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samwisethewitch · 3 years

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Everything You Need to Know About Pagan Deity

As you’ve probably guessed by now, there are many, many, many different approaches to deity within the wider pagan community. While it would be impossible to summarize all of these different perspectives in a single blog post, this post contains some common themes and best practices that are more or less universal and can be adapted to fit whatever system you choose to work with.

In my Baby Witch Bootcamp series, I talk about the “Four R’s” of working with spiritual beings, including deities: respect, research, reciprocity, and relationship. However, when it comes to gods and goddesses specifically, I think it’s important to include a fifth “R” — receptivity.

If you’re completely new to this kind of work and want to avoid making rookie mistakes and/or pissing off powerful spiritual forces, sticking to the Five R’s of Deity Relationships is a good place to start. The Five R’s are:

Respect. It’s always a good idea to have a healthy respect for the powers you choose to connect with, whether you see those powers as literal gods and goddesses or as archetypes within the collective unconscious (see below). While not every ritual needs to be incredibly formal and structured, you should always conduct yourself with an air of respect and reverence when connecting with deity. There’s no need to humble yourself to the point of cowering before the gods (and in fact, this kind of behavior is a turnoff for many deities), but you should strive to be polite and follow your system’s proper protocol for things like cleansing, offerings, and prayers.

Research. I am of the opinion that you should do serious research into a god or goddess before any attempt to make contact with them. This can be controversial, but in my own experience things seem to go more smoothly when I know what I’m doing. Books are really the way to go for this — the Internet can be useful for connecting with other worshipers and hearing their stories, but it isn’t a good source for nonbiased factual information. I recommend starting with academic sources written by secular experts for a purely historical account that won’t be colored by personal religious experience. Once you have a decent understanding of the basic historical context, look for books by pagan authors who have experience working with this deity. These sources will give you a framework for your own interactions with them.

Reciprocity. As we’ve discussed before, reciprocity is a core value of virtually every pagan tradition. Reciprocity is a mutual positive exchange where all parties benefit in some way, and this quality forms the backbone of all healthy relationships with deity. While we benefit from connecting with the gods, the gods also benefit from our worship. Upholding reciprocity in your relationships with deity means making regular offerings to show your appreciation as well as living in a way that your god or goddess approves of.

Relationship. At the end of the day, connecting with a god or goddess is about creating a healthy, fulfilling relationship. Like any relationship, it takes time and effort to keep the connection alive. The gods are living, thinking, feeling beings just like you and me, though on a much larger scale. Just like you and me, they have likes and dislikes and require certain things from those who want to work closely with them. Try to approach the gods as individuals, and connect with them as you would with another person. This will naturally lead to much more authentic and organic relationships.

Receptivity. To be receptive is to be open and ready to receive whatever comes your way — this is an essential quality for anyone who is serious about connecting with a god or goddess. Connecting with the gods means allowing them a place in your life, whatever they choose to bring with them. It means forming a relationship with them on their terms, and that requires us to give up a certain degree of control. While you should never feel afraid or completely out of control when connecting with deity (if you do, stop contacting that deity immediately), you may very well experience things you did not expect or ask for. Be prepared for these surprises, and understand that when the gods surprise us in this way, they do it in order to help us grow. Let go of any preconceived ideas about what a relationship with this deity “should” look like, and instead let it unfold naturally.

Though there is much more to working with deity than just these values, keeping these values in mind will get you started out on the right foot in your relationships with the gods.

Deity or Archetype?

As odd as it may sound, not everyone who connects with the gods through study and ritual believes those gods to be literal spiritual beings. Some pagans (I would even say the majority of pagans, based on my personal experience) connect with the gods as individuals with their own personalities and agency, but others connect with them as symbols that represent different elements of the human experience. This latter group is working with the gods not as deity, but as archetypes.

The term “archetype” comes from academia, particularly the fields of psychology and literary analysis. An archetype is a symbol that embodies the fundamental characteristics of a person, thing, or experience.

Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung argued that archetypes are powerful symbols within the collective unconscious (basically an ancestral memory shared by all of humanity) that arise due to shared experiences across cultures. For example, Jung would argue that Demeter, Juno, and Frigg all represent the “Mother” archetype filtered through different cultural lenses, reflecting the important role of mothers across Greek, Roman, and Old Norse culture. For Jung and his followers, archetypes allow us to connect to latent parts of our own psyche — by connecting with the Mother archetype, for example, you can develop motherly qualities like patience, empathy, and nurturing.

For comparative mythology expert Joseph Campbell, archetypes represented types of characters that appear in some form in most or all global mythology. In his book, The Hero of a Thousand Faces, Campbell identified the “hero’s journey” as the archetypal narrative framework on which most stories, from ancient myths to modern films, are based. (If you’ve taken literally any high school literature class, you’re probably familiar with Campbell’s work.) Like Jung, Campbell has been hugely influential on modern pagans who choose to connect with the gods as archetypes.

Working with an archetype is a little different than working with a deity. For one thing, while archetypes may manifest as gods and goddesses, they can also manifest as fictional characters, historical figures, or abstract symbols. Let’s say you want to tap into the Warrior archetype. You could connect with this archetype by working with gods like Mars, Thor, or Heracles — but you could just as easily do so by working with superheroes like Luke Cage or Colossus, literary figures like Ajax or Achilles, or the abstract concepts of strength and honor.

When pagans worship a deity, it’s because they want to form a relationship with that deity for some reason. But when pagans work with an archetype, it’s usually because they want to embody aspects of that archetype. In our above example, you may be trying to connect to the Warrior archetype to gain confidence or become more assertive.

The biggest difference between worshiping a deity and working with an archetype is that a deity is an external force, while an archetype is an internal force. When you connect with a deity, you are connecting with a spiritual being outside of yourself — a being with their own thoughts, feelings, and drives. When you connect with an archetype, you are connecting with a part of your own psyche. Because of this, archetypes tend to be more easily defined and behave in more predictable ways than deities, although some archetypes can be very complex and multi-faceted.

On the surface, worship and archetype work might be very similar, but the “why” behind the action is fundamentally different.

If you choose to worship the Morrigan, for example, you may have an altar dedicated to her, make regular offerings to her, speak with her in meditations and astral journeys, and/or write poetry or make art in her honor. If you choose to work with the Wild Woman archetype, it may look very similar to an outside observer — you may have an altar dedicated to the Wild Woman energy, speak with manifestations of Wild Woman (perhaps including the Morrigan) in meditation, and write poetry or make art dedicated to this archetype. However, these actions will have a very different intent behind them. Your Wild Woman altar is not a sacred space but a visual trigger to help you connect to the Wild Woman within you. Your meditations are conversations with different aspects of your own personality, not with a separate being. Your art is an expression of self, not a devotional act. The result is a deeper connection to yourself, not a relationship with another being.

I hope I’ve made it clear that archetype work and deity worship can both be very worthwhile spiritual practices, and that each serves its own purpose. Many pagans, myself included, work with both deities and archetypes.

There is some overlap between worshiping a deity and working with an archetype, and many pagans start out with one practice before eventually ending up in the other. Sometimes working with an archetype leads you to encounter a deity who embodies that archetype, which can lead to a relationship with that deity. Likewise, your relationship with a deity may help you become aware of a certain archetype’s influence in your life, which might lead you to work with that archetype.

Making First Contact

First impressions are important. This is true for making new friends, for job interviews, for first dates — and for your first meeting with a god or goddess. In many cases, the way you behave in your first meeting with a deity will set the tone for your relationship with them.

That being said, don’t overthink (or over-stress) about your first impression. You aren’t going to be cursed or punished if you mess this up — at the very worst, the deity might lose interest in connecting with you, and even that can often be remedied with an offering and a polite apology. While it’s always best to get off on the right foot, don’t feel like you need to be perfect.

So, how do you make a good first impression on a god or goddess? Honestly, the rules are largely the same for making a good first impression on any other person. Make sure your physical appearance is clean and tidy — some systems, such as Hellenismos and Kemetic paganism, have special rules for cleansing before contacting the gods, but it’s always a good idea to take a shower first and make sure you’re wearing clean clothes. Likewise, make sure the physical space you invite the gods into is relatively clean — it doesn’t need to be spotless, but take a minute to tidy up before beginning any ritual. Be polite — there’s no need to be overly formal, but you should be respectful. Don’t immediately ask for favors — how would you feel if you met someone at a party and they immediately asked you to do some sort of work for them?

Beyond the basics, it’s wise to make sure you have an idea of who this god is and what they are like before you reach out to them. This will keep you from accidentally doing something offensive. For example, you wouldn’t want to invite them to an altar dedicated to a deity they have a rivalry with. Likewise, you want to avoid offering food or drink that would have been taboo in their original worship. (Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but when you’re just starting out it’s a good idea to follow the historical framework as closely as possible.)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record: this is why research is so important. Knowing who you are dealing with allows you to deal with them respectfully, gracefully, and competently.

Callings

There’s one aspect of deity worship that is controversial in modern paganism: the idea of being “called” by a deity. This is a question you’ll find many, many heated discussions about online. Do you need to be called by a deity to form a relationship with them? Do deities choose their followers, or do we choose them? How do you know what a call from a deity even looks like?

As I said, this is a controversial topic, but I firmly believe that 1.) you do not have to feel called to a deity beyond being interested in them, and 2.) feeling drawn to a deity’s image, symbols, and myths is a form of calling.

Many pagans do feel like they were called or drawn to the deities they walk most closely with. They may have encountered myths of that deity as a child or teenager and deeply resonated with them, or may have always had an affinity for that god’s sacred animals. They may have dreamed of this deity before knowing who they were, or may have felt a spiritual presence around them before identifying it as a god or goddess.

Many people first encounter the gods in fiction, only for this fictionalized depiction to spark a deeper connection that eventually leads to worship. In the modern era, it’s entirely possible for someone who worships Loki to have first encountered him (or at least a character loosely based on him) in Marvel comics and films, or for someone who worships the Greek pantheon to have first discovered them through the Percy Jackson books. As far as I’m concerned, this is also a valid “call” from deity. The gods are very good at communicating with us through the means available — including fiction.

That being said, just because you don’t already feel a strong connection to a god or goddess doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t worship them. The connection will come with time and effort, just like in any relationship.

Dedication, Patrons, and Matrons

In online spaces such as Tumblr and TikTok, a lot of inexperienced pagans parrot the idea that every pagan needs to have a designated matron and/or patron god and/or needs to be formally dedicated to a god in order to have a close relationship with them. Not only is this untrue, but such restrictions can actually cause harm and/or stunt spiritual growth.

Let’s address dedication first. To be dedicated to a deity means to outwardly declare yourself a servant of that deity, usually with a formal dedication ritual — think of it as the pagan version of joining a convent or going to seminary. It is an outward expression of your devotion and loyalty to that deity. Dedicants are held to a higher standard than the average worshiper by themselves, their communities, and the god(s) they have dedicated to.

Dedication can be a powerful and fulfilling spiritual experience (it’s the backbone of many peoples’ spiritual practice), but it should not be taken lightly. Dedicating yourself to a god or goddess should be a sign of your commitment to them and a deepening of your relationship — it should not be the beginning of that relationship.

Dedication is a lot like marriage. Just like you wouldn’t marry someone you’ve only been on a handful of dates with, you shouldn’t dedicate to a deity just because you’ve had one or two positive experiences with them. Like marriages, dedication can be difficult to get out of — ending your dedication to a deity is possible, but it’s a messy, complicated, uncomfortable process that is sure to shift the foundation of your entire spiritual practice, and not always for the better.

My advice to new and inexperienced pagans is not to even consider dedication until you’ve been practicing for several years. As you begin your journey, your focus should be on exploring your options, forming meaningful connections, and developing a practice that works for you and your unique spiritual needs. Now is the time for experimentation, not lifelong commitments.

But let’s say you are an experienced pagan, and you feel like you are ready for dedication. How do you know if you should dedicate to a given god or goddess?

Dedication may be the logical next step in your relationship with a deity if:

This deity has been an active part of your spiritual practice for at least 2-3 years, with no major gaps in contact with them

You are comfortable upholding this deity’s values for the rest of your life — and are willing to face consequences if you fail to do so

You are willing to dedicate a significant amount of time and effort to the service of this deity

You are willing to face major changes in your life outside your spiritual practice — dedicating to a deity often leads to major shifts that may affect our career, family, and/or relationships

If you answered “yes” to all of the above, dedication may be appropriate. This may seem overly cautious, but remember that dedicating to a deity is a serious, lifelong commitment akin to joining the clergy. For context, it takes at least five years of study and practice to become a Catholic priest, a similar amount of time to become a Jewish rabbi, and three years to become a high priest/ess in Traditional Wicca. If you don’t have the patience to maintain a relationship for a few years before dedication, that is probably a good indicator that dedication isn’t for you.

If you are dedicated to a deity or are planning to dedicate, you may actually choose to attend seminary or receive some other formal religious training. This training will help you to better serve your deity in a public capacity, as you will learn skills like religious counselling, leading ritual, and building community. If your program of study includes ordination, it will also allow you to perform legally binding religious rituals like marriage ceremonies. Depending on your path, attending seminary or training may be your act of formal dedication.

Finally, let me make it clear that dedication does not make you a better pagan than someone who is not dedicated. The choice to dedicate or not dedicate is only one element of your spiritual practice, and it is possible to have a fulfilling and life-affirming practice without dedication. Some of the people who do the most work in the service of the gods are not dedicated to them. You may be one of these people, and that is totally okay.

Patron/matron relationships are a specific type of dedication.

The concept of patron deities comes from Wicca and related neopagan religions. As we’ve previously discussed, Wicca is a duotheistic system with a God and Goddess, whose union is the source of all creation. However, because Wiccans believe that all gods are manifestations of the God and all goddesses are manifestations of the Goddess, some covens choose to work with the God and Goddess in the form of other deities (say, for example, Osiris and Isis), which are referred to as the coven’s “patron” and “matron” deities. In these covens, initiation into the coven’s mysteries (traditionally in the form of first, second, and third degree initiations) typically acts as a form of dedication to these deities.

As Eclectic Wicca has gained popularity in the last few decades, there has been a growing trend of individual Wiccans and eclectic pagans choosing personal patron and/or matron deities. Some Wiccans will have a single god or goddess they are dedicated to, while others feel that it is very important to be dedicated to exactly one masculine deity and exactly one feminine deity. This second model is the one I see most often in online pagan spaces, especially Tumblr and TikTok.

The patron/matron model can be useful for some pagans, but it is not one-size-fits-all. As I mentioned, this model of dedication comes from Wicca, and is a very modern concept. In ancient pagan religions, most people would not have been dedicated in this way. That does not mean that this isn’t a valid form of worship (it absolutely is), but it does mean that those who practice reconstructionist paths may not be inclined to interact with deity this way.

The guidelines for patron/matron relationships are similar to the guidelines for dedication in general, but these relationships often (but not always) have a more parental nature. For some people, having a divine mother and/or father figure is ideal — especially for those who are healing from parental trauma or abuse. If you feel drawn to this type of deity relationship, I encourage you to explore it.

On the other hand, you may not have any interest in the patron/matron model, and that’s totally fine! It’s called polytheism for a reason — if you prefer to maintain less formal relationships with many gods, you should feel free to do so.

I hope this post has helped clarify some of the murkier aspects of polytheism and deity work. Obviously, this is only the tip of the iceberg — I could write a book about this topic and many, many authors already have. However, I think the information here is enough to get you started, and I hope that it will provide a first step on your journey with your gods.

Resources:

Wicca for Beginners by Thea Sabin

A Witches’ Bible by Janet and Stewart Farrar

The Spiral Dance by Starhawk

Where the Hawthorn Grows by Morgan Daimler

The Way of Fire and Ice by Ryan Smith

Jessi Huntenburg (YouTuber), “Dancing with Deity | Discovering Gods, Goddesses, and Archetypes,” “Archetype, Deity, and Inviting Transpersonal Experience,” and “10 Ways to Bond with Deity”

Kelly-Ann Maddox (YouTuber), “How to Have Deep Connections with Deities”

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fatehbaz · 3 years

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@kurapikawithagun - sorry, i know there’s a lot of text here. but was it one of these?

on second thought, post is way too long, so i edited this with a “keep reading” section. includes excerpts about how “plant collectors followed the Conquistadors”; Spanish and British botanists wanted to “de-territorialize” or “de-anthropologize” knowledge of plants by removing plants from local cultural context, gatekeeping and systematizing knowledge, and subverting local Indigenous/traditional knowledge-holders; creation of Britain’s first botanic gardens including world-famous Kew Gardens were designed to service plantation owners and the East India Company; how 18th/19th-century European naturalists were “agents of empire” who collected “green gold”; how plantations and imperial botanists turned plants from “companions into commodities” and established racial hierarchy; early science of botany functioned as a “teletechnique,” a way for an empire to “act-at-a-distance” on and against colonized lands and peoples; how British military commanders and economists ran the botanic gardens at Calcutta, Madras, and in the Caribbean; how British administrators dismantled local Indian knowledge and land systems by using key legislation in the 1780s/1790s to dispossess people of their lands before compelling those former gardeners to become forced laborers on tea plantations; gardens as part of American nationalist imaginary and “moral improvement” in the 1800s; how native plants and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples, Black communities, and the rural poor have been appropriated by “overwhelmingly white metropolitan homeowners” looking for “ecologically friendly ways of aesthetising their properties” in fads of contemporary South Africa; how imperial botany created a “monoculture of knowledge” to overshadow or control a multitude of other local “ecologies of knowledges” and ways-of-knowing; etc.

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In a 1998 interview [...], in advance of the release of her third novel, Gardens in the Dunes (1999), Leslie Marmon Silko explains how she became interested in plants: “They come from all over the world, and they’re also another way of looking at colonialism because everywhere the colonials went, the plants came back from there.” [...] Silko confesses that “it wasn’t too long before I realized how very political gardens are …. I had actually stumbled into the most political thing of all – how you grow your food, whether you eat, the fact that the plant collectors followed the Conquistadors.” [...] Gardens revolves around the colonization of indigenous minds and bodies through a variety of processes under the flag of manifest destiny: the loss of land and natural resources in general and the disruption of Native foodways in particular. […] Moreover, it problematizes the privatization of food commons and its negative impacts on local communities from the Gilded Age to the present. […] Silko, a writer of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and Anglo-American ancestry, employs the trope of the garden as a means of critiquing and revising modern America’s ecological imperialism, which has attempted to naturalize the conquest of Native lands and foodways. […]

Plant collectors served as what David Mackay calls “agents of empire,” their inventories full of precious and at the time unknown plants and medicinal herbs collected from indigenous peoples that they then shipped to various libraries, museums, and botanic gardens in the Western world. According to historian of science Linda Schiebinger, while “early conquistadors entered the Americas looking for gold and silver,” naturalists, their successors in the eighteenth century, were more interested in “green gold.” Whether they were “voyaging botanists” sponsored by trading companies or sent by the government, the central task of these botanists was to bring valuable plants “all into production within the boundaries of the empire itself.” […] [T]he trope of “I am monarch of all I survey” […]. The power relations between “seeing” and “being seen” suggest that Western science aids the conquest of the Americas by positing a distance between the colonizer and the colonized. […] Collecting, whether via bioprospecting or photography, thus exemplifies the colonial ideology inscribed in Western science that transforms Indigenous peoples and their traditional knowledge into possessable objects and buttresses the structural inequalities that cement the colonizer’s privilege. In her provocative essay on mushrooms as companion species, Anna Tsing has convincingly argued that the plantation system served as “the engine of European expansion” because it was able to produce enormous wealth based on “the superabundance of a single crop” and “cultivation through coercion.” To manage many plantations in colonies more effectively, Europeans eliminated the affective relationship between humans and plants: the labor needed for plantation cultivation was forced through slavery and indentured servitude, a racial hierarchy was created to draw a clear line between white property owner and colored worker, and plants were treated as commodities rather than companions. The legacy of the plantation system, as Tsing puts it, lies in the ways it has shaped the conditions of racial capitalism and environmental exploitation and in the ways it continues to structure “how contemporary agribusiness is organized. […] Commenting on the interrelationship of imperial botany and commerce during the colonial period, Schiebinger explains that “the botanical sciences served the colonial enterprise and were, in turn, structured by it.” Silko’s novel, then, shows how botanical gardens in Europe functioned, in Schiebinger’s language, as “experimental stations for agriculture and way stations for plant acclimatization for domestic and global trade, rare medicaments, and cash crops” against the common view that gardens like the Kew were centrally “intended to delight city dwellers.”

Source: Yeonhaun Kang. “The Garden in Motion: Botanical Exchange and Transnational Collaboration in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes.” 2019.

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After numerous false starts, and with the crucial aid of the practical embodied knowledge of the many Chinese gardeners who were literally kidnapped to India together with the tea plants, the Calcutta Botanic Garden and the pre-colonial Saharanpur Garden that was re-developed by the colonial administration, played pivotal roles in the emergence of colonial India as the major producer of tea. The practical knowledge possessed by the initial group of abducted Chinese gardeners eventually fed into incipient botany in the colonial setting. The tea plants transplanted from China to the botanic gardens in India were eventually transplanted to the massive rationalised tea plantations in Assam and parts of South India such as Ooty and the Nilgiris (Sharma 2011; Philip 2004). The lands for these plantations were acquired after the large-scale dispossession of the populations of Assam and Ooty, and the relocation and deployment of the people alienated from their lands as forced labour on the very lands they once possessed and cultivated. The setting up of the colonial botanic gardens, spurred by the crises generated by colonialism, also set in motion multiple transfers and transplants, local and global, of plants, people, culture, agriculture and the eventual transformation of practical knowledge into formal botanical science devoted to [...] production [...] and productivity [...]. These experiments conducted at the Calcutta Botanical Garden also provided institutional and intellectual opportunities for botanical careers for many colonial officials.

Source: Zaheer Baber. “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge.” May 2016.

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In this conception operating in the eighteenth century, there is no Nature without Empire. […] To “de-anthropologize” the knowledge of plants, also involved “de-locating,” or better still, “de-territorializing” it. Botany was emerging as a science separate from medicine, but also from chorography as territory became a vegetal mantle, a sort of carpet for plants to lie upon. […] Botanical nomenclature was also a matter of political nomenklatura: the exclusion of native names from the field of science defined new power relations. It acknowledged the authority of imperial botanists and belittled local herbalists and herbal practitioners. Nomenclature, indeed, displaced traditional wisdom: Nahuatl came to be considered as an unintelligible, garbled language [...]. This spatial strategy tends to identify certain regions with some characteristic species. This allowed a selective fostering of farms and forestry in those areas rich in species of particular interest to the Spanish Crown. Plants ceased to be the business of experts and became the concern of politicians. Botany came to strengthen imperial politics. [...] The plants themselves and not their products became the stuff of trade, and what circulated through the networks were ideas on how to mobilize species and how to denature them. Botany began as atechnoscope – a way to visualize at-a-distance – but, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was already a teletechnique – a way to act at-a-distance. Its success as an imperial undertaking was linked to the ability to set up an international network of professorships, gardens, expeditions and publishing companies able to produce aversion of Nature easily put into words, and deducible from very little data. […]

Source: Antonio Lafuente and Nuria Valverde. “Linnaen Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics”. 2011.

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“’These are my conquests,” Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, is reported to have said of the roses and lilies in her renowned garden showcase,” Bennett writes. […] “She would spend as much as 3000 francs on a single rare bulb […].” Gardens are “the most political thing of all – how you grow your food, whether you ear, the fact that the plant collectors followed the Conquistadors,” Leslie Marmon Silko told Ellen Arnold on the eve of the publication of Gardens in the Dunes [1999]. “You have the Conquistadors, the missionaries, and right with them were the plant collectors.” […] In Gardens, Silko uses the image of the garden to illustrate imperialism on international, national, local, and domestic levels. […] Silko offers a microcosmic history of ancient conquest, European imperialism, and modern botanical piracy, while demonstrating commercial trivialization of the sacred. […] The gardens […] exemplify America’s nineteenth-century gardening ideologies. In his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote of the spiritual benefits of agricultural labor. By the mid-nineteenth century, this idea had evolved into gardening as a form of moral calisthenics. […] According to historian Tamara Plakins Thornton, in the 1820s “[h]orticulture entered the mainstream of American life … as a movement [that] promised … moral benefits to an entire nation.” […] Further, by the 1890s, thanks to the early-nineteenth-century efforts of America’s premier landscape gardener, A.J. Downing, and, later, British gardening authority Gertrude Jekyll, landscape gardening had achieved the status of a fine art (Thornton; Bisgrove). It was in 1893 that historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the American frontier was “closed.” With […] Native peoples more or less incarcerated [...], the American landscape garden provided a blank canvas on which the gardener could impose control and exercise her fine art […].

Source: Terre Ryan. “The Nineteenth-Century Garden: Imperialism, Subsistence, and Subversion in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes.” Studies in American Indian Literatures. Fall 2007.

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Many colonial administrators were of course active in mobilising the tremendous economic potential of plants in the imperial project. At the same time however, there were many others who, although they were key actors in the colonial project, were also specifically interested in enhancing their cultural and intellectual capital by becoming “scientists.” [...] The British Empire, as well as the other European empires of that period, constituted one of the many institutional crucibles in which the sciences of plants literally germinated, took root and flowered. Plants constituted an integral element of colonial power [...]. This goal of setting up a rationalised system of administration and revenue collection was a major impetus behind the “great surveys” initiated by the East India Company. [...] The company officials were also familiar with the existence of a pre-colonial Botanical Garden in Saharanpur in northern India (Hyde 1962) and of course Kew Gardens in London, even though the latter was set up primarily for the cultivation of medicinal plants and had not as yet emerged as the major scientific institution that it would become later. The company had also set up smaller gardens in St Vincent in the West Indies for the transfer of the breadfruit tree from Tahiti to provide, in the words of the President of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, “food for slaves” (Mackay 1985, 127). In the context of a dramatically transformed Indian social structure coupled with serious concerns over the erosion of the legitimacy of their rule in the eyes of their Indian subjects, officials of the company were extremely receptive to the idea of a major botanical garden and its potential for restoring stable revenues. […] In less than four years after Kyd’s original letter of 1786, generous grants from the Court of Directors in London made possible the establishment of the first modern Botanical Gardens in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, as well as in distant St Helena. […] Unsurprisingly, the first superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Gardens was Lieutenant-Colonel Kyd himself and the plants that were transplanted there from Southeast Asia were exclusively those that were essential for trade and competition with other colonial powers (Burkill 1959). These included cinnamon, coffee and black pepper. [...] In the same vein, the Bombay Botanic Garden was established due to the initiative of Dr Helenus Scott – a friend of Banks, President of the Royal Society – with the express aim of conducting botanical experiments for the cultivation of sugar, indigo, tobacco, coffee and more.

Source: Zaheer Baber. “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge.” May 2016.

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Imifino is the collective noun isiZulu speakers in KwaZulu-Natal use when referring to auto-propagating leafy green vegetables that have a penchant for thriving in marginal soil. As interest in indigenous plants has grown, these vegetables – long an unheralded staple of the rural poor – are now at the centre of state and scientific attention. Plans are afoot to codify, patent, and popularise ‘indigenous knowledges’ for a variety of ends: the enhancement of national competitiveness; revalorisation of indigeneity; pursuit of food security; and of course the stimulation of profit-making. […] Subsistence cultivators, however, are not alone in cultivating indigenous flora. About three hours south, in the city of Durban (and throughout South Africa) something called ‘indigenous gardening’ has gained popularity since the end of formal apartheid. As we elaborate later, ‘indigenous gardening’ is a name reserved for a specialised field of activity, a metropolitan affair practised by conservationists, botanists, real estate developers, horticulturalists, architects, and enjoyed by mostly white upper class homeowners for a variety of purposes, especially those associated with conservation. It is sanctioned by science and other kinds of credentialed expertise, and geared towards enabling overwhelmingly white metropolitan home owners to pursue ecologically friendly ways of aesthetising their properties, rather than towards matters of subsistence undertaken by those deemed the black rural poor. From the vantage point of our conversations with subsistence cultivators like Gogo Qho, we wonder, ‘Why do overwhelmingly white metropolitan homeowners specifically want indigenous plants to adorn their properties? What kind of desire for indigeneity is being pursued here? What is Indigenous about Indigenous gardening other than plants?’ […]

Source: Narendran Kumarakulasingam and Mvuselelo Ngcoya, “Plant Provocations: Botanical Indigeneity and (De)colonial Imaginations.” 2016.

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Landscapes and vegetation are not simply the backdrop against which violence and dispossession unfold, but are mobilised as the very medium of violence [...]. Key here is the space of the garden, in multiple ways. Gardens in the Western imagination often have utopian, pre-lapsarian associations, but are in fact riven with ambivalences that stem from questions concerning who is displaced in order to demarcate their boundaries, and whose labour is exploited to maintain them as sites of nourishment and enjoyment. [...] As such, the colonised subjects remain cast out of the [...] garden of earthly delights, even if its is precisely through their knowledge and labour that the actual garden feeds and sustains the symbolic garden -- notably, the plantation system [...]. In the context of imperial botany the space of the garden was vital, with the frontrunners of the modern scientific botanic garden, which were established in sixteenth-century Italy, combining ‘the scientific ideal of comprehending universal nature’ [...] ‘by gathering together all the creations scattered at the fall of man.’ As such, the botanical garden can be understood as a laboratory of empire, as can tropical island colonies (also incubators for the revival of European Edenic dis/course) and the space of the plantation more broadly. Moreover, the construction of the category of the ‘damnes’ of the earth needs to be read in the context of this wholesale classification of forms of life enacted by imperial science. Notable botanists such as Linnaeus, as well as Hans Sloane and Joseph Banks, were influential in the development of scientific racism, as well as the endorsement of slavery and colonisation of foreign territories. Colonial natural science [...] was central in the construction of race and sexuality [...]. By and large, imperial science (what we might call a ‘monoculture of knowledge’) excluded other, ‘minor’ histories and systems of knowledge (’ecologies of knowledges’), as well as modes of being-in-the-world that are not premised upon the value, profitability and usefulness of plants [...].

Source: Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh. “Introduction” to The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions. Third Text. 2018.

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picturejasper20 · 3 years

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Infinity Train and Cults

One of the most interesting aspects in Infinity Train's story is how humans passengers start cults and the process of recruitment. This theme is very prevelent during the second half of Book 2 and all Book 3.

This theme is represented with "The Apex": a group commopsed of very young passengers who go from car to car harrassing citizens of the train and stealing their goods. They are first introduced in the series in the episode "The Lucky Cat Car" in Book 2.

In this post i'm going to write a detailed analysis explaining what is a cult, why the Apex could be considered a cult and the reasons why passengers would join the group in first place.

To do this i'm going to cite a few sources about cults and the psychology behind cult recruitment, which you'll find at the end of this post.

Let's start:

1) The definition of the word "Cult".

According to Sociologist Janja Lalich who speciales in cults the definition of a cult is:

¨A cult can be either a sharply-bounded social group or a diffusely-bounded social movement held together through shared commitment to a charismatic leader. It upholds a transcendent belief system (often but not always religious in nature) that includes a call for a personal transformation. It also requires a high level of personal commitment from its members in words and deeds.¨

Another details she talks about in her article are:

¨This definition is not meant to be evaluative in the sense of implying that a group is good, bad, benign, or harmful. Rather it is meant to convey a systemic view of such a group, which is comprised of a charismatic relationship, a promise of fulfillment, and a methodology by which to achieve it.¨

¨Each group must be observed and judged on its own merits and its own practices and behaviors as to whether it falls within this category type, which is not meant to be dismissive or one-sided¨

The Ted-Ed video: ¨Why Do People Join Cults?¨ gives a similar definition:

¨Broadly speaking, a cult is a group or movement with a shared commitment to a usually extreme ideology that's typically embodied in a charismatic leader. A typical cult requires a high level of commitment from its members and maintains a strict hierarchy, separating unsuspecting supporters and recruits from the inner workings. It claims to provide answers to life's biggest questions through its doctrine, along with the required recipe for change that shapes a new member into a true believer.¨

To put it in simpler words: A cult by definition is a social group which has a very strong belief system (this doesn´t mean it is religious), it’s controlled by a charismatic leader whose followers rarely question. The members of the group have to obey an specific set of rules that are usually created by the leaders of the cult. Critical thinking is very often discouraged between the members.

The word cult isn´t meant to be good or bad. It’s just a way to describe a social group with specific characteristics. The definition itself isn´t exact, one has to learn about the group first before labeling it as a cult.

Now, how do the Apex from Infinity Train fall in this category?

2) The Apex as a cult.

For this part of the analysis I’m going to cite common characteristics of cults and how they do apply to the Apex. I’m going to add multiple examples of how the Apex members behave, how they interact with their leaders (Grace and Simon) and their ideology.

¨The group displays an excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader, and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.¨

In the series, the Apex members consider Grace and Simon as unquestionable leaders. They follow their commands including those that are indicate to hurt train citiziens.

When Grace snaps her fingers in one of the kids immediately listens to her and goes to her side, kneeling when he meets her. (The Lucky Cat Car).

Simon also kneels before Grace in next episode since he is supposed to be second in command.

In ¨The Music Car¨ all the members pledge to the leaders and salute them:

¨Apex!

May our spirits be high!

And our numbers higher!

Down with the false Conductor!¨

Both Grace and Simon appear to have a special status within the group as they are given gifts by the kids when the raid a car as seen in the first episode. It’s not stated if this is part of their routine as way for each member to prove they are worthy of being a Apex but considering the rules of the group it is very possible assumption.

¨Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.¨

In ¨The Mall Car¨ after Jesse refuses to follow Grace orders and stands up for Lake and Alan, Grace responds by telling him he made a big mistake and uses her mirror to let the flecks catch Lake.

This is a huge contrast with how she was very friendly with Jesse at the start of the episode. Grace´s sudden change of behavior comes from how Jesse didn´t accept her authority and realized how he was being manipulated.

This is another example of The Apex behaving as a cult: In the moment someone doesn´t want to follow Grace or Simon´s orders, they are seen as an enemy who opposes the Apex and there before must be punished. Disagreement is very discouraged in cults groups. Those who show any sign of disagreement or doubt are mocked, guilt tripped and called out.

A more subtle case of this happening when one of the kids,Lucy, calls a train citizen a ¨person¨. Grace corrects him by telling him that the train citizen is ¨another toy the train made to amuse us.¨ She makes Lucy feel ashamed for doubting the Apex ideology by mocking her in front of Simon: ¨Aw, that's cute. Lucy thinks it's a person¨ (The Music Car).

¨The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members (e.g., the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity.¨

The Apex believe that they are entitled to their car. They are above the train citizens, they are allowed to take and hurt them as much as they want because for the Apex the citizens aren’t real and they don’t experience emotions.

¨She doesn't even have a number. (..) ¨She's not a passenger¨.(..) Exactly, she's a null. Null, it means nothing, not even a zero.¨ Grace talking about Lake in ¨The Mall Car¨

¨I've got a number, and you don't. You two are only as good as you are useful.¨ Simon referring to Alan Dracula and Lake.

The group itself refers to the old conductor as their as divine figure, who inspires them everyday and has been stolen from his true place by the ¨false conductor¨, who is One-One. It’s almost as the old conductor is their god because it has the highest number in the train.

Grace mentions multiple times in Book 3 how she was saved by the conductor. It´s heavily implied she believes she has been chosen and how she´s the only one that who knows how the conductor looks like.

In Apex ideology, the numbers are very important: They determine your status in the community. The higher the number, the more powerful you are. To increase your number you have to do the tasks the leaders give to you. These tasks involve destroying, stealing and hurting citizens. The person with the highest number is the leader of the group.

¨The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before joining the group¨

While wrecking the car in the episode ¨The Lucky Cat Car¨ Grace mentions how the Apex are just doing what they must to survive. This shows a very explicit example of ¨the the end justify the means¨ that is common to find in cults. Grace and the other Apex kids are clear they don´t care about stealing and hurting citizens as long as they are able to increase their numbers and get resources.

Another example of this is when Grace and Simon plan to getting rid of Tuba to take Hazel with them in Book 3. This implies they don’t care about separating kids from their train companions to make them join the Apex. It wouldn´t be farfetched to think they have done this before with other young passengers to isolate them and persuade them into staying with the group.

In case of Jesse in Book 2, Grace tries to convince him to participate in a raid by breaking a cube from a train car. She tries making Jesse believe that those without numbers aren´t real and lack capacity to experience actual pain. Before that she told him to throw food under the train by saying he is ¨free to do whatever he wants¨. This case is more about how members make non-members commit morally questionable actions before they become full members.

¨Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group.¨

Very often when joining a cult members are asked to keep distance from their close relationships (family and friends). Applying different methods, the leaders seek to isolate the new members from their family to control them more easily and thus making doubt less of the orders they are following.

In Infinity Train, the apex often try to separate kids and teenagers from their train companions. To do this, they manipulate the passengers into believing that their companions are just ¨toys to play with¨ and that the Apex are going to give them a home to live.

In ¨The Mall Car¨ Grace asks Lake to stay to look for Alan Dracula while Jesse goes with the Apex kids. Grace did this on purpose to be alone with Jesse and cause problems between him and Lake’s relationship.

After Lake stays behind, Grace starts talking about how Lake is getting Jesse into trouble and how the train is a ¨scary and lonely place¨. By giving Jesse all these negative thoughts she intends to giving him more reasons to not continue his journey and be part of the group.

In Book 3, Grace and Simon try applying something similar with Hazel and Tuba. They try to make Hazel to leave Tuba’s side and getting rid of the citizen. Much like Lake and Jesse, Tuba and Habel have a very strong bond which means they are going to have a hard time encouraging Hazel to ditch her friend.

One detail worth of adding is that they considered Tuba a threat because of her huge muscular form which made her look really intimidating. Someone like her was a obstacle that was impeding them to recruit Hazel.

¨Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.¨

The Apex believe there was a conspiracy against the old conductor and the new conductor (One-One) is the false conductor. They seem to hold into this idea that old conductor was overthrown and their true place is being in charge the train.

When Amelia is explaining them that she used to be the old conductor and she isn´t prisoner of One-On, Simon keeps accusing her of spreading false propaganda and insist Grace that she is trying to trick them. In this scenario, it makes some sense for someone to be skeptical, especially if they held a very strong belief system like Grace and Simon do.

3) Why would passengers join the Apex?

After watching how badly the apex treat the train citizens and separate kids from their companions, why would someone join them? It may look like only those who want to commit vandalism and have a extreme prejudice against citizens would but if one analyses how the train operates it makes perfect sense.

When a kid gets on the train, they are completely separated from their family. Unless they find a kind companion, they are going to be completely alone stuck in a unknown place without adults to take care of them. They are very likely going to feel lost and scared not knowing what they have to do and what they should go.

Combine all this factors and they make a very easy target for a cult movement like the Apex to recruit: The members can take care of them, give them a place to belong, have friends and a sense of community. The kid passengers don’t have to worry about anything as long as the follow the rules.

Cults seeks to recruit people who are in a state of extreme vulnerability, who have issues fitting in or may feel lost. The members give these people a new purpose. They say ¨we can be your new home, your family¨ which leads to people to be persuaded into joining.

In the two examples in the series, Hazel and Jesse, Grace talks to them about how great the Apex are: They are going to help them, they will take care of them and keep them safe from the dangers of the train.

With Jesse, Grace tells him ¨how she cares about people¨. She fills his mind with how the Apex are good and they can do whatever they one. She’s very friendly with him and even invites him to jump from car to car.

In the case of Hazel, Grace tells her how they are going to help her with fixing her number. She also mentions how Hazel is going to meet tons of other kids once they reach the Apex car.

She knows that kids like Jesse and Hazel feel confused inside the train and takes advantage of their weaknesses to trick them into becoming Apex members.

In Conclusion:

For the reasons I wrote in this post, one could interpret the Apex from Infinity Train as a cult or a social group that shares characteristics found in cults : They have a very specific type of almost religious ideology, they think having more numbers gives them a special status, they rarely have doubts in their leaders and don´t care about hurting people to get what they want.

I think that the Apex is one of the most interesting themes of the series. It explores what happens when many young passengers start working together and create their own society with its own rules while showing how people come together when they find themselves lost in a place they don´t understand. It’s worth of analyzing the psychological and sociological aspects of this community and how they work.

Sources that were used for this post:

http://cultresearch.org/help/characteristics-associated-with-cults/

http://cultresearch.org/definition-and-explanation-of-the-word-cult/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janja_Lalich

https://www.insider.com/why-people-join-cults-according-to-therapist-who-treats-survivors-2020-9

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/may/27/cults-definition-religion

The video ¨Why do people join cults?¨:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB-dJaCXAxA&ab_channel=TED-Ed

#infinity train #infinity train season 3 #infinity train season 2 #infinity train grace #infinity train simon #it analysis #cults #Animation

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funnuraba · 3 years

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A Rough Moral Overview of Archie Comics: Teen Propaganda Machine

Part 1: The 1940s

1941: Archie first appears in a small feature near the end of PEP Comics #22. His popularity builds rapidly, with the audience apparently writing in to express immense interest in the short monthly Archie comic.

At first the Archie story isn’t even mentioned on the cover, but Archie himself slowly starts appearing on the cover, always with PEP’s big star at the time, The Shield. The Shield on the cover is at first much larger than Archie, but he shrinks over time, and after Veronica’s introduction, she and Betty start to feature on covers as well. The Shield continues shrinking...

And by issue #49, the magazine is PEP Comics: Starring Archie Andrews! Archie quickly becomes its own imprint, and the only one of PEP’s lineup that survives into the present day. Ads in the magazine advertise an Archie radio show that was spurred by what was a apparently a massive outpouring of interest from PEP’s teenage subscribers. The concept of teenagerhood itself was a new invention dating from 1944. Archie’s reality included things like school, dating, and modern teen problems like trying to maintain a car and deal with wartime rationing.

Also, sending your dog to fight Nazis. (Note: the above are two separate stories; no Nazis ever actually invaded Riverdale. Oscar, Archie’s dog, gave birth on at least two occasions, including during her army tour, and eventually faded from existence.)

At this stage, minstrel-style caricatures of black men appear on occasion in Riverdale (as train attendants and no-account bums who steal clothing out of the trash), and Yellow Peril-style caricatures of Japanese people are a regular fixture in other PEP features like “Captain Commando and the Boy Soldiers”. As a side note, Chinese people are depicted quite differently in Captain Commando. At this point in US history, they were seen as important potential allies in the war against the Japanese. In Captain Commando, they’re drawn like actual humans in comparison to Japanese soldiers. One story shows a Chinese warrior who’s been bamboozled by foolish Buddhist ideals of peace, but finally snaps out of it and gets his followers to join up with US forces in resisting Japanese occupiers. Chinese-Americans were depicted less frequently, but also running in PEP for a time was a rather remarkable depiction (for the time) of a Chinese-American hero: Fu Chang, International Detective. Chinese people would later be collapsed into the Yellow Peril phenomenon in US pop culture and there were some very racist depictions within Archie Comics, but in the 40s there was a different perspective on display for a while.

(Captain Commando and his Boy Soldiers have since lapsed into the public domain; evidently the heroic quality of child soldiers lost its gleam after WWII and reviving the property was never deemed profitable.)

Also in the 40s, many, many stories end with a quite literal punchline in which Archie gets taken out to the woodshed and beaten by his father for causing trouble. This was PEP’s light-hearted humorous fare that apparently spoke quite deeply to a teenage audience of this era. The depiction of corporal punishment is neither “pro” nor “anti”, it’s simply an unavoidable consequence handed down from on high. Archie’s misadventures lead inevitably to physical punishment from an authority figure, no matter how much or how little he’s to blame for things going wrong. Mr. Andrews himself is sometimes a figure of fun during this period, but the 40s and 50s are the time when he most often feels like a self-insert for the writers and artists, who would have been closer to his position in life than Archie’s.

Archie’s position, though, isn’t entirely as the object of abuse. It’s pretty safe to assume that the writers and artists also grew up with corporal punishment and can sympathize with the experience--though they’ve now entered the stage of life where they understand that it was done only for their own good. Archie at the end of these stories is both resentful and rueful; he wishes it hadn’t happened, but there’s no room in the pages of PEP to contemplate a world where it doesn’t have to.

Violence was much more accepted in the 40s, including against the girls themselves--for their own good, in this case, but it’s still jarring to see a man give Betty and Veronica black eyes. Their crime in this case was, of course, being so silly and man-crazy that they nearly drowned him and themselves.

Often the violence was more cartoonish in nature, but it was only in the 40s that you’d see Betty showing up at Veronica’s door with Moe Szyslak’s weapon of choice.

The porter in this panel is one of the kindest portrayals of a black man in this period; the others (and the one depiction of a black woman that I noticed) are frankly unreproducible without heavy content warnings. Also in the 40s, fat and/or ugly women exist only as an object of fun or outright cruelty.

Vague “reducing plans” were advertised in the pages of Archie in the 1940s. This particular method was, as the name suggests, seaweed pills that were also marketed as chewing gum.

You may notice in some stories that the “ugly” and undesirable woman has very nearly the same face as Archie himself; the irony here is very likely unintentional. It’s rarely (seriously) suggested that there’s anything morally wrong with Archie aspiring to a girl much prettier than he is, but an ugly girl expressing interest in any boy is a figure of fun right up into... well, the present day. The Gabby pictured in the panel above her was a semi-recurring character, one of the only plus-size recurring characters ever depicted in Archie. As her name suggests, she was a gossip and one of the undesirable girls, but she was sometimes allowed to be friendly with Veronica or Betty without immediate karmic punishment. She’s also notable because she’s not only one of the only plus-size characters, she’s one of the very few plus-size female or teenage characters. Mr. Andrews, Mr. Weatherbee and Pop Tate all survived the 40s, but Gabby didn’t.

Betty at the inception of “Archie” (the comic) was just Girl. She rather liked Archie and he liked her, and he would try to impress/date her but end up having his monthly funny adventure. But only once Veronica was introduced did she start to gain more dimension, this time as Other Girl. Veronica was rather nice to begin with and it took a short while for them to start getting played off each other as “characters”. There was still little difference. Veronica was always rich and as a result became snooty fairly quickly, but her flaws were the flaws of an object. They existed to create difficulties for Archie, in his struggle to impress her, and Betty was differentiated only by not being snooty.

When Betty and Veronica were allies, it was because Archie had blown it somehow, and they were naturally compelled to be allies by virtue of both being girls. (When they didn’t like each other, it was also because they were both girls, and such was the natural state of being girls.) The panel above--both in the same pose, their identical faces lifted in scorn towards all men--would be echoed in other later stories, whether by chance or by accident.

Their posing in the 40s was frankly pretty ludicrous and transparent in its intentions.

Sexual attraction wasn’t explicitly commented on in the 40s comics in the way we understand “explicit” today, but it’s allowed to exist more openly than in later years. The va-va-voom effect highlighting the breasts would have to become more euphemistic as the decades passed.

In general, there was very little pretense in the 40s.

Artists had no qualms about showing the girls nearly in the nude (I cropped out a panel of Veronica in the bath above), nor about showing adult men leering at them. Even Mr. Weatherbee was occasionally moved by their charms. Generally adult men were “punished” for showing visible attraction, but only in humorous ways. It was more common for the teenage boys to drool over the girls, but the only disapproval shown when grown men did it came from women their own age, playing the role of scold or prudish spinster. There was also the occasional gag in which an adult man was misunderstood as a “masher” or peeper and received undeserved punishment from the supposed target.

There were various write-ups of celebrity activity in the 40s and 50s, and there too the attitudes towards women were pretty much what you’d expect, but even in the late 1940s the realities of life were not entirely veiled from teenage eyes. There was room for what would now be considered adult jokes.

Also in the 40s, Archie cross-dressed, like, a lot, in a way that noticeably vanished once the 50s rolls around. It’s always as a gag, and it’s usually noted that he makes an ugly girl, but in this era it seems to have been an idea that could be poked fun at without threatening the moral fiber of all America by the mere suggestion.

In fact, one semi-famous 1948 story, “The Battle of the Jitterbugs” (reproduced more fully elsewhere) revolves entirely around the girls and the boys competing in a “fair contest’ to see which sex is better at dancing--since boys only lead and girls only follow, it’s impossible to determine who can dance better overall. The obvious solution is for two girls to dance with each other and two boys to dance with each other.

Crucially, the idea is suggested by Reggie, the prankster of the group, framing it as a joke from its inception. Archie, the main character, follows through with it as a means of asserting male superiority. There’s also no possibility that two boys could dance, or two girls could dance, without the conceit of one performing the role of the opposite gender. But in practice, the whole thing does involve a lengthy depiction of two boys dancing together, and indeed, jokingly flirting with each other.

Again, the joke-flirting comes in the form of mocking from Reggie, both en femme and en homme. Archie, the protagonist and everyman, is uncomfortable throughout and finally throws Reggie right out Pop Tate’s door after Reggie goes too far in impugning his masculinity.

At this stage, the usual band of crones step in to punish him for imagined crimes against women, and he finishes the story sitting in bed with a broken leg, making a pronouncement that stands out rather sharply to the modern eye: “Confidentially, Jug! I’m no longer interested in women... or dancing!”

Veronica and Betty are significantly more comfortable with each other. In fact, it’s a rare 1940s story where they don’t quarrel with each other at all! Veronica’s femininity is seemingly unthreatened by the hat and pants, even though Archie Comics would continue issuing dire warnings against women in pants up through the mid-1970s.

It’s hard to imagine they lost after this! The tone of this page is downright celebratory, a rare occasion of early Betty and Veronica working together and coming out the victors of the story, not by one of them winning Archie, but by both of them showing their own skill at something without trying to show the other up. “Battle of the Jitterbugs” is a true rarity in these early years, a depiction of female triumph that doesn’t exactly defy the era’s pop culture as a whole--women were creating their own art even in the 1940s--but it does defy nearly every other Archie story up to the mid-1970s.

#archie comics #archieganda #i couldn't possibly put enough content warnings on this #content warning just about everything

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bonaintan · 4 years

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A Journey to KGSP/GKS: Study Plan

After a very long while, I finally managed to post this! This, I guess is my final post on A Journey to KGSP/GKS Series. I’m still considering whether or not to make a post about the interview. I’m not sure I can cover this topic well since my experience is limited to the interview session in the Korean Embassy. Even I heard that each Embassy has its own way of conducting the interview, including the questions given. Anyways, on this post, I’ll be sharing on my experience in writing a study plan (or statement of purpose for the Graduate degrees) for the GKS Application. If you just started preparing the GKS Application, you may want to check my previous posts on the guideline to the application forms and personal statement essay or read my experience in applying for the 2016 KGSP/GKS-G.

So, as we’ve known, a study plan is another important stage to showcase the applicant’s ability in planning his study in Korea. One needs to explain his/her plans before coming to Korea when doing the study in Korea, and after graduating from the Korean university.

Study Plan template (2021 GKS-Undergraduate Application)

Statement of Purpose template (2021 GKS-Graduate Application)

When preparing for the application back in 2016, I tried to find as many resources as possible. I joined the KGSP Global Applicant Facebook group, searched awardees from Indonesia and other countries online through Facebook and Instagram, and contacted them to discuss their experience and ask for some advice. I then found Mas Nasikun’s blog, a KGSP awardee from Indonesia who did his Master’s degree program at Seoul National University. I was especially very grateful for his posts on how to write a study plan. His posts on KGSP Application are still there and anyone interested in applying for this scholarship will surely find it very useful.

Here I’m making a kind of brief guideline in writing a study plan. I divide them into plans before, during, and after studying in Korea.

Plans before going to Korea. Here, you need to write down things you have been doing and will be doing before going to Korea. This mostly covers Korean language preparation. I believe that ‘taking Korean language courses’ shouldn’t be necessarily on the list. There’s a bunch of fun ways to learn a language, especially the Korean language. What is better than watching Korean TV shows and being whipped by the actors and actresses? (Not watching one?) Okay, if you still doubt whether you should start learning the language by now, I urge you to do so unless you just apply for fun and ‘luckily’ see yourself get a seat at the end. Especially for those who never got anything related to Korea, get yourself used to how Korean language sounds is an important first step that will take you further lightheartedly. I met people who hardly heard the Korean language until they reach the country, and they struggled within one-year language training which I believe could have been less tormenting and fun instead. One year is short if not to say insufficient, trust me.

I was far from fluent when applying for this scholarship program (well, I still am), but I wasn’t unfamiliar with the language either. If there was only one effort in learning the language that I invested the most, it was listening to Korean songs. I wasn’t into K-dramas before coming to Korea, and I could barely make any time to go to a language center. I started learning Hangeul (Korean alphabet) while preparing for the application but just started self-teaching on basic grammars around 2 months before my departure in August. I wasn’t confident in mastering the language in one year, plus my over-anxiety told me to do something to lessen my stress in the future. Still, I knew I should’ve started earlier.

So, you need to explain that any plans during this time are to prepare you for life in Korea and of course the degree program. Here, you also need to mention your goals during the language training program. You may divide it into two semesters; what things you will do and the level of Korean proficiency you aim in the first and second half. There are many programs you can participate in during language training, such as the Buddy program, voluntary work at Korean schools, cultural festivals, etc. You may do your research and mention what you’re mostly expecting to do to improve your Korean skills.

Plans during your study in Korea. This section is a little bit different for GKS-U and GKS-G applicants AND applicants via Embassy and University Track. GKS-U applicants are provided a separate section for this part whereas, for GKS-G applicants, this part is combined with the plan before coming to Korea. Regardless, the best way to deliver this part is by setting a timeline for your plan, either per semester or per academic year.

For GKS-U applicants, I personally think that you can simply mention the number of credits in total to graduate and the average number of credits every semester. As for the course, you can mention some courses you’re particularly interested in and the reason (for example, those courses are in line with the topic interest of your final project/thesis, or they will be beneficial for your future career). These are basic information, so make sure you check the curriculum and graduation requirements! Other things to include are plans on taking short-term courses during summer/winter break and organizations/clubs/other student activities you will want to join (check on the university/department website for reference). Don’t forget to elaborate on why you need these activities (project it to your future goal).

For GKS-G applicants, I recommend writing down your study plan per semester since dividing into two academic years may limit the details. Depending on the major, you may set different goals each semester. Generally, I believe, the first semester would be the time to strengthen your fundamental knowledge regarding your field of study while adapting to the Korean education system. Some may have chances to start consulting with their academic advisor/professor even working in a lab. In the second semester, you may need to start working on your research plans. Here, you may briefly explain the thesis research you want to do. Most Master’s degree programs in Korea require a thesis for graduation so make sure you prepare one. Unless you’re applying for the Research Program, no need to go very detail on this. Three important points to include when explaining your research plan: what the research topic is, why you want to work on it, and why Korea and/or your university choice is the best place to carry out this research. In the third semester, you will probably need to sit for a comprehensive exam and start conducting your research. For social science and humanity students, you should prepare the ethical clearance application by the end of this semester or during the semester break so that you can start conducting your research, especially, collecting the research data, as the new semester begins. Finally, you may wrap up your final semester by completing the thesis and publishing or submitting a research article to a journal (some departments have it as part of graduation requirements).

For Embassy track applicants, I don’t think you need to elaborate on your 3 university and major choices and the reasons behind every choice. You likely apply for similar if not the same major. Despite different names, the focus study should be the same and that’s what you need to elaborate on. What I did back then is briefing the reason I applied for that major (I already mention it in the Personal Statement so I just briefly explain it here) and what topic of study I will focus on my thesis research. For university track applicants, you may explain the reasons for applying to the major and the university of your choice and your study plan followed by the plan each semester.

Plans after graduating from a Korean university. The keyword for this part, I believe, is future career. And the best way to show the reviewer your enthusiasm and your visionary side (regardless of how vague the future life is yet), is to name your future goal. I think telling what kind of job you aspire and some motivations behind it would work. Another important point to include is whether you will return to your home country or stay in Korea after graduation, accompanied by things you will do afterward. Again, this part may seem vague for some, especially for GKS-U applicants. Still, you need to make it as detail as possible, regardless of whether you’ll change it someday in the future or whether it seems unattainable for now. Dream big! If you plan on going directly to a graduate school, briefly explain what motivates you to continue your study and what field of study you’re going for. For GKS-G applicants, I guess their work for this part shouldn’t be too difficult as some are likely to already have a job and/or know where they’ll go after receiving the degree.

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I hope you find this post helpful and may as well be a reference for writing your study plan. Best of luck with your GKS application and your study in Korea.

#korean government scholarship program #KGSP #global korea scholarship #GKS #studyinkorea #Korean Scholarship #scholarship for graduate programs #scholarship for undergraduate programs #student life #university life in korea #SouthKorea #studyplan

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moneypedia · 3 years

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How to Defend Against False Accusations: A Personal Defense and 5 Guidelines to Protect The Truth

August 5, 2018 By Drew Shepherd

[Note: This post contains details about an undiagnosed case of borderline personality disorder (BPD). These details are included for informational purposes only, not to spread hate towards people with the illness.

If you or a loved one have been diagnosed with BPD, however, you may want to avoid this article.]

Guilty until proven innocent.

That’s the new norm these days.

Our current social climate has made it empowering to be a victim. And any abusers left standing must be exterminated—whether they’re guilty or not.

Please don’t think I’m downplaying the experience of actual victims though.

I know what it’s like to be among the lowest of society, and the struggle of real victims is part of the inspiration behind this site.

But the inconvenient truth is that all these “abusers” aren’t the monsters they’re made out to be.

Why do I say that you ask?

Because I’m one of them.

And this is my story.

The Accusation(s)

During my early twenties, I got involved with a girl who I later realized had borderline personality disorder (BPD).

I’ve already written about the experience and I’ve alluded to it multiple times since. So please read that article before this one if you haven’t already.

BPD is a serious mental illness, but most people have never heard of it, let alone know how to diagnose it.

If you’re not aware of how people with the disorder act, this post will come off as a rant against an innocent girl who liked me—which couldn’t be further from the truth.

But to summarize, the most notable symptom of BPD is the inability to regulate emotions. It’s a symptom so powerful that a sufferer’s feelings can define his or her reality. And this is what leads to many false accusations.

Manipulation, emotional abuse, cheating, promiscuity—she publicly accused me of all them.

It’s part of the process of “painting someone black.” The BPD person goes through cycles of both extreme love and hate for their loved one, but once the relationship ends, the other party is permanently devalued.

Of course this treatment is reserved for those in close relationships with the BPD sufferer. Outsiders will only see a victim pleading her case.

I’ve stayed quiet on these accusations so far since most of them don’t have any substance, but I unfortunately made one mistake that appears to give her claims some validity.

So I’m sure that she already has, or eventually will use this evidence against me. And if her false accusations were to gain traction, they would not only destroy my reputation, but also the legitimacy of the message I present on this site.

The latter is my primary reason for defense.

I’ve always said that the Bible is the basis for my moral judgment, and that couldn’t be more important than in sexual matters.

Now do I always control my lustful impulses and thoughts?

And do I always prevent myself from viewing images I shouldn’t see?

No.

I’m a Christian but I’m still a sinful human being. Controlling lust is part of the lifelong battle against sin in the Christian life.

But when it comes to things like fornication and adultery, I’ve held true to my stance on abstinence.

And as tough as it is to be a twenty-something with this stance in our sex-saturated world, it’s beyond frustrating to be accused of doing the complete opposite.

I’m an ambassador for what I believe. And I can’t allow anything on this site—faith-related or not—to be diminished because of one person’s claims.

So I’ll go into detail here about what really happened, and then I’ll show you how to defend against false accusations once and for all.

Drew “The Player”

I’ll preface my story with a little background information.

I was going into my last semester in college, and it had been about a year since I saw my accuser in person.

Things didn’t end well between me and her the last time we were “together.” But I was admittedly still interested in her—even with all the red flags.

It appeared that both of us were sad with the way the first go ‘round ended. So I foolishly tried to work something out with her before the semester started.

To my surprise, I was ignored and indirectly shot down.

How a normal girl would’ve reacted

It hurt pretty bad after putting myself out there for someone I thought still cared. But rejection is a part of life, so I moved on.

What’s crazy though, is that she changed her mind at some point afterwards. And even though I never got a direct response from her, she apparently assumed we were in a quasi-relationship.

Now fast forward to February.

It was the week of Valentine’s Day. And while I did still think of her, I wasn’t sending a Valentine’s Day anything to a girl who I didn’t trust, who now lived in a different state, and who couldn’t even respond to my direct communication.

The only reason I entertained the thought of us getting back together—if we were ever truly together in the first place—was because she hoovered me back in.

Hoovering is a term that describes actions similar to what its namesake, the Hoover vacuum does.

It’s a tactic people with personality disorders subconsciously use to suck loved ones back in after a failed relationship.

In this case, she used one of the social media apps we both had to convince me that she was open to a renewed relationship, and that she had changed for the better.

But at this point, I was just focused on schoolwork because I had no clue what this girl was thinking.

I had a senior project for an external company that took most of my time that semester.

My project group and I met just about every weekday. And at the time, we were all trying to meet a deadline coming up the next week.

The day after Valentine’s Day, one of my teammates mentioned that we should go play trivia at a local bar. But being the introverted party-pooper I am, I declined.

My schedule involved waking at around 5:30 each day. My teammates were always out too late for my liking, and I knew I’d never make it back in time to get enough sleep if I went.

So I gave the whole, “Thanks, but no thanks” spiel even though I knew they wouldn’t let me off that easy.

Our team was a pretty tight group—especially for four people who were assigned to each other at random.

We had a ton of inside jokes by the end of the semester. And they were the first to tease me at graduation because my honor stole nearly fell as I walked across the stage.

So naturally, they all had a good laugh at me for not wanting to miss my bedtime.

Of course it was all playful fun though. I did get back at them numerous times over the semester, but I’ll admit that I have an off-kilter personality that lends itself to being teased.

So anyway, we went our separate ways and I headed to bed.

The next day, I saw an email from the night before saying that I was invited to a school-specific social app. I didn’t see the email until the early morning though because I went to bed early.

I had never heard of the app before and I was skeptical. So my first thought after waking and reading the email was, “What the heck is (app name here)?”

My second thought was, “Who’s the funny guy who sent this?”

Now I knew it was someone who previously had my email address.

Of course any student could have pulled that info from the school’s directory, but I doubt anyone would have gone through the trouble of searching their class roster, finding me, and then using my email address for the sake of hitting me up on an app.

So it had to be someone with whom I worked with closely or had a personal relationship with.

With these facts in mind, I falsely concluded that it was a prank from my teammate that the rest of the group was in on.

They had just gone out together the night before. And they always found a way to mess with me—even when I wasn’t around.

So just like any other time I felt I was being pranked, manipulated, or taken advantage of, I played along with the hope that the other party wouldn’t realize until it was too late (and this has been my M.O. since I was a kid).

But doing this, in hindsight, was a terrible idea.

Any form of participation on what I later realized was a hookup app would paint me in a bad light. And the consequences of my actions weren’t as clear at 5:30 in the morning.

After I made a quick profile—complete with pictures no man would ever use if he was truly seeking casual sex—I waited about 15 minutes for a response that never came.

Then after realizing how bad my actions could appear without context, I quickly deleted the app and went on with my day.

I’m not sure if I completely wiped the profile I created. But since the app was lesser-known and low key about its hookup aspect—it’s not like I signed on to Tinder—I figured this wouldn’t be a problem.

Outside of my own actions with the invite and the app though, I don’t know anything else. But there’s a chance that a troll profile made 10 minutes after I woke could end up biting me. And that’s why I’ve chosen to address it.

Now, I’m almost certain this invite was from my accuser. And I still kick myself for not recognizing the true source of the bait.

My actions gave her the apparent confirmation that I was “playing the field.” And within the week, she either started, or just made it obvious that she was sleeping with another guy to spite me—a wild and disproportionate response to the thought that your S.O. may be seeing someone else.

So once I confirmed that this actually happened, I ghosted her and all her drama, focused on my schoolwork (which led to my first 4.0), and then went along with my life.

People with BPD are notorious for doing stuff like this. It’s the reason why a popular book covering the illness is called Stop Walking On Eggshells (affiliate link):

They’ll cry about a lack of communication but then ignore you when you reach out to them.

They’ll go on about how lonely they are while sleeping with one of their (or even your) “friends” behind your back.

They’ll say you’re too stupid to complete a task but discredit you when you do it, and then raise the bar higher so you won’t reach the new mark.

After a while you won’t know what to do because she’ll never be satisfied. And everyone else will chalk it up to you not knowing how to treat a woman.

No-win situations and constant testing are common to those in relationships with these people—especially in regards to anything sexual. So I presume the invite was a test to see if I was some dirtbag who would cheat on his partner.

Now I’d hesitate to call it cheating either way since she ignored my attempts to directly communicate, and I had no idea what our relationship status was.

But the other “fact” she gathered was that I was a player who enjoyed casual sex (an assumption that would have driven a younger me mad with laughter).

Look, I understand that I don’t have a squeaky-clean Christian boy appearance—going through trials doesn’t purify the outside after all.

But that doesn’t mean I partake in the same activities those who look like me may be into. And it for sure doesn’t mean that my moral character is anything different than what I present on this site.

Of course it doesn’t help that I’m black either…but I won’t go down that road.

I should also note that I don’t have a personal Facebook or Instagram account. So it’s tough for others to know much about my life unless they read this site or talk to me or my loved ones personally.

This blank space makes me an easy target for accusations since I can be unknowingly attacked through mediums where I can’t defend myself. And there are no videos of me playing with my dog to fill the holes left by my “shady” lifestyle.

Usually this isn’t a problem as most of the people I meet don’t care about my online presence. But of course there’s always one person who assumes the worst case scenario. And it’s sad that in my case, this person was someone I genuinely liked before.

These obsessive behaviors were nothing new though:

This same girl cried sobbed in the middle of one of our classes—when we were both in our twenties mind you—because I didn’t initially return her interest.

She would go from spaced-out to depressed and then stare at me like it was my fault.

She even accused me of cheating after seeing a pic my mom took of me when I was at dinner with my family.

So you can imagine the relief I felt when I closed the door on that for good.

At this point, the only ones who still believe her lies—or to be fair to the illness she has, her reality—are people I’ve never met.

But I’m not even mad anymore. I’m just annoyed that my life is still negatively affected because I fell for the wrong girl.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the honest truth.

How to Craft Your Defense

So now that my story’s out of the way, how do you fight your own false accusations?

It’s not too difficult.

Just follow these 5 guidelines to protect yourself in both the present, and the future:

1) Remember the Alibi

As tempting as it is to piece together a story that makes you look like a saint, you have to ensure the truth you present is actually…well, true.

Since I couldn’t remember all this off the top of my head, I dug through my old emails and group conversations to get the timeline right. And I could always use them again if legal action was involved.

It also helps that I have an archive of posts here that clearly present my personality and the mistakes I’ve made.

You can even compare this post to the one I wrote on BPD earlier and you’ll see numerous similarities. If anyone thought I was lying, they could search the other 40+ posts here too to see that the story adds up.

But if you don’t have thousands of words as supporting evidence, just take your time, breathe, and write down what happened as best as you remember.

False accusations can cloud your memory when you first hear them, and your emotions will push for a raw defense. But if you start writing what you remember, you can put that passion to good use now, and update your writing later with more facts.

A story set in writing will be a great resource to have. You don’t want to lean on your memory or your speech when the pressure’s on.

If you write down what happened, you’ll also find other bits of evidence you’ll need to prepare your defense. And if your audience is really concerned with the truth, they’ll take all the info they can get.

2) Compare the Fruit

Perhaps the easiest way to expose the shakiness of false accusations is to note the shakiness of the accuser’s lifestyle.

This is by far my least favorite technique though since it appears to be an attack on character instead of the accusation itself. But understand that those two targets aren’t mutually exclusive.

A person who usually acts one way is almost certain to do it again.

And no, that fact isn’t judgmental. It’s simple probability.

This is going to sound like I’m bragging about my accomplishments and attacking her character, but let’s compare some notable points about my life and my accuser’s:

I improved to at least a 3.5 GPA in my last four college semesters within a STEM major. But I’ll admit my accuser was booksmart, so we’re pretty much even there.

I have never gotten blacked-out drunk (or even consumed alcohol). I have never taken an illegal substance. And I have never lived a promiscuous lifestyle. My accuser has done, and probably still does, all three.

I landed a stable job in my field more than a month before I graduated, and I’m still employed there today. My accuser barely held a job as a bar server about a year after graduating with the same degree.

Again, I don’t like expressing my achievements, and I never want to attack anyone’s character. We all make mistakes, and I made one of the biggest mistakes any student ever will (which she contributed to by the way).

But when someone’s lifestyle displays a clear pattern of incompetence, recklessness, and mental instability, the validity of their claims also takes a hit.

And that’s without mentioning that I’ve written the equivalent of a book here at HFE—a site where I cover my own shortcomings just as much, if not more than my accomplishments—on my own time and dollar because I believe it will help others.

So knowing all this, let me ask you, who do you think is telling the truth?

A tree’s fruit always gives it away.

Know who you are and know who you’re dealing with so any other lies are dismissed as the jokes they are.

3) Change “I” to “We”

The most unfortunate thing about false accusations is that no one’s waiting to hear a verdict.

As soon as those words leave your accuser’s mouth, you will be facing much more than one person.

Friends, family, social circles, even whole communities may turn against you.

And what began as a defense against one liar becomes a battle against an entire army.

So what do you do when this multitude of warriors stands against you?

It’s simple.

You gather the troops.

Find people who can vouch for your story. Get help from friends who aren’t blinded by the lies. Ask people who were neutral bystanders to explain what happened since they’re not biased.

I know I can get anyone from former classmates, friends, and family members to acknowledge the truth of my claims.

And since I know the mental issues my accuser deals with, I can also refer to a psychologist or another mental health resource.

An understanding of my accuser’s mind is one of the best counters to her claims. Yes, she acts in unstable ways, but they’re predictably unstable, and numerous people have experience with the problem I have now.

You shouldn’t be afraid to get professional help either.

Lawyer up if it’s serious enough.

Slander and libel are legit crimes. And if you can prove that your life is heavily impacted, especially financially, you may have a case.

So don’t go at this alone. You can bet your accuser isn’t.

4) Go One and Done

The biggest mistake people make when presenting any argument, defense, or reasoning is that they over-explain themselves.

Sure, you want to be as thorough as possible in your explanation, and you should reference points of that original argument to answer questions. But there’s no need to add to your stance or sate a mind that will never believe you.

If you’ve taken the necessary steps to present and defend the truth, you have to live with the results.

Learn to be comfortable with the fact that everyone won’t like, listen to, or believe you. Because the more you add to your original defense, the weaker it will appear.

You’ll also introduce more room for error. And it would be a shame for a memory lapse to cause an otherwise solid defense to fail.

Remember that it’s only your job to present the truth. Not to make others believe it.

I’m confident that my defense removes any ammo my accuser has left. So now the only claims she can bring against me are accusations of neglect—which don’t matter since I’m not her parent—or causing hurt feelings—which isn’t a crime in America yet.

I presented the truth one time, and now there’s no need to address her claims again.

Every accusation doesn’t deserve a response. So stay true to what really happened, and let people think what they want afterwards.

5) Don’t Even Fake It

These accusations have made me realize the importance of the Bible’s command to, “Abstain from all appearance of evil.” (1 Thessalonians 5:22 KJV)

It’s not enough to just avoid evil acts. You have to avoid situations where you could possibly do them too.

For instance, plenty articles on false accusations describe how to protect yourself against false rape claims. But if someone can accuse you of something like rape without an obvious fabrication, you are in over your head.

You can’t reach the point where a verdict is decided by a “yes” or “no.”

It’s one of the many reasons you shouldn’t sleep around in the first place. You are putting your life in the hands of someone who could easily change their mind in the morning. And you have to stay out of that gray area.

Remember to guard your character at all times. You never know when you’ll need to fall back on your integrity.

For example, I remember one conversation I had with a friend a few years back, and my accuser happened to be in the room.

My friend noticed that I received a few glances of interest from girls. So out of the blue he asked, “Drew, how many girls do you get?”

He chuckled while asking the question, so of course it wasn’t anything serious. He didn’t ask about anything explicitly sexual either.

So being the joker I am, I said something along the lines of, “I don’t know. I lost count.”

Then the both of us laughed it off.

But there’s a chance my accuser heard those words and immediately assumed the worst.

It would have been ridiculous to say something like:

“I’m sorry sir, but I am a Bible-believing man of God who has accepted the challenge to live righteously. How dare you imply that I live such a heinous lifestyle?!”

So I had a quick laugh and moved off the subject.

But even this could have added to her claims. So now I try not to even joke about stuff like that—at least not when I’m around people who barely know me.

You should do the same. But don’t limit your efforts to watching your tongue:

Always dress in a respectable manner.

Avoid the crazy nighttime venues—they’re magnets for people like my accuser.

And please don’t go to a hotel room belonging to a member of the opposite sex.

Presentation always matters.

Avoid the appearance of evil, and it’ll be impossible to even accuse you.

Grant Me That Chance

I’ve had enough headaches from my past relationship, and I’d rather not think about it anymore.

But it was important to defend myself here before any other false info leaked.

I hope none of it came across as too aggressive though. I wrote all of this to clear my name, not to get revenge.

From all I’ve seen, read, and now experienced, real victims don’t go out of their way to destroy their abuser’s life. They just want justice and a chance to finally move on.

So if anything else comes up about this, please remember this point and grant me that chance.

Contrary to what some people think, I don’t hate my accuser, and I hope she’s able to turn her life around.

If there was a normal version of her who didn’t have what she had, I’d love to meet her. But the ship has sailed on anything between me and the real her.

All I want now is peace and the freedom to live a good life. And I’m sure that’s all you want too.

So remember who you are, take a stand for the truth, and then defend it with your life.

And who knows? Someone else may come to your defense if you do.

-Drew

#truth

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beatriceeagle · 5 years

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Gonna toss off a couple of Good Place thoughts that aren’t quite formed enough for a full blog post:

I liked the idea of what The Good Place did with Simone and Chidi in the most recent episode. Simone is a character that we, the audience, fundamentally sympathize with, presenting an argument that I think the writers felt was missing from the show’s moral argument: Why should you go out of your way to help bad people?

In particular, Simone isn’t trying to answer that question. She’s introducing it. She’s problematizing the entire foundation of the The Good Place, a show about how people can become better by reaching out to each other. Simone is saying, “Well, wait. If I’ve given this guy chance after chance after chance to treat me with respect, and he’s never done so, what reasonable ethical code would require me to risk my life for him?”

And The Good Place, to its credit, doesn’t argue her down or explain her away. It recognizes her perspective as valid, if irreconcilable with its own. That’s why she and Chidi leave things the way they do: “I respect your position.” “And I respect yours.”

This is a vital piece of perspective, if you’re going to go from having four basically good-hearted fuck-ups gel as a team to trying to redeem The Face of Trump’s America. But there are two problems that keep this plot turn from really functioning effectively.

First, it’s just not set up very well. Simone’s ethical perspective has gotten exactly one episode of air time. She spent the first two episodes of the season in a solipsistic haze, then she was backgrounded almost entirely while we focused on Michael-and-Janet shenanigans, and finally we got her showdown with Brent in episode 6. But up until that point, Simone could hardly have been said to have a perspective. She was, in fact, the least developed of the experimental subjects, in the sense that I couldn’t have told you what she needed to improve upon. Simone and Chidi’s break-up, and Simone’s principled split from the group, should hit with the kind of inevitable-in-hindsight freight train oomph of—well, maybe not the season one reveal, but a baby version of that. Like getting mowed down by Thomas the Tank Engine. There should be a specific history to Simone and Brent, and Simone and Chidi, and Simone and Eleanor, that led us to this moment. This break should matter. Simone should matter.

Simone should matter. And she doesn’t, either to the emotional narrative of the show, or, if you really fundamentally dig into it, to the ethical narrative. Because Simone runs off in Brent’s Escalade, leaving Brent to his doom, and Michael and Eleanor lose their minds because oh no, oh no, we’re fucked, the humans didn’t overcome their basic selfishness to save the complete and total asshole, and nobody in the room stops to think that maybe Simone was right. I mean, Chidi says that he respects her perspective, but Chidi’s just a human. Michael and Eleanor are operating as higher beings, here. They don’t get to see the points, but they know the points exist. They know how they’re divvied out. They have some sense of what actions get them, and what don’t. But more to the point, they’re the people who designed this whole damn experiment. They’re the people who set its parameters. And the parameter they set was: People are going to make other people better.

And the thing is, I don’t think that Simone is inherently opposed to that idea. Her argument is that it’s unfair to ask her, specifically, to take on the responsibility of making Brent, specifically, better. Because why should that be Simone’s job? From Simone’s point of view, Eleanor and Michael are the authority figures, and she and Brent are either their charges or their victims or their subjects, depending on whether this is The Good Place or The Bad Place or some kind of weird experiment, but no matter what, Brent is their responsibility, not hers. Aren’t Eleanor and Michael people? Aren’t they the ones in charge here? Why aren’t they doing the work of trying to change Brent?

And of course they are, but the inherent weirdness of season four of The Good Place is that they’re trying to do so almost entirely through the medium of the other experimental subjects. There’s a weird mismatch of scope here, and it leaves Simone out to dry: She hasn’t done anything except try to protect herself, and argue, not incorrectly, that a man who has repeatedly insulted and demeaned her is not her responsibility—but the narrative requires that, in doing so, she doom humanity. It requires that she be wrong, even if Chidi says that he respects her position, because what we really need right now is a big point boost, and points come from selflessness, no matter the context.

The Good Place is a show whose societal and individual ethics are sometimes hard to disentangle. The first season is basically just about how to be a good individual person. But as the show has progressed, and its world has expanded, it’s become unavoidable that its ethical questions have become larger: What is an ethical system of punishment? How can “goodness” really be measured at scale? Is it possible to be an ethical individual when the consequences of our choices are so complicated that they are unknown to us?

Season four is addressing a fundamentally societal question—is ethical rehabilitation possible?—but it’s placing the burden of that work on the shoulders of four individuals. And by that I don’t just mean that Simone, Chidi, Brent, and John are the test subjects; I mean that they are being asked to do the work of rehabilitating each other.

But in a society, it is no one person’s responsibility to rehabilitate any other person. We do—we should—have a responsibility as a community to rehabilitate rather than take revenge, but we need systems for that, and volunteers, and procedures. Asking a random woman like Simone to live with and rehabilitate a random man like Brent isn’t just horribly unfair to Simone; it’s almost certainly going to fail.

Eleanor and Michael represent the authority, here, both within Simone’s point of view, and, to a certain extent, in reality; they set the parameters of the experiment. It was their responsibility to rehabilitate Brent, not Simone’s. These four people didn’t need to cohere as a group; they needed individuated therapy. Brent needed to be told he was in the Bad Place, and forced to accept (measured) consequences for his actions; Simone needed basically that one conversation with Chidi; Chidi needed to talk to Eleanor and/or whoever and get out of his shell; who the fuck knows what John needed, that character was barely part of the plot. Eleanor and Michael forcing everyone together was a failure both from Simone’s point of view (in that they’re not doing a good job of addressing problems within the neighborhood) and their own (in that they’re not effectively rehabilitating people).

None of which is to like, tear down Eleanor and Michael, who are very pointedly fallible, and who are trying their best to do right by all of humanity, including Simone. It’s just that as much as I appreciate the idea of Simone’s story, as much as I like that the writers of The Good Place saw the potential response to their moral argument and sought to acknowledge it, I think she represents more than an alternate perspective; she represents a real failing on the show’s part to separate “what we owe to each other” in an individual sense from “what we owe to each other” as a society.

(And this is all with the caveat that The Good Place doesn’t bring this all up and hash it all out in the next episode, of course, of course. But I suspect they won’t. Mike Schur is really all-in on altruism, and “I respect your perspective” had the ring of a thematic statement.)

#the good place #simone garnett #spoilers #the good place spoilers

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yeonchi · 3 years

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Doctor Who 2021 New Year’s Special Review: Revolution of the Daleks

Air date: 1 January 2021

New Year’s Day is the new Christmas Day for Doctor Who. Two years ago, I was writing the review for the 2019 New Year’s Special, Resolution. One year ago, I was writing the review for the first episode of Series 12, Spyfall Part One (which essentially served as the 2020 New Year’s Special). Today, I'm writing this review for the 2021 New Year’s Special. Whether the change was because of political correctness, low ratings or just to change up the status quo, I think we should be glad that we even have a festive special, unlike the English dubs on Koei Tecmo’s Warriors games.

Amazingly, this special was filmed alongside Series 12 last year and kept on hold to today, meaning that production was largely unaffected by the coronavirus. Even with the anticipation and uncertainty for Series 13, which has already been reduced to eight episodes (with festive special status unknown), this episode serves as a good icebreaker given everything that’s happened in 2020 and the Timeless Child arc of Series 12.

Here is my spoiler-free thought for this episode: “It’s epic, heartbreaking and ridiculous at the same time.”

Spoilers continue after the break. Also, please don’t forget to check out my look at Doctor Who: Lockdown and the hiatusbreaker update for some post-Series 12 review thoughts.

Introduction

Chibnall mentioned that the recon scout Dalek from Resolution give birth to the new Dalek variant that was seen in this episode, thus making this episode a sequel to said episode. As such, this was the case.

367 minutes (about 6 hours) after the Doctor and her extended fam fought the recon scout Dalek at GCHQ, its shell was recovered. Jo Patterson, then Technology Secretary, tipped Jack Robertson (he will be referred to by his surname hereafter to differentiate him from Jack Harkness) off about it and managed to acquire it. After acquiring the plants of car firms that had abandoned Patterson and Rugazzi Technologies, Leo’s company, Robertson had defence drones developed (and 3D printed) based on the design of the Dalek’s shell.

The production of this episode was concluded by April 2020, with Chibnall stating that post-production work was continuing during the lockdown. This was before the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, meaning that the scene showing the testing of the defence drones was likely inspired from the Hong Kong protests. We see people throwing bricks and molotov cocktails, and the Dalek is shown to be fitted with a water cannon, CS gas sprayer and a sonic deterrent. That’s about all the allusion we get - if we had any more then we would have had a serious problem.

Doctor and companions separated

At the end of The Timeless Children, the Doctor was sentenced to life imprisonment in a maximum-security prison, while Graham, Ryan and Yaz were brought back to Earth along with Ravio, Yedlarmi and Ethan. We don’t get to see those three in the episode, sadly.

Over the next ten months, Graham and Ryan had moved on with their lives while Yaz became obsessed with finding the Doctor (yeah, just forget that you have a family and a job as a policewoman lol). Graham shows Yaz some leaked footage of Robertson at the defence drone testing. They go to confront Robertson, but are turned away by his security guards.

Meanwhile, the Doctor had been in prison for decades, accompanied by a Weeping Angel, an Ood, a Sycorax, a Silent and even a Pting. Unbeknownst to her, Captain Jack Harkness had managed to get into the same prison as her, spending 19 years just to get the cell next to her, before making himself known and breaking out of the prison together. The Doctor and Jack head to Graham’s house, where they catch up and set out to find Jack Robertson.

There are a couple of one-to-one scenes that really got me thinking. When Jack and Yaz investigate traces of Dalek DNA in Osaka, they talk about their separation from the Doctor and what their time with the Doctor has changed them into. Jack tells Yaz, “Being with the Doctor, you don’t get to choose when it stops. Whether you leave her, or she leaves you.”

Let’s break that line down with information from the TARDIS Wiki page on companions. There are several ways that a companion can join the Doctor - they stow away on the TARDIS, they were “kidnapped”, or were assigned by higher powers, like UNIT, the Time Lords or the White Guardian. Just like that, there are several ways that companions leave the Doctor - they might choose to leave, the Doctor decides or is forced to leave them behind, or they die.

The interesting thing is that Jack says that they don’t get to choose when they leave. In the case of companions who decided to leave of their own will, you might think it was an easy decision for them, but in truth, there is context behind their motivation to leave. In Series 2, Mickey Smith stayed on Pete’s World to help defeat the Cybermen after that world’s counterpart of himself (Ricky) died and he became increasingly disillusioned with Rose favouring the Doctor over himself. In Series 3, Martha Jones decided to leave the Doctor after seeing her family enslaved by the Master for a year, travelling around the world to get people to think of the Doctor, and realising that her feelings for him would never be reciprocated. In the classic series, Tegan Jovanka left the Fifth Doctor after being sickened by the death and destruction she witnessed. From this, I can deduce that what Jack meant to say isn’t that the companions don’t get to choose when they leave, but that they don’t get to choose the circumstances that lead to them leaving. In some cases, that also applies to the companions who get left behind by the Doctor or killed.

The other one-to-one is between Ryan and the Doctor in the TARDIS. The Doctor apologises to Ryan for leaving him, Graham and Yaz behind for ten months and Ryan tells him that during this time his relationship with his father has improved and that he got to catch up with friends. Ryan asks the Doctor what has changed with her since they last met and the Doctor tells her that she isn’t who she thought she was (that storyline’s never going to go away, isn’t it? Hope to learn about the full story of the Timeless Child in Series 13). This scene really highlights how the companions can be a source of support for the Doctor, just as the Doctor is a source of support for them.

Ryan tells the Doctor that she is the same as she has always been. The Doctor comforts herself by saying that nothing’s changed, but Ryan says that it wasn’t what he meant; things change all the time and we might be scared of the new, but in the end, we have to confront the new, or the old. This bit was definitely made with the Timeless Child twist in mind. Yes, things change (particularly when it comes to Doctor Who), but some changes can be good or bad; just as there are people who saw the Timeless Child twist as good, there are people who saw it as bad (including myself). It’s like what I said in the hiatusbreaker update about The Timeless Children pulling an Ultraman Orb and trying to lessen the impact of the twist when it didn’t make sense and caused more damage than expected.

Human-created Daleks (sort of)

When the recon Dalek’s shell was salvaged, some traces of its DNA remained in it. Since, according to Missy in The Witch’s Familiar, every cell of a Dalek is genetically hardwired to survive, their consciousness can live within the tiniest fragment of their DNA. Leo managed to clone the recon scout Dalek out of those traces and hooked it into the neural network. Disgusted after being shown the creature, Robertson tells Leo to incinerate it, but when he tries to do so, it escapes and takes possession of him. In a way, the recon scout Dalek was resurrected in this episode, but it didn’t feel like the same character.

While hooked into the neural network, the Dalek managed to make more clones of itself using Robertson’s resources, feeding them with the liquefied remains of the people who worked on them. After being confronted by the Doctor and the others, the Dalek uses the UV light to activate the Daleks, transport themselves into the shells that it augmented, then kills Rob and begins subjugating Earth.

Just as Jo Patterson introduces the defence drones in her first speech as Prime Minister, she gets exterminated by them quickly after they are activated. If Jack Robertson is an expy of Donald Trump, then Jo Patterson is an expy of Theresa May - a forgettable Prime Minister whose claim to fame (defence drones for the former, Brexit for the latter) backfired on them. To be honest, when I heard that they would be in this special, I almost thought that they got married or something.

There was a similar situation like this in the Series 3 two-parter, Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks, only this time, the Daleks were more involved. In that story, the Cult of Skaro were attempting to find a way to survive beyond the Dalek shell, to the point of creating Dalek-human hybrids, a new race with the intelligence of Daleks but with the emotions of humans. In both cases, the new Dalek variants were considered impure due to the human elements within them.

I’ve compared this episode to Victory of the Daleks when the trailer came out. With the addition of the conflict between the two Daleks (as I will outline below), there are additional contrasts to the Seventh Doctor story Remembrance of the Daleks and the Big Finish Eighth Doctor audio story Blood of the Daleks.

The nuclear option

With thousands of defence drone Daleks on the move and no weapons to deal with them, the Doctor seems to do the only thing she can think of that doesn’t involve destroying the Earth ala the Moment (which was what I was thinking) - signal a ship of Death Squad Daleks (SAS Daleks, but more brutal) to Earth to deal with the impure defence drones.

The two groups of Daleks confront each other on a bridge (specifically the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol). After seeing his Daleks get exterminated, Robertson takes his nuclear option - part with the Doctor and side with the Daleks. That’s right, Jack Robertson does an Utsumi (Nariaki Utsumi from Build, if you didn’t know) and sides with a race that would kill him the first chance they got. Give him a cane to break and we would have gotten the first tokusatsu meme in Doctor Who.

For someone who seems to be so obsessed with protecting himself (normally by using other people), I must say that this was a strange step for Robertson to take. Given that Robertson is an expy of Trump, one can only wonder what Chibnall and people like him think of Trump. Would Trump sell himself or humanity out to invading aliens? Personally, I don’t think he’d be stupid enough to do so. I think he’d bomb them with everything he has.

Robertson convinces the Daleks to take them aboard their ship and meet their commander. Meanwhile, Jack, Graham and Ryan board the ship and plant explosives on it. Graham tries to get Ryan to fistbump him, but he just tells him to “stop talking weird”. We’re back, fellow kids. Missed us?

Robertson tells the Daleks that the Doctor summoned them. The original Dalek returns and offers to be purified, only to be exterminated. Graham, Ryan and Jack find Robertson and they get off the ship together just as it is destroyed.

The Doctor floats her TARDIS in the sky among the Daleks and lures them inside, which would normally be an impossible feat if it weren’t for the fact that it isn’t actually the Doctor’s TARDIS, but the other TARDIS from earlier. She sets it to fold in on itself and send itself to the heart of the Void, thereby destroying them.

Soon after that, Robertson claims that he was acting as a decoy and so, he is lauded as the saviour of humanity. A honorary knighthood and a revived presidential run is mentioned after the toxic waste scandal (Arachnids in the UK) ruined his previous attempt. This is where my comparison to Utsumi weakens - Utsumi pledged himself to Evolto so that he could find a way to bring him down, but there doesn’t seem to be any ulterior motive in Robertson’s actions. Frankly, I’m surprised that he wasn’t exterminated at all.

Parting ways (for now)

By the time Graham and Ryan return to the TARDIS, Jack has left and is on his way to see Gwen Cooper, who has apparently had another child, a son. Honestly, his departure feels quite lackluster.

The Doctor offers to take the fam to a restaurant apparently named the Meringue Galaxy, but Ryan decides to leave the Doctor since he believes that his friends and planet need him. Graham struggles to decide, but in the end, he decides to leave with Ryan, leaving the Doctor and Yaz on the TARDIS. The Doctor gives them some psychic paper as a parting gift.

The final scene is a throwback to the beginning of The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Graham is helping Ryan ride his bike when they bring up some strange incidents around the world, like a troll invasion in Finland or gravel creatures in Korea. Ryan begins riding his bike one more time when they see Grace looking back at them in the distance. This is the last episode where Ryan’s dyspraxia is explored. Shame Chibnall never managed to do a lot with it.

We’ve known that Graham and Ryan would be leaving the series for months now, and we’ve also known that there would be opportunities for them to return. Let’s hope we see them again in Series 13.

Going back to my discussion about companions leaving, the major factor in Ryan and Graham’s decision to leave was that they had spent ten months away from the Doctor and unlike Yaz, they had already moved on with their lives. Additionally, for Graham, he doesn’t want to leave Ryan given the relationship they built up during their time with Doctor and possibly also for fear of abandoning Ryan, given how his father wasn’t there for him previously. This doesn’t feel as deep compared to other companions’ motives for leaving the Doctor, but it’s still quite deep.

At the end of Can You Hear Me?, we see Ryan talking to Yaz about spending their lives with the Doctor and forgetting everyone back home. I’d always thought that the human element of being a companion was annoying, but we have to remember that companions are people too and they had their own lives before they met the Doctor.

Other general thoughts

I know this is kind of irrelevant given that this episode was produced at the end of 2019, but could Leo be considered an Uncle Tom for inventing something designed to suppress protesters? By the way, don’t let China know about this or we’re all screwed, even in Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Jack gets a gold star for rescuing the Doctor. That puts Jack and Graham at 10 points and Yaz and Ryan at 20.

Jack also has his sonic blaster back as well. Will Jack also be back for Series 13? We’ll just have to see it to believe it.

The title cards are jarring again. Can the production team not be inconsistent with their fonts?

I swear, all the Yaz favouritism in the last two series must have given her Stockholm syndrome. Who’s to say that Mandip Gill wanted to leave, but Chibnall asked her to stay?

Taking a look at the designs for the Daleks, the defence drones are alright. They glow a bluish-white colour normally, but they glow red and shoot red beams when the Dalek creatures took control of them. You could probably mistake them for being red in the dark, which is highlighted when they are shown shooting people in the streets. As for the Death Squad Daleks, they’re basically just the basic bronze Daleks, including their leader. They should’ve brought back the multicoloured New Paradigm Daleks just so the Death Squad Daleks could be differentiated from ordinary Daleks.

Following the premiere of this episode, a new companion was announced for Series 13, with John Bishop playing the role of Dan. Honestly, with the Timeless Child mystery still looming and the lack of character development for Yaz, a new companion is the last thing this series needs, particularly since Series 13 would be Jodie Whittaker’s third series and possibly, her final one (if we’re going by previous Doctors). At the moment, Bishop is currently isolating after being tested positive for the coronavirus. I wish him well and look forward to seeing him in Series 13.

The reduced number of episodes in Series 11 or 12 may have contributed to the lack of focus on Ryan’s dyspraxia or character development on Yaz, but that’s no excuse. Chibnall had plenty of opportunities to factor them in, but he was too focused on not having a story arc in Series 11 and destroying canon in Series 12 to even think about it (Graham and Ryan got more character development in those two series than Yaz did). Now that Series 13 has been reduced to eight episodes (not counting the possibility of a split series or another New Year’s Special out of the eight), I fear that Chibnall won’t have enough opportunity to factor in Dan’s character development with Yaz’s character development, the Timeless Child, Ruth and/or the Master, particularly when he delegates half of the series to other writers and does very few good things in the remaining episodes he writes (or co-writes). Honestly, Series 11 and 12 felt like a waste of time in some aspects.

Summary and verdict

Like I said at the start, this episode acted as a good icebreaker in the long break between series. However, ever since my red-pilling in The Timeless Children, I’ve started to see this series in a new light, particularly with the help of YouTubers like Bowlestrek or Nerdrotic. Despite this, I’m reluctant to hop on the #RIPDoctorWho bandwagon because we still don’t have the full details for the Timeless Child arc, so I’m reserving most of my judgement until we get it.

Most of the episode was good, but the ridiculous part for me was when Robertson Utsumi’d himself and somehow managed to survive. Jack’s departure felt lackluster, Ryan and Graham’s departure felt lackluster to other companions’ departures and Jo Patterson was just... ehh. Let’s not forget that we didn’t see or hear a mention of the surviving humans from the previous episode because Chibnall just forgot about them.

Rating: 6/10 Series 12 total: 77/100 (77%) Series 12 total with Revolution of the Daleks: 83/110 (75%)

Overall, this special brought down my total score for Series 12, but it still did slightly better compared to Series 11. If it weren’t for Jack Harkness, my score for the episode would have been lower. Robertson, being a Trump expy, essentially represented all the SJW red flags in this episode; pointing them out is unnecessary at this point given my red-pilling.

That’s it for my review of the New Year’s Special. There is a certainty that Series 13 will premiere this year, so the next time I return with another review will presumably be in late 2021. As long as Jodie Whittaker is the Doctor, my mission to review her episodes will continue. Follow me on Facebook and/or Tumblr and keep an eye out for my future posts, Doctor Who-related or otherwise, such as the Kisekae Insights series where I give insights on my personal project, which was heavily influenced by Doctor Who.

Stay safe and I’ll see you then.

#doctor who #doctor who series 12 #thirteenth doctor #doctor who series 12 review #thirteenth doctor review

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comrade-meow · 3 years

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The term ‘gender identity’ was coined by psychologist and researcher, Dr. John Money, founder of the first gender clinic at John Hopkins Hospital in 1966. ‘Gender identity’ first appeared in print on November 21st 1966, in the press release announcing the creation of the clinic. Money would go on to develop his theory of gender by experimenting on young children.

Money recruited the parents of David Reimer to a twin study research project at the newly-founded clinic and inextricably linked the concept of gender identity to the case. Born in 1965, David, then named Bruce, and his identical brother Brian were test cases in an experiment designed to see if a boy could be brought up successfully as a girl after surgical alteration. Money’s hypothesis was termed ‘gender neutrality’. Bruce had suffered burns to his penis during a circumcision that went wrong. Money persuaded the parents to fully alter Bruce’s genitals at the age of two, removing testes and fashioning the artificial appearance of a vulva. Bruce was then renamed ‘Brenda’. Money reassured the parents that this measure was in the best interests of Brenda and that his theory of ‘gender neutrality’ would be proven correct. Money had, according to John Hopkins Hospital, solved an ethical dilemma, and so had an ethically sound basis to study how Brenda would proceed. Twin Studies are regarded as the gold standard within psychology and psychiatry and so these children appeared to Money to be the perfect experimental subjects on which to ground his ideas.

Money required that during childhood Brenda and her family visit John Hopkins to observe how the treatment progressed. This process of treatment included interviews to see if the parents were ‘girling’ Brenda correctly (enforcing femininity) and how the now supposedly differently sexed twins interacted. Brenda (David) and his twin brother Brian as adults reported that during part of this ‘treatment’ both were sexually abused by Money, who made the pair ‘role play’ heterosexual intercourse, inspected their genitals, and took photographs. Money denied these allegations, but also justified these coerced acts as, ‘childhood sexual rehearsal play’ which he considered important for a ‘healthy adult gender identity’, What is evidenced in transcribed interviews documenting Money’s interaction with the twins was that they were made to describe the difference between their genitals, repeat that these sexual differences made one a boy and one a girl and were encouraged to deliberate why Brenda fought less at school than Brian (“because I’m a girl”, Brenda is heard saying, to Money’s confirmation, “you’re a girl!”) It is very clear here that regressive gender roles became mixed with Money’s invention of gender identity.

Despite Money’s sexual liberalism and unorthodoxy regarding homosexuality, he and other researchers at John Hopkins did not consider reinforcement of strict binarism in relation to the sexes as damaging or illegitimate. For years Money wrote about the case as ‘John/Joan’ (instead of real names Bruce/Brenda), depicting the apparent success of gender identity development to support arguments for the feasibility of sexual reassignment. In contrast, Reimer decades later described how he urinated through a hole in his abdomen due to botched urological interventions by doctors.

Around the period of adolescence Brenda [David] was given oestrogen to induce breast development as part of early female puberty. Clinical notes show that shortly afterwards Brenda [David] rejected Money’s recommendations of surgery to create a vagina. From the age of thirteen Brenda began no longer to identify as a girl, reporting feelings of suicidal depression. At age fourteen, Brenda’s father told him about the sex reassignment process. Brenda shortly after took the name David and began living as a boy. In early adulthood David underwent treatment to reverse sex reassignment, including testosterone injections, a double mastectomy, and phalloplasty operations.

Throughout this period Money continued to publish on the experiment as a success, despite it being known by him that Brenda, originally Bruce, was now living as David. Only when Reimer opened his life to academic Milton Diamond did the devastating outcome of Money’s experiment become public knowledge and his research was exposed as fraudulent. Reimer committed suicide in 2004 at the age of 38. Leading gender theorist Judith Butler wrote shortly after David took his own life, ‘It is unclear whether it was his gender that was the problem, or the ‘treatment’ that brought about an ‘enduring suffering for him’, as if it were a riddle or great mystery.

The scarce amount of academic literature utilising the work of Money today might seem to indicate the widespread rejection of his methods, but the impact of these grievous scientific errors, if we can term medical violence against children under the name of science, remains paramount in informing contemporary accounts of gender identity. This is most obvious in the status of the Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic (GIC), the largest, most renowned Gender Identity Clinic in the UK. The Charing Cross GIC from 1994 has employed Money’s colleague, Dr. Richard Green as its Director of Research. This appointment came only seven years after Green published, The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and the Development of Homosexuality. Green is important not just because of his direct link to Money, but also because he was the sole colleague to publicly defend Money. Green claimed in a BBC interview that:

“With the benefit of hindsight, based on what we knew at the time about how you become male or female or boy or girl, with the advantage of hindsight knowing the difficulties to say the least of creating a penis surgically, the decision that John Money made at the time was the correct one. And I would have made the same one at that time.”

What the failed Reimer experiment and subsequent ‘hindsight’ amounted to was a conclusion that gender identity is not simply socially constructed, but also innate. The dominant position within psychology is that sexual difference is mapped onto the brain. For over two decades a myriad of neurological research has emerged from the Western psychological establishment arguing that male and female brains are ‘differently wired’. This research has been heavily promoted in mainstream media, but equally heavily challenged by feminist authors like Cordelia Fine.

How did we get from there to here?

Gender identity, a construct created in the United States, has crossed the pond and gone global. American cultural imperialism is hardly a new phenomenon, but how exactly did gender identity come to appear on so many campuses in the United Kingdom within the last decade? The consensus around gender identity inside the humanities, emanating primarily from U.S campuses, has been established over the last three decades mainly by Queer Theorists who sought to outflank structuralist accounts of gender, that positioned gender as part of a wider system of social relations that maintain capitalist patriarchy. That systemic approach has been sidelined in favour of concepts like ‘performativity’ and gender as an essentialist quality emanating from ‘inside’ us, something that we are born with.

The emergence of the idea of gender as essential and internal is not a new one. The regressive belief in male and female souls has existed for centuries, often expressed through notions of the sexed male or female brain. It is this notion that feminist Mary Wollstonecraft addressed in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) stating, ‘There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. May as well speak of a female liver’. Even Freud a century ago, wrote against the arguments of the sexologists, challenging the idea of a feminine or masculine brain in his Three Essays on Sexuality (1905).

Unfortunately, these ideas continue to dominate mainstream discourse. Gender as an element existing in the brain, or as an innate essence has been taken up and promoted by youth advocacy groups like Gendered Intelligence. For example, Gendered Intelligence organised events around the ‘Trans soul’ entitled The Corpse Project. It may seem surprising that today it is still necessary to dispute the concept of sexed brains or gendered souls, or to argue against dualist claims of the mind or brain as separate from the body, but we have in our arsenal as Marxists a key theoretical tradition, namely; historical materialism.

When Marx famously wrote in 1852, ‘Men [ed: and presumably women!] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ he pointed towards a wider understanding of how the already established social world determines us as subjects within it through social conditions. This is exactly complimentary with the materialist understanding that gender is ‘socially constructed’ – that gender as a system of social relations and norms is socially contouring, creating a web in which we sit and constituting us as gendered subjects (a Marxist understanding considers ‘ideology’ as the key method of this). We, as subjects, do not determine the world around us purely as individuals.

If gender is the system of norms that underpin the social relations and sexual politics between men and women under capitalist patriarchy i.e women’s role within the home and the associated qualities of femininity, such as passivity, the suitability to the private world of the domestic sphere, coupled with the conception of men as embodying masculine traits, such as being outgoing and suited to the public world of work. We can see why it is so important for the existing social order to naturalise and reify these codes of behavior. Women’s subordination must be secured in order to sexually and socially reproduce our societies. Men’s domination must be established to help secure women’s subservience.

The contemporary version of gender ideology with its reliance on femininity and masculinity (women’s subordination and men’s dominance) as inescapable points of reference to understand ourselves, and society, is simply a rearrangement of the building blocks required to accept patriarchy as it exists today.

That men who identify with feminine dress or feminine beauty practices can be considered women only re-establishes the idea women are feminine. Women, as adult human females, have no natural predisposition towards ideological gender norms and radical politics should reject any imposition of the acceptance of femininity as anything other than a social construct designed to secure women’s subjugation. Similarly, masculinity, attributed to men, constructing men, underpins male domination as the natural order.

When women reject femininity and submissiveness, instead seeking power for ourselves, or even engaging in traditionally male activities such as sports, we are sometimes called ‘men’ or ‘mannish’ — as if only men can dominate and structure their environments. Of course, within patriarchy, that is precisely the norm; but we are meant to think of it as natural, rather than merely normative. Gender is needed in order to maintain the social order of male domination and female subjugation.

The best that we, as Marxists can do, is to be truly gender non-conforming by rejecting ‘gender’ entirely.

#Anglo.txt

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dukeofriven · 5 years

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Good In The World

I meant what I said with that extended LOTR quote being what the Epilogues are about - about there being good in the world, and it being worth fighting for. Given that I’ve been up to my neck reading Hussie commentary lately I feel like I’ve gotten a pretty strong grasp on what makes him tick - and who boy does this guy love stories about friendship, teamwork, and love, loves them so much he sometimes sounds like Téa Gardner about to lay down a friendship speech on Yu-Gi-Oh. So - while noting that the extent to which the epilogues are and are not Hussie’s work are even more muddled that usual in regards Homestuck - the take-away is this: everything went wrong, in both Meat and Candy, because everyone forgot that - that friendship, teamwork, and love is the only reason any of them survived. The Sburb survivors came to Earth-C as literal gods, beings of inordinate celebrity and power, and then didn’t work as hard as they should have to still be friends and family. We point to John as some kind of recluse but it quickly becomes clear that everyone stopped working at staying together. Karkat and Dave are as much shut-ins as John, stewing together in their own incapacity. Katkat’s self-loathing, so often a hilarious joke in Homestuck is - free of the immediate pressures of Sburb - shown to be intensely debilitating. It undermines him repeatedly in Meat, and requires incipit genocide in Candy to be set aside, costing him everything that mattered on a personal level. Dave made the mistake of many in his position before him, leaning too much on the first epiphany about trauma and not taking the care to continue down the path to further healing and reconciliation with the past. It leaves him desperately reaching for intimacies he too scared of to actually experience. Coupled with an abused kid’s terror of perpetuating harm he lies to Karkat and Jade both time and time again to try and save their feelings. Jade, so utterly fucked up by years of isolation and loneliness, and so endearingly, crushingly full of love makes all the wrong decisions in trying to build a triad (that is - the triad could have worked, but she went about it all wrong) and makes two separate instantiations of Dave and Karkat miserable. Rose and Kanaya have no malice in their actions, but they do what married people always do: pull away from everyone else, and focus on themselves and their new lives. Harmless, normally - or, at least, not seriously harmful - but those lives took them underground and away from everyone else, The two most insightful and level-headed members of the party simply weren’t around when everyone needed them most. Unaware how bad things were getting they missed so many of the warning sides that would have clued them in earlier that everyone was going off the rails - and being as isolated as she was in Meat this left Rose vulnerable to the manipulation most likely to succeed: just like with Doc Scratch she was preyed upon by someone who could flatter her sense of grievance, knowledge, and uniqueness. Terezi wouldn’t have stood by and let things go to shit - but she was doomed the moment she tied her heart to ego personified, and so was absent too. As for the Alphas, well - their problems were never resolved in the first place, their 'conflict arcs’ interrupted by the arrival of the betas. Only Roxy, element of void, utterly self-contained, a refugee from a dead reality, walked onto Earth-C able to withstand the horror that awaited them: celebrity. Skaia is benevolent, but it is not wise: Sburb seems to have a cherub’s worldview, full of bright colours and heightened stories, but not much maturity. When the victors of Sburb escaped to Earth-C the last thing they needed was celebrity, praise, and positions of note. The issues are all laid out in the prologue: John retired before he ever started working, every one of them richer than any mortal could conceive of. These kids didn’t need parades, they needed to go school. Jane didn’t need honorary degrees from every business school on the planet, Jake didn’t need a TV show centred entirely around his ass: what everyone needed was to be aggressively ordinary. Mundane and unregarded. They needed to put everyone in a group home with four on-staff counselors and take a chunk of years doing nothing but heal. Because everyone was damaged. Other than Calliope - a special case - everybody walked out of Sburb having witnessed at least one apocalypse. Put aside any of the individual traumas and deaths and abuses and sins and just focus on that alone: the death of entire worlds and the burden of saving seven sentient species. Rather than the ultimate Reward being a sit-down with kindly professionals who could help a bunch of kids cope with that, these literal children entered a new world and built new lives on a foundation of dust. The beta kids never finished seventh grade. Jane Crocker never finished high school. Jade Harley, Jake English, Roxy Lalonde, and Dirk Strider never went to school at all. Not one of those four had ever been around more than four humans in their lives until the day they won the game. They couldn’t have. Jade and Jake grew up alone on islands. Roxy and Dirk grew up in the apocalypse. Dirk grew up in a literal box. As Cascade hit Dave and John were the only living humans Jade had ever met who wasn’t her grandpa: and she spent three years alone on a ship with only the Nannasprites and consorts for company. (And Jaspers to chase.) For those four especially, think about they went through within 24-hours: BAM here’s a group of people including your alt-relatives and literal aliens BAM here’s a crazy fucking battle against technicolour chess people, killer dogs, and fish queens BAM here’s a pristine new-ish world better BAM produce thousands of species to populate a new world /TABLE SCRATCH/ Welcome to Earth-C in the year 5000 Celebrity Gods. Here’s your debit cards full of riches. Seriously - this all happens in about a day. And yet people are shocked that things didn’t work out? They were sixteen years old. Four of them had no formal education of any kind, nor had ever been around enough to people to form a softball team. And that’s not even starting on the trolls, who had multiple culture-shocks and traumas of their own the sort through. And yet people are shocked that things didn’t work out? There is, absolutely, a way all of this could have been addressed and become a happy ending. If you don’t like the Epilogues because you’re just sick and fucking tired of tragedy stories - boy do I feel you. Man, don’t get me started on shit like Westword we will be here all week. If you just wanted there to be a fucking happy ending because god-damnit people deserve to be happy - I feel that too. Had that been what we got I can’t say that I’d have been displeased. But if you’re angry because what happened in the Epilogues seems “unreasonable” all I can do is wave my arms at all the shit everybody went through and ask you why going from that to retired celebrity godhood was good for anyone. What happened on Earth-C was nobody’s fault - not even Dirk’s. Of course he lost it. Of course he took his godhood to its logical conclusions - what possible grounding in real human beings had he ever seriously had, and what in his life was there to make him see people as people? Dude grew up alone in a box with SBAHJ and rapping robots for company - the only voice in his head his own, magnified in the echo chamber of ego and his own blindness to his inadequacies. Why wouldn’t Jane cling to status quo of her dead world? Really, what did Sburb ever bring her but heartbreak, an excessively baroque Bad Relationship Simulator that took away her home and her position as a corporate heiress for a six month romp through a bunch of dead planets and inter-friend squabbling (We don’t talk about how fucking boring the alpha session was: nothing but undead and emptiness.) She reaches a new world, gets told how smart she is, gets a bunch of degrees - but as Dave himself notes, when you’re rich as can be and have everyone on the planet lining up to do business with you, it’s pretty easy to think you’re actually skilled at running things, especially if YOU STOPPED YOUR EDUCATION AT SIXTEEN AND GOT TOLD THAT YOUR SIXTEEN YEAR OLD SELF WAS THE APEX OF YOUR BEING. Take a moment to remember yourself at sixteen. Try to put sixteen year old you in charge of something meaningfully important - like, mmh, let’s say a regional bank. Uh - oh. Oh dear. Oh it’s on fire, is it? And the fire is spreading? Yeah, that’ll happen. [One glaring issue I’ll note in these epilogues is that nobody knows what the fuck to do about Dad Crocker, so they do... nothing, until Candy reminds you he exists in order to kill him to motivate Jane to do something she probably could have been easily prompted to do anyways by another means. I guess Dad Crocker just... happily let Jane not finish school or exert any kind of parental control at all after that point? On her or anybody else? You want to talk about OOC: what the fuck happened with Dad Crocker, of whom I expected better? And where did Tavrosprite and the Nannasprites go?] My point in all this is that Homestuck is a story about how important love, teamwork, and friendship is, and after the Earth-C victory everybody got lost. Everybody reacted to being Celebrity Gods in their own way, and it created little cracks that widened over time, and when everyone should have been coming closer together - group therapy sessions, even - they got further and farther apart. These emotionally-stunted mentally-teenaged kids with buckets of trauma, the power of gods, and the celebrity to match broke. One by one. All in their own unique ways. The Epilogues are in some sense a musing on the absurdity of adulthood - how its mantel is placed upon you regardless of whether you are ready or not, for reasons as arbitrary as ‘turning a certain age’ or ‘winning a video game.’ In some cases it takes our heroes DECADES of life before adulthood - before real maturity - begins to make something of an appearance, and even then it’s a crapshoot. Love, friendship, and teamwork are what matter in Homestuck: in the epilogues it takes years of monumentally boneheaded decisions for our heroes to remember this, and some of them never do.

Is there still a happy ending at the end of Homestuck? One that lies ahead? I think so. Hussies loves his characters dearly - and yes, he does. Of course he does. He didn’t spend ten years of his life telling the story of one dimensional Brechtian Archetypes to make some otiose point about the nature of narrative: if he had none of you would be feeling as you are now. The difference between you and Andrew Hussie is that you see his characters like family: you leap to their defence whenever they are hurt, and when they are cut you bleed: “How?” you ask, “Could anyone be so cruel to do this thing?” But Hussie sees his characters as characters, in a story of which he is author, and in which pain and hurt and tragedy can be the vehicles through which good stories can be told: that the light is made all the brighter because of the quantity and quality of darkness that was banished. Candy and Meat are the story of a boy who can only destroy love because he thinks he understands it, and lashes-out when things don’t go as planned. Dirk is just as much the villain in Candy as in Meat, as Calliope makes very clear: the Candyverse is in some sense defined, or at least made more distinct, by his absence. He is a tragic figure on the macro scale - if only he and all the walking wounded of Sburb had been given help when they needed it - but his death in Candy is not a tragedy of ‘what ifs,’ it’s an act of petulance and cruelty by a kid who’ll take his ball and go home if he’s not allowed to play the winning game. His death destabilizes the Candyverse far more than John’s choice to stay, its just that its corrosive effects take longer to be obvious - and the gears he’d already set in motion didn’t cease to turn, though they may have slowed. Dirk destroys love, his effect on both timelines is to push people apart because division suits him, and to push his own view of what ‘love’ is on people who experience it far more expansively than he could ever imagine. He’s a sad little boy who grew up in alone in a box and entered a world that told him he was a literal god with the powers to match - by the end of Meat it’s clear that love, friendship, and teamwork mean nothing to him, only the perfect order of his own fevered imagination. What will bring him down in the end is the reclamation of that feeling at the end of Act 7 - the joy of victory, of having worked together, of the love of family both found and familial, and of the realization that they were none of them better apart. And then some therapists. Some actual therapists. For a good long time. (Also I hope that they find Doc Scratch and beat his sorry ass from here to eternity because that smug fuck has his puppety fingertips all over this thing, and if Dirk really is merging with his ultimate self that includes (as @geekycalligrapher noted) aspects that wound up in Lord English, including a not insignificant portion of one Doctor Vanilla Milkshake, Esq.) (Edit: I did, in fact, do a few edits when I noticed the opening sentences were missing things like ‘the subject.’)

#homestuck #The Homestuck Epilogues #beta kids #alpha kids #doc scratch #dirk strider #andrew hussie #homestuck analysis

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Dust Volume 6, Number 6

Whatever happens, Bobby Conn will always be fabulous

Greetings from the never-ending sameness! It must be Friday since we’re doing a Dust, but we are not exactly sure which Friday and, indeed, which day of the week comes after that. We have not had a haircut in a while, and we’re wearing the most comfortable, least fashionable things we own, but we have not quite given up, because, you see, we’re still listening to music. Here are short missives from our respective quarantines, covering experimental psych, fey orchestral pop, slow rolling sine waves, disco-glittering satire, solitary black metal and assorted other musical manifestations. Contributors included Bill Meyer, Andrew Forell, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw and Michael Rosenstein.

Eric Arn & Jasmine Pender — Hydromancy (Feeding Tube)

hydromancy by eric arn & jasmine pender

Hydromancy is the ancient practice of divining the gods’ intentions by staring for long periods into a pool of water. Eric Arn, an American guitarist who has been based in Austria for the last decade and a half, seems to have picked up at least one message from the cosmos, and he is acting upon it. Feeding Tube Records is his home. Hydromancy is his third release on the label, and like its two predecessors, it carves out a unique zone within a large and ever-spreading field of inquiry. Arn’s spent time playing psychedelic rock, free improvisation and solo acoustic explorations, and worked with players from Texas, New England and Vienna. This time he’s partnered with an English cellist, Jasmine Pender, on two side-long ponderances of resonance. The title is apt; the musicians seem to be regarding the surface of their sound, first letting ripples and reflections guide them, but ultimately peering beneath the surface into darker, persistent currents.

Bill Meyer

ARTHUR — Hair of the Dog (Honeymoon)

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On his sophomore album, Philadelphia songwriter ARTHUR disguises ruminations on addiction, anxiety, pain and paranoia in summery cloaks of experimental pop. The combination of whimsy and woe is nothing new, but it’s a fine balance. In Hair of the Dog, complex arrangements surround naïve-sounding melodies, hinting at inner turmoil.

The album incorporates whispers of disco in “No Tengo,” a low key Caleb Giles rap interlude on “Something Sweet,” swinging 1960s horns on “William Penn Island” and a choir of children on “You Are Mine.” The magpie eclecticism holds together beneath a voice that can err on the side of mannered. It is most effective when direct and unadorned as on “Simple Song” where a woozy waltz and detuned guitar bridge underline the poignancy of the lyrics: “In a couple of years/You lose a couple of friends/You lose yourself and you start over again/I don’t have patience/All that I know is addiction.” There is a lot to like here even if at times ARTHUR treads too hard on the path of whimsy.

Andrew Forell

Gaudenz Badrutt — Ganglions (Aussenraum)

Ganglions by Gaudenz Badrutt

“Connect” is the not the first words that 2020 is going to wear out, but it’s in the running. Veteran Swiss electronic musician Gudenz Badrutt could not have foreseen the present situation when he was making this LP, but it speaks to at least one aspect of it. Perhaps the barrages of commercials dropping the word “connect” by corporations interested in currying your subconscious good will has you pondering the networks by which that state is accomplished and sustained. Badrutt’s music is assembled from sine waves and feedback systems, which he layers and interrupts to make sound that flickers and surges like an audio rendering of your nervous system in various states of load-carrying and overload. Listen closely, and you can ponder your place within the system. But if you’re sick of thinking, feeling, and awareness, turn this shit up and it will blot out whatever offends you.

Bill Meyer

Nat Baldwin — Autonomia I: Body Without Organs (Shinkoyo)

AUTONOMIA I: Body Without Organs by Nat Baldwin

Nat Baldwin is a published novelist as well as a singer and double bassist with several solo records and a long-time stint is a member of the Dirty Projectors on his cv. His versatility does not come at the expense of focus; indeed, Autonomia I (so named because there’s a second, cassette-only volume) show that he knows how to get a lot out of a particular idea. This LP was inspired by a broken bow, which he employs (sometimes in concert with an intact one) on five of the LP’s seven tracks. When one of your tools is unreliable, you have to be ready to scramble, and there are moments when it sounds like he’s trying to recover from or get ahead of his implement’s waywardness. But those also sound like moments of opportunity; whether he’s exploring rattle of a loose part against his bass’s body or using that bow to obtain non-prescribed tensions from his strings, he organizes his instrument’s unusual sounds into quick-moving, provocatively shaped constellations of sound.

Bill Meyer

Bonifrate—Mundo Encoberto (Self-released)

Mundo Encoberto by Bonifrate

Pedro Bonifrate is one-half of the Brazilian psych outfit Guaxe, this solo album (according to Google translate “overcast world”) springs from the same trippy, laid-back but multi-instrumented roots. Lush like the rainforest that surrounds him, playful and full of bright colors, this eight-part composition unfolds in the manner of a particularly vivid dream. “Parte 1” mutates freely over its 11 minute duration, stirring to life in a rush of strings, slipping into beach-y mildly hallucinogenic balladry, trying on a bit of Syd Barret-ish whimsy, crescendoing in clangorous guitar overload. Hard to say if Bonifrate played all the instruments, but the album has an idiosyncratic euphoria, as if it were lifted in one piece from the vivid contours of one person’s mushroom trip.

Jennifer Kelly

Bobby Conn — Recovery (Tapete)

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“It’s a disaster, the one we’ve been waiting for for years, and now we get to see how this thing ends,” croons the one-and-only Bobby Conn in his glam-shuddering, disco-sleek tenor, and sure, 2020 in a nutshell, got it in one, congrats! Who’d have thought that Conn’s arch, satiric performance art could be a form of comfort here at the end of the world? Who’s have supposed his stylized excesses would seem not an iota too much? Conn, as ever, is sharp and topical, pondering all the oppressed sub-groups left out of the “Good Old Days,” (against a swaggering Phil Spector beat), mourning the xxx-rated theaters put out of business by Pornhub in “Bijou,” skewering big data’s intrusions in the synth-operatic glories of “Disposable Future.” But what’s always separated Conn from mere satirists is the elaborate, over-the-top quality of the music he makes. “Recovery” with its scatted bassline, its frenetic syncopation, its funk precision—it all works as music way before you start to chuckle at the lyrics. Conn is as much a character in the long-running graphic novel that plays in his head as a bandleader, but don’t underestimate the bandleader. There’s art underneath all that eyeliner.

Jennifer Kelly

Curanderos — Raven’s Head (Null Zøne)

Raven's Head by Curanderos

If you’re looking for something to cure what ails you in these uncertain times, Raven’s Head might be your balm. You won’t need a prescription, since the tradition of shamanistic healing precedes the AMA, and the particular configuration of healers here — John and Michael Gibbons of Bardo Pond + Scott Verrastro of Kohoutek — models a cooperative approach that more conventional leadership would do well to emulate. The combination of personalities also tips you off to what to expect. Verrastro is a colorist, using the metal parts of his drum kit to keep the listener aware of the dimensions surrounding the listening space, but he also provides just enough forward momentum to keep the music moving at a fogbank-rolling pace. The Gibbons match liquid lead and coarse riff with practiced ease; they’ve spent a lot of time in such cloudy spaces, and they breathe deeply of the inspirational atmosphere.

Bill Meyer

Discovery Zone — Remote Control (Mansions and Millions)

Remote Control by Discovery Zone

“Sophia Again” is a sci-fi mini-story, presenting the conversation between an AI creature and her creator, talking about the self, the meaning of life and the joy of connection, as bubbling arcs of synthesizer sounds jet off into the ether. It is, perhaps, the most literally futuristic of the cuts on this gleaming, synth-centric album, though the whole thing is polished to an other worldly, not quite natural glow. JJ Weihl, the artist behind Discovery Zone, also works in Fenster, a Berlin-based psychedelic pop band of a similarly polished, dance-referring (but not dance) aesthetic. Here, she works solo in luminous abstractions of crystal clear sound. The pleasure comes in the purity and beauty of voices, synths, drum beats, which sound like Sophia might have made them while learning to be human; they are a little too perfect to be wholly man-made.

Jennifer Kelly

Esoctrilihum — Eternity of Shaog (I, Voidhanger)

Eternity Of Shaog by ESOCTRILIHUM

An epic of esoteric demonology from Ashtâghul’s one-man black metal project Esoctrilihum, Eternity of Shaog presents as ten songs, most of which bear titles like “Exh-Enî Söph (First Passage: Exiled from Sanity)” and “Amenthlys (5th Passage: Through the Yth-Whtu Seal).” One gets the sense that there is a cosmology being built—but even Google has a tough time tracking the references to the many, many Eastern mythic systems in the repertoire. The provisionally good news is that Eternity of Shaog is a bit less musically spastic than its predecessor, The Telluric Ashes of the Ö Vrth Immemorial Gods, an even longer record released just last year. Say what you will, Ashtâghul is prolific. On this new record, you get his signature combination of black metal speed and snarl and an ambitiously (that’s the kind word) proggy compositional sense. The transitions this time around are less violent, the riffs are pretty good and plentiful synths build out to lush soundscapes. The musical textures are rich, but the bad vibes dominate. It’s hard to say what malign presences you’ll be summoning into your home if you play this stuff as loud as seems intended. Maybe keep some holy water handy.

Jonathan Shaw

Fire-Toolz — Rainbow Bridge (Hausu Mountain)

Rainbow Bridge by Fire-Toolz

As Fire-Toolz composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist, Angel Marcloid conjures mosaics from such disparate elements that one wonders how the music hangs together. Yet what at first seems like a chaotic, fractured farrago coalesces into a cohesive picture of her world that simultaneously bewilders and awes. Catholic in source and meticulous in construction Rainbow Bridge is an uncompromising and often stunning dash through Marcloid’s mind. Treated vocals that evoke death metal or JG Thirwell at his most outré, passages of twinkling synth and arena guitar, elements of 1980s Japanese ambient music, fusion jazz and Chiptune slot together like Jenga blocks that wobble but never quite collapse.

Marcloid’s project of musical excavation, reclamation and transformation perhaps mirrors her experience as a non-binary transgender person and the atomization of many tracks on Rainbow Bridge read as a meditation on the contingency of identity and the struggle for place within/outside social constructs that define acceptability and “taste”. On the other hand, sit back, push play and prepare to drift along with the ambient flow then be jolted from reverie by glitch and noise. Much like the world really.

Andrew Forell

Jacaszek — Music for Film (Ghostly)

Music for Film by Jacaszek

Music for Film collects the Polish composer Jacaszek’s scores for three movies — the 2019 documentary He Dreams of Giants, the 2008 project Golgota wrocławska and the 2017 film November. Haunted, evocative, disquieting and gorgeous, these ten soundscapes infuse the sounds of electronics, strings and samples with dread. “The Iron Bridge” turns sampled voices and slow throbs of cello into dance with death and memory, while “Liina” picks up eerie vibrations just out of focus, like a camera accidentally recording a ghost. “Dance” hurls electric bolts of tremulous sound—they sizzle with aftertones—then picks out a morose melody in plucked strings. All is dark, subdued, ominous but velvety, sensually smooth. Not having seen the films, I can’t guess the subject matter, but let’s assume there’s no laugh track.

Jennifer Kelly

Kontrabassduo Studer-Frey — Zeit (Leo)

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Double bassists Peter K Frey and Daniel Studer has spent the better part of the 21st century performing as a duo, but they don’t seem to have felt pressured to rush out a recording documenting their music. This CD includes selections from 2004, 2007, and 2018 that were made at home, in concert, and in the studio. But despite the variety of sources and occasions, this album feels quite cohesive, which is a testament to integrity of their partnership. They rarely play similarly at any given moment, but their contrasting techniques and frequency ranges evince a balance makes even the tracks with contributions by clarinetist Jürg Frey and cellist Alfred Zimmerlin feel like the work of one massive, multi-bodied bass.

Bill Meyer

Marlin’s Dreaming — Quotidian (Self-Released)

Quotidian by Marlin's Dreaming

The trick of putting soft, flickery voices in front of raging guitars is not a new one, but it’s still worth trying, especially as well as Marlin’s Dreaming does on “Outward Crying.” This sweeping, soaring, but fundamentally introspective tune blasts and blares in a sensitive way, the guitar noise parting like drapes for the singer’s disconsolate confession that he’s leaving this town. The town in question is Auckland, New Zealand, and you can certainly make connections to antipodal fuzz icons, especially the Verlaines. Yet there’s a bit of romantic swoon here in cuts like “Sink or Swim,” which links Marlin’s Dreaming’s diffident lo-fi pop with the baroque gestures of Roxy Music. This is the band’s second album and rather poised given their short history. Marlin’s Dreaming out loud in soft colors and blistering fuzz, and it’s a good one.

Jennifer Kelly

Christian Rønn & Aram Shelton—Multiring (Astral Spirits)

Multiring by Christian Rønn & Aram Shelton

Some musicians stake their claim within a particular locale, and others tour the world. Alto saxophonist Aram Shelton’s done a bit of both. You could say he’s a serial resident; over the past couple decades he’s been based in Chicago, Oakland, Copenhagen, and now, Budapest. But his recording history lags behind him. His latest release is a cassette recorded in April 2018, and it stands apart from anything he’s done to date. Credit for that lies partly with his choice of partner, Danish keyboardist Christian Rønn. Rønn’s instrument here is a Wurlitzer electric piano, augmented with effects that play up its reverberant qualities, but played without much reference to the way people used to play the thing when it was omnipresent in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of nailing down a groove, Rønn posts reverberant signposts that Shelton can snake through or lays out undulating surfaces that the saxophonist can sail over. Either way, Shelton plays with a darker and softer tone than has been his wont in the past, casting a pall of eerie foreboding over this gradually evolving music.

Bill Meyer

Snekkestad / Guy / Fernandez — The Swiftest Traveller (Trost)

The Swiftest Traveler by Snekkestad / Guy / Fernandez

Englishman double bassist Barry Guy (b. 1947) has been shuttling between free and composed musical zones for over half a century, longer than the similarly versatile Scandinavian reeds and brass multi-threat Torben Snekkestad (b. 1973) has been alive. Catalan pianist Agusti Fernández (b. 1954) traverses similar terrain. And all three shift fluidly between conventional virtuosity and astutely applied extended techniques. The trio’s rapport is so strong that one supposes that however the album got its title, it wasn’t the result of some musical contest. They’re builders, not destroyers. Still, the rapidity with which these three musicians move from event to event is undeniable. Sparse stasis morphs into quick runs up and down the keyboard; a dense, high-velocity onslaught transforms into intricate, three-part counterpoint. The quickness with which the music changes and the completeness that it expresses from moment to moment make this a very satisfying performance.

Bill Meyer

Various Artists — Quilted Flowers: 1940s Albanian & Epirot Recordings from the Balkan Label (Canary Recordings)

Quilted Flowers: 1940s Albanian & Epirot Recordings from the Balkan Label by Canary Records

The word “Balkanized” has the dubious distinction of having acquired extra-regional meaning, to the point where it now signifies a whole divided into smaller, mutually hostile regions. But some of the Balkan musicians who moved to New York City pulled together to play on each other’s gigs and recordings. The Albanian multi-instrumentalist, Ajdan Asllan, who ran the Balkan record label, partnered with musicians from Greece and Bulgaria on both a musical and business level, and kept the company running into the LP age. This collection pulls 11 sides of instrumental and vocal music that originated on his home turf, but if your ears have previously pricked up in response to rural music from Greece or Anatolia, you will want to hear this stuff. A pair of clarinets or a violin usually carry the melodies, sometimes chased by sharp-pitched vocals that spread out in ragged but lusty unison, and always carried by unevenly accented rhythms articulated by vigorously strummed stringed instruments.

Bill Meyer

Otomo Yoshihide & Chris Pitsiokos — Live in Florence (Astral Spirits)

Live in Florence by Otomo Yoshihide & Chris Pitsiokos

Live in Florence documents a meeting between Otomo Yoshihide on guitar and turntables and Chris Pitsiokos on alto sax and electronics at the Tempo Reale Festival in Florence, Italy. This was the final date of a six-day European tour by the duo, and they’re primed from the first crackled sputters and blasts. The two thrive on these sorts of boundary-crushing forays and their seven short improvisations careen along with frenetic, brawny energy. The two deploy jump-cut pacing and shredded attacks from piercing overtones and feedback to frayed overblown sax and turntable crackle to manically angular reed lines and searing electronic bursts to chafed sax amplifications and thundering rumbles. Even on pieces where they start things out a bit more subdued, the two quickly ratchet up the intensity with torrid, barely-controlled vigor. There’s a slight respite on the sixth piece, with Otomo’s chiming guitar harmonics laying a resonant field for Pitsiokos’s breathy chirps and bent tones but even here, they arc to waves of feedback and skirling reed fusillades by the end. The final piece starts with shattered electronics and spitting reeds and mounts into bellowing din, exploding to the finish of the exhilarating 37-minute set.

Michael Rosenstein

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socialjusticeartshare · 4 years

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ICE Expels Migrant Children Without Trial, Making Them ‘Impossible To Find’

A teenage girl carrying her baby arrived at the U.S. border this summer and begged for help. She told federal agents that she feared returning to Guatemala. The man who raped her she said had threatened to make her “disappear.”

Then, advocates say, the child briefly vanished — into the custody of the U.S. government, which held her and her baby for days in a hotel with almost no outside contact before federal officers summarily expelled them from the country.

Similar actions have played out along the border for months under an emergency health order the Trump administration issued in March. Citing the threat of COVID-19, it granted federal agents sweeping powers to almost immediately return anyone at the border, including infants as young as 8 months. Children are typically entitled to special protections under the law, including the right to have their asylum claims adjudicated by a judge.

Under this new policy, the administration is not deporting children — a proceeding based on years of established law that requires a formal hearing in immigration court.

It is instead expelling them — without a judge's ruling and after only a cursory government screening and no access to social workers or lawyers, sometimes not even their family, while in U.S. custody. The children are not even granted the primary registration number by which the Department of Homeland Security tracks all immigrants in its care, making it “virtually impossible" to find them, Efrén C. Olivares, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project, wrote in a court declaration arguing that the practice is illegal.

Little is known about how the process works, but published government figures suggest almost all children arriving at the border are being rapidly returned.

Between April and June, Customs and Border Protection officials encountered 3,379 unaccompanied minors at or between ports of entry. Of those, just 162 were sent to federal shelters for immigrant children run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Health and Human Services agency tasked with their care. CBP would not say whether the remaining minors had been expelled or explain what had happened to them.

The precise number of children who are detained or to what situations they are returned is difficult to ascertain.

“We are only reaching a tiny fraction of these kids," said Lisa Frydman, vice president of international programs at Kids in Need of Defense, an advocacy group for migrant children with partners across Central America. “The rest are just gone."

Lawyers have fielded frantic calls from family members whose children suddenly went missing after crossing the U.S. border. Of the thousands of unaccompanied minors expelled under the health order, advocacy organizations said that they have only found about three dozen after months of searching across the United States, Mexico and Central America.

The Guatemalan teenager is one of them. She told child protection workers in Guatemala that she was sent to an American hotel with her baby for days and allowed only a brief call with her father in the United States. Then she and her infant were flown to Guatemala, where her case so alarmed international refugee groups that they referred her for protection in another country, determining that she was in peril. Advocates would not provide her age or other personal details to protect her.

The Associated Press first reported last month that the administration has detained at least 169 children in three Hampton Inn & Suites hotels in El Paso and McAllen, Texas, as well as Phoenix, before expelling them. New government numbers show that practice grew to more than 240 children over the past three months. Children reported being held for weeks in hotel rooms by an unlicensed government contractor, with little ability to reach anyone outside.

Advocates said the administration's expulsion policy is far more concerning than simply the practice of lengthy hotel detention, which they argue violates a long-standing court settlement protecting migrant children. Most kids who now reach U.S. soil are quickly flown back to their home countries — often to danger, forcing the intervention of international child welfare agencies to protect them from harm. Some children told advocates that they were sent to Mexico, even if they were not from there, in the middle of the night.

The U.S. government has largely declined to comment or release statistics, citing litigation that the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy organizations have brought against the expulsion program.

In June, a desperate father in Houston found Linda Corchado, an immigration attorney in El Paso. His 16-year-old son was detained somewhere in an American hotel, although where or by whom he did not know. He said the government was about to fly the boy back to Honduras, where he feared his son might be executed by gang members who threatened him after he saw them kill another man.

Corchado alerted the ACLU, and the boy became the first plaintiff in what lawyers hoped would be a test case as they argued that the government was illegally using an obscure provision of the federal Public Health and Welfare Code, written in 1893, to justify expelling all migrants, even children, at the border.

The boy's case spurred an emergency court hearing in June in Washington, D.C., before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who ruled that the ACLU was “likely to succeed" in its arguments that the government did not have the authority to expel the boy under the health declaration, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Within days, Justice Department attorneys paused the boy's expulsion and agreed to allow him to request asylum through the immigration courts — the legal process usually required for migrant children coming here alone.

Attorneys found more children facing expulsion.

The relative of another 16-year-old Honduran boy told an advocate at the U.S. port of entry in El Paso that the teenager had disappeared in U.S. custody after they crossed the border together. Corchado called CBP and requested the protection screening allowed for the boy under the expulsion process, but federal agents said that they were moving him to a hotel to fly him back.

Once migrants are transferred to a hotel under the care of a government contractor, it is as if they vanish into a “legal abyss" where it is unclear which federal agency retains custody, Corchado said.

“You can't advocate for them," she said.

She said a supervisor with Immigration and Customs Enforcement told her that after migrants are moved there, “it's kind of off our radar."

Under the threat of litigation by the ACLU, the administration agreed to halt the boy's removal and transfer him to a federal shelter while he fought for asylum, his lawyers said.

Coordinating with advocates across the country, ACLU attorneys have located at least 18 children as of late July who were being expelled, court filings show. In each case, the government agreed to halt proceedings against them — a win for the child, but a concession that blocked lawyers from obtaining a judge's ruling on the policy as a whole.

“We assumed the government would want to have a test case in court to decide the lawfulness of this highly controversial and unprecedented practice of using public health laws to effect shadow deportations of children," said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney fighting the program in court. “The government is getting away with a complete end run around all of the protections for children that Congress has painstakingly enacted."

Alexa Vance, a Justice Department spokesperson, declined to comment. So did April Grant, a spokesperson for ICE, citing the pending lawsuits.

Grant also refused to release statistics on children expelled by the agency, including those it detained in hotels, or provide the repatriation agreements that the U.S. holds with at least eight countries — including Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — that would shed light on how those countries have agreed to accept expelled children and under which circumstances.

Matthew Dyman, a spokesman for CBP, similarly said the ongoing litigation meant he couldn't answer most questions about the policy. Alexei Woltornist, a DHS spokesman, did not respond to emails.

“Nobody Can Find Them"

Advocates said the secrecy reminds them of their search two years ago for thousands of immigrant children whom the Trump administration separatedfrom their parents at the border.

Then, government agents sent children to federal shelters under ORR, often without tracking numbers linking them to their parents in ICE detention centers. It took a federal court order and months of taxpayer-funded efforts before many could be reunited with their parents. A few never were because their parents had been deported and so they were released instead to acquaintances or other relatives in the U.S.

What's different now is that children are not entering the U.S. system for migrant children at all.

“Nobody can find them," said Jennifer Podkul, vice president for policy at KIND, the advocacy group.

The majority are quickly flown back to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the three main origins of unaccompanied children to the U.S.

Once in Central America, they don't have access to protections offered before the pandemic. Strict lockdowns have made it hard for watchdogs such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to track unaccompanied children after they are sent back to government repatriation centers.

Government representatives in those three Central American nations said that they could not differentiate between children who had been returned under the health order and those who had been deported under usual proceedings. But what they could report alarmed advocates.

Since the start of the pandemic through early July, at least 476 unaccompanied children have been sent back to Honduras, about half flown from the United States and the rest largely returned from Mexico, the Honduran federal agency overseeing children reported.

Guatemala reported about 380 such children returned from the United States in roughly that same period, according to a government spokesperson. El Salvador said more than 70 unaccompanied minors had been returned, and Mexico's government reported some 1,050 of its own children were returned between April and June, the latest data available.

The total for unaccompanied children governments said had been returned to those four countries — about 1,700 — is far less than the last official figure the U.S. government released. In early June, it said it had expelled at least 2,175 “single minors" under the health declaration. Then, citing litigation, the administration stopped providing that data.

“The number of kids who have been received doesn't match up with the number of kids who have been expelled," said Frydman of KIND.

She and other advocates suspect children from other countries are informally expelled to Mexico. Many in the last few months have reported that U.S. authorities returned them there — sometimes alone in the middle of the night and without being processed by Mexican immigration officials.

KIND found at least three unaccompanied minors from Central America in Mexico.

Two were siblings who said they arrived on their own at the port of entry in El Paso. CBP officers told them “the border is closed," the children later told attorneys, who declined to reveal the siblings' ages or other details for their safety.

Federal officials sent the siblings to Ciudad Juarez, where they were homeless until they went to a shelter, which contacted Mexico's child welfare agency.

Dyman, the CBP spokesperson, did not respond to questions about the siblings. But he said non-Mexican children can be expelled there only if they are with adult relatives. They are not supposed to be sent there alone.

“When minors are encountered without adult family members, CBP works closely with their home countries to transfer them to the custody of government officials and reunite them with their families," Dyman wrote in an email.

He said agents may exempt migrants from expulsion under certain circumstances, such as when they cannot be returned to their countries or if officers suspect they were victims of human trafficking. But he declined to elaborate on how CBP officials make those exceptions and conduct screenings, saying that information is “law enforcement sensitive."

Statistics from Mexico's National Migration Institute show that more than 200 children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have been expelled to Mexico under the health declaration as of June. That number includes unaccompanied children and those with adults. An official at Mexico's Secretary of Interior wrote that it does not have a formal agreement with the U.S. on how to return unaccompanied children from other countries, so it does not keep cumulative statistics.

“Shadow Operation"

Usually children coming to the U.S. alone from nations other than Mexico must be flown home — an operation delayed by logistics during a global pandemic. By law, they cannot be held for more than 72 hours in temporary CBP processing facilities before they are sent to shelters run by ORR.

That agency is currently detaining about 850 children, although it has 14,000 taxpayer-funded beds available. Before the administration's health order, ORR in late March was holding about 3,600 unaccompanied minors.

Instead of placing children in these federally regulated and state-licensed shelters, where they would have access to counsel and social workers, the U.S. moved hundreds of minors to a clandestine network of hotels — under the custody of a contractor not licensed to care for children.

The administration provided that data to attorneys litigating a court-ordered settlement that sets specific rules on how the government is allowed to hold migrant children. That 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores Settlement, requires migrant children in detention have certain rights, including that they be released quickly and held in licensed child care facilities.

In April, May and June, the government confined at least 240 children awaiting expulsion — including more than a dozen younger than 6 — in hotel rooms, according to legal filings submitted to the court overseeing compliance with the Flores Settlement.

In April, ICE, via its contractor MVM Inc., held at least 29 unaccompanied migrant children for as long as 10 days in the three Hampton Inn & Suites hotels in Texas and Arizona before expelling them.

In May, the contractor detained 80 children for days in those three hotels. In June, 120 were held there before being expelled, according to the government reports.

A 5-year-old was kept in a hotel room for 19 days in June before she was expelled.

An 8-month-old was held in a Hampton Inn for 12 days that month before being turned back with a 9-year-old sibling.

As of June 30, according to the administration's most recent reports submitted under the Flores Settlement, a 2-month-old had been detained in a Hampton hotel for four days while awaiting expulsion along with 19 other children.

Neha Desai, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law, an organization that litigates to ensure the government abides by that consent decree, called the prolonged detention of migrant children in hotels a “blatant breach" of that settlement.

“This is a shadow operation," she said.

The U.S. has always briefly held a small number of children in hotel rooms after an immigration judge ordered them removed if there was a delay with their deportation flights.

But such widespread detention for up to three weeks involving children whose protection claims have never been adjudicated “flies in the face of the law," said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former senior ICE official who left the agency last year. He said Congress and the courts have repeatedly held that children should not be kept in hotel rooms for more than one night — and even then, only in limited circumstances.

“The government is playing cowboy with regards to children's safety," he said.

Bob Carey, who headed ORR under President Barack Obama, called the practice “horrific … you have vulnerable children in the care of a private contractor with little, if any, transparency or adherence to state law, federal guidelines, legislation and a court settlement."

Not much is known about MVM, the private security contractor from Virginia that detains the children in hotel rooms. A spokesperson wrote in an email that its multimillion-dollar agreement with ICE to transport unaccompanied minors prevents it from disclosing information. It referred questions to ICE, which declined to comment and refused to release the contract.

In 2018, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found that MVM had held children for longer than a day in vacant office buildings in Phoenix. An ICE spokesperson said the agency did not permit the company to detain children for more than 24 hours in those offices, which she said were intended as “waiting areas" for same-day transport between CBP and ORR shelters. An MVM spokesperson termed it a “regrettable exception" to the company's policy of finding a hotel when there are delays in transporting children.

Details about the company's current contract came to light in a July court filing from Andrea Sheridan Ordin, a former U.S. attorney appointed to monitor the Flores Settlement in 2018. The federal judge overseeing that consent decree determined that was necessary because the government was not complying with it.

Ordin recommended ICE cease detaining unaccompanied minors in hotels, citing a “lack of formal oversight." She wrote MVM's “transportation specialists" are required to have only an associate's degree or high school diploma and one year of relevant work experience. They separated migrant children in hotel rooms by age and gender and allowed “little to no access to recreation." Children must be “within the line of sight" of contractors at all times.

Ordin said detention for weeks in hotel rooms can have a “harmful" impact on children, adding that MVM did not appear to have consistent requirements “regarding the special needs of young children, including hygiene, nutrition, or emotional well-being."

Ordin wrote that what was initially a “stop-gap measure" for the government to fly back children outside of normal proceedings has transformed under its expulsion policies into an “integral component of the immigration detention system" for children.

The administration argued she had overreached her authority. Children expelled under the health order, it contended, were not subject to protections under the Flores Settlement because they had never formally entered “immigration" custody.

Lawyers representing children under that settlement requested a judge's ruling, writing that the government has a “penchant for unilaterally disregarding" the consent decree.

A Sense of Deja Vu

Thirty-five years ago, a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl fleeing a civil war in her homeland was also imprisoned in an American hotel under the care of unlicensed private security guards. Jenny Flores' case forced the most significant overhaul yet of how U.S. authorities can detain migrant children. In fact, the 1997 federal settlement is named for her.

Carlos Holguín, who began litigating that case in 1985, said there is now a sense of “deja vu … but the degree of lawlessness is even beyond what was going on then."

Since taking office, the Trump administration has tried to end the Flores Settlement, arguing that it and a 2008 trafficking law work as “loopholes" encouraging families to send children here alone. The government has attempted to undo the settlement through regulations and requested Congress curtail the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which requires certain safeguards for children arriving alone at the border.

So far, both efforts have failed.

The administration tried separating parents and children at the border, but a federal judge largely ruled against the practice in 2018, allowing it only in narrow circumstances such as if the adult poses a danger.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee, who is in charge of the Flores Settlement, has determined the administration must quickly release children locked up with their parents in immigrant detention centers, most recently citing the risk of coronavirus spreading.

“The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures," she wrote in a June 26 order.

The government is now arguing it can force detained parents to choose between freeing their children or staying indefinitely imprisoned with them.

But none of the administration's attempts to undo either the settlement or the law have been as effective as the expulsion order, which is “eviscerating every single protection mechanism outlined by Congress and the courts with one sweeping gesture," said Podkul of KIND.

Late last month, the ACLU sued to allow its lawyers access to children detained in the McAllen Hampton Inn after a video went viral showing a Texas Civil Rights Project lawyer forcibly pushed away.

“The children are in imminent danger of unlawful removal," the attorneys wrote.

Facing a public relations scandal, Hilton quickly announced that all three hotels had canceled reservations with MVM.

“We expect all Hilton properties to reject business that would use a hotel in this way," a Hilton spokesperson said.

Government attorneys agreed to pause the expulsion of the migrants who they said remained in the McAllen hotel on the date of the lawsuit — once again, ACLU attorneys said, mooting litigation on the broader policy. A separate suit involving a 13-year-old Salvadoran girl who was expelled this summer is still pending in a Washington, D.C., federal court.

By the time the administration stopped the removal of the migrants detained at the Hampton Inn, most who had been held there had already been expelled or transferred elsewhere — some, advocates said, just before the ACLU filed its lawsuit. Only 17 family members, including one unaccompanied child, remained in that hotel.

What happened to the rest? No one would say.

Article Source

#ICE #separated children #separated families #ICE Expels Children

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dweemeister · 4 years

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The Shop on Main Street (1965, Czechoslovakia)

Putting “New Wave” in a sentence referring to a film movement is asking for trouble. Whether the New Wave is French, Iranian, or Japanese in origin, the term implies a series of films and filmmakers breaking narrative and aesthetic norms in conventional moviemaking, exalting innovation. New Wave directors from those respective countries include Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda; Forough Farrkohzad and Mohsen Makhmalbaf; Nagisa Oshima and Seijun Suzuki. For those I have just listed, I am not denying their talents, their importance to film history. But show any of their films to someone who is less familiar with these New Waves, without the contextual understanding of the environment their works were released, and befuddlement and distaste will likely abound. Rare is the New Wave film that can be shown to unfamiliar eyes and minds without appropriate context.

Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’ The Shop on Main Street (adapted from Ladislav Grosman’s novel of the same name) is sometimes considered a part of the then-concurrent Czechoslovak New Wave. And if one considers it part of that New Wave, then it is one of the more comprehendible, technically grounded films of that movement. It certainly qualifies as one of those New Wave exceptions – a film that can be digested by a viewer not accustomed to older movies or has any experience with Czech- or Slovak-language cinema. I consider The Shop on Main Street a Czechoslovak New Wave film. When one looks beneath its World War II-era surface, its politics extend beyond its condemnation of Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and the local Slovak population. Though rooted in the nation’s past, it was as timely as Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) upon release. The film outdoes many New Wave films by playing fast and loose with genre expectations: a black comedy in the first half, a tragedy in the second. Nazi Germany’s state-executed hatred, if not including the fringe groups inspired by their example, is no longer; Czechoslovakia has long been split in two. The Shop on Main Street and its censure of those who manipulate the oppressed, while pointing their fingers elsewhere.

In March 1939, the Slovak Republic was carved out of Czechoslovakia as a client state of Nazi Germany. The Slovak Republic never received recognition from the Allies (with the brief exception of the USSR until they were invaded by Germany), and they soon set about the process of Aryanization. Aryanization was a process in which Jewish property and businesses were to be put into “Aryan” ownership so as to “de-Jew” the economy. In The Shop on Main Street, Slovak carpenter Anton "Tóno" Brtko (Jozef Kroner) is offered by an official the ownership of a button store owned by the elderly, near-deaf Rozália Lautmannová (Ida Kamińska). Mrs. Lautmannová, a widow, is unaware that there is a war, that Czechoslovakia is being occupied by invaders intent on seizing her business and exterminating her fellow Jews. She welcomes Tóno as a helper and believes – mishears, really – that he is her nephew. Tóno, thrown into this awkward situation, soon learns that Mrs. Lautmannová’s store is not profitable and depends on community donations. The Jewish community implore Tóno to stay as de jure owner of the store, for fears that a more exploitative owner might be selected were he to give it up. Tóno agrees, accepting a small payment, and dedicating himself to the store’s and Mrs. Lautmannová’s welfare. They find time to see the humor in her mishearing and his stubbornness. In the final scenes, Tóno and Mrs. Lautmannová must make a horrific decision.

Czechoslovakia’s communist government, during the Czechoslovak New Wave, frowned upon films that could be construed as anarchic, insurrectionist, troublemaking. The Shop on Main Street – unlike many of its contemporaries – avoided government meddling. The villains here are the Nazis, whom communist forces across the Eastern bloc fought against. On its surface, The Shop on Main Street assigned no criticism towards Czechoslovakia’s communist regime or to communism. Yet the braggadocious Nazis are a minority in this film. A detestable sociopolitical minority becomes empowered when others sympathize with them, rationalize their prejudices and atrocities, and fail to defend the targets of that minority. We see non-Jewish Slovaks shrugging their shoulders about Aryanization. Why not pocket some extra money with this new policy, they reason, in a sluggish economy and a better-armed invading force now patrolling their streets? These are economically desperate times for non-Jewish Slovaks (and, if my hunches are correct, probably even more so for Jewish Slovaks), so they will use whatever programs necessary to survive, rooted entirely in self-interest.

The communist censors probably thought something, while viewing The Shop on Main Street, that is resurgent in modern-day Europe: that Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policies (from Aryanization to concentration camps and much more) were Germany’s responsibility and no one else’s. Complicity with the Nazi agenda is being debated among historians, politicians, and within the 125-minute runtime of The Shop on Main Street. For Tóno, the invaders inspire mutterings out of earshot and disdainful moues. His wife, Evelína (Hana Slivková), is concerned only about money – she is thrilled when she learns that the Aryanization program will give them a financial cushion (so she thinks), never contemplating the possibility this it is the beginning of the Jewish community’s ruin. Has she ever known someone from the community? It is not clear. Tóno’s non-Jewish acquaintances, too, are unfazed by these proclamations. Life is already difficult in the Slovak Republic (Czechoslovakia itself was not formed because its patchwork of ethnicities had common political pursuits and aspirations, but due to expedience and tensions with other ethnic groups), and any economic lifeline that will be offered to the non-Jews will be taken. Are those who support and/or participate in Aryanization irredeemable, given their desperation and the Nazi aim to manufacture conflict between Jews and non-Jews? Is Tóno an accessory of the Nazis?

These are questions that may seem small when grasper the enormity of the Holocaust. But that is the intention of directors Kadár and Klos, who often worked together co-directing films. In his directorial statement for the film in the New York Herald Tribune’s January 23, 1966 issue, Kadár (whose parents and sister were murdered at Auschwitz) writes that he was the principal director for this film – Klos agreed to be a sort of secondary director for The Shop on Main Street, deferring to Kadár because of his personal connection to the material. Klos also notes:

[Klos] knows that I am not thinking of the fate of all the six million tortured Jews, but that my work is shaped by the fate of my father, my friends’ fathers, mothers of those near to me and by people whom I have known. I am not interested in the outer trappings—figures, statements, generalizations. I want to make emotive films.

This is not an epic film intended to sweep viewers into the broadest discussions of the Holocaust. The Shop on Main Street is foremost a film about an unlikely connection – one separated by age, language, and faith – that is formed when exploitation would be so much easier. This is where The Shop on Main Street derives its pathos, in places where despair ought to triumph.

When Tóno meets Mrs. Lautmannová for the first time, he is surprised to see how disconnected she is from the world. She knows little of what is happening outside of the storefront door, and she delights in the company of her few – but dedicated – customers and the letters she receives from a relative in America (she hasn’t received their letter in some months). She closes the store on the Sabbath (sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday), retreating to her bedroom to pray and to read. Her friends in the Jewish community realize her frailty and lack of understanding, deciding to protect her from the news of pogroms and war. When lacking any authority to make laws or force political change, all they possess are their words and neighborliness – which they share with Tóno freely. Tóno is struck by their generosity, and his friendship with Mrs. Lautmannová grows. Ida Kamińska (the Polish actress was sixty-six years old when The Shop on Main Street was released, and nicknamed the Mother of the Jewish Stage) and Jozef Kroner (a star of numerous Slovak films, but this is his most recognized work) play off each other. In a series of successive (gentle and dark) misunderstandings, these two commoners are each other’s foils. He is a drinker, impatient, and needs to learn diplomacy. She is kind, religious, and concerningly naïve.Their performances are incredible, helping The Shop on Main Street pull off its tonal transitions that should have seen this film crumble into treacle.

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Zdeněk Liška’s score to The Shop on Main Street alternates between foreboding string lines wracked with minor key, string-crossing double stops signaling the precariousness of the story’s developments, the unusual situation the characters find themselves in, and emotional torment. A memorable, carnival-like march that opens the film is used to stunning effect when employed ironically. Liška’s cue placement helps Kadar and Klos achieve the respective comedic and dramatic moods that the screenplay and actors so nimbly establish.

Lengthy is the canon of films depicting and commenting on the Holocaust. The Shop on Main Street, avoiding extensive declarations, is one of the earliest films on that list. Its examinations on complicity and the extent of human callousness reverberate to a present where Holocaust denial and blame-shifting continues to rail against the truth of untold millions and their descendants. It is a tremendous film, one containing unexpected power through its performances and the impossible situations the main characters find themselves in. Bathed in white, the final seconds of The Shop on Main Street show a wonderful dream, one that could only be crafted by a director pouring his decades-long grief for his parents and sister into his work. As the camera dances to the right, away from the shop on main street, we see in the background the shops and homes of the Jewish community now silent.

My rating: 10/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. The Shop on Main Street is the one hundred and fifty-eighth feature-length or short film I have rated a ten on imdb.

#The Shop on Main Street #Jan Kadar #Elmar Klos #Ida Kaminska #Jozef Kroner #Hana Slivkova #Martin Holly Sr.#Frantisek Zvarik #Ladislav Grosman #Zdenek Liska #Vladimir Novotny #Czechoslovak New Wave #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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sciencespies · 4 years

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Eight Things We’ve Learned About Moms Since the Last Mother's Day

https://sciencespies.com/news/eight-things-weve-learned-about-moms-since-the-last-mothers-day/

Eight Things We’ve Learned About Moms Since the Last Mother's Day

We freewheeling humans may be the only species that reliably showers mothers with cards and confections on the second Sunday in May, but all animal moms deserve some serious love and gratitude—probably on more than an annual basis.

From conception to birth and beyond, moms across the tree of life play an indispensable role in their kids’ survival and success. Here are a few things we’ve learned about the many ways the bong between a mother and her offspring manifests since our last Mother’s Day.

We Still Have a Lot to Learn About the Placenta

A mammalian fetus usually spends a few weeks or months or so in their mother’s placenta, an organ that shuttles nutrients, oxygen and waste between a mom-to-be and her embryo during pregnancy. Understanding this bizarre and complicated bit of anatomy is, quite literally, crucial to comprehending life as we know it.

Plenty about the placenta is still puzzling to researchers, including whether it hosts its own collection of friendly microorganisms, or microbiome. Though microbes are known to quickly colonize both the inside and outside of the human body after birth, playing important roles in immunity, digestion, and more, the placenta has traditionally been considered a sterile spot. If the placental microbiome exists—as some researchers argue it does—it could represent a fetus’ first exposure to benign bacteria and play a role in shaping the child’s future health.

But not everyone is on board with the idea. Last July, a group led by Stephen Charnock-Jones of the University of Cambridge published a study arguing against the existence of this mysterious microbial population, suggesting that previous experiments that had detected it had been the result of contamination in the lab, Laura Sanders reported for Science News at the time. The debate will inevitably rage on, wrote Ed Yong for the Atlantic, but highlights how little we understand about the microbes that inhabit our bodies.

Swamp Wallabies Can Get Pregnant While They’re Already Pregnant

Regardless of whether the placenta teems with bacterial tenants, this organ is inarguably a powerhouse—especially in the swamp wallaby, a petite marsupial that romps around Australia. Thanks to a series of weird quirks in their reproductive cycles, female swamp wallabies can get pregnant while already pregnant. These oddball animals boast two separate uteruses, and can alternate embryo implantations between them, allowing some overlap in gestation if they have sex before giving birth.

Female swamp wallabies may spent their entire adult lives continuously pregnant.

(pen_ash / Pixabay)

“As soon as they reach sexual maturity, these females are—perhaps unfortunately—pregnant all the time,” University of Melbourne biologist Brandon Menzies, who led the team that made the discovery, told Smithsonian magazine earlier this year.

Because their offspring suckle in the pouch for many months after birth, female swamp wallabies can end up supporting three young at once: an older joey that’s left the pouch, but still returns to mom for food; a younger joey nursing inside the pouch; and an incubating fetus that has yet to be born. Now that’s some impressive single parenting.

A 306-million-Year-Old Lizard Mother and Her Child Fossilized Together

The scientific community has learned about a few very old examples motherhood. Among them is a 306-million-year-old fossil immortalizing two lizard-like creatures huddled together in a tree stump—presumably, researchers argue, a mom protecting its kid.

If that’s indeed the case, this rare fossil could represent an extremely ancient instance of parental care in amniotes, the group that includes today’s mammals, birds and reptiles. The behavior, which requires an adult animal to invest time, energy and resources into its offspring after birth, might sound intuitive for modern creatures, but may not have come as easily to our egg-laying predecessors.

“Parental care is a strategy with a long antiquity,” paleontologist Arjan Mann told Smithsonian magazine last year. “Clearly, it’s worked out multiple times in evolutionary history. And we should have an appreciation for it.”

Were Ancient Europeans Using Clay Vessels to Feed Their Infants Animal Milk?

Not quite as old, but perhaps at least as impressive, are a set of 3,000-year-old clay vessels that may have been used to feed babies in what’s now Europe, Bruce Bower reported for Science News in September. Spouted and laced with traces of nonhuman animal milk, the containers may represent rudimentary baby bottles used on young kids during weaning, researchers argued in a paper published last year. By this point in time, dairying in Europe had been in place for at least 3,000 years, and women may have used milk from livestock animals to supplement their own breast milk as their children transitioned to solid food. The findings aren’t definitive, but still offer something for us modernites to chew on.

Mama Whales Whisper to Their Young to Evade Predators

Even when offspring stop relying on their mothers for food, they’ll often turn back to them for comfort, protection and companionship. That concept isn’t exactly breaking news, but each passing year offers up new examples of the tender ties between parents and their progeny.

Last July, Carolyn Wilke at Science News wrote of a heartwarming ritual between female southern right whales and their calves, who will listen to their mothers’ soft whispers to evade predatory orcas. These gentle calls—which sound like baritone moos—are too quiet to be picked up by anyone other than an adjacent whale (and, in this case, an eavesdropping scientist), allowing the gentle giants to protect their little ones in the vast and dangerous sea. “This shows us that whales have a sort of intimate communication as well,” Mia Nielsen, a behavioral biologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, told Science News at the time.

Vampire Bat Moms Persevere Through Illness to Care for Their Young

Moms will also go to great—and probably unsurprisingly—lengths to care for their kids, even when they’re feeling under the weather, a recent find in vampire bats suggests. Despite their vilification as blood sucking antagonists, these flying mammals are intelligent, social and generous, ecologist Gerry Carter of Ohio State University told Smithsonian magazine earlier this year. Sickness and symptoms do change behaviors, but illness-stricken moms will still muster the energy to feed and groom their offspring, highlighting the resilience of these relationships. The flipside of this, of course, is that it may enable infectious diseases to spread more quickly through family groups.

A Dolphin Adopted an Orphaned Baby Whale

A few heroic animal moms will even extend their caregiving to younguns of other species. Such adoptions are extremely rare (and don’t always end well). But recently, scientists have stumbled upon a handful of examples, including a female bottlenose dolphin that spent more than three years caring for a young melon-headed whale—even though she already had her own biological baby.

For mammals, milk production is a costly endeavor, making most moms wary of investing in young they’re not related to, even within the same species. The researchers behind the discovery, described in a paper published last summer, aren’t sure what circumstances bore out this odd cross-species interaction, but suspect it may have been largely fortuitous. Perhaps the little melon-headed whale was particularly persistent in pursuing the bottlenose mom at a time when she was “permissive” to the idea, having just given birth herself, Pamela Carzon of the Groupe d’Étude des Mammifères Marins (GEMM) de Polynésie told Erica Tennenhouse at National Geographic at the time.

A mother lion, her lion cubs and her adopted spotted leopard baby.

(Dheeraj Mittal / Deputy Conservator of Forests in India)

A Lioness Cared for a Sick Baby Leopard

Even more unexpected was a bond that formed between a mother lion and a baby leopard, described in a paper published earlier this year. Natural competitors who typically tussle over space and resources in India’s Gir National Park, lions and leopards are “at perpetual odds,” Stotra Chakrabarti of the University of Minnesota told Cara Giaimo at the New York Times. But a fuzzy, blue-eyed leopard cub managed to manage to melt another big cat’s lion heart. For more than a month, the lioness fostered the little interloper before he sadly died from a condition he’d likely had since birth.

The melon-headed whale and the leopard represent only the second and third cases of interspecies adoption ever documented, following on the heels of 2004 observation of a group of capuchin monkeys sheltering an infant marmoset. In all cases, the adoptee seemed to fit in relatively seamlessly with its new family, sometimes even engaging in playful behaviors and mimicking its newfound siblings.

These events are notably for their scarcity—but they’re also just plain adorable. As Carzon told National Geographic, “We were really excited to be able to witness such a rare phenomenon.”

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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James Carney, Culture and mood disorders: the effect of abstraction in image, narrative and film on depression and anxiety, Med Hum (2019)

Abstract

Can cultural representations be used to therapeutic effect in the treatment of mood disorders like depression and anxiety? This article develops a theoretical framework that outlines how this might be achieved by way of mid-level cultural metrics that allow otherwise heterogeneous forms of representation to be grouped together. Its prediction is that abstract representations—as measured by Shannon entropy—will impact positively on anxiety, where concrete representations will positively impact on depression. The background to the prediction comes from construal level theory, a branch of social psychology that deals with the effects of abstraction on psychological distance; the types of cultural representations analysed include image, narrative and film. With a view to evaluating the hypothesis, the article surveys the empirical literature in art therapy, creative bibliotherapy and cinema therapy.

Introduction

How does culture relate to mental health? If this question is easy to ask, it is less easily answered. Both culture and mental health are highly contested terms, meaning that no two interlocutors are likely to agree on even basic definitions. In the first instance, this is because culture comprises categories of assortment like ethnicity, nationality and class, as well as symbolic practices such as religion, art and sport—a scenario that disperses the consideration of culture and mental health across a range of objects and disciplines.1 In the second, the fraught political history of medical classification means that mental pathologies are the site of some of the most vigorous debates in the critical social sciences, ensuring that no one account of what constitutes mental illness attracts majority assent. While such tensions have been productive when it comes to unsettling normative diagnostic labels,2 there can be no doubt that they have also had the effect of balkanising the literature. To be sure, there is no shortage of interesting results and discussions.3 Nevertheless, it is equally true that the lack of a background theoretical framework militates against a deeper understanding of how culture shapes (and is shaped by) the experience of mental illness.

As no single exposition is likely to successfully anticipate what such a framework will look like in totality, I shall not attempt to deliver one here. Instead, I hope to outline how one metric of variation—abstraction—promises to connect different modes of cultural representation and mood disorders in a way relevant to thinking about how cultural objects might be exploited therapeutically. The background to this will come from recent work in construal level theory (CLT), a branch of social psychology that links the experience of psychological distance to the experience of abstraction. The animating claim of CLT is that the experience of abstraction cues expectations of psychological distance in the spatial, temporal, probabilistic and social spheres, just as the experience of distance cues expectations of abstraction.4 In itself, this observation seems relatively modest, but the achievement of CLT is to identify in abstraction a mid-level metric that is sufficiently general to be detectable across a wide range of stimuli, yet concrete enough to say something non-trivial about any given one of these. What this means in practice is that CLT allows for connection to be made between the experience of cultural artefacts in the broad sense and the disposition to behave in certain ways. That is, if the experience of abstraction (or concreteness) can be linked to expanded or contracted mental horizons, then the vehicle of that experience can be identified as a stimulus for the actions that take place within those horizons. And this, indeed, is what the literature shows: the experimental programme of CLT provides many examples linking moral, social, practical and creative behaviours (among others) to the experiences of abstraction and concreteness.5

Where these discoveries connect with the mood disorders is by way of a separate body of work that identifies depression and anxiety to be problems of overgeneralisation and undergeneralisation. While both conditions are obviously more complicated than can be explained by a one-dimensional characterisation such as this, it remains the case that it picks out an important component of variation. Depression, for instance, is typically experienced as ‘a feeling of being dislodged from everyday activity’, 6 leaving the sufferer ‘an isolated object in a world without relationships’.7 Conversely, anxiety generates the sense of ‘being too much in contact with reality’8 and ‘the fearful anticipation of a catastrophe one is hopeless to prevent’. 9 What is visible in both conditions is attentional capture by interpretive frames that either strip away or exaggerate the constituent details of ordinary human experience. To this extent, CLT provides an empirically sanctioned bridge between modes of cultural expression (and the historical factors behind them) and the experience of mental illness. It hardly needs stating that this connection may well allow for insights into how cultural representations can be most effectively leveraged in support of therapeutic interventions.

Starting from these observations, I shall proceed here by delivering an overview of how different modes of cultural expression can evince abstraction and concreteness, and commenting on the relevance of this for anxiety and depression. For the most part, the cultural forms I will discuss relate to image, narrative and film. (Music I shall not consider due to lack of specialist knowledge.) All these genres of representation use different materials against different horizons of expectation, with the result that there is no simple sense in which they can be said to be abstract or concrete. Nevertheless, if the ideas I propose here are to be tested, defensible and reliable measures of this representational tendency need to be developed. Necessarily, doing this will involve a wide-ranging discussion of cultural representation; to no less a degree, it is unavoidable that some of these discussions must deal with technical concepts in linguistics, information theory and cognitive science. However, to develop even one metric of health-relevant variation that extends across several cultural forms and which admits of objective estimation must surely be admitted as a useful exercise. At the very least, it challenges the de facto approach, which is to treat different modes of expression on an individual basis, without ever taking a global overview.

CLT, depression and anxiety

If CLT and mood disorders are to contextualise an analysis of cultural forms, then the relation between the two needs to be properly explicated. The present section will do this by way of a short review of the CLT literature that discusses how its findings might be brought into contact with cognate findings on depression and anxiety. This will deliver the background knowledge needed for the subsequent engagement with specific modes of cultural representation.

For all that CLT is communicated in a specialist vocabulary, the insights behind it are rather intuitive. Central among these is the idea that human cognition persistently links abstraction and distance. ‘Abstraction’ in this connection relates to the level of detail associated with a stimulus, with CLT proponents labelling a high-detail stimulus as having a ‘low’ construal level and a low-detail stimulus as having a ‘high’ construal level. ‘Distance’ equates with psychological distance, which comprises distance in the spatial, temporal, probabilistic and social dimensions. (The adjective ‘psychological’ denotes that it is the subject’s perception or imagination of distance that matters, rather than any physical measure of distance, even if the two are frequently connected.) The CLT proposal is that that expectations of distance on these four dimensions are cued by high-construal level stimuli, just as the experience of concreteness is projected to promote expectations of nearness. And by a reciprocal process again, the experience of psychological distance leads to expectations of high-construal level, just as the experiences of nearness cue low-construal expectations. In the words of two leading CLT theorists, ‘different levels of construal serve to expand and contract one’s mental horizons and thus mentally traverse psychological distances’.10

Some examples should make these claims clearer. Take the high-construal noun ‘civilisation’: typically, this prompts one to expect psychological distance along several dimensions—thus, one speaks of ‘Roman civilisation’ (temporal distance), ‘Japanese civilisation’ (spatial distance) or ‘alien civilisation’ (social distance), but never ‘Oxford civilisation’. In the other direction, distance cues high-construal expectations. Probabilistically remote events, for instance, prompt low-detail hypotheticals (‘if alien civilisations exist, we will discover whether there are cultural universals’), when likely events enjoin more detailed ones (‘if there’s traffic on Oxford High Street, I’ll divert via Queen’s Lane’). Similar considerations obtain with respect to low-construal stimuli, though here of course the relation is with nearness. For example, a detailed statement like ‘The venue for Julia’s vocal performance has poor acoustics’ is typically consonant with Julia’s recital happening soon and not in three decades, just as ‘Julia hopes to be still able to sing on her 100th birthday’ does not usually enjoin one to ask whether the room in which she sings will have air conditioning.

In themselves, these examples are merely suggestive; the achievement of CLT is to support them with an experimental programme that links a diverse range of behavioural and cognitive outcomes to the experience of both psychological distance and construal level. With respect to distance, the evidence is that framing actions as far away on one of the dimensions of psychological distance makes high-construal purposiveness salient while inhibiting considerations of low-construal context. Liberman and Trope,11 for instance, show that action statements like ‘locking a door’ are represented in terms of constituent subactions (‘putting a key in the lock’) when located in the imminent future, but in terms of agentive intention (‘securing the house’) when set a year from the present. Cognate results are available for spatial distance,12 probabilistic distance13 and social distance.14 Another effect of distance is to prime for morality over empathy (ie, the application of abstract normative principles over the emotional engagement with the needs of another). In this connection, Eyal, Liberman and Trope demonstrate that the violation of widely accepted moral rules (sibling incest, eating pets, desecrating national symbols) is judged more harshly (ie, more morally) in far-future conditions than in near-future ones15 —presumably because contextual mitigating factors are not in play. Intensity of emotion is also linked to distance cues, with events like visiting the dentist being imagined to be less intense when imagined to be further in the future than near to the present;16 similarly, objects and events moving away from the subject are felt as having less emotional valence than object and events moving towards.17 Some other behaviours that have been identified as affected by considerations of construal level and distance include the propensity to conform,18 the alignment of goals with desires,19 the perception of expertise,20 the experience of shame,21 the appreciation of creativity,22 the use of politeness23 and the making of economic decisions.24 In all cases, the general result is the same: abstraction and psychological distance are cues for one another, just as concreteness and psychological nearness are also.

As indicated, the link between these considerations and the mood disorders comes by way of attentional capture in depression and anxiety. Though both conditions share a common cognitive trait in overrumination and are thus often comorbid,25 the focus of rumination tends to be quite distinct—and this is where CLT considerations come into view. Starting with depression, this should be understood here to mean ‘major depressive disorder’ (MDD) or ‘persistent depressive disorder’ (PDD) as classified by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V). Typical symptoms of both involve depressed mood, diminished interest in activities, weight loss/gain, insomnia/hypersomnia, psychomotor agitation/retardation, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness and/or guilt, lack of concentration or decisiveness, and recurrent thoughts of death.26 MDD requires more symptoms for a shorter period for diagnosis; PDD requires fewer symptoms for longer. Both are to be distinguished from bipolar disorder, which the DSM-V now classes alongside the psychoses.27 With respect to the phenomenology of both conditions it would seem that the ruminative emphasis falls on capture by high-construal, negatively valent thoughts and memories. For instance, Watkins and Teasdale note that ‘overgeneral memory is a disorder specific phenomenon found in depression and posttraumatic stress disorder but not in generalised anxiety disorder, social phobia or obsessive-compulsive disorder’,28 with Watkins amplifying this into the more general claim that ‘the level of goal/action identification adopted in major depression is abnormal and dysfunctional, with patients with depression tending to adopt more abstract levels of goal/action identification, at least for negative information, than non-depressed controls’.29 Significantly, the CLT-predicted distance priming that this experience of abstraction should enjoin can be readily identified in first-hand accounts of depression.Matthew Ratcliffe, for example, collates the following descriptions: ‘There was just an unfathomable distance between me and any other human being’;30 ‘It feels as though you’re watching life from a long distance’;31 ‘the world looks different—familiar things seem strange, distant’;32 ‘things are no longer appear available; they are strangely distant’;33 ‘I was terribly alone, lost in a far-away place’;34 ‘You’ve lost a habitable earth. You’ve lost the invitation to live that the universe extends to us at every moment’.35 There can be no doubting the salience of psychological distance in these reports.

Moving on to anxiety, this condition should be taken here as a proxy for ‘generalised anxiety disorder’, which the DSM-V defines as ‘excessive, uncontrollable anxiety or worry for at least 6 months and associated with two of restlessness, fatigue, irritability, muscle tension, and sleep disturbance’.36 At first glance, the literature seems to identify these symptoms as a form of attentional capture by high-construal stimuli. Watkins, for instance, concludes that generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) is ‘characterised by a predisposition towards adopting an abstract level of goal/action identification as the prepotent operational level … patients with GAD demonstrate a biassed tendency towards a more abstract level of processing’.37 However, though this formulation may be technically correct—after all, it is certainly true that worry deals in hypotheticals—it is questionable how useful it is. (And note the disagreement with Watkins and Teasdale quoted above.)38 Instead, it would seem more accurate to characterise anxiety as the making concrete of ostensibly abstract threats. Mathews, for example, notes that anxiety is marked by ‘persistent awareness of possible future danger, which is repeatedly rehearsed without ever being resolved’39—an appreciation that is echoed in a number of studies that identify anxiety as a form of ‘selective processing that fits [the anxious individual’s] view of the world as dangerous’.40 From a CLT perspective, this amounts to collapsing the psychological distance on the probabilistic dimension. By making unlikely events—that is, events that are probabilistically distant—salient, anxiety cues the collapsing of mental horizons into the here and now.

A cursory examination of first-hand descriptions of anxiety bears out this view of anxiety as an overconcrete immersion in the near-hypothetical. Though equivalent collations of anxiety experiences to those available for depression are less easy to find, discussions on social media forums offer some useful evocations. For instance, a psychiatrist on Reddit recalls a patient as saying anxiety ‘feel[s] like she tripped and the moment where you don’t know if you are going to catch yourself or not is how she felt all day long.’41 Another commenter likens it to what happens when your ‘stomach turns and you get hot and your heart pounds, whatever happens when you think something went very wrong and you’re about to catch shit for it’;42 a second exhorts the reader to ‘Imagine if every small decision had life or death consequences’.43 An author on the Anxiety and Depression Association of America website recalls, ‘I’d be stuck in traffic and these irritating voices would take my brain hostage. “Did you leave the coffee on? The house will catch fire, the neighbours will burn!”’44 Another recounts, ‘I don’t see five to ten ants. I see the inevitable 100 to 200 that I imagine will invade and eventually carry off our house. It’s very hard for me to deal with the here and now when I am catastrophizing’.45 The examples could be multiplied, but the point is clear: anxiety, contra depression, shrinks the horizon of cognition into immediately nearby spatial and temporal concerns.

The question that follows from framing mood disorders in this way is whether doing so provides any therapeutic insights into anxiety and depression. The answer would seem to be that it does, even if such insights are not explicitly articulated using CLT.46 Specifically, there is a small (but growing) body of evidence that exposing the depressed and the anxious to stimuli that exhibit a construal level opposite to that which characterises their condition yields positive therapeutic results. In the case of depression, Werner-Seidler and Moulds47 establish that prompting depressed and recovered individuals to recall an autobiographical memory in abstract and concrete modes yields a positive impact in the concrete mode; in their words, ‘a concrete processing mode enabled positive memory recall to have a reparative effect on mood for depressed and recovered participants’.48 Equivalently, Watkins et al show that complementing treatment as usual (TAU) for depression with concreteness training ‘seems to be an efficacious treatment for mild to moderate depression in primary care, producing significantly better outcomes than TAU’.49 Viewed through the lens of CLT, these results are explained by the adopting of a low-construal cognitive frame, where the depressive tendency towards ruminative overgeneralisation is recalibrated towards shorter psychological distances. These distances, being more amenable to everyday projects and goals, challenge the impotence in the face of the cosmos that characterises depression.

With respect to anxiety, the situation once again seems less clear-cut. Amir, Beard, Cobb and Bomyea demonstrate that diverting attention away from threatening stimuli succeeds in reducing anxious feelings50 —a result that is replicated in several places across the literature.51 However, there is also evidence that actively exposing anxious individuals to inducing stimuli can, over the course of time, ameliorate symptoms.52 How can these different data be reconciled? The key to doing this comes with recognising the role played by abstraction in both protocols. Attention diversion techniques invariably work by training participants to attend to neutral stimuli over threatening ones; as such, they strip away one dimension of experience—valence—and thereby shift the individual’s perception of the world into a marginally more abstract mode. It can be argued that exposure therapies do the same, but in a radically different way: by inserting the threatening stimulus into a series of encounters, they dampen its singularity and subordinate it to an abstract category that is amenable to cognitive manipulation. What emerges, therefore, is the finding that ‘a tendency to preferentially attend toward or away from threat, relative to an equal distribution of attention irrespective of threat, results in greater reduction in clinical symptoms and diagnoses’.53 In other words, so long as a high-construal perspective is adopted—whether by diversion or habituation—the anxiety-inducing character of a stimulus will tend to diminish.

In sum, there exist reasonable grounds for thinking that the results of CLT have relevance for the treatment of both depression and anxiety. I stress, once more, that this does not amount to saying that they are explained by CLT, or that CLT captures the full phenomenology of either condition. If it did, it would be a damning verdict on psychological medicine for it to have missed so straightforward a result, given the amount of research that anxiety and depression have stimulated over the years. Instead, the value of the CLT perspective is that it allows for connections to be made with cultural processes that may have a therapeutic value for both conditions. These processes will be the target of the next section.

Construal level and culture

Viewing culture through the lens of abstraction is not a new idea. As long ago as 1908, Wilhelm Worringer wrote of ‘the antithetic relation of empathy and abstraction’, and how the impulse towards abstraction ‘finds in beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in general terms, in all general law and necessity’.54 For Worringer, the motivation towards abstraction is ‘the immense spiritual dread of space’,55 which leaves humanity ‘tormented by the entangled inter-relationship and flux of the phenomena of the outer world’.56 By positing abstraction as the antidote to the anxiety entrained by the unpredictability of the world, it should be clear that Worringer is making a connection between mood and forms of cultural representation that is cognate to the issues under discussion here.

In the present section, my aim is to go beyond Worringer’s purely qualitative appreciation of how abstraction shapes the experience of culture and develop quantitative metrics that allow for such abstraction to be measured. The value of such measurement is that it allows for cultural representations to be compared with one another, both within and between the categories they belong to. This is a potentially controversial move, given the long-standing resistance to such acts of quantification in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences.57 Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that recent work in areas like cognitive cultural studies will have gone some distance towards illustrating the power of using empirically informed methodologies to engage with the symbolic apparatus of culture.58 Equally, the movement towards the experimental humanities points to the value of having manipulable measures that allow for the testing of predictions against real-world audiences.59 Here, both considerations will allow for an account of different forms of cultural representation that predict their impact on the mood disorders.

At a practical level, I shall focus mostly on construal level as my variable of interest. This is not at all to dismiss psychological distance as playing an important role in the operations of culture; indeed, I have written previously on how manipulations of distance play a crucial role in establishing the cognitive effect of genres such as science fiction.60 Instead, my view is that the necessarily synoptic exercise of surveying how distance emerges in several media would eclipse the no less important (and comparatively underdeveloped) issue of abstraction, which must therefore be my principal focus here. Saying this, however, invites the question of how construal level can be quantified. While it is often intuitively obvious whether a representation is abstract or concrete, this is of little value when precise comparisons are needed. Moreover, the experimental manipulations of construal level in the literature, though fit for purpose, are not generalisable across multiple modes of stimulus presentation. What is therefore needed is a reliable proxy for construal level that yields precise values and can be extended across a variety of media.

I propose here to use Shannon entropy as this measure.61 Like the thermodynamic concept it is derived from, Shannon entropy (hereafter just entropy) is a measure of how much structure is required to encode a message, with high entropy messages being more unpredictable than low entropy messages. As the central concept in information theory, entropy is surrounded by a forbidding formal vocabulary. Nevertheless, it is relatively easy to illustrate by way of a linguistic example. For instance, it is easy to see that asking someone to complete a three-word phrase that starts with ‘the northern’ will more often produce ‘the northern lights’ or ‘the northern hemisphere’ than ‘the northern engine’ or ‘the northern babysitter’. This is because, in English, the former two phrases occur with a much higher frequency than the latter, meaning that any guess concerning how the phrase should be completed is more likely to be correct if it uses ‘lights’ or ‘hemisphere’ as the relevant word. In this sense, the phrase ‘the northern lights’ has less entropy than ‘the northern babysitter’, as it would require fewer guesses to reconstruct it in the event of the last word being missing.

In more formal terms, entropy is therefore ‘a measure of the information contained in a message as opposed to the part of the message that is strictly determined (hence predictable) by inherent structures’.62 What this involves in practice is calculating the average freedom to vary each symbol or item in a given message relative to the constraints that operate on that message. This is done using the following formula, where H corresponds to the entropy of the message X, i denotes a value in the range 0≤ i ≤ k when k is the number of symbols in the message, and p(xi) is the probability of a specific symbol xi occurring:

For those unfamiliar with the formalism, the sigma operator ‘Σ’ means that if there are k symbols, then the entropy should be calculated for each one of them and the results added together. The log2p(xi) quantity picks out a number y, such that 2y=p(xi). Though this formula outputs a value in bits for any well-defined system, this number is often normalised so it can only take values between ‘0’ and ‘1’ by dividing by the quantity log2(k); this quantity is called metric entropy. To see how the formula works in advance of its use below, take a simple example: a coin toss with an unbiased coin. There are two possible results (heads or tails) with the same probability each; thus p(xi)=0.5 for i=1 and i=2. The entropy of the system is calculated by summing across both possible results: – [(0.5 × log2(0.5) + (0.5 × log2(0.5)]=1. Thus, this system can be completely described using 1 bit of information. (Note that the metric entropy is also one in this example, as log22 =1.)

The relevance of entropy for the discussion of construal level and culture is that it reliably tracks abstraction. The core cognitive operation of abstraction is to strip away redundant detail and make a given system predictable—a function that reaches its apotheosis in mathematics and logic, but which is present in any act of classification or generalisation. Conversely, concreteness entails unpredictability, with its limit case being a purely random distribution of elements where the only structure is that described by the normal distribution. In the terminology under discussion, this means, counterintuitively, that low entropy corresponds to high-construal level and high entropy corresponds to low-construal level. If this identity is allowed, it means that entropy can be used as a proxy for identifying the likely impact of cultural representations on anxiety and depression.

Naturally, all of this raises the question of what such analysis might look like in practice. I shall initiate it now by giving an overview of how three modes of representation—image, narrative and film—can be discussed in terms of construal level. I would like it to be noted from the outset that my treatments of each area will be highly summary in character, and for every operational choice I make, I acknowledge that a specialist will be able to make the case for a different one. In defence of my procedure, I state here that my aim is only to demonstrate in principle how one might approach these three areas. Any thoroughgoing practical demonstration would need to be more circumspect in its approach, if also longer than is useful for an article-length exposition.

Image

Most discussions of the therapeutic potential of image focus on the production rather than the reception of visual artworks.63 However, as Vidler notes ‘anxiety, estrangement, and their psychological counterparts, anxiety neuroses and phobias have been intimately linked to the aesthetics of space’.64 For Vidler, this is a specifically modern phenomenon, but it can readily be seen that the attempt to ‘permeate the formal with the psychological’65 can inhabit the visual art of any period. The 70 k BCE ochre carvings from the Blombos Cave, for example, display a geometrical linear styling that has no obvious mimetic intention;66 conversely, the 17 k BCE animal paintings of the Lascaux Cave evince a highly concrete realism.67 Closer to the present, Celtic art of the Hallstatt style (1200–500 BCE) is geometrical, linear and spare, while that in the La Tène (450–1 BCE) style is curvilinear, richly detailed and organic68—no less than the formal innovations of the twentieth-century avant-garde contrasts with the nineteenth-century pictorial realism. The point is that the oscillation between mimetic detail and formal abstraction is a pattern the repeats across the history of visual culture.

To the extent that this is so, entropy should provide a reliable measure of abstraction in an image. The question concerns how it might be calculated. The standard protocol for doing this is to use colour as the variable i in the entropy formula, such that it takes a value from the set of k colours that make up an image. The object taking the value can be thought of as the pixels making up the image, so that for any colour i, a given image will contain m pixels of that colour. Thus, for any randomly chosen pixel from the total of n pixels in the image, the probability of it being colour i will be the fraction n/m. To illustrate, take an 8-bit grayscale computer image: this format allows 256 (ie, 28) shades of grey that can occur in any admixture. The probability of a randomly selected pixel exhibiting any given one of these shades will be given by dividing the total number of pixels exhibiting the shade by the total pixel count of the image. In turn, this allows the image entropy to be calculated by summing the 256 products of each shade’s probability by the log base 2 of this probability—a number that can then be normalised by dividing by log2(256). As even small images have very large numbers of pixels, it would be impractical to reproduce such a calculation here; it is easier just to show the results generated for specific images (figure 1), which I calculate using a python function specifically scripted for the task. As can be seen, there is a clear linear progression such that the more abstract an image is, the lower the entropy score.

Figure 1. Metric entropy scores for three images, where ‘0’ is the lowest possible value and ‘1’ is the highest. The rectangular grid is highly predictable and has a low score. The middle image—taken from Louis le Brocquy’s illustrations to Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the medieval Irish epic, Táin Bó Cuailgne—blends pictorial and schematic elements, and takes a value in the middle of the distribution. The final image, as a photograph, lacks any easily defined organising principle, and thus comes close to the entropy of a purely random distribution of pixels (ie, a score of 1).

Directing these results back to CLT, what can be said is that entropy tracks abstraction—and therefore construal level—in images in a reliable way. High-construal images, in virtue of exhibiting law-like regularities, are predictable and have low entropy; conversely, low-construal images frustrate schematic perception and have high entropy. The prediction that follows is that high entropy images should be of value for individuals with depression, when low entropy images should be of value for those suffering from anxiety. Such a claim invites assessment: is it the case that entropy tracks the therapeutic value of images?

To the extent that there is evidence available, it would seem that it does, looked at from both a historical and an experimental perspective. Starting with anxiety, Currey and Kasser69 compare the therapeutic impact of colouring a mandala design, colouring a generically abstract plaid design and colouring by way of a free-form unguided exercise. The results clearly show that colouring low entropy images in the form of the plaid design and the mandala reduced anxiety in a statistically significant way relative to colouring the free-form design, which has no impact—with this outcome being replicated in an independent follow-up study.70 In a separate study, Sandmire, Gorham, Rankin et al71 compare the impact on anxiety of mandala design, free-form painting, clay sculpting, collage making and drawing .Small sample sizes by condition did not allow the different interventions to be statistically distinguished. Nevertheless, given that the largest group chose the mandala design, the positive results they establish for art therapy across all conditions are consistent with the CLT abstraction hypothesis. Though more work is needed, these results clearly point to high entropy images as having a potentially positive impact on anxiety.

With respect to depression, the evidence is that the types of images produced by depressed individuals are of a low entropy kind, to the extent that they use less colour, have more empty space, are more constricted, are less effortful and are less meaningful.72 Correspondingly, it is unsurprising that high entropy images appear to be more therapeutically efficacious for depression. For instance, in a study that involved patients with cancer in a non-abstract watercolour-based art therapy intervention, Bar-Sela, Atid, Danos, Gebay et al73 found that depression was reduced while anxiety levels remained the same. Beyond this, it is difficult to generalise, as most experimental studies do not distinguish between the specific types of art therapy administered. Nevertheless, it is possible that the relative preponderance of concrete and mimetic modes of representation in art therapy is responsible for the positive impact on depression identified in several meta-analyses.74

It would seem, then, that there is evidence in support of the view that CLT effects on depression and anxiety can be tracked using entropy as a proxy, and they take the direction predicted. Necessarily, this requires further testing if the hypothesis is to receive the support it requires. Equally, a more cognitively ‘thick’ account of visual perception is needed to allow for entropy-reduction processes (like face and scene recognition) that improve the predictability of images. Nevertheless, it should be evident that the CLT-entropy approach points to a potentially important line of inquiry for the discussion of the therapeutic impact of images.

Narrative

If art therapy has an established therapeutic pedigree, treatment using literary materials has emerged in the last number of years as a parallel method of engaging with various disorders.75 Variously termed ‘book therapy’ or ‘creative bibliotherapy’, the idea is that ‘active immersion in great literature can help relieve, restore, or reinvigorate the troubled mind’.76 Though certainly an appealing prospect, the field is new and there is no robust proposal as to why literature should have a therapeutic effect in the first place. Montgomery and Maunders probably offer the most considered approach when they argue for literature as a vehicle for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) effects,77 though this ultimately relies on the same ideas concerning readerly identification in fiction that underwrite less developed approaches.78 Moreover, even allowing that literature has a therapeutic effect, no approach predicts how different types of literature will interact with any one of the 297 or so conditions that at least one diagnostic system identifies as defining the repertoire of mental illness.79

As scoping a response to these problems for all forms of literature is obviously impractical, I shall restrict myself here to outlining how a CLT-informed entropic perspective might be used to make predictions concerning the therapeutic impact of narrative literature. Naturally, this poses the problem of how narratives can be understood as ‘abstract’ or ‘concrete’—not least because there are several levels, ranging from the lexical to the sentential to the discursive, that may exhibit such qualities. One useful concept for probing the distinction is that of narrativity.80 This is a global term that indexes the extent to which a cultural artefact lends itself to narrative elaboration across all its elements. A text with a high degree of narrativity will exhibit a judicious mix of surprise and predictability, with a preponderance of either surprise or predictability being deleterious to a text’s narrativity. As David Herman notes, ‘there is a lower limit of narrativity, past which certain ‘stories’ activate so few world models that they can no longer be processed as stories at all’, just as there is ‘an upper limit of narrativity, past which the tellable gives way to stereotypical, and the point of a narrative, the reason for its being told, gets lost or at least obscured’.81 In other words, a highly concrete text will be one that frustrates narrativity by resisting predictability, while an abstract text frustrates it by being too general. The connection here with entropy is obvious: texts that are either too high or too low in entropy are poor in narrativity.

One way in which these distinctions can be illustrated is by way of the link between character and action—a central plank of all forms of narrative. In this regard, one achievement of formalist models of narrative has been the identification of narrative ‘grammars’, where the key intervention involves abstracting recurrent classes of action from a given class of narratives to arrive at a general model. These models often generalise across categories like region and genre,82 but there also exist accounts that identify features purportedly present in all narratives.83 Their value for the present purpose is that they offer one clear dimension on which narrativity varies, to the extent that texts that entirely coincide with, or entirely deviate from, narrative grammars are also poor in narrativity. I shall illustrate this here using A J Greimas’s actantial model84 —not out of any conviction that Greimas is correct where others are wrong, but simply because his model is well known and supports a formal demonstration that can be readily extended to other models.

For Greimas, a character in a narrative can take one of six actants or roles: it can be a subject, an object, a helper, an opponent, a sender or a receiver (figure 2). The subject and object are paired in a relation of desire, want or need, with the subject exercising this relation on the object. Take Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels: here, Bond is typically the subject, with the defence of democratic values and the social order being the object. The helper and opponent are paired in a relation of power, such that they either augment or detract from the subject’s ability to pursue the object. In the Bond narratives, the helpers can be Q, the Bond girl, Felix Leiter and so forth; the opponent is manifested through the agents of the USSR and the various criminal enterprises that Bond confronts. The sender and receiver are paired in an axis of transmission, where the sender legitimates the subject’s actions, the value of which is delivered to the receiver. Thus, M, as representative of the Crown, authorises Bond’s actions, which benefit the British public and the wider democratic world. According to Greimas, these categories are present in all narratives, such that any character can be identified with a given actant on a given appearance (ie, they can be identified with different actants at different points in the narrative). Thus, what the actantial model defines is an underlying principle of organisation that maps the information contained in the set of character appearances into the information contained in the set of actantial roles.

Figure 2. Greimas’s six-term actantial account of narrative.

Viewing this model through the lens of entropy, the six actants define a set of values that partition the set of character appearances. This means that, for any given character appearance, that appearance can be classified under a category i, where i belongs to the set (sender, receiver, subject, object, helper, opponent). The sum of the character appearances in each category will then total the amount of appearances in the narrative. The probability, pi, of a given appearance being a particular actant is found by dividing the number of appearances in that category by the total number of appearances. As per the formula, the entropy is calculated by summing the products of each probability pi by log2(pi). In the case where there is an equal likelihood of a character belonging to one of the six roles in a given appearance, the metric entropy of the narrative is exactly 1, as there is no structure present. The latter enters into the picture via genre, which will foreground and background different actantial roles, thereby changing the relative probabilities involved. In Greimas’s words, ‘an articulation of actors constitutes a particular tale; a structure of actants constitutes a genre’.85 To properly represent this would require exact data on the relative proportion of actantial roles in different genres, which it is beyond the scope of the present article to provide. Instead, it is more useful to look at how entropy and narrativity relate to these considerations of abstraction and concreteness.

In this regard, the tendency towards concreteness has a clear expression in the realist novel. As an exercise in ‘the mimesis of consciousness’,86 realism participates in the unpredictability of its subject matter. That is, by attenuating the connection between actantial role and character identity in favour of character identity, narrative realism refuses the predictability of a schema and makes salient instead the sense of subjective freedom that attends personhood. Given the social orientation of much human cognition,87 it is unsurprising that that texts exhibiting this tendency should be narrative to a high degree. Nevertheless, it is no less true that the wholesale reproduction of subjective experience as found in texts like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake88 or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves89 have the effect of reducing narrativity. By requiring the reader to invest sustained cognitive labour before she can extract the general principle from the concrete particular, they frustrate the sense of (immediate) universality that is implicit in highly narrative texts.

On the abstract side of the spectrum, quasi-formulaic narratives like folk tales and myths are close mirror images of realist fiction, in that they also have psychological verisimilitude and functional roles, even if here the functional role predominates. The result is that such genres evince the same degree of narrativity as realist fiction, while having lower entropy. The ‘pathological’ tail to this end of the narrativity distribution is probably to be found in those simplified narratives that entirely dispense with specific actants. These are most commonly found in children’s discourse, which evolve over the course of development from primitive assertions of desire or causality to fully worked-out stories.90 Notably, such narratives are also visible in the ‘anti-narratives’ of modernist fiction, which strategically interrupt the story-telling process so as to highlight its inadequacy to human experience. Take, for instance, Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels, Molloy, Moran and The Unnamable, where all distinctions of character and structure eventually collapse into the ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ of The Unnamable’s immobile subject.91

The general picture that emerges from this is that there is a clear alignment between the concept of entropy under discussion here and narrative structure. Moreover, this alignment is not merely theorised to exist, but has a long-standing expression in narratological terminology. But while this is welcome and satisfying, it is of incidental importance to the present inquiry if it cannot be connected with anxiety and depression. In this connection, the evidence is promising, if limited. As might be expected, the difficulty of making lengthy narrative materials amenable to experimental manipulation means that such studies as exist tend to focus on shorter narratives or narrative selections. With respect to depression, Carney and Robertson show that individuals exhibiting traits that correlate with depression are more strongly engaged by a high entropy version of a narrative text than a low one.92 On the side of anxiety, Glavin and Montgomery93 and Montgomery and Maunders94 offer a meta-analyses of studies that use literature in the treatment of various conditions and find either modest effects or no effects, but suggest that lack of comparability and poor design make definitive conclusions untrustworthy. Orthogonal to both, Troscianko shows substantial effects for fiction reading on several dimensions of behaviour relating to eating disorders, but the classification of fiction type is determined by thematic focus rather than abstraction or concreteness.95 Beyond this, the research literature offers little in the way of robust empirical evidence, even if there is no shortage of speculative pieces.

Thus, though there is no evidence against the proposal that abstraction impacts differentially on mood disorders, and some small evidence for it, a programme of testing is needed to properly establish the effect of narrative abstraction on depression and anxiety. I am currently engaged in an ongoing programme of such testing, which aims to ground the efflorescence of interest in creative bibliotherapy with solid empirical data. As yet, however, no solid conclusions can be reached concerning the role of abstraction in the cognitive impact of fiction—even if there are reasons to be hopeful that it might yet be used to good therapeutic effect.

Film

Just as literature has been suggested as a possible vehicle for therapeutic intervention, so too has film. The practice of using ‘motion pictures in a structured manner with specific populations for particular therapeutic gains’96 dates back to at least the 1940s,97 and continues today in a wide range of healthcare contexts.98 To the extent that it is theorised, ‘cinematherapy’ is framed in much the same way as its literary equivalent, with many theorists even going so far as to explicitly identify it as a form of bibliotherapy.99 Given the problems with bibliotherapy, this does little to clarify how cinematherapy might work, but it does point to CBT-style effects as the most commonly assigned mechanism.100 Though this may well be the case, the fact remains that such accounts say little about the specifically filmic dimension of cinematherapy, or indeed how different types of film relate to different conditions.

As will be anticipated, my suggestion is that abstraction provides one way of approaching this issue. In fact, given that film contains both visual and narrative components, it can be readily seen that two ways in which filmic entropy can be measured have already been covered. The task comes with outlining how these approaches might be adapted to account for the specific effects of cinema. In the former scenario, this involves extending the static entropy measure of a still image into a dynamic register of multiples of images per second; in the latter, it means incorporating the issues that arise when characters and actants are instantiated in physically perceivable agents and objects (ie, actors and props). Once both issues are dealt with, it should then become possible to consider the therapeutic impact of film.

To start with the issue of dynamic entropy, there is an obvious sense in which the relevant abstraction measure for film is not the average entropy across its frames, but the distribution of the entropy values these frames take. Take, for instance, the Heider-Simmel demonstration,101 which is the famous animation that uses moving shapes to illustrate the human propensity to assign agency to objects. Consider, at the same time, the introductory sequence to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now,102 which uses richly worked cinematography to conflate the external chaos of the Vietnam war with the inner turmoil of its protagonist, Captain Willard (figure 3). It should be clear that, on a frame-by-frame basis, both films will exhibit very different entropy measures—as is clear from plots of the entropy levels for the first 1800 frames of each (figure 4). Equally, however, what should emerge is that there are marked differences in the variance of the entropy across both films. Though neither exhibits a particularly large variation, the overall spread of entropy in Apocalypse Now is much wider than in Heider-Simmel, and would likely be wider again in a longer selection (figure 5). What this serves to show is that a measure like the IQR (the numerical interval in which the middle 50% of the data lie) is likely to offer the best measure of the entropy of a sequence of film. Where this range is narrow and lies close to 1, the film will be concrete and exhibit high entropy; where it is narrow and closer to 0, it will be abstract and have low entropy. Where there is a large IQR, there is likely no worthwhile measure of the central tendency of entropy, and analysis will have better results by focusing on shorter subsequences.

Figure 3. Illustration frames from the Heider-Simmel demonstration frame (left) and ApocalypseNow.

Figure 4. Entropy by frame for Heider-Simmel and ApocalypseNow.

Figure 5. Box plots for Heider-Simmel and ApocalypseNow.

Moving on to the issue of character-based entropy, the specifically filmic problem that emerges is the high cognitive load that the audience must sustain when they are inferring the motives of ostensibly unknown persons. Unlike a linguistically mediated narrative, where mental states can, in principle, be directly communicated, acted roles are physically instantiated in real people and thus engage computationally expensive inferential processes.103 As pushing cognitive load beyond a certain point is typically antihedonic,104 this means that film, as a genre, perpetually runs the risk of alienating its audience due to excessive entropy. How might this be resolved? One solution comes by way of the ‘star’ phenomenon. As noted by theorists such as Richard Dyer, ‘The star’s presence in a film is a promise of a certain kind of thing that you would see if you went to see the film’.105 Though Dyer volunteers this as motivated by economics, it functions equally well to reduce entropy. That is, if the presence of a specific actor entrains a set of performance expectations, then these expectations reduce cognitive load by creating a set of priors that prestructure the relevant inferences. Putting this in terms of the entropy formula, the variable i will thus pick out a member of the set of conventional movie roles (action hero, femme fatale, comic relief, maverick, wise counsellor, etc). Summing across his or her appearances, the presence of a specific actor will increase the conditional probability of a given character belonging to a given role, thereby providing implicit context for making sense of their actions. As this serves to increase predictability, it lowers overall entropy, and helps resolve the problem of cognitive load. In this sense, the star system created by the film industry operates as an entropy reduction ‘grammar’ that increases consumption by lowering the cognitive demands of understanding the actions of person-like agents.

Bringing these considerations back to the mood disorders, what emerges is that abstraction is concomitant with films that have predictable action structures and character motivations, and which impose a low perceptual processing burden. Conversely, detailed visual innovation and eschewal of ready-made associations between actors and roles creates a highly concrete cinema that resists predictability. Once more, the question is whether the latter type of cinema is therapeutically efficacious for depression, where the latter is for anxiety. Such experimental testing as has been conducted supports the general idea that cinema can have a therapeutic impact, though there are no data that can be parsed in terms of abstraction and concreteness in cinematic representation and how they serve to differentially impact on mood disorders. Thus, even more than image and narrative, cinema remains a terra incognita with respect to its clinical impact. It remains possible—even plausible—that it has a palliative effect on conditions like depression and anxiety, but this needs to be supported by well-designed experiments. Given the popularity of cinema relative to other cultural forms, there can be little doubt that supporting the emergence of an effective cinematherapy by doing so would be a socially valuable outcome.

Conclusion

My aim in this study was to show that abstraction provides a useful metric for grouping together observations about how culture and mental health might interact. Necessarily, this is a speculative undertaking from which no definitive conclusions can be expected—which is as well, because no definitive conclusions have emerged. However, what will hopefully be in evidence is that mid-level measures like abstraction, in virtue of how they shape information-bearing structures, can be used to bridge the gap between mental illnesses that themselves actively shape the processing of information.106 If this is allowed, how might such a research programme be taken forward?

The first issue that would need to be addressed centres on the question of content. In the interests of exposition, I have set to one side all considerations of how subject matter might impact on the reception of abstract and concrete modes of representation—despite the obvious fact that content (rather than form) is often the primary driver of response. The problem this poses is how content can be made susceptible to systematic hypothesis testing. One solution might come from dimensional accounts of emotion like the valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) model, which maps variation between emotions into variations in the degree to which each of the three components are associated with a stimulus.107 Though experimentally investigating a system that has four parameters of variation is a formidable task, it is not intractable, and will certainly nuance the abstraction-derived model explored here. Moreover, there are now available large corpuses of words and images that have already assessed for how to trigger the VAD components, which makes the creation of experimental materials substantially easier.108

A second issue comes with the parallel problem of interpersonal variation. Several studies show that a preference for abstraction is either a driver or concomitant of stable personality traits.109 What remains unclear is how this preference relates to anxiety, depression and CLT effects. It may be, for instance, that it merely moderates susceptibility to CLT effects, and can thus be controlled for experimentally. But it may also be that it is implicated in proneness to anxiety or depression in the first place, which makes for a more complicated model. Either way, this interaction needs further research before a complete picture can emerge.

Finally, there is the issue of how the cognitive effects proposed here might be instantiated in the brain. In this regard, recent work on predictive processing and the free energy principle shows that entropy plays a crucial role in how organisms optimise for error reduction in their interaction with the world.110 The crucial idea is that organisms minimise ‘surprisal’—expressed as the log probability of a given stimulus—by either updating their model or probing the environment to gain better data. However, tolerance for surprise is not fixed, and is likely to be mediated by the predictive actions of the dopaminergic and serotonergic systems.111 As these systems are also implicated in mood disorders,112 this opens a potential avenue of connection between CLT-style cultural effects (as mediated by entropy) and the neurotransmitters involved in the regulation of mood. Though I can do no more than point to this possibility here, recent work by Carhart-Harris et al on the ‘entropic brain’ model and the impact of serotonin on active and passive coping suggests how it might be pursued by linking the surprisal of a cultural stimulus (relative to background cultural entropy) to the differential activation of 5-HTA1 and 5-HTA2 serotonin receptors.113

I do pretend that these considerations are enough to defend the present survey against its limitations. But they may point to solutions that obviate the need to reject the abstraction hypothesis merely because it is difficult to assess. With respect to the hypothesis itself, only further testing can establish whether it has value. Though such testing with cultural materials will always be difficult, I submit that the potential gains—therapeutic and intellectual—make it a practice that will richly reward being pursued.

Notes

1. Edward B Tylor (1873), Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom; Leon J Goldstein (1957), “On Defining Culture”; John Baldwin, Sandra Faulkner, and Michael Hecht (2005), “A Moving Target: The Illusive Definition of Culture.”

2. David Pilgrim, Ann. McCranie, and Recovery (2013), Recovery and Mental Health: A Critical Sociological Account; Whitehead et al., Edinburgh Companion to Crit. Med. Humanit.; Michel Foucault and Madness (1967), Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

3. Ana Mari Cauce et al. (2002), “Cultural and Contextual Influences in Mental Health Help Seeking: A Focus on Ethnic Minority Youth”; Giyeon Kim et al. (2013), “Regional Variation of Racial Disparities in Mental Health Service Use Among Older Adults”; Kate Loewenthal (2006), Religion, Culture and Mental Health.

4. Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman (2010), “Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance”; Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope (2008), “The Psychology of Transcending the Here and How.”

5. Tal Eyal and Nira Liberman (2012), “Morality and Psychological Distance: A Construal Level Theory Perspective”; Stephan, Liberman, and Trope, “Politeness and Psychological Distance: A Construal Level Perspective.”; Liberman and Trope, “The Role of Feasibility and Desirability Considerations in near and Distant Future Decisions: A Test of Temporal Construal Theory”; Mueller, Wakslak, and Krishnan, “Construing Creativity: The How and Why of Recognizing Creative Ideas.”

6. Matthew Ratcliffe (2015), Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology, 79.

7. Thomas Fuchs (2013), “Depression, Intercorporeality, and Interaffectivity,” 229.

8. Daniel Smith (2012), Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, 174.

9. Scott Stossel (2014), My Age of Anxiety, 56.

10. Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman (2010), “Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance,” 442.

11. Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope (1998), “The Role of Feasibility and Desirability Considerations in near and Distant Future Decisions: A Test of Temporal Construal Theory.”

12. Kentaro Fujita et al. (2006), “Spatial Distance and Mental Construal of Social Events.”

13. Cheryl J Wakslak et al. (2006), “Seeing the Forest When Entry Is Unlikely: Probability and the Mental Representation of Events.”

14. Ido Liviatan, Yaacov Trope, and Nira Liberman (2008), “Interpersonal Similarity as a Social Distance Dimension: Implications for Perception of Others’ Actions.”

15. Tal Eyal, Nira Liberman, and Yaacov Trope (2008), “Judging near and Distant Virtue and Vice.”

16. Leaf Van Boven et al. (2010), “Feeling Close: Emotional Intensity Reduces Perceived Psychological Distance.”

17. Joshua Ian Davis, James J Gross, and Kevin N Ochsner (2011), “Psychological Distance and Emotional Experience: What You See Is What You Get”; P. Sol Hart, Richard C. Stedman, and Katherine A. McComas (2015), “How the Physical Proximity of Climate Mitigation Projects Influences the Relationship between Affect and Public Support.”

18. Alison Ledgerwood and Shannon P Callahan (2012), “The Social Side of Abstraction: Psychological Distance Enhances Conformity to Group Norms.”

19. Antonio L. Freitas et al. (2009), “Action-Construal Levels and Perceived Conflict among Ongoing Goals: Implications for Positive Affect.”

20. Adam L Alter, Daniel M Oppenheimer, and Jeffrey C Zemla (2010), “Missing the Trees for the Forest: A Construal Level Account of the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.”

21. Maayan Katzir and Tal Eyal (2013), “When Stepping Outside the Self Is Not Enough: A Self-Distanced Perspective Reduces the Experience of Basic but Not of Self-Conscious Emotions.”

22. Jennifer S. Mueller, Cheryl J. Wakslak, and Viswanathan Krishnan (2014), “Construing Creativity: The How and Why of Recognizing Creative Ideas.”

23. Elena Stephan et al. (2010), “Politeness and Psychological Distance: A Construal Level Perspective.”

24. Caglar Irmak, Cheryl J. Wakslak, and Yaacov Trope (2013), “Selling the Forest, Buying the Trees: The Effect of Construal Level on Seller-Buyer Price Discrepancy.”

25. Katie A McLaughlin and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema (2011), “Rumination as a Transdiagnostic Factor in Depression and Anxiety”; Jennifer A. Harrington and Virginia Blankenship (2002), “Ruminative Thoughts and Their Relation to Depression and Anxiety.”

26. American Psychiatric Association (2013b), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 160–61.

27. American Psychiatric Association (2013b), 123.

28. E Watkins and J. D. Teasdale (2001), “Rumination and Overgeneral Memory in Depression: Effects of Self-Focus and Analytic Thinking.” 353.

29. Edward Watkins (2011), “Dysregulation in Level of Goal and Action Identification across Psychological Disorders” 270.

30. Matthew Ratcliffe (2015), 10.

31. Matthew Ratcliffe (2015), 31.

32. Matthew Ratcliffe (2015), 79.

33. Matthew Ratcliffe (2015), 71.

34. Matthew Ratcliffe (2015), 67.

35. Matthew Ratcliffe (2015), 15.

36. American Psychiatric Association (2013b), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 222.

37. Edward Watkins (2011), “Dysregulation in Level of Goal and Action Identification across Psychological Disorders” 271.

38. E Watkins and J. D. Teasdale (2001), “Rumination and Overgeneral Memory in Depression: Effects of Self-Focus and Analytic Thinking.”

39. A Mathews (1990), “Why Worry? The Cognitive Function of Anxiety” 456.

40. Allison J Ouimet (2009), “Cognitive Vulnerability to Anxiety: A Review and an Integrative Model” 460; Yair Bar-Haim, Dominique Lamy, and Lee Pergamin (2007), “Threat-Related Attentional Bias in Anxious and Nonanxious Individuals: A Meta-Analytic Study”; Merel Kindt and Marcel Van Den Hout (2001), “Selective Attention and Anxiety: A Perspective on Developmental Issues and the Causal Status”; Karin Mogg and Brendan P Bradley (2004), “A Cognitive-Motivational Perspective on the Processing of Threat Information and Anxiety.”

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42. Reddit.

43. Reddit.

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47. Aliza Werner-Seidler and Michelle L Moulds (2012), “Mood Repair and Processing Mode in Depression.”

48. Aliza Werner-Seidler and Michelle L Moulds (2012), 476.

49. E. R. Watkins et al. (2012), "Guided self-help concreteness training as an intervention for major depression in primary care: a Phase II randomized controlled trial," 222.

50. Nader Amir et al. (2009), “Attention Modification Program in Individuals with Generalized Anxiety Disorder.”

51. Nader Amir and Charles T Taylor (2012), “Combining Computerized Home-Based Treatments for Generalized Anxiety Disorder: An Attention Modification Program and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy”; Yuko Hakamata et al. (2010), “Attention Bias Modification Treatment: A Meta-Analysis towards the Establishment of Novel Treatment for Anxiety”; Han-Joo Lee et al. (2015), “Computerized Attention Retraining for Individuals with Elevated Health Anxiety.”

52. Stefan G Hofmann (2008), “Cognitive Processes during Fear Acquisition and Extinction in Animals and Humans: Implications for Exposure Therapy of Anxiety Disorders”; Mark B Powers and Paul M G Emmelkamp (2008), “Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Anxiety Disorders: A Meta-Analysis.”

53. Tom J Barry, Bram Vervliet, and Dirk Hermans (2015), “An Integrative Review of Attention Biases and Their Contribution to Treatment for Anxiety Disorders” 9.

54. Wilhelm Worringer (1997), Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 4.

55. Wilhelm Worringer (1997), 15.

56. Wilhelm Worringer (1997), 16.

57. Clifford Geertz (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays; Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004), Truth and Method; Paul Ricoeur (2003), The Rule of Metaphor.

58. Pascal Boyer (2001), Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought; James Carney and Pádraig Mac Carron (2017), “Comic-Book Superheroes and Prosocial Agency: A Large-Scale Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of Cognitive Factors on Popular Representations”; Tamás Dávid-Barrett and James Carney (2015), “The Deification of Historical Figures and the Emergence of Priesthoods as a Solution to a Network Coordination Problem”; David Herman (2013), “Narrative and Mind: Directions for Inquiry”; Emily T Troscianko (2013), “Cognitive Realism and Memory in Proust’s Madeleine Episode”; Lisa Zunshine (2012), Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture.

59. P Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltkamp (2013), How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation”; David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano (2013), “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind”; James Carney, Rafael Wlodarski, and Robin Dunbar (2014), “Inference or Enaction? The Impact of Genre on the Narrative Processing of Other Minds”; Carney and Robertson, “People Searching for Meaning in Their Lives Find Literature More Engaging.”

60. James Carney (2017), “The Space Between Your Ears: Construal Level Theory, Cognitive Science and Science Fiction.”

61. Claude E Shannon (1948), “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”; David McKay and Information Theory (2003), Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms; C. E. Shannon (1951), “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English.”

62. Alexander Leonidovich Kuzemsky (2017), Statistical Mechanics and the Physics of Many-Particle Model Systems, 275.

63. David G Edwards (2014), Art Therapy.

64. Anthony Vidler (2001), Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, 1.

65. Anthony Vidler (2001), 1.

66. Christopher S Henshilwood, Christopher S et al. (2002), “Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa.”

67. Paul G Bahn (2012), Cave Art: A Guide to the Decorated Ice Age Caves of Europe.

68. D.W Harding (2007), The Archaeology of Celtic Art; Barry W Cunliffe (1997), The Ancient Celts.

69. Nancy Curry and Tim Kasser (2005), “Coloring To Reduce Anxiety.”

70. Renée van der Vennet and Susan Serice (2012), “Can Coloring Mandalas Reduce Anxiety? A Replication Study.”

71. David Alan Sandmire et al. (2012), “The Influence of Art Making on Anxiety: A Pilot Study.”

72. H Wadeson (1971), “Characteristics of Art Expression in Depression”; Harriet Wadeson (2010), Art Psychotherapy.

73. Gil Bar-Sela et al. (2007), “Art Therapy Improved Depression and Influenced Fatigue Levels in Cancer Patients on Chemotherapy.”

74. Sarah C. Slayton, Jeanne D'Archer, and Frances Kaplan (2010), “Outcome Studies on the Efficacy of Art Therapy: A Review of Findings”; Matthew W. Reynolds, Laura Nabors, and Anne Quinlan (2000), “The Effectiveness of Art Therapy: Does It Work?”

75. Jonathan J Detrixhe (2010), “Souls in Jeopardy: Questions and Innovations for Bibliotherapy with Fiction”; M L Lanza and Marilyn Lewis Lanza (1991), “Literature: A Vehicle for Emotional Connection between Clinician and Client”; Gavin Francis (2017), “Storyhealing”; Pehrsson, Dale-Elizabeth Pehrsson (2015) “Fictive Bibliotherapy and Therapeutic Storytelling with Children Who Hurt”; Josie Billington (2016), Is Literature Healthy?

76. Jonathan Bate and Andrew Schuman (2016), “Books Do Furnish a Mind: The Art and Science of Bibliotherapy”, 743.

77. Paul Montgomery and Kathryn Maunders (2015), “The Effectiveness of Creative Bibliotherapy for Internalizing, Externalizing, and Prosocial Behaviors in Children: A Systematic Review.”

78. Keith Oatley (1995), “A Taxonomy of the Emotions of Literary Response and a Theory of Identification in Fictional Narrative”; Keith Oatley (1999), “Meetings of Minds: Dialogue, Sympathy, and Identification, in Reading Fiction.”

79. American Psychiatric Association (2013a), Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition.

80. Monika Fludernik (2004), Towards a “Natural” Narratology; Gerald Prince (2004), “Revisiting Narrativity.”

81. David Herman (2002), Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, 103.

82. Alan Dundes (1964), The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales; Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964), Mythologiques, Vols. I–IV; Christian Metz (1991), Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema; Vladimir Propp (1968), Morphology of the Folktale.

83. David Herman (2011), Basic Elements of Narrative; A. J. Greimas and Catherine Porter (1977), “Elements of a Narrative Grammar”; H Porter Abbott (2000), “The of Evolutionary Origins of the Storied Mind: Modeling the Prehistory of Narrative Consciousness and Its Discontents.”

84. A.J Greimas (1983), Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method; Greimas, “Elements of a Narrative Grammar”; A.J Greimas (1987), “Actants, Actors, and Figures.”

85. A.J Greimas (1983), Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, 200.

86. Dorrit Cohn (1978), Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, 9.

87. Chris D Frith and Uta Frith (2007), “Social Cognition in Humans.”

88. James Joyce (1939), Finnegans Wake.

89. Virginia Woolf (1931), The Waves.

90. Arthur N Applebee (1989), The Child’s Concept of Story: Ages Two to Seventeen.

91. Samuel Beckett (1958), The Unnamable, 1.

92. James Carney and Cole Robertson (2018), “People Searching for Meaning in Their Lives Find Literature More Engaging.”

93. Calla E. Y. Glavin and Paul Montgomery (2017), “Creative Bibliotherapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): A Systematic Review.”

94. Paul Montgomery and Kathryn Maunders (2015), “The Effectiveness of Creative Bibliotherapy for Internalizing, Externalizing, and Prosocial Behaviors in Children: A Systematic Review.”

95. Emily T Troscianko (2018), “Literary Reading and Eating Disorders: Survey Evidence of Therapeutic Help and Harm.”

96. Michael Lee Powell and Rebecca A. Newgent (2010), “Improving the Empirical Credibility of Cinematherapy,” 41.

97. E Katz (1947), “Audio-Visual Aids for Mental Hygiene and Psychiatry”; E Katz (1945), “A Social Therapy Program for Neuropsychiatry in a General Hospital.”

98. Shannon B. Dermer and Jennifer B. Hutchings (2000), “Utilizing Movies in Family Therapy: Applications for Individuals, Couples, and Families”; Carla Gramaglia et al. (2011), “Cinematherapy in the Day Hospital Treatment of Patients with Eating Disorders. Case Study and Clinical Considerations.”

99. Linda Berg-Cross, Pamela Jennings, and Rhoda Baruch (1990), “Cinematherapy: Theory and Application”; Emily Marsick (2010), “Cinematherapy with Preadolescents Experiencing Parental Divorce: A Collective Case Study.”

100. Vitor Hugo Sambati Oliva, Andréa Vianna, and Francisco Lotufo Neto (2010), “Cinematherapy as Psychotherapeutic Intervention: Characteristics, Applications and Identification of Cognitive-Behavior Techniques.”

101. Fritz Heider et al. (1944), “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior.”

102. Francis Ford Coppola (1979), Apocalypse Now.

103. Tamás Dávid-Barrett and Robin Dunbar (2013), “Processing Power Limits Social Group Size: Computational Evidence for the Cognitive Costs of Sociality.”

104. D. E Berlyne (1970), “Novelty, Complexity, and Hedonic Value.”

105. Richard Dyer (2004), Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 5.

106. A. K Wittenborn et al. (2016), “Depression as a Systemic Syndrome: Mapping the Feedback Loops of Major Depressive Disorder”; Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.

107. Albert Mehrabian (1980), Basic Dimensions for a General Psychological Theory: Implications for Personality, Social, Environmental, and Developmental Studies.

108. Peter Lang, Margaret Bradley, and B N Cuthbert (2008), “International Affective Picture System (IAPS): Affective Ratings of Pictures and Instruction Manual”; Artur Marchewka et al. (2014), “The Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS): Introduction to a Novel, Standardized, Wide-Range, High-Quality, Realistic Picture Database”; Amy Beth Warriner, Victor Kuperman, and Marc Brysbaert (2013), “Norms of Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for 13,915 English Lemmas.”

109. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Adrian Furnham (2004), “Art Judgment: A Measure Related to Both Personality and Intelligence?”; Adrian Furnham and John Walker (2001), “Personality and Judgements of Abstract, Pop Art, and Representational Paintings”; H. J. Eyesenck and Hans Jürgen Eysenck (1940), “The General Factor in Aesthetic Judgments.”

110. Andy Clark (2016), Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind; Karl Friston (2010), “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?”; Karl J Friston, Jean Daunizeau, and Stefan J Kiebel (2009), “Reinforcement Learning or Active Inference?”; Mateus Joffily and Giorgio Coricelli (2013), “Emotional Valence and the Free-Energy Principle.”

111. Sara Matias et al. (2017), “Activity Patterns of Serotonin Neurons Underlying Cognitive Flexibility”; Friston et al., “Dopamine, Affordance and Active Inference.”

112. D Baldwin and S Rudge, 1995, “The Role of Serotonin in Depression and Anxiety.”

113. R L Carhart-Harris and D J Nutt (2017), “Serotonin and Brain Function: A Tale of Two Receptors”; Robin L Carhart-Harris et al. (2014), “The Entropic Brain: A Theory of Conscious States Informed by Neuroimaging Research with Psychedelic Drugs.”

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