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ohscorbus · 4 years

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Do you think Albus had a moment where he realized how rich Scorpius was?

Everyone knows how rich the Malfoys are. That’s common knowledge. But knowing something and understanding it, seeing it with your own two eyes, that’s something completely different. So yes, I think the reality of it hits him many times over the years. Which is actually quite funny considering the Potters aren’t exactly poor themselves.

Harry is undoubtedly very well off and no matter how much he probably donates or invests, those vaults aren’t going down. He’s working as the Head Auror and there’s all the vaults he inherited, but also the fact he doesn’t spend excessively to show off or simply just because he can. Not in the way your typical Malfoy would. Where they’ll have the finest robes and rooms of rare trinkets, Harry prefers his Weasley jumper and his family photos. I think Ginny would be the same. She grew up in a family that got by on hand me down clothes and secondhand textbooks. She also had to deal with people making her family’s financial situation the butt of their jokes. But she never went hungry, was always surrounded by family, and knew she was loved. That’s the heart of the Weasley family to me. All the things Harry desperately craved growing up. The fact he loved the Burrow the second he stepped foot in there was not surprising. I have no doubt the home they built for their own kids resembles the Burrow in many ways. On the outside it may look more like a traditional house, but inside there’s a warmth to it that money just cannot buy. It’s in Lily’s artwork on the walls. Their first September 1st photos along the mantelpiece. The lingering smell of a home cooked meal. The lines on the doorframe marking their ever increasing heights. The jumper left on the worn armchair. Their faces on the clock that Ginny has ‘detention’ added to so she knows when James isn’t telling the whole truth in his letters.

Albus never grew up without food or a warm bed. He also always got whatever new books he needed and whatever toy he’d asked for at Christmas. Just like Scorpius. And I think it’s a privilege both the Potters and the Malfoys have tried to instil in their sons. For Albus it was ‘just because they can afford it, doesn’t mean he needs it’. There’s pocket money to earn and treats for special occasions and siblings to share with. So Albus still ended up with half a wardrobe of James’s old clothes and he happily passed down his books to Lily as she learned to read. He never questioned it because his cousins did the same. That was his norm. Just like Scorpius’s class was his. Even with Draco and Astoria bringing him up without all the pureblood nonsense, I don’t think they’ll ever be able to lose their class. Nor would they want to. But I can see them actively trying to instil some modesty in him. He’s not to be embarrassed or ashamed of what they have but he’s also never to be as boastful or spoilt as Draco was. I don’t think they’d ever try and live more modestly though. They want the best for their child and they can afford that, so why not?

So the Potters are rich and the Malfoys are super rich. But I don’t think the Potters and the Malfoys are financially worlds apart compared to many of their fellow students. They’re alike in that sense. It’s more their parent’s attitude towards money that makes them different from each other. But part of growing up and venturing out into the world on your own is about meeting new people from different backgrounds and experiencing new cultures. So I think Albus being shocked by Scorpius’s world is just part of that. (Although as the eldest of five myself, I can imagine Albus is more shocked by Scorpius’s life as an only child!) It also makes me wonder if Scorpius is ever shocked by Albus at any point. It wouldn’t surprise me if Scorpius has a better idea of the Potter wealth than Albus does. If money isn’t something Albus has ever had to worry about then he’s probably not paid much attention to it. He’s still a child so why would he? Whereas Scorpius is the sole heir in a family that’s very much involved in their investments. I doubt Draco hasn’t taught him a thing or two over the years about what that entails. Not that Scorpius would judge Albus or his family for their choices, but I’m sure he’s intrigued by them. Harry Potter could afford a manor of his own, so why wouldn’t he have one? It’s an innocent question I’d love to see eleven year old Scorpius discuss with his parents. He’d never ask Albus. Not even when Albus eventually visits the Manor for the first time and makes a comment about wishing he had a room like his. That too is an innocent statement. I don’t think either boy would actually want to change anything about their lifestyle. (Although not having to share a bedroom wall with James sounds like the dream to teenage Albus.)

You know what I’d really love to see? Scorpius at the Burrow for the first time. You’d think it wouldn’t be the same once all the kids had moved out, but now they all come back with their own kids and the place is fuller than ever before. I’d love for Scorpius to have that close knit, extended family experience. I want him to see how everyone has a place in the chaos. A bigger house would give them breathing space but it soon becomes clear they don’t need it. They’re happy to share food, fight over who gets the better stool, and argue whose turn it is to do the dishes. It’s utter madness but he feels the love here just as much as he does at his own table. It’s not about whose parents got it right or wrong. Which is better or what they prefer. It’s about understanding and acceptance. So Scorpius doesn’t hesitate to grab the tea towel and stand alongside Albus at the sink. Just like Albus happily learns exactly which fork he needs for what course. They adapt because they choose to be part of each other’s lives.

But there are moments that give Albus pause at Hogwarts though. Like Scorpius’s fancy shower products that outnumber Albus’s single bottle. The expensive sweets he’ll sit and mindlessly eat on an ordinary Tuesday evening. The birthday presents he receives that cost more than what his own parents would even spend on him. But there’s no judgment. Just surprise and amusement. Because Scorpius also collects chocolate frog cards, he doesn’t take his Weasley jumper off for weeks once he gets his own, and he wears more odd socks than any other person he knows. He may tease Scorpius about it, in the way only a best friend can, but there’s nothing behind it. Albus isn’t jealous or annoyed by his wealth and nor is Scorpius rubbing it in. In fact, I bet he’s even a little embarrassed those first few times he catches a reaction from Albus. But ultimately? Albus doesn’t care and so neither will Scorpius around him. They’ve both had a lifetime of people judging them so they aren’t about to do that to each other. They’re just Albus and Scorpius. That wealth still belongs to their parents at this stage in their life anyway. I don’t think any significant shock or even disagreement over money comes until they’re both adults and more independent. That’s when I can see the differences in their upbringing really being highlighted. That’s not to say they don’t also align in places. It’s definitely Albus and Scorpius vs. Draco when it comes to their wedding!

(Apologies for the long winded answer. Money is such a fascinating subject because it brings out the best and the worst in people. The fact that Albus and Scorpius seem so grounded is a credit to their parents. But just because they are okay with each other doesn’t mean they don’t encounter any issues from other people. But the bullying is another topic entirely. Vandalised trunks can be replaced but words can cause wounds money can’t heal.)

#albus potter #albus severus potter #scorpius malfoy #scorbus #potter family #malfoy family #text post #mypost #long post #Anonymous

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vssoise · 4 years

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Lesvos

I've been procrastinating writing this blogpost for a long time because it's felt like I'd have too many thoughts to effectively capture on paper and that it would be too rambling. But it's about time now, during my last evening in Mytilini, while my housemates cook food for my farewell dinner/party tonight before I leave tomorrow, that I get to it.

Mytilini and Moria.

I was so looking forward to this trip for such a long time. I was determined to keep a journal while I was here, to document the things I saw, the people I interacted with, to bear witness to the events. However, it was a perfect storm of circumstances that have forced me to have to leave for the States two weeks early. Before I arrived on the island, we knew of the Golden Dawn and other fascist groups holding rallies in the city of Mytilini and on the road to Moria, but then Turkey opened its borders and things got worse. The school at the One Happy Family community center, where my organization, Medical Volunteers International, operates a refugee medical clinic, was burnt to the ground by suspected fascist activities. This paused MVIs activities out of the clinic, and as fascist rallies started becoming more frequent, with some even attacking NGO workers and breaking car windows, there was an exodus of volunteers at the same time as Greece started tightening restrictions on NGO activities and migrant/refugee processing. They even suspended their cooperation under international asylum laws, rejecting new arrivals. A fascist group physically forced one refugee boat back into the water as they made land, resulting in the drowning of a child onboard. Then COVID-19 becomes a serious threat. There is one confirmed case on Lesvos, being treated at Mytilini hospital, but no known cases elsewhere. NGO activity is further hamstrung, and the local government makes no effort to facilitate aid to people trapped in the camp.

Fascists, fires, a pandemic, a volunteer exodus, restrictions on NGO activities. I've been frustrated at not being able to do anything about it all, despite being here. I know I could be more effective once I'm done with school, but even MSF and Kitrinos, two of the bigger medical NGOs still operating, have had to scale back their work. It feels like I came all this way to try to make a difference, and aside from about a week's worth of seeing patients, I wasn't able to do anymore. At times this has felt more like a poorly planned vacation than a trip to help people.

I also noticed that I wasn't as phased by much of Moria's situation: the open sewers, the poor hygiene, the burning of plastic for fuel, the rampant scabies, the five families living in one tent together, because it all felt very familiar. Like any slum I've visited in India. We are rightfully enraged about the EUs treatment of the refugees, and the conditions they've been forced to stay in. Perhaps justifiably more so because the EU has significantly better developed infrastructure and more money than does a country like India. But it made me consider why circumstances I get angry about here don't provoke as strong a response in my back home. Why do I more readily accept the status quo in India? I had this thought in a different vein a few years ago when I realized I treated service workers differently in India than in the States. Not that I treated them badly or dismissively here, but that in the States, be it due to a more common language or a less internalized sense of class structure, I found I'd treat service workers like people like me who are working a job. Potential friends, whom I treated as true equals in the sense of actually engaging and invested conversation. Whereas in India, I realized I never extended the same idea of possibly being friends to those who worked there. It was always cursory pleasantries, but never with the underlying idea that this person is a "real" person just like me, with a life outside work.

Perhaps it's just silly or privileged or stupid to have been thinking this way. Perhaps it's normal to think this way, as we can't be friends with everyone we meet and so we draw up those invisible divisions to make our social lives more feasible. Either way, the discrepancy between my thoughts/actions in the States vs in India was noteworthy to me, and one I have been conscious of not propagating further.

People.

Aside from that overarching frustration and general cloud over my thoughts however, the people I coordinated to room with are fantastic. As are the others I've met here. The house I'm staying in houses me, a German/French medical student, a German nurse, an Italian junior doctor, and a Spanish Antifa activist, and the landlord is a Syrian refugee who arrived on the island four years ago.

The translators we work with who become fast friends quite quickly include a Palestinian, a Burundian, and a man from Burkina Faso, the latter two of whom speak predominantly French, forcing me to improve my French significantly, having entire conversations for entire evenings in an entirely different language.

Then there are the coordinators of the different NGOs here. There's a German retired GP who made the decision to extend his trip in light of all the changes because he knows that now the need is highest and it feels wrong to leave. His family understands and supports his decision. There's an Irish lady who works with unaccompanied minors, i.e. kids below the age of 18 who have lost or been separated from their parents, aunts, uncles, or any family at all, but have somehow managed to cross an ocean to get away from the people literally destroying their homes. She teaches them, cares for them (sometimes as simply as giving them a place to shower), and more recently put one in touch with a lawyer to delay his deportation due to turning 18 and therefore being able to be tried as an adult. A 17yo kid, running away from the Taliban in Afghanistan, having had his family killed in front of him, arrives in Greece finally hoping he's safe, only to be deported to Turkey, where he knows and has no one. There's an American journalist who started an NGO to teach refugee kids to film and document their lives, giving them skills, and the ability to bear witness, but more so, just giving them something to do. He's stayed to document the EUs mismanagement of this refugee crisis. And there's a Russian teacher who runs a school for minors and children of refugees so they have somewhere to go and don't miss out on some form of education while their parents do what they need to to get by.

And lastly, I met the settled refugees in Greece, including my landlord from Syria and his friends. Got a haircut from one of his Iraqi friends, met some other friends of his in the Olive Grove, the overflow camp surrounding Moria.

The people I've met here are incredible. From all over the world, trying to do what they think is some good for the people they know are in need, in conditions where the vast majority of people would not stay in.

The remind me that everyone we interact with is just another human being, and force me to consider my own biases that I didn't realize I held until this trip. I didn't realize I unconsciously put up a guard around people who didn't speak the same language as me, or more accurately, people who didn't speak the same language, and, I'm ashamed to say, were doing poorly socioeconomically. Having traveled all my life and seeing the ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, I always thought I was very accepting and comfortable around any conditions. But be it a product of internalizing the presentation of certain types of people as dangerous or undesirable, or a core poor judgement on my part, I realized I was being defensive. It was clear to me when I was sitting across from this person on the bus, obviously living in Moria. I remember feeling an almost subconscious desire to avoid conversation. But then the Irish lady asked him if he was on his way to school, to which he excitedly replied yes, and showed her his notebook. I noticed it in myself again when we were surrounded by refugees as the Irish lady spoke to the boy about to be deported, and I found myself feeling uncomfortable, or even unsafe. But these were literally kids. 10 years younger than me, having seen and experienced so much more than I could imagine, gathering around to listen to how they could maybe help one of their newly acquired friends. I couldn't understand when I started feeling this way. I even jumped into a jog for a couple steps before very ashamedly catching myself when a homeless man in Atlanta tripped behind me.

What exactly am I scared of? Where is that insecurity coming from? And why, of all people, is it directed at those who are least fortunate? I hate that I've had to ask myself these questions. But I'm glad that I have. I think these questions are exactly those that many people in the world need to be asking themselves right now as well.

Life.

Living here has been a unique experience as well. Since my arrival, I knew my housemates were a special group of people. I've always only seen it on TV shows or in fiction, the idea of communal living, or a family of sorts formed out of the people you live with. Even in the States, my roommates and I very much kept to ourselves and led our own, parallel lives. But somehow, and perhaps because of the relative non-fancy-ness of our accommodation, that's exactly what happened with us. We would cook together every night and have dinner, go out for drinks with the other teams and organizations, spend afternoons together just talking. And the scaled-down lifestyle was something I was slowly getting used to as well. The relatively spartan bedroom with the creaky and drafty windows, the limited facility bathroom with the hot pipes running along the walls and the shower I can't stand up in, the "kitchen" with one working burner, knives more blunt than the spoons, and poorly draining sink, the laundry machine that no one knows how to work shorter than 5 hours, the cafe cat that started staying with us for food since the covid-19 lockdown, the tiny living room space that everyone gathers in both because it's the only option and because we're all new here and subconscously I'm sure want to spend time together with familiar faces. It's a simple life, with people you like around you, doing work you enjoy and find important. Life in Dayton with all the other things I normally do to try and fill my time seems so far away. I haven't watched a youtube video in two weeks, when I usually spend at least a couple hours watching back home. I've cooked more often these couple weeks with these blunt knives and poor kitchen than I did in Dayton over two months. I've learned new, inexpensive dishes. I've met and befriended more new people.

As my last post captured a snapshot of what I could see as my potential future, I think this trip captured a snapshot of what I think I wish my life could ultimately be like at least intermittently, if not always. When I do this kind of work that I already feel satisfied by, that feels important and fulfilling, I realize I don't feel that underlying insecurity or restlessness than makes me want to get involved in other things. I started Dayton Driven because I was too restless in medical school, for example. This feeling here reminds me of when I felt similarly in Geneva, just, finally, content.

I know there are other things important to me too though, in normal life, if not within this parentheses. I may not be able to be the Irish lady or American journalist, but perhaps I can be the German retired doctor, still being involved, still doing what I think is right, and still holding on to the other things important to me. Saara said something to me a couple months ago that I didn't realize would become something I'd think of quite often. She said, "If you ever feel like you are torn between two things and have to give up one, then you have the wrong two things." Maybe that's true. Maybe I can have and do every thing that I want. Maybe I can make it happen.

Well, it's at least pretty to thinks so.

#blogpost

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cakeandcrows · 4 years

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I remember this one time I was watching some documentary about a white actress, I can’t recall who. One of her first roles was something like... a German lesbian with some kind of drug addiction (I think cocaine?). Point is, in her interview segment about it, she said something like, “When my mother heard about the role, she said, ‘if I were you, I would have told the director to pick just one of those things, not all of them at once.’” And all I can think about is how like... so many of us on here are more than one kind of minority or ‘invisible’ identity, or neurodivergent, or in some level of recovery from one thing or another.

Like, this isn’t huge news, y’know? Yeah, privilege is a thing. And people are so absolutely unaware of it when they have it that it makes me want to scream. I’m even unaware of my own privilege a lot of the time and I won’t go into a moment of how I feel when I realize I’ve forgotten, because my guilt on the matter is irrelevant. I just need to get better at keeping myself in check and that’s that.

Yeah I’d love to be cis some days because of how much easier it would make my life (and honestly for not many other reasons, I’m pretty happy being trans... if it just... y’know, weren’t for how people react to it). Sometimes I think, “Man, straight people are fucking insane; how on earth do they function,” while looking back on the days when I thought I was straight and realizing that even back then I was lost as hell, but some days I’m just like, “If I were straight, would life really be so much easier?” And it would. It really would. If I were also cis at the same time. Etc.

And I don’t want to make this into an us vs them sort of thing for even a minute, either, because everyone has common ground somewhere. Does that common ground always matter as much to one person as it does to another? Probably not. Jeff Be/os probably shares a home town with a fuck ton of people but I’ll bet he doesn’t give a shit about a single one of them, or that commonality, while you could see a popular rock band and never hear them shut up about how proud they are to be from the West Coast. Sometimes it just doesn’t fucking matter to other people what you have in common with them, because to them, what’s different is so much more volatile. And it goes both ways.

There’s people from my home town, my graduating class, and even old friend groups that I could never see myself talking to again because of how we’ve split paths in beliefs and lifestyles. Or, maybe they’ve stayed the same and I’ve changed, or the opposite... and I’ll bet they’d see how I’ve changed and think the same things of me. “Wow, I want nothing to do with that person.”

I’m just... constantly having little wake-up calls over and over again of how some people seriously think that I’d choose a harder life on purpose. And I’m not ashamed of living as I am; I’m very proud of who I am and what I’ve overcome to get here.

Customers at work, where I feel like I live 2/3rds of my life these days, are always just like... a window into the world for me sometimes. Most people don’t mention my pronoun button. Some people don’t notice it outright and misgender me because they’re looking at my face; entirely being polite and engaged, and not at all aware of how they’re upsetting me. I let it go a lot of the time. It’s not worth it.

There’s the few good folks who listen carefully and patiently and are seemingly brought to a new awareness by my gentle explanations. They’re polite and they honestly revive part of my faith. Like the guy who opened his coffee order saying, “yes, miss,” and left the store tipping his hat to me saying, “thank you very much, sir.” God or whoever does things fucking bless that guy.

Then there’s the people who decide to look at my pin, and ask about it. So far, it’s either people who are just reading it aloud for the sake of it, and then becoming confused but not actually wanting to understand so much as they’re just desperate to make some kind of conversation with a Youth (which is wild because I’m 25??). They don’t actually care, so I don’t really put effort into explaining. They either cut me off mid-explanation, or listen and don’t say anything further.

Then there’s the people who look at it and laugh at me. Or the woman who decided it was a good idea to read it, listen to my explanation, and say, “You know, my daughter tried to explain that to me. I just don’t get it. I think it’s silly and too complicated. People should just stick to the old ways.” Like... lady. What the fuck do you want me to do about it. Why the fuck do you think telling me this will make me happy or even... want to engage further. I straight up just don’t understand where these people get off. They’re just as rude and uninterested in me as a human being as the people who start rattling off their order and refuse to wait for me to get it all down before shoving their credit card at my face. They do not care. They do. Not. Care. And my patience is starting to wear extremely thin.

I had a new coworker, who knows I’m trans, the other day stop mid-sentence to say, “Oh, you know, sister? Oh! Also, I call everyone ‘sis’, boys or girls.” “Not me, you don’t.” “...oh?” “You don’t call me that. Ever.”

“ >:/ tch. Glad we got that out of the way.”

It’s not cute. I don’t think it’s endearing. I don’t think it’s funny. And I don’t give a shit if you call other people that. If you thought about it for five seconds you’d realize how insensitive and fucked up it is. If anyone, anywhere, I swear to god, just thought about ANYTHING for five fucking seconds... I wish... I hope, that they’d be better human beings than they are.

Like, god, what a horrible inconvenience it is for you to have to stop and think about what to call another human being. To use their name. To use the right pronouns. To avoid nicknames or pet names that would be inappropriate for such a person. Heaven forbid you have to do that for anyone, right? Why am I different? Why are you trying to step on my toes and see if I’ll just sit here and take it? I know why. Everyone knows why. And I’m so sick of being the dog under the table who gets kicked every time it whines about having no escape or being surrounded by the feet of people sitting around the table.

I don’t hate being trans. I don’t hate being pansexual. I don’t hate being poly. I don’t hate myself. I hate the people who hate me for being myself and intentionally or ignorantly go out of their way to make my life an extra level of hell Just Because They Can. ,

I have been bullied and abused all my fucking life by one kind of person or another and not a single excuse I’ve been given justifies it. Humans are better than this. I want to have faith in humans. And there are good humans; I surround myself with them. But if I have to pry yet another motherfucker’s eyes open to yet another goddamn social issue they were too thick-minded to notice, and then have them turn around and bless me and hail me for some kind of... Joan of Arc bullshit, calling my suffering and my existence some kind of blessing, like my life had to be this hard to spread words and messages across time and space to reach their Oh So Important Ears, I’m gonna choke. Or... even the people who mean well that just straight up make me think that they actually believe that the queer people in their lives are some sort of Manic Pixie Dream (gender) who’s come into their lives to teach them something new and advance their own character development. That’s what it fucking feels like! Being reduced to someone else’s educator and being placed as a Background Character in their own fucking Growth Arc.

If there’s some sick destiny where I’m lined up to be some kind of flogged messenger to idiots for the rest of my life I want a motherfucking refund. Ship me off to the next incarnation. I don’t care if I come back as a ladybug for two days and die under somebody’s shoe.

And I’m not somebody’s teacher. I’m not somebody’s martyr or savior. I’m not somebody’s free fucking Queer Almanac and Seasonal Guide to the Experiences of Not Their Own. I’m so fucking tired of explaining myself.

I’m so fucking tired of People ™ But I also want to have so much faith in People ™ that I think I’m just setting myself up for disappointment.

Sometimes people prove me wrong and it’s okay. Other times I write a several paragraph long rant at one in the morning. Fuck me honestly, just, fuck me and boy howdy do I wish I could pluck one or two things off my list of identities if only for the sake of not having to Explain Shit To People ™

And at the same time, I very clearly care about people. I want people to understand because fuck, I was there! I used to be some Jacked Levels of Crazy and I was hugely homophobic when i was a teenager. I look back on the way I used to be and I can’t feel proud of who I was and what I believed. I know a lot of it was internalized hatred and disgust. I know all of that shit now. But I see myself in some people and that’s the mistake I make sometimes. Most of the time, I’m fine; I help other folks learn something new and it’s good and I feel fine about it. I just hate feeling like other people assume it’s my motherfucking duty to tell them and speak on behalf of all non-cis, non-straight people everywhere. I sound like a goddamn Gender and Women’s Studies textbook.

Fuck, I’m going to bed...

#rant #long post #2/14/2020 #transphobia tw

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ceramicfiver · 5 years

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Summary of "Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center" by bell hooks

Notes I took while reading Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks, May 2014

Chapter one: "Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory"

Black women have been forgotten in feminism in favor of upper-class, white women feminism. In order to upend oppression, it's vital to listen to the voices of the most oppressed and put their concerns at the core of the movement in order to identify the origins and effects of oppression, which will then allow rightful liberation. Being oppressed means the absence of choices.

Chapter two: "Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression"

My favorite chapter so far. First, hooks destroys the former definition of feminism "the belief that men and women should be equals" by questioning to what men should women be equal to? Upper-class, white men? Unfortunately because of this definition much of feminism has been characterized as liberal reforms to alleviate upper-class white women's concerns while neglecting lower-class black women. Instead feminism should be defined as "a movement to end sexist oppression."

Another way liberal ideology dominates feminism can be addressed in my favorite quote so far on page 30:

"Focusing on feminism as individual commitment, we resist the emphasis on individual liberty and lifestyle. Such resistance engages us in revolutionary praxis. The ethics of Western society informed by imperialism and capitalism are personal rather than social. They teach us that the individual good is more important than the collective good, and consequently that individual change is of greater significance than collective change."

Instead of the individualistic "I am a feminist" we should say the collective "I advocate feminism" to adequately represent the political struggle as opposed to personal lifestyle.

Chapter three: "The Significance of Feminist Movement"

Here hooks emphasizes the importance of this new definition. Instead of attacking men in a supposed women vs men battle, we should instead focus on the root of sexism, namely systemic oppression. Secondly, societal issues should not be ranked in importance but rather should be recognized as intersecting oppression that share a root cause. It's silly to say sexism should be the first issue to destroy when racism and classism may remain. Likewise, when addressing racism and classism it's vital to not ignore sexism.

Chapter four: "Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Among Women"

Sisterhood should not be racist or classist. Sisterhood should permeate sexist institutions, dominating individuals, and internalized sexism.

It should have dialogue with all women, not uncritical agreement, not exclusionary to non-feminists or the Other, and not characterized by hateful attacks. "Rather than bond on the basis of shared victimization or in response to a false sense of a common enemy, we can bond on the basis of our political commitment to feminist movement that aims to end sexist oppression."

The label feminist is not enough, there must be a continuous dialogue within feminism. "Since we live in a society that promotes fads and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change." (My comment: perhaps once we have our own grassroots built organization these fads will become permanent structures to counter capitalism's institutions.)

Dialogue should breach ethnocentrism, racism, and classism.

Unconditional solidarity, recognizing that we all have differences in opinion (and race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, etc.), is vital for revolution.

Chapter Five: "Men: Comrades in Struggle"

Feminism shouldn't be anti-man, it should be anti-sexist oppression. The former alienates men, people of color, and lower class people who have united in to oppose white supremacist capitalism. For example, many blacks see racism as more powerful than sexism. The latter fits into this well, targeting the ruling class patriarchal domination too.

Anti-man sentiments led to female separatism from society. These lifestyle choices do not effectively combat patriarchy. Lifestyle is not politics. "Separatism has led many women to abandon feminist struggle ... As a policy, it has helped to marginalize feminist struggle, to make it seem more a personal solution to individual problems, especially problems with men, than a political movement that aims to transform society as a whole."

Focus on feminist lifestyle exploits people of color and lower classes. To be able to afford not having to deal with men probably means you're privileged, and exploiting others for your material gain. System change does not come from lifestyle change, it comes from solidarity and struggle to end sexist oppression.

"While [men] do not need to blame themselves for accepting sexism, they must assume responsibility for eliminating it ... in exposing, confronting, opposing, and transforming the sexism of their male peers."

"When [a man] beats or rapes women, he is not exercising privilege or reaping positive rewards ... The ruling-class male power structure that promotes his sexist abuse of women reaps the real material benefits and privileges from his actions. As long as he is attacking women and not sexism or capitalism, he helps to maintain a system that allows him few, if any, benefits or privileges."

"Separatist ideology encourages us to believe that women alone can make feminist revolution -- we cannot." Just as how white people struggled in solidarity with blacks against white supremacy, men can struggle in solidarity with women against patriarchy.

Chapter Six: "Changing Perspectives on Power"

#feminism #bell hooks #gender #women #oppression #books #sexism

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theoceanthatdrownthemoon-chaldea · 6 years

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Master Artoria vs Tokiomi - P.1

Since there’s no official translation for Fate/Koha-Ace, many fans don’t think of the Nobutoria pair as foil to Tokiomi/Gilgamesh pair.

First off, in term of Physical Appearance:

M. Artoria: A young girl identical to Artoria Pendragon. Blond hair, green eyes although her depiction in Koha-Ace doesn’t show her eye colors. Color theme: white and blue

Tokiomi: Middle age man. Aqua blue eyes. Has a beard. Considered tall for a Japanese male. Color theme: deep red

M. Artoria and Oda Nobunaga: Is actually taller than her Servant by 2 cm. Has Western look compared to Nobu’s East Asia look. Shocking look like they’re about the same age. Military style clothing, not out of place for the era their Grail War taking place in. Her color theme doesn’t clash with Nobu’s black-red and is independent from Nobu’s theme. There’s always something green on Nobu but a lack of anything black or red on Master Artoria. Servant has red eyes.

Tokiomi and Goldie: Is shorter than his Servant. A Japanese man dressed in Western clothing compared to Gilgamesh’s Uruk style. Obvious age difference when standing together. Sharply dressed in the face of Gil’s fashion disaster. His color theme is a subset of Gil’s gold-red theme. In contrast to the Nobutoria pair, there’s no gold in his theme - an indication of their relationship. Servant has red eyes. Since his color theme is the same as Gil’s eye color, it hints at his heavy dependence on Gil.

Second, Abilities:

M. Artoria: Magus in title only. Has excellent mana quality and capacity to support her Servant. Expert swordmanship. Combat ability against enemy Servant is virtually zero unless she use Nobu’s katana against them. Is shown to be capable of keeping herself alive when accompanied Nobu to battles. Strong willed.

Tokiomi: Jewel Magecraft. Fire elemental user. A strong Magus without martial art prowess. Doesn’t have anything that can hurt the other Servants in the war.

M. Artoria and Oda Nobunaga: In all the battles, Nobu is the sole fighter. She has Artoria come with her regardless. Nobu doesn’t have to worry about her Master’s ability to stay alive so she could focus fully on fighting. Master Artoria served as a sort of mission command, keeping Nobu updated with new development such as raid on their base or the others making off with the Grail. While Caren was taken hostage by Caster in the presence of her Servant Li Shuwen, Artoria was never captured by others as Nobu focused on fighting. She either can fend for herself or skillful enough to avoid them. Master Artoria is an asset for Nobu. Once, Nobu was able to turn the table of the battle by using the fear of her Master to fool the enemy into thinking she’s helpless and dying. May or may not be the one to defeat Akiha from Tsukihime while Nobu was fighting Ryouma.

Tokiomi and Goldie: Despite advantage against most other mages in the war, he only ever went out to deal with Kariya. Otherwise he’d be holed up in his base or ride the aircraft with his Servant. Tokiomi is neither an asset nor a hindrance to Gil. He also doesn’t have enough awareness to keep himself alive till the end of the war. Sometimes he’s considered a hindrance by Gil.

Third, Background:

M. Artoria: Illegitimate daughter of a high ranking officer in the army and a foreign mistress. Was intended to be a sacrificial tank for Nobu. Caught Nobu’s eyes and became the true Master of Demon Archer in place of the proper Magus the military prepared. Virtually no one would care if she died and her death would impact no one in the army. The only one probably lament her demise would be her mother whose whereabout is unknown and her cousin Mordred. Probably ostracized for the western look she was born with.

Tokiomi: Head of an important family in Fuyuki. Gave away one of his daughter to be tortured for at least the next decade. Death was lamented by Rin. Summoned Gilgamesh with a proper catalyst. Later was disposed by his protege with the implicit agreement of his Servant. By losing the last shred of favor with his Servant, he was disposed of to be replaced with a less competent Magus. If he’s alienated from his countrymen, it might have to do with the lifestyle he and his family chose.

M. Artoria with Nobu: Both suffered attempts on their lives. Both were considered pawns by others. Both flipped the table and showed their inner competence. Both are discriminated due to them being women. Both were among common folks and aware of society’s darker aspects. Common elements in background enable them to bond.

Tokiomi with Goldie: Both are elitists. Both are considered born winners. Both are men and enjoy privileges that come with it. Both didn’t have to endure suffering of the poor and common folks. Common elements in background make them think the other is no better than themselves and built a wall that prevent any sort of mutual understanding to form from the beginning.

#nobutoria #demon archer #master artoria #koha ace #fate series

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artistemmaduehr-blog · 6 years

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Responses to Week 5 Readings

Mr. Lisa goes to Washinton D.C.:

Learn by experiences. We are taught to believe certain things, act in certain ways solely by being taught about American history in a very specific way. Why does the American education system not just speak the damn truth about our history and stop putting us on a high horse for murdering almost 80% of a whole culture! We stole land, we committed genocide, we are CURRENTLY committing a genocide by tearing children away from their families. I always feel so uneducated on this subject because I can’t reference certain dates or names or big timeline changes. have we really put enough effort into raising children to finally change the American way?

like honestly, I just looked up on google, “what was the last country to abolish slavery, Mauritania is.

“Mauritania’s endless sea of sand dunes hides an open secret: An estimated 10% to 20% of the population lives in slavery. But as one woman’s journey shows, the first step toward freedom is realizing you’re enslaved.”

I am so amazed at the process of initiating change, so many people are anti-change which really just means white privilege. Its fighting for your future, putting your whole soul into something you believe in, demanding that enough is enough and not stop the fight until you reach that desire. I think to the Kavanagh case, where so many older women had these few moments of “is this really it? is their final justice for women?” then when he was elected I seriously saw so much hope in older women just DROP. Older women are SO supportive of young women who are fighting the fight. So many of them feel that the Kavanagh case and the election of Trump vs Hillary were 2 big tests that will lead the future of America. If a woman is elected, that's a big ass deal. If a supreme court judge is proved guilty for sexual assault, that a damn big deal. But the BIG AMERICAN WHITE MEN will never be okay with any of that.

Lisa’s experience is Washington lead to this for me. We are raised to believe such high thoughts about the American way, but when people who are actually interested in positive evolving and equality for all, we research and we learn the nasty truth of our American culture. Some people fight for the change, some people are too afraid of the change because they lose that power. BUT, Lisa learned this, she was so supportive and excited and eager to represent, until she learned something she wasn’t taught, something that was kinda hidden from her in our culture. Freedom speech. Teach em young if we really want change to come.

Transgender female gamer:

I am really thankful for the experience of reading this article. I think this was the perfect time to read this article. With the fucked up shit, Trump is trying to pull on Transgender people, seriously? I want to talk about this. I want to learn more about what exactly he is HOPING to do with this bill. What is coming from it? It is not doing anything good, and anyone that believes or supports I view as murders. Trying to take the existence away from a group of people because you don't agree with their lifestyles and beliefs. it's sickening.

But also this article touches on a really important prevalent problem that goes on in the world, the cyber network is largely an abusive network, and I have experienced it many times since starting this new project of mine. The computer is a screen for fucked up people to make fantasies come true, and just to play a sick game. At first with my experience of cyberbullying, I just said shove it off, its just a comment, don't engage with them. & I did ignore it. UNTIL 3 guys started attacking me and my followers and threatening to rape us because we are “women and we deserve to be raped.” I posted a statistic “1 of 4 girls in the U.S. experience sexual assault before 18.” and comments such as “Lets get it to 3 out of 4 girls by 2020, who’s with me” yeah that really fucked up comment, but the REALLY fucked up part is when about 9 people LIKED HIS COMMENTS! THESE PEOPLE BREATHE ARE AIR AND WALK THIS EARTH. I CAN NOT FATHOM HAS SICK, SAD, FUCKD UP, AND INSECURE THESE PEOPLE NEED TO BE TO FEEL ITS OKAY TO ATTACK PEOPLE BECAUSE of THEY ARENT LIKE THEM.

Albina District:

When I moved to PDX and preparing to move here, I had no knowledge of this. I viewed Portland as a diverse, evolving city that is aware of many social struggles and obstacles. Since moving here I have definitely learned otherwise; with where I work, with this article, and how diverse the city really isn't actually.

I think this is such an important article and piece of Portland history that everyone that lives here, visits, and makes art here should definitely be aware of. I couldn’t help but ask myself the whole time while i was reading, “have I been here? What is it like now?” Turns out I have visited the Albina district and parts of it have actually been some of the neighborhoods I have enjoyed most, like Mississippi & Alberta. This just shows that now the city of PDX is totally gentrifying that neighboorhood again by trying to make it a “hip art scene.” I was talking to some of my local friends around the time I was reading this and 2 of the 3 didn't know about the history, both are Hispanic, whether that is important or not, they didn't know about the history of the neighborhood. the other friend knew all about it and even mentioned the underground tunnels of sex trafficking in Portland, called the “Shanghai Tunnels.” She has said that she noticed the cultural differences that are still ever present in the area, I said I never noticed, she said yeah because Portland tries its best to cover it up yet still trying to keep minorities out. It really is a racist town.

I thought my small town was just a small town where just most older community members were just racist and seen as normal, I wanted to leave this so bad. I moved to Portland. Racism is everywhere. In a city, I had so many high thoughts about for being diverse and aware in the country, but so present here. Wealth, Racism, discrimination is all over the city of Portland. Racists do not see the wrong in their thoughts. Wealthy talking shit about the homeless, like help them then? Do something about it, instead of saying “get them out of here.” Same with the topic of the wall, it seems that all the wealthy care about is making sure minorities never get the money they have. So fucked up.

Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics

Antagonism: active hostility or opposition.

the relationship that emerges between such incomplete entities.

legable middle ground.

contradictory beliefs

nor is real difference equal to antagonism

presence of the other

antagonism-you have to engage with it. view of the limits of society to constitute itself

needs to have specificity

look who isn't there. who is present?

criticizing Borough

aesthetic

inamate- togetherness

transcendent

members that identify with each other because they have something in common with one another

Who goes to galleries?

art people

family of

curators

buyers

critics

emma

people with interested eyes

people that feel comfortable

“I do not want to invite or oblige viewers to become interactive with what I do: I do not want to activate the public. I want to give of myself, to engage myself to such a degree that viewers confronted with th work can take part and become involved, but not as actors.”

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rennyji · 3 years

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July 14th Morning Tweets...

So, they say what isn’t from God, doesn’t last.

So while religions fight each other over biases toward each other, they gotta realize it is The Will of God that they all exist to the present day. It is because they are from God that they exist to the present day. When people like me come across religions, I see puzzle pieces to one truth.

One religion can help us understand the other.

Hinduism (though seen as polytheistic), in my belief, and probably among the more educated, is a monotheistic religion. Hinduism is what is known as a pluralistic religion. If I remember correctly, the religion, which is not just a religion, but a lifestyle/culture/societal structure, incorporated the local belief practices and idols of the places/local villages it spread. The concept is that it works with peoples existing religions. They first Hindu teachers, spreading their religion, would tell the village they’re trying to include, “join our religion, for ur god is just another face of our One True God.” Technically, the household deity of a Hindu household could be Jesus from Christianity, as Jesus would he seen as “one of many forms” of The One God.

Now Islam may find problems with some of the idols incorporated because, for one thing, they resemble, in appearance, the Jin from their belief system. While Americans turn the jin into genies, they are actually demons, and not the dedicated house wife blonde in “ I Dream of Jeanie.” Sometimes, because of the business of life and lack of time to think, even the practitioners of belief of the idols of Hinduism, forget that those idols are accepted in the overall religion because they are possibly believed to be an illusion of appearance of the One God. In their confrontations with Islam, the Muslims may encounter Hindus very much attached to the physical appearance of their idols and forgetting or never realizing that there is only One God. They may encounter tribal practices that the pluralistic Hinduism tolerated, for the purpose of initiating a culture, a structure, to people spread across the vast subcontinent of India, currently home to 1 billion + people.

I think at its core, Hinduism is about the One God taking the forms of the Trimurti, kind of like the Christian Trinity. In Christianity, there is Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Muslims call The Father, The Creator. As I understand, they don’t believe in the Son (FYI Muslims see Jesus or Yesu or or some variation of the name as a prophet and not God) and the Holy Spirit.

That being said, The Father is the Creator, The Son is like a Preserver of good and tries to spread it, and the Holy Spirit is the guide to our lives, from my belief. That relates to the Hindu Trinity in that in their Godhead, Brahma is the Creator, Vishnu is the Preserver, and Shiva is the Destroyer. The two religions differ in the third person of the Trinity- I mean the idea of A holy spirit vs. A destroyer (though a destroyer by nature or role, still prayed to by followers for needs/desires ). Like all religions, Hinduism believes we are in End Times. They call it Kali Yuga. Yuga is a reference to a Period of time. After the time of destruction of evil, we enter Satya Yuga, a time of good. But the world goes through a cycle from Satya Yuga to Kali Yuga multiple times because of human nature. It gives a clear understanding of man. During good times, times of peace, people get too comfortable. It can get to the point they are not alert to the changing times, not mindful of their behaviors, or acting like animals which is fueled by desire/impulse and lacking a thinking mind and heart. In the Bible, God sends prophets to warn man of a path that leads to destruction. The message is “Repent, for the time is near or the end is near.”

Here, in my situation, there are advertisements for mind reading/mind control. When Christ returns and/or the 10th Avatar of Vishnu: Kalki (depicted as a rider of a white horse…sounds like something from Revelations), have you wondered what kind of insane army of people fights Christ, following the Rapture? Perhaps the members of the army are mind controlled and lack common sense and free will.

To be honest, I don’t understand what motivates a mass group of people to follow the instructions of a few, surrounding one individual.

I’m just a passerby, going from place to place. If you team up against me, a nobody, suddenly it becomes evident that you will actually fight in defiance against the forces of the end times.

Have you heard of the demon Legion from the Bible that was cast into pigs? The demon says call us Legion, for we are many. You have the conscious instructions of the orchestrators uniting a large group of people against one individual. Was Legion of the Bible also a metaphor for this behavior of mankind I.e. mindless naively-trustful-instruction-following? Well, it sounds corny in America, but in the face of forces against the mind, remember that you consist of mind and heart. Know what’s in ur heart, follow what’s in your heart, while your mind may be susceptible to external influences. Your identity resides in ur heart and cannot be affected by the forces your mind may be susceptible to.

In brushing with Hinduism, I came across the concept that “all is one” and the differences we see are part of the “illusion of life.” Sounds deep for an American. But as a Christian, this helped me understand Holy Communion better. In receiving this Sacrament, we are becoming One with The Body of Christ or One with God Himself. Just like a mother or father tells their children “you are a part of me”, we are destined to be One with Our Father (as Christians say) or One with The Creator ( as Muslims probably say). Our prayers get answered, miracles happen, when we are like a diamond chair that God will find worthy to sit on-Or when we are one in body and mind with The Creator…how do you picture something like that: I.e. being one with God? You can picture it as being in a hug with a Being of Light, or for Christians, being in a hug with Jesus. Through the act of hugging, you occupy one point in space, kind of like being one, physically. How do you become one with God in mind and spirit? By following the Golden Rule: love God first and foremost, and love ur neighbor like urself. In loving God, you live life in a way Big Daddy-O would be proud of.

You always acknowledge the good things are not because you deserve them, but because The Really Really Big Guy (as Steve Urkel refers to God when talking to Carl Winslow in an episode of Family Matters) or Pops (a.k.a. The Really Really Big Guy), want His children with the best in life. You are “blessed” or privileged because God, your Daddy, wants whats bests for you and for you to have the best. You acknowledge and always remember you are nothing without Him. You love ur neighbor like yourself by being in service to mankind.(in my case, you can be a neighbor to me and tell me what’s going on, cuz I’m sure you wouldn’t wish this on urself or ur loved ones…but getting back to the point…). When people hear things like this, they think priest. When they hear service to mankind, they think something like a missionary. I’m saying you just gotta be ur cool self while holding a door for someone or sticking up for someone or simply being the best version of you and privileging someone with your company- I mean use common sense to be blunt, or live with ur heart.

Oneness with God is the unspoken goal of all religions. We, along with the Universe or the multiverse or whatever, came into being through an explosion or a bang or The Big Bang (sound of an explosion) that comes from God thinking, or voicing His Thought. From the resulting vibrational energy of God thinking/speaking with His powerful voice, like a wave, we echoed into existence. And through the gift that is life, which is a manifestation of God, we echo back. But as there is a heaven/hell or believed to be or if it’s not just a state of mind (as elaborated in previous tweets/blog), existence could be a purification process. We are all part of the Body of Christ. Christ is the mind, the Divine Plan for all Creation, (or for non Christians, the Godhead is the head of the body that is creation) and we are members of the Body of Christ or The Body of the Divine. Bodies can have cancers that need to be removed. Those who misuse the gift of life-assuming life is a purification process in one aspect, from one angle-I think…are removed as tumors from the Body of Christ. They go to hell.

In the Body of Christ, in this life, in the next, we all have a function. Ive said it before and I’ll say it again: you were born to be a titan, as you are Child of God or have ancestry sourced in something as cosmic and magnificent sounding as “from the beginning of time” (<-you are here today because so was ur great great great to infinity grand parents at the dawn of time).

You, whatever ur current circumstance in life, are royalty.

Act with class and dignity.

If we are part of the body of God, then we’re not typical cells and organs. We have super functions and it is our job in life to figure that out, carry it out, and at least follow the Golden Rule. If the heart turns against the kidney or liver, how does the body function? We are all equal parts to a whole, a family of a world before ANY nation, required to help each other, in the same way the heart, kidney, liver, etc. work together to bring harmony in the body. We need to bring harmony to our world, or epically put: our existence. You wanna know what one form of God looks like? Well you see it all round you in people, places, things. Why? Because creation is a manifestation of the Divine. We are God’s thoughts/words taking form. What we view as separate is just an illusion or trick of the mind. The heart and kidneys are nothing on their own. They are identified through, and as part of, the body they reside. Person A and Person B and New York City and Dallas, Texas and the Middle East and the airplanes that go to/from and the phone I’m typing on and the stars and planets in space, are all parts of the Body of Christ or the Body of the Divine or are One Manifestation of the Divine. This ideology I’m sharing is my understanding of the Body of Christ image, through the lens from Hinduism about us being the manifestation of the Divine and things in life depicted under the illusion of separate. A different religion helped me gain better understanding of my own.

So being the manifestation of the Divine, while alive on this earth, clean up, perfect, beautify yourselves and everything around you. We are One Body and we gotta be our best and look our best.

We are the suit that God wears or the cool shades on His All Seeing Eyes. It’s a whole new kind of “Representin’…”

We are God’s thoughts echoing into formation, and we will echo back into the light, or another way of putting it: like a mom or dad holding their baby and spending every second with them till it’s time for preschool, in our beginning, before we were formed in our mother’s womb, God held us, and did the hard thing for any parent, and let His kids leave Him to go to the school and series of classes that is life. Jesus says we are to be a light to the world. Life or our figurative classes or life’s wonders, trials, tribulation is so that we can graduate from “Life School” and be light in this world, and ultimately echo back to The Light or the origin of electromagnetic thought waves or the sound waves resulting from The Powerful Voice commanding our creation. When our wave echoes back to The Source, after completing the training/purifying process of life to be one with God, so that our frequencies match, we are ultimately returning to His embrace or His hug. That is our destiny: Heavenly Bliss.

In the school of Life, we don’t all have to be valedictorians or salutatorians. We don’t all have to go to a figurative college. Do what you can, for you and for others, with what you have- for your Father, your Creator, knows you did your best. So different religions floating through my head helped me put that thought into writing on the fly.

I recently mentioned the power of prayer. Prayer is a way for us to program ourselves and our reality.

From being made in the Image of God, we are children of God,

and thereby little gods.

Act with class, act with dignity, be who you were born to be.

I said prayer is a way to program reality. Im a computer science graduate. I learned to use the language of computers to create what you see on your computer screens. This too has given me perspective as to the value of all the religions in the world. In programming, we have what is known as high level languages and low level languages, if I remember correctly. I see Christianity as a high level language. It encapsulates a lot of complexities and makes things easy for people through “data encapsulation”. Christ blackboxes (I think that’s the word) or hides the hard things you have to learn to be enlightened, by saying “Love God first and foremost, and your neighbor like yourself.” That’s also a summary of the 10 Commandments given to Moses and seen as Judaism. Christ sums up many and deep spiritual lessons in His parables.

Here’s a computer metaphor: parables are like computer zip files or compressed files. A zip file is a file that can contain multiple files and folders in the convenience of one smaller file. You use a program to unzip that one file to reveal the multiple files and folders. The parables are zip files and you can gain a myriad of advice, lessons, truth from the same story.

The program you use to unzip a parable is “insight” and “life experience.” These things open our eyes to different perspectives on the same parable, or story.

I said Christianity is a high level language and that there are low level languages and even machine code. Machine code are the 1’s and 0’s you hear about with computers. To break that down further, a 1 is an electrical charge and 0 is the lack of it. Then there’s what’s known as assembly language. Assembly language puts a sequence of these 1’s and 0’s in association with English keywords. It can be complicated. Then there’s ur high level languages. This allows the programmer to speak to a computer in English while not having to know about special keywords and sequences of 1’s and 0’s or electrical charges. Christ tells us that in order go to Heaven, or from the Buddhist perspective: to reach Enlightenment, follow the Golden Rule and exercise your ability to believe, for this sums up the Commandments from the time of Judaism. Jesus tries to make salvation easy and accessible for everyone.

Hinduism, from how I see it, is like assembly language and machine code. Being the 1s and 0s of religions, it’s like working under the hood of a running vehicle. Sometimes it is necessary to open the metaphorical “black box” to fix the vehicle as a whole or to put the vehicle in the right direction. However with Hinduism, there’s a lot to learn. Among those things: Mantras, meditation, yoga, a lot to read, and sometimes in Sanskrit. I’m personally interested in it, because Hinduism is not just a religion, but perhaps the source of the culture of one billion people in the subcontinent of India. We have our own health system in Ayurveda. It’s not just about enlightenment, but it gives a specific guide for health, and roles in life.

The Hindus have a belief that the stars have control over our lives, that there is a fate, hence astrology. I personally like astrology to learn about potential personalities, not really into future predicting. So, according to Hindus, the stars govern us.

Now from a Christian perspective, when Christ was born, there was a star over His birthplace guiding the Wise Men, who happened to be Iranian Zoroastrians or at least Zoroastrians, if I remember correctly. Just an example of how God, as understood by Christianity, is the God of all religions and Whose family consists of everyone. But regarding the star guiding the wise men to Jesus’ birthplace, I believe the new “Jesus star” is a symbol that we can be more than what the programming of the “already existing” stars from Hinduism dictate for the framework or even future for individual lives. The stars may say person A can only marry person B or that person C had to be a doctor. But Christ says, if we exercises our minds, if we believe we can move mountains and walk on water. Through communication you can resolve relationship problems, console others, leave an impact on this world.

The Word of God created human beings and the universe, according to belief systems.

Assuming we are little gods from being made in the Image of God, our words have power.

If not to command the winds and storms, we can use communication to better all relationships, to practice diplomacy- that itself is a great power, greater than our fists or any weapon.

As I’m Indian, like my Pakistani, and Bangladeshi brothers, we have Indian Hindu ancestry. Things like the restrictions of the caste system, once for the purpose of giving order/structure to a primitive society and making sure every niche or role in society was fulfilled, were among a source of problems, making our ancestors seek alternative options. Seeing a different perspective on faith and life were another reason for alternative options to religion. Ive wondered why my ancestors personally converted from Hinduism to Christianity. There are stories that they were Brahmins (the upper priestly/teacher class) or Ksatriyas (the warrior class). On a sidenote, I remember learning that the first Brahmins who traveled down the vast Indian subcontinent, spreading/teaching the religion, were from around the Punjabi region of India. As Hinduism forgot about its monotheistic roots, one enlightened group of people from the Punjabi region formed Sikhism, with emphasis on whole hearted love for One God being the key attribute of the religion. I believe other religions came about as well, focusing on the mind and monotheism.

But back to my ancestors and their possible caste roles…When I was in college, I met an Indian from the Indian state of “Gujarat” . Her last name made me think. Her last name was “Brahmaksatriya.” That’s sounds like a combination of the aforementioned words of “Brahmin” and “Ksatriya”. I’d like to think my ancestors were a special breed of what that last name alludes to in my mind: “Warrior Monk” or Brahma-ksatriya. I mean it sounds like Master Roshi from the Dragon Ball series…but it could just be my fantasy…

I think my ancestors converted to Christianity, because it is the metaphorical high level language. You don’t have to know all sorts of texts and ways of life through the Christian path to Oneness with God or The Divine. Was that my ancestors being lazy? Well let’s look at it from the perspective of the orchestrators. They seem to try to control every aspect of my life. With all the random details that come their way from constant monitoring, it’s clouded their vision and made them blind to seeing me, as me. Sometimes too much information can do that. Sometimes you need the highlights. Perhaps all the details around the specifics to the universe like assembly/machine language for computers was just clogging my ancestors minds in trying to achieve new heights in life. Perhaps knowing the Golden Rule and the power of belief gave my ancestors a perspective on moving mountains and walking on water. Perhaps they realized they could be more than priests/monks/warriors/or even warrior monks. Perhaps they saw a limitless approach in the Christian path or gained the idea that they can be and achieve anything, as not even the stars can contain the “Might of Our Existence.”

“Believe and you can move mountains...” Be doubt free that your Father will take care of things, and you can walk on water.

Christians say a prayer at the beginning/end of their day or before every meal to thank God for the food they eat and to bless it and to make them worthy to consume it (as there are people without sustenance in this world). I believe doubtless prayer from strong disciplined minds can make those meals, the Hindu concept of “Saatvic” in nature. I believe the power of prayer can make those meals Halal or Kosher without the physical actions, but through the power of our minds, hearts, and Spirit. I believe the high level language of Christianity wants us to take things up a notch and strengthen our minds and follow our hearts in practice of the Golden Rule. Doubtless Belief is stronger than any mantra or meditation. But that being said, mantras and meditation can remove the doubts and strengthen belief as one possible route to such belief.

Believe, don’t get lost in the details and rules and regulation of religions. You are royalty in being children of the Divine. Know that you are taken care of, do what’s appropriate for your life using insight that transcends right/wrong, while practicing the Golden Rule.

Want something secular on the power of belief? Have you heard of the DC superhero: Static Shock? In the animated series, he runs into a future version of himself (time travel stuff) who is more developed, stronger, and a more accomplished version of his younger self. In the face of all that awesomeness, the younger Static Shock asks, “HOW?!” In a powerful/mature tone, despite the whole electricity powers, Static’s future self responds, “Believe in yourself, for “that” is your greatest power.”

So that’s my long thought on the fly.

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junephang2021 · 3 years

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Cultural differences: collectivism vs individualism

In the case of HAPPINESS:

“In the case of the SHARING mapping [Source: SHARING; Target: HAPPINESS], the concept of HAPPINESS pertains to social aspects of this emotion and reflects the collectivist nature of Korean society. “Sharing,” as an idea and an act, can be considered one of the most important norms of Korean society as it relates to establishing, maintaining, strengthening, and fostering social relations within a community. Such reciprocal social interactions are understood as keeping harmony within the society.” (Türker, 2013, p. 102).

One of the most interesting discussions I had with nearly all of my participants was how collectivism might be reflected in the Korean language. Interestingly, there was a consensus that Korean culture leans toward collectivist, group-centered values, but when asked to describe happiness through Korean metaphor, none cited the HAPPINESS IS SHARING mapping, and most descriptions of general expressions of happiness in Korea did not align with the sense of sharing described in the selection above. The following statements reflect a strong sense of collectivism in Korean society, but through the perspective of modesty rather than sharing:

“In Korea, [happiness] is kind of a silent moment. They seem more humble. They are very reflective of their happiness, and it’s very deep for them. They cherish it.” (Anna, 22)

“[Koreans] don’t brag or show off, it’s more subdued. Maybe it’s a lasting effect of Confucianism, but I think it’s rooted in modesty. It’s easier to show off your happiness through others’ achievements rather than your own.” (Shin, 26)

“North Americans are more willing to show [happiness] than others. Koreans are a little shy showing their contentedness to others by fear of showing off.” (Heejin, 58)

“In the US, people start talking about why they are happy. They talk first, and it goes [along] with their feelings. In Korea, they feel first, and then later they express [their happiness]. Koreans don’t want to show off or brag, that’s part of their cultural manners.” (Isaac, 65)

The notion that happiness should be kept to one’s self out of consideration for others is an interesting approach to collectivist social norms. The emergence of potential cultural mappings for the expression of HAPPINESS in Korea, like HAPPINESS IS DEPTH, or HAPPINESS IS MODESTY, indicates a difference in the role of HAPPINESS between American and Korean culture, even as a “desirable” emotion (as opposed to ANGER or SADNESS).

The following quote touches on HAPPINESS IS DEPTH:

“American [happiness] just feels easier. Maybe I associate happiness in Korea to getting to the point you wanna be at. In America, it’s easy, it’s shallow. In America, I’ll be happy when I have fun with friends, party, whatever. I had a good time, and I feel happy, but to me, that’s not true happiness.” (Minseok, 28)

The following quote touches on HAPPINESS IS SHARING:

“In Korea, we try to hide our happiness. But [America and Korea] are very similar in how people express happiness, even with different cultures. Sharing happiness in Korea is a good thing as well, not like sadness or anger. Still, there’s hesitation of being too open about it in Korea.” (Sanghoon, 52)

And this quote touches on HAPPINESS IS A NATURAL FORCE:

“I would say that Koreans are more expressive about their happiness. North American happiness kind of feels like a lifestyle issue; people are figuring out what makes them happy, they set goals and emphasize mental health, self care... It almost feels like an industry, there’s a bit of a weird obsession over it. In Korea, they find happiness is simple things, like ‘this coffee is really good.’ They just let happiness happen, whereas in America, it’s something that needs to be managed.” (Maya, 31)

Maya (31) characterizes happiness as something to be “let happen,” indicating passivity on the part of the person feeling happiness. Describing happiness in America as “something to be managed” directly positions this American happiness opposite the passive Korean one--in America, the person is an active agent, seeking and manipulating their happiness. The emergence too of HAPPINESS IS AN INDUSTRY in English/America also signals an absence of passivity on the part of the person.

If indeed the collectivist values of community, collaboration, and sharing produce cultural mappings in Korean metaphor and/or emotion expression, they manifest differently. According to my participants, Koreans seem to internalize their happiness so as not to brag or compete with others. However, they externalize it as well, to share the positive emotion with their group or community. I am led to wonder whether sharing one’s happiness and “shared happiness,” the former carrying a risk of bragging while the latter does not, need to be differentiated in this case.

In the case of SADNESS:

“The SHARING metaphor [Source: SHARING; Target: SADNESS], as I mentioned earlier in regard to the HAPPINESS concept, reflects the importance of sharing in the Korean cultural model. Korean society and culture are strongly collectivistic, as opposed to the Western individualistic society. The source domain of SHARING yields only one linguistic expression, in which SADNESS is conceptualized as a concrete object to be shared by two or more people (e.g. seulpeumeul (hamkke) nanuda ‘X share sadness (together)’). There is a Korean saying, “If you share happiness, it increases; if you share sadness, it decreases by half,” which depicts perfectly the collectivist nature of the culture. Therefore, this metaphor should be considered another culture-specific metaphor.” (Türker, 2013, p. 114).

In my data, a similar pattern to that of HAPPINESS occurs where the participants perceive Koreans deal with their SADNESS individually, and tend less than Americans to readily express it.

“If I were to guess, sadness [in America] kind of seems like something people need to shed or get rid of as quickly as possible, whereas maybe in Korea it’s more of something that is taken and compartmentalized. There might be more of a culture of absorbing [sadness] in Korea.” (Abigail, 19)

“To me, [Korean sadness] is more repressed. They hold it deep down.” (Anna, 22)

“I associate [Korean] sadness with solitude. We deal with our sadness alone.” (Jordan, 23)

“Korean folks don’t necessarily allow themselves to healthily express sadness.” (Shin, 26)

“Koreans have Han, which I associate with just staying quiet and going through [their sadness].” (Minseok, 28)

“There’s a hyper competitive culture in Korea. They don’t want to express their feelings. They have a fear of burdening others, and they don’t want to show vulnerability, which I think is a fear of judgment as well. If you break the mold, you become alienated.” (Jacob, 32)

One participant cited the opposite:

“North Americans are more subdued, controlled in expressing sadness. In old Korean movies, you see groups of people crying, sobbing together. They share their sadness, they share their burden.” (Heejin, 58).

An interesting dichotomy around “shared burden” emerges in discussions about Korean sadness. Majority of participants feel that Koreans are hesitant to share their sadness with others for fear of burdening them, but some do align with the data in Türker (2013), and see the burden of sadness as something to be shared and born together. If there is a consensus among my participants that the SADNESS IS A BURDEN metaphor exists in Korea, there are different ideas of how this sadness should be expressed, despite the common motivation of benefiting the collective rather than the individual.

In the case of ANGER:

There is less data in my research and interview data that indicates correlation between anger expression and culture in Korea and America. My participants expressed a wide range of perceptions of how anger is expressed in the two cultures.

ANGER in Korea is more reserved:

“Anger in America is a lot more outward, clearly communicated. I think anger is more internal in Korea.” (Abigail, 19)

“Americans are bold and straightforward. Koreans circle around [anger], especially women.” (Olivia, 25)

“A lot of Korean people are not outwardly emotional, there’s a lot of repressing emotions, I find, due to manners, society, formality--there are a lot more social rules.” (Maya, 31)

“Anger tolerance is higher in Korea. In the US, people are blunt, they tell you what they’re feeling right away. In Korea, they keep it more inside. They hide their feelings. They don’t want to burden others either.” (Jacob, 32)

“In Korea, being angry, especially in public, is not as acceptable as in American culture.” (Benjamin, 33)

“Expressing anger in America is very casual to me, anger is embedded in a lot of day to day language and behavior...[Americans] freely throw anger around in their day to day communications. In Korea, a lot of people get offended when you use that kind of communication.” (Sanghoon, 52)

Most of the reasons for increased reservation regarding anger expression in Korea reflect the social emphasis on collectivism: politeness and proper conduct.

ANGER in Korea is more outward:

“I think Koreans, specifically people from Busan, according to stereotypes are much more stoic and prone to anger. They’re quick to let it out.” (Jordan, 23)

“In Korea, if you get mad, you get mad. In America, people, especially women, are more conditioned to be passive aggressive.” (Shin, 26)

“In Korea, [people] might say, ‘I’m gonna kill you,’ and that doesn’t really mean they’re going to kill you, but they are expressing their anger and feelings straight. People in the US cannot do that, they select their words carefully.” (Isaac, 65)

ANGER in Korea is depth, or a potential ANGER IS DEPTH mapping:

“In American culture, anger is petty, it’s pointless. It’s privileged. Korean anger can be petty and shallow too, but it’s more internalized, and deep.” (Minseok, 28)

ANGER in Korea is like ANGER in America

“I don’t think there are cultural differences. Rather, there are personal differences. Some people express [anger] more actively, and others just take more passive aggressive attitudes.” (Heejin, 58)

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fucktheoryquestions · 6 years

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On The Economics of Higher Education

I would like to ask you a question I've been thinking of for a while, if you have the time. I have just started my PhD in Anthropology in University of Helsinki, and I have been involved in quite a few student campaigns against university reforms (of neoliberal kind). Yet still all our universities are public institutions, there are no tuition fees and all students receive student allowance, so our situation is quite different than in, say, UK and US. I've been able to study two majors without acquiring any debt, which is quite common here. My question is: Do you think university system that is publicly funded and free for all students (and adjunct staff is payed comparatively well) still has some of the irredeemable qualities that you describe in your critique of US elite universities? Best wishes, Viljami Kankaanpää-Kukkonen

Hi, I appreciate the question, thanks for letting me respond publicly so I don’t have to answer it more than once.

Before I answer your question let me say what perspective I’m speaking from. I’ve been in the US for 10 years. My involvement in American academia was mostly at private institutions on the East Coast, though I took a few seminars and spent time at Rutgers and CUNY, as well. Before that, I did my undergraduate education in Berlin at the Free University. I was in the last generation of students at the FU who graduated with a traditional German Magister degree; even before I graduated, the FU began to implement the accords of the Bologna Process, which aimed to unify educational standards across the EU and which led to a splitting of the Magister degree into American-style BA and MA programs. I haven’t been involved in European academia in the past 10 years. My “data” consists in 10-year-old experience with the German system; extensive 10-year-old familiarity with the British and French systems; and passing 10-year-old acquaintance with the Italian and Dutch systems. I’m sure that higher education in Europe has changed a great deal in the past 10 years in response to the pressures and forces you describe as “neoliberal,” so take everything I say in light of these ongoing developments.

Very simply put: the more “Americanized” an educational system becomes, the more its structure and consequences will resemble the structure and consequences of the American education system. The most distinctive feature of the American university system is its exorbitant cost, and its relation to debt and hence to the labor market. So the shortest answer I can give you is No, a free or cheap university system does not share all the dangerous implications of the American system. That said, the disciplinary and organizational nature of the European system is very similar to the American system and growing more so. I don’t think humans are “rational actors,” but I do think we constantly perform conscious or unconscious cost/benefit analysis, and I think it’s easy to see why the cost of an American higher education is much greater than the cost of a European higher education, not only in dollars but also in anxiety, in preparation, and in non-academic lifestyle commitments required to access and survive the university. The higher the cost of attending a European university becomes, the more that system will resemble the American one

That’s the short answer, and anyone who’s reading this can feel free to stop reading here; the rest of this post is just an elaboration.

Your e-mail mentions “other countries” generally, but I’m not comfortable speaking about countries I don’t know enough about. I’ve met and studied with and read papers by academics from all over the world, and I know some vague stories, but that’s not the same thing as having concrete knowledge of economic relations, so I’m going to localize the rest of my response and frame it as a comparison between the American and the European systems with which I’m familiar.

A free university system cannot engage the same socio-economic relation to the labor market and to personal debt that the American university system currently engages. The difference has to do with a different relation of the institution to the state and to private capital, as well as to the job market and to relations of labor and production more generally. For these reasons, I consider the European university less irredeemable and pernicious than the American one.

It shares many of the same features and problems, especially on the inside of the institution and in the production of knowledge, but I think the social role of the university is less compromised and dangerous and I think European universities could be improved more easily than American ones – for now. As we’ve already noted, the twin ideologies of privatization and austerity are pushing hard to “Americanize” higher education in Europe and elsewhere. The more successful these efforts are, the more irredeemable the university becomes.

Before I continue, please note that while I’m less critical of the European university system, I’m not holding it up as an ideal or a model or ignoring its very real problems. For example, I discuss the non-academic (vocational/professional) higher education system in many European countries as opening up more paths to financial stability than are available in the US. I stand behind that claim, but I’m also very aware that the parallel higher education systems in Europe have a classist function and a classist history, serving mostly to route upper and upper-middle class students to universities and poorer students to vocational schools. I’m also keenly aware that I went to university in a city (Berlin) that has more Turkish residents than Ankara, but I can count on one hand the number of Turkish students that sat in seminar rooms with me at that university. Etc., etc. This is not an encomium to the European higher ed system, it’s just a description of some crucial differences.

There are at least three major differences between the American and the European higher education systems:

· Debt

· Non-academic higher education

· Public system only vs. public/private dual system

I’ll expand on all these, but first we can observe that despite a profound difference in the economic relations in which the university is embedded, a fascinating aspect of the question is that there is fairly little difference between higher education systems in terms of content and style. You find the same plodding, obfuscatory writing; the same laborious processes of peer review; the same behind-the-scenes politicking and reputation-based privilege; the same interests and questions, though often with different approaches or angles; and most importantly, the same canon of concepts and thinkers and disciplines. This fact reinforces my belief that the discourse of the university performs a similar organizing social function (what Gramsci describes as “traditional” intellectual activity) everywhere, regardless of the specific hegemonic structure it’s serving or upholding. In this context, it’s worth distinguishing a critique of the university as an institution embedded in a specific economy from a critique of the discourses produced in the institution. These aren’t separate questions: there’s only one economy. But these questions operate in different registers, because the critique of the production of knowledge goes all the way back to Plato and beyond while the critique of the university’s current economic entanglements can’t go beyond the material history of those entanglements while remaining in any way immanent.

Back to the three big differences I listed.

Debt is the biggest one, by far.

I graduated from a European university debt-free. I paid registration fees every semester and I had to house and feed myself, but I didn’t have to pay exorbitant tuition fees. I certainly didn’t have to take out a loan at the age of 18 that would follow me the rest of my life. This difference is the single most important difference, because it doesn’t just change other relations, it changes the weight of other relations. A damaging situation is bad; a damaging situation is 100 times worse if you have no way of getting out of it or putting it behind you.

If you’re German and you get into a university and you find it utterly unbearable and traumatizing, you can just leave. You’ve spent some time, you might disappoint yourself or other people, but you’re not in debt, your parents didn’t spend $80,000. If you’re 20 years old and you’ve already signed the loan papers and you’re $80,000 in debt already after just 4 semesters, you’re going to think really fucking hard about starting over in a different program, or leaving school to do something non-academic. You’re much more likely to stay on a path you’re not happy with. And even if you do make the choice to leave, that debt can still follow you around the rest of your life unless you manage to adjust very effectively to a highly profitable new career path. If you spent $160,000 on a law degree from Yale then start practicing law and discover you absolutely hate it, you’re probably going to practice law for a few years anyway because otherwise you’re changing careers $160,000 in debt (that’s one hundred and sixty THOUSAND dollars). Minimum wage in Connecticut is currently $10.10 dollars an hour

Maybe this isn’t the case any more, but 15 years ago in much of Europe, you could decide academia wasn’t for you, leave the university, and get a job in a restaurant that would pay all your bills. In other words, you could shift gears to a much lower-pressure lifestyle without serious consequences. But imagine if you have serious student debt and you have $500 deducted from your salary each month? Suddenly you have earn more, even if you want a low-key lifestyle; you take on another job, or you find a job that’s higher-pressure even though you want to shift gears or whatever.

The costs of debt – in labor, in health, in anxiety – are enormous. In this way, there is a much tighter and more vicious link between higher education and the labor market in American than in Europe. There’s no other way to put it – the structure and pressures of the American system mean that Americans have to work, constantly, grindingly, in a way that many (not all) Europeans just don’t have to and honestly can’t understand. The American system presents a double bind: either you are bound to the labor market by debt because you did go to school, or you’re bound to the labor market by necessity because you didn’t go to school and are locked out of higher-paying jobs. The American university system is locked into the economy in a way that presents three options only: serve the system at the top; serve the system at the bottom; or succeed against all odds by being truly exceptional and carving out a space for yourself alongside the system or breaking into it in an unexpected way. There are very few paths to genuine economic prosperity that don’t run through the university system somehow.

The situation in the US hasn’t always been so dire; it got bad under Reagan and has been getting worse ever since. For a couple of decades after World War II, the G.I. Bill and a flood of money to universities made public higher education really affordable in the U.S. for many people. In the ‘60s or ‘70s in the U.S. (so I’m told, I wasn’t here), you could flip burgers for three months during the summer and save up enough money for a year’s tuition at a good state school if you were an in-state student; I doubt that’s still the case anywhere in the U.S., and certainly not at the more prestigious state schools.

Now that the American “middle class” has effectively vanished, we can see what role the university had in making that class disappear. An absolutely crucial element in that process was the defunding of public universities at the state and federal level, which led to massive tuition hikes that have made tuition at the most prestigious public universities almost as high as those at prestigious private ones. Capitalism played a major role in that process, because university pass their costs on to students by framing the rising costs as the availability of additional features, from trendy new disciplines to massive, ridiculous sports facilities. This is a “client-centered” approach to education that directly prioritizes students who can afford to pay. Basically, America no longer has a state-sponsored, debt-free path to prosperity, which Europe still does…for now. Defunding of universities and tuition hikes are the changes that will most quickly introduce debt as a decisive factor and bring the European system in line with the American one, with massive implications for the entire economy, not just for academia in some isolated, abstract way. Keeping the European university system free or at least cheap is unspeakably important and probably impossible at this point.

The relation between the education system and the labor market is also different in that many European countries have vocational or professional higher education that isn’t academic. That’s the second big difference. Craft and trade apprenticeships represent an important bloc that has no equivalent in the US, where most internships are professional position you get after you do a BA, and not instead of doing a BA (not always, but often). There are often but not always alternatives to university-style education in Europe. German interns (Auszubildende, or Azubis) are usually paid and can access no-interest government loans to support themselves when they aren’t. Many people I knew in Germany in the 2000s finished an academic Magister degree and then went on to do an Ausbildung in a completely different area (sound design, lighting tech, theater management) which then became their actual career. Here again the major difference is debt – you don’t need to take on massive debt to study nursing or hotel management in much of Europe – but there is also a difference in the need for critique of the institution. Simply put, if there are effective non-academic paths to prosperity, academics have less of an ethical obligation to critique and correct their institutions, and the institution has less of an exclusive onus to fight against inequality. If we consider “university students” as a socio-political bloc, that bloc is much more massive, diverse, and complex in the United States than it would be in much of Europe.

Third – and this too is linked closely to the question of debt rather than separate from it – a major difference between the US and Europe is the long-standing existence in America of extremely wealthy private universities. In Europe until recently there weren’t many private institutions of higher education. This was changing rapidly even while I was still there, and I’m sure it’s gotten worse. However, it will take a long time before new institutions acquire the prestige and surplus capital which American private universities already have.

The brilliant scheme of the American private university is that it took up the model and the rhetoric of the European, post-Enlightenment liberal university, but without sharing or adopting its economic model, which is that of a state-operated and –funded institution. The American private university is a European liberal shell over a fundamentally different economic motor, which is basically a massive private endowment of religious origin. The biggest American universities weren’t started to train scholars, they were started to train preachers; in this, they had more to do with the medieval canon school than with the post-Enlightenment liberal university. These universities acquired private wealth and land in the manner of traditional Catholic institutions, not in the manner of liberal European universities; now, centuries later, these institutions are basically giant pools of privately-held capital which have an enormous impact on the education, labor, leadership, scholarship, and values of the United States and, indeed, the world, but without any of the regulations that state-funded and –controlled institutions have to endure. These institutions are first and foremost corporate brands and wealth managers; they only teach students incidentally, as a kind of favor to the rich whose money they manage, but despite this they exert an enormous and unhealthy influence on higher education all over the world. For decades, the public university system in the US has worked extremely vigorously to imitate the private model, where instead the American public should have demanded the divestment of property from private universities, or at least an end to their tax-exempt status.

The impact of these institutions can scarcely be overestimated, but they are only the keystone of a vast system that all works together to produce and enforce inequality in the United States. Because the university is an instrument of hegemony and because capitalist hegemony always depends on inequality, the university under capitalism will always be in some ways an instrument and an enforcer of inequality. This statement is always true, but for that reason also fairly banal, because it doesn’t engage with any actual, specific material relations. The difference – as of now – is in the degree to which the entire system interlocks to trap and control the individual. Simply put, because in Europe there is less systemic inequality, less poverty, and more options for non-academic upward mobility (not many, but more than in the U.S.), the effect of the European university can’t be considered as pernicious and total as the effect of the American university. That doesn’t mean there isn’t much to correct and improve, it just means that capitalism has long tended to workshop its oppressions in the Americas first and then exported them elsewhere.

European systems, which have traditionally been national or nationalized, tended to have a single centralized application system and held rigidly to unitary standards of admission and education across the national system, even if certain schools had a better “name” or were more popular. But even before I left Germany, there were already efforts to declare certain universities in the national system “centers of excellence” and to pump money into those places. A major symptom of Americanization is the establishment of a corporate institutional hierarchy, often based equally on actual funding and on institutional PR, between universities in the public system. This idealistic appeal to merit and excellence justifies budgetary inequalities which in turn serve both to defund “less excellent” disciplines and to center education on the interests of funders and not students. Here too a “client-centered” corporate approach claims to serve students but is actually a pretense for increasing inequalities between them, and here too the same conclusion follows as above: the more tiered and hierarchical the national European systems become, the more inequalities will emerge that resemble those of the American system.

Another big difference between the US and Europe traditionally has been a much higher European emphasis on the humanities and “human sciences.” Scientists have always looked down on poets, but until fairly recently in Europe, it was equally the case the poets had the opportunity to publicly and emphatically look down on scientists. When I first lived in Germany as a teenager, I remember regularly seeing literary critics, poets, screenwriters, and other kinds of art and humanities people on TV, in panel discussions (broadcast on daytime network television!) and in newspapers. This too had begun to change by the time I left Germany, and I’m sure it has gotten worse. There’s a reciprocal pressure between intellectuals and institutions devaluing the humanities and the general public devaluing the humanities; as humanities programs disappear from the university humanities programming disappears from mass media. A primary ideological function of the university in modern society is to tell people what’s important and what counts as real knowledge. There are direct and significant consequences to the logic of quantification and its Four Horsemen, S, T, E, and M. Global warming would be easier to fight if so many people weren’t convinced life is impossible without tech, for example. These societal ideological formations don’t begin or end with the university, but they are upheld by it, promoted by it, and routed through it. Consider for example the ways in which STEM professions are dependent on corporations in a way that many humanities jobs aren’t. You can be a high school teacher pretty much anywhere if you speak the language; good luck being a freelance molecular biologist and crowdsourcing a lab. There are material and economic and personal consequences to ideological formations, that’s the whole point of enforcing an ideology, whether consciously or not. Here too it’s a question of degree; we already see the process happening. How far will you let it go? You often hear administrators tell you that the emphasis on STEM comes from students, who just don’t care about literature the way they used to. In my experience, this is nonsense. The proportion of humanities-oriented students and science-oriented students in the average classroom doesn’t change; what changes is the number of students who feel pressured or obligated to try and be science people when they’d rather be studying literature. That is my experience only, I haven’t done any studies.

The importance of fighting to keep European higher education free and accessible doesn’t rest on some liberal ideals of education and equality, but on the very real functions that higher education plays in the general economy, and in the relations of labor and production that express that economy. The European university often serves the interests of industry and private capital, but it is an arm of the state and transmits the values of the state and is susceptible to the pressures of private capital roughly to the same degree that the state itself is. But in America, the leading universities are expressions and instruments of private capital. They are inseparable from it, and they serve as instruments with which private capital applies pressure to the state, rather than as an apparatus of the state on which private capital applies pressure.

At the moment, the differing economic and social relations within which it is embedded make the European university less broken and less harmful than the American university, and with more potential for reparative change. But even as American global hegemony collapses, economic “Americanization” is on the rise everywhere. How far it will go, and what traditional institutions are destroyed or altered in the process, remains to be seen.

#higher ed #student debt #education

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steamishot · 3 years

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social life

i’m in the process of building a social life here. ironically, the more doses of socialization i get, the lonelier i realize i am and therefore feel. it was easier to be a shut in, which was maybe my time to recuperate from all the socializing that i’ve had for the past years. there will most likely not be another time in my young adulthood that i have the privilege of being able to quarantine/isolate myself from the world as such.

i somehow influenced my reddit friend K to also go on bumble BFF. she’s been in LA for almost a year and has not met anyone new. it’ll be an interesting journey to hear how making friends will progress for both of us. yesterday, i met up with A for hip korean food in koreatown. within the first 30 seconds, i already felt “i like her”. conversation between us was a lot more evened out than with T. i felt she was kind, patient, fun, caring and smart. our commonalities include: doing long distance, living with our partners for the first time, being non-east asian, both from california and just moved here, similar values for family/friends/community, hobbies. i knew that i would like to hang out with her again. i wonder if i’m also not being as open minded because i gravitated someone similar to me again. like, instead of finding local friends, i somehow found a girl from CA to be friends with lol. however, i know it’s not entirely my fault because the local girls tend to lose interest or not be as interested either.

the local girls i’ve chatted with do exhibit “work hard, play hard” vibes. perhaps my friends back at home weren’t as hardworking and it’s socal in general with the laidback vibes, but working 60-80 hours a week seemed like a lot to me and my friends. when i mention matt working that much to some girls around here, they just shrug it off as if it’s normal. T mentioned she used to work 60-100 hours a week in the media field on a 55k salary. well, even the CA/SF girl i met also thought it was normal. probably because her husband works for a japanese company and they also work very long hours. now it’s apparent that i live in the most capitalist city of america. one girl i chatted with mentioned how there are so many rich people in nyc, and that the median household income for tribeca, one of manhattans richest neighborhoods, is 700k. google actually says tribeca’s median household is 879k, and in comparison, says beverly hills is 103k. i don’t know how accurate google is but wow, that is a major difference.

it seems like what people do for fun around here revolve around eating at restaurants, bars/speakeasies, partying, shopping, museums and city events (which most require $$$). versus LA/SF where there was a better mix of city vs naturey lifestyles.

a lot of popular nyc restaurants i’ve tried have a modern twist to it. i’ve learned that i have a very traditional palate, that i most often will prefer traditional, “authentic” food to fusion/modern food. this is why matt and i frequent chinatown the most - where the crowd’s median age is like 60 LOL. i also don’t feel like i’m a “play hard” person to justify working that much - i’m more of a “work enough, play a little” type of person hahaha. i’m not very interested in partying, the bar scene, holding a prestigious title, or having expensive clothing. i also feel like my palate is more asian than what nyc is known for so the restaurants i’ve been interested in are actually in the “suburban” areas. let’s see how i assimilate to this nyc culture as time goes on. it is also quite intimidating as i realize the competition here is very cutthroat. even though LA is a big city in itself, somehow i feel like i’m a small town girl. i’ve applied to maybe 20+ UX/UI jobs so far, and i received one rejection letter.

it’ll take time for this laidback socal girl to get used to the hustle and bustle of big city life.

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newanglicanism · 7 years

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Gospel and culture: a vital lesson from the past

As the world around us exhibits an unprecedented pace of change, the language of gospel fidelity and cultural influence, if not contamination, are frequently set against each other. Suspicion of all things identified under a wide designation of ‘culture’ sets up a simplistic, and missionally disastrous, opposition of gospel against culture. Culture is to be feared, rejected, and as best we are able, held at a distance.

The rhetoric of the day is to establish stronger boundaries over and against ‘culture’, and withdrawal into a less contaminated social environment within the church. A powerful ‘us and them’ dynamic emerges, and in more extreme forms can be seen in geographical enclaves or separatist communities. As extreme as that sounds, social disconnection and withdrawal from wider community engagement is already very evident, together with a desire to undertake things from a church controlled platform, as free from values and constraints from the wider community as possible.

Proclamation of the gospel is framed with reference to battlelines shaped in terms of a gospel vs culture battlefield. One very real danger in this is equating gospel life as the way we used to do things as part of our Christian cultural heritage, or more simply, the way things used to be.

Before I explore a vital lesson to be learned from past missionary experience, we need to clarify what is—and is not—meant by the term ‘culture’. Gerard Arbuckle, in his must-read book Culture, Inculturation, and Theologians (Liturgical Press, 2010), discerns three categories of usage: classicist, modern, and post-modern.

The ‘classicist’ notion is readily understood, referring to a singular quality of ‘refinement’, essentially Eurocentric, drawing on advances in the arts and sciences as informing and demonstrating civilised behaviour.

It is the sum total of the spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic aspects of human society. The definition stresses the need to detail the observable phenomena: for example, foods, literature, dances. Cultures are then graded aesthetically, with European civilization as the normative culture at the top of the list. Non-European peoples are definitely inferior, but it is possible for them to acquire the normative civilization with its elite values and lifestyles as gifts from above. (2)

The ‘modern’ category is the one most frequently assumed in much theological and ministry speak. This usage is often reflected in big-picture, paradigmic reviews, where ‘culture’ is used of historical epochs or eras. It is used to name culture as a homogeneous and integrated whole, something that can be identified over and against other cultures. Very common is reference to ‘Western culture’, as though there is such a thing that pervades and identifies all living within western communities and States.

Finally, Arbuckle identifies a more post-modern understanding. ‘[Every culture is fragmented to some degree or other, internally contested, its borders permeable. There is no such thing as a “pure” culture: never has been, never will be. Cultures are hybrid, constantly interacting, mixing, and changing’ (xxi). Far from being homogenous and integrated wholes (as in modern usage), culture reflect ‘polyphonic, fragmentary, and hybrid qualities’, including internal dissent and competing visions.

‘Culture’ defies definition, and in many ways is more extensive than the sum of its parts. Coming with expertise as a cultural anthropologist, Arbuckle both commends and urges the church to engage with culture understood within the complexity of post-modern perspectives. His proposed definition shapes the rest of his book, with each chapter unpacking the significance of recognising how a more complex understanding of culture enables us to understand and engage with our changing world meaningfully and constructively. As Andy Crouch puts it, as culture makers, rather than culture deniers. Arbuckle proposes this ‘working definition’ as broader interplay of notions in understanding what is associated with culture:

Culture is a pattern of meanings

• encased in a network of symbols, myths, narratives and rituals,

• created by individuals and subdivisions, as they struggle to respond to the competitive pressures of power and limited resources in a rapidly globalizing and fragmenting world,

• and instructing its adherents about what is considered to be the correct way to feel, think, and behave.

Now this discussion regarding ‘culture’ is simply preparatory to the main concern I want to raise. It is frequently observed that we appear to be living through a profound nexus of world history. Old norms are being replaced with a bewildering array of ‘new normals’, life looks very different from our childhood memories, and from one generation to the next, constant change is the new reality, whether we like it or not.

The impact on churches, especially those associated with a Eurocentric heritage, is profound. While the re-shaping or decline of major social institutions is widespread, together with community associations, political processes, banks and financial institutions, and ever-adapting or innovating business enterprises, the Christian church finds itself in a much more exposed position socially. The privileged status, resources and shared worldview of earlier times has gone.

How do we relate to this ever-changing new world, complete with more open hostilities, competing social drivers and political agendas? Apart from anything else, a whole new publishing industry of theological and missional analysis and guidance has been birthed!

Navigating and engaging gospel and culture is as real and urgent now as it was in the first century. And it is in this context, and mindful of the temptation to set gospel over against ‘culture’, I want to highlight one vital lesson from relatively recent history, initially identified in the Brandenburg Mission Conference in 1932, and subsequently in the landmark 1952 Willingen conference of the International Missionary Council. At issue was reframing mission not as a missional expansion of the Church (and the European culture of the sending Church), but as a movement of God into the fullness of the world, with all its peoples. The term missio Dei (the sending of God) was introduced.

Reference to the terminology of missio Dei is now widespread (and all who know me know that I am a great advocate), but the origins of the term are more specific. Early usage was cast more in reaction to the strong association between mission and European colonial imperialism, with all the cultural baggage that entailed. The terminology of missio Dei as initially construed was more specific and contextual than later adaptations of the term assume, with a concern to distance mission from colonial cultural agendas (mission as cultural propaganda). Opposition was framed in challenging mission cast as a task of the Christian West in sending missionaries with an agenda of cultural transformation (see further John G. Flett, The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community). This was a massive mistake, to say the least, and one that brought scars across generations, cultural abuse, and a whole host of post-colonial baggage of which we are still hearing, recognising and repenting.

The entanglement of gospel ministry with the preservation of a perceived ‘Christian culture’ is not only mistaken, it is profoundly counter-missional. The gospel, however it is expressed and understood, is invariably inculturated, and necessarily so. Every word, form, and media of Scripture is inculturated, for that is the nature of God. As Karl Barth responded in critique, there can be no separation of God’s missional purposes and the realm of creation. Salvation and redemption cannot be separated from the world in real time and space. God’s mission cannot be experienced or advanced in any form other than in and through culture.

And no culture has an exclusive claim on the gospel. Any and every culture can be redeemed, transformed and improved through the gospel. The missional calling is not to impose one culture over another, nor to withdraw from culture into some hermetically sealed enclave. The sending of God was into the world. The incarnation of Christ was into a place and time, into a world of competing cultures, narratives, rituals and visions. And it must ever be so. The story of the early church, as reflected in every stream of New Testament tradition, is one of the gospel bridging and transforming cultures, of faithfulness to God witnessed through evangelization, that is, the redemptive transformation as social and communal as it was—and is—personal and relational.

I finish with another quote from Arbuckle, written a decade ago, that seems particularly prescient, both in its analysis and gospel affirmation. Alongside recognising the lack of tools available for practitioners to discern and engage with cultural change, together with a reluctance at official leadership levels to sanction experimentation in missional inculturation, Arbuckle detects a third concern:

…a revitalized fundamentalist view that the study of culture(s) is unimportant for evangelization, that it is even a waste of time, and that all we need to do is preach the Good News just as Jesus Christ did in his time! Yet inculturation is a fundamental imperative of the Gospel itself. In fact, Jesus Christ was extremely sensitive in his preaching to the cultures of his day. As the master of inculturation, he knew that his message had to penetrate to the “very roots” of cultures. (xx)

To which I simply say, ‘amen’ to that!

#mission #culture

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busybuffalos · 5 years

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Be Tricky or a Dick but not both.

Congratulations, if you're reading this, you’re human, but this fact doesn’t make you more superior just because these words are written in English.

Just because you’re angry and have privilege doesn’t mean you’re right… And just because you believe something doesn’t mean it’s true. Ignorance is contagious and American society has come to recognize the characteristics of the classic alpha male as strength and virtue which is blatantly ignorant. Though perplexing at times, we accept the proverbial beating of the chest as a necessary trait for effective leadership.

You may have been given the power of intelligence, but that doesn’t mean you’re wise. You might have even found some level of privilege in life using these traits. The idea that we can be both ignorant and intelligent at the same means a division of consciousness. Division implies conflict. This is where we as humans have a common ground in this polarization of politics where Fear is being used as a Pawn, Knight and Rook Bishop and Queen.

When we consider ourselves as part of the whole vs judging and exploiting, peace is found. Humility is the key to the liberation of our suffering. Love is a tool to Shepard us to a better understanding humility.

Our world needs leaders, and I am far from putting myself on a pedestal; however, I would caution anyone from choosing an ignorant lifestyle in the pursuit of an “alpha leader”. Because we are not animals. While this behavior may win one a momentary position of power, it won’t last.

#iam1busybuffalo

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succorcreek · 5 years

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Gillette Video on Men being Woke now: no more Boys will Be Boys male dominism and over entitlement http://bit.ly/2DbeQhQ Gillette takes a stand on bullying and more. I like it. But, the bullies in the world were quick to discredit the video. Why would they discredit, find arcane facts against this? Gaslighting includes the Gaslighters using the arcane as if common fact: Arcane: mysterious, secret, hidden, concealed, covert, clandestine, enigmatic, dark. esoteric, obscure, abstruse, recondite, little known, recherché, inscrutable, impenetrable, opaque, incomprehensible, cryptic, occult, unimportant, not fully accepted by the public or experts, without common evidence or examples, not provable by scientific method, not part of critical thinking Arcane: Abtruse Information used to: discredit confuse distract discombobulate put down in order to support the Gaslighter's over entitlement scheme and schema divide and conquer propaganda disinformation propaganda: to stop the main information aggrandize oneself play games with egospeak This is a great video about Boys Will Be Boys fallacy. How are you buying into that propaganda supporting male dominism and over entitlement? How are you being played to serve another's self-seeking? Critics: do they fit any WORDS from this article??? 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laundryandtaxes · 7 years

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Yea sorry, same ‘Im missing something" anon, this is easier than ask because its complex and I care more about you doing some thinking than coming back with a quick answer about what you already think you know

I’m still missing what this has to do with being a sapphic woman only attracted to women vs those attracted to more genders? Lesbian makes sense as unique label & its important to protect the current meaning of it but, what makes you think other sapphic women have less need for terms that describe ways of being sapphic, interacting with other sapphic women, navigating our queerness? This isn’t cishets stealing “queer” - this is sapphic women who experience homophobia expecting to be treated as part of the sapphic community, and the only difference I see is you pushing us out because we may be attracted to men. If you don’t call us straight but you treat us straight it’s the same thing.

I see your concern about lesbophobia & I respect that. But, to say there is ‘lesbian culture’ that excludes other sapphic women and that there are ideas that came “from lesbians for lesbians”? it just makes no sense unless you don’t think other sapphic women are really sapphic and haven’t always been a part of sapphic culture. Lesbians shouldn’t be forced to ID as anything else, but, how does that mean your needs are unique to other sapphic women? because the idea we can oppress you by being bi is just as wrong as the homophobic “monosexual privilege” idea that some bi people puked up. When you separate lesbian women from bi women you are lumping us in with straight people & that’s just as homophobic as when bi women lump lesbians in with straight women.

To say these butch/femme ideas are “from lesbians for lesbians” means your erasing bi women in the sapphic communities that developed them and, erasing that bi women were deliberately pushed out of and erased from those communities. Even the quickest search suggests exactly what I suspected that butch/femme came from sapphic women as a whole back when 'lesbian’ meant all of us, and, definitely included women who would probably now call themselves bisexual and not lesbian, before we got kicked out and erased by homophobic lesbians who see us as traitors or straight infiltrators

I don’t need a response and to be honest I would be happier if you just took some time to think about this instead of immediately coming back with something defensive.

I just want you to think on this some about, why you are insisting that butch/femme are lesbian only ideas? Why you are erasing sapphic women attracted to other genders from our shared history? And, what do you think you lose if butch/femme labels are open to all sapphic women? (like they were created and always intended to be)

Answer:

I don’t know why you need me to agree with you on this- you presumably have your own blog, and your own mind! You are literally free to disagree, free to make up your own mind, free to follow any number of blogs where “femme” doesn’t really refer to anything at all, free to follow a bunch of “sapphic wlw lesbian is a bad word” style blogs. Have at it! I’m not even mostly being tongue in cheek- these are real options for you. Why not just take them?

Anyway, you’re wrong on several counts.

1. There is no such thing as overarching “sapphic” community in the same sense there isn’t REALLY an overarching LGBT community, even though we reference it when we talk about a group of people. Bi women and lesbians are not the same, or members of the same group. I have no interest in laying claim to “sapphic” as a term, so I am not pushing you out of literally anything.

2. You can use whatever terms you want to talk about specific ways of “being sapphic” or “navigating queerness.” I literally do not care. But neither butch nor femme has anything to do with “navigating queerness,” they are specific ways of experiencing and embodying lesbianism, point blank.

3. At no point have I said bi women oppress lesbians. I think that’s as stupid an idea an monosexual privilege, yes. You’re making an assumption that doesn’t make any sense. Being in a relationship with someone of the ~opposite~ gender obviously affords a number of material benefits, but not all bi people are, have ever been, or will ever be in these kinds of relationships, so I wouldn’t universalize that to bisexuality itself.

4. Bi women and lesbians do not need to be separated with rhetoric because, again, we are literally already separate groups, that share a lot of community, history, and issues (including homophobia) in common. But we are literally not the same. We are not the same because “lesbian” references an experience bi women don’t have, and “bisexual” references an experience lesbians do not have. This is fine. It is okay for us to be different. It is okay to celebrate difference, to see it as diversity. But to say lesbians and bi women are roughly the same is no more reasonable than saying lesbians and gay men are roughly the same, even though we are both gay- different lived experiences, period. So when you ask why I am separating them you’re presuming, wrongly, that we aren’t literally already separate but close to each other. Bi women also have a number of NEEDS (depending how you define needs) which lesbians don’t, and lesbians have a number of needs which bi women don’t.

5. Anne Lister as the source of the contemporary use of “butch” and “femme” has been debunked a million times- why you think working class American bars would have been so intimately connected with Anne Lister’s ideas as to credit her with “femme” in the bar scene sense of the term is beyond me, but “femme” literally means “woman” in French and this is almost certainly the way in which Lister used it, and I believe in certain contexts it also means “sister” and “wife;” additionally, Lister’s “plus femmes que moi” (not even actually worded by Lister, btw) translates roughly to “more womanly than me.” Not that it matters, because “femme” starts popping up in its current use in the US in working class gay bar scenes almost 100 years after Lister’s death in the UK. That’s a major geographical and historical gap.

6. WHATEVER the answer is to “Well lesbian used to refer to women who were probably attracted to men as well/many women who called themselves lesbians would not identify as bisexual,” which is a claim that is likely true but absolutely disprovable in the vast majority of cases, the absolute worst possible solution is to rhetorically dig up dead women and coercively relabel them as bi just because you think they wouldn’t see themselves as lesbians today. First of all, the meaning of the word has literally changed over time- the idea of being gay as a lifestyle choice in accordance with underlying attractions used to be very popular among actual LGBT people, and is not anymore, for instance, and people absolutely used “lesbian” to refer to women who had histories of dating men, may have still been attracted to them, but lived lives in communities of women who exclusively dated other women. I don’t care what politics you have, I think it is disrespectful and historically and intellectually disingenuous to dig them up and reclassify them according to your personal politics and taste. Doing so is gross. Stop it.

7. As for the idea that I haven’t already considered the overwhelmingly popular opinion that any and every woman has the right to use “butch” and “femme” as an identifier for themself, honestly that’s both stupid and deeply annoying, on top of being obnoxiously patronizing. Yeah, I considered it and I disagree, point blank. Don’t wanna see it, just don’t look at my blog. It’s not that deep.

8. I want you to think about why you are so defensive when confronted with the reality that actually, yeah, lesbians and bi women are different and not the same, and there are a number of experiences lesbians have that bi women don’t, and vice versa- for instance, if there was a term which specifically referred to the ways bisexual women navigate bisexuality while being gender nonconforming, I wouldn’t go “Oh I’m gnc too so that’s my word.“ What about lesbians wanting to lay claim to something we made upsets you so much? As for your last bit, you’re a total stranger- why should I care about what would “make [you] happier” when it comes to your unwanted opinion on misappropriated lesbian terms? You’re quite oddly entitled, honestly. Which does not surprise me, considering this whole conversation is about your entitlement to terms that don’t reference you. Frankly, this whole thing is why I hate the popular use of the term “sapphic” and the culture of brushing over difference which has popped up around it on tumblr. There is a reason I never use the term, and instead opt for lbpq in most cases or SOMETIMES wlw, where it makes sense.

#literally what freaks you out so much about difference itself #if i sound annoyed it is because i am #submission #lesbian things #butch/femme

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