#Oxford is basically another planet

[thesarahshay]

Oxford: We're a university but we're actually made up of a bunch of separate colleges with different names

Me, an American: Ok, sure

Oxford: So we've got like Queen's College and Exeter College

Me: Right, sounds very British

Oxford: And there's Christ Church and Jesus and Corpus Christi

Me: That scans historically

Oxford: We've also got Balliol and Brasenose

Me: Haha, cute

Oxford: Also there's one called New College

Me: Huh, ok

Oxford: It's one of the oldest

Me: Seems confusing, but you do you

Oxford: And then of course there's University College

Me: ...Now you're just messing with me

#I knew almost nothing about Oxford before I discovered Dorothy Sayers and now I know things I can't unknow #Oxford is basically another planet #Oxford University #Gaudy Night

[brokenhardies]

Book Covers - Fairest Of Them All

“This planet’s ours to defend”

In one universe, after saving Khonshu - and the world, that was more important - and defeating Arthur Harrow, Amber returns to London, gets back to Oxford, and is now staying in Steven’s flat with Layla and the Moon Knight system. It’s an interesting dynamic, especially considering that Moon Knight and Eclipse are still saving people, even without the threat of an ancient vengeance God breathing down their neck. However, little does Amber know, there’s something about to be unlocked -- specifically to do with a mirror in the flat.

In another universe, after defeating Sivana - and awakening the other Champions, that was more important - and saving the world from the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man, Amber enters the Rock of Eternity with a plan to fully move in with her respective charges for the time being. But as she’s decorating, she finds a box with a strange, ancient looking mirror in it. Confused, she asks her new team for help, but suddenly realizes that she possibly shouldn’t have done that.

When both girls tap the mirror, they’re suddenly sucked into the other universe -- the Amber who was much younger and less experienced finds herself staring down Steven Grant, unsure of how to deal with his issues as well as how to get back to Billy. The other Amber finds herself in a strange new environment, surrounded by children that maybe shouldn’t be running off to save the world at the age of basically 15. And to make things worse, Amber’s curiosity may have doomed the world even more than before...

“Ain’t got no time to pretend”

TAGLIST

@seize-the-droid @anotherunreadblog @ocfairygodmother @kazinejghafa @eddysocs @foxesandmagic @seymours-secret @witchofinterest @akabluekat @booty-boggins @anna-phora @starcrossedjedis @bravelittleflower @jewelswrites-ish @ryutabas @darth-caillic @fuckitup-in-style

#ocappreciation #ocapp #ochub #queerocs #fyeahsuperheroocs #OC: Amber #story: decode #story: electric feel #so the amber from the supernatural horror meets the amber from the coming of age tale! #yay! #basically this explores the two different ambers and how they would respond to the others charge #esp poor dceu amber who has to deal with steven/marc/jake #she gets used to one and then they switch and shes like 'WTF?????' #meanwhile mcu amber is basically that buzzfeed gif with the drunk girl and the puppies with billy and the shazamilly :')

[dailyaudiobible]

10/6/2021 DAB Transcript

Jeremiah 6:16-8:7, Colossians 2:8-23, Psalm 78:1-31, Proverbs 24:26

Today is the 6th day of October, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible, I am Brian, it is wonderful to be here with you today. As we continue our journey and settled into this 10th month of the year, as we continue our journey through the book of Jeremiah and the letter to the Colossians. We’re reading from the Common English Bible this week, Jeremiah chapter 6, verse 16 through 8 verse 7.

Commentary:

Okay so, we’re reading in the 2nd chapter of the letter to the Colossians in the New Testament. And, what Paul lays out today is our reality and in describing that reality he’s kind of coming against some other behaviors that have been taught, like this is what will lead you to righteousness. So, he says don't let anybody judge you about eating or drinking, or about a festival, a new moon observance or sabbaths. These religious practices are only a shadow of what was coming. Don't let anyone who wants to practice harsh self-denial and worship angels rob you of the prize. And so, what is the prize? The prize was described today. Literally, I can't say it in another way that's better, or teach it, like Paul teaches it out of this letter exactly as it's intended to be received, so I simply want to reread about five verses while highlighting this is supposed to be the reality, we live in. This is supposed to be what normal looks like to us. And so, Paul says “See to it that nobody enslaves you with philosophy and foolish deception which conform to human traditions and the way the world thinks and acts rather than Christ. All the fullness of deity lives in Christ's body. So, all the fullness of God lives in Christ's body. And you have been filled by Him who is the head of every ruler and authority. In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision not administered by human hands. The circumcision of Christ is realized in the stripping away of the whole self, dominated by sin. In other words, that was cut away and discarded, the self, dominated by sin. You were buried with Him through baptism and raised with Him through faith in the power of God who raised Him from the dead. When you were dead, because of the things you would done wrong and because your body wasn't circumcised, God made you alive with Christ, and forgave all the things you had done wrong. He destroyed the record of the debt we owed with its requirements that worked against us. He canceled it by nailing it to the cross.” Oh, that is our reality. And it's not like we have encountered these concepts in Paul's writings, but here it is laid out concisely, we aren't who we were. Things have changed. We have changed. In fact, so much so that who we were is well, dead, no longer existing. We have been resurrected into a new life. Again, this is kind of, I mean it's a mind blowing, let's not, let’s not take that off the table, its mind blowing. But it's also essential Christian teaching, like 101. It's the basic understanding. But man, if we could get the fundamentals, if we could get the basics down, because if we look at this and this is the reality, then why don't we live like this is the reality? Like, that’s the question, right? If this is the reality and we’re now living in reality than what are we doing, besides living in a false reality that is considerably less then what the good news offers us? On one hand, we can make this really encouraging and bolster ourselves and rise up, and yeah, we’re going to do this, but on the other hand, this is not really just about us. This is how the world will know, this is how Earth's people, who do not know Jesus will come to understand. We have been entrusted; we’re supposed to be living this reality. Anything less is just less.

Prayer:

And so, Holy Spirit, come into that. We confess that we have elected to live less, more of the time, then is easy to admit. The letter to the Colossians tells us that the fullness of God is in Christ, and we are filled by Christ who is the head of every ruler and authority, that's hard to get our mind, it's so big and so good, it's hard to get our minds around. And yet we choose to ignore things like this when there, they change everything. You change everything and we just try to moderate that which essentially makes us live less than You've offered. And we don't want to do that anymore and we need to not do that because we are the light of the world, a city on a hill, the salt of the earth. And so, come, Holy Spirit, not only let this message transform our own hearts and encourage us but give us a sense of purpose and understanding about why this reality has been offered to us in the first place. Come, Holy Spirit into this we ask You to lead and direct us and guide us. Lead us into all truth. We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is home base, it’s where you find out what’s going on around here, so be sure to check that out. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app you can check it all out with the drawer icon in the upper left-hand corner. Places like the Community section which is well, that's where different links are to get connected on social media, provided social media platforms are up and running but it is also the home of the Prayer Wall. The Prayer Wall is there and available day or night, no matter where you are in the world and no matter what is swirling around in your life, you don't have to be alone, which is one of the things that we worked so hard around here on as we come around the Global Campfire, to know that we’re not alone. Just that one thing, that one piece of knowledge, even if it's just knowledge that we’re not alone is so helpful sometimes when we feel nothing but alone. And the Prayer Wall is always there and so you can always go and ask our brothers and sisters to pray for us. We can also go and pray for our brothers and sisters. And that's how works right, we give and we receive and we give and we receive from one another in so many different ways, so don't be a stranger to the Prayer Wall.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, if this mission to continue to bring the spoken word of God read fresh every day and offered to anyone who can hear it, anyone who will listen anywhere on this planet, any time a day or night, and to build community around the rhythm, as we call it the Global Campfire. This rhythm, the next step forward together. If that is meaningful to you, then thank you for your partnership, we wouldn't be here at all, if we weren't in this together. So, thank you. There is a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. If you’re using the app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or the mailing address is P.O. Box 1996 Springhill, Tennessee 37174.

And of course, if you have a prayer request or encouragement; certainly, the Prayer Wall is a place to go but you can also hit the Hotline button in the app, that little red button up at the top, or you can dial 877-942-4253.

And that's it for today, I’m Brian, I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Prayer and Encouragements:

Hey everybody, Tony the Narrator here. Just a big shout out to everybody just to let you know that I’m praying with you and for you. I love all of you but yeah. Quick prayer request if possibly; my Mum’s come down with COVID for the second time. She's had both of the Oxford shots and she still come down with it and she's got a cold at the same time and it's really, she's, she's going through it, bless her, she's going through the ringer. She actually got it in November 2019 before we all knew what it was. So yeah, it was, it was, she was one of the very early cases and she picked up a new version of it so, if I could just, please beg your prayers over my mum. I’ve already told her that your all praying because I know that I can trust you guys in DABC. I’ve told her that she's got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Christians around the globe praying over her right now because time is irrelevant when you’re speaking to the Lord and she also said to say thank you and she said all that’s lovely, which is very English thing, don’t worry.  And so, yeah, please hold my mom up in prayers she’s going through it and this is a really beautiful opportunity for me to be able to share the gospel with her and to let her know that actually she's got a Jesus who is caring for her. So, guys, I love you so much. I'm going to be able to share the gospel with my mom because of you and I love all of you. You’re all mine.

Hello beautiful family this is Susan calling from Albuquerque. I just wanted to lift a couple people up in prayer. The first one: Mark the teacher in Australia, he called about his brother who's been missing in the Outback for a couple months now and can’t imagine how, how worried you must be. I'm just kind of speechless. I can’t imagine. And the other is Bonnie from Virginia who has managed, who came here from another country and I'm assuming it's from a culture that, where women are thought of as no less important than dogs. And I, you came over here and managed to escape from a very big abusive situation. Oh, my goodness, you are so courageous and I'm so grateful you are here, there is no accident you came here and we're just all loving you and supporting you and I just wanted to say that and I'm so glad you called in. So, Father I wanted to lift up Mark and Bonnie today and we come together because Your family we love you very much and we love Your children and our brother and our sister. Please encourage Mark. Please help him find his brother-in-law. I know that they're terribly worried and they need peace of mind, please comfort this family and help them find an answer very soon. And Bonnie, please continue her recovery from this abusive marriage. I'm all out of time now. Love you all.

Good morning my DAB family. This is Judy from Georgia. This message goes to Victoria Solider. Victoria, I'm so sorry my sister to hear about your brother passing. May God comfort and keep you in His care and comfort the rest of your family and give you the strength to get through this time of mourning. We’re all praying for you my dear. Have a great day everyone. God bless you all.

Good morning Daily Audio Listeners all around the world and here in the United States. This is Maurine from Alexandria. I want to call myself Dr. M, because that's how many people refer to me. So anyway, I wanted to let you know that I am so grateful to all of you for your contributions, for your prayers and I want to say a quick prayer for everyone today, Sunday. For your healing, for your deliverance, for God's peace and for God’s protection in your life. For all those who are suffering from COVID, I pray for God's healing. For all those who have lost their loved ones, I pray for God's comfort. For all those who are finding strength in the word of God, may you be strengthened in every area of your life. Father, thank You so much for my brothers and sisters all over the world. Thank You so much for this place where we can come together to pray and to study Your word. May Your divine presence strengthen, encourage, provide, protect and heal. In the name of Jesus, by the way, thank you for such a beautiful, beautiful time together daily. And we ask that your blessing continue on Brian and his family. Lord, we love You, we bless You, we worship You. In Jesus name. Amen.

Good morning everybody, it’s Susan from Canada, God’s Yellow Flower calling. I just want to lift up Victorious Solider in prayer today and her family, over the loss of her loved brother. Dear God, dear God, I am so thankful that her brother has been saved and is enjoying the benefits of his faith here on earth. I am joyful that his heart and soul and mind and body are with you, right at this time. But for those left behind God, it's hard. And I pray Your arms of comfort about each and every one of them and that You would strengthen them and guide them and lead them through this hour of grief. I pray dear Lord that You would especially bless Victorious Soldier with leadership she needs in guiding this family through this terrible time. In Jesus name I pray. Amen.

[moghedien]

Could you recommend some adult sff? Love your blog btw!

Thank you! 

And ok, I could give you better personalized recs if you give me some idea of what you’re looking for or what you like, but I’m gonna give you some general recommendations. Also I only really feel comfortable recommending books that I have personally read, and there are tons more out there than what I have read. If you want to find more, looking at recent Hugo nominations over the past few years might be helpful. Also one of the reasons why I know anything at all about the SFF world is that I’ve been listening to the Sword and Laser podcast for like, a decade. I never really mention that podcast, but its literally why I started reading at all and also they have a pretty active goodreads group as well. 

So recommendations: 

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie: 

This is one of my favorite books period. This is a far future space opera about an artificial intelligence who used to be a spaceship and now is only one human body, and she is ANGRY ABOUT that. I don’t really want to say more than that, but if you like AI shenanigans and being sorta confused as to what is going on the entire time, then this is the book for you! It’s the first book in a completed trilogy.

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan: 

Obviously I’m gonna recommend the Wheel of Time. This is the first book in a 14 (actually 15) book series and if you need something to do with the next 1-5 years of your life *motions toward EoTW*. 

So the Eye of the World, I think is uniquely good as a book if you kinda want to get into adult fantasy for a few reasons. For one thing, its kinda considered to be one of those “classics” of the genre but its not too old to be offputting to some readers. It’s a 30 year old book, so its not reflective of the genre now, but you can definitely see its influence all the place, even outside of just books. The Eye of the World specifically, also goes out of its way to make readers comfortable. It leans heavy on Tolkien references and tropes at first without being a straight up copy of Lord of the Rings like some classic fantasy books are. Its done very purposefully, in my opinion, to make the reader feel like they have some idea of what’s going on, and the series quickly drops the Tolkien references as soon as its established itself enough. 

Also the Gandalf parallel for the series is a smol bi lady and there is 24 year old rage healer who wants to fight everyone with her own two fists.So many women to stan. 

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

This is the first book of the Expanse, which is a nearish future space opera that takes place in our solar system. Mars has long ago been colonized and is a completely separate government entity than Earth, and conflict between the two planets has been stirring. The Asteroid Belt has also been colonized and have long been little more than tools of corporations that run their colonies. A group of ice haulers working in the outer planets get in the middle of one of the biggest secrets in the solar system and find themselves in all kinds of trouble. 

I don’t really want to say more than this, but this is probably the only SF series that I actively keep up on when a new book comes out. There are 8 books our currently, and the 9th and final book will be out sometime in the near future. There are also several short stories and novellas set in the world, and there’s a TV show that I really like though I need to catch up on it. 

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Hello, this book comes with content warnings for literally everything, but it is such a good book/trilogy. This is book about a woman trying to find her daughter again in the middle of the apocalypse. Definitely a heavy read but absolutely brilliant. The world has a magic system based on geology and the people that can use that magic....saying they’re discriminated against is an understatement. I don’t want to say much more about it, but if you have any kind of content you can’t read for whatever reason, I’d check before picking this up. This is the first book in a completed trilogy

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

So this isn’t really super SF heavy and is actually sold as a literary book, but it takes place after a flu pandemic has wiped out a large portion of the population...so maybe this is a bad time to read this book, OR its the best time to read it. Depends on how you’re dealing with *motions at the world*

The book flashes back to before and during the pandemic a lot, but is largely about art’s importance and is actually quite optimistic in its messaging, and this is another of my favorite books ever. But yeah, might be a bad time for you to read it of you can’t deal with the content now. 

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon 

I just remembered that this book also has a plague, but its a subplot and not the major thing. So this is a big ol’ chonky standalone book that is high fantasy, deals with multiple cultures having to interact and work together, and has dragons. Also there’s a genunine slow burn f/f romance and *chef’s kiss*. I can’t really say much else, mostly because I struggle to explain this book, but its very good and probably my favorite book from last year. 

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal 

In this house we stan Mary Robinette Kowal, ok? 

So this is a science fiction that is more an alternate history that poses the question, hey, what would have happened if an asteroid slammed into the east coast in 1952 and the world had to scramble to colonize Mars so that everyone didn’t die on earth when the climate got catastrophic, because that’s the inciting action of the book. The main character is a Jewish woman who was a WASP pilot in WW2 and is a computer for the space program when all this happens. The book deals with sexism, and racism, and xenophobia, and all the social issues that are gonna come up with it being set in 1952, but Mary Robinette doesn’t flinch away from addressing social issues in any of her books, even when it makes her main characters look bad. (Also if you like Pride and Prejudice, she has a series that is just Pride and Prejudice with magic and like, yeah, its good). 

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

This is a book which poses a question, what if dragons were like weird animals that were real and an eccentric woman spent her entire life traveling the world to study them and then told the stories of that in her memoirs when she was too old to care about the consequences of publishing all her scandals. That’s what the book is about. This one is probably actually the weakest in the series, just because it deals with so much set up. It’s a great series to get on audio because Kate Reading is a fantastic narrator, and the prose works so well as audio, because it’s just someone telling you her life story. There are five books in the series. 

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

So this is a novella and is the first in the murderbot series. Basically a killer robot gets addicted to television shows and accidentally became sentient. I haven’t read the others in the series, but I really need to reread this one and get to the others. 

Jade City by Fonda Lee

This is a fantasy set in world sorta inspired by the early 1900s but is in a fantasy world. It’s like a mafia movie and kung fu movie had a baby and it was this book. The sequel is out currently, but the third book is set to release next year.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon 

This is another heavy read. This is a SF story set on a generation ship that has a society very heavily inspired by the antebellum south. There’s class issues, race issues, gender issues, mental health issues. All kinds of things intersecting here. Its fantastic, but a heavy read.

Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb

This is another fantasy classic, and is the first of the Farseer Trilogy. The title is sort of also a description of the book, so like. I’m not sure what else I can say. I haven’t read further into the series, but people I trust love it, and honestly I need to reread this and read more of the books. 

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

So if you think that Station Eleven might be a bad book to read at the time, then this is THE WORST POSSIBLE BOOK TO READ RIGHT NOW. Or, maybe the best. Depends on how you cope. This is a book about time travelers based in Oxford and the main character accidentally gets stranded in the past right as the Black Plague is about to hit. And it hits. The book is horrific. The second book in the series is much funnier. This one ain’t funny, but is good. Just, oof. 

Mistborn or Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

So if you want to get into the Cosmere, which is a series of series that interconnect and will ruin your life, then then my personal opinion is to either start with Mistborn or Warbreaker. People might not agree with me, but that’s my personal opinion. 

Warbreaker is currently a standalone (a sequel will come out eventually but its not set up for a sequel so you can 100% read it as a standalone). The magic in this world is based on colors, and the story revolves around two sisters. One of them is betrothed to the horrific God King of their neighboring kingdom. The other sister ends up being sent in her place because their dad hates her. I adore Warbreaker so much. It has it all. Two women discovering their true places on the prep/goth spectrum. Talking swords. Vivenna. Everything you can need right there. 

Mistborn is a trilogy that is very emo and will ruin you. Its about people who swallow metal to get magic powers and live in world where the dark lord won already, so they’re all emo. And that was the worst description of Mistborn I ever could have written, but I find it too funny to change. 

So if you’re interested in the Cosmere, but are afraid to commit long term, pick up Warbreaker. If you want to get into a series right away, pick up Mistborn. 

[musette22]

Hello, I am sending these questions to a few selected bloggers that I like and you are one of them, I'd like to hear your answers ❤️

-What's the last thing you did that made you feel proud of yourself?

- Favourite Ship?

-If you could grant one wish to another person, who would that be?

--One personal trait you like having?

-What's a movie you feel deserves more love?

-What's a song you need people to hear at least once?

- Favourite TV show?

Hi sweetheart! Thanks for these questions, I’m touched that you’d think to send me them! 😘😘

-What's the last thing you did that made you feel proud of yourself?

Writing 6k on my fic this weekend! 

- Favourite Ship?

Stucky and Evanstan. I can’t choose between my boys, but let’s just say they’re basically one and the same thing anyway :p

-If you could grant one wish to another person, who would that be?

Oooohh, well if I could grant one wish to one person, I’d research which powerful person is most likely to wish something selfless that would do most good on this planet, but I can’t tell you off the top of my head who that would be!  

-One personal trait you like having?

I like that I’m am open-minded person.

-What's a movie you feel deserves more love?

You know what, let’s go with Before We Go. I was just chatting to @merlinruse about it, and we both feel like it’s an underrated movie. Okay, so it’s not perfect and won’t win awards, but it’s very honest and it’s got heart, which is something that’s often lacking from movies these days ❤

-What's a song you need people to hear at least once?

Oh no, another one I find so hard to answer 😂 There are SO many songs I absolutely adore, but okay, one that came to mind and that always gives me goosebumps is Weight of Love by The Black Keys.

- Favourite TV show?

At the moment, I don’t have a favourite TV show... But I guess and all time favourite for me would be Inspector Morse! I absolutely love old detective shows and Oxford is one of my favourite places on earth, so I always love it when I happen to catch a rerun on this one on TV (yea, I know, super exciting answer 😂)

Thanks again for these, lovely! This was nice, hope you’re doing very well 😘😘

#minnie answers #Anonymous

[lhs3020b]

Contrary to what you may have thought, I’m not dead.

I’ve noticed that my posting has dropped almost off the face of the planet; unfortunately I’m basically running at capacity for stress at the moment, and productivity has been a major casualty.

Work is ... well, I suppose at least I still have a job, so there is that. But all the institutional chaos within my workplace has only got worse. Most of the crazy is coming down from management - if they could just stop, just hit the pause button, actually the place would be fine. But nope, apparently this year is the year for random changes to policy and process, bizarre new HR practises and an ever-increasing upsurge in random micromanagement. Honestly, it’s exhausting and I’m having a lot of mornings when I just do not want to open the work laptop.

No sooner did I get better from the (likely, if unproven) case of The Thing, then within a fortnight, I managed to come down with an absolute stinker of a cold. This one, I think, is just a normal cold - but it’s been dragging on for weeks and generally being an exhausting, depressing misery. It’s also been forcing me to stay in the house as much as possible, making a mess of my sleep and generally draining all my energy and initiative.

On top of that I’m also stressing myself into a proper mess over household stuff. Lately it feels like it’s just been one crisis after another at this building. We recently had a neighbour vanish under weird circumstances. (This was the flat below me, where the police had to break in - as far as I can tell, it’s still vacant down there. No-one seems to know what’s happened to him.) Last week we had a near-miss on a house fire (luckily it was caught before it escalated, but it was still a serious “feel your stomach drop” moment). Today, I’m suddenly having plumbing problems again - this has been a consistent theme over the past three years - the landlord is a unique storm of incompetence, illiteracy and disorganisation, so getting any repairs done is always a real struggle here.

I know that I need to move house.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. First of all, there’s the problem of finding somewhere. This city is absurdly expensive, in fact it turns out it’s now one of the most expensive in the country. (It’s still beaten by the black holes that are London, Oxford, Cambridge and the other property-market horror stories out there, but it’s in pricey company!) There’s basically nowhere in this city that I can now afford (my employer being a notorious low payer doesn’t help here either).

As for nearby places, well, that’s where we start to get into the Covid problem. The UK is presumably heading for a second lockdown (Wales is there already, and so are a lot of bits of the North of England), but the government are currently doing their usual thing of blustering and threatening, rather than acting, so of course no-one has any idea what’s going on or when anything will happen. And knowing my luck, of course it will get decreed the day before the removals van is due, won’t it? Because it just will, won’t it? There’s no other day it could possibly happen on, etc. etc.

Then we get to removals, which will be complex here between my lack of a car (how could I possibly afford one?), the weird stairs in this building, and the lack of parking outside.

Yeaaaahhhh.

Fair to say I’m a mass of stress at the moment. So, that’s where I am right now, and this is where I will probably stay for the foreseeable future.

#job rent bills taxes aaaargh #LHS witters #2020 is 2020

[canchewread]

Editor's note: The War on Sharing is an informal journal about my life as an anti-capitalist dissident in a burgeoning Pig Empire police state, during a time of normalized fascist reaction. Given the deeply personal nature of this writing, please consider citations to be arbitrary, profanity to be praxis, and slang to be artisanal.

 Those who control the present take great pains to control our understanding of the past." - Michael Parenti, History as Mystery (City Lights Books, 1999)

  The War On Sharing: Thunderheads

  So why the fuck am I starting an informal meme blog? It's complicated.

If I'm being completely honest in this space, I should start by confessing that I don't know how to tell you the things I need you to hear. That is of course a terrifying thing for a writer to admit openly, but recent events in both my personal life, and the world at large have convinced me that I might not have as much time to perfect my revolutionary rhetoric as I had previously believed. What I have come to understand as the global capitalist war on sharing is clearly escalating; in both scope and violence. In light of a recent illness, and my own personal brush with a burgeoning Pig Empire police state, I find myself questioning the value of debunking the individual lies of the capitalist order, and the wisdom of exhausting myself in a hopeless battle against both the neoliberal, and modern fascist propaganda arms of said order. I feel a desperate, almost primary need to put these events into their proper context and reveal the larger picture, but the plain truth of it is that I'm beat up, exhausted, and frankly I don't know how.

Oh, don't get me wrong, it's not as if I haven't tried to communicate the horror of what our capitalist society really is and where it's clearly heading; I most certainly have, by means both painfully earnest, and humorously circuitous as it happens. Unfortunately I am an imperfect messenger, and I have never quite mastered the trick of getting folks to understand something they know is true, but do not want to believe because it's simply too horrible to bear. Faced with the reality that possessing a library with hundreds of books cataloguing the monstrous functions of capitalism, and the historically verified crimes, deceptions, and outrageous abuses of its enforcers, isn't very useful if nobody who hasn't also read those books is even willing to believe you about the established facts of history, I find my academic writing wholly insufficient to properly communicate this larger, and admittedly quite terrifying picture of the reality my studies have revealed to me.

Therefore, I need a blog, or a journal if you'll humor my vanity, because I don't know how to artfully tell you there's a storm coming, or perhaps more accurately, already in progress; a violent pincer "reaction" that's as predictable as rain after thunder, driven by the multiplying crises of capitalism and the rising public embrace of socialist alternatives. I need to tell you these things in plain language because this phase of the class war is going to be hard on folks who sincerely believe you can't get in trouble for having ideas and I cannot allow myself to be misunderstood; the reality is that under the thumb of Pig Empire capitalism, the only truly outrageous crime is having ideas that threaten the continued dominance of capitalist extractivism, and the ruling classes it benefits. 

Like clockwork the emergence of an even vaguely cohesive Pig Empire left, has already resulted in the unleashing of yet another flavor of fascist political violence, and legalized oppression by the bourgeoisie capitalist state. As we literally run out of planet to pillage, rising global inequality leads to what amounts the mass murder of the poor, and the bald-faced inhuman monstrosity of our ruling ideology (and the classes of folks who benefit from it) forces the protesting masses into the streets, there is no reason whatsoever to believe this situation is going to improve. Indeed, history says that both the reactionary right, and neoliberal police states in the Pig Empire, are quite capable of inflicting far more violence and terror in the service of protecting the capitalist order than we've seen so far in this particular round of the endless struggle.

The knives are out lads, and reality doesn't actually give a fuck if you feel a way about what is and isn't possible in a so-called "liberal democracy." The simple truth is that the world does not work the way we have all been led to believe, and perhaps more importantly, trained to uphold. Capitalism is not an economic system; it's a hierarchal social order, an ideological prison, and (particularly as expressed in the Anglo-American sphere of influence) a predatory cult. The extraction of wealth from the underclasses, at bayonet point if necessary, is not only the driving force of the last five centuries (and counting) of Pig Empire history, but maintaining, strengthening and obfuscating that primitive accumulation through legalized violence, is ultimately the very reason most "liberal democratic" institutions exist in the first place; from media and politics, to policing and the military. 

Does that sound like a conspiracy theory to you? Well let me inform you that it's a simplified Marxist historiographic analysis of modern society, but the fact your brain immediately told you to question my sanity demonstrates the effectiveness of the explicitly capitalist propaganda model that utterly dominates our educational and media environments - does it not? “All that is solid melts into air,” indeed.

So I'm starting a journal, because there are some things I still need to say and don't feel I can express any other way. I'm starting it because there are some nights that I'm just too damn broken and tired to keep proving basic Marxist analysis is not a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory to folks who genuinely want to believe you can topple capitalism at the ballot box. And I’m starting it because I still don't know how to tell you the world is a fucking vampire in the proper Oxford vernacular. As it turns out, life during wartime is no place for meticulous footnotes.

This irregular feature won't replace my regular writing, but given that I'm currently stone incapable of engaging with polite fictions and necessary illusions, it is a vital activity for the preservation of my sanity; if not other's perceptions of the same. If I'm lucky, we'll never do this again; but given that the other option is literally staring at a blank page with tears of frustration welling in my eyes for what feels like the fifth consecutive night, I assumed readers would prefer my emo ravings to continued radio silence.

Additional Reading:

Manufacturing Consent – Chomsky, Herman – Review – Margin Notes

Necessary Illusions – Noam Chomsky – Review 

Political Mind Games – Roy Eidelson – Review – Margin Notes

History as Mystery – Michael Parenti – Review  

Inventing Reality – Michael Parenti – Review – Margin Notes

Propaganda, Inc – Nancy Snow – Review 

Debt: the First 5,000 Years – David Graeber – Review 

A Brief History of Neoliberalism – David Harvey – Review 

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

#journals #informal writing #nina illingworth #memes #anticapitalism #Marxist analysis #capitalism is a cult #reaction #fascism #neoliberalism #The War on Sharing #propaganda #counterinsurgency #COINTELPRO #Pig Empire

[mashounen2003]

Here is the text of the video, translated into English. Seriously, check out this video, this guy is awesome.

"Conspiracy Theories" by Guille Aquino.

Posted on June 27, 2019.

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Warning: if you're influenceable, you need to watch this.

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Alright, before we start, I want us to welcome and applaud our new friends from the CIA, the FBI, NASA, the former SIDE -today, the AFI-, the KGB, Interpol, and the lazy virgins at the troll centre on Miserere Park, who are surely already watching this video because today we're gonna talk about...

Conspiracy Theories.

We all know some: the humans didn't go to the Moon, the 9/11 was a self-attack by the USA's government, Bin Laden never existed, Walt Disney is frozen, Elvis Presley is alive, the Simpsons predict the future, Marcelo Tinelli went to a famous hospital with a famous object inserted in a famous place on his body, and Dengue and Zika fever were created by Bill Gates who genetically modified mosquitoes to depopulate the Earth because it most likely was easier than making work that "Internet Explorer" bulls*** he sold us. But let's get to the news: in early 2019, YouTube modified its recommendation algorithm to avoid promoting conspiracy theories and false information. And let's stop here because I want us to become aware of the magnitude this matter took on and how this little joke of the conspiracy theories videos completely went to Hell.

Think of it this way: YouTube, the second most trafficked website in the world after Google, with over 30 million visitors per day and over 1.3 billion users -almost a third of all people connected to the Internet in the world-, where 300 hours of videos are uploaded per minute and almost 500 trillion videos are viewed per day, had to change its own recommendation system because all of us were watching too many videos denouncing that Lali Espósito is an Illuminati:

Video excerpt: [with obvious robotic voice] "Also, at the second Number Ten, she covers one of her eyes again, obviously symbolizing the All-Seeing Eye."

And I'm very sorry to tell you that, in today's world, if YouTube has a problem, we all have a problem.

Conspiracy theories are the Internet's new porn. In fact, if you filter the words "conspiracy" and "theories" by the number of views, the most viewed video has 36 million views. THIRTY-SIX! MILLION! VIEWS! That's like putting together the total populations of Belgium, Greece, Cuba and Jamaica, and then lighting a giant reefer to everyone and making them watch this video of people saying the Earth is flat:

Another video excerpt: [Channel 13 interview with Flat-Earthers, recorded in a park in Buenos Aires] "I pour water into this dish... Look, I pour water, and it stays, you see? But we pour water into the globe... and it goes down, people."

Okay, now we're gonna go over some of the most popular conspiracy theories of recent times, and we're gonna try to deconstruct the psychological profile of the average consumer of the conspiranoid world.

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We'll start with everyone's favourite...

The Flat-Earthers.

Excerpt of the second video: "This first meeting began to be announced in the groups I followed on YouTube. (And the tattoo you have there, what is it?) This is the flat Earth, the Sun and the Moon."

The Flat-Earthers basically hold the theory that the Earth is not actually spherical, and they claim Galileo Galilei was an old smoke-seller blabbermouth who often played into the Far-Right's hands, cut his hair in an old-fashioned barbershop and used the 1610 telescope mainly to bed with chicks. And I have nothing personal against the Flat-Earthers but I find it difficult to take them seriously, mostly because much of their scientific hypothesis can be explained with this blooper.

Excerpt of another, different video: "There's an inflatable pool filled with water and with two people in it, a third person suddenly jumps into the water, and the pool deforms and overflows on the other side, as one of the two previously present people also falls over the edge."

(Images from the film "Armageddon".)

The truth is that the "flat Earth" theory has one fundamental premise, and it's the same one that supports 100% of conspiracy theories:

There's a power above us that manages everything.

Governments, lobbies and other de facto powers are capable of lying on a massive scale, just as intelligence services, the New World Order and FlyBondi hostesses do.

Excerpt of the second video: "(And you can't see the curvature of the Earth from the plane.) Uh... I travelled by plane to Bariloche, and no, I didn't see it. There's some aircraft glass with a small magnification or something that changes your perspective, due to the thickness of the window, and because aircraft glass also has something."

Alright, stop, let's not turn this into "Point at the crazy assholes and laugh" either, right? Well, yes, a little- But we go beyond that! We're better than that!

Why do so many people choose to believe we're puppets of an evil system? One might say that, in the absence of a sense of real control over our own lives and in the face of the desolation of living in a seemingly random, chaotic world, believing there's an external force exerting control is, to some extent, comforting. Yes, phone the Vatican.

And according to a certain old white upper-middle-class snob who teaches at Harvard University, conspiracy theorists share several or at least one of the following features: they're paranoid, radical, extremist in their opinions; they aspire to a feeling of superiority, and basically, they feel special for possessing information that exceeds the common citizen. Yeah, it's like the row for an indie film festival.

Umberto Eco even said:

"The control syndrome invades us. When someone claims to have a secret, their strength is not in hiding something but in making people think there's even a secret in the first place."

And I didn't understand a f*** because I've never read a book in my life, but it sounds ultra-mega-hyper cool. I dare you to deny it!

So who would be the most likely to believe in these kinds of theories? People who had bad experiences in life, people in search of an answer that would rescue them from a deep existential crisis, and the most important: people in search of a place of belonging.

Excerpt of the second video: "Well, no, this opened a door for me to start thinking more, to question things, about a supposed alien invasion."

Wait, stop right there. Excuse me, but if I'm an alien and I have the power to cross the universe in a spaceship, with my own army and the ability to colonize a celestial body, I don't even waste my time invading a paper-thin planet. Give me a round planet or give me death!

And that's when the contradiction comes into play. Because if you believe in one conspiracy theory, you immediately start to believe in all of them. It's like the weed. Even the refutation of a plot fits within the plot itself: for example, if you believe Lady Diana was killed by the British Crown, you're also prone to believe Lady Diana is actually still alive.

(Woah, Mind Blown... She was totally killed anyway, sorry.)

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Good, let's move on to the next one:

The Anti-Vaccination movement.

Okay, here we come to a key point, since clearly there are the "harmless" conspiracy theories and the... rather dangerous ones. We've all heard someone say vaccines may cause autism in kids. Now, I'm clearly a specialist in absolutely nothing, and I ain't gonna explain why you guys have to vaccinate your children, so I better recommend to you the websites of any Ministry of Health or Wikipedia, so that you later visit them and find out how very important it is to inject legal drugs to your sweet little angels. And it's not to detract from any position or to err on the side of bigotry, but if you're an anti-vax and your baby coughs next to me, I swear I'll kick their head off.

(Tack! That bag of germs...)

And after all, that's why we invented Democracy!

(Ha, of course not, but...)

In fact, I dunno who gives a f*** about this but maybe someone will find it useful: I follow a pretty simple method when it comes to ideologically locating myself regarding any issue. And this is:

Always do the opposite of whatever Gisela Barreto says.

Gisela Barreto: [speaks with a flag in the background] "Vaccines show up, and they show them to us as something that heals us. Actually, they're part of our death."

(Seriously, she came this close to being in the Avengers.)

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Okay, and now let's move on to one that touches us all closely (at least here, in my country):

Hitler in Argentina.

It's the conspiracy theory ensuring that, after losing World War II, the Nazi leader, the most disgusting dictator and genocide in Human History, came to live incognito in our country. And I ask myself: what the heck did we need to shelter Hitler for? The birth of Alejandro Biondini, who's pretty much our local version of Nazism, was imminent:

Interview with Biondini in 1991 by Mariano Grondona in his program "Key Time":

Grondona: "Would you condemn Adolf Hitler?"

Biondini: "No, we vindicate Adolf Hitler."

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Okay, question: is it possible to keep a secret on such a large scale for so many years? Well, the Math says no. Seriously! I've read that a physicist at the Oxford University (Where else?) took the "humans didn't go to the Moon" theory, and then this guy created a mathematical calculation based on the number of conspirators involved, the time elapsed since the conspiracy, and the inherent possibility that a plot would fail.

For example, in the case of Apollo 11, 411 thousand NASA employees were involved, and according to the variables this physicist analyzed, the lie should have been known in less than four years; half a century passed, and no employee denied the mission. What does this tell us? Well... they were threatened and killed off, of course! It's obvious! [imitating Mirtha Legrand] Stanley Kubrick was not in the coffin! Nobody saw him. Nobody saw him!

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Gimme more!

Famous people who are actually dead.

For example, Paul McCartney. On the cover of the album "Abbey Road", he's barefoot; a clear subliminal message that the real one died and was replaced with a stand-in. (Why?!) It sounds silly, but the rumour got so big that McCartney himself had to go out and publicly deny it... Although come to think of it, he also came out to congratulate the butchers who named their butcher shop "Paul Mac Carne" ["Paul McMeat"], so maybe he's truly a stand-in and, to top it off, looks like a raisin.

Excerpt of another video: "Well, thinking of different names, someone said "Paul Mac Carne". And well, he, being a vegetarian, says the idea was very good, started laughing and sent us a greeting."

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I love this one:

The Reptilians.

It's basically the theory that there's a race of amphibian aliens [Wait for a second: aren't they called "reptilians"?] living among us for centuries and hiding their reptilian features behind human faces.

(Oh, you were telling me they're not actually aliens because they were born here?)

Excerpt of the 1996 movie "Mars Attacks!".

And who discovered this? David Icke! Or "Ique". An unsuccessful former soccer player and sportscaster. (How can you be unsuccessful as a soccer sportscaster?! All you need is a suit!) It's like believing in a religion where your Pope is Diego Latorre.

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Now, I know what you're thinking: after all, how dangerous can all this get? I mean, no conspiracy theory has someone popular to represent it, no spokesperson of ridiculous and implausible plots has reached a truly important position in today's world.

Bah... There's actually only one.

The President of the United States of America.

That's right! Donald Trump, once the leader of the most powerful country in the world, had come to power mostly by throwing out fake news and conspiracy theories. And here are some:

Barack Obama is an immigrant.

Trump: "And I just say: why doesn't he show his birth certificate?"

Global warming is a myth.

Trump: "Obama is saying all of this has to do with global warming and I say all that is a hoax..."

Gisela Barreto was right.

Trump: "At two and a half years old, the baby, the beautiful baby, went to get the vaccine. Now he's autistic."

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Okay, then... Conspiracy theories. For what? Well, in the case of Trump: influence on public opinion and accumulation of power. In the case of people who upload videos to YouTube... What do you think? A profitable, monetizable business! In fact, there's the conspiracy theory that we're actually making this video about conspiracy theories in order to have lots of views and earn buttloads of cash. (We'd never do that!)

And finally, a much deeper, inherent aspect of the human condition:

The need to believe in something.

The world is divided into two types of people: some think everything happens for a reason, everything is a sign, and perhaps there's also a magical entity organizing things for us; the other half of the people think we live in a desolate world without meaning or messages, there are only atoms randomly colliding with each other, and the Universe gives no f***s about us. Which of these two groups seems happier to you? Which one do you belong to? Which one would you like to belong to? I choose to join the conspiranoids! And listen to this, I know exactly what's going on:

The New World Order organized the Lollapalooza at the request of the Illuminati, who wanted to marketingly manage Lali Espósito, who actually wears a mask and underneath is "La Mona" Giménez, who's not actually a monkey but a reptile and has drank all the wine to get immunized against the vaccines at the request of Gisela Barreto, who was born in Corrientes just like Barack Obama, who claimed to have killed Bin Laden, who's actually alive and was driving the car that crashed that night and carried Chano Charpentier, who taught driving to Lady Diana, who was actually Mexican and was assassinated by Donald Trump, who was matched on Tinder with Hitler, who lives in a nursing home in Recoleta and has glaucoma, so he's hitting the reefers with Biondini, who is actually a hippie and a fan of León Gieco, invented global warming and, when being in a bad mood, takes a bus and goes to dinner at "Paul Mac Carne", where they invented the extra-thin Provoleta cheese, which coincidentally has the same shape as the Earth, which is actually flat!

*sigh* Knowledge is power. Quiero creer.

Soundtrack: State Anthem of the Soviet Union.

#conspirative theories #Analysis

[queenofcarrots]

Manuscripts in Star Wars (And Star Wars Fan Fiction)

This is the text of a talk originally presented at the conference Fan Cultures and the Premodern World at Oxford University in July, 2019, organized by Dr. Juliana Dresvina of the Oxford History Faculty. This presentation represents a collaboration between myself and Dr Brandon Hawke of Rhode Island College, and is essentially a summation of our video project Sacred Texts: Codices Far, Far Away, (Introduction to the series at that link) and examples below will include links to brief conversations where Brandon and I talk about the examples in a bit more detail. This has also been posted on my academic blog but I’m cross-posting here to reach a different audience.

Hi, My name is Dot Porter, and I want to start by thanking Juliana for the wonderful organization of this conference, and also for including me in the program. This is very different from the kind of conference I normally present at – in my day job I’m a special collections curator at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in medieval manuscripts, their digitization, and their post-digital lives. Basically I get paid to digitize medieval manuscripts and then play with them. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis project, funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources, which is just finished, and through which we digitized and made available for reuse more than 465 codices from institutions in Philadelphia)

Aside from my family there are two things in life I adore: medieval manuscripts, and Star Wars. I must admit that while I am a scholar of manuscripts, of a sort, I am also a fan. I love manuscripts – the way they look, feel, smell; I love to hold a manuscript and think about all the other people who have touched it, and consider the signs of use that imply their long histories. This interest has led to current work on conceiving of medieval manuscripts as transformative works themselves, first presented at Leeds 2018 and work I’m continuing looking specifically as Books of Hours. (My original draft of this presentation featured some of this work, but it threatened to take over, so I axed it all; a blog post of my Leeds paper is on my blog, if you’re curious).

While I am arguably a manuscript scholar, I am most definitely not a scholar of fandom studies – you will, I’m sure, find my theory wanting – nor am I a scholar of Star Wars, but I am a fan. I do the things that fans do. I’m on Tumblr, although that platform is pretty dead now, and I have a fandom Twitter account, which is much more active. I write and consume fan fiction, and I regularly commission artwork to illustrate my stories and stories I would like to write. I have written exactly one notable meta, which was even picked up by the AV Club – they actually cited me, unlike many of the other websites, which only cited the person who stole my work and posted it on Reddit!

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, released in December 2017, we were introduced, for the first time, to manuscripts in the Star Wars universe. I had avoided trailers and spoilers, so the first time I saw this was in the theater, and I was, as the kids say, shooketh. Not only one manuscript, but a whole shelf-full of them! And they’re important. Rey, our heroine, has been sent to the island of Ahch-to to bring Luke Skywalker back to help the Resistance, led by Luke’s sister General Leia Organa, defeat the First Order. Rey has been there for a day or so, following Luke around, making no headway, when she is called to the Uneti tree, a large, hollow, Force-sensitive tree that houses these manuscripts. It’s in the company of these books that Rey and Luke finally communicate with each other, when Rey admits that she has only recently come to the Force and that she needs Luke to train her to be a Jedi, and when Luke grudgingly agrees to give her some lessons, but also tells her that the Jedi must die. Exciting stuff, and the books are there to hear it.

According to Star Wars The Last Jedi: The Visual Dictionary, Luke Skywalker scoured the galaxy for these texts and collected them himself, storing them in the tree that we see in the film. So these texts weren’t originally all in one collection, they are from many different planets, potentially written in ten different places, ten different times, ten different languages and alphabets, although there’s only one we ever see in the film. The starwars.com blog post “Inside the Lucasfilm Archives: The Jedi Texts” gives us an up-close look at the prop book that was shown in the film; as you can see it’s a real book, written and bound, and even damaged. There are manuscripts in our collection at Penn that look not very unlike this book. It is a real manuscript.

This is one manuscript in the universe. What else do we know about manuscripts in star wars in general? To be honest: not much. But we do know that it is rare to write by hand (as opposed to writing with digital technology like data pads). In Claudia Gray’s novel Bloodlines, which takes place six years before The Last Jedi, Leia Organa is preparing for a fancy party when she finds a handwritten note at her seat, and she’s shocked: “Virtually nobody wrote any longer; it had been years since Leia had seen actual words handwritten in ink on anything but historical documents.” So it appears that, by the time the current films take place, there are no longer manuscripts being actively written in the galaxy, or at least it’s very rare.

Interestingly there is one character in the Sequel Trilogy who it is suggested knows how to write by hand: Kylo Ren, formerly Ben Solo. There is a scene – the same scene is actually shown three times, from three different points of view – where a young padawan Ben is sleeping and his Uncle, Luke Skywalker, comes to him and looks into his head, sensing great darkness in his dreams. Ben calls his lightsaber to either attack his uncle or defend himself against him, depending on the version of the scene, and in one of these shots we can see that he has a calligraphy set in his bedroom. We can see the set here, in a screenshot of his desk just before he calls his lightsaber over – which knocks over the pen and inkwell and jar of parchment scrolls in the process – and in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

What else do we know about these specific books? There is concept art in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi; including six internal pages and six shots of the bindings.

I remember looking at the concept art and thinking how alike and different they were from the manuscripts I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Penn, and I discovered that my Twitter mutual Brandon Hawke, an Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College, was having many of the same thoughts that I was. So in October of 2018, Brandon came down to Penn and we sat for hours in front of a green screen and talked about manuscripts and Star Wars, comparing books in the Penn collections to what we see of the manuscripts in the concept art. We’ve been posting snippets of our discussions on the Schoenberg Institute YouTube channel, and there’s a link at the top there if you want to check them out. So for most of the rest of this paper I’ll be walking through some of the possible comparisons between real manuscripts and the Star Wars manuscripts. I want to stress that we did this for fun, and not for science, and that we’re limited by the collections at Penn and by our own knowledge.

Consider yourself warned: The remainder of this presentation is essentially an educated fan, raving.

As far as Brandon and I have been able to determine, this is a previously unknown script in the Star Wars universe. When I saw it my mind immediately went to Ge’ez, shown here in an early 20th century book of Hymns from Ethiopia. There’s something about the blockiness that is just slightly curved, and a few of the letter forms are slightly similar although I don’t think that’s necessarily meaningful. (video)

We also made a comparison with Coptic, which is thinner, more curved, and perhaps a closer match. (video)

For the third example we looked not at the text, but at its layout on the page. We found a similarity with this 16th century collection of Persian poetry, both its illuminated header (similar in aspect to the illuminated blue line of text in the center of the ancient Jedi text) and the framing of the text. (video)

Aside from text, it is clear that the concept art of pages supplied to us here represent astronomical texts. This is really not surprising, considering that in the Star Wars universe we have a galaxy that seems to have been very closely connected, between planets and cultures, for a very long time, and so it makes sense that even the most ancient texts would be concerned with objects in the system – stars and planets and moons – and how they related to and interact with one another. And this is a major concern in medieval astronomical texts, too: these texts illustrate people trying to make sense of the system they live in, in the best way they know.

One of the pages in the jedi texts is the symbol of the Galactic Republic, but placed on some kind of chart, with characters dispersed through the chart and text – perhaps labels – along the outside. We found a similarity with this chart in LJS 57, a 14th century astronomical anthology from Spain. I don’t know exactly what this chart represents but I can tell you that astronomical texts are full of similar charts; it was one of the ways that medieval people made sense of the data they had available to them. (video)

Something similar is happening here, in LJS 449, a 15th century German medical and astronomical miscellany. These charts are perhaps a bit simpler than the Spanish chart, but they have that attractive blue coloring. Both the coloring and the arrangement of data around the circle reminded Brandon and me of the diagrams on this page of the Jedi texts. (video)

The next three slides show diagrams from LJS 26, a mid-13th century copy of Johannes de Sacro Bosco’s, Algorismus and Tractatum de sphaera, an immensely popular text that was copied and translated and commented upon from the time it was written in the early 13th century (it is possible that our copy was written during Sacrobosco’s lifetime) through the 16th century. It is full of diagrams illustrating the movement of the planets, and the sun, and the moon in relation to the earth. I personally find these diagrams most reminiscent of the two pages on the bottom left, although I feel like their organization suggests a sense of scale that is lacking in the medieval diagrams. (video)

Medieval astronomers only had to think about the earth, and the moon, and the sun, and a few other planets. On the other hand, the Star Wars universe operates on a whole other level – a galaxy with countless star systems and planets that aren’t even charted. When I look at these diagrams I see a clever attempt to illustrate scale using the relatively primitive technology of ink and paper in place of the star charts and 3D maps that we see in the films.

On the other hand, there are some really simple 1:1 comparisons to be made, such as this diagram, which pretty clearly illustrates the phases of a moon. (video)

I want to take a quick look at the bindings of these manuscripts, particularly this piece of concept art, which is quite similar to the prop that we see in the film.

This has a fairly standard binding structure, quite similar to LJS 102, the Ethiopic manuscript we looked at earlier, except for the front cover, which is built of three separate pieces that are obviously connected together. In western bindings, if a wooden cover were a composite of multiple pieces, we would expect that to be obscured, as in this late 13th century Catalonian manuscripts (It’s hard to tell, which is the point, but this cover is made of three pieces of wood).

The only example of a cover like this I’ve seen is from the Walters Art Museum, this 14th century Ethiopian Gospel book. The cover was broken and then sewn back together, but this was the result of an accident, not done on purpose.

My colleague Alberto Campagnolo also suggested that it is similar to the Chinese practice of writing on bamboo strips and binding them together, as in this 18th century example.

This is one instance where the artists who created these concepts have done an excellent job with suggesting a manuscript culture – in fact, several manuscript cultures, cultures that use what is available to them. There are two manuscripts here that appear to be bound in decorated tusks, one that has what appear to be shells embedded in a leather binding, and another that might be bound in hairy skin or – I like to think – had the binding grown on it underground. In any case these all suggest books written in different places, perhaps at different times, and as a manuscript scholar I find that fascinating.

Following up on this I wanted to see how the concept of the manuscripts was received by writers of fan fiction. As a fan author myself I have written a few stories featuring the ancient Jedi texts, but given my interests that made sense; I was curious to see what other authors have done with them. I think there’s more extensive work to be done here, but in reading through the 40 or so stories I was able to find (by searching AO3 for ancient jedi texts, and the “jedi text” tag) I discovered not surprisingly that the stories focused on the text of the books, not on their physical appearance (which is at least partially due to fan fiction being a written medium, vs. film being a visual medium) and that there are three main themes that can appear by themselves or be combined:

Rey can read the texts on her own, or she needs help (Kylo Ren, C3PO, Obi Wan Kenobi’s force ghost)

The translation is used to further the story (whether or not it happens)

The texts do something (e.g., magic spells)

What will happen next? Will there be manuscripts in the Rise of Skywalker, the final film in this last trilogy? Of course I hope so, and it seems likely. The Uneti tree was struck by lightning and burned, but Rey took the manuscripts with her (here is a screenshot of a drawer in the Millennium Falcon, at the very end of the film, showing the books clearly safe and tucked away)

and in the Poe Dameron comic #27 we learn that Rey has been working with C3PO to translate the texts.

And there’s also the spectre of Kylo Ren with a calligraphy set; if he had access to these manuscripts when he was studying with Luke Skywalker, it’s possible that he has read and perhaps even annotated some of the books. Only time will tell, and I for one can’t wait for December.

#star wars #meta #manuscripts #ancient jedi texts #jedi texts #medieval manuscripts

[uncloseted]

What non-fiction books can you recommend me?

That really depends on what you like, but I’ll give you a few that I like in general... if you’re a young girl, I think Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein and Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski are really important reads. Both books are deep-dives into female sexuality- how it works, how it’s different from male sexuality, how it develops, etc. Girls & Sex focuses specifically on Millennials/Gen Z, while Come As You Are is a more universal primer.  I also really liked Modern Love by Aziz Ansari, which is basically an exploration of how sex and love have been impacted by new technologies. If you’re interested in psychology and neuroscience, I really like Oliver Sacks’ books.  The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a good starting point for his works, but I think in general his books are pretty accessible. Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century is another psychology book that has really shaped my views of the field.  Each chapter is separate from the ones before, so it goes quickly. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by Chuck Klosterman is one of my favorite books in general, and I really recommend his work. He’s basically a pop culture critic.  In that vein, Helen Anne Petersen’s books are also good; I would start with Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud.  If you like philosophy, I enjoyed In the Dust of this  Planet by Eugene Thacker, which shaped a lot of the philosophy that went into the TV show True Detective.  If you’re interested in economics, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt is a great foray into behavioral economics (and there’s a weekly podcast, if you like the book).  In general, I really like the A Very Short Introduction books from Oxford University Press.  They’re a good introduction to new topics and there are a ton of installments in the series.  If I think of others, I’ll update this, but those are the ones that come to mind.

[such-elegant-banter]

Have some Good Omens Fanfiction...

Because basically the Good Omens TV series was so incredibly amazing it lured me back into the world of fandom and fanfiction and this is the result. I know there’s probably thousands of variations of this scene (Lord knows I wrote one about 10 years ago when I first finished the book!), but enjoy. The title comes from the song Mess Her Up by Amy Shark.

Title: It’s the long drive home that makes people talk

Pairings/Characters: Aziraphale/Crowley

Summary: The one where, after a long bus ride, Aziraphale and Crowley realise they still have a chance. Spoilers for Good Omens TV Series

HERE on AO3 or...

“You can stay at my place, if you like.”

It’s not quite the same as running off to Alpha Centauri together, but Crowley has the same tone in his voice and the same shadow of hope flickers across his face, visible even in the dark.

And Aziraphale figures it’s another chance. And perhaps that means something; perhaps someone is trying to tell him something. He’s been around a while on this planet, long enough to know that second, and third, chances don’t come up too often.

He’d missed his chance before and let Crowley drive away without him, into the stars. It had made his heart give a pathetic little squeeze when he realised that Crowley had actually researched planets. But Aziraphale had still let the demon go. And it was odd, Aziraphale had remembered thinking. His mind could so often conjure a dream of a life with Crowley. A life where things were different and they could be something. But when faced with the possibility of a new life together, the angel had frozen and backed out. Because he was an angel. He had a duty. And Crowley, as he was so often reminded, was a demon. So instead, Aziraphale has simply said “I forgive you” and let Crowley go.

And now, as he follows the demon onto the bus, he hopes Crowley can forgive him too.

Crowley flops back into the seat by the window with the ease of one who has spent years developing a special kind of aggressively casual pose, one arm thrown over the back of the adjacent seat. There’s an invitation in that too, Aziraphale knows. And a chance to back out if he wants; there are other seats on the bus after all. But he takes the seat next to Crowley and Crowley makes a little noise that could be a sigh of relief.

The bus does take them back to London. Eventually. It does so via Oxford, so the other passengers can get to their destinations. And it does bypass the bus driver’s home, and continues south towards the capital with no driver and one angel and one demon as passengers. No one else seems to notice.

Crowley simply raises an eyebrow at Aziraphale.  

“It seemed cruel to make him drive miles outside his usual route,” Aziraphale says defensively.

Crowley sighs and gives a mildly fond smile. “I know,” is all he says.

They don’t talk for the rest of the drive, both too tired and too consumed by their own thoughts.

~ *XX* ~

In London, Aziraphale follows Crowley through his flat. They pass the foul wreckage that occurs when demon meets holy water, and pass the verdant plants, and pass the statue that still makes Aziraphale blush (“They’re fighting,” Crowley had said when he’d first shown Aziraphale through the flat. “Oh indubitably,” Aziraphale had replied, straight-faced).

They wind up in the kitchen, where Crowley wrenches his sunglasses off and runs a hand through his hair and mutters agitatedly about wine. Aziraphale knows something is not quite right and he dithers for a fraction of a second before simply moving around the stylish island bench and enveloping the demon in a hug. Crowley clearly isn’t expecting it and makes a startled noise. He is whipcord strong and tense, but slowly relaxes into Aziraphale’s softness when he realises the angel isn’t going anywhere.

“Oh my dear,” Aziraphale whispers. “Can you ever forgive me?”

Crowley grips him tighter, hands tearing desperately across Aziraphale’s back, and draws a ragged breath. “I thought I’d lost you.” The sound of the demon’s voice is so uncharacteristically emotional, that it makes Aziraphale ache. But there’s anger in that statement too, he knows. It will come out eventually, but not tonight. They’re both too exhausted for true anger and just a little bit broken by recent events.

“I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologise, you idiot,” Crowley huffs into Aziraphale’s shoulder, some anger ebbing away. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

“But I… I let you go,” Aziraphale stammers. “I let you drive off and…”

“You did the right thing, as always. You basically averted the apocalypse,” Crowley says. “I just… I…” What he doesn’t say, but what the angel understands anyway is that Crowley was being selfish and thinking only of himself and Aziraphale. The angel’s heart beats a tiny bit faster, even though it doesn’t have to.

“Well, I don’t think I can take all the credit for averting the apocalypse.”  

Crowley snorts. “Joint effort then. I just…” he pauses and when he speaks next, his voice has dropped so low Aziraphale nearly misses it. “I never thought I’d get this chance again.”

“Ch- Chance?”

Crowley pulls back and stares at Aziraphale, his hands still maintaining a vice-like grip on the angel’s arms as though frightened to let go. “My chance!” he cries. “Our chance! To survive, to make the most of what time we had left, to escape to bloody Alpha Centauri or something. Because I… Oh don’t make me say it.” He turns away with something like shame.

And it suddenly clicks in Aziraphale’s mind how alike they are, talking of chances like this. Crowley cares too much, about the world and humans and about Aziraphale himself. He cares the way angels should care, not that he’d ever admit it aloud. And Aziraphale feels guilt flood through him, because he’s spent so long trying not to care about Crowley. He didn’t want to like Crowley, but he does. And he’s spent too much time trying to deny it. But he’s too tired now, and suddenly too tired of waiting.

So very softly, he says: “we have our chance now.”

“Do you mean that?” The hope in Crowley’s expression as he looks up is almost too much for Aziraphale to handle. Crowley takes a deep breath like he’s trying to control something. With forced gentleness, he brings their foreheads together. “Angel… I, I don’t want to…” Hurt you. Scare you. Push you away. The words go unsaid. “…I know I go to fast for you.”

“Crowley…” Aziraphale says, breath hitching. “I -”

“Don’t deny it,” Crowley cuts him off. “Please don’t. I tempt people, angel. Trust me, I know the look someone gets when they’re in love with someone they think they shouldn’t be.”

“I wasn’t going to deny anything,” whispers Aziraphale, placing one hand on the demon’s chest and feeling the thrill of his racing heart. And Crowley twitches forward, his lips scant inches away from the angels. “I just… Are they watching us? Is Hell watching us?”

Crowley tenses in a different way for a moment. “No,” he says eventually. “Is Heaven?”

“No, I think they’re regrouping or -”

Crowley cuts him off with a kiss. Even though he should be expecting it, the contact still makes Aziraphale gasp. It’s awkward at first and Aziraphale dimly wonders if Crowley has ever kissed anyone else before. But he finds himself not caring as the demon pushes into his mouth and Aziraphale grips the lapels on Crowley’s jacket with a fierceness he didn’t realise he had. And maybe they have gone just a little native, because Aziraphale is exhilarated and enjoying this too much to be possible and Crowley must be too because he is just not stopping.

It’s not until Aziraphale finds himself being pushed back into the kitchen bench and the connection startles him, that they break apart. “Alright?” Crowley asks.

Aziraphale can only nod as he brings hands up to cup Crowley’s face and gently presses their lips together again. It’s gentler this time but no less enjoyable. And when they pull back, Aziraphale can’t help the smile that breaks out across his face.

“You know, I’ve always wondered what that would be like,” he says.

“Good as you imagined then?” Crowley asks with a little smirk.

“Oh definitely good,” Aziraphale says quickly. “But also different.”

“How so?”

“I… I don’t know.”

Crowley simply kisses him again. “So now what?” he asks after a few more moments have been lost.

Aziraphale thinks he would very much like to continue what they’ve started and see where it leads. It’s not in his nature to be prurient, but he’s suddenly very curious about certain parts of his human body, and of Crowley’s. However, he pushes the thought to the back of his mind. Heaven and Hell might not be watching them now, but that reprieve won’t last.

“We need a plan,” Aziraphale says, regretfully. “Heaven knows I’m to blame, that we’re to blame. They won’t leave us alone. And neither will Hell, I’d imagine. We need a plan or… or something.” He tries to sound matter-of-fact, but he can’t stop the panic which seeps into his voice.

“Then we’ll think of a plan,” Crowley says reassuringly with a sudden, familiar confident grin. “And I think I know exactly where to start.”

And there’s a small glimmer of hope in Crowley’s eyes that makes Aziraphale smile.

#Good Omens #good omens tv #ineffable husbands #Crowley #Aziraphale #My Fanfiction #Good Omens Fanfiction #air conditioning #do we still use air conditioning? #or am I a fandom grandma? #also please be kind - this is the first thing I've written in about three years

[sciencespies]

Aliens may have explored the galaxy and visited Earth already, scientists say

https://sciencespies.com/space/aliens-may-have-explored-the-galaxy-and-visited-earth-already-scientists-say/

Aliens may have explored the galaxy and visited Earth already, scientists say

The Milky Way could be teeming with interstellar alien civilizations, according to a new study. We just don’t know about it because they haven’t paid us a visit in 10 million years.

The study, published last month in The Astronomical Journal, posits that intelligent extraterrestrial life could be taking its time to explore the galaxy, harnessing star systems’ movement to make star-hopping easier.

The work is a new response to a question known as the Fermi Paradox, which asks why we haven’t detected signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The paradox was first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked: “Where is everybody?”

Fermi was questioning the feasibility of travel between stars, but since then, his query has come to represent doubts about the very existence of extraterrestrials.

Astrophysicist Michael Hart explored the question formally when he argued in a 1975 paper that there has been plenty of time for intelligent life to colonise the Milky Way in the 13.6 billion years since the galaxy first formed, yet we’ve heard nothing from them.

Hart concluded that there must be no other advanced civilizations in our galaxy.

The new study offers a different perspective on the question: Maybe aliens are just taking their time and being strategic, the authors suggest.

“If you don’t account for motion of stars when you try to solve this problem, you’re basically left with one of two solutions,” Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, a computational scientist and the study’s lead author, told Business Insider.

“Either nobody leaves their planet, or we are in fact the only technological civilisation in the galaxy.”

Stars (and the planets around them) orbit the centre of the galaxy on different paths at different speeds. As they do, they occasionally pass each other, Carroll-Nellenback pointed out. So aliens could be waiting for their next destination to come closer to them, his study says.

In that case, civilizations would take longer to spread across the stars than Hart estimated. So they may not have reached us yet ⁠- or maybe they did, long before humans evolved.

A new idea about interstellar travel

Researchers have sought to answer the Fermi Paradox in a number of ways – studies have investigated the possibility that all alien life forms in oceans below a planet’s surface, and posited that civilizations may get undone by their unsustainability before accomplishing any interstellar travel.

There’s also the “zoo hypothesis“, which imagines that Milky Way societies have decided not to contact us for the same reasons that we have nature preserves or maintain protections for some uncontacted indigenous peoples.

A 2018 Oxford University study, meanwhile, suggested that there’s a roughly 2-in-5 chance we’re alone in our galaxy and a 1-in-3 chance we’re alone in the entire cosmos.

But the authors of the newest study point out that previous research hasn’t accounted for a crucial fact of our galaxy: It moves. Just as planets orbit stars, star systems orbit the galactic centre. Our Solar System, for example, orbits the galaxy every 230 million years.

If civilizations arise in star systems far away from the others (like our own, which is in the backwaters of the galaxy), they could make the trip shorter by waiting until their orbital path brings them closer to a habitable star system, the study says.

Then once settled in that new system, the aliens could wait again for an optimal travel distance to make another hop, and so on.

In this scenario, aliens aren’t jet-setting across the galaxy. They’re just waiting long enough for their star to get close to another star with a habitable planet.

“If long enough is a billion years, well then that’s one solution to the Fermi paradox,” Carroll-Nellenback said. “Habitable worlds are so rare that you have to wait longer than any civilisation is expected to last before another one comes in range.”

The Milky Way could be full of settled star systems

To explore the scenarios in which aliens could exist, the researchers used numerical models to simulate a civilisation’s spread across the galaxy.

They factored in a variety of possibilities for a hypothetical civilisation’s proximity to new star systems, the range and speed of its interstellar probes, and the launch rate of those probes.

The research team did not attempt to guess at aliens’ motivations or politics – a tendency that some astronomers view as a pitfall in other Fermi Paradox solutions.

“We tried to come up with a model that would involve the fewest assumptions about sociology that we could,” Carroll-Nellenback said.

Still, part of the problem with modelling the galactic spread of alien civilizations is that we’re only working with one data point: ourselves. So all our predictions are based on our own behaviour.

But even with this limitation, the researchers found that the Milky Way could be filled with settled star systems that we don’t know about. That still held true when they used conservative estimates of the speed and frequency of aliens’ interstellar travel.

“Every system could be habitable and could be settled, but they wouldn’t visit us because they’re not close enough,” Carroll-Nellenback said, though he added that just because that’s possible doesn’t make it likely.

So far, we’ve detected about 4,000 planets outside our Solar System and none have been shown to host life. But we haven’t looked that hard: There are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and even more planets.

One recent study estimated that up to 10 billion of those planets could be Earth-like.

So the study authors wrote that concluding that none of those planets hold life would be like looking at a pool-sized amount of ocean water and finding no dolphins, then deciding that the entire ocean has no dolphins.

Aliens may have visited Earth in the past

Another key element in debates about alien life is what Hart called “Fact A”: There are no interstellar visitors on Earth now, and there is no evidence of past visits.

But that doesn’t mean they were never here, the authors of the new study say.

If an alien civilisation came to Earth millions of years ago (the Earth is 4.5 billion years old), there might be no remaining signs of their visit, the authors wrote. They pointed to previous research suggesting that we may not be able to detect evidence of past alien visits.

It’s even possible that aliens have passed near Earth since we’ve been here, but decided not to visit. The paper calls this the “Aurora effect”, named for Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora.

What’s more, aliens might not want to visit a planet that already has life, the authors said. To assume that they would, they added, would be a “naive projection” of a human tendency to equate expansion with conquest.

The study accounted for all of these considerations – the calculations assumed that alien civilizations would only settle a fraction of the habitable worlds they encountered. Still, the researchers said, if there are enough habitable worlds, aliens could easily have spread across the galaxy by now.

There’s still much more to learn

For now, the researchers don’t think we should get discouraged by any perceived silence from the universe.

“It doesn’t mean that we’re alone,” Carroll-Nellenback said.

“It just means that habitable planets are probably rare and hard to get to.”

In the next few years, our ability to detect and observe other potentially habitable planets is expected to improve dramatically as new telescopes get built and launched into space.

The Kepler telescope made leaps and bounds in the search for planets that might host life in our galaxy. In Earth’s orbit today, the Hubble Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) are continuing the search.

NASA is also building the James Webb Space Telescope, which may be able to see as far through space and time as the Big Bang. It’s slated to launch in 2021.

Of course, what would really improve scientists’ ability to estimate the probability that we’re alone in the universe would be more data on the speed or ranges of interstellar probes. A better sense of how long hypothetical alien civilizations last would be useful, too.

“We’re in desperate need of some data points,” Carroll-Nellenback said.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

Join us on Facebook or Twitter for a regular update.

#Space

#Space

[fen-ha-fuck-you]

the 100 ask game

hi i was tagged by approximately a million of you for various things in the past few weeks, so forgive me if i missed you, but I believe this one included: @little-oxford-st — @yourereallyhere — @foreverandalwayscrysis — @clarkgriffon — @mamabearsdontthink 

and i’m putting the rest of this under a cut bc she’s thicc ladies

1. What station on the Ark would you be from?

honestly, probably alpha tbh

2. What would you get arrested for on the Ark?

treason. i don’t know specifics, but it would absolutely be treason

3. Would you take off your wristband when you landed on the ground?

nah

4. What would the necklace Finn would make for you look like? (Clarke: deer/Raven: a raven duh..)

bold of you to assume i’d let that boy so much as speak my name

5. If you could resurrect any MINOR character who would it be?

gina martin, may she rest in peace

6. Create a squad of 5 characters to go on missions with. Who are they?

clarke and bellamy, clearly, and also lincoln, diyoza, and roan. i call it Competence Squad™

7. What Grounder Clan would you belong to?

get grounder culture 31596026746 feet away from me. skaikru.

8. What would your name be in Trigedasleng? (example: Octavia=Okteivia…just make it up!)

Abi 

9. Thoughts on Finn? Some people hate him, and others love him, so I’m curious

from a writing perspective? fascinating character and arc  from a personal perspective? boy can choke 

10. Be honest. How willing would you have been to take the chip without knowing all the horrible things it does?

absolutely not, nope

11. What character do you relate to most?

clarke 100%

12. What character do you like the least?

currently? echo. the one thing I like less than a complete asshat of a character is one with absolutely zero development, and there she is, right there. don’t @ me

13. Describe your delinquent outfit. (Would you wear something like Murphy’s jacket with the spikey red shoulder patch or have a trademark like Jasper’s goggles? Be creative, yet practical)

clarke’s s3 fetish gear but like............... more leather

14. Favorite type of mutant animal?

i have a soft spot for the worms, idk why. i love their useless non-existent asses

15. What would your job be on the Ark?

i’d probably be doing some high-level organizational work or some shit. i’m good with patterns and recall

16. Would you have willingly pumped Ontari’s heart if Abby asked?

without hesitation

17. If Lexa wasn’t Heda, but she was still alive then who would have made the best commander?

let’s make it a democracy babey

18. How would you act if you ate the hallucinogenic nuts like Jasper and Monty?

i have no goddamn clue

19. How would you have dealt with Charlotte’s crime? A more John Murphy approach or Bellamy Blake approach?

neither. clarke griffin approach. protect the kid, but give her some tough love because holy shit, you can’t just kill people charlotte

20. Who should have been the Chancellor, if anyone?

clarke was basically the chancellor anyway and saved their asses more than any of the other “chancellors” so i’m gonna go with clarke

21. Would you have been on Pike’s side like Bellamy or on Kane’s side? Or Clarke in Polis?

kane’s

22. Mount Weather had a lot of modern commodities. (example: Maya’s Ipod) What is the one thing you would snatch while there?

gimme the tunes

23. What would your Grounder tattoos look like? Hairstyle? War paint?

a nice mix of geometric patterns and flow-y nature. undercut. classic american football shit

24. Favorite quote?

"You won’t do it.” / “You don’t know me very well.”

25. If all of the characters were in the Hunger Games, who would have the best shot at winning?

i keep answering clarke, and i’m gonna keep answering clarke. girl fights smart and dirty, and uses her surroundings to her advantage. plus she’s highly adaptable

26. Least favorite ship? Favorite canon ship? Favorite non canon ship? NOT INCLUDING CL OR BC OR BE

i’ll say BE is my least favorite ship if i damn well feel like it, and i do. very closely followed by CL. for writing reasons, specifically and bellarke might as well be canon already so i’m gonna say that for both of the other ones

27. A song that should be included in the next season? If there had to be another guest star like Shawn Mendes on the show, who would you want to make a cameo?

no more cameos.............. blease, i’m begging................................ but i’m gonna go with season 6 because i have a whole playlist for it and say The Devil Within by Digital Daggers

28. What would you do if you were stuck in the bunker with Murphy for all that time?

jam out and snark until we inevitably killed each other probably

29. You’re an extra that gets killed off. How do you die?

just let clarke kill me in a really hot way

30. A character you’d like to learn more about and get flashbacks of?

where the fuck is harper’s backstory jroth

31. A character you’d bang?

i would be in the middle of a blarke sandwich, thanks. the dream. alternatively, a roan/diyoza sandwich. the forbidden ship

32. Would you stay in the Bunker? Go up to Space? Or live on your own in Eden?

would i rather eat people, only algae, or a whole variety of fresh fruits and vegetables? are you joking?

33. In the Bunker, would you follow Octavia? What would you do to pass the time underground?

yeah, hard pass. i’d sure as hell train though holy fuck

34. What crime would you commit in the Bunker that lands you in the fighting pits?

again, treason. 

35. Up in Space, who would you bond with first? Who would be the most difficult for you to get along with?

i’d probably bond with murphy and clarke first. i probably wouldn’t get along with jasper much

36. How long do you think you would last on Earth by yourself?

i’d be fine with the solitary element for a good chunk of time, it’s the outside survival part that’d be the problem

37. When the Eligius ship lands what do you do?

recon that shit

38. Favorite Eligius character? Least favorite?

DIYOZA. mccreary.

39. Would you Spacewalk?

fuck no space scares the shit out of me

40. Would you prefer to eat Windshield Bugs, Space Algae, or Bunker Meat?

... bugs. but people are a close second.

41. Would you start a war for the last spot of green on earth? What would your solution be to avoid it?

no??? a peaceful solution was right there. it wouldn’t be difficult. as long as i didn’t have a group of people staging a coup to remove the person i made a deal with and also someone who didn’t give a flying fuck about anything but war at the time. *cough*

42. Would you rather dig out flesh-eating worms or stick thumb drives into bullet holes?

i’d rather try to save someone’s life than cause so much damage to someone’s injury that it kills them, if that’s what you’re asking. 

43. Are you willing to poison your sister for the Traitor Who You Love? What would you do to stop Octavia?

LMAO, i’d probably just straight up kill her, but i also don’t have a bellamy to be in love with, nor is she my sister

44. Would you go to sleep in cryo or stay awake like Marper?

cryo, fuck that shit

45. Who are you waking up first to explore the new planet?

clarke, bellamy, diyoza. everyone else is window dressing

#the 100 #tag games #long post

[liviastudiespsych]

My week on Waterloo Bridge

Hi guys, as you may or may not know I spent a week and a half (on and off, not all the time) protesting with Extinction Rebellion. It has been one of the best experiences of my life and I will never forget it. I really wanted to make a post about it to clear my head, put my thoughts black on white and to share a few things I have learned.

I don’t want to, because I really want people to read this, but I’ll have to put a read under the cut cause this is tooooo long.

First of all, what is Extinction Rebellion (or XR for short). XR is a non-violent movement that was mostly rooted in the UK but present in several countries around the world, about climate change. By that I mean that the whole scope of the protest was to sensitise the public about climate change and demand an action from the governments through acts of pacific social disobedience. Such as occupying a bridge, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it (I’m so funny lol). Social disobedience in the case of XR has been disrupting traffic, occupying major spots and raising the voice against a perceived wrong doing of the government who hasn’t been listening to the science, the warnings and the speaking up of people. To be precise, XR wants to stop climate change to stop the otherwise inevitable and catastrophic changes that will happen to our planet in 12 years if we don’t act NOW. This was based mostly, but not only on the 2018 IPCC report (which you can find here if you are interested x) that explains how the rise of the planet’s overall temperature could cause irreparable damage to the amount of global ice which would in turn mean a rise of the ocean, floods and other natural disasters that would possibly mean migration of humans to better areas, overpopulation and starvation. These are not opinions. XR feels that if we don’t act now, there will be a problem in the near future so they set 3 demands:

Government must tell the truth and declare climate emergency

Government must make laws to reduce all carbon emission (which is related to global warming) by 2025

Creation of a citizen assembly to oversee and asses changes

It’s important to mention that none of this was legal. And part of the movement’s idea was that getting people arrested is important because it brings visibility and it forces the government to engage with the protest (more on this later).

Good, now that we have cleared this first let’s dive into my experience.

I got involved with XR on the second day of the London protests (tuesday the 16th of April, 2019) when a friend of a friend came from Edinburgh to take part and brought us along. What I saw that day was I-N-C-R-E-D-I-B-L-E an entire bridge, one of the mostly used in London, was completely empty of cars. We could walk on the bridge and there were plants and music and people. It was so beautiful. That day I spent it all there, on that bridge. We even slept there, or tried to. I left at 3 am because I was too cold. But not before we had a massive dance party on that bridge. Day 2 was wednesday. And that day too I spent it on the bridge and that night we went around the other occupied places in London until 6 am in the morning when we collapsed home to sleep for a few hours. I danced in a completely empty Parliament Square. I sang in front of a pink boat in the middle of Oxford Circus. I had an animated discussion about climate change next to a sea of tent in Marble Arch. London was like a place I had never seen. Day 3 was Thursday which too I spent on and off that bridge, leaving only when the police started to arrest people only to be back for another night of roaming the occupied streets of London and I saw the most beautiful dawn on the City. On Friday I was there again as my friends were being arrested and almost got in trouble myself. I took a few days because if four days I had slept about four hours in total not per night and I was sleep deprived. I was back one final time the 23rd to march to Parliament Square and show the MPs what we were about.

Some things that will forever stay with me of those days are the amazing people I have met all over those sites and the awesome stories I have heard all through the protest. The chant of “whose bridge?” “OUR BRIDGE!” will forever be in my memory. The overall feeling of being together, sharing something everyone was so passionate about, to discuss important topics and to feel like even if this might not result in nothing at least we tried, at least we did our best. For my future. For my children’s future. I thought about my future children a lot this protest. A bit sombre and a bit happy. Maybe we created a chance for them, maybe their generation will be better. I saw those days what London (and a lot of cities) could be like. There was a place for children to play, there were trees in the middle of the road - something I personally am not used to as having grown up in a big city - and the human interaction was warm and welcoming. I hope, if nothing else, that we will keep this at least in memory to change the way we interact with others, to make us more open. I learnt what it means to be able to socialise like that. I learnt what it mean to be part of a real community. I learnt how to make myself useful for others. I learnt how to talk about important topics. I met extraordinary people and honestly, I had a blast.

I also will remember the opposition and critics we got.

We were called “Cunts!” shouted at us from a motorbike as we were simply walking. We were called “You fucking cunts.” again, with no provocation. We were called “You fucking hippies.” by a punk drunk dude at 4 am. We got called “Socialist scum” to which someone I don’t know replied “Yes and proud of”. I want to point out that the movement was non violent. That it was the most peaceful protest ever seen by the met police. That no police officer got hurt.

I heard a lot of people say “I support you and your idea, but not how you are doing it.” which I understand, I honestly do. From outside we must look like a bunch of assholes blocking a bridge and not letting you get to work. But other ways were tried before and no one listened. This got everyone’s attention. I am not saying you have to agree with the way, but keep an open mind, support in other ways. We are not doing this to hurt you personally, we are doing it to save the planets.

I also heard a lot of “Well, what’s this going to do?” to which I am simply going to say: what’s that going to do? Being all pessimistic about it. At least we are trying.

Also a few more notes. It was not a privileged movement of stuck up middle class. It was not. I met people from everywhere, every social extraction and a lot of different backgrounds, I promise you.

Now, the arrest. I know 3 people who got arrested. 2 of which I consider good friends at this point. And I met countless more who shared their stories. No one I know has been charged. Why? Because there were more than a THOUSAND arrest in the UK alone and there was no way they could process everyone. So unless you glued yourself to something, you were not charged. I did not get arrested because I can’t. And I know a lot of people who did the same and left when the police moved in. But I respect those that did. Because it really helped to put the story on the news, it made people stop and say “ah, if they are willing to get arrested there must be something really going on.” No one EVER asked me to get arrested. That is not how the movement works. You can if you want, but no one forces you. Ever. To do anything. There are no requirements. So, no. No forcing, no radicalisation. Nothing of the sort. Just plain and simple social disobedience and people very passionate.

I will continue to be part of XR and we will be back if the requests aren’t met, if we aren’t listened. I am doing this for myself, for my children and for the planet.

TLDR: if it’s too long I will sum it up like this. Help our planet by asking the government to act. I had an amazing week protesting. I will not stop. Climate change is happening. Join Extinction Rebellion

thanks for reading, if anyone did. I will block people being rude under this post. If you have questions/want to PEACEFULLY discuss the issue please do. Basically, don’t be shit.

#politics #political #xr #extinction rebellion #extinctionrebellion #London #protest #climate change #personal #this honestly means a lot #and i have a lot more thoughts about it but for today this is enough #i was not kidding when i said i will block you

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Race, Brand and the Placebo Effect

by Dan H

Tuesday, 31 March 2009

Dan rambles on the vague theme of Racefail~

This is an article about race, but it's going to start off being an article about shampoo.

I have, on occasion, had trouble with dandruff, and as a result have needed to purchase shampoo to deal with this affliction. In my second year of university, I ran out of shampoo, so I went to the local Co-Op and picked up a bottle of Head and Shoulders.

It wasn't until I was on my way back home with my purchase that I realised that the only reason I had chosen that particular brand was that I had been seeing advertisements for Head and Shoulders for as long as I can remember, so that in my mind “anti-dandruff shampoo” was linked with the Head and Shoulders brand on a fundamental and inextricable level.

This was something of an epiphany for me, because it finally made me realise that advertising does not work the way I thought it did. I had assumed, and I think most people assume on some level, that advertisements worked my making you see the advertisement and immediately want the thing advertised. Some adverts do (particularly ads for food or drink if I see them when I'm hungry or thirsty) but that's usually secondary to their main function, which is to get into your head on a subconscious level and make you associate a particular need (anti-dandruff shampoo, a cool refreshing drink, a boost to your fragile self-esteem) with a particular product in a positive way, so that your choices and actions are influenced without your even knowing it.

And it works. If I am generically thirsty and not making a conscious effort to drink more fruit juice, or actively wanting a particular type of drink, I'll buy a coke.

What's even more interesting about this phenomenon is that it works even if you are aware of it. I know that a big part of the reason I drink coke, eat fast food, and shop in Sainsburys is that I've been influenced by advertising, but I carry on doing them anyway because most of the time people don't make informed decisions about things, we just go with our first instincts and our irrational impulses, even if we know they're wrong.

The same concept shows up in all kinds of places. It shows up in the pharmaceuticals industry, people find shiny red pills in bold, brand-name packaging to be more effective than nondescript white pills in generic grey packaging. We respond instinctively to visual cues, and we don't know we're doing it.

I bring all this up, because one of the many semi-irreconcilable controversies that came up during the whole Racefail debate is the dichotomy of race-as-physical-appearance versus race-as-cultural-identity. Heck, the whole thing basically started as a direct result of Elizabeth Bear saying you should write non-white people the same way you wrote white people, and some other people respectfully disagreeing.

Essentially there's two problems. The first is that most characters – particularly most protagonists – in genre fiction tend to be white (and tend to be men). The second problem is that most invented cultures in genre fiction tend to be based on either medieval Europe, modern America or horrendous stereotypes of non-European cultures.

The argument can be made that the latter problem simply can't be addressed by white American or European authors. Hell, it could be argued that it can't be addressed by non-white American or European authors. Nobody can ever really shake off the preconceptions of the culture they were raised in, and you can never really understand a culture that isn't your own. You can know stuff about it, but no matter how much anime you watch you can never know what it's like to be Japanese.

The first problem, however, can be addressed by white, American or European writers, and should be. Again the argument could be made that, particularly if you're working in a created world, race is kind of an arbitrary choice and so is ultimately meaningless. This argument is half-right. In a created world, race is purely cosmetic, but it's cosmetic in the same way that the colour of a headache pill is cosmetic. It's the sort of cosmetic that gets in your head and changes the way you think.

It all comes down to the nature of racism (or, for that matter, of prejudice in general). Prejudice is a lot like advertising: people think that it's all about big, obvious things. You see an ad for coke, so you go out and buy a glass of coke, a black man applies for a job, but he doesn't get it because the guy who interviews him is a big fat racist who hates black people.

I'm going to go off on another tangent here and talk about

Captain Planet

.

Captain Planet

was a well meaning kids cartoon that took an endearingly multiracial gang of kids and had them fight villains who represented various ecological issues through the power of Earth, Fire, Wind, Water and Heart, which together allowed them to summon Captain Planet, who would lay the smackdown on evil villains who wanted to wreck the environment for no clear reason.

My mother really didn't like it.

She didn't like it because she thought it was dangerous to present the idea that problems for which we are all responsible (like pollution) are caused by single “villains”. I kind of think she was right.

I get that you can use a villain to personify something that is “part of all of us” (man) but I think it's actually hard to pull off in practice. Most of the time, personifying a social problem as an unambiguously horrible villain just sends the message that there are “bad people” out there who are polluters, racists, or whatever. This is why Whedon's cardboard misogynists piss me off, this is why the pseudo-Nazism of the Death Eaters was so annoying to me. Pollution doesn't happen because some guy in a cape decided to tip toxic waste into the sea for fun, it happens because guys like me can't be arsed to turn out heating down in the early summer.

The same kind of goes for racism. We all like to think that racism exists because of other people, that somehow there's some kind of rogue group of twenty or thirty hardcore racists out there who are between them responsible for all race issues everywhere, from the lack of Chinese characters in Firefly to the lack of decent Kosher butchers in Oxford. In fact racism exists because racist attitudes are pernicious, self-perpetuating, and all-pervasive.

There's a lot wrong with the Avenue Q song Everyone's A Little Bit Racist (it frequently sounds like it's using that statement to excuse racism rather than examine it - “ethnic jokes are so uncouth, but we laugh because they're based on truth” umm, no they're not, guys). It is, however, an important statement of fact. The reason that a white person is more likely to be hired for any given job than a nonwhite person is not because the person giving them the job is a cartoon racist, sitting there saying “no, I will not hire a filthy mudblood” it's because the person giving them the job is affected by racism on a level so fundamental they don't realise they're doing it. Just like you pass over the store-brand coke for the one in the red-and-white can you have been taught your whole life to associate with a cool refreshing beverage, so you pass over the guy (or woman) who doesn't look how you have been taught your whole life to expect a lawyer/teacher/investment banker/data entry clerk to look.

The really scary thing is that I catch myself doing it. I do, in fact, pay less attention to the opinions of my non-white and female friends. Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation. It's weird as fuck when you catch yourself doing it, just like when you catch yourself unconsciously reaching for a can of coke instead of a bottle of lemonade, or buy Head and Shoulders instead of a cheaper or more effective shampoo.

It all comes back to branding.

Now okay, you can make the argument here that I'm just passing the buck, and to a degree I am. Ultimately my attitudes, my purchasing habits and my behaviour are my responsibility, but they are influenced by the surroundings I grew up with. There isn't a causal link, I don't listen to my female friends talking and think “gosh, I remember this one TV show I saw had a woman on it who didn't know what she was talking about, therefore I won't listen to this person” nor do I think “well Willow knew what she was talking about, so this person must too”. I just have instinctive responses to things which are coloured by the society in which I was raised.

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid. Of course first you need to get over the fact that it would then be a book about a black kid who gets rescued from his abusive black family by a kindly white guy, but if we assume that Harry was black and the Potter books weren't written in such a way that “Muggle” was effectively a racial slur. You would then have a situation in which the single most recognised fictional character in the world was a black kid (not only a black kid, but a black British kid). It would be huge, just like it was huge the first time they let an actual black guy play Othello. It wouldn't matter in the slightest that Harry Potter didn't listen to hip-hop or talk about Malcom X or use “urban” slang or do whatever else it is that white people seem to think black people have to do in fiction to properly represent “black culture”. The simple fact of the most popular fictional character in the world having black skin would have been huge. It would have changed the way a generation of children thought about race, and it would have changed it for the better. It wouldn't have been a miracle, it wouldn't have abolished racism overnight, but it would have done more good than any three government initiatives you might care to name.

Of course, if Harry Potter had been black, the book might not have sold at all, but that's a whole different problem.

Themes:

Topical

,

Minority Warrior

~

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http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/

at 23:19 on 2009-03-31This is really interesting, Dan! The comparison between unconscious racism and branding makes a scary amount of sense. (And you are right about the "Potter" books, as well.)

But the fact that SF/fantasy often seems more racist than other types of lit is another problem entirely, isn't it? A friend and I were discussing this when racefail happened - the link is here, if you're interested.

http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/40140.html

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http://viorica8957.livejournal.com/

at 00:31 on 2009-04-01(I keep getting an error message when I try to log in, so I'm using OpenID)

It's a pervasive problem, and one that is worsened by the fact that so many people refuse to acknowledge it. I was arguing with my mother about racism recently, and the argument she kept falling back on was "But don't you see how much has changed since the sixties? There's a black president! There's no segregation! Things are so much better!" It's a defense people use to ignore their own buried racism- "

I'm

not a Nazi/KKK member/skinhead, so clearly

I

can't be racist."

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Sonia Mitchell

at 03:20 on 2009-04-01

Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation.

I'd love to bristle more at that than I am, but much as I hate myself for it that's a bit of branding I end up buying into. Whenever my mum says I'm studying in Oxford I have to add 'Brookes, not proper Oxford' just to make it clear I'm not attempting to ride on coat-tails.

Anyway, interesting article. Whenever I'm staying for any length of time with advert game co-players (guess the advert on tv before the product is named) I find myself much more aware of how many don't mention the product until right at the end. Building up the atmosphere/message first and then linking it to the product, cementing it in people's minds on a less conscious level after a few repeated viewings, seems to be the way a lot of things are done.

Which, as you say, is exactly what makes these attitudes harder to spot - they don't come ready labelled.

Mary-j-59 - that was an interesting read, thanks.

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Guy

at 05:30 on 2009-04-01I think a really interesting example in relation to this question is the original series of Star Trek. For anyone who isn't a total nerd and therefore doesn't know this already, part of Gene Roddenberry's idea for Star Trek was that in the far future, all of our silly, parochial attitudes about race and gender and nationality and so on will have been resolved and looked on much like we look on witch-burnings or the crusades or whatever; we will have gotten over it and it'll just be a bit of ugly but quaint ancient history. And on this basis, he wanted to have a multi-ethnic crew, with men and women in equal positions, and, most importantly, for them *not to make a big deal out of it*, with "episode of the week on gender equality" stuff happening.

Of course, for any of us who watch an episode of Star Trek now, this is a pretty laughable conception of what's going on, because the most important person on the ship is Captain Kirk, a white American male, who is pretty much defined by his adherence to an ideal of American masculinity which is very much "of its time". Meanwhile, he's surrounded by a crew of other white men who are primarily distinguished by their funny accents... and Uhura, who essentially is a telephone operator wearing a very, very short skirt. So from the point of view of making a judgement about whether or not this represents a successful embodiment of Roddenberry's vision, we would stamp "FAIL" all over it in big red letters.

However, I remember seeing a documentary a while ago (possibly "Trekkies"? Anyway...) which mentioned that Uhura was the first black woman on television (either in a regular part or at all, I can't remember) and various well-known contemporary black women talking about how exciting and how important it was for them to see a black woman with a speaking part on TV. By contemporary standards the part seems incredibly sexist and virtually definitive of the whole "token black character" phenomenon, but compared with the standards of the other things on TV at the time, it was very progressive.

So I guess what I'm saying is, people making well-intentioned efforts to move the discourse forward are actually good and important, even if they fail in all kinds of ways to live up to the ideal of what they intend to attain or represent.

In terms of fantasy fiction, I think the clear beacon showing how the representation of people of other "races" (I have to put the scare quotes because I'm one of those who believes the term "race" is not a good descriptor of anything) can and should be done is Ursula le Guin's Earthsea series. Ged is not just a "white character with dark skin", but nor is the culture he comes from depicted as some horrible stereotype of an existing earth culture. It may be the case that in 50 years time people will look back on Earthsea and find it just as gauche as we find Star Trek now, but for the moment I would say it is the gold standard. It's also rather unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be much else around that is even trying to achieve that standard, but... "90% of everything is crap", as they say, and with genre fiction that is probably, sadly, an understatement.

Lastly (I hope that I don't break ferretbrain with such a long comment!) on the "everyone's a bit racist" question, I think there is a grain of truth in that statement but taken at face value I would disagree with it. I think... in my own case, I grew up in a suburb of Sydney where I never saw a black person at all, on a day-to-day basis. In fact, the only black person I knew was my grandfather (who is/was an Australian Aboriginal - but the genes are "dilute" enough in my case that I look absolutely white) who I did not see often. And so as a consequence I think I had all kinds of unconscious ideas about "other races" that I didn't really think about... I guess I didn't have any real sources of information beyond books and TV and lectures at my very left-wing school that took the form of "Don't be racist! For real!" (which were well-intentioned but I think were in their form a bit stupid, rather in the way that Captain Planet is a bit stupid).

Anyway, when the family moved to England we moved to a suburb (and I went to a school) where there were a lot more non-white people around, and I discovered that... a lot of my ideas had been really dumb, as well as being rather unformed. And in some sense, if you were to spell out those ideas in words, you would probably conclude that they were indeed racist ideas and that therefore I was "racist", despite all my intentions to the contrary.

But... I also think that it was that exposure to the actual people that broke down and changed those dumb ideas. And it remains my conviction that all the well-intentioned talk (or even, clever and subtle argumentation and explanation) in the world is no substitute for encounters with real people for breaking down prejudices based on ignorance. I suppose, to go back to your Shampoo analogy, it's kind of like this: the world may be full of explicit, overt messages telling you to buy a certain shampoo, and those overt messages may be supported by hidden and hard-to-unearth ideologies (bright packaging indicates a superior product to those in bland packaging!) but once you actually put the shampoo in your hair, it either works or it doesn't. (There may of course be an effect whereby those social messages cause you to undermine or misunderstand your own experiences, but this post is already waaaay too long...)

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Gina Dhawa

at 07:46 on 2009-04-01@Guy regarding Star Trek - I entirely agree. There is a lot of fail with regard to the depictions of race in TOS, but as a product of its time, I give it a lot of credit. And about the gender imbalance, it's very interesting that he was specifically told to drop the female second in command from the pilot episode if he was ever to get the series on air.

@Dan I've never been entirely convinced by the argument that a white author can't write non-white cultures, particularly in SF/Fantasy. OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right. I think the key thing people forget is just to have a

awareness

goes a long way. Doesn't go the whole way to fixing the problem, but it's a good start.

In the case of culture, it isn't a case of understanding truly everything about a culture that isn't your own, it's about respecting that culture and not treating like the exotic other. I'm not saying it's an easy thing to do, but hell, if I wasn't to write about a culture other than mine then I have no idea

what

I'd ever write.

Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation.

I will bristle at that, thanks.

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Arthur B

at 08:27 on 2009-04-01

But the fact that SF/fantasy often seems more racist than other types of lit is another problem entirely, isn't it?

I suspect a lot of this boils down to people using particular ideas or tropes developed by the grand old racist authors of the past without really thinking about where the tropes from and why they are doing it; all they know is "this is the sort of thing that happens in the SF/fantasy stories I like, so they're going to happpen in the stories I write."

For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way: you simply have to skip the ones which are just blatantly horrible, and treat the others as an inversion of colonialism, in which the simple beliefs of a "primitive" outsider prove to be more powerful and enduring than the hypocrisies of so-called "civilised" people.

There is nothing in this scenario which

requires

that the outsider be a white man from an analogue of Northern Europe, or the corrupt civilisations he encounters have to be Mediterranean/Middle Eastern city-states. But hundreds of Howard imitators, and even more folk who have been unconsciously influenced by his stories, make that assumption every time they use the idea. And that's racist.

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Andy G

at 10:18 on 2009-04-01"For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way"

I wondered about this recently when I was reading H.P. Lovecraft - whether we really can "read in a non-racist way" - as Dan says, it's not a matter of racist individuals, but of pervasive racist attitudes in society as a whole. Can we actually manage to remain a detached attitude where we're conscious of how terrible the "racist bits" are while still enjoying the "good bits" on their own grounds? Or are we just deluding ourselves that we're not just indulging a little bit in some unpleasant ideas?

I think you're spot on though about modern authors not reflecting on the dubious assumptions they take from older authors. I especially felt that about Olaf Stapledon.

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Andy G

at 10:37 on 2009-04-01Oh and there's also a great example

[here]

of the Captain Planet approach to complex world issues.

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Shim

at 10:58 on 2009-04-01

@Dan I've never been entirely convinced by the argument that a white author can't write non-white cultures, particularly in SF/Fantasy. OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right. I think the key thing people forget is just to have a awareness goes a long way. Doesn't go the whole way to fixing the problem, but it's a good start.

I suppose there's a bit of difference there, because if I wrote about aliens (or heck, even from an "alien perspective") there's little to no chance of aliens lambasting me in the Sunday papers about my ignorance and stereotyping. Also, because they're not real, there's no objective reality that my writing would fail to reflect. A lot of stories basically take White Middle-Class Anglo-Saxons and jiggle them a bit to make them vampires or wizards (sometimes, especially for wizards, these people are 'Celts' in an unspecified way that is hard to distinguish from WMCAS).

On the other hand, if I try to write about or from WMCAS female experiences, the fact that women actually exist means my writing can be objectively inaccurate. Same for, say, writing about Indian culture. So I think the fact that there is a whole deep, complex culture there that the writer doesn't understand is a real problem; while more understanding can mean they write more convincing stories, you can end up with the situation where people understand things just enough to make massive generalisations, or inaccurate depictions that convince the foreign readers but not the natives.

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Rami

at 11:24 on 2009-04-01

OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right.

Indeed, I've always found that particularly grating. Mostly that no one seems to even make the effort. And situations like RaceFail can make it worse for white authors who mean well and would like to make the effort but are scared off because the Wrath of the Public might descend on them.

My favorite line from "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" is

♫ If we all could just admit / that we are racist, a little bit ♫

because I think it strikes toward the heart of a sensitive issue in pointing out that pretty much no one is free from racist ideas -- and if we admit that to ourselves and make a conscious effort, things could be a lot better. Lots of people mistakenly

equate racism with blatantly racist speech or actions

(warnings: PDF, racefail), after all.

For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way

I was thinking vaguely along these lines recently as well, when I picked up

Triplanetary

, and had to put it down after only a few pages because it was so full of the unconscious attitudes of the 30s and 40s. It may be a classic of science-fiction and have inspired half of the current generation of SF writers and editors, but the racism and sexism were a bit too much for me. It distresses me that, as Arthur points out, lots of modern writers have doubtless picked up a few of the tropes because they "really liked it in the Lensman series" and completely obliviously dropped them, scheming dark-skinned villains and helpless blonde damsels included, into their own work.

think the key thing people forget is just to have a awareness goes a long way. Doesn't go the whole way to fixing the problem, but it's a good start.

Absolutely!

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Rami

at 11:28 on 2009-04-01

massive generalisations, or inaccurate depictions that convince the foreign readers but not the natives

IIRC, that kind of thing was at the root of the whole RaceFail imbroglio -- when people did exactly that, but refused to admit it.

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Arthur B

at 11:34 on 2009-04-01

Can we actually manage to remain a detached attitude where we're conscious of how terrible the "racist bits" are while still enjoying the "good bits" on their own grounds?

We'd better learn to, otherwise that's everything from before 1950 down the memory hole...

Or are we just deluding ourselves that we're not just indulging a little bit in some unpleasant ideas?

Firstly, reading isn't condoning. You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards; I really like Gene Wolfe but I'm not going to convert to Catholicism just because there was a nice mass scene in

The Book of the Short Sun

.

Secondly, if the stories have any merit at all there's going to be something more to them than just bigotry. Yes, Lovecraft used the fear of the outsider a hell of a lot. But the fun thing about that particular fear is that it's always going to be with us, and HPL had a clever knack of turning the fear of the outsider into the fear of the outside itself. When Lovecraft was writing about how threatening he found immigrants (

The Horror At Red Hook

) he was being horrid; when he was writing about how the entire universe beyond this placid island we call Earth is a cold uncaring void that is completely hostile to any life that even resembles us (

The Colour Out of Space

) he was being visionary. It's not always easy to divorce the cultural xenophobia from the cosmic vertigo - they're written by the same man, they have the same experiences and agendas shaping them - but I'd submit that it is possible.

Thirdly, there's plenty of Lovecraft and Howard where racism just isn't a factor, or is only a factor if you try hard to look for it.

The Tower of the Elephant

and

At the Mountains of Madness

spring to mind.

I honestly don't think that reading Lovecraft or Howard is necessarily going to feed anyone's inner racist unless they actually

want

to be influenced that way ("Oh man, I totally agree with that but I could never say it in public..."). It helps that they lived in a time when many people simply didn't know better; it doesn't excuse them, but it does mean that both the attitude of the society they came from and their own personal quirks are well-known and out there for all to see. As Dan points out, it's not the individuals who you can identify as being racist bastards who are the problem a lot of the time (although they're usually the ugliest symptom), it's the people where you don't necessarily see the subtext, perhaps because they themselves aren't aware of it.

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Rami

at 12:00 on 2009-04-01

You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards; I really like Gene Wolfe but I'm not going to convert to Catholicism just because there was a nice mass scene

Depends how much you disagree with them, I guess, and how evident that is in the text. I agree you can't dismiss an author entirely because of their attitudes, since as you say there's got to be something other than bigotry -- but if the bigotry is omnipresent it does get pretty difficult. Lovecraft is a good example: I'm sure there were interesting ideas somewhere in The Horror at Red Hook, but because every other paragraph was about the demon-worshipping foreigners I found it impossible to get through and kept wishing I could punch ol' HP in the face. On the other hand, he's only peripherally bigoted (xenophobic, but in a more understandable way) in The Whisperer in Darkness, and that's much easier to appreciate for what it is...

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Dan H

at 13:18 on 2009-04-01

I'd love to bristle more at that than I am, but much as I hate myself for it that's a bit of branding I end up buying into. Whenever my mum says I'm studying in Oxford I have to add 'Brookes, not proper Oxford' just to make it clear I'm not attempting to ride on coat-tails.

Crap, sorry about that. It's probably deeply ironic that in an article entirely about the subconscious effects of prejudice on our everyday thoughts and actions, I managed to forget that using "went to Oxford" as a synonym for "knows what they're talking about" is, itself, kinda offensive.

Sorry folks.

To clarify, all I meant was that it was absurd that I find myself ignoring my friends' university educations or other relevant qualifications in place of easy stereotypes about race and gender.

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Dan H

at 13:39 on 2009-04-01

Lovecraft is a good example: I'm sure there were interesting ideas somewhere in The Horror at Red Hook, but because every other paragraph was about the demon-worshipping foreigners I found it impossible to get through and kept wishing I could punch ol' HP in the face.

I suspect this is one of those examples of White Privilege in action. It's easy for me and Arthur to read Lovecraft (well, easy for Arthur to read Lovecraft, I don't actually like his writing) and say "gosh, this is very racist but I still appreciate it as an artifact from its time." We're in a position where we can condemn racism without it actually harming us. There's a world of difference between reading an old work of genre fiction and saying "hey, those monsters are supposed to be black people" and reading a work of genre fiction and saying "hey, those monsters are supposed to be *me and my family*."

My favorite line from "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" is ♫ If we all could just admit / that we are racist, a little bit ♫ because I think it strikes toward the heart of a sensitive issue in pointing out that pretty much no one is free from racist ideas

Yeah, I can see that. It's just that a lot of the way the song presents itself is in the language of racist apologism. Remember that the very *next* line is "and we could all stop being so PC!". The more I've thought about the actual sketch, the more I've been bothered by the way it's presented - remember it basically starts with a minority character (Kate Monster) calling out a non-minority character for being racist, and the non-minority character using "well you're racist too!" as a defence (and in fact citing the "but minority rights groups are racist as well!" argument).

But perhaps I'm overthinking it...

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Shim

at 14:16 on 2009-04-01

Lots of people mistakenly equate racism with blatantly racist speech or actions (warnings: PDF, racefail), after all.

Interesting linked article... overall I tended to agree with the arguments, but at times it gave me the feeling that they were interpreting things in the way that supported their expectations, i.e. seeing racist attitudes that

might

not be there. Given how complicated some of the topics were, and how much discussion of racial issues goes on, it's not surprising to me (for example) that people sometimes argued from several sides, or were less coherent on more personal, complicated questions. I'm also suspicious of suggestions that arguments like "I'm not a black person, so I don't really know" should be lumped in as ways to conceal racist attitudes, and the idea that it might be a valid point in some circumstances wasn't considered. Ditto, say, ambivalence over 'affirmative action', which people still can't decide whether it's beneficial overall and exactly what form it should take. Oh, and I'd have liked some counter-examples of answers that were

not

seen as hiding racist attitudes.

Also, it could really do with proofreading. But enough digression, back to Dan's article!

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Arthur B

at 14:48 on 2009-04-01

I suspect this is one of those examples of White Privilege in action. It's easy for me and Arthur to read Lovecraft (well, easy for Arthur to read Lovecraft, I don't actually like his writing) and say "gosh, this is very racist but I still appreciate it as an artifact from its time."

For what it's worth, I don't actually enjoy

The Horror At Red Hook

; I was raising it (not very clearly) as an example of a story that I'd usually just skip because the motivations behind it are entirely too obvious and entirely too ugly.

At the Mountains of Madness

is nice in that the monsters don't resemble

any

identifiable people - not physically, and not culturally - so that's at the other end of the spectrum.

I do think that a certain amount of white privilege is inevitable, but I don't necessarily think it's a problem so long as you're aware that it might be happening and that other people might not see your favourite author in the same way. (It helps to have a diverse group of friends and colleagues as well; "hey, that's meant to be my friend's family" is almost as shocking as "hey, that's meant to be my family".) The most important thing is to read with your eyes open, and to read diversely; I think an exclusive diet of Lovecraft, Howard, and the various descendants and imitators is vastly more unhealthy and likely to blind you to problematic elements in their stories than a more balanced reading range.

A tangent: it dismays me sometimes to see the amount of uncritical fanboyism that surrounds

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

, which granted is a decently-written story but it again has massively problematic undertones; any interpretation of it which doesn't at least acknowledge that part of the point Lovecraft was making was KILL THE HALF-BREEDS is wilfully blinding itself to a really major component of the story, and there's a distressing number of authors who keep reusing the Deep Ones without even considering that angle.

Granted, the angle that people imitate most frequently is the "Oh no, it turns out I am a Deep One too" revelation at the end of the story, but - like Lovecraft himself - nobody ever makes the leap to "wait, surely that means the Deep Ones can't be all bad".

Even people who admit that Lovecraft was a racist

do this. And nobody calls people on it or says "hey, you're just repeating Lovecraft's slurs against miscegenation", presumably because everyone's kidding themselves that the fish people are fish people and can't possibly be a metaphor for something else.

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Arthur B

at 15:06 on 2009-04-01

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid.

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

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Andy G

at 15:57 on 2009-04-01@ Arthur: I did enjoy Lovecraft for the kinds of reasons you said (otherwise I wouldn't have kept reading) - and felt that I could "pick and choose", appreciating and analysing without necessarily condoning. But equally, I was aware that some of the bits I now found uncomfortable I would never even have noticed a few years ago - because I only really imagined racism to be overt KKK-style hatred, as Dan terms it (and Lovecraft does occasionally go there) - and yet even back then I would have prided myself on being able to detach myself from condoning the "racist bits" of the stories, which I now realise are far more pervasive. That's why I hesitate a bit before saying I can definitely remain a detached, objective attitude without colluding in the questionable ideas and imagery. Even if we can distance ourselves from stories by regarding them as historical artefacts, I'm not sure that we can do that completely successfully while still enjoying them as stories.

I also wonder whether it's sufficient to find the bad bits "unpleasant", "uncomfortable" or "distasteful" (from the perpsective of white privilege) but keep reading anyway - I mean, at what point does the text simply become so irredeemably bad that the only thing to do is just not to keep reading? Again, I didn't feel that with Lovecraft, but is that a defensible position?

Hmm ... basically, I do kind of agree with you, but am niggled with doubt, because I wonder whether what I'm really trying to do is give myself an excuse to enjoy books and films that I really shouldn't.

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Gina Dhawa

at 16:11 on 2009-04-01

To clarify, all I meant was that it was absurd that I find myself ignoring my friends' university educations or other relevant qualifications in place of easy stereotypes about race and gender.

Sorry, Dan, if my hackles got raised. It's one of my buttons.

I do think that a certain amount of white privilege is inevitable, but I don't necessarily think it's a problem so long as you're aware that it might be happening and that other people might not see your favourite author in the same way.

This. People have different levels of privilege (white, class, education, etc) and that's such a big deal with regard to how their mileage will vary at what they will personally be able to deal with in texts.

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Gina Dhawa

at 16:19 on 2009-04-01That's not to say I condone racism or any other kind of bigotry in texts, just that I find it understandable that people who don't themselves necessarily hold bigoted views can find things to enjoy in texts that do.

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Arthur B

at 16:33 on 2009-04-01

I also wonder whether it's sufficient to find the bad bits "unpleasant", "uncomfortable" or "distasteful" (from the perpsective of white privilege) but keep reading anyway - I mean, at what point does the text simply become so irredeemably bad that the only thing to do is just not to keep reading?

It varies for me. I have, in fact, stopped reading Robert E. Howard stories because they were pure out-and-out bigotry. On the other hand, I read

The Horror at Red Hook

all the way through. When I do keep reading, it's normally for one of two reasons (or a mix of them):

- The story has something more to it than racism.

Red Hook

is awful for many reasons, one of them being that there really

isn't

anything more to it than the racism.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

is, in many respects, just as racist, but it also features other ideas which are sufficiently interesting - and have exerted a sufficient influence over the horror genre - that those ideas are both worth salvaging and engaging enough that reading the story doesn't

exclusively

evoke discomfort.

- The story is useful for understanding the author, and I'm interested enough in the author to want to understand them.

Red Hook

as a story is terrible, but as an insight into what Lovecraft was thinking during his brief and unhappy tenancy in New York it's valuable.

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Dan H

at 18:11 on 2009-04-01

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

I see what you did there.

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Dan H

at 18:44 on 2009-04-01Also:

Just reading the article you linked to Rami.

It's kind of terrifying, isn't it.

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Shim

at 18:45 on 2009-04-01

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

Hmm... I reckon there were enough references to his tousled mop of hair, and looking pale, to make that problematic.

East Asian descent? Native American? Inuit? Totally possible.

(this leads me to something Dan mentioned once; racism discussions always leap on to Black/White dichotomies even though it's not the most obvious one for everyone. I'd argue in Britain that Chinese or South Asian ancestry is much more common, certainly in the north)

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Arthur B

at 18:49 on 2009-04-01look he's albino with really messy hair

you are racist against albinos you are

you want to kill them and turn them into

medicine

and that's wrong

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Shim

at 21:56 on 2009-04-01What a wasteful idea! Everyone knows that albinos are best used as ruthless assassins.

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Dan H

at 22:15 on 2009-04-01

I'm also suspicious of suggestions that arguments like "I'm not a black person, so I don't really know" should be lumped in as ways to conceal racist attitudes, and the idea that it might be a valid point in some circumstances wasn't considered. Ditto, say, ambivalence over 'affirmative action', which people still can't decide whether it's beneficial overall and exactly what form it should take.

I personally found it fairly clear from most of the examples that the actual opinions of the inverviewees were, if not racist, more likely to be perceived as racist than the opinions they tried to express.

It's things like the fact that pretty much all of them disagreed with affirmative action (which I'll admit can't be taken as racist in itself - it's a specific government policy and there's probably several reasons to disagree with it) but that none of them actually felt that they could *say* they didn't agree with affirmative action.

One of the things I've noticed in my recent Rambling Thoughts About Prejudice is that there's a lot of things that people are willing to condemn utterly (or support wholeheartedly) in the general case, but not in the specific. "I have nothing against interracial marriage, but I'm a little bit worried about the children" or "I support affirmative action, but obviously you can't let a better qualified white guy lose out to a black guy if it's a job he actually wants."

Ironically the person that comes out best is the seventy year old woman who says straight up "I'm against interracial marriage, but if my daughter married a black guy I'd still support her."

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Shim

at 22:44 on 2009-04-01

I personally found it fairly clear from most of the examples that the actual opinions of the inverviewees were, if not racist, more likely to be perceived as racist than the opinions they tried to express.

Indeed. Sorry, I'm not clear enough... it was the way the arguments were presented that I found dodgy, rather than anything in the analysis of the examples given; it seemed like they might be generalising from "this person said this, and in context of everything else they said which I have only partially printed here, they seem racist, so I think it may be tactical" to "this kind of language is a tactic to cover racism". The usual extrapolation problem arises. That's kind of why I'd like to see a comparison with non-racist people discussing the topics.

I found the paper a bit rambling (ooh, diminutive) and sometimes incoherent - for example, as basically a scientist I'm used to things with statistics and explanations of the experiment, rather than launching into an argument peppered with examples. Also I think it mixed up the names in at least one place (Andy/Mickey)?

I've had three goes at articulating why I agree with you about the old woman, and can't get one that covers all my feelings, so I'll leave it as "Yeah".

Back on the article... I remember the Captain Planet thing coming up in a PSE class about ethics, on the lines of whether there were actually specific Evil people. A surprising proportion of the class (upper sixth) were really set on this idea and did

not

respond well to questions like "so do you honestly believe that Pol Pot never did a single good thing?" or "exactly what characteristics distinguish between the Evil people and everyone else?".

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Dan H

at 23:17 on 2009-04-01The paper is a bit rambling, and does make a bunch of assumptions (you can't really go from "these white people said this" to "white people say this") but I think it highlights some interesting points. I thought the example with "there is a firm which is 97% white" was a really interesting one, because a lot of the arguments people made were basically "you can only say their hiring policy is racist if you have met their HR guy and you know that he, personally is a racist".

Which brings us neatly back to Captain Planet and the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil.

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Wardog

at 23:24 on 2009-04-01I'm not saying anything constructive here because I'm quite frankly *terrified* since it's such an incredibly complex issue. But I just wanted to mention that I found the article interesting and the comments equally so.

I was also really worried we were going to have our own small-scale racefail but I'm relieved we only had a highereductionfail instead.

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Rami

at 00:04 on 2009-04-02

That's kind of why I'd like to see a comparison with non-racist people discussing the topics.

I don't remember exactly where I was linked to this paper from, but the two studies mentioned in the paper (from which the interviewees were drawn) tried to measure prevalence of racist attitudes based on survey responses, and found very few sets of responses that appeared minimally prejudiced. I think it's because of this that the paper makes the assumption that the interview responses are evincing racist attitudes, even where the responses themselves could be seen as ambiguous.

I've had three goes at articulating why I agree with you about the old woman, and can't get one that covers all my feelings, so I'll leave it as "Yeah"

I'd say it's because she was honest ;-)

the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil

I don't doubt there are people out there who are and do; I think that, as you say, the problem with Captain Planet et al is that they encourage the belief that the little actions of every day (not turning off the lights properly, etc) are perfectly OK, and that the Badness is distilled into the Evil People and that they are the only ones to blame.

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http://roisindubh211.livejournal.com/

at 03:50 on 2009-04-02The Tarzan books are a little horrifying- I was pretty young when I read them and completely believed that racism ended in the sixties, but even then I understood that something strange was up with all the beautiful blonde women (and beautiful, blond Tarzan, of course). Why the hell would any ape (except humans) think a blonde was attractive? Later on in the series the racism gets more overt but its still ridiculous when its just "look how pretty and superior we are!"

My mom used to laugh whenever I watched Captain Planet and said I was being brainwashed.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/x4HhAM1souauxovBXQn5IheyvJm6KIO2jP8MPvM5#590f1

at 03:53 on 2009-04-02Andy G.:

I mean, at what point does the text simply become so irredeemably bad that the only thing to do is just not to keep reading? Again, I didn't feel that with Lovecraft, but is that a defensible position? Hmm ... basically, I do kind of agree with you, but am niggled with doubt, because I wonder whether what I'm really trying to do is give myself an excuse to enjoy books and films that I really shouldn't.

I enjoyed Taming of the Shrew when I saw it performed twenty years ago in college. Then I watched it again within the last two years. It sickened me. When Katherina obeyed whatshisname, I booed, but only loud enough for my wife and maybe a nearby audience member could hear.

Unless the play is promoted/listed as one of the tragedies, I won't see it again.

Perhaps the harder question is: is it making an excuse for the racism rather than for the enjoyment of the read.

The language the theater used excuse the production of TotS was that it may *appear* offensive to the modern audience and that it was the norm for the time. But that's donkeyshit. Disney's Song of the South won't be 're-released on dvd/blueray for only a limited time' even though it was the norm for the time because it *is* offensive to the modern audience today.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/x4HhAM1souauxovBXQn5IheyvJm6KIO2jP8MPvM5#590f1

at 04:14 on 2009-04-02

It all comes back to branding.

But the people that do the branding are members of the dominant culture.

Though arguably, that has been changing especially within last couple of decades. Well, at least to some degree though not quite for the better. Fucking BET.

- F.Dillinger

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 20:01 on 2009-04-02

But perhaps I'm overthinking it...

Honestly, thinking about it at all lead to overthinking, because although that song from Avenue Q gets quoted *all the time* in discussions of race, it doesn't really seem to be saying anything simple about race at all except in the title. It includes characters talking about actual racism that they experience (Gary Coleman "can't even get a taxi"), apologetics ("stop being so pc"/"ethnic jokes are based on truth") and some things that honestly sound like they know perfectly well they're defending racism: people make judgements about race not about "big things like who to buy a newspaper from, but little things like thinking Mexican busboys should learn to speak GODDAMN ENGLISH!"

In the end the song is kind of a big mess of things you've heard people say about racism, but without a clear pov. The clearest point actually is that everybody's racist and that's okay, but there's other stuff in there too...and also racism is such a hot button word it's hard to imagine using it to be completely positive. Also yes completely about the way it starts off with the idea that a minority is being "racist" to ever focus on its own group without including the majority, the "reverse racism" claim. Blech.

And regarding the rest, yes--in some of the discussions about sci fi I remember somebody mentioning the mystery genre and that shows a real difference. Where sci fi and fantasy has in many ways stuck to their traditional white guy roots, I don't think any mystery fan would say that they really expect the detective in any series to be white or male. I'm not a huge reader of mysteries, but even knowing the genre a little it seems like creating detectives from different backgrounds has become totally common. I guess since the detective is always going to have certain standard qualities (smart, analytical, observant, insightful etc.) people are eager to branch out in other ways looking for how they are different and how their differences affect how they solve crimes.

Where as fantasy seems still so stuck in the whole colonial project mentality...you've often got the race that's our pov race, who seemings white and British or American, and then you've got these other races who are all far more alike than the main race is. To us HP as an example, you couldn't really say what a Wizard was like personality-wise, but you could do that for a House Elf or a giant or a goblin or a centaur...

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Arthur B

at 20:57 on 2009-04-02

Where as fantasy seems still so stuck in the whole colonial project mentality...you've often got the race that's our pov race, who seemings white and British or American, and then you've got these other races who are all far more alike than the main race is.

I think sometimes it is colonial, and sometimes it is an attempt to be pseudohistorical. People have this odd idea that in the medieval period nobody travelled at all, and while it's true that 90% of the population never travelled much under normal circumstances a) that's still kind of true today in many places, and b) even though that was the case, you never had a situation where you had the English people who lived exclusively in a place called England whose borders were always much the same as they are today, and neighbouring them the French people who lived in a place called France with borders much like today's, and so on. People moved around: rich folk travelled and became merchants and sometimes settled in cities where the money was, poor people went on pilgrimages and were drafted into their lord's militia when time came to go to war, and enormous numbers of people ended up becoming refugees from plague, famine, and war - and that's just in medieval Europe.

This is not to say that our cultures aren't more diverse today than they were back then. But they were significantly more nuanced and heterogeneous than the sort of fake-medieval societies that sub-Tolkien fantasy hacks crank out. Writing realistically diverse societies is

achingly difficult

, and many people just don't try. (Which is wrong of them.)

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Dan H

at 02:04 on 2009-04-03

The clearest point actually is that everybody's racist and that's okay,

It's the "but that's okay" that I have trouble with. Or rather, it's the way *in which* it's supposed to be okay. I'm okay with the idea that "it's okay" to have racist attitudes in the sense that everybody has them, and having racist attitudes doesn't make you a bad person, just somebody who needs to be a bit more aware of race issues. The song, though, seems to imply that racism is just plain acceptable.

This might be a bit overly-analytical, but the song basically involves a bunch of minorities complaining about racism, then being revealed to be hypocrites. There's a fine line between humour about racism, and humour that is just plain racist and I fear that EaLBR strays into the latter camp.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 02:35 on 2009-04-03

t's the "but that's okay" that I have trouble with.

Sorry, I wasn't clear there--neither am I. I don't think that the clearest message being "everyone (including minorities) is racist and that's okay" is a particularly good thing.

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http://descrime.livejournal.com/

at 17:52 on 2009-04-03re: Captain Planet clip: Oh God, that was so bad I had to stop watching at the 30 second mark. I think I watched CP as a kid. Obviously I wasn't a very bright child.

I thought the firm question was stupid, to be honest, if the only information they are given is that a firm is 97% white! Draw inferences!

I once worked for a small business that employed 5 people. It was 100% white. By the paper's logic, the owners were horrible racists. But the population size of the firm is too small to use statistics like that.

Also, what industry is this firm in? If a 20 person video game development company employes 19 males and 1 female, is it sexist? The population of video game designers is heavily skewed towards men and 20 is still a rather low number to be applying statistical inferences to.

If a hospital's nurses are 97% female, does that mean the hospital is discriminating against male nurses? To figure that out, you need the percentage of male nurses in the area to compare with.

Now, I did do an internship at a ~170 person, publicly traded company and every single position of importance was filled with a white male, and that did seem suspicious.

If a firm is 97% white, all that statistic tells us is that is could be racist, not that it is racist no matter how obvious the author of the paper finds that conclusion. Similarly, even if the company has reached that magical percentage that means diversity, it doesn't mean the company /isn't/ racist.

My aunt works for a large "diverse" company, 600 employee, and she told me about a month ago how a group of white coworkers had hung voodoo dolls from their desk lamps (as in mimicking lynching) in response to a black coworker reporting on some previous misbehavior they had done (I don't really remember the details). The company had no real policy to deal with the situation and basically tried to sweep it under the rug.

I thought the paper was interesting in that it showed some examples as to how people have developed a method of speaking around an issue that is impossible to discuss in our society.

I also thought it was interesting that people who reported having friendships with someone who was part of a minority group were much less racist towards that group. Which would suggest to me that diversity in elementary schools is probably one of the most important things we could do to help promote understanding.

I thought his methodology was a little suspicious for what he was trying to achieve--an honest discussion of racial prejudices. A stranger asking you questions to your face on a sensitive topic (which he obviously have strong feelings for) is hardly likely to promote honesty and is probably a large factor in the nervousness and stuttering the subjects showed.

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Arthur B

at 18:11 on 2009-04-03

If a 20 person video game development company employes 19 males and 1 female, is it sexist? The population of video game designers is heavily skewed towards men and 20 is still a rather low number to be applying statistical inferences to.

Wait, what? I know it isn't very fair to blame individual game companies for an industry-wide bias, but wouldn't it be completely fair to criticise them if they made no effort to address that bias?

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Dan H

at 19:31 on 2009-04-03

Also, what industry is this firm in? If a 20 person video game development company employes 19 males and 1 female, is it sexist? The population of video game designers is heavily skewed towards men and 20 is still a rather low number to be applying statistical inferences to.

I think you're actually making a classic mistake here, which is to make the focus of a discussion about prejudice the question of whether or not specific *people* are prejudiced instead of whether prejudice is at work in a given situation.

If a games development company is 95% male, whether they have 20 employees or 200 there's something wrong. Is it partly the fault of the industry? Probably, but not entirely. Roughly one in six

World of Warcraft

players are female, the proportion of women in your hypothetical company is one third that size.

There is, actually a serious issue here. An interesting statistic is that when people are asked to judge what a "balanced" gender mix looks like, they tend to settle on a male:female ratio of about 2:1 with anything more than that being perceived as unfairly biased towards women. Even

Buffy

follows this pattern, with the core cast of the first series being two girls (Buffy, Willow) and three guys (Giles, Xander, Angel) for a 60-40 split in one of the most female dominated shows on mainstream TV.

Part of what I've been trying to get at with the article above is the idea that it's all too easy to condemn prejudice in general, while making excuses for it in every specific instance. You actually

can

take the fact that only 5% of a company's employees are women as evidence of sexism. Evidence isn't the same as proof, but if your first reaction to the suggestion that your hiring policy might be sexist is to go on the defensive, you're never going to make any progress.

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Shim

at 22:54 on 2009-04-03@Dan

agreed. I do think the response depends on exactly what question is asked (and due to editfail/vagueness of the article I'm not sure) and how the interviewees interpret it; someone might say that racism was definitely at play (in the industry as a whole, in the education system...) but not necessarily conclude that the company itself is definitely racist. But as you say, it would be a pretty good place to start.

Re: gender balance; a similar rule applies to time-per-student in the classroom. Teachers of either gender judge a "balanced" lesson as one that gives far more time to boys (cf. "Language Myths", Bauer & Trudgill - let nobody say I make airy claims). Observers, students etc. also follow this pattern. Giving equal time is a major problem for teachers even when made aware of it and leads to people claiming the lesson is dominated by girls.

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http://arkan2.livejournal.com/

at 22:30 on 2009-04-06Another excellent essay, and great discussion, too.

Yeah, it's scary what advertisements can do, without being able to influence people through “subliminal messages.” Ever seen

The Ad and the Ego

? Heavy stuff.

And then of course, there's Naomi Klein's

No Logo

…

You're right, Dan, this is exactly how racism works. And sexism, heterosexism, classicism, ableism and all the rest. Until those types of oppression are completely eradicated, they'll be with us to some extent, but the first step towards making the solution is identifying the problem.

I also agree that you can't learn Japanese culture by watching anime, but that's not the same as saying you can't learn it at all. You can't learn everything about Japanese culture, or even just a subsection thereof—but then, this applies even if

you yourself are Japanese

. Nobody can know everything about a culture, their own or anyone else's.

Fortunately, authors don't need to do that much, any more than honest anthropologists do. How should an author in the United States go about writing a story set in modern India with modern Indian characters? To which I would reply: the same way said author should go about writing a story set in medieval Europe (or a decent knock-off thereof): research. Of course, cultural imperialism and cultural misappropriation are dangers that rear their ugly heads in the former case, but I think if the author comes at it with the right mindset (including but not limited to sympathy, sensitivity, awareness of probable pitfalls and a continentload of caution) they can pull it off (though you can't please

every

one).

I have the same problem with Whedon's Misogynist-Of-The-Week depiction of sexism as you do. Audiences in my experience tend to process characterization first, symbolism second. (A strongly feminist friend of mine who is also a major Whedon fan once tried to sell me some argument about how incredibly feminist the symbolism of the female characters in

Firefly

is. I'm betting she'd say the same about

Dollhouse

. My reply would be that even if so, the straightforward characterization is rather less feminist, to put it charitably, and that counts for a lot more.)

I'm sure

Harry Potter

could've sold if Harry had been black, or brown, or any other known shade of human skin. Whether it would've been such a cult phenomenon is a different problem. (Who knows, it might've been. And yes, that would've done more than probably any ten government initiatives. And what if he'd been Arabic …?)

people making well-intentioned efforts to move the discourse forward are actually good and important, even if they fail in all kinds of ways to live up to the ideal of what they intend to attain or represent.

That's a very good point, Guy. I believe I maybe try harder than Roddenberry to be progressive on issues of race, sex, sexuality, class and all the other -isms, but if in 100 years' time people aren't looking at my fiction and finding a dozen holes in it at first glance, I'll be one disappointed ancestor. I'll be disappointed because it will mean that a) the culture will not have progressed so far as to outpace anything I could even imagine at my most radical, or b) that I never ended up actually publishing any fiction (or at least none worth looking at). To some extent, whatever I do will be a product of its time, just like the

Star Trek

.

OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right. Indeed, I've always found that particularly grating. Mostly that no one seems to even make the effort. And situations like RaceFail can make it worse for white authors who mean well and would like to make the effort but are scared off because the Wrath of the Public might descend on them.

Yeah well, white privilege means that you can ignore all that and not have to worry too much. Whereas if you're a person of colour (say, Arabic) and you piss off the white folks, Allah help you. (There are exceptions like Salman Rushdie, of course, but they are very much the exception.)

I for one do care about public opinion of people of colour, but I think it better to take that risk and at least try to be part of the solution than play it safe and know for sure that I'm perpetuating the problem.

Firstly, reading isn't condoning. You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards;

This is a good point, Arthur. I recently read Michael Crichton's

State of Fear

, and, for various reasons, have been obsessing over it for months. It's a pretty mediocre thriller, but I have an intense love/hate relationship with the discourse. Some of it I agree with, a lot of it I don't, but what really gets me is that Crichton sets himself up to make his points in a way that should get even the readers who don't agree with him thinking, then lets most of it dissolve into a tired political rant. I felt like I would've enjoyed the book more—should've enjoyed it more—even as I was disagreeing with it, but Crichton failed to try hard enough to connect with the skeptics (which is ironic considering we're presumably the one's he's addressing).

… Although, as Dan points out, there's a difference between something being disagreeable and something actually insulting you as a person because of the social group you happen to belong to, especially when there is a looong history of insult and oppression of people from that social group.

On the other hand, as we're agreed that in a racist society everyone is racist to some degree, all the fiction we produce is probably going to be racist in some way. So if we can't find any merit in racist works, then Arthur's suggestion of throwing out everything before 1950 is too conservative by half.

So basically, I guess, it all comes down to degree of offensiveness and personal taste. If you can find merit in something, I'd say there's probably some merit, although I reserve the right to withdraw my condone-ance (there doesn't seem to be a proper word for that) if the merit you find is something along the lines of e.g. “All Arabs are evil.”

As Dan points out, it's not the individuals who you can identify as being racist bastards who are the problem a lot of the time (although they're usually the ugliest symptom), it's the people where you don't necessarily see the subtext, perhaps because they themselves aren't aware of it.

Damn, you people are good at making excellent points with incredible clarity.

It helps to have a diverse group of friends and colleagues as well; "hey, that's meant to be my friend's family" is almost as shocking as "hey, that's meant to be my family".

That's my viewpoint too, and something I feel slightly guilty about not cultivating more some of the time. However, I do think there's a bigger difference than you suggest, Arthur. I have a lot of close friends who are queer, but when I see something homophobic, the fact that “they're talking about my friends” doesn't spring immediately to mind. Similarly, when I see something blatantly anti-Palestinian, I don't immediately think of my Palestinian-American friend.

I agree that it helps to have friends who belong to the insulted group in question, but maybe not as much as you suggest.

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid.

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

Or in the liner notes to the movie script. Dumbeldore's sexual orientation on the other hand …

the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil

I don't doubt there are people out there who are and do;

Well I for one, don't doubt the exact opposite, and think that's a

very

dangerous philosophical road to venture onto. Of course, it partially depends on what definition of “Evil” we're working under, but still …

re: Captain Planet clip: Oh God, that was so bad I had to stop watching at the 30 second mark. I think I watched CP as a kid. Obviously I wasn't a very bright child.

Me neither.

And yes, racism is amazingly adaptive when it comes to rhetoric.

I've heard elsewhere that positive exposure tends to dilute one's own prejudices at least. So yes, diverse elementary schools = very good idea.

Part of what I've been trying to get at with the article above is the idea that it's all too easy to condemn prejudice in general, while making excuses for it in every specific instance.

Like all other types of basically immoral attitudes/behaviors/actions. War/torture/murder/rape, people can (and too often do) excuse away the patently inexcusable when it gets down to specifics. If anyone has any suggestions on how to get people to stop doing this I'm listening.

very

attentively.

#Ferretbrain #Minority Warrior #Captain Planet #Avenue Q #Dan H

[thekitschies]

Blackwell’s review: Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers

This review was written by Lat Lea, a Blackwell’s bookseller in Oxford

Record of a Space Born Few – This novel by Becky Chambers is the third of three novels (the first is the Kitschies Golden Tentacle-shortlisted A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and the second is A Closed and Common Orbit)  set in the future, in a fictional universe  that Chambers calls the “Galactic Commons”, i.e. our galaxy and the name of the vast alliance that loosely governs the known intell1gent species in the galaxy.  There are 10 of those, including human beings. Most are technically more advanced, more populous and more powerful than humans.   These other species are a range of physical types, roughly corresponding to various “lower” species on earth, molluscs, crustaceans, insects, birds, apes and so on.   The history of the Solar System is gradually gleaned from the three novels:  as the ecology on Earth declined, wealthy people colonized Mars and partly terra-formed it, whereas those remaining on the home planet eventually built a fleet of spaceships, the Exodus Fleet, and set forth for parts unknown.   At the beginning of the series, humans have been accepted into the Galactic Commons and are gradually spreading out into the galaxy, integrating themselves into the diverse worlds and societies that comprise the “Commons”.

Becky Chambers is astonishingly inventive and more than any other science fiction novelist that I have read, she manages to address the physical, cultural and social implications of her universe.  Plus she has written three novels with quite different plots and themes that nevertheless develop her main idea:  what it means to be tolerant and coexist with other species.  All that could be read as a blue print for future co-existence and tolerance of different races and religions in our current situation.  She considers the technical challenges of communicating across species as well as cultural challenges and she even considers the implications of inter-species sex and love.  That can be seen as an analogy to contemporary concerns about non-gendered sexuality and LBGT issues.  (One glib reviewer called the first novel “science fiction for the Tindr generation”.)   On top of that, one of the other themes is whether AIs are human. In the GC (although they are illegal) it’s possible for an AI to obtain a body.   Can one love an AI especially after it’s in a body, and what is its gender?  

In addition, Becky Chambers explains plausibly and in practical terms a range of technical and scientific questions that any future technology will have addressed.   There are many invented basic technologies, “dent bots” as well as more complex ones, e.g. various forms of interstellar travel and types of spaceships.   All of these are carefully thought through.  Thank goodness:  no fantasy mumbo jumbo in these novels.

This particular novel is set on one ship in the Exodus fleet and is probably the most domestic novel of the three.  It opens with a large explosion on one of the ships in the fleet and then describes the period leading up to the explosion. There’s a family, mother, Tessa, mostly off-ship father, George two boys and small girl. Plus, grandad AKA Pop.  The eldest boy, Kip, is on the cusp of adolescence and accordingly rebellious.  He’s unsure of his future, like anyone his age, but also because the “traditional” society of the Exodus fleet is no longer the only option available to people on the fleet.  They can leave and the fleet is no longer going anywhere; it’s a habitat in space circling around.   Another character, Eyas, is a caretaker, who manages funerals and the disposal of dead bodies, a significant issue on a spaceship.  Plus, there’s Isabel, an elderly archivist on board the ship who is tasked with hosting a Harmagian scholar (a slug like species) who is researching life on the Exodus fleet as a sociologist or anthropologist.  There is also Sawyer, a young man trapped in a dead-end job on a multi-cultural planet who tries to join the fleet, because his family came from it a generation previously, and he believes it will offer him a better, more complete life.

Thus, Record of a Sapce Born Few is about a range of characters, grappling with family life, job responsibilities, aging, living in the same space for generation in a static society, ambition, education and how best to live a good life.  It’s a gentle novel, but then, all three novels are suffused with kindness and sensitivity.

Read it for those qualities but also for the exceptional imagination of Becky Chambers, who uses her Galactic Commons to create an intensely plausible but different future.

from http://bit.ly/2P9cN2w

#2018 #Blackwell's reviews #Guest reviews #Kitschies #Shortlist #becky chambers #Blackwell's #Lat Lea