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acaplion · 2 years

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Famous Musicians astro notes

So, I have seen a lot of discussion about what placements do musicians have and I decided to do my own research and I dived into many charts on Astrotheme. Some of the celebrities charts are more or less verified while others have an unknown birth time. I tried my best to discuss elements that few other posts have to keep it interesting. I hope you enjoyed these astro notes and as always please check out my masterlist and show support by liking or reblogging!

Pisces influence: Many musicians tend to have either a Pisces Moon or a pisces degree moon. I am a pianist and while my moon is in Capricorn it is in the 12th degree (Pisces Degrees are 12, 24) and in the 12th house traditionally ruled by Pisces.Lang Lang is another pianist that has a Pisces moon. I have been praised for my musicality and Lang Lang is one of the more expressive pianists out there.Whitney Houston also had a Pisces Rising at 8 degrees.

Libra influence: Libra is not often brought up in placements musicians have but it makes sense because Libra is ruled by Venus the goddess of beauty. So is Taurus, but that is discussed ad nauseum here.I noticed this in the charts for Van Cliburn, Yo Yo Ma and Vladimir Horowitz, three famous classical musicians of the last century. Van Cliburn had his ascendant in Libra, Yo Yo Ma and Horowitz have their suns in Libra. I go into greater detail for Van Cliburn down below if you are interested. Britney Spears also has a Libra Rising and she was known for appearance at the beginning of her career. She became the It girl of her generation because of her ‘aesthetics’ and ‘vibes’. She also has Saturn and Pluto in Libra in the first house which represents her father. Her father was overbearing and controlled her career and her free will. She kept silent for many years since Libra wants to be fair and balanced and they can find it hard to speak out. I am so happy that she finally freed!

Leo influence: Leo rules the sun, and Apollo was the god of the sun so it would make sense that leos are also naturally good at music, poetry, healing just like Apollo. Leos also have a natural flair for the dramatics and they are natural performers which really helps in music. I have a Leo sun and Mercury, Yo Yo Ma has his Jupiter in Leo, Van Cliburn has his Moon at 0 degrees Leo. Lana Del Ray has her moon in Leo conjunct her MC in Leo in the 10th house.

Cancer influence: The moon rules Cancer and emotions making Cancer placements common amongst musicians. Taylor Swift for example has her Vertex, Moon and Jupiter all in Cancer. It is interesting that her mercury is opposite these planets in Capricorn. Capricorn Mercuries are straightforward and steady, wise beyond their years. Taylor Swift is known for her masterful lyrics writing lyrics far above her years in her teens. She is also a master at understanding and utilizing emotions in her writing and music. One of the best examples of this is the All Too Well 10 minute version because it combines hard hitting lyrics with a depth of emotions. She makes you feel a 10 minute story about a relationship that happened a decade ago. Lana Del Ray also has Sun, Mars and Mercury in Cancer in the 8th house. This explains why she writes moody music. She would be unafraid of discussing taboo topics in her music. Britney Spears has her MC and North Node in Cancer but her chart is predominantly in the 1st-4th houses making her relatively introverted in real life. It is almost like she puts on a public facade but privately she is something completely different.

Fame Aspects

We all know that there are many great musicians who do not go on to become famous. So there are some “fame” indicators to be found in famous musician’s charts. No surprise that there are usually planets,angles or asteroids at 5, 17 and 29 degrees (Leo Degrees). Taylor Swift for example has her North Node at 17 degrees Aquarius. Lana Del Ray also has her North Node at 17°. Another degree for longevity in fame is the 28 degrees (Cancer Degree). Miley Cyrus has her Gemini Rising at 28 degrees (I explained more below). Interestingly enough, Whitney Houston has her MC at 18 degrees which is a Virgo degree and she has only become more legendary after her untimely death. Whitney also had her Moon at 17 degrees. Several famous musicians like Britney Spears, Whitney Houston, Miley Cyrus, Chester Bennington and Frank Ocean had their Jupiter trine Midheaven. Jupiter trine Midheaven natives have luck in their career, they can make lemonade out of lemons. In general, most famous musicians either have a prominent MC/tenth house or prominent Rising and North Node. All of this makes sense since MC/Tenth house rules public persona and career while the Rising is another indictator of how we appear to the world. The North Node is all about our destiny, or what we came to this earth to do.

Misc Notes:

My favorite classical composer is Sergei Rachmaninoff (seriously, listen to Rach 2 or Rach 3, they are the soundtrack of my life). He had a rough life and wrote one of his best concertos (Rach 2) after being hypnotized. He had Sun and Mercury in Aries which makes sense because he forged ahead and revolutionized piano music. He also had Saturn exactly opposite his Uranus which also makes sense because he faced many abrupt changes in his career and life. He had to pivot his career many many times and he spent most of it depressed (hence the need for the hypnosim).

Van Cliburn, who is known for his miraculous win at the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in the middle of a cold war is someone who had an ASC conjunct jupiter in the first house. This conjunction especially in Libra gave him endless fortune and good luck in developing his talents. Even in the height of the Cold War, in a competition set up for young soviet pianists, Van Cliburn a pianist from Texas wowed the judges. Libra is a sign about balance and bringing peace which Van Cliburn did through his music. Watch him play the amazing Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto #1 here. His Part of Fortune is also conjunct his Jupiter. He is also an air dominant with a secondary water dominant which makes sense as he was expressive in his musicality. He was also someone who played at a high technical level. He has the least earth which makes sense for a musician since they tend to live in their feels. He also has a strong dominance in his chart in the angular houses (1,4,7,10) which can indicate an unusual life which he certainly led! He also has a cardinal dominance which also makes sense because he was constantly forging ahead in his career.

Ariana Grande Pluto opposite Venus - she’s known for who she dated and who she got engaged to. In fact, one of her most famous/popular songs is Thank U Next, a song that talks about all her exes. People are intrigued by her relationships and that helps fuel her music career.

Miley Cyrus

MC in Aquarius: Again, Miley is someone who values being unique. She not only played 2 different people in her most famous role on TV her every era has been unique. Since leaving Disney, she has not given a d**** about how she looks. She’s rocking a mullet right now, she once sang on a literal wrecking ball for a video. Truly all of her provocative performances are unique and talked about in the media for months. Miley could care less if she’s unique and does things other artists wouldn’t.

Gemini Rising at 28°: 28 degrees is the degree for longevity in fame. She first rose into prominence playing Hannah Montana at the age of 13. She has stayed just as famous for the last ten years both in her personal life and in her professional life. There have been many other child disney stars who have fallen off the map but Miley has always stayed in the spotlight. Gemini Risings are also known as the twins and Miley’s most famous role Hannah Montana had her portraying two different personas. She also came out with an album Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus which was a double album. There is a duality to her public persona, her career and even her appearance.

Well that's it for these Astro notes! Let me know if this was helpful.If you are a musician let me know if you have any of these placements.

love, acaplion

#astro notes #astro #astrology #astrology notes #career astrology #career notes #career observations #fame indicators #music #music astrology #celebrity astrology #natal astrology #libra #pisces #cancer #leo

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ericgamalinda · 2 years

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My Sad Republic Redux

Sometime around the late 1980s, I traveled to the island of Calauit in Palawan. Ferdinand Marcos had gifted the island to his only son, Bongbong, and had populated the island with exotic animals from Africa.

After the People Power uprising deposed Marcos and the US airlifted the family to Hawai’i in 1986, there was some concern about the zebras, gazelles and giraffes that had been abandoned there, and an ecological preservation project was underway.

But the island still reminded me of the excessiveness of the Marcos family, who had all but turned the entire country into their personal playground—a kingdom they would rule forever.

When I learned that Bongbong Marcos had won the Philippine presidential elections, I felt a flood of confusing emotions wash over me. Anger and depression, mixed with overwhelming nausea. I felt helpless—for something that was out of my control. I felt a sense of failure—not mine alone, but shared with my entire country.

To understand how traumatic Bongbong’s victory is for those of us who lived through his father’s dictatorship, imagine a Spain with Franco’s family or Chile with Pinochet’s progeny winning national elections.

Jose Rizal famously warned us that “those who refuse to look at where they’ve been will never move forward.” We studied his works in school ad nauseum but time and again, when I see what’s been going on in our country, I realize his words have hardly sunk in. I have always suspected that our country is caught in an endless loop, a sinister Möbius strip where we are doomed to relive our nightmares over and over.

I am only 11 months older than Bongbong Marcos, so we belong to the same generation—the lost generation whose formative years were spent under his father’s repressive regime. I knew of Bongbong as the privileged son who could easily receive an entire island to serve as his own private safari, while the rest of us struggled to make ends meet. But that was all he was, the country’s spoiled but not especially bright brat. No one ever imagined him following his father’s footsteps. Today, some people imagine that Marcos 2.0 would be a benevolent, enlightened version of his father.

That may be wishful thinking. Bongbong has been quoted as saying that his father’s dictatorship was the “golden age” of the country. Golden for whom? His family, no doubt, whose reign had the political and military support of the United States, and who are still alleged to have siphoned nearly 10 billion dollars off the country’s coffers to their private accounts. Or their cronies, who benefited from his father’s largesse and the culture of corruption he had led. But not for the hundreds of thousands whose lives were destroyed, who were incarcerated, tortured, assassinated, or disappeared. Not for the millions of Filipinos who wallowed in deeper penury while his family hosted lavish festivals, mingled with celebrities, and lapped up mansions across the globe.

By denying his family’s culpability and showing no remorse for the suffering the people had endured, he appears as deluded as his own mother, one-half of the rapacious couple who ruled by fear and terror during the martial law years, who had said, without a hint of irony, that she wanted her epitaph to read, “Here lies love.”

We can blame this landslide victory on voter ignorance, or a naïve nostalgia for the past, or a desire for radical change. I understand when our political analysts say this is the result of decades of exclusion, of unkept promises, of frustration with the country’s entrenched oligarchism. But to choose a dictator’s son and hope he would make us “rise again,” as his campaign promised, contradicts everything our revered national hero had told us. We have moved backwards fifty years.

I have been researching on some of the major events that had shaped our country since the beginning of the 20th century and through the 21st for a new novel, and I am amazed at how resilient we always were, if not simply lucky. Our great-grandparents lived through the cholera epidemic of 1902, where over half a million died. World War I left us practically unaffected, and we quickly bounced back from the Great Depression, thanks to a thriving middle class. The Japanese Occupation was possibly the most traumatic episode in our history, three long years of excruciating suffering under a fascist power. This was followed, a couple of decades later, by the dark years of the Marcos dictatorship. We endured all that, and proudly picked up the pieces after. We remained hopeful that we would see the last of Rodrigo Duterte after his term (a hope that has proven false, alas), and we appear to be somehow managing to contain Covid 19, despite shoddy resources.

But another Marcos presidency? Led by a man who has shown no inclination to correct the wrongs done by his family? Who continues to delude himself and his followers about a fabled “golden age”? Would he revisit his private safari in Calauit, and would it remind him of that golden age when his family was virtually omnipotent, their opponents either jailed or dead, their bank accounts awash with the billions they had bilked from us?

The Marcos dynasty might rise again, as Bongbong has promised during his campaign. I don’t believe he will “save” the country, but he will certainly save his father’s dubious legacy and continue to rewrite it until we get used to the lies, just as his father once tried to do.

It will be another dark chapter of our sad republic.

#philippines election #my sad republic

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twilightprince101 · 3 years

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So I made an SCP entry for Bugsnax...

I thought with the ending and all of the disturbing stuff that this game has, it would fit perfectly with SCP stuff. Not to mention, there has to be an SCP equivalent in the Grumpus world. GCP? SGP? SCG? I dunno man, have some horror writing about muppets.

SCP-3470: Sentient Sustenance

[Heavy spoilers for Bugsnax ending]

Item #: SCP-3470 aka “Snaktooth Island”

Object Class: Keter

Special Containment Procedures: Due to its nature of being a landmass the most SCP teams can do is obscure its location to the populus. Efforts have been made to create rumors of numerous shipwrecks--akin to SCP-605 “Bermuda Triangle”--to deter the public from exploring the location. If unauthorized ships are witnessed crossing into the restricted zone, they are to be terminated immediately. Addendum: Due to the recent insubordination of Dr. [REDACTED]. All authorized personnel that enter or exit SCP-3470 are to be subjected to a rigorous screening process to ensure that no instances of SCP-3470-A are brought out of the restricted area without B Class Permission or higher. Further precautions being considered are a 10 minute test in which personnel seeking access to SCP-3470 are to be placed into an empty room with an instance of SCP-3470-A. If SCP personnel show any signs of wishing to consume SCP-3470-A, they are to be removed from the team immediately. Permission from Professor [REDACTED]. Is awaiting approval.

Description: SCP-3470 is a large landmass off of the coast of [REDACTED]. Spanning 50 mi^2 and nearing 1.5 mi in height. Several sections of SCP-3470 are flux in weather patterns, ranging from lush forests to arid deserts in the span of 3 miles. Although similar in appearance to locations such as [REDACTED]. And [REDACTED]. , further research concludes that flora are substantially different in chemical composition, containing traces of [REDACTED]. Which was only recently discovered. Due to this, nearly all flora encompassing the island are inedible, as digestion induces hazardous effects ranging from intense stomach pains to spastic vomiting.

The most significant aspect of SCP-3470 are various instances of sentient life, which are to be referred to as SCP-3470-A-[1-100]. SCP-3470-A take appearances of common food items, such as SCP-3470-A-1 [“Strabby”] taking the form of a ripe red strawberry with what appear to be dollar store googly-eyes [all instances of SCP-3470-A share the final trait]. All instances of SCP-3470-A vary in physique, behavioral patterns and similarities to their respective food item. Each instance also appears to have a “name” that it repeats ad nauseum despite not having observable mouths or vocal chords, making them easier to classify. Chemically however all are similar, containing faint traces of [REDACTED]. . This can be witnessed upon any attempt to alter SCP-3470-A instances from their base form, dissolving into an unknown inedible fluid, losing sentience in the process.

Due to SCP-3470’s flora being inedible, SCP-3470-A instances become the landmass’s only source of sustenance. Consumption of SCP-3470-A induces a drastic and instance side-effect of modifying the consumer’s limbs, thereby becoming SCP-3470-B. The limbs of SCP-3470-B instances vary depending on the instance of SCP-3470-A that has been consumed, alongside how many instances have been consumed prior to said event. Fundamentally however, all limbs modified take on the appearance of whatever the SCP-3470-A instance was impersonating. The more instances a subject consumes the more of their body transforms, beginning with the hands and feet and extending to the entire torso and face. The internal functions of the body remain intact along with full autonomous control, however the structure and physique of transformed limbs change drastically, such as an SCP-3470-B instance’s arm transforming into a banana after consuming an instance of SCP-3470-A-12 [“Banooper”]. These transformations subside in time [correlating to amount of SCP-3470-A instances consumed], with SCP-3470-B limbs reverting back to their original state, containing faint traces of [REDACTED].

Addendum 3470-B: Increased Exposure

Proceeding with experimentation with SCP-3470-A instances under Prof. [REDACTED]. , extended exposure and consumption of SCP-3470-A instances results in increasing addictive tendencies and side effects. File below contains audio files of experiments with Personnel D-125.

Dr. [REDACTED].: D-Class 125, approach SCP 3470-A-45.

D-125: What is…? Ok, seriously what the grump is this??? Like, I signed up for this expecting a lot of horrifying stuff, but-did someone slap googly-eyes on a piece of corn?!

Dr. [REDACTED]. : 125, please approach SCP-3470-A-45.

D-125: Yeah, yeah, alright. So… (to A-45 after approach), what are you supposed to be then? Did Dr. [REDACTED]. Have their kid put their arts and crafts project on display or-

A-45: Cobhopper!

D-125: GRUMPIN WHA- IT JUST TALKED?! IT MOVED IT’S LOOKING AT ME!!!

Dr. [REDACTED].: (whispering) so much for being the ‘toughest D-class around… ‘

D-125: So you’re telling me I just… eat it? The eyes too?

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Correct. Do not worry, upon further testing the eyes seem to be made of a material akin to valentine’s candy hearts (lie).

D-125: Huh… alright then. Down the hatch, I guess?

Sounds of eating, cries of A-45

Dr. [REDACTED]. : D-125, describe the flavor.

D-125: It’s… good actually! I was honestly expecting the insides to be guts or poison or something, but it’s actually pretty good! Nice and buttered to, a bit of salt? Reminds me of my mom’s barbeque.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : And the sensation of your leg transforming?

D-125: Huh? (125 looks down and notices their leg transformed into a head of corn). Oh… Well this is pretty cool I guess.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Any uncomfortable sensations?

D-125: Not really no. It’s weird… I can still feel my toes, but it’s like a peg leg. Actually, I think I can see a few kernels wiggling if I try. Neat!

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Is… that it?

D-125: Yeah I think so, *chuckles,* this is actually pretty cool!

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Hmm… (To recorder) Despite initial panic from witnessing A-45, subject D-125 has adjusted to transformation with record pace. Further research required.

D-125: Heya doc!

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Greetings D-125. Have you adjusted to recent transformations?

D-125: Yeah it’s been going alright. The pineapple hair is a pretty nice dew all things considered, and the bacon tongue makes me look like a snake. I like it!

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Pleased to hear it. Now, approach SCP-3470-A-52.

D-125: Alright, what’s on the menu today then? Who’re you little guy?

A-52: Sodi-D Sodi-D!

D-125: Huh, a drink this time. Change of pace I guess.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Please consume A-52.

D-125: Right away ma’am. Sir. Whatever.

Sound of soda can opening and drinking, cries of A-52.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : (To recorder) Upon the first drop of A-52’s fluid, transformation has already occurred, transforming the subject's ears into what appear to be soda can tabs. No further transformations appear to occur on consecutive gulps-wha (To D-125) Sir?!

Sounds of crunching, further cries of A-52, then silence.

D-125: Not bad! I don’t usually drink soda, beer’s more my thing personally, but it was pretty sweet! Just the right amount of sugar. And hey, new accessory!

Dr. [REDACTED]. : ...D-125, why did you eat A-52’s shell?

D-125: Huh?

Dr. [REDACTED]. : The… the can. Nobody has attempted to consume the can.

D-125: Oh. Uh…

Silence for 7 seconds

D-125: I dunno, I guess since the eyes were edible on the other guys, I thought the can would be here? Wasn’t too hard to eat, kinda like biting into ice. Didn’t hurt.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Very… interesting. This will be recorded for future experiments, thank you D-125.

D-125: No prob. And hey, call me Chuffee.

D-125: Hehey, candy corn teeth! Pretty sharp too, should make eating these things even easier!

Dr. [REDACTED]. : D-125, you’re nearing complete bodily transformation. Have you been experiencing any discomfort as of late? Any anomalies?

D-125: Nope, in fact I feel great! I used to have this crink in my back for the longest time, but now it’s gone! I’m more limber than I’ve been in ages!

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Fascinating… very well then, thank you for your time.

D-125: ...wait, what? That’s it?

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Hm?

D-125: There isn’t any more left? I thought there would be a bit more.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : *sigh,* D-125, we’ve went over this last time. We cannot give you more than one instance a day due to 3470-A’s high caloric count. The instance you just ate was over twenty th-

D-125: You know you keep saying that. Didn’t you guys want to really figure out what’s with these things? When I ate that soda can you said yourself that nobody’s tried that before, so let’s go further! I’m still hungry anyways, I’m craving a burger if you got any like that.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Sir, please exit the room. I cannot give you any more than what I am authorized.

D-125: ……..You know, it’s interesting how your window is so high up there. I can hardly see you.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : ...excuse me?

D-125: You heard me [REDACTED]. , I can barely see you from down here. You can see exactly how I change, the new stuff I get… but I can’t see yours.

Silence for 15 seconds.

D-125: I know you’re holding out on me up there [REDACTED]. .

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Sir, I’ve told you countless times already. I can’t give you any more than I’m authorized.

D-125: (Sarcasm) Oh yeah, suuure. For all I know you guys are feasting away on these things up there, while leaving me for dust! Like seriously, a single popcorn kernel?! That’s it?!

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Sir, that is all I can give you today. Please exi-

Sound of a door opening

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Wh- Professor [REDACTED]. ?

Professor [REDACTED]. : Hello D-125.

D-125: Oh great, another snob to tell me what to do. If you aren’t gonna feed me, then just shut up already! My stomach’s growling like crazy, and I’m not leaving until I get my meal!

Professor [REDACTED]. : Not to worry D-125, I’m fully prepared to grant your wish.

D-125: ...wait, really?

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Professor, what are you-

Professor [REDACTED]. : I listened to the log of your previous meal, and you raised a good point. If we at the SCP foundation wish to fully understand what these creatures are capable of, we must push the boundaries of what we believe are possible. So then…

(Sound of metal grinding, several overlapping cries of SCP-3470-A instances)

D-125: Oh, my…

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Professor, what are you doing?

Professor [REDACTED]. : Eat until you can’t eat anymore. Consider it my treat, to you.

D-125: Ooohohohohoooo yes!!! Now we’re talking!!! Come to papa little guys!!!

Professor [REDACTED]. : Subject so far has consumed 34 instances of 3470-A. Since consuming number 21 he has shown increased signs of vigor, despite eating half of his body mass.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Professor, please, stop him. This is-

Professor [REDACTED]. : (continuing) Upon complete transformation of limbs to SCP 3470-B instances, any further consumption appears to override a prior one. His leg, previously resembling a head of corn has transformed now into a roll of sushi. His tongue, once a strip of bacon, now a wad of chips.

D-125: (While eating) Mmmph! Oh my god, what are you a jar of pickles! More the merrier!

Sound of sloppy gulping, glass crunching, cries of SCP-3470-A-35

D-125: Ooogh, some noodles too! Love japanese food!

Sounds of rapid slurping, rapid glass crunching and licking.

Professor [REDACTED]. : Subject appears to have increased vigor in consuming 3470-A instances, not leaving a single crumb or shard left uneaten. A query: what is the chemical makeup of instances contained in glass jars or bowls? The bowls themselves? Further research required.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Chuffee please, stop! You’re going to hurt yourself!

Rapid, feral sounds of crunching and slurping.

Professor [REDACTED]. : Subject has now eaten approximately eaten 1.5 times his body mass yet continues to feat, now with no regards for table manners whatsoever. I have already called for a janitor to wait outside.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Chuffee stop!! You-

Laughter, slowly increasing in volume

D-125: This!! This is the best I’ve eaten in my entire life!!!

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Chuffee please-O-oh… oh my-

Professor [REDACTED]. : Subject’s left ear has disconnected itself from its host. There appear to be no signs of blood or even markings indicating he has had one at all-there goes a tooth!

D-125: Hooooh I knew you all were holding back on me!!! This stuff is delicious, amazing, spectacular!!! I’ll never go hungry again, no more rotting on the streets!!! This is all mine, you hear me?! Mine, MINE, MINE!!! HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAH

Laughter continues for several seconds, sounds of objects falling to floor as volume slowly decreases, ending with a loud clatter.

Dr. [REDACTED]. : Ch-Chuffee, I- urp!

Sound of vomiting

Professor [REDACTED]. : Subject, after eating nearly twice his body mass, has had each limb separate from his core torso one by one, now fully resembling their respective food items, until his eyes transformed into SCP-3470-B instance, resembling the mixed nuts that made up his head. Soon after, his torso and head fell apart, scattering into mixed-nuts. I can not recognize Subject D-125 in the slurry.

More sounds of vomiting

Professor [REDACTED]. : These results are quite fascinating. Further research is required into these various side effects. End tape.

#bugsnax #scp #scp foundation #bugsnax spoilers #secure contain protect #my writing #my writings #twi talks #spoilers #((I love writing fucked up stuff like this))#tw horror #tw body horror #body horror #horror

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tlbodine · 4 years

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When the Timeline Split

2016 was a crazy year.

My perspective on it, like anyone else’s, is colored and clouded by my own experiences, like the personal tragedy of an unexpected job loss. Things had been strange and bad in the world before, of course, an ebb and flow of tragedy. But four years ago, somehow the world shifted cataclysmically, irrevocably, into a dark new timeline.

I remember early in the election assuming that the race would come between Hilary Clinton and Jeb Bush. I was not thrilled at the prospect. I was researching other candidates, taking the quiz I have relied on for previous elections, and discovered Bernie Sanders -- someone whose ideals aligned almost perfectly with my own, something I’d never seen before in a candidate. I didn’t know that “Democratic Socialist” was an option, but that sure as hell described me.

And for a brief while, it looked like he might win.

I remember the Idaho caucus. I remember the, “Holy shit, this could actually happen!” feeling. I indulged myself in imagining a future where all of the things I cared about were addressed -- socialized healthcare, student debt forgiveness and free education, green new deal, tax on the wealthy.

It was the last time I have felt true and genuine hope. More than four years ago, today, was the last time I thought about the future and imagined it could be good.

Donald Trump seemed like a joke candidate at first. Good for a laugh. Good for a meme.

I remember the exact moment that changed for me. I was at the gym, a 6am workout before my commute. The news was on, the television above the treadmill, some morning show where they were talking ad nauseum about whatever new impropriety Trump had done. I thought: Holy shit, the media is going to hand this man the election. They cannot help themselves. He’s like catnip to them. They’re giving him all the free publicity in the world and he’s going to win because of it.

And, of course, that’s exactly what happened.

A rash of celebrities died in 2016: Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Gene Wilder, Prince, Ron Glass, Glen Frey -- many others besides.

It became something of a dark joke. When Glen Frey died, everyone was posting "Hotel California" on social media in tribute. I was irritated (couldn't they have used one of the Eagles songs that Frey actually sang? "Take It Easy"? "Tequila Sunrise"? Come ON!). My best friend and coworker, who shared two hours of commute with me every day, decided that "Hotel California" was simply The Song You Played when a celebrity died. We played it with gentle irony for every celebrity death, even Fidel Castro.

The celebrity deaths set a strange, grim tone for the year. We joked: They’re leaving before things get any worse. Eventually, we started to believe it.

Mass shootings were reported seemingly every week, but all of them were dwarfed by then-record-breaking 49 deaths in Pulse Night Club, a hate crime of unfathomable size.

But perhaps more than anything, 2016 was weird.

Pepe the Frog, a cartoonish internet meme, became a Nazi dogwhistle.

Bernie Sanders became an unwitting meme lord, probably with the help of 4chan trolls and Russian hackers.

People reported sightings of scary clowns all over the country.

Liberal friends started fighting each other out in the open on social media, and sometimes in person, during the most divisive primary election I’ve ever witnessed.

The internet filled with conspiracy theories about Russia and Iran and inevitable war.

“This is Fine Dog” became the rallying symbol of the year for many -- a dog cheerfully ignoring the room on fire around him.

On May 28, 2016, a silverback gorilla named Harambe was fatally shot in a zoo after a child got into his enclosure. There was a brief ripple of genuine controversy surrounding the zookeeper’s decision. Some misanthropes wondered whether the life of a human was, necessarily, always more valuable than the life of an endangered gorilla. Fueled almost certainly by racism and the ironic edgelord culture of the internet, Harambe became a meme -- Justice for Harambe! Dicks out for Harambe!

Given the backdrop of Black Lives Matter protests that had already been taking place across the country, and the ongoing murder of black people by police, it seems self-evident that the Harambe meme was a racist dogwhistle. Not everyone who shared it was probably aware of that -- but it had a meanness there at its center, a cruelty, the hint of a dark equivocation between a 17-year-old gorilla and, say, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

In hindsight, for me, I think Harambe’s death was the moment when something in the fabric of our social reality snapped.

Nothing so fully encapsulates the exact tenor of modern discourse -- irreverent, nihilistic, performative, and absurd.

Of course the society that joked about a dead gorilla would elect Donald Trump as president.

Today is May 28, 2020. Four years to the day since Harambe.

Today is the third day of nationwide riots and looting as black communities protest the death of George Floyd, who was pinned by the neck to the ground for seven minutes by a police officer, while other officers looked on. Floyd’s abuse and death were captured on video, but the police have not been charged with any crime.

Years of peaceful protest have amounted to nothing, and so things have reached a fever pitch. As we speak, a police precinct in Minneapolis is on fire.

It is May 28, 2020, and 100,000 Americans have died from a global pandemic. 40 million people are out of work. The country was brought to a halt, shutting down helter-skelter in an attempt to keep people safe, and no long-term plan was enacted during that period for re-opening. People return to work now, putting themselves in danger.

The president refuses to acknowledge these deaths in any meaningful way. He complains, instead, that this pandemic is unfairly hurting his campaign. He claims that no one has been treated more unfairly.

Black people make up 13% of the population but represent 25% of deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Today is May 28, 2020, in the midst of the deadliest pandemic in a century, with nationwide protests and riots, and President Donald Trump signed an executive order to threaten social media, because Twitter put a “fact check” link beneath one of his tweets.

#thoughts #wtf news #personal #musings #for my memoir one day #ha ha #recollections #politics #long post

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beloved-not-broken · 3 years

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Evangelicalism is no longer for me

I've talked ad nauseum about growing up evangelical and deconstructing my faith. It's time for me to start rebuilding.

Although I don't need to explain myself, I want to share 25 reasons why I'm breaking ties with the white evangelical church.

Trigger warnings ahead for anyone with religious trauma.

Anti-LGBTQ teachings

To white evangelicals, being queer is considered sinful.

I believe that God makes LGBTQ people queer on purpose, and that we're equally as beloved and qualified to serve Him as cishet (non-LGBTQ) Christians.

"For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made..." - Psalm 139:13-14

Biblical inerrancy

Many white evangelicals think the Bible is inerrant (error-free) despite scientific inaccuracies and narrative discrepancies.

I believe history, science, and scripture don't have to be at odds; it's simply a matter of contextualizing the Bible.

"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands." - Psalm 19:1

Christian nationalism

We've seen from the insurrection at the Capitol in January 2021 that many white evangelicals in the U.S. have an "America first" mindset.

I believe that God doesn't play favorites; rather, He focuses on building a unified kingdom, knocking down barriers to entry and erasing borders in the process.

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." - Galatians 3:28

Disinformation

Research shows that a politically saturated religious community like evangelicalism is more susceptible to conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, than other faith groups.

Like I said before, I believe science and history aren't at odds with scripture.

"Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them." - Acts 20:30

Evangelizing without consent

In my experience, proselytizing is drilled into churchgoers at an early age, encouraged by leaders who say stuff like "this could be the last conversation this person has before they die, so make sure it's a gospel conversation."

I believe that evangelism should be consensual—religious trauma is real, and people who've been hurt by Christians might not want to talk about God, sin, or eternity. God will connect seekers with believers.

"Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'" - John 14:6

Fearmongering

"You're going to hell" is a favorite call-out among conservative Christian protestors at Pride events, abortion clinics, and college campuses.

I believe that we have no right to judge anyone whose sin looks different from ours; God considers all sin offensive.

"'Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

'Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?

'You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.'" - Matthew 7:1-5

Guilt-tripping

White evangelical pastors tend to emphasize sin more than grace.

I believe that grace sets Christianity apart from other religions; therefore, we should be leading with the idea that Jesus gives grace freely to those who ask, and that there's freedom in accepting this free gift from God.

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast." - Ephesians 2:8-9

Hypocrisy

Too many white evangelical church leaders have committed sexual misconduct and fraud.

I believe that church leaders should be held accountable for their actions.

"'Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.'" - Matthew 23:23

Imperialism

Short-term mission trips to third-world countries have been criticized as "poverty tourism."

I believe that attempting to convert people of different cultures to an Americanized version of Christianity (or even attempt to contact unreached people groups) can do more harm than good.

Furthermore, I believe the Great Commission has evolved over the past 2,000 years. Because there are Christians all over the world now, going "into all the world" doesn't necessarily mean U.S. missionaries have to (or even should) go overseas.

Interestingly, research shows that countries where white evangelical churches in the U.S. typically send missionaries—like the Dominican Republic and Mexico—have a larger Christian population than the U.S.!

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are." - Matthew 23:15

"Judge thy neighbor" mentality

Research shows that about 50% of Christians and 87% of non-Christians age 16-29 perceive Christianity as judgmental. In my experience, white evangelicals tend to look down on anyone who doesn't meet certain standards, regardless of whether those standards are biblical.

I believe we have no right to judge others, especially fellow Christians. Unity in Christ is greater than anything that could divide us.

"Indeed, there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins." - Ecclesiastes 7:20

"Kill 'em with truth" mentality

"Speaking the truth in love" is an excuse I've often heard from white evangelicals who've used scripture as a weapon (especially toward the LGBTQ community).

I believe that Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4 is how we should bring up sin in other people's lives (if God calls us to do so). Specifically, we should present the solution before pointing out the problem.

"Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you." - Ephesians 4:32

Literalism

Because many white evangelicals consider the Bible to be inerrant, they tend to take the Bible at face value—in other words, cherry-picking scripture to support an argument or stating rules as if there were no exceptions.

I believe that we must approach scripture with wisdom. To apply it here and now, we must understand why the authors were writing to their specific audience there and then.

"He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." - 2 Corinthians 3:6

Misogyny

White evangelicals tend to reinforce men as leaders and women as supporters (complementarianism) and prevent anyone from overstepping those gender roles.

I believe that God can call anyone to any role regardless of gender identity.

"'And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.'" - Joel 2:28

Normalizing self-hatred

In my experience, white evangelical pastors and worship leaders emphasize our worthlessness without a savior. The church's focus on guilt rather than grace and downplaying mental health makes matters worse.

I believe that all people are inherently worthy as image-bearers of God. Furthermore, Jesus' command to "love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:31) implies that we must care for ourselves just as selflessly as we care for other people.

"So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. ... God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." - Genesis 1:27 & 31

Oppressive rhetoric

The white evangelical church has a long history of supporting slavery and other oppressive systems.

I believe we should consider everyone as fellow image-bearers of God, regardless of race, gender, and socioeconomic status. We can start by using language that promotes freedom and equality for all.

"For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another." - Galatians 5:13

Purity teachings

In my experience, being taught that my worth was tied to my virginity distorted my view of sex. But I and countless others who grew up in white evangelical churches are just now realizing the lasting harm that purity culture has caused.

I believe the decision to engage in or abstain from sex should be entirely up to the individual. When based on mutual, enthusiastic consent, sex can be an intimate and enjoyable experience for all involved.

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs." - 1 Corinthians 13:4-5

Quicksand spirituality

In my experience, white evangelicals value catchy but theologically empty sentiments over scripture. Phrases like "God will never give you more than you can handle" are not only absent from the Bible, but they can mislead people about God.

I believe that we should base our faith on Christ, like Jesus said himself when telling the parable of the wise and foolish builders.

"'Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.

'But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.'" - Matthew 7:24-27

Racism

The reason I've been saying "white evangelicals" up to this point is because many evangelical churches are still segregated. Failure to acknowledge racial segregation and speak out about issues affecting people of color is likely why it's still happening.

I believe that Jesus calls us to speak up for the oppressed, especially within the church.

"But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it." - 1 Corinthians 12:24-26

Silence on social justice issues

In my experience, the church is a bubble, and Christians are unconcerned with whatever is going on outside the building. Current events are rarely discussed from the pulpit.

I believe that being "in the world, not of it" has become an excuse for staying silent on social justice issues. Christians should be among the first, not last, to speak out about oppression in our communities.

"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." - James 1:27

Televangelism

To me, modern televangelism seems, at best, inauthentic due to the one-sided nature of broadcasting a message to an audience. At worst, modern televangelism allows charlatans to get rich off people's spiritual insecurities by peddling a false prosperity gospel.

I believe that wisdom isn't hidden behind a paywall; the Holy Spirit gives freely to those who ask (Matthew 7:7-12). Furthermore, God's idea of an abundant life might not necessarily involve material wealth.

"Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." - 1 Timothy 6:9-10

Us-vs.-them mentality

In my experience, white evangelicals hold so firmly to certain theology that they claim other Christians aren't actually Christians!

I believe that gatekeeping is destructive and does no one any good. Instead of focusing on what we believe are faults in others, we should examine our own biases. Ultimately, anyone who believes in Christ's resurrection and divinity is a Christian (Romans 10:9-10).

"How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!" - Psalm 133:1

Vilifying the unfamiliar

In my experience, white evangelicals believe the worst about the LGBTQ community. I used to, too, until I actually met gay, nonbinary, asexual, and transgender people.

I believe that because we are all made in the image of God, we shouldn't dehumanize one another. Our neighbors should be more important than our theology, as Jesus explained in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

"A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him." - Luke 10:31-33

Watering down the gospel

Because of everything mentioned so far, white evangelicals have made their version of the gospel less potent. In fact, the gospel according to white evangelicals lacks the freedom and forgiveness Jesus promises (Matthew 11:28-30).

I believe that Jesus invites everyone to an abundant life here and now. He doesn't restrict access to God to certain people in certain countries in certain circumstances—it's an open invitation.

"But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. Many will follow their depraved conduct and will bring the way of truth into disrepute." - 2 Peter 2:1-2

Xenophobia

Research shows that a majority of white evangelicals look down on immigrants and refugees.

I believe that we are all equal in God's eyes. Regardless of our national origin or native language, we should treat each other with respect, mercy, and love.

"Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt." - Exodus 22:21

Yeast of the Pharisees

Hypocrisy is rampant in white evangelical churches, not just at the leadership level. The same Christians who claim to love their neighbor are the same ones treating anyone outside their circles with contempt. I've done it, too.

I believe we should be more mindful about practicing what we preach. Living by the Spirit isn't easy, but the Holy Spirit enables us to do so.

"'Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs.'" - Luke 12:1-2

#cw religious trauma #cw sex mention #exvangelical #toxic theology #deconstructing my faith #rebuilding my faith

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didanawisgi · 3 years

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Medicine’s Fundamentalists

The randomized control trial controversy: Why one size doesn’t fit all and why we need observational studies, case histories, and even anecdotes if we are to have personalized medicine

BY NORMAN DOIDGE

AUGUST 14, 2020

If the study was not randomized, we would suggest that you stop reading it and go on to the next article. —Quote from Evidence-Based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM

Why is it we increasingly hear that we can only know that a new treatment is useful if we have a large randomized control trial, or “RCT,” that has positive results? Why is it so commonly said that individual case histories are “mere anecdotes” and count for nothing, even if a patient, who has had a chronic disease, suddenly gets better with a new treatment after all others failed for years—an assertion that seems, to many people, to run counter to common sense?

Indeed, some version of the statement, “only randomized control trials are useful” has become boilerplate during the COVID-19 crisis. It is uttered as though it is self-evidently the mainstream medical position. When other kinds of studies come out, we are told they are “flawed,” or “fatally flawed,” if not RCTs (especially if the commentator doesn’t like the result; if they like the result, not so often). The implication is that the RCT is the sole reliable methodological machine that can uncover truths in medicine, or expose untruths. But if this is so self-evident, why then, do major medical journals continue to publish other study designs, and often praise them as good studies, and why do medical schools teach other methods?

They do because, as extraordinary an invention as the RCT is, RCTs are not superior in all situations, and are inferior in many. The assertion that “only the RCTs matter” is not the mainstream position in practice, and if it ever was, it is fading fast, because, increasingly, the limits of RCTs are being more clearly understood. Here is Thomas R. Frieden, M.D., former head of the CDC, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, in 2017, in an article on the kind of thinking about evidence that normally goes into public health policy now:

Although randomized, controlled trials (RCTs) have long been presumed to be the ideal source for data on the effects of treatment, other methods of obtaining evidence for decisive action are receiving increased interest, prompting new approaches to leverage the strengths and overcome the limitations of different data sources. In this article, I describe the use of RCTs and alternative (and sometimes superior) data sources from the vantage point of public health, illustrate key limitations of RCTs, and suggest ways to improve the use of multiple data sources for health decision making. … Despite their strengths, RCTs have substantial limitations.

That, in fact, is the “mainstream” position now, and it is a case where the mainstream position makes very good sense. The head of the CDC is about as “mainstream” as it gets.

The idea that “only RCTs can decide,” is still the defining attitude, though, of what I shall describe as the RCT fundamentalist. By fundamentalist I here mean someone evincing an unwavering attachment to a set of beliefs and a kind of literal mindedness that lacks nuance—and that, in this case, sees the RCT as the sole source of objective truth in medicine (as fundamentalists often see their own core belief). Like many a fundamentalist, this often involves posing as a purveyor of the authoritative position, but in fact their position may not be. As well, the core belief is repeated, like a catechism, at times ad nauseum, and contrasting beliefs are treated like heresies. What the RCT fundamentalist is peddling is not a scientific attitude, but rather forcing a tool, the RCT, which was designed for a particular kind of problem to become the only tool we use. In this case, RCT is best understood as standing not for Randomized Control Trials, but rather “Rigidly Constrained Thinking” (a phrase coined by the statistician David Streiner in the 1990s).

Studies ask questions. Understanding the question, and its context, is always essential in determining what kind of study, or tool, to use to answer those questions. In the “RCT controversy,” to coin a phrase, neither side is dismissive of the virtues of the RCT; but one side, the fundamentalists, are dismissive of the virtues of other studies, for reasons to be explained. The RCT fundamentalist is the classic case of the person who has a hammer, and thinks that everything must therefore be a nail. The nonfundamentalist position is that RCTs are a precious addition to the researcher’s toolkit, but just because you have a wonderful new hammer doesn’t mean you should throw out your electric drill, screwdriver, or saw.

So let’s begin with a quick review of the rationale for the “randomized” control trial, and their very real strengths, as originally understood. It’s best illustrated by what happens without randomization.

Say you want to assess the impact of a drug or other treatment on an illness. Before the invention of RCTs, scientists might take a group of people with the illness, and give them the drug, and then find another group of people, with the same illness, say, at another hospital, who didn’t get the drug, and then compare the outcome, and observe which group did better. These are called “observational studies,” and they come in different versions.

But scientists soon realized that these results would only be meaningful if those two groups were well matched in terms of illness severity and on a number of other factors that affect the unfolding of the illness.

If the two groups were different, it would be impossible to tell if the group that did better did so because of the medication, or perhaps because of something about that group that gave it an advantage and better outcome. For instance, we know that age is a huge risk factor for COVID-19 death, probably because the immune system declines as we age, and the elderly often already have other illnesses to contend with, even before COVID-19 afflicts them. Say one group was, on average, 60 years old, and all the members got the drug, and the other group was on average 75 years old, and they were the ones that didn’t get the drug. Say that when results were analyzed and compared, they showed the younger group had a higher survival rate.

A naive researcher might think that he or she was measuring “the power of the medication to protect patients from COVID-19 death” but may actually have also been measuring the relative role of youth, in protecting the patients. Scientists soon concluded there was a flaw in that design, because we do not know, with any reasonable degree of confidence, whether the better outcomes were due to age or the medication.

Age, here, is considered a “confounding factor.” It is called a confounding factor, because it causes confusion, because age can also influence the outcome of the study in the group as a whole. Other confounding factors we know about in COVID-19 now include how advanced the illness is at the time of the study, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and probably the person’s vitamin D levels. But there could easily be, and probably are, many other confounding factors we don’t know, as of yet. There are even potential confounding factors that we suspect play a role, but are not quite certain about: the person’s general physical fitness, the ventilation in their home, and so on.

This is where randomization is helpful. In a randomized control trial, one takes a sufficiently large group of patients and randomly assigns them to either the treatment group, or the nontreatment (“placebo” or sugar pill) control group, for instance. Efforts are made to make sure that apart from the treatment, everything else remains the same in the lives of the two groups. It is hoped that by randomly assigning this large number of patients to either the treatment or nontreatment condition, that each of the confounding factors will have an equal chance of appearing in both groups—the factors we know, such as age, but also mysterious ones we don’t yet understand. While observational studies can, with some effort, match at least some confounding factors we do understand in a “group matched design” (and, for instance, make sure both groups are the same age, or disease severity), what they can’t do is match confounding factors we don’t understand. It is here, that RCTs are generally thought to have an advantage.

With such a good technique as RCTs, one might wonder, why do we ever bother with observational studies?

There are a number of situations in medicine in which observational studies are obviously superior to randomized control trials (RCTs), such as when we want to identify the risk factors for an illness. If we suspected that using crack cocaine was bad for the developing brains of children, it would not be acceptable to do an RCT (which would take a large group of kids, and randomly prescribe half of them crack cocaine and the other half a placebo and then see which group did better on tests of brain function). We would instead follow kids who had previously taken crack, and those who never had, in an observational study, and see which group did better. All studies ask questions, and exist in a context, and the moral context is relevant to the choice of the tool you use to answer the question. That is Hippocrates 101: Do no harm.

Now, you might say that a study of risk factors is very different from the study of a treatment. But it is not that different. There can be very similar moral and even methodological issues.

In the 1980s, quite suddenly, clinicians became aware that infants were dying, in large numbers, in their cribs, for reasons that couldn’t be explained, and a new disorder was discovered, sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, or “crib death.” Some people wondered if parents were murdering their children, or if it was infectious, and many theories abounded. A large observational study was done in New Zealand that observed and compared factors in the lives of the infants who died and those who didn’t. The study showed that the infants who died were frequently put to sleep on their tummies. It was “just” an observation. But on that basis alone, it was suggested that having infants sleep on their backs might be helpful, and that parents should avoid putting their infants on their fronts in their cribs. Lo and behold, the rates of infant death radically diminished—not completely, but radically. No sane caring person said: “We should really do an RCT, rule out confounding factors, and settle this with greater certainty, once and for all: All we have to do is randomly assign half the kids to be put to bed on their tummies and the other half on their backs.” That would have been unconscionable. The evidence provided by the observational study was good enough.

Again, all studies have a context and are a means to answering questions. The pressing question with SIDS was not: How can we have absolute certainty about all the causes of SIDS? It was: How can we save infant lives, as soon as possible? In this case, the observational study answered it well.

The SIDS story is a case where we can see how close, in moral terms, a study of risk factors and a study of a new treatment can be in a case where the treatment might be lifesaving. Putting children on their tummies is a risk factorfor SIDS. Putting them on their backs is a treatment for it. The moral issue of not harming research subjects by subjecting them to a likely risk is clear.

Similarly, withholding the most promising treatment we have for a lethal illness is also a moral matter. That is precisely the position taken by the French researchers who thought that hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin was the most promising treatment known for seriously ill COVID-19 patients, and who argued that doing an RCT (which meant withholding the drug from half the patients) was unconscionable. RCT fundamentalists called their study “flawed” and “sloppy,” implying it had a weak methodology. The French researchers responded, in effect saying, we are physicians first; these people are coming to us to help them survive a lethal illness, not to be research subjects. We can’t randomize them and say to half, sorry, this isn’t your lucky day today, you are in the nontreatment group.

There are other advantages to observational studies in assessing new treatments. They are generally lower in cost than RCTs, and can often be started more quickly, and published more rapidly, which helps when information is needed urgently, as in a novel pandemic when little is understood about the illness. (RCTs, in part because of the moral issues, take longer to get ethics approval.) Observational studies are also easier to conduct at a time when patients are dying in high numbers, and hospital staff is overwhelmed, trying to keep people alive. They can involve looking back in time, to make use of observations in the medical chart. In such cases, it is crucial that the initial observations about how patients responded to the medications and treatments that the staff had on hand is documented, in as systematic as way as is possible, because there might be clues and nuggets as to what worked.

Exclusion Criteria: Do RCTs Study Real-World Patients?

But there are also problems at the conceptual heart of the RCT. Often the RCT design sees “confounding factors” not simply as something that has to be balanced between the treatment and no-treatment groups by randomization, but eliminated at the outset. For a variety of reasons, includinga wish to make interpretation of final results more certain, they aggressively eliminate known confounding factors before the study starts, by not letting patients with certain confounding factors get into the study in the first place. They do this by often having a lot of what are called “exclusion criteria,” i.e., reasons to exclude or disqualify people from entering the study.

Thus, RCTs for depression typically study patients who only have depression and no other mental disorders, which might be confounding factors. So, they usually study people who are depressed but who are not also alcoholic, not on illicit drugs, and who don’t have personality disorders. They also tend to exclude people who are actively suicidal (because if they are, they might not complete the expensive study, and some people think it is unethical to give a placebo to a person in acute risk of killing themselves). There are many other reasons given for different exclusions, such as a known allergy to a medication in the study.

But here’s the problem. These exclusions often add up until many, maybe even most, real-world depressives get excluded from such a study. So, the study sample is not representative of real-world patients. Yet this undermines the whole purpose of a research study “sample” in the first place, which is to test a small number of people (which is economical to do), and then extrapolate from them on to the rest of the population. As well, many studies of depression and drugs end up looking at people who are about as depressed as a college student who just got a B+ and not an A on a term paper. This is why many medications (or short-term therapies) end up doing well in short-term studies, but the patients relapse.

If you are a drug company (which pay for most of these studies) and you’re testing your new drug, exclusion criteria can be made to work in favor of making your drug appear more powerful than it really is, if sicker patients are eliminated. (This is a good trick, especially if your goal of making money from the drug is your first priority.)

This isn’t a matter of conjecture. This question of whether RCTs, in general, are made up of representative samples has been studied. An important review of RCTs found that 71.2% were not representative of what patients are actually like in real-world clinical practice, and many of the patients studied were less sick than real-world patients. That, combined with the fact that many of the so-called finest RCTs, in the most respected and cited journals, can’t be replicated 35% of the time when their raw data is turned over to another group that is asked to reconfirm the findings, shows that in practice they are far from perfect. That finding—that something as simple as the reanalysis of the numbers and measurements in the study can’t be replicated—doesn’t even begin to deal with other potential problems in the studies: Did the author ask the right questions, collect appropriate data, have reliable tests, diagnose patients properly, use the proper medication dose, for long enough, and were their enough patients in it? And did they, as do so many RCTs, exclude the most typical and the sickest patients?

Note, other study designs also have exclusion criteria, but they often are less problematic than in RCTs for reasons to be explained below.

The Gold Standard and the Hierarchy of Evidence

So, why is it we also hear that “RCTs are the gold standard,” and the highest form of evidence in the “hierarchy of evidence,” with observational studies beneath them, and case histories, at the bottom, and anecdotes beneath contempt?

There are several main reasons.

The first you just learned. It had been believed that RCTs were a completely reliable way to study a treatment given to a small sample of people in a population, see how they did, and then one could extrapolate those findings to the larger population. But that was just an assumption, and now that we have learned the patients studied are too often atypical, we have to be very careful about generalizing from an RCT. This embarrassment is a fairly recent finding that has yet to be taken fully into account by those who say RCTs are the gold standard.

The second reason has to do with the fundamentalists relying on outdated science, which argued that RCTs are more reliable in their quantitative estimates of how effective treatments are because they randomize and rule out confounding factors.

But a scientist who wanted to know if RCTs, as a group, were universally better and more reliable than observational studies at truth-finding would actually study the question scientifically, and not just assert it. And, in the 1980s, Chalmers and others did just that, examining studies from the 1960s and 1970s. They found that in the cases where both RCTs and observational studies had been done on the same treatment, the observational studies yielded positive results 56% of the time, whereas blinded RCTs did so only 30% of the time. It thus seemed that observational studies probably exaggerated how effective new treatments were.

Three other reviews of comparisons of observational and RCT study outcomes showed this same difference, and so researchers concluded that RCTs really were likely better at detecting an investigator’s bias for the treatment being studied, and hence more reliable. Since many scientific studies of drugs were paid for by drug companies that manufactured those drugs, it was not a surprise that the studies would have biases. These reviews formed much of the basis for RCT fundamentalism.

Just because an RCT is performed and published is no reason to assume it doesn’t exaggerate efficacy.

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But here’s the problem: These were reviews of studies that were done in the 1960s and 1970s. Once the observational study researchers became aware of the problem, they upped their game, and improved safeguards.

In 2000, new reviews comparing the results from hundreds of RCTs and observational studies in medicine that had been conducted in the 1990s were conducted by scientists from Yale and Iowa College of Medicine. They found that the tendency of observational studies to suggest better results in treatments had now disappeared. They now got similar results to RCTs. This was an important finding, but it has not been sufficiently integrated into the medical curriculum.

There is another reason we hear about RCTs. As RCTs became the type of study favored by regulatory bodies to test new drugs, they rose to prominence, and drug companies upped their game and learned many ingenious ways to make RCTs exaggerate the effectiveness of the drugs they are testing.

Entire books have been written on this subject, an excellent one being Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients.Since, to bring a drug to market requires only two RCTs showing the drug works, these techniques include doing many studies but not publishing the ones that don’t show good results. But there are sneakier techniques than making whole studies with negative outcomes go missing. There are ways to publish studies but hide embarrassing data; publish the good data in well-known journals and the negative findings in obscure journals; not study short-term side effects; almost never study, or ask about, long-term side effects; or play with measuring scales, so that patients appear to achieve statistically meaningful benefits which make no clinical difference. If you do a study that gives you a bad outcome on your key measure, don’t report that, just find some small outcome that was in your favor and retroactively change the goal of the study, to report that benefit and that alone. Make researchers and subjects sign gag clauses and nondisclosures. Have the drug companies ghostwrite the papers, make up the tables, and get academics, who never see the raw data sign them. This is routine.

The list goes on, and those tricks have often been used, successfully, to gain approval for drugs. Becoming very familiar with these ruses can save lives, because in a pandemic, new drugs will earn Big Pharma billions because the illness is so widespread, and they have a large playbook to draw from. Once two RCTs are selected from the many done to take the drug forward, the propaganda campaign begins, and as Goldacre shows, drug companies spend twice as much on marketing as they do on research. So, to repeat, just because an RCT is performed and published is no reason to assume it doesn’t exaggerate efficacy.

One group of studies, though, that don’t often play by these corrupt rules are RCTs done on already generic drugs, because they are off-patent, and there is really very little money to be made in them. In these cases, when a drug company has a generic rival to what might be a big money maker, there are ways of making that generic look bad. If the generic takes four weeks to work, test your drug against it, in a three-week study (the placebo effect for your drug won’t have worn off yet). If a vitamin is threatening your drug, test your drug against it, but use the cheapest version, in a dose that is too low. It’s an RCT, that’s all that matters.

Despite all this, advocates of RCTs still teach that, all else being equal, RCTs are always more reliable, and teach this by cherry-picking well-known cases where RCTs were superior to observational studies, and ignore cases where observational studies have been superior, or at least the better tool for the situation. They take the blunt position that “RCTs are better than observational studies,” and not, the more reasonable, accurate, and moderate, “All else being equal, in many, but not all situations, RCTs are better than observational studies.”

The phrase, “all else being equal,” is crucial, because so often all else is not equal. Simply repeating “RCTs are the gold standard of evidence-based medicine” implies to the naive listener that if it is an RCT then it must be a good study, and reliable, and replicable. It leaves out that most studies have many steps in them, and even if they have a randomization component, they can be badly designed in a step or two, and then lead to misinformation. Then there is the very uncomfortable fact that, so often, RCTs can’t even be replicated, and so often contradict each other, as anyone who has followed RCTs done on their own medical condition often sadly finds out. A lot of this turns out to be because they have many steps, and because Big Pharma is so adept now at gaming the system. Like gold, they turn out to be valuable but also malleable. A lot of the problem is that patients differ far more than these studies concede, and these complexities are not well addressed in the study design.

The Hierarchy-of-Evidence Notion Does Harm, Even to RCTs

One of the peculiar things about current evidence-based medicine’s love affair with its “hierarchy of evidence” is that it is still proceeding along, ignoring the implications of the scientifically documented replication crisis. True, the fact there is a replication crisis is now widely taught, and known about, but to the fundamentalists, it is as though that “crisis” doesn’t require that they reexamine basic assumptions. The replication crisis is compartmentalized off from business as usual and replaced with RCT hubris.

The irony is that the beauty of the RCT is that it’s a technique designed to neutralize the effects of confounding factors that we don’t understand on a study’s outcome, and thus it begins in epistemological humility. The RCT, as a discovery, is one of humanity’s wonderful epistemological achievements, a kind of statistical Socrates, which finds that wisdom begins with the idea, “whatever I do not know, I do not even suppose I know” (Apology, 21d).

But that beautiful idea, captured by a fundamentalist movement, has been turned on its head. The way the RCT fundamentalist demeans other study designs is to judge all those designs by the very real strengths of RCTs. This exaggeration is implicit in the tiresome language they use to discuss them: The RCTs are the “gold standard,” i.e., against which all else is measured, and the true source of value. Can these other designs equal the RCT in eliminating confounders? No. So, they are inferior. This works, as long as one pretends there are no epistemological limitations on RCTs. The problem with that attitude is, it virtually guarantees that the RCT design will not be improved, alas, because improved RCTs would benefit everyone. In fact, RCTs would be most quickly improved if the fundamentalists thought more carefully about the benefits of other studies, and tried to incorporate them, or work alongside them in a more sophisticated way. That is another way of saying we need the “all available evidence” approach.

The Case History and Anecdotes

Also disturbing, and, odd, actually, is the belittling of the case history as a mode of making discoveries, or what it has to offer science as a form of evidence. In neurology, for instance, it was the individual cases, such as the case of Phineas Gage, that taught us about the frontal lobes, and the case of H.M., that taught us about the role of memory, two of the most important discoveries ever made in brain science.

Here’s how the belittlement goes. “Case histories are anecdotes, and the plural of anecdote is not data, it is just lots of anecdotes.”

First of all, case histories are not anecdotes. An anecdote, in a medical text, is usually several sentences, at most a paragraph, stripped of many essential details, usually to make a single point, such as “a 50-year-old woman presented with X disease, and was treated with Y medication, for 10 days, and Figure 7 shows her before and after X-rays, and the dramatic improvement.” In that sense, an anecdote is actually the opposite of a case history, which depends on a multiplicity of concrete, vivid details.

A case history (particularly in classic neurology or psychiatry) can run for many pages. It is so elaborated because it understands, as the Canadian physician William Osler pointed out: “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.” And who that patient is—their strengths, weaknesses, their other illnesses, other medications, emotional supports, diet, exercise habits, bad habits, genetics, previous treatment histories, all factor into the result. To practice good medicine, you must take it all into account, understanding that the patient is not any one of these details, but a whole who is more than the sum of the parts. Thus, true patient-centered medicine necessarily aspires toward a holistic approach. So, a case history is a concrete portrait of a real person, not an anecdote; and it is vivid, and the furthest thing possible from an abstract data set.

A typical RCT describes several data points about hundreds of patients. A typical case history describes perhaps hundreds of data points about a single patient. It’s not inferior, it’s different. The case history is, in fact, a technology, albeit an old one, set in language (another invention, we forget) and its structure (what is included in the case history, such as descriptions of the patient’s symptoms, objective signs, their subjective experiences, detailed life history, what makes the illness better, what worse, etc.) was developed over centuries.

Even anecdotes have their place. We often hear methodologists say, when a physician claims he or she gave a patient a particular medication, or supplement, or treatments, and they got better, “that that proves nothing. It is just an anecdote.” The problem is in the word “just.” Something doesn’t become meaningless, or a nonevent because a scientist adds the word “just” before it. That word really says nothing about the anecdote and a lot about the speaker’s preference for large number sets.

But anecdotes are very meaningful, too, and not just when lives are changed by a new treatment for the first time. This dismissive indifference to anecdotes turns out to be very convenient, for instance, for drug companies. If you are a physician, and you give a patient who had perfectly good balance an antibiotic, like gentamicin, and she suddenly loses all sense of balance because it injured her balance apparatus, the drug maker can say that is “just” an anecdote. It doesn’t count. And in fact, it is a fairly rare event. But it is by just such anecdotes that we learn of side effects, in part because (as I said above) most RCTs for new drugs don’t ask about those kinds of things, because they don’t want to hear the answer.

If we are to be honest, evidence-based medicine is, in large part, still aspirational. It is an ideal.

That’s why the approach I take—and I think most trained physicians with any amount of experience and investment in their patients’ well-being also take—might be called the all-available-evidence approach. This means, one has to get to know each of the study designs, their strengths, and their weaknesses, and then put it all together with what one is seeing, with one’s own eyes, and hearing from the particular patient who is seeking your care. There are no shortcuts.

One of the implications of this approach in the current COVID-19 situation is that we cannot simply, as so many are insisting, rely only on the long-awaited RCTs to decide how to treat COVID-19. That is because physicians in the end don’t treat illnesses, they treat patients with illnesses, and these patients differ.

The RCTs that are on the way may recommend, in the end, one medication as “best” for COVID-19. What does that mean? That it is best for everyone? No, just that in a large group, it helped more people than other approaches.

That information—which medication is best for most people, is very useful if you are in charge of public health for a poor country and can only afford one medication. Then you want the one that will help most people.

But if you are ordering for a community that has sufficient funds for a variety of medications, you are interested in a different question: What do I need on hand to cover as many sick people as possible, and not just those who benefit from medication X which helps most, but not all people? Even if a medication helps, say, only 10% of people, those will be lives saved, and it should be on hand. A medication that helped so few might not even have been studied, but if the others failed, it should be tried.

A physician on the frontline wants, and needs, access to those medications. He or she asks, “What if my patient is allergic to the medication that helps most people? Then, what others might I try?” Or, “What if the recommended medication is one that interacts negatively with a medication that my patient needs to stay alive for their non-COVID-19 condition?”

There are so many different combinations and permutations of such problems—and hardly any of them are ever studied—that only the physician who knows the patient has even a chance of making an informed decision. They are the kinds of things that arise on physician chat lines, that ask questions to 1,000 online peers like, “I have a patient with heart disease, on A, B, and C meds, and kidney disease on D, who was allergic to the COVID-19 med E. Has anyone tried med F, and if so, given their kidney function, should I halve the dose?”

Evidence-based medicine hasn’t studied some of the most basic treatments with RCTs or observational studies, never mind these kinds of individual complexities. So, the most prudent option is to allow the professional who knows the patient to have as much flexibility as possible and access to as many medications as possible. If we are to be honest, evidence-based medicine is, in large part, still aspirational. It is an ideal. Clinicians need latitude, and patients assume they have it. But now the RCT fundamentalists are using the absence of RCTs for some drugs to restrict access to them. They have gone too far. This is epistemological hubris, at the expense of lives, and brings to mind the old adage, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” As long as we’ve not got the best studies for all conceivable permutations, medicine will remain both an art and a science.

So, does conceding as much and giving the clinician latitude mean I don’t believe in science?

“Believe,” you say?

That is not a scientific word. Science is a tool. I don’t worship tools. Rather, I try to find the right one for the job. Or, for a complex task, which is usually the case in medicine—especially since we are all different, and all complex—the right ones, plural.

#medicine #fav #print this off later #family medicine #internal medicine #philosophy #science #covid-19 #sars-cov-2 #covid-19 vaccine

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doberbutts · 4 years

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Do you feel like there are pros to spay/neuter? Can you expand on the way it can affect dogs and maybe some pros/cons related?

As with all surgeries there are pros and cons and the individual decision to sterilize a specific dog should not be broad-brushed to all dogs everywhere, just as there are pros and cons to wait or to not do it at all.

Sushi will be spayed either at maturity or when she finishes her show career, whichever comes last, as she is first and foremost a service dog and my health cannot afford to not have her 2+ months of the year. Fae, however, will depend if her breeders want her to be bred... and only if they choose not to will I spay her, and possibly only when she's in her prime.

Because of the possibility of pyometra increasing exponentially as the dog ages, it's imparitive for bitches to have a plan of *when* and not *if* they get spayed. I am not against sterilization of dogs by any means, but rather against misinformation being spread.

And, before you ask, I was made to question the practice of widespread sterilization well before tumblr existed, when my parents' dog Mocha was spayed and immediately had urinary incontinence, and our vet (THE ONE WHO PERFORMED THE SPAY) explained to us that this was always a possibility. That's not just something I read online and parroted back ad nauseum, but something I was encouraged to research and read about by that very same vet.

In any case I will not add to the numerous posts regarding the multiple studies on the documented effects of spay/neuter, the timing, or the breeds in question... but rather explain that my post was about how an intact bitch will have a larger vulva and nipples, intact males will have a broader and more masculine appearance, from the muscles of the head down to the way they walk there are nuances that separate intact (and post-maturity neuters) from sterilized, and claiming that there is 'no effect' even on that ground is ridiculous to me.

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mattatouile · 4 years

Text

I’m so far behind on replying to comments and reading and writing. All I can offer is that my health is almost hilariously awful and has been for 18 months or so. It’s really been a special couple of years for me.

STILL.

There are a couple of things that didn’t end up in the text of The Limit Does Not Exist, that I cannot remember to do on Trivia Tuesday (or is it Thursday? what are days?), so for the sake of getting them out before I forget again:

So, Jaime is a jerk and purposefully so, and the original plan was dueling POVs so his side of things was a little more obvious, especially in his Feelings.

But the obliquely mentioned scandal at the beginning of the fic before Brienne even meets him is that Aerys was his doctorate advisor and when Jaime’s research ended up being A Very Big Deal, Aerys accused him of stealing the main idea/work from him. Aerys didn’t exactly have proof beyond the normal bounds of the work/discussion between an advisor and a doctoral candidate, but it was enough, and he said enough damning things about the Lannisters and what the Lannister family name and money could buy that it DID tarnish Jaime’s reputation rather pointedly.

And it’s part of why he is so insistent on the whole “I won’t do your work for you” angle, and the not really wanting to work closely with Brienne. It’s not because he wants to use her work, it’s because he doesn’t want to allow any insinuations about his level of involvement in his students’ work.

Also, the original ending of the fic was at the acknowledgements. However, I received threats if I left it at that place, which is why you all get the gift of when Jaime finally showed back up. Re-reading it ad nauseum, every time I got to her offer to get dinner and talk about work and the weather I knew it was familiar but I didn’t know why and then I realized it made me sing one of Taylor Swift’s more melodramatic songs about Taylor Lautner.

Finally, the alternative titles were Brienne and the Kissing Problem (you can google Isaac Newton’s Kissing Problem, it wasn’t super relevant but it did make me laugh because it sounded like a BSC book), and tell me where to start because Jaime’s whole “I wouldn’t hesitate” line just resulted in me listening to the goddamn Jonas Brothers’ song on repeat for like two weeks.

#the limit does not exist #i write things #jb fic exchange or die #i still can't believe i wrote that fucking story #also oh god the response to it made me cry #whatever #it was so lovel #and so many people read it not knowing it was me which made me feel like...idk #it's different #knowing someone is just reading your words and enjoying them #then again #a lot of people definitely knew it was me #because apparently it was On Brand #I LOVE CONSENT POLITICS

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unpopularly-opinionated · 4 years

Text

This is going to be a bit of a long post so apologies, I’ll try to keep it brief and of course include a hider.

The TL;DR of it is: Some insane self-proclaimed SJW on Twitter made a ‘chart’ outlining how Men’s Rights and Gaming are responsible for neo-Nazis, and every website in existence is to be held responsible should anyone using their website ever commit a crime.

So, in essence, stupid people on Twitter.

To start off with, before we get onto the words, let’s discuss the Venn Diagram and how that’s immediately flawed:

Right off the bat, we have complete misrepresentations of the Men’s Rights Movement, and Gamer Culture. Men’s Rights has nothing inherently to do with Feminism, and it never has. While yes, it is typical that a Men’s Rights Activist might oppose Feminism, it’s only because Feminism has done plenty in the past to disenfranchise the movement, not the men, the movement. Very clear and important distinction. No, Feminism hasn’t “taken rights away from men”, and no one is claiming that they are, but it is also quite clearly not helping men either, despite openly claiming to be in favor of equality among the sexes and in fact they do more to inhibit the Men’s Rights Movement from trying to help men.

As for Gamer Culture, the definition here is only half-right and entirely disingenuous. It’s true that technically-speaking, men make up most gaming, but it’s still disingenuous to imply that it’s “overwhelmingly male”. We’re not talking about a 99:1 ratio here, not even a 75:25. It’s far closer to 50:50 than people seem to realize. Even being generous to this assertion, I would say 60:40 is significantly closer, albeit still too low compared to reality.

As for the claim that video games ‘objectify women’, this is a topic that has been thoroughly addressed numerous times by others, but the short and sweet response is: “women are objectified, but so are men”, and again the split isn’t as wide as you might think, however the focus might be fairly skewed which could be the problem. There are plenty of objectified men in games, but (at least in my experience) objectified women are given more of a spotlight, likely due to the fact that, for whatever reason, men AND women prefer to see women naked than they do men (don’t ask my gay ass why, I don’t know either).

What’s interesting here, is that they clearly outline a distinction between Pick-Up Artistry and Men’s Rights yet somehow fail to see that they’re separate and distinct. Pick-Up Artists aren’t interested in Men’s Rights, and neither are Incels, they just want their dick sucked, and they’ll perform whatever scumbaggery they think will accomplish that, so the definition for that is apt, but the implication that there is cross-over with Men’s Rights is laughable.

Is it possible there are Pick-Up Artists and/or Incels out there interested in Men’s Rights? Of course, but this diagram suggests that Men’s Rights is the cause of Incels, even though that literally does not make any sense unless you have a significantly warped understanding of what Men’s Rights is, which this author seems to have.

Then, of course, we have the misrepresentation of GamerGate. Honestly, that’s a can-o-worms I’m not looking to open right now because it’ll add another 10-15 paragraphs to this. There’s plenty of resources out there that are available for you to do the research yourself if you don’t know enough about it already. I suggest you start with @gamergate-news and work your way from there.

“Cool Girlism” is, admittedly, a new term to me but the definition of it is recognizable. It’s essentially saying any girl who happens to A) disagree with Feminism, B) is a gamer, C) is “red-pilled” or not immediately Far-Left, or D) All of the above, is considered a “cool girl” and is clearly just putting on an act so she can get some of that sweet gamer dick.

OR, in simpler terms, it’s an example of how misogynistic the author of this diagram is because she refuses to accept that any women can possibly disagree with their point of view and have a unique thought of her own. We’ve seen this all before, nothing new.

“Nu-Misogyny” is also a new term, apparently coined by the author as far as my research shows and is meant to be defined by the culmination of the entire graph. Frankly, even if we suspend disbelief and pretend these are all salient points, I don’t see how any of this is ‘new’ misogyny, except perhaps in reference to the method in which it’s received, that being the digital space (internet, online video games, etc.). As a completely personal gripe, I hate this fad of using made up language to replace old language. Just say new, not “nu” or “neo”, just new.

Great, now that we’ve covered that mess, moving on:

“Milo and Breitbart also used Gamergate to recruit nu-misogynists and gamers to white nationalism.”

While I won’t pretend Milo or Breitbart are bastions of integrity, the simple fact is that whatever they might’ve been using to “recruit” people (which is still a hilarious concept to consider) it wasn’t Gamergate. Never mind the fact that there’s little to no significant overlap between Gamergate and White Nationalists, there’s no overlap between Gamergate and Breitbart OR Milo. The only reason they are misconstrued as being a part of Gamergate is, perhaps, because they didn’t disparage the movement like every other media outlet did.

“As these communities grew more violently extreme, they were increasingly relegated to fringe platforms, notably 8chan.”

Now, at a surface level I don’t see anything inherently wrong with this statement, but allow me to extrapolate a bit:

Given the misconceptions of many groups throughout this post, I’m not inclined to believe they’re being genuine about these so called “extremely violent communities”.

If we were genuinely talking about white supremacist neo-Nazis actively rising up, then I wouldn’t care, but because outside of “the media says so, so it must be true”, there’s little to no evidence of this actually happening, I’m instead inclined to believe they’re referring to people genuinely critical of their world view. You know, the imaginary people harassing Anita Sarkeesian or Zoe Quinn; the people who are just pointing out how these people are wrong who are then vilified by them and their media peers.

What’s also interesting to note here is, again, if we suspend our disbelief, we see here she’s actively admitting that they aren’t doing anything to solve the problem either, something which later in the post she criticizes the chan boards for doing.

“On 4chan and 8chan, pro-terror nazis mingled with pro-terror nu-misogynists.”

Remember when I pointed out that her Venn diagram that was meant to define her coined term “nu-misogyny” didn’t define anything other than just regular old misogyny? Well apparently, it was supposed to define it as “violent” or “pro-terror”. Now, I’ve never been on 4chan, 8chan, or any chan board really, so I can’t comment on the validity of there being white supremacists, neo-Nazis, misogynists, etc. From what I’ve been told it wouldn’t really surprise me.

“Nu-misogyny (especially incel-inflected nu-misogyny) was already explicitly pro-violence and obsessed with evolutionary/racial pseudo-science, and they cross-pollinated more and more.”

I’m not too familiar with many ‘Incels’, but frankly other than right after the Joker movie released, I had never once heard exclaimed that they were “explicitly pro-violence”, let alone “obsessed with evolutionary/racial pseudo-science”. That last part doesn’t even make sense. What does “racial pseudo-science” have to do with wanting to get your dick sucked? Is it like “Yeah I had my chance to have sex, but the chick was Asian so I couldn’t do it. Whites only, ya know?” Whatever, I’m not about to defend Incels.

“And, that’s the (very) short version of the story of how you get a new generation of nazis marked by an unusually high level of hatred for women and advocacy for gynocide.”

In summary, video games and men’s rights will apparently mark the rise of Hitler 2.0.

Credit where credit is due, the sheer fact that she’s outlined this with a neat little diagram, and everything only helps to further the point that she has no idea what she’s talking about. Her chart alone never refers to an overlap between gaming and men’s rights with white supremacy.

At the absolute best, she’s made a point (albeit an easily disproven one) that gamers are sexist, but not once does this diagram point to a significant overlap, or any overlap at all, with white supremacy. All of this boils down to an argument akin to “Nazis drink water so water must be bad”, which hopefully for obvious reasons, you can understand why that logic doesn’t hold up.

“If we’d booted 8chan from the web earlier, if Reddit and 4chan had shut down extremist communities when they first started advocating violence against women, that cross-pollination might never have happened.”

Now we’ve entered the full authoritarian-brand delusion. Never mind the fact that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are far far worse at this very thing she’s accusing the chan boards of, or that Reddit is quite obviously in favor of doing exactly this since they ban communities at the drop of a hat, what she’s asking for is quite literally impossible.

If not 4chan, then 8chan. If not 8chan, then Twitter. If not Twitter, then Facebook. If not Facebook, then Tumblr. If not Tumblr, then literally anywhere else, repeat ad nauseum forever. Removing their platform doesn’t prohibit them from speaking, it just prohibits them from speaking there, where we can see them, where we can mock them, where we can discredit their views. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather be able to see and know people are talking about killing me than pushing them to some fringe site where they can do it without my knowledge.

Earlier, she pointed out that they pushed these people to the chan boards, thereby admitting to ‘solving the problem’ by simply making it someone else’s problem, and here she is now openly criticizing the chan boards for not dealing with this problem that they themselves created for them.

“That online nazi/gynocidaire population boom wouldn’t have occurred.”

Again, removing their platform doesn’t prohibit them from speaking. They simply would’ve organized elsewhere. You aren’t solving any problem by banning them from a website, you’re simply making it someone else’s problem, and then you blame whoever’s problem you just made it.

“But the platforms were greedy. And now, there’s blood on their hands.”

This is by far the most egregious part about this entire post. “We pushed the bad people off onto you and you didn’t immediately push them off onto someone else so that means you are liable for the blood they spill.” Never mind the overarching implication this borderline psychotic statement has. Apparently, every single website ever is to be held responsible should anyone on their site ever commit a crime. Holy fuck, the delusions from this woman.

Apologies if there are any grammar/spelling mistakes. I wrote this in a Word Document and then transferred it over because Tumblr is notoriously terrible when it comes to these longer posts.

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evilisk · 4 years

Text

Reading Len’En Profiles Pt 1

Just realized that except for Jun, Shou and Hibaru, I’ve been making judgments on characters purely off the games and also my gut. I’m gonna go through the profiles and see if they can change my mind. This part is for the Evanescent Existence characters.

Yabusame Houlen

Original Opinion: Except for that one line when talking to ‘Tsubakura’ in EE, Yabusame seemed perfectly sensible, if a little boring, as a character. Then EMS comes along and they are consistently portrayed as ‘dumb as Sukune’ in EMS and RMI. I find it hard to like a dumb protagonist, though RMI pairing them with Tsuba made them more tolerable.

Profile Details:

Apparently Yabu was always meant to be dumb, JynX just didn’t do a good job of showing it in EE

I find it hilarious that line 1 is “Yabu can be described is plain and boring” but then line 2 is “Yabu is outrageous weirdo”

I did pick up on “Yabu is a cross dimensional thing” but I did not know they were *not* spirited away to Senri in this game... that explains one line during their convo with Tsuru.

New Opinion: Eh, I still don’t like ‘em. Their profile makes it seem like they’re a satellite character to Tsubakura and I don’t really like one of the series protags having that kind of attitude.

= = =

Tsubakura Enraku

Original Opinion: I had no opinion on Tsuba in EE since you spent almost no time with them. EMS and RMI made me realize I do like Tsubakura... thought not as much as I like Kuroji. My impression of them is “lazy, entertaining jerk’ with strong emphasis on the lazy part.

Profile Details:

“Young genius scientist” is not what I was expecting to read in Tsuba’s profile. The “slave to sponsorships” and “suspicious research” makes them sound really shady tbh.

It’s zany that a young genius scientist was Tsuru’s first pick for their successor / substitute.

Why is their power described as ‘controlling ink’ only for ‘ink’ to actually be frigging nanomachines? Why do you write profiles like this JynX?

Enjoying things which are enjoyable is my ability too.

New Opinion: Tsuba is way more interesting than I gave them credit for, though I can’t believe “the greatest prodigy in all of history” is supposed to be one of their titles. Now I can understand Kuroji’s salt.

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Kurohebi

Original Opinion: I have no opinion on Kurohebi (I typically don’t have opinions on Stage 1 bosses even in Touhou) other than ‘the comparisons to Rumia make me very angry’ because Rumia makes me angry. (NOTE: My opinion is that Rumia is a PC98 character who stumbled out of a PC98 game and lucked out into being the Stage 1 Boss of the most popular Touhou game ever)

Profile Details:

So you’re telling me that Kurohebi is this super Frankenstein and is such an ultimate assassin that you can’t detect them by sound or even touch, only by sight, and that they’re actually a “fake assassin” only because they haven’t been given an assassination order yet? What the hell, I love Kurohebi now, why the hell are they only a Stage 1 Boss?!

New Opinion: No seriously, how could you make the character with the coolest backstory the Stage 1 Boss, Jynx?!

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Aoji Shitodo

Original Opinion: I don’t like them for being a wimp, and also for being Absurdly hard for a Stage 2 Boss (seriously, even on Easy, they’re too Hard!)

Profile Details:

Wow, this profile has nothing! Seriously, it describes their powers and that’s it. There’s only two lines describing their personality, and they’re details you can easily pick out from the game (they’re the youngest Shitodo sibling, and they’re hesitant)

New Opinion: I have the exact same opinion as before, as reading their profile is like adding 0 to an existing number.

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Hooaka Shitodo

Original Opinion: They’re also pretty hard (I hate that spell card where they summon a bullet maze that you have to scale before it fires downwards) but at least they’re on Stage 4 instead of Stage 2. And I guess they have some funny lines too.

Profile Details:

Wait, their species is “Magician”? What? Are we operating on Touhou rules here? (In Touhou, Magician is a subspecies of Youkai)

I’m also not getting a whole lot out of this profile (talk about powers is useless to me). All I’m really getting is that Hooaka can read the mood (literally) and that they’re quite adaptable.

I’ve heard that Hooaka is a lazy bum, so I’m a bit surprised it’s not referenced anywhere. Is Hooaka in Brilliant Pagoda then? Cause they’re sure as hell not in EMS or RMI.

New Opinion: I don’t know what to do with the information that they’re very adaptable. And that they’re species is “Magician”, but I guess I still like ‘em more than Aoji (who, by comparison, is still my least favourite EE character).

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Kuroji Shitodo

Original Opinion: I didn’t really like this character for feeling like discount Seija, but I slowly came around on them. I can’t hate on this dashing and competent scamp in purple who is ready to shakedown everyone and everything. It helps that they’re basically the underdog MC (now if only they’d stop problematically blackmailing poor Snek Kid)

Profile Details:

Continuing the weird bit on Species, we have Kuroji’s species as “Scholar of Prehistory” (though they’re listed as Human in the subsequent description.

Their backstory is sounding a lot like discount Tsubakura tbh...oh, okay, I get it. No wonder they see Tsuba as their rival.

With how many mentions of Tsuba there is in their profile, it’s no wonder they ended up being a player character in EMS. Because besides Tsubakura themselves, the other two characters that focus on Tsuba on their profile are also the two player characters in *this game*.

I didn’t really pick up on the Historian theme (I don’t have “Historian” in the same mindspace as “Archaeologist”) though in hindsight, their two themes do have “History” in their titles.

I think if I read their profile as I was playing EE, I probably would have liked Kuroji even less (bc of the discount Tsubakura angle)

New Opinion: Kuroji’s still my favourite MC though I empathize with them a little more with this profile.

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“Clause”

Original Opinion: This fella gives me big Rinnosuke vibes. I do not like this fella.

Profile Details:

Ah I see, so Clause is exactly what they appear to be (they’re that one annoying person you know, who is now so much worse now that they have actual superpowers)

Thank God Wilhelm von Clausewitz etc. isn’t their real name. Now if only some character got to rib ‘Clausewitz’ about this.

“Species: Annoyance” okay yeah, JynX is totally joking around here.

This isn’t in the profile, but the one good point I’ll give to Clause is that even Suzumi gets annoyed by their talk.

New Opinion: So, basically, what you’re saying is, I am totally justified in not liking this fella. Got it.

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Tsurubami Senri

Original Opinion: Tsuru’s easily the coolest character in this game, but is that any surprise? I mean, they’re one of the two original player characters, they have a cool fight, they have one of the best tracks in the game AND they have the best smack talk too. They even BTFO Suzumi in her own Extra route. They’re basically the complete package.

Profile Details:

I actually know a lot about Tsuru just because they seem to be such an integral part of Len’En’s setting, and most lore bits that you see repeated ad nauseum (e.g. Tsuru is a militant tyrant) seem to be ripped directly from Senri’s profile.

With that said, uh, what the hell does “ability to raise poultry” mean?! Is Tsuru a farmer? Or is this referencing the final two lines where Tsuru can “raise latent potential in others” and then use it for themselves? (If it’s the latter, ‘poultry’ is an incredibly unsettling way of describing that power’)

Wait, are you telling me that Tsuru did all of this so they could go on VACATION?! What the hell. Tsuru really is “tired Reimu”

New Opinion: This character just got a little more interesting. I’m hoping they get to be playable in Brilliant Pagoda or Haze Castle, but in their true form instead of their disguised form.

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On Suzumi

I already mentioned them a bunch of times, but yeah, I sort of get what their deal is, just from in-game conversations and from general popular knowledge of the series (e.g. you can’t not watch a video with her theme without all the commentators losing their shit, talking about how spooky she is).

Since this is about profiles and since I also don’t specifically remember what reveals about Suzumi were in EE, I’ll hold off on writing about her until she gets an in-game profile I can comment on.

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And that’s about it. Aside from Aoji, Clause and Yabusame (who were like my bottom 3 EE characters already), I have a much better appreciation of EE’s cast. I’ll get to doing EMS and RMI’s casts soon.

#len'en #len'en lore #evanescent existence #len'en mugenri evanescent existence #len'en project #kurohebi len'en #aoji shitodo #hooaka shitodo #kuroji shitodo #clause len'en #tsurubami senri #tsubakura enraku #yabusame houlen #len'en profile review #len'en content #not a reblog

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