woman.

These structures i’ve been confined within make it difficult to leave this vessel. They hold weight. I’m expected to live out past my structures. To make something great of myself despite the labels I've been given. These labels are “self empowered” we always hear about a struggle behind these labels. How hard it is to live within them because I live in a system designed not for my socio-economic benefit. An apologetic system that wants to allow a certain percentage of people from my sort of background to be the “token” of businesses. To demand they show a fair balance between me and that of my possibly Caucasian counterparts. Affirmative action-y type of thing. It’s not winning if it’s handed to you, right? But everything has been handed to me. And I don’t mean that in a “my life is super silver-spooned” type way. I mean that in, these cards were not my dealings. I didn’t sit at this table to talk about why I am what I am. Who I am.

I was told this was my name, this was my class, this was my gender, this was my struggle, do something about it.

It’s almost as is my life is one big test and I'm being monitored by someone i can’t see. Someone who constantly is scripting my movie, making changes to parts of my life. And flashbacks and deja-vu are scenes I've filmed already as this character that are part of the deleted scenes.

The only escape is through dreams. And even then, those contain a whole new take on what reality actually is. I’ve had recurring dreams littered with signs or allusions to my life outside of that realm. I’ve felt the most free in my dreams. I struggle to remember them when i wake up but i always seem to remember the point of them. How they’re messages or sometimes, often times, escapes.

Then it hit me. I felt free when I was God in that game, not because of that sense of power. But because I could spend time not being binded to these structures that I live in everyday. I could spend time being someone else.

And that’s why writing in first person these stories about Korean performers was so liberating. I was writing as If i was really a Nam Joon or Ji Min. Exploring and observing their personalities on camera and alluding to what it would be like to reduce their existence to characters in a story where I could make them do what I wanted. Feed my own emotions into the piece at the time and make them react to real life situations I dealt with as themselves and instead of me. It fucks with you when you stop writing and you have to go back to being confined in your structures. But it fucks with you more when you work a 9-5 like a zombie knowing this is nothing but another structure where your creative outlet is being muted so you can make time to be someone you are not.

But is that really any different than sitting at a computer for 7 hours concocting a tale of lust, angst and drama. Pretending to be someone you are not. I am the god in my stories. I am the god in my video games. I am not the god in my present day life.

#psych #pschology #college #2019 #reality #mind-bending #kpop #bts #poem #poetry #my poem #poems #poems on tumblr #black excellence #perception #black empowerment #literature #black literature #black women

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ahouseoflies · 5 years

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The Best Films of 2018, Part III

Parts I and II are here and here.

GOOD MOVIES

70. Mid90s (Jonah Hill)- I usually applaud filmmakers for letting visuals tell the story instead of spelling everything out, but Mid90s needs to spell some more stuff out, especially at the truncated end. His brother brought him an orange juice, so all of the abuse is forgotten? I need a bit more there.

I was always going to be in the tank for this though, having been the same age as the protagonist at the time, owning some of the same shirts as him and hanging some of the same posters on my wall. Despite the "My First Screenplay" beef I had up top, each supporting character gets something to do. Hill shows promise as a director (and the fingerprints of his influences) by being able to shift between poles of emotions in a matter of seconds.

69. McQueen (Ian Bonhote)- Although it waits too long to get into McQueen's depression, this documentary does an adequate job of showing the ups and downs of his life. It was great seeing things I've only read about, like the Voss show.

Here's the thing though: I'm not a genius, but if I were, I would hope that my closest friends and advisers would be able to articulate what made me great. A little less "We were working sixteen-hour days." A little more "He changed art forever."

68. Beautiful Boy (Felix Van Groeningen)- For better and worse, this portrait of a parent's worst nightmare is unrelenting. Surprisingly, the toughest moment is when Nic is fierce with pride, clean for fourteen months. Because when you pause and see that there's an hour left in the movie, you shudder at how low he might end up going.

Van Groeningen's sort of french braid of past and present hasn't changed for his English-language debut, but things worked best for me when he locked in on Timothee Chalamet's mannered but touching performance. I wish the movie had a proper ending.

67. The Kindergarten Teacher (Sara Colangelo)- This takes a little while to get sick and twisted, but I liked it once it did. Part of why it works is Gyllenhaal's commitment to the role. As dark as the character gets--and the film does seem hell-bent on establishing her as a failure when I'm not sure that's true--Gyllenhaal never judges her. It's probably her best performance since SherryBaby.

As for Gael Garcia Bernal, who plays a poetry professor who kisses people and then apologizes and says that he misread the moment and acts all bashful, are we sure about him? Are we sure he's good at acting?

66. The Spy Who Dumped Me (Susanna Fogel)- The spywork of the last half-hour is way too convoluted, but the comedy is fast and loose in service of a sweet female friendship. We're at the stage with the genius of Kate McKinnon in which I just assume that she came up with anything funny on the spot. For example, there's an off-hand joke that her character went to camp with Edward Snowden and was surprised that the news didn't mention how "into ska" he was. It's so bizarre that it had to be improv. Later, when Edward Snowden shows up as a character, I had to admit that the movie was tightly written. But I assumed it was McKinnon first. 65. Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg)- Halfway through Ready Player One, there's a sequence that takes place inside The Overlook Hotel of The Shining. The characters are walking through a photorealistic recreation of that setting, down to the smallest details, but it has been repurposed with different angles for this film. Not only have I literally never seen something like this in a movie, but I never imagined the possibility of such a thing existing. And somehow...it's corny and derivative.

So goes Ready Player One. It takes the simple pleasures of a Chosen One narrative with a killer villain, loads every corner of the frame with Ryu or Beetlejuice or a Goldie Wilson campaign poster, and punishes you with maximalism. Each piece reliably contributes to the whole, sometimes in thrilling and amusing fashion, but no matter when you check your watch, forty-five minutes are left.

When imdb came out, Steven Spielberg was one of the first people I looked up. What shocked me was how many projects I attributed to his direction when he had only produced them. In my kid brain, Spielberg had directed Gremlins or Goonies or An American Tail. They had his imprimatur of whimsy and wonder and childhood identification even if they were, you know, a bit more conventional and less purposeful than the movies he directed. Well, not since Tintin has there been a Steven Spielberg-directed film that feels more Spielberg-produced.

My favorite reference was the Battletoads. Or more accurately, imagining the seventy-two-year-old filmmaker going, "Oh, you know I gotta get the 'Toads up in this bih!"

64. Ben Is Back (Peter Hedges)- Despite a little bit of note-card screenwriting--"Get a line about how insurance doesn't care about drug addiction in there!"--The first two-thirds take their time revealing information to the viewer, dropping bread crumbs of the family history quite gracefully. Roberts and Hedges play off each other well, and their charisma powers the first half. She, of course, has an ample bag of Movie Star tricks, but, surprisingly, he already does too. You can see, in the confrontation at the mall, for example, how the mother's dissembling and conniving would pass down to him.

So it's a real bummer when the final third decides to separate the leads and rushes to a baffling conclusion. It falls apart like few movies in recent memory.

63. Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo)- Whatever. I admire the skill that it must have taken to balance the revolving wheel of characters--even if it does feel like check-ins half the time. The movie is exhausting in a bad way until it's exhausting in a good way. More importantly, here are my power rankings. (Their power in my own heart. Thanos is obviously the most powerful.)

1. Rocket 2. Hawkeye (Renner Season even when it isn't.) 3. The Collector 4. Black Panther 5. Thanos 6. Iron Man 7. Ned 8. Nick Fury 9. Star Lord 10. Thor (His scene with Rocket is the best one in the film.) 11. Gamora 12. Hulk (Your boy is so earnest in this. "They KNEW!") 13. Spider-Man 14. Wong 15. Okoye 16. Doctor Strange (Way cooler in this than his own movie.) 17. Captain America (His hair was beautiful.) 18. Drax 19. Pepper Potts 20. Falcon 21. Groot 22. Black Widow 23. Winter Soldier 24. Loki (Is he alive? Was he alive before this? Can he impersonate people or whatever even if he's dead? What's his deal?) 25. Scarlet Witch (Her first line is, getting out of bed, "Vis, is it the stone again?") 26. Gamora's Sister (No, you look it up.) 27. War Machine (Do you think Cheadle forgets that he's in these? Like, he misses a day of shooting just because he forgot?) 28. Vision 29. Whatever Peter Dinklage Was

62. The Old Man & the Gun (David Lowery)- Sissy Spacek's character explains, on a tour of her house, that she pulled up some wallpaper and found a signature from 1881 underneath, which is so unique that--ugly as it is--she couldn't bear to cover it. The movie is sort of about that. Does a way of life from a long time ago matter now?

Does it matter how you present yourself? How much does intention cancel out action?

The questions play themselves out in a way that is formally interesting--Lowery swish-pans and advances the scenes in a way that he hasn't since Ain't Them Bodies Saints--but informally pretty dull. Redford is engaging as possible, but I feel like I maxed out on my concern for a person who refuses to change.

I've had the Sean Penn "on one" scale for a long time, but I'm introducing the "off one" scale for Casey Affleck, who is so purposefully muted that he seems like he's going to pass out in some scenes. Keep doing you, Case. As far as acting goes.

61. Disobedience (Sebastian Lelio)- I admired how little the film spelled out about the setting and the characters' pasts. The beginning is cautious without being slow, and the women seem drawn to each other with a sort of magnetism that is difficult to pull off. While the triangle of people at the center is realistic and fair, the picture is ultimately a bit staid. I don't want melodrama out of the story either, but I do think it would work better if the characters were more passionate about anything, even the religion that makes them lack passion. 60. Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu)- This movie is sweet, and it nails the rom-com fulcrum scenes that it has to. Hear me out though: Both of the leads are winning, and Henry Golding's charm keeps us from acknowledging that his character is a psycho. Here is a list of things that, over the course of a year, he does not bother to tell his girlfriend:

a. That his family is the wealthiest in Singapore. Or wealthy at all. But more notably, he tells Rachel no details at all about his family, such as his brothers' and sisters' names. b. That he skipped an important trip home a few months ago, which caused a rift in his family. c. How to pack or dress for their trip to visit his family. d. That his mother did not want them sleeping together at her house, not that he "wants her all to himself." e. That his family wants him to take over their business, which would necessitate a permanent move to Singapore. f. That he went out with one of the women attending the bachelorette party, and that this woman has very good reason to sabotage Rachel and Nick's current relationship. g. That the wedding they're attending is also a super-rich affair that will be covered by international media. h. That the wedding party they're attending the night before is a formal affair with hundreds of guests, not the "family party" that he presents it as. By the way, this is one of the two times that he not only doesn't accompany her to an event, expecting her to meet him there and find him, but he doesn't even send a car. i. That he's thinking about proposing to her. "We haven't even talked about that stuff," Rachel tells her mother.

Communication is key, Nick.

59. Lean on Pete (Andrew Haigh)- I liked the first half and its patient doling out of information. Haigh sews quite a few credible threads to show why the gruff Dell would take a liking to Charley. When the film diverges into a drifter story, I got frustrated with it. To me, drifter characters aren't interesting because they take unpredictable actions, what enliven films, and make them predictable. A dine-and-dash is a dangerous, exciting thing to happen in a movie, but when this scared kid has already done so much similar running, it dulls that edge. This is Haigh's least successful film, but it's still empathetic and sensitive.

58. Hereditary (Ari Aster)- The first third of Hereditary is when it is at its most intimate and compact as a story of grief. And with the bridge of a genuinely shocking event, it becomes less Don’t Look Back and more of a hellish explainer.

Ari Aster is a master craftsman already, investing every element with intention, down to “Why are clocks so present in the frame?” That craft extends to Toni Collette, who is even better than she normally is. But in refusing to be mysterious and small, the film didn't connect with me on a level beyond admiration..

57. Gringo (Nash Edgerton)- The expository information about the company comes too late, the ending is too tidy, and I'm not sure what my girl Mandy Seyfried is doing in this. But it's funny overall, in large part because Theron and Edgerton bounce off each other beautifully, projecting a very specific brand of nouveau riche awful. She says, "Fat people are...hilarious," and he wears too many accessories in his pick-up basketball game, for which there's a running clock.

Many of these crime comedies fail because all of the characters are painted with the same cynical brush, but Oyelowo is so likable here as a frazzled guy in over his head, playing against the type of simmering dignity he inhabited as someone like Martin Luther King. I'm glad that he's getting at-bats with something this different.

56. Bad Times at the El Royale (Drew Goddard)- If you like table-setting (and I do), then this is going to be a fun time. Each room at the motel gets a two-sided mirror, each character is two-faced, many events are presented from two perspectives, and there's even a double in the title. It's hard not to share in Goddard's delight as he patiently lays out all of the Tarantinian pieces.

Once he has to start declaring things though, somewhere halfway in the meandering two and a half hours, the film doesn't end up having much to say. I'm not sure I wanted another Cabin in the Woods ending, but I did want it to add up to more than the modest pleasures that it does. Kudos to Chris Hemsworth and his dialect coach for finally piecing together a serviceable American accent.

55. Thunder Road (Jim Cummings)- As far as calling card movies go, this one is a pretty smart character study. It centers on how the things we find important, the impact of words in this case, can often be the things we struggle with the most, through dyslexia and spoonerisms and messed-up jokes in this case. That being said, no offense, the film would be 25% better with a more capable lead actor. 54. Annihilation (Alex Garland)- Much like Sunshine, another Alex Garland script, this story handles the mystery elegantly, with jolts of real horror, until we get where we're going, which doesn't live up to the promise. I do appreciate that it respects the viewer's intelligence--withholding answers to questions, sometimes never answering questions. I'm grateful that it exists. 53. BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)- Like Chi-Raq and Red Hook Summer, BlacKKKlansman would make for a hell of a YouTube compilation if you cut together its best moments. It's sharp and vital when it's at its best, which is pretty much any time it's commenting on the present, through "Now more than ever" Nixon campaign posters, mentions of how David Duke's policies might show up in Republican platforms, or the searing epilogue that brings back one of Lee's oldest tricks.

Like a lot of his recent work though, it's a mess tonally, and basic stuff like the timing of the cuts seems amateurish. I also think Lee's relationship with Terence Blanchard is hurting him at this point; the music doesn't match what's going on at all. I wish it hung together better than it does.

52. Widows (Steve McQueen)- This is the messiest film that Steve McQueen has made, which is its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. That loose quality allows for some expressive moves, such as when the alderman candidate takes a real-time two-minute ride from the poor area where he's campaigning to the tony area where he lives, in the same district. This is a film with admirable ambition to go with its cheap thrills.

But that same messiness produces as many bad performances (Farrell, Neeson, and, yes, Duvall) as it does good ones (Debicki, Henry, Kaluuya), and it elides so many moments near the end that I have lingering questions about whether a major plot point was even resolved. This is definitely the type of movie that has a three-hour cut that is better, and I still hope that director's cut doesn't waste five scenes on Debicki's prostitute relationship with Lukas Haas. (Where is his sliver of a face on the poster?)

51. The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci)- I feel as if I have to adjust to the astringency of any Iannucci property, and when I do, I laugh a lot. This movie is hilarious, and I'll save you from a list of the jokes that work the best.

Iannucci and his collaborators take one of the most violent, tyrannical periods of history and expose its perpetrators as sniveling, feckless children who might accidentally spit in their own faces as they're trying to spit on someone else's. Destabilizing those in power--in this case de-memorializing them--and portraying them as lost, scared humans is the goal of satire. So even though he does it so well, part of me wonders, "Is that it?" Bureaucracy is dumb? Isn't this an easy target? For what it's worth, I felt the same way about In the Loop, despite everyone else's praise. I'm waiting for Iannucci to find a weapon sharper than the middle finger.

50. Tully (Jason Reitman)- In a way, it's refreshing for a screenwriter to be bad at writing men. The outdated, clueless, manchild dad is the biggest weakness of the script, especially since everything else is pitched with such realism. There's also one scene that I hate but probably shouldn't spoil.

Put aside that character though, and this is a movie with wit, verisimilitude, and even a bit of visual agility. The protagonist--Marlo, a Diablo Cody name if there ever was one--has a special needs son, and I appreciated the honest way that Marlo's frustration with him sometimes outweighed her understanding.

49. Fahrenheit 11/9 (Michael Moore)- Fahrenheit 11/9 is diffuse, but it's effective enough to be in the top half of Moore's work. He stays out of it mostly (besides that familiar narration, as gentle as it is ashamed), but his heart is clearly in the searing Flint section. In fact, I wish he had made a documentary that focused only on that American travesty, not all of them.

He has the same challenge that many of us do--pointing out the crimes and perversions of Trump while keeping the high ground--and he doesn't always avoid the low-hanging fruit. Dubbing Trump's voice over Hitler's is the type of shit that people hate him for. At most turns, however, Moore's choices make sense. A long diversion into the Parkland kids, even though I find them kind of tiring personally, serves as an inspirational peak to the valley of any people of a generation or two earlier than them.

48. Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson)- Many Wes Anderson movies are flippant about death and disease. When the effect works, it's refreshing and disorienting. When it doesn't, like in this movie, it feels cold, as if he's moving dolls around in a playhouse.

But in every other way, the sweet and wry Isle of Dogs benefits as a manicured chamber piece. The details are obvious (the tactile fur on all of the dog puppets), less obvious (a translation provides the legend "very sad funeral" to accompany a news story), and even less obvious (more than one joke about how many syllables should be in a haiku). If the narrative--jaded stray finds redemption through guileless child--doesn't offer much in the way of re-invention for the director, then I'm glad the large canvas does.

47. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsey)- I wanted an artsy crime film, and I got an artsy crime film. I have no idea if I liked it. It's bleak and groady, more of a violence movie than an action movie, concerned with the cycle of abuse and the oily spread of vengeance. It begins twenty minutes after most films of its type might choose to, and it begins in earnest at the hour mark. The atonal Jonny Greenwood score is a perfect approximation of whatever kind of dark clouds are floating in the protagonist's head.

Even when it doesn't work, the film is a reminder that Lynne Ramsey is a real artist. Although this doesn't come close to the catharsis and real-world relevance of We Need to Talk About Kevin, it reveals a focused point of view. Whether it's depicting a sequence through only surveillance footage or cutting to a half-second of flashback, she includes exactly what she wants to.

46. The Commuter (Jaume Collet-Sera)- I gave Non-Stop two-and-a-half stars, and this is a much more elegant version of Non-Stop. Even though it succumbs to gross CGI and outsized conspiracy, the class-conscious table setting is non-pareil, and it lets Neeson act his age.

45. Vice (Adam McKay)- Vice is a difficult film to evaluate because its greatest strength, the resolute, partisan, experimental point of view, is also its greatest weakness, the hand-holding, pedantic, antic point of view. There are moments in this film--the menu scene, the fake-ending--that are more inventive than anything else this year. And credit to McKay for a sui generis structure that covers thirty years in the first hour and two years in the second hour; if nothing else, he has the talent to make unitary executive theory fun.

It's a big, angry, auteurist, '70s swing, so it also takes a lot of chances that don't work and, quite obviously, it wields poetic license in the way that Ron Burgundy swished around a glass of scotch. Sometimes it doesn't know when to trust the viewer, like when it freeze frames and flashes "George H.W. Bush, President, 1989-1993" over a Bush-looking guy talking about "Barbara and I" as his son misbehaves in the background. Through no fault of McKay's, the story feels anti-climactic as well. Although I felt more distance than I expected from events that I consider recent history, the dominoes are still falling in the world that Cheney shaped.

One thing that is less debatable is Christian Bale's transformation into Cheney. That word "transformation" is used any time a famous person wears a wig. This performance, which spans decades and is not directly related to any of Bale's other work, is different. The portrait of Cheney is one of monolithic evil, which Bale suggests, but it's also grounded in reticent, clenched jaw micro-movements. Cheney, who is four inches shorter than Bale, seems like the smallest and biggest man in any room. At this point, if you told me Bale was playing Grendel, I wouldn't bat an eye. In fact, his Grendel might look a lot like Dick Cheney.

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earth2craig-blog · 5 years

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Design Thinking 210,Task 1: Altered Reality

Introduction:

Hello there reader. Yes, I’m addressing you as an individual. You may be my lecturer here to read and evaluate what I have written for this task or you might be a fellow student or you may be none of these... Perhaps you found that this post might be interesting to read. Because of the public nature of this medium, I feel it is important to provide context:

~Task 1: Rewriting the history of the world. In a written piece, re-imagine the history of the world. Identify one historical reality that you would like to eliminate from the history of the world. This should be a historical occurrence that lead – in your mind – to a problem that exists within our current world order. Imagine what the world would be like if this historical event/occurrence never took place.~

What this task is asking me to do is fix a problem with the world by changing/eliminating one “historical occurrence...This should be a historical occurrence that lead – in your mind – to a problem that exists within our current world order.” The phrase “in your mind” is important for you as the reader to keep in mind. This is my opinion, and my opinion is formed on my narrow context of the world, based on my experience and the experiences of those closest to me. I can not in any capacity claim that I’m an authoritative figure that can claim to know what’s best (I am a student and still learning how the world works). Another disclaimer, I will be writing this in a very informal manner as this is what is most comfortable when expressing my opinion and tackling this task in a creative manner.

Chapter 1:

So... on to the actual task. I found the instructions of this task a little difficult to follow, because I don’t think changing one historical occurrence by itself will fix a singular problem. I think “a problem that exists” exists because of a multitude of reasons instead of just one. The world is complex after all.

Also, it would be easy to say, “I wish Hitler never came into power”, but, I think actually that that history has some significance in shaping our views as a society. That may sound insensitive. What I mean is that bad experiences can shape us into better people. Just as an individual can learn through, for example, being bullied (not trying to liken genocide to school ground bullying, obviously very different scales of hatred). Being bullied is obviously something as an individual you don’t want to experience, but, through being bullied as an individual you can learn not to bully by being able to empathize with anyone you interact with. And as an individual, you can also learn how to stand up for yourself when subjected to conflict. So Hitler is someone we look back on and say to ourselves, “lets not be that guy”, and “lets not let that Hitler guy push us around”.

I definitely don’t perceive the world as a perfect place, there are a lot of problems, but although it’s easy to say: “I wish this thing was different”, changing and fixing problems can only be done as a group through effective dialogue and in a lot of ways, the world is growing and changing for the better (although progress can feel incredibly slow). This dialogue is where I would like to focus my attention.

If we think of any problem in the world: the wealth gap, homophobia, racism, sexism, etc. All these varying problems are made up of ideology. It is clear that people can have very opposing beliefs. The problem, I think, is that we aren’t effectively taught how to communicate or empathize with one another... And so the problem that I will be addressing is the educational system, throughout the world.

Chapter 2

Now that I have (finally) identified the problem that I want to change, I’ll go into greater detail of why I think our educational system currently is problematic. All our conflicts are based on ideology. As children, we are in a state of learning how the world works, and we learn how the world works through our family’s ideals, interacting with our friends, religion, what we are taught in school, the media we interact with and even the products that we buy. We can interact with ideals both in an active and passive state, aware or unaware. We can be taught ideology that can be... for lack of a better word, wrong and then proceed to never question it.

Out of all the ways that we as children learn how to interpret and interact with the world, what is the lowest common denominator, a common practice we engage in that can be altered. We can’t choose our family, religion is (supposedly?) a freedom of choice no one has the right to alter, media is created by individuals usually with the purpose of selling you either an ideal, narrative or a product, often by creating a false ideal (buying a Starbucks coffee makes you a charitable or environmentally conscious person when in reality you are still just consuming selfishly for the sake of consuming or convenience)... School is an artificial system quite literally designed to shape us. It’s something your parents most likely went to, it’s where future media creators, entrepreneurs, designers and even politicians learn the tools necessary (hopefully) in order for them to know what they are doing.

But, the educational system doesn’t adapt or change easily. The educational system can be influenced or corrupted (depending on your viewpoint) by religion, by families not liking what is taught or even by governments promoting propaganda in our history... With so many varying ideologies, and for a person to be well informed enough to decide what is right or wrong, you need to be subjected to everything, but instead, what we learn is designed to be learnt and everything else can seem censored.

Chapter 3

Here’s what I believe based on my experience of school. I think school fails at teaching us to be good, ethical people. It doesn’t teach us to be bad people directly through what is being taught, it just is such a passive experience that how we are taught doesn’t have much effect. My role in school was always as a passive listener. I listened, and listened, and listened some more to my teachers. And when no teachers were present, kids reverted to engaging in questionable ideological practices, essentially bullying or behaving in an unsuitable manner in order to feel accepted. It’s not as if teachers don’t tell us not to bully, and it is very clearly stated in the school rules. We have classes like Life Orientation where we do talk about “not doing drugs” only to later be offered some by a fellow Life Orientation classmate. The teaching of ideals, the theory of ideals, the effects, all of it need more of a focus and needs to somehow be more active and engaging, more exercise based and maybe even taught earlier.

Most of us would have seen a video somewhere of kids being tested in social experiments. It could be that a kid is given a marshmallow, and if they avoid eating it, they will get another one. Or the experiment where there are two children, and only one of them is given a plate of treats, and that kid can decide whether to share or not. That could be a practical example of how to investigate how to treat others based on how we want to be treated. And from there it empowers a child to talk about how they feel on the matter. If we just listen, we don’t have a voice. Now don’t get me wrong, being able to listen is obviously an important skill to have as well, especially in order to empathize and understand others, but there needs to be a back and forth open dialogue between everyone, not just one person imparting all of their ideals onto a group of people.

Outside of school, we have rules and laws. Things like don’t pollute and don’t speed. We all as people know that doing these things is wrong. But to me, it feels like that the bad behavior in school follows us out of it, because I see people very comfortably dropping their waste on the ground instead of disposing of it properly, and I’ve seen traffic enforcer cars break speed limits or drive in an unsafe manner for seemingly no justifiable reason other than because they can.

If we can just do what we like, say what we like because we can, without taking into consideration others, it’s just a recipe for disaster.

Chapter 4

Where did it all go wrong? Honestly. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly, educational systems have been around for a long time. I think the safest argument to make is when capitalism started to take hold, when the shift from an individual identifying as a producer or creator became the individual rather identifying themselves as a consumer. I blame the first Industrial Revolution for this most of all because the change was so massive. It gave power to the wealthy, those that owned methods of production, and gave those with only their ability to provide labor a distinct disadvantage. It also alienated us from one another. Instead of us taking pride in creating something of value and meaning and not to mention with good intentions for others to enjoy... we now justify us exploiting workers - by having them do an immense amount of labor for little pay, as well as by substantially increasing the price of the product for the most profit - as “fair”. This is a very selfish way to think, and it shows. When someone pollutes, that’s selfish. When someone speeds, that’s selfish. When someone bullies, that’s selfish. There is no consideration of the other person or people.

Furthermore, now that the gap between the wealthy and the less wealthy is so large, there is an interest by the wealthy to maintain this power. Education is the one defense we have against the powerful and wealthy imposing their ideals on us. Where we learn needs to be neutral and take into consideration everyone’s feelings and circumstances so that we can then actively discuss solutions to our problems and actively improve the world.

Conclusion

The positive I often hear about the Industrial Revolution is about how beneficial it was to advancing medicine and technology. But I think that people will, even without the selfish desire to have a better quality of life than others, achieve advancing areas of life by taking pride and having a sense of genuine enjoyment in what they do.

Taking pride in what you do, enjoying what you do and doing it to improve the lives of others, if that was our focus instead, that to me sounds like a Utopian Society.

One more thing I’d like to add is that we at all times need to be open minded and the practice of being open minded, of challenging the way we think and feel, that needs to be encouraged in this Utopian educational system through an open dialogue. In any society, that is necessary to ensure no ruling class or ruling power can either oppress or control others.

#DT210

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surveys-at-your-service · 6 years

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Survey #173

“i like the sound of the broken pieces.”

Do you get excited when you learn you have to dress up? No. What brand of hair spray do you use? I don't use that. When you were younger, did you believe you could fly? Maybe? Favorite farm animal? Pigs! Have you ever written or considered writing a play? No. Have you ever had kidney stones? No. Have you ever been sedated or put under anesthesia? Yes. Have any of your friends ever cheated on somebody? *shrugs* Pin the tail on the donkey - fun or stupid? I loved it as a kid. Still would have fun. In your opinion what is one of the ugliest cars on the road? I'm not knowledgeable on car names, but those box-looking ones are definitely up there. Have you ever been on the very top floor of a skyscraper? NO. Have you ever won anything out of one of those crane machines? Yeah. Can you remember being taught how to ride a bike? Was it hard for you? Yeah, I don't think it was too hard. How many instruments do you own/have you owned? Three: Recorder, flute, guitar. Were you ever a flower girl or ring bearer in anyone’s wedding when you were little? No. Have you ever had an ear infection? All the time as a kid until I had tubes put in, then I had one from Hell itself early this year because my former doctor was a fucking idiot. Do you own or rent your home? Rent. Are your parents in good health? No. Well maybe Dad is all right, but he doesn't look to be in great health. He's too skinny. Have you picked up any new hobbies in the past year? No. If you have a significant other, how old were you when you first met them? Like, ten. How old were they? Eight-ish. Is English your first language? If not, was it hard to learn? Yes. Have you ever worn a costume for any reason other than Halloween? Dance recitals/competitions. Is there anything you’re a snob about? I don't believe so. Are you open to trying new foods or would you prefer to stick to foods you love and have often? I'm hesitant to try new foods. Have you ever had a ‘summer fling’? If yes, did it continue when summer ended? No. Has anybody ever told you that you could be a model? No. Do you use different kinds of moisturizer for different body parts? ie. hand lotion for your hands, face cream for your face. Or do you just use one moisturizer for all body parts? No. Have you ever felt like you were someone’s rebound? No. Are you a vegetarian? If yes, how long have you been a vegetarian for and what are your reasons for being one? If no, do you think you’d ever like to stop eating meat? Not anymore, but I was for a couple months. I wish I could be one permanently; the way animals are butchered is horrific, and I don't want to take any part in their consumption. I see their lives as equal to mine. I'm not anymore for two reasons: 1.) Willpower, and 2.) my diet without meat is too carb-focused as I couldn't dedicate myself to enough vegetables (especially) and fruit. If for some reason you were were unable to get to a supermarket for the weekend (let’s say you were snowed in or something) which item would be the worst for you to run out of - toilet paper or toothpaste? Toilet paper. I mean both would be gross, but. I'd be more disgusted if I couldn't clean myself after using the bathroom, especially if, y'know. I could at least use mouthwash for the latter. Has anybody ever broken up with you over something really pathetic? What was it? Have you ever been dumped in a disrespectful way? (eg. through text, through a friend..) No, and yup. Jason broke up with me over Facebook Messenger after a serious three-and-a-half-year relationship. Yeah, pathetic. Does it irritate you when people are late for things, or do you not really care? Not really. But I guess it depends on the occasion. Is your bed against more than one of your walls? No Have you ever burned yourself while taking something out of the oven? No. I don't mess around with the oven. Have you ever made out in your room? Last time? Not in my current room. Have you ever injured yourself while you were under the influence of alcohol? No. When was the last time you were bitten by a bug? Idk. What’s the fastest you’ve ever driven in a car? I guess on a highway maybe I accidentally approached 80 mph? Have you ever had a dream where you could understand a foreign language? No. Have you ever owned a beanbag chair? I think so. Are you a fan of retro things? Y E A H Have you ever used pastels? Yeah, made a few things with them in high school art class. What’s the limit on how much you would pay for a shirt? Ohhhh idk... I'm a sucker for band tees especially. I suppose I'd be hesitant once it hits $40. Is it currently humid where you are? No. Who were the last people you hung out with? Just Mom. How many different colors have you dyed your hair? Black, red, purple. Do you feel safe where you live? Yeah. Where have you considered moving to? I'd like to move to the mountains once I'm independent. Have you been falsely diagnosed with something by a bad doctor? Lol yup. Did you know I had ADHD? :^) Have you ever had a doctor refuse to treat you? No. Are you against abortion? Not in all cases. Has anyone ever hacked your accounts before? Not maliciously. Back when it was a "thing," Megan and I "hacked" into each other's YouTube accounts to write lovey-dovey shit in our descriptions. Who is the first person who broke your heart? Dad when he left. If you only mean romantically, everyone knows who. Do you know anyone who has fought in a war? Not to my knowledge. What’s the last song you danced to? No clue. Do you tend to be self-destructive? Eh, there's a moderate chance when something goes wrong. Self-bashing thoughts are easy to let in. What religion are you? Theist. Who is the last person you gave a ride to, and where did you take them? I don't have a license. Have you ever been shot? No. What is the coolest thing you can do? I dunno. Do you have anything from past relationships? Yeah, just like, plushies. And a small jewelry box. Do you like coconut water? Never tried it, and I doubt I'd like it. I hate coconut. Do you have a Nintendo Switch? No. At what venue was the last concert you attended? Idr. Do you think stained glass windows are pretty? YES. Are you scared of snakes? No. Have you had your wisdom teeth removed? No. I have my two bottom ones, but I was told there's enough room in my mouth for them to not be a big issue. X-rays show none on my top row. Do you like hard or soft pretzels better? Soft. Has anyone ever asked for your phone number, and you refused to give it to them? I believe so. Are you ready for children? Never will be. Does it take you a while to actually get jokes? Occasionally. Have you ever bleached your hair? Yes, to get it dyed. Do you like jelly beans? Depends on the flavor. Who taught you how to apply make-up? Myself, I guess? Would you rather live in an apartment or a house? House. Do you prefer Small Business Saturday, Black Friday, or Cyber Monday? Cyber Monday, man. Which do you prefer: iPhones, Android, Blackberries, or something else? iPhone. Do you ever put fruit on your cereal? No no no ew. Are there more photos or music files on your computer? Photos. Say something about the band/artist you’re listening to right now. I'm listening to "Professional Griefers" by deadmau5 ft. Gerard Way. I have no opinion on the band (this is the only song I know), but loooove me some Gerard. What is your favorite thing about the summer, besides the the no school thing? Just swimming. Are you similar to your sibling(s), personality-wise? How so? Nope. Well, my mom's eldest daughter is quite like me. We're both more quiet people that feel deeply and suffer from bipolarity. Do you watch amateur song covers on YouTube? No, but fun fact! I got into YT because Nicole wanted me to listen to "Before He Cheats" covers with her. I found the MM fandom, and it was all over. Which YouTuber have you learned the most from? About life and such, easily Mark. As far as obscure knowledge goes, Good Mythical Morning/Rhett and Link. What is your favorite type of church that you’ve visited? Visually, Catholic. What different types of churches have you visited? Catholic and Christian. What type of church do you hate or dislike? I don't *hate* or even "dislike" any just for their existence. Who would you want to be the flower girl at your wedding? My niece Aubree, buuut considering there's a 99% chance I'll be marrying a woman, her dad would never allow it. It might even be "too far" for Ash. What group are you most active in on Facebook? None. I pay most attention to the WoW ones I'm in, but I don't really take part, especially since I'm not currently playing. Are you ashamed of anything? Yes. What were your favorite Disney rides as a kid? I think it was called Splash Mountain? Have you read the entire Bible? No. How old were you when you first dyed your hair? Uhhh however old I was my freshman year of high school since middle didn't allow dyed hair. Do you dye your hair regularly? No, sadly. ;-; Can't afford to. What is the most comfortable type of pants, in your opinion? Pj pants, man. Do you think you have what it takes to make it big in the entertainment biz? HAHA NO. Do you have a job now? If so, what is it? No. Currently going through VR to hopefully change that. List 10 favorite girls’ names. Alessandra, Josephine, Evangeline, Chloe, Evelyn, Fallon, Heather, Amani, Violet, and Ellie. List 10 favorite boys’ names. Damien, Vincent, Victor, Luther, Severin, Alexander, Aiden, Jaxson, Shawn, and Jamie. Which stereotype do you fit the most? Uhhhh idk?? Geek??? Are you thankful for social media, or do you wish it didn’t exist? I'm thankful for it. Do you think social media is beneficial? Or is it destructive? It's perfectly capable of being either. Have you ever been socially awkward? Hi, I'm Brittany. How old were you when you started puberty? Around 11? Do you think of baby names you like often? No. What health issues do you have? B O I severe social and generalized anxiety, AvPD, chronic depression, bipolar 2, OCD, PTSD, I think ADD, vertigo, inactive MRSA, severe dry mouth, the humiliating excessive sweating, carpal tunnel in both wrists, we're tryna figure out the fuck's wrong with my knees, and moderate-severe tremors. Is that it???? What are some health problems you have had in the past? Insomnia seemed to fuck off thank Christ, ear infections. What are some of the best medications you’ve ever had? The medical combo that is partially responsible for saving my life is Latuda + Lamictal. What is your favorite pizza topping? It depends on the place that makes the pizza, but to be safe, I get pepperoni at most places. Who are your favorite small YouTubers? Johny Paranormal is a sweetheart, but I don't watch him regularly. Most others I watch have at least/almost 1M subs, so I don't think you could call them "small." Have you ever made money off of YouTube? No. What was a video you watched over and over as a kid? Oh my GOD there was this guy who made a video to "Gasolina" by whoever-the-fuck and Nicole and I were obsessed with it??? Do you own a pair of fishnets? Gloves. Are you sore right now? No. Have you ever experienced depression as a side effect? Lol I'm diagnosed with it, so. Because I have bipolarity too though but was medicated for depression, my bipolar symptoms were worsened and thus sometimes depression. (Learned being on anti-depressants while simultaneously being bipolar is only destructive.) Have you ever been suicidal as a withdrawal symptom? I don't believe so. How old were you when you got braces? Idk, sometime in middle school? How old were you when you started wearing glasses (if applicable)? High school, I think?? Are you good at remembering names? NO. When was the last time you held someone’s hand? Few days back at the movie theater. A preview for a movie that took place in a psych hospital came on, so Mom grabbed my hand tight, knowing it gave me bad memories. I was all right, but. Woulda rather not have seen it. Movie looked stupid anyway. Do you prefer earbuds or headphones? Earbuds. Block out sound and you hear everything so well. Could you possibly write a successful novel? I honestly feel I'm capable, but I won't. Do you have any clothes with spikes/studs on them? I have a spiked choker and a studded bracelet, but I think that's it rn. If you had to get a portrait tattoo, who would it be of? Dead serious, I want to at some point get Darkiplier's first appearance/smile above/to the side of my left elbow by a really professional artist. I'll take my stanning behavior to the grave. Do you get exercise daily? No, but I really would like a treadmill. Something easy like that. Work my shit knees, too. Which emoji would you be most apt to dress up as? I don't????? know???????? Which do you think is better, DIY costume or storebought costumes? DIY!! You can get sooo creative. Do you stay out of stupid arguments online? I try to. I'll butt in though if I feel it necessary and/or beneficial. Do you want a new phone? Why or why not? More like I need one. Drops calls randomly, restarts at random, doesn't always do what I click. What book do you think should be made into a movie? Idk. Do you know anyone with a service dog? No. Do you like babies? Why or why not? Nooooo. Annoying as actual fuck, can't properly communicate with them, needy as hell, etc. etc. I'm not at all expecting anything more from them, they're babies, I personally just don't usually enjoy them. What is something most people don't know about you? I RP. Did you earn a title in the senior class polls? If so, what? No. How many teachers have bullied you? None. Have you ever ridden in an ambulance? No. Snickerdoodles or s'mores? S'mores! What is something you remember enjoying very much as a small child? Webkinz. As a child, were you a sore loser or a sore winner? I don't believe so. Did you play with siblings, neighborhood kids, or by yourself? All of those. Have you ever, or would you like to attend a gaming or comic convention? YEAH. What's your opinion on online multiplayer games? Well, I went through a WoW addiction, so I obviously didn't hate it. I tend to enjoy single-player, though. Who is the most important person in your life (besides yourself)? Sara. Do you find it easy to make friends now? If not, what makes it difficult? NO BC I FEAR HUMAN INTERACTION AND JUDGMENT. If you live alone, what would be your criteria for a roommate? I don't live alone. But let's say I did: No drugs, no smoking, female, CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF, and by this point, you'd probably have to be my s/o. I'm almost 23 so am more interested in working towards settling down in a place with her versus nightly sleepovers with a friend. How about criteria for a spouse, if you're single? Jfc a lot, I am PICKY. What is something you do every day without fail? Go to the bathroom when I wake up. What is your typical breakfast? Cereal or a meal supplement shake. Or nothing. Is there a TV show you watch habitually? No. Where do you usually spend most of your day? In my room. Do you usually have something playing in the background when you're home? Yup, either a let's play (only background /usually/ if I've already visually watched it and I'm just revisiting) or music. Where do you usually get your groceries? Wal-Mart or Harris Teeter. What is your favorite fruit? Strawberries. How about your favorite berry? ^ Which trait in a person do you find most appealing? Compassionate. Care for more than yourself. Which trait puts you instantly off? Cockiness. Who is an actor/actress who you dislike so much you can't watch them? No one. Do you donate money to any charities? If so, which ones? I can't currently as I don't have a source of income. If you have pets, are any of them rescues from shelters? No. Have you ever had to rely on other people's charity? When we got evicted, yes. Is there a charity you absolutely never ever will trust? There are some that I know are full of shit, but nothing's coming to mind at the moment. Have you ever donated to a cause that had a person going door to door? No. Is there a book series you're currently collecting? No. Which website do you frequent the most? YouTube and KM. Do you judge people who have their phones out all the time? If so, why? Not really... It's where we are now. Technology is truly the dominant species. If your connection goes down, what do you do? Restart the router. Is there something you wish you could do online that isn't possible yet? Sure, like uh. Oh yeah lemme fucking hug YouTubers when they hug the camera and that sort'a shit. What was a website you used to frequent that doesn't exist anymore? Uhhh... I don't know about them no longer existing. Maybe this HUGE flash game site we used to go on. Do/Did you ever have your own website? For photography I do. Have you ever kissed an ex after you two have broken up? No. When was the last time you talked to your most recent ex? It's been quite a while, actually. Are you racist to any race? No. Can you break dance? No. Have you made out with anyone in the last 2 weeks? Yes. She was ready and it was the cutest shit on Earth because she'd never done so before and had no clue what to do so we were giggling uncontrollably. Literally one of the purest experiences in my life. Have you shaved your legs in the past three days? I haven't shaved my legs since like June. Have you ever been professionally waxed? How did you find it? If you haven’t, is it something you’d consider trying? Eyebrows, yeah. It's a better way than plucking. What do you think of very cheap airlines, such as Ryanair? Would you fly with them or would you rather pay more for better service? Biiiitch no, I wanna feel safe. Does your mom like the last person you kissed? She loves her. Is there a secret you've never told your parents? Yes. Who last gave you their number? Uhhhh good question. Honestly, are you afraid to die? I mean I sure don't want to yet, but I'm not especially *afraid* of it. Have you ever had an ice cream cake for your birthday? No, not a big fan. Did you get a car the minute you turned sixteen? Lol I still don't have one. What do you want to major in? Zoology. When was the last time you kissed someone who was younger than you? The 17th. Have you ever kissed someone of the same sex? Yeah.

#survey #quiz #questions #random

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marcjampole · 6 years

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In light of Trump’s remark about “animals” here is a new definition of human beings: “Animals who kneel.”

Whether Donald Trump meant his “they’re like animals” remark to refer to all immigrants or merely to members of the MS-13 gang, everyone understood his intent: To say that a group of human beings of a certain ethnicity are less human than we full-blooded Americans, and perhaps not even human beings at all. In this sense, even if Trump really only meant MS-13 gangbangers, MS-13 served Trump as a synecdoche, which is a figure of speech in which a part represents the whole. Just as we understand that “a strong arm” or a “piece of ass” refers to an entire body, so do we realize that Trump was saying that all immigrants from Latino (and African and Islamic) countries are animals.

The essence of racism involves the belief that certain human beings are better than others—by virtue of their skin color, DNA, family history or whatever factor is being used to distinguish individuals by race. In the West at least, humans have traditionally considered animals to be lesser forms of life put on earth for the benefit and use of human beings. To call someone an animal is virtually always used in a pejorative sense, except when referring to football players or boxers, and even in the sporting context, our admiration for an animal is for her/his less than human qualities.

To call a group of people animals is always racist.

Of course, most Americans nowadays would be appalled if we treated animals, especially dogs, how we treat immigrants and refugees. Far more was made in the news media of Michael Vick killing dogs he trained to fight than in the separation of families by the Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). Without a doubt, America loves its pets more than we love the human beings whom we have defined as “others.” In the mass media and advertising and in our streets and living rooms, we see dogs pampered and treated as members of the family, referred to as children, given holiday gifts, preferred over human beings for companionship. The composite message we should infer regarding the totality of television advertising for food and what are called food products is that human beings give their pets a healthier, more nutritionally balanced diet than they themselves eat.

Thus many, if not most, of the people who embrace Trump’s demotion of groups of human beings to animal status routinely elevate animals to the status of “human beings.”

Defining people as less than human makes it easier to treat them badly. It used to justify slavery, segregation and Jim Crow laws. Today, it justifies an ungenerous, mean-spirited immigration policy—to use violence when dealing with them, to turn them away even though they are suffering refugees, to split families, to send people well-established in this country to the countries of their parents.

Trump’s animal comment is one set piece in a large campaign he and his allied are waging to divide America into “us-and-them” armed camps, with ”them” defined by color and ethnic background. Another theme in this long-term propaganda war is Trump’s constant labelling of behavior by blacks, Hispanics and Muslims as horrific while condoning or remaining silent about similar white behavior. The most obvious example of the Trumpite double standard is Trumpty-Dumpty’s reaction to mass murders involving whites versus people of color. When whites go postal, mental illness is to blame; anyone of color and it’s terrorism.

Contrast, too, Trump’s comments about “the good people” marching with the Nazis in Charlottesville versus his condemnation of Colin Kaepernick and other professional athletes for taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem before sporting events.

Which brings us to the unfortunate decision of the National Football League (NFL) to fine players and their teams when the player genuflects during the anthem. Like Trump and his minions, NFL owners have decided that taking the knee is inherently unpatriotic and thus antisocial, even if the players are asserting a right that defines Americans to protest a flaw in the American way of life that supposedly makes the United States a superior place to live—the unfair treatment of African-Americans and other minorities by the criminal justice system. The NFL owners put themselves on the side of Trump and his minions, which is why Trump is praising the announcement.

In attempting to explain why NFL owners didn’t decide to affirm the right of all Americans to engage in peaceful protests by doing nothing, we face another set of bad options, caught between a symbolic Scylla and Charybdis with no ship to navigate us safely between the two: Either pressure from rightwing politicians and the large numbers of NFL fans who are racist or Trumpite has coerced a craven NFL to submit to their un-American, and covertly racist, agenda OR the NFL owners sincerely believe that saluting the flag is more important than a basic civil right.

Or maybe they just like the idea of controlling the players, like a sheep herder controls the flock.

Let’s keep in mind that the NFL, more than any other professional sport, has maintained the plantation owner attitude towards players that all sports used to have before the days of free agency. No other league is as preoccupied with its public image as the NFL, and the owners insist on that image being corporate, conservative and dedicated to the values of small-town white America. No other league has as many rules of behavior that have nothing to do with playing, e.g., the extensive regulations dictating proper behavior after scoring a touchdown. Now the NFL wants to take away the player’s right to free speech, or at least make them pay for the right through fines (which is in keeping with the essential rightwing idea that people with more property should have more of an influence on social policy, as if the NFL is saying, “If you want a say, you have to pay.”). The racial makeup of the NFL reinforces the plantation metaphor: The league is about 70% black, but there are few blacks in management and no black owner.

In organization and physical infrastructure, the old slave plantation had many similarities to contemporary immigration collection centers, Japanese internment camps during World War II and German concentration camps. Moreover, in all these instances of herding people into confined quarters and controlling their every movement, the people in charge openly expressed a superiority to those under their control. The evidence of that superiority was and is racial in nature and usually color-based.

Thus the NFL’s decision to try to prohibit political protest during the national anthem and Trump’s “worse than animals” remark are profoundly connected, not only as different arrows in Trump’s quiver of racism, but as manifestations of the continued persistence of the belief that whites of European decent are superior to others. Both Trump’s comments and the NFL action are highly calculated moves meant to exploit the virulent racism that still distorts American values.

During the last few centuries, science has undercut the notion that certain groups of humans are superior to others, or that all humans are superior to animals for that matter. Science’s inexorable refutation of revealed religion removed our inherent superiority to other creatures as much as its dismissal of inherent differences between the races has refuted racism. Moreover, over the past 40 years, anthropologists and paleontologists have found evidence of all kinds of behavior in animals that humans once cited to assert our superiority, including the development of language, use of tools, social organization and hierarchy, altruism, morality and even religion. The more we learn about the natural world and ourselves, the more like other animals we seem. Even as American whites wrongly believe that they are losing their status economically and socially to “others,” all humans are losing their status of uniqueness among the animal kingdom.

While respecting all life (except maybe rats and cockroaches), I still believe that humans are different. Other animals may use tools, but not to the degree we do. Other animals may communicate, but they haven’t built the widespread and sophisticated communications networks we have. And while altruism and morality exist among other animals, none have yet banded to together to protest the mistreatment of others. Your typical alpha male or alpha female among social animals doesn’t threaten its own existence by trying to raise awareness about how creatures in other groups suffer. And that’s what Kaepernick, the quarterback—the quintessential human alpha—did. In standing up for the civil and judicial rights of people of color, Kaepernick performed a uniquely human act. He could have defined himself as a privileged football player or a member of the economic elite, much as Trump and the NFL owners do, but instead he chose to identify with the downtrodden, and by implication, the entirety of humanity.

In a profound sense, then, those who protest and work for human, civil, judicial and economic rights are the most human among us. That’s certainly what Christ and the early Christians thought. They knelt before the concept of a god who helps the poor. Kaepernick knelt before the secular concepts of equality, equity and human solidarity. Either way, they elevated themselves—made themselves more human and less like animals—through the devotional act of kneeling. Perhaps when considering definitions of human beings, we should simply say, “animals who kneel.”

My hope is that the NFL edict will incite more football players and other professional athletes to become “animals who kneel.” I would like to see entire teams either stay inside the locker room for the national anthem or all take a knee in unison. I would like to see fans stay seated during the national anthem to protest this new restriction on civil rights. I would like to see a class action lawsuit by the players that upends this obnoxious new regulation. In short, I would like to see Americans collectively tell Trump and the NFL owners that we are not animals, but human beings.

#trump #nfl #anthem #immigrants

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glittergummicandypeach · 4 years

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‘Cancel Culture’ Is as Old as Religion, And It’s Only a Thing Because of Who’s Doing the Cancelling | Religion Dispatches

I don’t understand “cancel culture.” I mean, I understand what people mean, but I don’t quite understand why those decrying it claim that it’s something new.

I’ve often thought the term itself is born from social media which portends to inaugurate the democratization of knowledge but really functions to introduce the democratization of opinion. In some way, of course, opinion was always democratized; free speech enables me to say whatever I want (given certain caveats) but it doesn’t, nor did it ever, give me the right to say it wherever I want.

In some way, cancel culture has always existed, mostly in the hands of editors of opinion pages and letters to the editor; university committees who decide who’s invited to speak and who isn’t; people who evaluate material for publication, etc. That is, there was always a process of vetting, and that vetting was not always pure and without ulterior motives.

The lines of communication between what I happen to think and your ear have never been unmediated unless you happened to pass by my front lawn as I stood there and expounded on the ills of the world. Before this present moment, for example, would anyone think of accusing a newspaper of “cancel culture” because they rejected one’s letter to the editor (if so, I would have been the victim of cancel culture many times over).

But something has changed. Let me cite a few examples. When I was a young assistant professor at The Jewish Theological Seminary I received many invitations from Conservative synagogues to speak about my research, or on topical matters. I enjoyed such opportunities. Once I began publishing essays criticizing Israel’s occupation, the invitations stopped. Pretty abruptly. As I told a friend at the time, I could close my eyes and envision my name being summarily plucked from the Rolodexes in synagogue offices. Did that disturb me? Not really. While I certainly missed the extra income, I knew that was the price I paid for making my views public on a contentious matter. At no point did I think I was being cancelled. In fact, I was happy that at least they were reading my essays.

A second example happened more recently. I read an essay in an online journal on a topic I know something about that I felt was very problematic, not because I disagreed with the views expressed therein (although I did), but because the essay contained errors, inaccuracies, leaps of logic, and was poorly argued. I wrote to the editors of the journal to express my dissatisfaction. In response I received a very mean-spirited response from one editor accusing me of “bullying a young writer” (the editor called him “a kid”) and claiming he was just “living his truth” (he was an American who had immigrated to Israel).

First, I had assumed he was closer to my age. But if readers were meant to account for the writer’s age shouldn’t his work have been presented in a way that reflected this? Second, I had no idea, nor did I care, where he lived. And third, I didn’t quite understand being accused of “bullying” since I never wrote to the author and never made my views of the essay public. To this day, the unnamed author still has no idea how I felt about his essay. I simply wrote privately to the editors. While I wasn’t quite accused of “cancel culture,” that seemed to be the underlying message of the editor’s remarks. In this editor’s view I was, in some way, questioning, by privately discrediting, the right for this author to state his views.

Finally, when someone crosses a line on my Facebook thread I often block them. Before doing so, I write to them to tell them I’m blocking them, and that they have the right to say whatever they want in this world, but they don’t have the right to say whatever they want on my Facebook page. While my page is public, it’s still mine and I have the right to curate it as I see fit. I offer them the opportunity to apologize or retract their remarks and if they choose not to, I block them. I’ve been accused in this instance of “cancel culture”; that is, of preventing him or her from expressing their views and censoring them. The elision of whatever and wherever seems to have grown roots in our psyche.

So in these three moments—one where I’m not invited to speak at venues because of my views (perfectly legitimate), one where an editor accuses me of preventing someone from “living their truth” by privately criticizing their essay (illegitimate), and one where I am accused of ‘cancelling’ someone for saying whatever racist or misogynist nonsense on my Facebook page (necessary, in my view)—we find ourselves in a state of confusion where the right to say whatever we want has morphed into the right to say it wherever we want. Where public space and the democratization of opinion now enables us to confuse whatever and wherever.

People can be, and continue to be, excluded (cancelled) for all kinds of reasons; race, religion, creed, sexual orientation. We now have legal structures in place to try to alleviate or minimize that kind of illegitimate discrimination. We’ve decided that those criteria for exclusion are unacceptable in our society.

What it seems “cancel culture” is introducing is another layer; political or ideological discrimination. And in doing that, weaponizing something that’s existed for a long time: exclusion for other reasons. Kind of like how white people who oppose affirmative action do so because suddenly they are disadvantaged, though they had no problem for centuries when it was reversed. But is political discrimination valid? If I edit a journal and reject an essay because I find its political or ideological foundations unacceptable, is that discriminatory? Should it be? The expansion of discriminatory practice to include political or ideological differences in regard to who gets to say what, where, is perhaps the place to get a deeper sense of what’s going on.

Yes, even the Talmud

Recently, Will Berkovitz, a rabbi and CEO of Jewish Family Service in Washington State published an opinion piece arguing that, as the headline states, “The Talmud has a lesson for our cancel-culture world.” In it, he argues that the Talmud, a product of a small cadre of Jewish sages in Babylonia from the third to sixth centuries CE, can be a model for the tolerance and diversity of opinions that our present moment needs. That it can teach us a lesson about cancel culture.

Others have made similar arguments that the Talmud is a lesson in pluralism as its pages contain legal discussions that include minority and rejected opinions. In fact, one of its tractates called Ediyot (‘Testimonies’) even discusses why minority opinions remain inside as opposed to being relegated to the dustbin of history. This of course, is not unique. U.S. Supreme Court decisions contain dissenting views that are continually analyzed by legal scholars.

On the Talmud, Berkovitz concludes:

“As our ancient rabbis understood, debate—and the people who engage in it—is vital to advancing society; it doesn’t degrade it. We gain nothing by turning debates on ideas into attacks on people. Both are part of the arc of the human story, but only one will elevate our community.”

How can one argue with that?!

And yet, the example of the Talmud fails to support Berkovitz’s claim. Jews, Christians, and Muslims may have entertained a variety of opinions on matters of great urgency. But not all. In fact, maybe not even most. They had their own “cancel culture.” It’s called heresy. Heresy constructed the limits of legitimate debate. In a sense heresy constructed Orthodoxy.

So who formulated heresy? That’s a complex historical question beyond the scope of this essay. But typically it was ecclesiastical authorities, or sometimes regional leadership. And what constituted heresy? Also beyond the limits here, but suffice it to say that these were largely theological or ideological determinations that extended beyond simple “errors” of belief, but required pertinacity, which is a willful or deliberate act of deviance, even after being warned.

In Christianity it often applied to the rejection of Church doctrine or dogma, while in Judaism it often consisted of either a rejection of rabbinic authority, or its construction of monotheism or claims of the divine origin of the Torah. One guilty of any of those “fallacies” was excluded from the debate; that is, they were canceled.

While the Talmud indeed includes multiple voices, it’s the product of a fairly small and exclusive fraternity of sages, each of whom passed the requisite initiation to be included. Of course, Babylonian Jewry was much more diverse than the included views would suggest. The Talmud doesn’t include those other voices, not necessarily because they thought they were heretics, but because they weren’t part of the club and thus their views had little if any authority. If all we had was the Babylonian Talmud we’d know very little about Babylonian Jewry in this period. All we’d have is the record of a thin slice of the society in a small number of academies.

Today, Talmudic scholars are exploring the wider vistas of the context of the Talmud, not only to show how it may have been influenced by its surroundings, but also in some cases to examine those the Talmud “cancelled”; those who engaged in magic bowl incantations, perhaps Zoroastrian fire worship, and other manner of religious practices that didn’t find favor in the sages of the Talmud. Were the sages being discriminatory by excluding these people and ejecting heretics from their midst?

One could say, and many have, that heresy is an old idea that’s no longer relevant. That modernity has thankfully moved us beyond heresy toward a more pluralistic world. French sociologist Emil Durkheim didn’t think so. Author of many works, including the influential The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim held that categories like heresy do translate into secular societies. In an essay “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena,” Durkheim writes:

It is a fact that there are general beliefs of all kinds which appear to be relevant to secular objects, things like the flag, one’s country, some form of political organization, some hero, some historical event or other…They are obligatory in a certain sense, because of the very fact of their being in common…they are to some extent indistinguishable from religious beliefs proper.

Durkeim is talking about things common in a society but the same would apply if we diversify it to apply to venues, universities, churches, synagogues, and mosques, social communities, even Facebook threads. To take an example straight from Durkheim, a 2017 poll found that 60% of Americans believe that professional athletes should be required to stand during the playing of the national anthem. Groups are able to hold deep-seated convictions like this one, the rejection of which is a kind of secular heresy meaning they are excluded from their discourse. Protesting that norm is an act of “heresy” to counter a norm. If successful it can change the norm. But it can do so only by acting outside it.

This doesn’t deny that a group can hold a diversity of views on a particular issue, just as the Talmud records some of the views it ultimately rejects, but the Talmud in its diversity is also exercising cancellation (those outside the academy or those deemed to hold heretical views). Free speech enables us to say anything we want, but it doesn’t give us the right to say it anywhere we want. The Jewish heretic in late antique Babylonia could espouse any theological view he or she wanted, but if it didn’t find favor with the rabbis it wasn’t recorded in the Talmud. And thus, for all intents and purposes, it was cancelled.

Anything, but not anywhere

In light of the Harper’s Magazine letter, I find it curious that many now decrying cancel culture are the very beneficiaries of precisely that culture before it was named. That is, beneficiaries of all kinds of other people being excluded from the public sphere because of their religion, race, sexual orientation, or political views (communists, for example).

Thankfully our society is slowly rectifying those sins. But now to raise the issue of ideological discrimination as if to say, you cannot prevent me from saying that I want to say in your newspaper, or at your university, in your church, or even on your Facebook page, seems like protesting too much. That kind of freedom was never given, nor should it be foisted on, any community, publication, or platform.

In addition, the “cancel culture” police seem to be playing both sides of the wager. That is, they decry being “cancelled” but maintain their state of privilege and thus use their “cancellation” as proof they’re saying something important.

That’s because, ironically, the mere fact that they can say they’re being cancelled means, in part, that they’re not. They just take the position of privileged opposition and wear it as a badge of honor. If they were really cancelled, we wouldn’t hear their voices at all.

If you want to see real “cancel culture,” look at the myriad women, Black, gay, and other writers who lived their life in obscurity because they couldn’t get published and thus had no voice. For every Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, or Toni Morrison there are hundreds, maybe thousands, whose names we will never know.

In a free society, I may have to tolerate your views, but I’m under no obligation to publicize them, nor to let them pass without criticism. My right to criticize you publicly is no less important than your right to pontificate publicly. As Durkheim said, secular societies and subgroups, like religious ones, get to choose what is sacred and what is heretical. The former is included, the latter excluded. There may be no better example of that very limited diversity, and equally strong exercise of exclusion, than the Talmud.

Shaul Magid is a Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and Contributing Editor to Tablet magazine. His forthcoming book Meir Kahane: An American Jewish Radical will be published by Princeton University Press.

This content was originally published here.

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