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vee-vee-writes · 1 year

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Floral Arrangements (Thorin x gn!reader)

A/N: I have been working on this for ages but couldn't finish it, so here is part one. Hopefully I can get on to writing part 2 soon if people are interested.

The reclamation of Erebor by the company of Thorin Oakenshield had come with mixed emotions for (Y/N). You were excited to return to your childhood home with your two brothers. The three of you were given standard family quarters and small allowance to help you to settle in. The only downside was that so many who returned were also skilled in dressmaking, crafting, and forging leaving the three of you out of the job. To honour your fathers’ memory, the oldest of your brothers joined the royal guard, fulfilling your fathers’ old position. Both you and your youngest brother had no desire to follow suit.

Instead, the two of you decided to set up your own business outside of a stall in the market square. Flowers were neither common nor traditional in gifting practice within Longbeard culture. But the two of you were counting on the clans’ heavy involvement in the human world. It wasn’t uncommon for dwarves to adopt foreign human practices, even those of gifting and courting means. Thus, the two of you decided to adopt and adapt.

You took care of the purchasing, finances, displays and arrangements for the stall. There was limited private garden space within the mountain and requests for a private plot outside of the mountain for flower growth going unanswered, you had resorted to buying fresh flowers from a farmer just outside of Dale. Your fresh floral arrangements and bouquets proved popular enough amongst the mountain residents and its visitors, but they certainly were not what set your business apart.

The true jewel of your enterprise was the flowers crafted of precious metals and jewels of the most vibrant hues you sold. A sign of un-wilting and passionate love was the motto associated with them. Such a product was much more suited to the nature of dwarven love and courtship. You designed singles, arrangements and bouquets while your brother brought them to life.

With the introduction of said product, the popularity of the stall had doubled. The word had soon spread of the glittering creations and dwarves from across the seven kingdoms travelled to visit your stall. Within its first year and a half of operation its notability had grown to such heights that you were able to move from a stall to a rather comfortable store. This notability had additionally brought the attentions of the royal family upon you.

It was a warm afternoon when you received word from a steward that Princess Dis would be stopping by to look at your wares. After his departure you had bustled around the store preparing for the royal visit. A visit by a member of the royal family to look at your joint creations was incredibly humbling. Your bustling was disrupted by the sound of a customer entering the store. Peering up from where you knelt behind the counter you were shocked to see Princess Dis herself was already here.

“Pardon my lady, I was not expecting you yet” you politely greeted while stumbling up to your feet. “There’s no need please” Dis gestured at you kindly to continue what you were doing. “How can I be of service to you? Would you just like to browse or were you looking for something in particular” you gently prodded. The last thing you wanted was to drive away a customer like Dis Durin by being overbearing and pushy.

“I’d heard of the brilliance of your jewelled flowers and decided to come and have a look at the crafts myself” she praised glancing around, “do you make them yourself?” “No Ma’am. I design and arrange them, but my brother is the one who crafts them” you answered in earnest. “Well, you are both truly talented. The delicacy with which your brother has crafted them and your eye for colour are truly well paired together” she praised. Embarrassed by the praise you bowed your head in thanks and smiled shyly at the Princess in return.

Dis fluttered gracefully about your store for the next half hour inspecting the different florals on display, making conversation with you as she went. Eventually though she asked about whether you took custom orders. The two of you had never actually made a specified custom order for a client, instead you typically just sold the premade stock. Every piece was one of a kind so most customers were content by the uniqueness that the piece they choose offered. However, this was the future Queen mother, the honourable Lady Dis which had ruled in Thorin’s stead while he was on the quest to Erebor. So, you agreed that the two of you would be happy to make her a custom piece. Dis had been excited by the offer and promised to come back in several days’ time to plan out what she would like. With her departure you shut up shop and rushed home to tell your brothers of the great news.

----Several days later ----

You hadn’t seen nor heard from the Princess. You both were disappointed that Dis hadn’t followed through and placed an order but kept your heads up. After all the reason that you had moved to the shop was because of the influx of other noble and rich customers. Instead of dwelling on Dis’ missed order, you carried on organising and designing to pull your previous customers back.

It was late one evening while you were preparing to close the shop for the evening when a surprise visitor appeared in your shop. With your back to the doorway, you had failed to hear the quiet footsteps making their way up behind you. It was the unfamiliar gruff tone of a clearing throat that alerted you to the other presence. Whipping around you stepped back in surprise. Before you stood Thorin, Son of Thrain, son of Thror, King under the Mountain.

Remembering your manners, you were quick to greet and bow to the King with all of the Court courtesies you had been taught as a child. Thorin nodded in acknowledgement of the respectful gesture as you rose. “My sister visited you store a few days ago and has been raving about the crafts you sell ever since” the King began, “I convinced her out of investing in one because my nephews and I would like to get one for her birthday.” You smiled broadly as you dwelled on the King’s words. Princess Dis had not forsaken your store nor had forgotten your arrangement. Instead, she had gushed about to the rest of the royal family.

Switching back into business mode you got straight to work, “Were you interested in buying one of our premade arrangements or were you looking to commission a custom piece as your sister was looking into?” Almost instantly Thorin answered, “a custom, if you are free now then I would like to go over the details while I have time.” His curtness took you slightly off guard, but you tried not to let it show, “of course, I will just close the shop front so that nobody comes in and disturbs us. Then we can begin.”

You had been quick to close the shop front as you had done many other nights and then led the king to your workstations in the rare of the shop. After settling in you had questioned him rigirously about what he was looking for. From the types of flowers, sizing, number, types of jewels, and colouring of the joinery the two of you had discussed it all. Thorin’s demeanor had relaxed the more the two of you spoke, seeming almost as if he was enjoying the informalities of the conversation. He had even asked personal questions of you while you had jotted down notes of the details, he fed you; who had come up with the idea for the shop, how many of you run it daily, where you had lived during the clan’s refugee years, if many of your family members had been able to return to the mountain, your age, and even if you were married.

By the end of it you had come up with a comprehensive plan of what the Durin’s were looking to have done for the matriarch. You promised Thorin that over the next few days you would come up with several design compositions to showcase to him. He smiled warmly at you and promised to return in a few days’ time as he bid you, his farewells. Giddily, you found yourself looking forward to a visit from the mountain king, a man truly unobtainable to you due to his status and yet had asked about your marital status out of curiosity. A dwarf could dream.

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dteamain · 1 year

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seeing a majority of people (that arent even indigenous) praise q for removing the mod and say he doesn’t have to apologize is disheartening. people I considered my own friends are doing it. all in the name of some stupid fucking pixelated eggs. I know racist remarks about us are constantly swept under the rug so it shouldn’t be shocking but it still hurts me. been iffy with supporting him for damn near a year at this point and it was just the final nail. really hope he one day realizes he cant just brush off and ignore everything that inconveniences him in life. such a shitty mentality to carry.

honestly i'm very disappointed all around.

q's response was less than desirable a short mention of 'we need to reset the server bc a mod was a bit offensive' at the end of a stream. in fact he was more concerned with letting people know they were doing a reset than what the actual problem was.

as well the celebration of the mod creator right now is also making my head spin.

first off they openly admit that they would rather the backlash of having a racist creation over the backlash of simply removing the mob:

and while they are open to making changes to the mob to hopefully move away from the racist representation they still insist that the mob itself isn't racist and only the people viewing it as indigenous tribes are (also bonus the creator acting like they are doing a favour by giving representation (horribly might i add considering the mob is hardly comparable to the mythical creator they claim it's supposed to be) to a 'rarely depicted mythology':

they also think that players attacking these mobs are acting out of some kind of internalized racism and that these mobs are not meant to be attacked and conquered yet a fundamental mechanism of these mobs is their masks and the only way to interact with them in a peaceful manner is by first killing them to steal their mask and wear it:

at the end of the day i will be happy if these mobs are removed but the passiveness in which everyone involved (quackity, the cc's role playing with these mobs in a racist manner and the creator of the mobs) has treated this situation with is very disappointing.

it once again shows me and people like me that our culture is to be swept under the rug to avoid having non-indigenous people feel uncomfortable about their own actions and this is a very common feeling for many indigenous people around the world

#anon #sorry i know. it's been a long ass day and y'all are probably tired of hearing it #i'm also tired of having to say it quite frankly

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bike42 · 8 months

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Monday September 18, 2023

Nice morning - yoga and breakfast and we were in the library at 8:30am to pick up our lunch boxes, whatever snacks we wanted for the day, and to have our daily briefing.

Jenn described that there are 282 Munro’s (mountains over 3000 feet) in Scotland and it’s sport to “bag” them all! We’ll walk on the foothills of a few of them, but not to the top. Some people vie for bagging them in record time in a self propelled manner - cycling or paddling to reach them!

The leaders decided not to offer the 11 mile hike today due to the rain last night. They’re concerned about slippery conditions. All 17 of us opted for the eight-mile, 1000 ft gain (most of it in the beginning) option. They enlisted the Local Taxi Driver, Donald McDonald (supposedly they’re two of them in town) to help with the shuttle today.

It was a quick 15 minute drive to the trailhead. Keith had said we might meet a Stag named “Collin” at the car park, and he was there to greet us and ask for a handout. I was kind of shocked when Keith fed him a banana. Seems wrong to encourage what should be a wild animal in that manner! Jenn said the locals look after him year around and a vet even comes by to check on him. Still seemed wrong.

We climbed a bit, then as we overlooked and old homestead, Keith gave us a chat on “Highland Clearances.” Ruins like the one we were viewing, are known in Scotland as “scars on the land”. After Industrial Revolution, the land was “cleared” of original landowners - many were offered one-way tickets to US / Australia / Patagonia. If they didn’t leave, the “sheriff” tore off the roof and burned the house. The land was developed into large hunting lodges and sheep grazing. Scotland’s system of land ownership is said to be one of the world’s most inequitable: 83 percent of the land is privately owned, and about half of it is owned by just 500 families - many not from Scotland originally, or living outside of Scotland.

People in this area had a great cultural hub - exported whisky. Many sheep herders from this area did go to Patagonia, and came back. The old traditions are being reestablished, which is refreshing.

Right to Roam - runs deep with Scottish people! Before “The Clearances,” many Scottish families earned their livelihood as “sustenance farmers” on public lands. Now land ownership is concentrated in a few hands, but all are free to enter and landowners must maintain the trails.

Keith grabbed a handful of Spagham Moss. He squeezed it to show us how it retains water. Dried out, it can be used as a wound dressing. Compacted, it becomes a peat bog. Keith’s grandma told him be careful of the Bog man (precursor of the boogie man). Bogs can be used to pickle and preserve things (bog butter).

This area would have had trees in the medieval days - lumber used for building and fires. Landowners now keep it open as a heather meadow for hunting purposes.

Jenn talked a lot, or rather, wondered out loud, about the creation of this landscape - water and glaciers, sedimentary rock and sandstone. It’s clear to see the glacier involvement, but were there also volcanoes and/or earthquakes? Such lovely, yet different rock and scenery. And the power of water - so much water coming out of the mountains and making its way to the sea!

A first for us while hiking, we took a break about an hour into the hike and Keith pulled out a bottle of Whisky and small paper cups. I skipped the cup and had him add a dram to my tea flask - hit the spot. As our break time was ended, it started to rain so I put my rain pants on. Since it had also gotten a little chilly, I added my puffy jacket under my rain jacket thinking I’d take it off in a bit … I didn’t!

The group started splintering, Kelli had a busted boot and Keith tried to tape it up for her, but it slowed them down. We got behind 4 others and the ladies seemed to be having a tough time with the terrain and were taking it slow. We all stepped aside to let some crazy mountain bikers through, and Jeff and I took the opportunity to pass them and work on catching up with the others (the 4 from WI and the 3 ladies). We caught them, but then had a stop in the rain so Jeff and I decided to sit and eat some lunch. Jules was there too, having hiked up from the end.

We continued our hike, odd being all alone now, but we enjoyed the solitude and the trail was obvious so we didn’t have concerns of being lost. The rain came and went, but we were warm inside our rain suits. The river grew larger and the number of waterfalls dumping into it increased in numbers and volume - very spectacular.

We reached the parking lot and found two Backroads vans (a third had driven away just as we reached the end of the trail). John and Rhydian (the newlyweds) were there, along with the coolers full of drinks. I grabbed a Gin and Tonic and climbed in the van as the rain increased and I wanted to finish my lunch! About 15 minutes later, Jules came back and picked up the 4 of us and delivered us back to the hotel.

We went up to our room. Jeff showered, then I took a long, not bath. I could barely stand afterwards - maybe it was too hot. I laid on the bed trying to cool off enough to get dressed with JT napped. We dressed, grabbed some umbrellas and walked to another bar/restaurant on property for a wine tasting session, followed by dinner.

The wine tasting was led by Shane, originally from France. He came to The Torridon six years ago for a six month gig, but fell in love with it here. He said what he likes best is the people are so nice! He added “you know how we are in France!” We tried three difference single malts - I liked all, but preferred the non-peaty varieties. Here are some other facts we learned:

Five Types of Scotch

Single Malt

Blended Malt Scotch Wiskey

Single Grain (corn etc added to Barley)

Blended grain

Blended scotch (Johnny Walker Red)

France is the top consumer of Scotch Whiskys

The Angels Share - check out the movie

We had a nice dinner sitting with John and Rhydian, learning more about them. Afterwards, we headed back to the main building and had a nightcap (Scottish version of Bailey’s on the rocks) and chatted more with Shane.

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basicsofislam · 11 months

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ISLAM 101: Muslim Culture and Character: Embracing The World: Part 10

FORGIVENESS

Humans are creatures with both exceptional qualities and faults. Until the first human appeared, no living creature carried such opposites within its nature. At the same time as humans beat their wings in the firmaments of heaven, they can, with sudden deviation, become monsters that descend to the pits of Hell. It is futile to look for any relationship between these frightening descents and ascents; these are extremes because their cause and effect take place on very different planes.

At times humans are like a field of wheat bending in the wind; at other times, although they appear as dignified as a plane tree, they can topple over, not to rise again. Just as the times that the angels envy them are not few, neither are the times when even the devils are shocked by their behavior.

For humans, whose natures contain so many highs and lows, even if committing evil is not essential to their nature, it is inevitable. Even if becoming sullied is accidental, it is likely. For a creature which is going to spoil his good name, forgiveness is paramount.

However valuable it is to ask for and expect forgiveness and to bemoan the things that have escaped us, forgiving is that much greater an attribute and virtue. It is wrong to think of forgiveness as being separate from virtue or of virtue as being separate from forgiveness. As the well-known adage says, “To err is human, to forgive divine,” and how well this has been said! Being forgiven means being repaired; it consists of a return to our essence and finding ourselves again. For this reason, the most pleasing action in the eyes of Infinite Mercy is any activity pursued amidst the palpitations of this return and search.

All of creation, animate and inanimate, was introduced to forgiveness through humanity. Just as God showed His attribute of forgiveness through humanity, He also put the beauty of forgiveness into the human heart. While the first man dealt a blow to his essence through his fall, something which was almost a requirement of his human nature, forgiveness came from the heavens because of the remorse he felt in his conscience and because of his sincere pleas.

Humans have preserved gifts, such as hope and consolation, which they have obtained from their ancestors over the centuries. Whenever people err, by boarding the magical transport of seeking forgiveness and by surmounting the shame caused by their sins and the despair caused by their actions, they are able to attain infinite mercy and are shown the generosity that is involved in veiling their eyes to the sins of others.

Thanks to their hope for forgiveness, humans can rise above the dark clouds that threaten their horizon and seize the opportunity to see light in their world. Those fortunate ones who are aware of the uplifting wings of forgiveness live their lives amidst melodies that please their spirits.

It is impossible for people who have given their heart to seeking forgiveness not to think of forgiving others. Just as they desire to be forgiven, they also desire to forgive. Is it possible for someone not to forgive if they know that salvation from the fires of suffering caused by his/her mistakes in the inner world is possible by drinking deeply from the river of forgiveness? Is it possible for people not to forgive if they know that the road to being forgiven passes through the act of forgiving?

Those who forgive are honored with forgiveness. One who does not know how to pardon cannot hope to be pardoned. Those who close the road to tolerance for humanity are monsters that have lost their humanity. These brutes that have never once been inclined to take themselves to task for their sins will never experience the high solace of forgiveness.

Jesus Christ said to a crowd that was waiting for rocks in hand to stone a sinner: “If anyone of you is without sin let him be the first to throw a stone.”

Can anyone with sin on their conscience still be inclined to stone another if they truly understand this idea? If only those unfortunate ones of today who spend their lives putting the lives of others to the litmus test could understand this! In fact, if the reason for stoning a person is our malice and hatred, if this is the reason why we have passed judgment on them, then it is not possible to pass this sentence on them. The truth is, unless we destroy the idols in our ego as courageously as Abraham destroyed the idols, we will never be able to make a correct decision in the name of our selves or in the name of others.

Forgiveness emerged with and reached perfection through humanity. In this respect, we can witness the greatest forgiveness and the most impeccable tolerance in the greatest exemplars of humanity.

Malice and hatred are the seeds of Hell that have been scattered among humans by evil spirits. Unlike those who encourage malice and hatred and turn the Earth into a pit of Hell, we should take this forgiveness, and run to the rescue of our people who are confronted by countless troubles and who are being continually pushed toward the abyss. The past few centuries have been turned into the most unpleasant and foul years by the excesses of those who do not know forgiveness or recognize tolerance. It is impossible not to be chilled by the thought that these unfortunate ones could rule the future.

For this reason, the greatest gift that the generation of today can give their children and grandchildren is to teach them how to forgive—to forgive even when confronted by the worst behavior and the most disturbing events. However, thinking of forgiving monstrous, evil people who enjoy making others suffer would be disrespectful to the idea of forgiveness. We have no right to forgive them; forgiving them would be disrespectful to humanity.

We believe that forgiveness and tolerance will heal most of our wounds if only this celestial instrument will be in the hands of those who understand its language. Otherwise, the incorrect methods of behavior, those used up until now, will cause many complications and will only confuse us from now on.

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sladewilsonisanantihero · 3 years

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The Original Intent of Terra and how Deathstroke got the bad end of the stick for it

Okay, Deathstroke Children (Idk what to call you guys because fellow Deathstrokers would end this conversation immediately), I found the time to do this, so let's get to it!

(Note: My original laptop broke with my comics, so I have no images to spare, so it will be sourced. Another note: Many words will be in bold. Partly so that for those reading will not lose track.)

But if tl;dr:

Cold Hard Truth: Everyone from Terra fans to Deathstroke fans needs to stop seeing these characters as real people.

Original Terra wasn't human trafficked or whatever sob story people want to label her with. The CREATORS intended her to be written as Evil without the mental illness and to die for the shock value. They had Raven, The Literal Empath, spell this out in Judas Contract. As for Deathstroke's involvement, he was shoved into her creation story, and Marv Wolfman himself recognized his mistake in doing that.

And for those calling Deathstroke a nazi, Original Terra had nazi-like beliefs where common people should fear and serve them or be killed off just because they're 'special'. Again, BLUNTLY stated in the Judas Contract. So if you're going to call Deathstroke a Pedophile, we'll call OG Terra a Neo-Nazi. (But I highly advice for Deathstroke Fans to not start that kind of war, but I had to say what I had to say.)

Don't get me wrong. (Hopefully all) Deathstroke fans know that their relationship was wrong just like Marv Wolfman, and we do not support pedophiles! But Slade isn't a pedophile! He was never intended to be written as one! It was a mistake made on many levels and should be rewritten like OG Terra's Evil Neo-Nazi-like personality, instead of being thrown into cancel culture.

Also for Deathstroke fans, don't get upset over their content and begin any argument emotionally. Just enjoy whatever good content we can get and support it if you can. Hopefully we'll get our Deathstroke movies and so on!

So I've briefly chatted with one of you over the matter with Terra/Tara Markov and how upsetting it is about how people refer to Slade Wilson as a Pedophile. That is a serious accusation that would make it very uncomfortable to argue about since it can easily make it seem like we justify the actions of pedophiles, and that we are part of pedophile culture that does exist in social media space.

AND WE SHOULDN'T, AND FOR ANTIS READING THIS WE WON'T.

But there was a time when I used to have a blog called friendlyremindersofsladewilson, where I defended Slade and put the blame all on Terra. I was 14 at the time, and looking back at it, I am not proud of it because I realized now as an adult how I defended it for most of the wrong reasons, but still stand with the fact that SLADE IS NOT A PEDOPHILE.

And since this took place when I was so young, it compelled me to write this post because I fear some of you are really young, too, and may end up in this regretful position.

So to make it clear, what Slade had been written to do is a crime, and we should acknowledge it, but not in the way as if it was a crime acted out in real life.

What I mean by that is that there's a clear separation between fiction and reality where one isn't real (Duh!). In this case, it's about the mistakes made between fiction and reality. In reality, mistakes made by the person responsible is on the person. In fiction, mistakes made is dependent on the creator's intent, and sometimes the creators can make mistakes themselves.

Most notably Terra's:

Tara Markov/Terra was created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez.

In Marv Wolfman's literal website, he stated in his online "What the-?" column:

"Which leads to Terra. That was easy. George and I wanted a Titan who betrayed the others. we also wanted to play against every reader conception of who characters are. George and I knew her whole story before we began and we knew she would die. We set the story up with her trying to destroy the Statue of Liberty to show she was the bad girl, but we knew if George drew her as a cute kid everyone would simply assume she would be ‘turned’ from the dark side because that’s the way it was always done which is why that wouldn’t be the way we did it. Tara was insane an stayed that way right until the moment she died. By the way, she IS dead. I don’t know what other writers will do with her – if anything – but if they want to honor the original series they will leave her dead. The Terra from Team Titans was – as stated – some kid the villain kidnapped and physically and mentally altered her into looking and acting like the original. But she was NEVER the real Terra."

And it should also be noted that he stated before this statement that:

"...Only mistake I think I made with him is having him have a physical relationship with the 16 year old Tara Markov. That was wrong."

So Marv Wolfman himself recognizes that what he did was a mistake, but his intent on Terra was never to write a victim.

And quick note: Insanity isn't written as a mental illness here. It's written like how many villains are labeled as insane for having skewed beliefs that deviates from the common good.

Terra truly had some nazi-like beliefs where she BELIEVED that everyone who wasn't 'special' like her and the Teen Titans deserved to be treated like shit because they weren't 'special' like them. She bluntly said it herself in the Judas Contract.

As for George Perez's comment in an interview I found in this website:

"GEORGE: Tara was just a cute little girl, although I based a little bit of that on my wife Carol’s sister, Barbara. A little upturned nose… Barbara does not have the teeth that Tara had. I wanted Tara to be a girl who looked normal. Which also means her death caught everyone even more offguard.

Tara, she was made to be killed; she served her purpose. That was it.

ANDY: You didn ‘t get any attachment to Tara?

GEORGE: No, because I knew we were going to kill her. So I deliberately used all the things to make her as likeable and cute as possible, so people would never believe we were going to kill a sixteen-year-old. And she was a sixteen-year-old sociopath. She was one of our cleverest gimmicks; we deliberately created her in order to lead everyone astray. So we couldn’t build any fondness for her, ’cause we knew full well what her whole motive for existence was. Her existence was basically to keep the stories interesting; we were tossing a curve that no one would have expected.

ANDY: You didn ‘t even love to hate her, huh?

GEORGE: No. I loved handling her, because she was such a good idea. But she was an idea. Not as much a person. She was there to show exactly how much their humanity can be one thing they have to be careful about, the Teen Titans have to be careful about. . . they can be too trusting, or their own weaknesses can be used against them."

Terra was supposed to be a representation of An Evil Betrayal of Trust and That Not All Cute Girls Are Good.

But they took it too far by making her sleep with Deathstroke because they wanted to truly make her look evil by literally sleeping with the enemy. Y'know because this was the 80s, and women having sex was an evil act back then, and that point of view has somewhat or barely improved 40 years later.

Deathstroke was just shoved into this idea, and Marv tried and perhaps failed at trying to undo this mistake with his talk with Beastboy (Tales of the Teen Titans issue #55) and before his confrontation from Wintergreen (Deathstroke (1991); Chapter 35).

So just as I had stated at the top in the tl;dr, it was a mistake made on many levels and should have been rewritten out just as many had done with OG Terra's true personality, and be done with it.

Random person: "He still slept with a 16-year-old."

And it's not that hard to make other heroes and villains do this mistake. Because again, it's all fiction. Deathstroke's fictional. As in Not Real, so we could literally undo the damage by rewriting this mistake. Or make it worse by making Terra the rapist by her using her Earth powers to bind Slade down and force him, and you can't deny that it's plausible. Because she's fictional. Anything can happen. So why didn't Slade tell Beastboy whether he slept with her or not, maybe it was because he really didn't want to but he was forced into it. And that's just something you can't dump on a very emotional man who was trying to kill you a moment ago.

ALL THE POSSIBILITIES BECAUSE IT'S FICITIONAL!

But ANYWAY, I went way too dark there.

Ending on a brighter note: Personally to all Deathstroke fans, please value your mental health, please don't start any arguments that'll compromise it, and continue supporting Deathstroke in whatever way you can!

#Deathstroke #Slade Wilson

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comrade-meow · 3 years

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The commodification of women and “enclosure” of sexuality through prostitution, widespread porn and the resulting fallout led to the next frontier: biology itself, womanhood itself. Transgenderism leverages the mind/body split that rape culture promotes by introducing a new form of biological enclosure. With transgenderism, the reality of sex is no longer something natural that we simply share in common, but a place for Big Pharma to set up shop in the name of “identity.”

I have a “big picture” brain. I’m unsatisfied with superficial explanations of current events and political trends, and only understand them once I’ve placed them in the context of deeper historic trajectories, social patterns and human drives. Without these explanations, I remain unsatisfied and questioning (and can’t be sold on false solutions either).

Transgenderism is one contemporary political trend that requires big picture thinking to comprehend—because there are no casual explanations for why, in less than a decade, people all over the world have started to accept a set of bizarre and contradictory ideas: that sex is a spectrum, that sex can be changed, and/or that sex is not real at all, only gender identity is—all to justify the political mantra, “transwomen are women.” This mantra is simply an assertion of male privilege, that men should be able to claim female identity if they want to, without needing sound justification. How did it spread so fast?

I have just finished writing a series of books called the Brief, Complete Herstory (2021) which offers a continuous narrative of history from the Big Bang to neoliberalism. It discusses pre-patriarchal cultures around the world, and the creation of patriarchy, church and state, capitalism, and neoliberalism. Only the last volume mentions transgenderism, but writing these books has helped me put the transgender trend, among others, in context.

One thing that is clear to me is that the idea that men can become women is not new—it began when patriarchal religions insisted that God, the creator of life, is male. Before this, if “god” had a sex, it was commonly female: she who birthed the world. The idea of god as male-produced all sorts of weird stories and myths to capture the imagination: like the one about Aphrodite being born out of Zeus’ head, and Jesus being born after an “immaculate conception” involving a male sky god and Mary, a sexless virgin (trans activists might call her an “incubator”).

Another thing that strikes me, taking this long view of history, is a succession of waves of “enclosure” or colonisation that cause enough social and economic fallout to prepare the ground for the next, more intimate, “enclosure.” The pattern begins earlier, but if we start with the enclosure movement of the 15th and 16th centuries, also called the “privatisation of the commons,” it is easy to place transgenderism in the context of a historic trajectory. I’ve discussed this before, in a talk on YouTube, but here I want to cast a wider net.

The 16th century saw the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern capitalism while the Tudors reigned in England. The Tudors used the Reformation as a way of breaking from the Catholic church in order to act without, or against, the pope’s approval. After breaking from Rome, they seized church property, privatised the commons, and colonised Ireland. For centuries, peasants had used common lands to graze milk cows and gather water, edible and medicinal plants, and wood for construction and making fires.

The simultaneous confiscation of the commons and church property cast many people into poverty because the lands were a source of sustenance and, under feudalism, it was the church that had given aid and shelter to the poor. Women were especially affected by the double whammy of enclosure and lack of poverty alleviation. In her biography My Own Story, British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst traces her feminist awakening to witnessing women in the homeless shelters and workhouses that queen Elizabeth I eventually established to address the crisis.

Looking back, we can see that the enclosure movement provided the preconditions for Britain’s industrialisation. When common lands were privatised, they largely became lands for grazing sheep used for wool in the textile industry, the biggest industry of the early industrial revolution; and it created a class of people desperate enough to work up to 18 hours a day for a pittance in dismal conditions, in the factories or “satanic mills,” as the poet William Blake called them. Most textile workers were women. Urbanisation also took place in tandem with the rise of prostitution, with many women forced to choose between that, factory work or domesticity.

In her book, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women(2018), Silvia Federici connects the 16th- and 17th-century witch hunts in England with the rise of capitalism and the privatisation of the commons. She writes that “women were the most likely to be victimised” by enclosure, pauperisation, and the “disintegration of communal forms of agriculture that had prevailed in feudal Europe,” because they were “the most disempowered by these changes, especially older women, who often rebelled against their impoverishment and social exclusion.” She notes that some women participated in protests, pulling up fences enclosing the commons, and explains:

[W]omen were charged with witchcraft because the restructuring of rural Europe at the dawn of capitalism destroyed the means of livelihood and the basis of their social power, leaving them with no resort but dependence on the charity of the better off, at a time when communal bonds were disintegrating, a new morality was taking hold that criminalised begging and looked down upon charity.

The premise of Federici’s book is that this very same correlation between privatisation and “witch” hunting can be seen with neoliberal privatisation. She shows how witch hunts have escalated dramatically following the neoliberalisation (or “re-colonisation”) of the African continent and the privatisation of lands there, for instance in Tanzania, where more than 5,000 women per year are murdered as witches and in the Central African Republic, where “prisons are full of accused witches.” In Indian tribal lands, “where large scale processes of land privatisation are underway,” witch hunts are also increasing, as they are in Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Saudi Arabia. Describing the way witch-hunting frames the female sex, Federici argues that, “we have to think of the enclosures as a broader phenomenon than simply the fencing off of land. We must think of an enclosure of knowledge, of our bodies, and of our relationship to other people, and nature.”

Federici considers her analysis of the correlation between privatisation and witch-hunting to be ongoing, a work in progress—but I think her project is hamstrung. Her conclusions will remain sorely limited as long as she maintains the position that there is such a thing as a “sex worker” and a “transwoman,” because these ideas are central to the neoliberal “enclosure of knowledge, of our bodies, and of our relationship to other people, and nature” today. The term “sex worker” was coined by the global sex trade lobby on the back of women’s poverty and the normalisation of prostitution under neoliberalism.

In his book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2010), human trafficking expert Siddharth Kara shows that neoliberalisation leaves indigenous women especially vulnerable. He unveils a pattern of neoliberal government reform followed by land confiscation, leading to domestic poverty, and then prostitution in Asia, Europe and the United States. His book covers the period of the 1980s and 90s when the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were handing out “structural adjustment packages” all over the world. These are financial loans conditional on land and infrastructure privatisation, cutbacks to health and welfare spending, and removal of legislation protecting workers and obstructing profit.

In The Shock Doctrine(2007), Naomi Klein argues that this neoliberalisation requires disaster to disorient people and render them sufficiently immobilised to have their rights stripped. Once implemented, just like enclosure and colonisation, neoliberalism creates its own fallout. As Klein explains, neoliberalism began to enter more intimate territory after September 11, 2001, when surveillance culture began to “enclose” our privacy in unprecedented ways. This led to an age where internet companies, which are best positioned to track and collect data, reign.

History shows us a continuous pattern that goes all the way back to the Tudors and before: disaster followed by enclosure creates more disaster that allows for further, more intimate, enclosure. This is precisely why Federici’s argument that we need to define enclosure more deeply and broadly, is so important: otherwise we cannot properly track the pattern and we will fail to notice when neoliberalisation starts claiming new frontiers.

Combine the internet age with prostitution and you have today’s growing porn industry—and porn creates its own fallout. As feminist author Gail Dines points out in Pornland(2010), the average age boys start watching pornography is at eleven years, and porn brainwashes them into objectifying women by linking the image of rape to orgasm. There is hardly a more efficient way to condition somebody than through orgasm. Social conditioning normally involves a system of punishment and reward by some external body—but when men learn to objectify women by watching porn, their own penises dispense the rewards. After that, nobody needs to offer them any other incentives to keep repeating the behaviour.

The fact that porn not only depicts rape but drives it is well established. We can see the link in high profile rape cases like those involving Brock Turner and Larry Nassar. Turner took photos during his assault, and shared them with friends; Nassar was found to be in possession of at least 37,000 child pornography videos and images. New Zealand women’s organisation the Backbone Collective’s report on child abuse "Seen and Not Heard" shows that for 54% of abusive fathers, pornography is a factor in the abuse of their children.

The fallout from rape is dissociation. The human stress response is designed to allow us to run from predators, or to overpower them if we judge ourselves as capable. It is not designed to deal with entrapment and cruelty, and when faced with these situations, women often freeze, our minds shutting off conscious awareness of what is happening, whilst the subconscious absorbs it for dealing with later. This mind/body split is at the root of patriarchy and patriarchal religion because patriarchy relies on it: it requires men to detach from their own humanity and cultivate the dissociation, body hatred and dysphoria that rape culture fosters.

Trans activists assist this commodification of sex by excitedly censoring, blacklisting, firing, harassing and abusing women as “TERFs” (“trans-exclusionary radical feminists”). “TERF” is a now well-known misnomer for feminists who have not forgotten what sex is, and, whilst trying to tear down the fences transgenderism erects around it, get in the way of the rollout of this new form of enclosure. With respect to her work, it is almost mind-boggling that Federici does not take into account this neoliberal “witch-hunting” that trans activists participate in.

If this terrifying trend exists as part of a broader trajectory—how far can it go?

The first volume in my Brief Complete Herstory argues that the most basic quality of life is sensitivity. Water has a miraculous capacity for storing information, for picking up the qualities of all it encounters. Even the smallest, single-celled organisms share with human beings the capacity to sense and respond to light, movement, and other environmental patterns and changes. Yet the more people are tethered to our phones and smart devices, our behaviour mined as “data” and sold to those who profit from predicting and manipulating our movements, the more numb and desensitised we become. I sometimes worry that as privatisation and dispossession advance in what Shoshana Zuboff calls the Age of Surveillance Capitalism(2019), this is the current frontier: our very sensitivity.

If we listen to spiritual teachers and visionaries throughout the ages, the seat of human sensitivity is the heart. Indigenous cultures have always recognised this, and herbalist Stephen Buhner taught me that this is not a metaphor: our bodies are surrounded by an electromagnetic field generated by the heart, and this field is five thousand times more powerful than that created by the brain. In The Secret Teachings of Plants(2004), Buhner writes that this means that the “[a]nalysis of information flow into the human body has shown that much of it impacts the heart first, flowing to the brain only after it has been perceived by the heart.”

If this is true, then in an era of desensitisation, the heart is the new frontier of enclosure. Can it be captured and domesticated? Or is there a freedom in the heart that simply cannot be enclosed?

One thing the long view of history shows us is that freedom does not exist in the hands of politicians who will deliver it after they tidy up the aftermath of the latest crisis, as they like to promise. I would also suggest it shows us that not only is the very idea of a patriarchal state incompatible with human freedom by definition—the tactic of negotiating with governments to have our “rights” and freedoms delivered has proven ineffective through centuries of trial and error. History shows us that governments are irredeemably deaf to the voices of women, and when they appear not to be, it is short-lived. Between the era of enclosure and the present day, women won the right to vote. Today, we may officially still have that right, but as womanhood is redefined beyond meaning, so has the relevance of the vote to our lives.

I am not saying that people should not lobby governments to promote the recognition of their rights, or that changes in the law have never benefited those who fought for them. I am also not suggesting that you can save the world by sitting under a tree and searching your heart. What I am saying is that in an era characterised by noise and desensitisation, there is no better time to tune out for long enough to discover whether you do carry within you a freedom immune to enclosure—because if you do, if this is part of our make up, surely there could be no better advisor in the decisions you, and we, need to make from here. There cannot be a better guide in the defence of freedom than freedom itself.

#Anglo.txt

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neil-neil-orange-peel · 2 years

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Yeah I find that Ben and Rik's other work you can see what they contributed to the Young Ones writing, but none of their other work had that 'was that a part of the episode or a fever dream I had as a child' element Young Ones had, so I like to think that was Lise. Bit of black humor but i cringe/laughed when they were looking back at the show and asked Lise what her fave bit was and she said with this sadistic smile 'when they drove off the cliff and died' knowing her history with Rik 😅

Yeah Lise... Has not had it easy with men, let's just say that! I have no idea what terms her and Angus Deayton parted on and I'd never claim any insight (they were together for a long time, after all, and have a son), but the stuff he got up to in the early 2000s shocked everyone. 😅

As for Lise and Rik. Yeah. Terrible behaviour on Rik's part and I'm glad he (to my knowledge) never defended it. In fact, I'm pretty sure he eluded to it being a reason he shouldn't be held up as a role model in an interview many years later. Apparently Rik and Lise weren't on speaking terms for a long time, but did make up. I watched along as Robin Ince hosted a TYO quiz on Rik's last birthday, and Lise asked to be involved for a segment. During their general chatting about TYO and Rik, she said when he died it became clear just how loved he was and that she hopes he knew how loved he was. I thought that was a nice sentiment and would seem to suggest the both of them were on okay terms before he died. Oh! And she had a big poster of Rick from the opening credits of series 1 too. And a poster from from Nasty. The fan is me was dancing!

I'm really glad Lise is still open to talking about TYO, even after all this time, and can I just say that the woman does not age! She is some kind of goddess. And not to be feminist on main, but I'm glad there was a woman involved in the creation of TYO too. Just 'cos.

So yeah, Rik did fuck up. Of course he did, he was human. I don't like the way online purity culture holds people up as pure evil the moment it's discovered they're flawed in some way, because no one is "pure" by those standards. It's good to remember the people we look up to/admire/fancy the pants off are flawed, as putting them on a pedestal doesn't help anyone, least of all ourselves. However, at the same time, it's not any of our places to forgive Rik for cheating on Lise, or try to excuse it with all the ways in which he was great. It has nothing to do with us, so to do so would be a bit arrogant really. He hurt her, and that wasn't okay.

About the young ones driving the bus off the cliff - Rik also cited it as his favourite bit of TYO in a documentary Ben did about 10 years ago called Laughing At The 80s. I think because it's an iconic scene and was quite exciting to film, it sticks out in a lot of people's minds as one of the - if not, the - defining moments of TYO. Not to mention the fact that they probably couldn't film it today 😂 a stunt man literally weighted down the gas and then had to jump from the bus before it went over the cliff. Lise's said elsewhere that she's sure they could have brought the lads back from that death if they'd wanted, since they'd killed them before and brought them back (at the end of the first episode, in fact).

Thanks for the ask!

#asks #anon #the young ones #tyo #rik mayall #lise mayer

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june2734 · 3 years

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The Short Lived Golden Age of Nerdy Web Shows

There was a time between the years of, let's say, 2007 to 2015 that I like to call the golden age of nerdy web shows. It consisted of a lot of small low to no budget productions that had a lot of heart, the kind you just don't see very often anymore for some reason. Many of these show have found a dedicated home on streaming services like The Fantasy Network, some have even gained enough steam to be featured on big name services like Netflix and Amazon like The Guild and LARPs The series respectively. I'm not exactly sure why the web show trend died out so hard, maybe the crowds just aren't there for them anymore like they use to be with some many pieces of high budget productions on streaming services vying for their attention. Every once and a while I'll jump onto Google to try and find new web shows that have that same heart and feel but rarely if ever do I come up with anything. As far as I can tell the only place new nerdy low to mid budget web shows or films gets any attention is at GenCon or small streaming services like The Fantasy Network. Who knows if there will ever be another nerdy heartfelt web show created that captures the spirit of those old series I hold so dear to my heart, but regardless if it happens or not I'd like to bring some attention to a few of my favorites. They may be old by the standards of the internet and maybe even cheesy by today's standards, but I really think they were something special and if you give them a shot maybe you'll think so too. If you have any others that you think would fit in with shows like this feel free to let me know.

The Gamers: Hands Of Fate

Zombie Orpheus Entertainment use to be one of my favorite channels for nerdy fantasy related content back in the day. You could always see the quality and passion that they put into every piece of content they out out on their channel. They're still around today but they've shifted their focus to other ventures such as the ever popular trend of live streaming table top games rather then making scripted content. That being said their old stuff is still well worth a watch and The Gamers series, particularly The Gamers: Hands of Fate, is some of their best work they’ve ever put out. The series centers around a group of table top gamers(the same that can be found in most of the other The Gamers creations by ZOE), particularly the character by the name of Cass, as he steps into the world of one extremely popular card game hopes of impressing a woman who's a huge fan of it. But this is seemingly simple premise is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this series. The show also features a secondary narrative that involves the characters that actually exist in the card game as as the players decisions in the real world effect their lives and leads one character, Buckstahue(not sure if I’m spelling that right), in particular to start questioning what mysterious forces are controlling their lives. The show is a real treat filled with twists and turns I never saw coming, it's fascinating seeing how the real world actions of this card game effects the card characters lives as well as question if and when Buckstahue will figure out what strings control her actions. The stories surrounding the other characters in the party might not be as engaging but they are by no means a weak point of the series either, many of their subplots are engaging in their own rights and pay off certain character moments established in proper The Gamers creations. If this peaks your interest then the series can still be found on Zombie Orpheus's Youtube channel or as a movie on The Fantasy Network. ZOE had pivoted more towards live streaming as opposed to the scripted content of their past but I'd love to see more content from The Gamers one day. Source

LARPs The Series

LARPs The Series first premiered at GenCon 2014 and took home the award for Best Independent Series. The year after it was picked up by Geek and Sundry as a part of a push for more scripted content on the channel which was where I and many others first got a chance to watch it. When the short trailer for popped up on the G&S channel everything about it screamed that I was absolutely going to love it, and I wasn’t wrong. The series centers around a 4 man party of larpers (AKA Live Action Role Players) by the names of Will, Brittany, Arthur and Sam and their DM (Dungeon Master) Evan as we follow their lives in and out of the game. The show is surprisingly heartfelt and sympathetic towards the characters involved in this often misunderstood and mocked hobby as it shows how larping enriches their often turbulent lives and connects them all as friends on a deep and meaningful level. These characters felt real and you really rooted for them as they deal with, work, relationships and the many other hurtles of adult life as they wait eagerly to gear up for whatever peril might befall them in their next campaign session. The show was also pretty hilarious, seeing them play out classic predicaments that any party, whether they be larpers or table top roleplayers, have experienced such as one player trying to roll to kill a tavern owner or romances between PCs were always a joy to watch unfold. Another thing that most will notice right away is how the production value and direction are surprisingly astounding as well, especially in season 2. I was shocked by just how much quality was put into the show from the costumes and sets as well as from a writing standpoint. If you're interested in checking out the show then it can be found on Amazon Prime but they can also still be viewed for free on YouTube or in The Fantasy Network. Beanduck, the production company behind LARPs The series, is working towards a funding campaign in hopes of earning enough to produce a third season so if you have any spare change you might want to toss it their way in support. Regardless if you decide to help or not, LARPs The Series is a show that I think any nerdy individual will enjoy. Source

Glitch

Glitch was another show produced by the team over at Zombie Orpheus Entertainment, but it never seemed to get the same kind of love as many of their other productions. The concept was brilliant: What if one day you woke up and found out your life operated on the logic of video games? Well this is the predicament that a programing temp nicknamed Glitch finds himself in. Most episodes of the show centered around particular game mechanics causing problems in his and his friends lives and how he tries to figure out ways to work around or fix problems they've created. Glitch, Wyatt and Samus were all fantastic characters and it was always fun seeing Glitch trying to work through some real world problem with game logic like trying to flirt with a woman he likes using a conversation wheel like in Mass Effect or figuring out how to "defeat" his boss at work who he see's as an actual game boss. Another thing I liked about the show was how the characters really felt like real people I knew, they played games on the couch, debated about which Sci-Fi starship captains were the best, and they grilled each other in nerdy ways while working in slang from their favorite bits of nerd culture into their daily vocabulary. I always hoped that ZOE would eventually put out a second season but unfortunately for whatever reason that never became a reality. Now days the channel that originally hosted Glitch has changed their name to Burger Orchard and rarely if ever uploads anything, but luckily those original episodes of Glitch can still be found on their. Give it a watch, it's short but sweet and if you really enjoyed the show a lot there are little companion shorts that can also be found on the channel. Source

The Street Fighter

The Game Station was an early find for me back in my early college days, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I shaved away many hours watching all kinds of gaming related content on that channel instead of studying for exams. One production, created by one of the channels founders Layne Pavoggi, which came out in late 2011 and was a cut above much their already fantastic content was a short lived series was called The Street Fighter. The series centered around a single dad by the name of Phil who has just lost his job and decides to take up a short career as a professional Street Fighter player to provide for his son as well as keep his mind off of the stressful and highly competitive job market. This a real underdog story that’s extremely reminiscent of old sports 80s films where the protagonist has everything working against them, with that being said you might think that such a trope filled narrative would make things a little predictable and you wouldn’t be wrong but there’s still plenty to love since this concept has really never been explored with videogame to my knowledge. Phil is a guy you’d be hard pressed not to warm up to, especially when you see him interacting with his preteen son Ryan or his best friend/semi love interest Camile (played by former All That star and all around spectacular person Lisa Foiles). Seeing him trying to make his way into the job market, taking odd jobs here and there just to try and get by while also playing Street Fighter to destress and become better for the sake of winning a competition for money to support his son really makes to root for him through all of it. One aspect of the show that I really this is fantastic is how it feels truly authentic to the FGC (Fighting Game Community) when it comes to talking about all of the technical aspects of play Street Fighter on a competitive level. There are moments when Phil goes into detail about his “bread and butter” combos or talks about different strategies when it comes to taking on different characters compared to his main. The show was short lived but it can still be found on The Game Stations channel, if you’re looking for a heartfelt underdog story then I highly recommend giving The Street Fighter a shot. Source

Versus Valerie

Versus Valerie is a bit of series finale for a fictional character created by Hannah Spear for the character more commonly known as the Sexy Nerd Girl on her YouTube channel. Even if you didn't watch the characters vlogs over the years leading up to the web series I still think you'll find something to enjoy in this extremely charming show. It centers around Valerie Lapomme, the titular Sexy Nerd Girl, as she lives life hanging out with with her best friend Guy, shopping for comic books, going on dates, vlogging, and trying to make something of herself as a mid 20 something living in Toronto. The brilliant thing about this series is how each episode is structured like or makes homage to popular shows, films and games such as Star Wars, Doctor Who, Memento, and The Matrix just to name a few. On top of that the show is surprisingly well produced and written for something that spawned from a fictional vlog series, Valarie and Guy are much more fleshed out and all the characters including them have some really fantastic character arcs and moments in the show. Valerie’s awkwardness and extremely nerdy imagination felt embracingly relatable to me personally since I often imagine different situations in my life in relation to my own nerdy fandoms. What I was often taken aback by when I first watched the show years ago was just how enjoyable all of the episodes were in their own special way, and the pay off of it all really feels like a proper satisfying ending to the strange and imaginative journey we’ve been on with Valerie. If it peaks your interest at all then you can still find the full series on the Veruse Valerie YouTube channel as well as some of the vlogs prior to the series on the Sexy Nerd Girl channel as well. It’s well worth a viewing and aside from the fantastic lead characters of Guy and Valerie the show also managed to grab Mark Meer as a supporting character, aka the voice of COMMANDER MOTHER F^*$(^% SHEPARD BABY!!! Source

#Web Shows #geek and sundry #Zombie Orpheus Entertainment #LARPs the series #table top rpg #larping #web series #a few of my favorite things

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matildainmotion · 3 years

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All That We Carry - and the launch of the MWM Peer Mentoring Programme.

Image by Zoe Gardner @limberdoodle

“How are you?”

“Oh, you know, surviving,” I say.

“Taking it a day at a time.”

“Just about upright!”

Or sometimes I say nothing but describe a hilly landscape with my hand - “Up and down,” I might add.

Over the last ten years, since my son was born, I have accrued a ready-made stock of replies when someone - at the school gate, the shops, on a zoom call- asks the generic “how are you?” I can’t bring myself to smile gaily and say, “Great, thank you!” so my responses are designed to indicate just enough of the truth not to make the questioner worried or burdened, but do not tip me into the territory of barefaced lying. Because, the fact is, it’s hard.

‘It’ means everything - my son, my daughter, their school, my mother, time for my husband, the house, my work, my health, my sleep, the world.

‘It’ is a tiny word. In this context ‘it’ makes me think of an ant - the way they clamber across the dirt track by our house, carrying a stick, twice their size and weight. We do this. Parents and carers do it. Women do it. Non-binary people too. We carry A LOT, and often we do it in relative silence, either because we are too exhausted to shout about it, or even to notice or fully acknowledged it to ourselves, or because we do not know who to tell or how to tell them.

This is not new. Not news. We have been doing this - carrying a lot - for a long, long time. In fact, there is even a well-researched theory that the first thing that a mother ever made was probably a net or sling* - a thing to put things in, to enable her to carry more than she could manage to hold with just her hands, just her arms. We have been carrying stuff around in nets, slings, sacks, pots, on our heads, on our backs, in our bellies, in our hearts, we have had loads on our minds for millennia. The act that is less well documented, because it happens less, is that of us setting things down. Of course, some brave pioneers have done it, through acts of radical art, or resistance: Hildegard of Bingen, Rosa Parks, Mary Wollstonecraft. But all too often when we hear of someone ceasing to carry it all, it is a story of crisis - of dropping the lot, out of exhaustion, ill health, burn out. Because mostly, as a carer, there are so few opportunities to set things down, we just carry on carrying.

Six months into motherhood, when I was feeling the hardness of it already, I enrolled on a support course for parents and I still remember the phrase that the course facilitator used: most parents, she said, walk around with “a huge empathy deficit.” Empathy, I believe, involves someone else bearing witness to all you are carrying, acknowledging its full weight. It is a miraculous thing, but this acknowledgment in itself lightens the load, or perhaps, more accurately, the load gets no lighter but we feel stronger, better able to bear it. Earlier this year - still feeling the struggle - I enrolled on another course, a Hand in Hand Parenting one. The founder of Hand in Hand, Patty Wifler, did so out of a recognition of the severe lack of support that parents receive in our culture to do the enormous task of raising children. A cornerstone of her approach, her answer to the ‘empathy deficit’ is the idea of Listening Partnerships - a peer support arrangement that enables parents to offload regularly, safely, with another adult.

For a long time now, I have wanted to run something like this within Mothers Who Make- a way to provide one another with support, encouragement and accountability, as we do the almighty work of caring and creating. It is the same impulse that informs our peer support groups, but there is something vitally different that can take place in a one to one exchange - a more precise sharing of the weight of what you are carrying, a chance, for however brief a time, to set it down and take a good look at it. This month then, I am delighted to announce the launch of the MWM Peer Mentoring Programme. I ran a trial in July and it was everything I hoped it could be, so I am very excited to offer it again now. Please read about the programme below - what it is, how it works, how to enroll. Before you do, however, I want to use this moment as I might a peer-mentoring session, to set down what I am carrying, not because I need empathy (though, like everyone else, I do!) but because I hope it will give you permission to do the same. One thing I love about writing is that, despite the distances of time and space it traverses, it is strangely intimate, like a one on one exchange - just me, telling this to just you.

So, in answer to the question, “How are you?” here is the fuller response, which I do not give most of the time:

I am tired, always, and tired of being tired. The nights feel like dark imprints of the days, a negative image, not restful but grainy, smudge. Last night I slept on the children’s bedroom floor because it was easier to relax without the pressure of being in a bed, with the hardness of the floor against me. Today my breasts are tender even though I am only partway through my cycle - I googled it - another symptom of the perimenopause. Next door, as I write, my son is playing Lego Star Wars on the TV and my daughter is watching Lego Friends on Granny’s iPad - their daily dose of screen time so that I can have my daily dose of this, but it never sits easy. I dread the week ahead, of dressing them in bed, still half-asleep, readying them for school, where it is uncertain how their day will go, how long they will stay before I get a call asking me to pick them up, how they will be when they come home - it is a shock, although it shouldn’t be, to realise that both my children are neurodiverse. This is a trendy term nowadays, one to celebrate, and I do, but it is also a weight, to carry all the not-fitting-in-ness that goes with it. The last two nights my son has thrown up with anxiety, from the fear of anything bad happening to any one of us. I managed to get the potty-as-sick-bowl there in time, on to his top bunk, calmed him at last, till he fell asleep just before midnight. I went downstairs to turn off the lights - I always stop at this moment, to look through the back window into the tiny dark of the garden, to Granny’s room, or shed, at the end of it, and wonder how long my mother will live and if it will be long enough to see my novel published - apparently it takes two years even once you’ve got a publisher. I told her this yesterday and she frowned, said she would have a word with God, thought she ought to be able to manage it. I am wondering, though, how I will manage it - manage to do the rewrites the book needs, to do the work MWM requires, and the work I have taken on for Improbable, the finding of a new home for the company, but also for us, a new school, a place for us to be. And meanwhile, the house is overspilling – every room - with toys, books, dvds, with plastic trinkets from the inside of Kinder eggs, dried up felt tip pens and stale biscuits, stored in tins too late, which I should throw away but I can’t face the waste and so I continue to pretend that one day they may get eaten.

That’s me. And all the short answers are still true - I am surviving, I am still upright, taking it a day at a time, through all the ups and downs, and I am, actually, in a position of great privilege, on many levels.

And you? How are you? That’s my question for the month. And I’m interested in the long answer. Here are some ways you can respond:

You can post below this.

You can participate in the MWM Peer Mentoring Programme - read all about it and apply here: https://motherswhomake.org/peer-mentoring

You can attend a peer support meeting - read all about that and book your space here: https://motherswhomake.org/international

*The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution by Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill 1973)

Image by Zoe Gardner @Limberdoodle

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xbellaxcarolinax · 4 years

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Forging A Heart (Ivar the Boneless) 10- Requests

Pairings: Ivar x Artemis (OFC)

Word Count:

Warnings:

9- Conflicted

AN: This one's a little boring, sorry 😅

...

The axe glimmered in the light, shinning fiercely in a way that resembled the northern star. It was a thing of beauty, a foreign styled weapon held in the hands of a vengeful son. She knew it would soon drip the blood of the foreign kings.

It had taken a few days, just as she said it would, but it was worth all the time in the world to her. It was like a child she had to give away into uncaring hands. Leather strips were woven strategically around the wooden handle in the viking fashion, thanks to Arvid.

Artemis watched as Ivar's thumb grazes over the runes carved into the wood. He had it blessed by their own priests for battle as soon as he could.

The sun filtered through the branches perfectly, melting away the snow caught on the leaves. It was where the brothers had their training ground, and they were all determined to test run the axe. Ivar sat on the old tree stump, a haughty smile playing on his lips. It was an axe that any warrior would envy.

"I think he is quite impressed with your creation," Arvid says to her as they watched the brothers from a distance. Like children, they circle around Ivar to get a chance to glimpse at the weapon.

"The only good I've been able to do it seems." She mutters with a shrug, bringing her new fur cloak tighter around herself when the winds picked up speed.

"You know, you do not look like much of a slave." Arvid remarks, casting her a curious look. He was quick to notice the fine cloak she wore.

"No," She responds, "That is because I was never meant to be one." She says with such honesty, turning to glance up at him. Arvid's blue eyes clashed with her's in a playful battle. The young blacksmith had always treated her differently, and it didn't help that he was strikingly handsome. Artemis never thought she'd think of a northman as attractive, but it was something she could not deny, God help her.

"Artemis!" Ivar hisses her name, glaring at the pair with daggers for eyes. He called her over using the axe as if it had replaced his arm, "Come here!"

"Your master awaits," Arvid holds back a laugh when she rolls her eyes, slowly trudging through the melting snow. Ubbe and Hvitserk were smirking while Sigurd stood neutral, looking at her with stone like eyes.

"Yes, Prince Ivar." Somehow the snow had gotten into his hair, melting onto the brown stands that grew longer by the day. His eyes were a pretty pale blue that day, a sign the he wasn't in any particular pain. His brow was wrinkled in displeasure, and pink lips set in a pout. Artemis glanced at Ivar's lips before looking back into his eyes.

"You must have the first throw," He grunts, handing her the axe.

"The first throw, Prince?"

"Mhm," He hums, pointing towards the target placed high on the tree a few feet away from them, "You made it, you get the first throw." Hvitserk laughs at her expression as it was one of pure horror.

"Come now, Artemis, surely you can throw an axe?" Hvitserk taunts, and Ibbe laughs along with him.

"I can make them, but I was never trained to wield them." She responds, slightly embarrased. She knew some of the women in their culture were known as shieldmaidens, and that they were held in high regards. Generally, it seemed the women of the north had more liberties than the rest of the known world.

Artemis remembered watching her brother fight with father, makeshift training for any future defenses. But that was all she did. She watched and was never allowed to engage. It was one thing for a woman to work with metals, but something entirely different if she could fight. She would have never been married off, not that it mattered anymore.

"She is no shieldmaiden, Ivar," Sigurd says, though it came out more taunting than he wanted. He moves towards her to grab hold of the axe and she immediately takes a step away from him on instinct. Sigurd frowns, but took a step back as well, putting his hands up in defeat. Ivar watches their exchange but says nothing of it.

"No, she is no shieldmaiden, only a trickster with a foul mouth, like Loki," Ivar says as he watched Artemis hesitate, "A blacksmith should be more than qualified to fight in combat." She blinked at his words, frowning. Still, she doesn't move an inch to do what Ivar was asking of her.

"Let us see what you can do, Artemis," Ubbe says, stepping forward, placing a comforting hand to her shoulder, "Do not look so defeated, you are strong if you can manage the skill of a blacksmith."

Ubbe had always been the one to have words of comfort, which she was always grateful for, but those words had no affect at the moment. Artemis looks over at Ivar, who beckons her to continue. Suddenly the old tree stump he sat on made him look a pompous, smug king.

"Well? Go on." Artemis hesitated before looking down at the axe. She would make a fool of herself, she knew. It would be an embarrassment to her and her axe. The target was a distance away from them, how was she supposed to hurl it so far?

"Come Artemis! You are one of us now, go ahead!" Arvid calls from behind her, and she looks round just enough to catch a flash of his charming smile.

"Hurry up," Ivar growls, the young blacksmith's voice irritating him to no end. That was enough to push her, her irritation growing along side his. She let out an angry huff, and without thinking, she flung the heavy axe to its destination with both hands. Everyone was silent, watching in anticipating as to where the axe would land.

Her hands flew to her lips in shock, glancing down at Ivar who had a lopsided grin.

"Not exactly the target, but you struck the tree well enough." The axe was embedded into the tree about a few feet under the target. It wasn't too bad of a first throw, but it still caused an eruption of laughter from the brothers.

"Well done," Laughs Hvitserk, ruffling her hair, "You're on your way to becoming a shieldmaiden." They howled in laughter while Artemis stared at her feet in utter shame.

"Come now, none of that," Ivar says to her with that damned smile, "Go on and fetch the axe." He pats her lower back, encouraging her to move forward. Her hands were balled into fists by the time she reached the axe, and she used all her strength to pry it out from the strong wood. She brought it back to Ivar who took it easily from her hands.

"Watch." He tells her, and with such ease he hurls the axe into the air with a fierce velocity, and in a few seconds the blade was embedded into the middle of the target. The force cracked it slightly, making it hang off the tree before breaking and falling to the ground.

Artemis's eyes grew wide in awe, and she turns to look at Ivar, only to see he was already watching her, a smirk in place.

"And that is the axe that will conquer the world."

...

It was a light snowfall when Floki found her. She was a small figure in black, hood raised with no way of identifying her person, but he knew it was her. That was Ivar's cloak she was wearing, he'd seen it a million times before. A woven basket hung from her arm, with a collection of fabrics and threadings from only the finest seamstress in Kattegat.

There was something different about her, Floki noticed, as he followed her down towards the bustling market. It might have been her physical appearance, as she did not look entirely beaten down and disheveled as before. She did not seem entirely happy, that was evident, but not entirely sad either. She walked without the fear she once had, weaving her way through the market as if she's lived there her entire life.

She stops at the fish stall, looking down towards the array of sea creatures inbedded in mounds of salt for sale.

"Christian." Floki's voice was easily recognizable. She whips her head to look at him, surprised with his approach. He wasn't seen often in the city, preferring to keep to himself on the outskirts of Kattegat.

"The people speak of your abilities." He continues and Artemis almost snorts in response. He was making her sound like a shaman.

"And what have you heard?" She asks, raking her eyes over his form. He had many furs about his shoulders, giving him the appearance of a large yet lanky wolf. All that did nothing to hide the sadness in his eyes.

"They say you are a blacksmith," His tone was nothing she'd heard before, "Is it true?"

"It is."

"It is also said you can craft jewels." Artemis eyes Floki curiously.

"Is there something you wish to ask me?"

She never liked being around him for too long, not that she sees him often enough, but he was interrupting her work with small talk, and she had to return to Edda with the fabrics and fish before she was repeimanded.

"I wish to gift Helga with jewels." Floki says, looking out towards the northern seas that lapped at Kattegat's shores to avoid her eyes. Artemis hums in response, alerting the fisherman of the fishes she would be purchasing. She says nothing, watching the fisherman pack them while Floki fumed beside her.

"Did you hear me, Christian?"

"I did," She responds, "Though I wonder how this involves me." Floki huffs out an irritated breath. She knew what he was asking, but she wanted him to say it, which did not please him.

"I want you to make a necklace for her." Floki's black rimmed eyes stare down at her. His pride was hurt somehow, to be asking a slave, let alone a Christian, for a favor.

"A necklace?" Artemis snorts as quietly as she could, careful not to let out a laugh that threatened to slip past her lips.

"Helga worries me these days. She has grown a fondness for a little girl from the Morrish country, but I fear she is losing herself with this child. Tanaruz, she has a hatred for us that my wife refuses to see." Whoever the girl was, Artemis didn't blame her. She has felt the same feelings of hatred herself.

"And Helga misses you dearly," Floki grunts, scratching his head, "I fear I have made her upset by not allowing you to visit and the little patience I have for the child."

"So you wish to seek forgiveness with jewels?"

Jewels were indeed beautiful. What woman would not want to be draped in luxury? But Helga seemed like the type of woman who would not be easily swayed by jewels.

"I wish to see her happy, Christian, now can you do this or not?" Artemis thanked the fisherman, handing him a gold coin before placing the bagged fish in her basket.

"You may visit Helga in our home if you please." He adds reluctantly. She gives him a side glance, pulling the basket comfortably over the crease of her arm before nodding.

"Very well. I will do this for Helga, but only if Prince Ivar allows it."

"I shall speak with him. I will accompany you to their cabin." Her brows knit in confusion, but she walked beside him silently, letting the flurries of snow lightly melt against her cheeks and lashes.

"You remind me of someone," Floki speaks after a while, "An old friend of Ragnar's."

"Oh?"

Was that for her to take as a compliment?

"He was a priest taken on our very first raid in England. He was Ragnar's slave."

"How lovely," She mutters, "I suppose you weren't fond of him either, this Christian priest?"

"Of course not, " Floki scoffs, "He had nothing to offer us but to misguide and to stray our king away from the ways of our gods."

"Is that what you think I will do? Misguide the prince and your people?" Artemis shakes her head, "I've no interest in teaching any of you of my God." She wished the cabin could be closer so that their conversation may end. How ill her luck was, to be subjected to such useless talk.

"Perhaps," Floki shrugs, looking up towards the gray skies. His hair blew with the winds, causing him to appear a mad man, but that was not far from the truth, "But this priest was patient, just as you are, and infuriatingly kind. Such a pious man, with his Christian ways. Ragnar freed him, and he assimilated into our society quiet well. He chose the faith of our gods, but I always knew he was not true to it."

"What was his name?" Artemis asks out of curiosity.

"A very Saxon name. Athelstan." Floki says his name with a sigh. Perhaps it reminded him of Ragnar.

"What happened to him?" The cabin was finally in sight and Artemis mentally cheered, rubbing her hands together in an attempt to warm them.

"A most unfortunate death I'm afraid," When Artemis finally turns to look at him he let's out a manic giggle before continuing.

"I killed him."

Floki opens the door of the cabin and enters without hesitation, leaving Artemis dumbfounded out in the snow.

...

@didiintheblog @heavenly1927

#ivarxofc #ivarfanfiction #ivar imagine #ivar lothbrok #ivar #vikings ivar #vikings #vikings ubbe #ubbe #hvitserk #sigurd #floki #ivar the boneless #alex hogh andersen

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starwarsnonsense · 5 years

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Best Films of 2019 (So Far)

It’s that time of year again! As most of my followers probably know, I’m an avid cinema-goer beyond Star Wars. I also quite enjoy making lists, so what’s better than a combo of the two? Below, I run down my top 10 films of 2019 so far - please note that this list is based on UK cinema release dates, so some of these films were 2018 releases elsewhere.

What are your favourites so far from this year? Let me know in replies/asks!

Honourable mentions: Toy Story 4, Long Shot, Aladdin, Alita: Battle Angel & The Kid Who Would Be King

1. The Favourite, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

This completely wowed me - it features a trio of magnificently compelling female characters (played by Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone) operating at the court of Queen Anne (Colman is Anne, Weisz and Stone are courtiers), and is focused solely on the shifting sands of the power dynamics between them. The script is savage without sacrificing poignancy, witty without ceasing to be genuine. And while I’ve seen some react to this film as a comedy (and it certainly has laughs, most of which are closely tied to shock), for me it was very clearly a drama about the inscrutable and complicated relationships that exist between women. Specifically, it is about how those relationships run the gamut from sincere affinity to ruthless manipulation. This is an amazing movie, and it also has the best use of an Elton John song in 2019 (sorry, Rocketman!).

2. Midsommar, dir. Ari Aster

I went into this film with reservations, since I wasn’t a huge fan of Hereditary (by the same director), which I found to have extraordinary moments but iffy execution overall. This movie, however, wowed me, and I am still uncertain as to whether this or The Favourite is my top film of 2019 so far (fortunately, this gives me a good excuse to watch Midsommar three or four times in cinemas). While marketed as a freaky cult horror film, the director has described it as a fairy tale, which is the level on which is spoke to me. Midsommar follows Dani (an incredible Florence Pugh), a young woman who has suffered a terrible loss, as she travels with her boyfriend and his friends to a pagan festival in the Swedish countryside. Dani is painfully isolated, and her grief is hers to shoulder alone since her boyfriend is un-receptive and distinctly unprepared to help her. Over the course of the film, destruction and creation are conflated in ways that are frequently beautiful and horrific at the same time - this film spoke to me on a profound level, and the way it ended gave me a sense of incredible catharsis. This won’t be for everyone, for I found it to be a deeply special film and I can’t recommend it enough.

3. One Cut of the Dead, dir. Shinichirou Ueda

While I went into The Favourite with high expectations given the talent involved, I went into this with no expectations whatsoever - and what a treat it was! One Cut of the Dead is easily one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in ears, taking what initially seems like a trite concept (a crew is filming a zombie movie at a desolate location ... only to discover that the zombies are real!) and twisting it in a truly ingenious way. The comedy is often of the broad variety, but it is consistently delightful and always manages to avoid becoming crass - the movie even has some really sweet family dynamics at the centre of it, which gives it some real emotional heft. The success of this film is heavily reliant on a major twist that occurs part-way through, so the best advice I can give you is to stay as far away from spoilers for this one as possible - go in blind, and you will be amply rewarded for your faith.

4. The Farewell, dir. Lulu Wang

I saw this following a wave of festival hype, so while I was excited I was also a bit apprehensive (since I have been burned by the aforementioned festival hype before). Thankfully, my doubts were blown away as this turned out to be just as wonderful as the early reviews had suggested. It’s a personal story about a young Asian-American woman (Awkwafina) struggling to reconcile her heritage with her current situation and values - specifically, she is tested when her grandmother is diagnosed with terminal cancer and the wider family make the decision to hide the truth from her. The Farewell does a fantastic job of generating empathy for all the different perspectives and positions in play, but it’s truly anchored by Awkwafina’s amazingly nuanced and tender performance - basically, anyone who’s ever loved a grandparent should leave this feeling incredibly moved and inspired. The themes of The Farewell are both specific to the Asian-American experience and general to anyone who has struggled with maintaining bonds over a vast distance, whether physical or cultural.

5. Booksmart, dir. Olivia Wilde

God, how I wish I’d had this movie as a teenager! While Booksmart has a cliched premise - two high-achieving teens decide to have one wild night before graduation - it tells the story in an incredibly charming and impressively creative way (I won’t spoil it, but let me just say this - that scene with the Barbies!). As someone who was an awkward nerd with no discernible social life in high school (as you Americans call it), I found this portrayal of that peculiar limbo period very sensitive and thoughtful - it doesn’t mock or shame its heroines for being studious, and it allows them to have limits and step back from situations that make them uncomfortable. It also serves as a beautifully honest portrait of a friendship, depicting the qualities that bring people together in friendship together in the first place, as well as the forces that can break people apart. This is a very accomplished debut from Wilde, and it makes me very excited to see where she goes next as a director.

6. A Private War, dir. Matthew Heineman

This was a very suspenseful and tightly focused film about an extraordinary woman, and the film soars on the strength of Rosamund Pike’s incredible performance as Marie Colvin. She provides piercing insights into the psyche of a person so driven to pursue truth and enact change that she loses all concern for her own wellbeing - it’s simultaneously a portrait of heroism and obsession, and it’s impressive for how it handles the ambiguity inherent in Colvin’s choices. She’s exceptionally brave, but the film is unflinching in depicting the costs of her bravery. It left me feeling inspired to learn more about Colvin’s life and work, and I still need to watch the documentary Under the Wire to get more insight into the real story behind the film.

7. Fighting With My Family, dir. Stephen Merchant

This is the year of Florence Pugh - she killed it in Midsommar, and she is just as fantastic here. If anything, Fighting With My Family and Midsommar make great complements as they serve as fantastic showcases for Pugh’s range as an actor. While her character in Midsommar is fragile and vulnerable, Fighting With My Family is a platform for her strength and comedic skill. As Paige, Pugh is instantly likable and compelling - I don’t give a damn about any form of wrestling, but this film (and Pugh specifically) did a fantastic job of drawing me in and making me root for Paige’s struggle to prove herself as a legitimate force in wrestling. This is a real underdog story, and Pugh did a wonderful job as the Cinderella of the WWE.

8. Apollo 11, dir. Todd Douglas Miller

My dad has always been crazy about the space program, but I hadn’t picked up the bug myself. That changed after I watched this extraordinary documentary, which brought the Apollo 11 mission to vivid life. The footage that’s used for this documentary is extraordinarily crisp, and some moments are vividly powerful - the crew getting into their spacesuits, the swirl of fire surrounding the moment of takeoff, and the journey of the spacecraft towards the moon. It left me feeling moved and touched by human potential, especially when you remember that this all happened 50 years ago when the available technologies were so fragile and primitive. I also loved how the footage was allowed to speak for itself, with no voiceover or exposition - it’s a must-see for anyone who’s ever looked up at the stars and wondered about reaching them.

9. High Life, dir. Claire Denis

This movie is second to only Midsommar in terms of how weird it is. I saw this in a Hungarian cinema while on holiday, which made for a disorientating experience in itself. While the meaning of the film is quite elusive and I’m sure that many people will find viewing it a uniquely frustrating experience, I appreciated how it created a hothouse environment that brought out some of the ugliest aspects of humanity. Robert Pattinson was great as what comes closest to amounting to our protagonist, though he is as inscrutable and inaccessible as the film itself. I can’t quite pin down why I liked this one so much, but I know I did and it made me want to seek out more of Claire Denis’ work.

10. Free Solo, dir. Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

It’s tragic that most people will only watch this documentary on a TV screen (or, so much worse, a laptop!). I was fortunate enough to see it in its full IMAX glory, and it’s rare to see any film - let alone a documentary - take such full advantage of the format. The woozy spectacle of this film is the real star, though the subject - mountain climber Alex Honnold - is also fascinating with his unnerving detachment from the magnitude of what he is setting out on. It is clearly a necessary detachment for him to be able to achieve what he achieves, but I appreciated how the filmmakers questioned it and explored its impact on his girlfriend. This is a compelling documentary, and is worth watching even if you’re not usually a fan of the genre.

#films #cinema #films 2019 #midsommar #florence pugh #the favourite #one cut of the dead #free solo #high life #apollo 11 #fighting with my family #a private war #the farewell #booksmart

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parrotvoid · 4 years

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Sam Harris - The Moral Landscape (2010)

“The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values is a 2010 book by Sam Harris, in which the author promotes a science of morality and argues that many thinkers have long confused the relationship between morality, facts, and science. He aims to carve a third path between secularists who say morality is subjective (e.g. moral relativists), and religionists who say that morality is given by God and scripture. Harris contends that the only moral framework worth talking about is one where "morally good" things pertain to increases in the "well-being of conscious creatures". He then argues that, problems with philosophy of science and reason in general notwithstanding, 'moral questions' will have objectively right and wrong answers which are grounded in empirical facts about what causes people to flourish.”

The “moral landscape” is an abstract concept where a 3D grid plots every conceivable form of human moral system. You can imagine a gridded landscape where each grid represents a belief system. Similar belief systems will be located next to each other and extend out making a plane. On this map, elevation is the measurement of well-being among the users of the moral system. Sea level (the zero), could the be set as the well-being conditions of hunter gatherers in the wild. Any system which produces conditions on average better than living in the wild would produce a hill and any system producing conditions worse would produce a valley. The result would be a topographically diverse landscape plotting out the ‘worst’ and ‘best’ systems for managing humanity effectively.

An interesting result of this idea, is that it would produce a scientific model of objective morality while still preserving multiculturalism. In most forms of objective morality, it is taken as fact that there is one set of principles, either given to us by God or through Nature, that must be followed or else suffering will result. The Moral Landscape approach preserves multiculturalism by allowing for multiple hills, representing different moral systems which produce similar peaks of average well-being, to exist simultaneously on the grid.

Sam Harris’s book is deeply criticized by the majority of moral philosophers. This isn’t exactly shocking considering that the main theme of the book is the replacement of moral philosophy with a new science of morality. Ever since Natural Philosophy mutated into Science, philosophy has struggled to maintain relevance. This is just another case of science’s potential to engulf a field of philosophy and leave philosophers further pushed into the gaps untouched by science. In many ways, philosophy has suffered a fate similar to religion.

The main criticisms of The Moral Landscape involve: (1) pedantic fussiness over category errors presented in some of Harris’s thought experiments, (2) Harris building off of thought experiments which are highly speculative, (3) the problem of defining well-being, (4) the book presumes a utilitarian model of morality, and (5) the book puts the moral impetus on the State and not of the individual.

(1) Fair enough, although I see these criticisms as getting so far into the weeds of the book that they end up missing the fundamental message. It’s intellectually dishonest to dig so deep into the details of a specific example that you throw the baby out with the bath water. If we flushed every philosophical idea down the drain because the philosopher who argued for it had flaws in their logic, then we would be left with exactly zero philosophical ideas.

(2) This invokes a similar response to (1) with the added point that Harris is advocating for the creation of a comprehensive field of science. It’s absurd to demand anything other than speculation from a field that doesn’t officially exist yet. That would be like asking what quantum mechanics has done for us back before quantum mechanics was discovered. Also, all philosophy uses thought experiments, so a philosopher criticizing the use of thought experiments is highly hypocritical.

(3) It’s certainly possible to scientifically analyze the effects of certain behaviors, rules, and cultural values on human health, wealth, innovation, luxury time, system stability, etc. Psychology can then be used to study what variables define individual well-being (something like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). Once you have that knowledge, you can use it to guide society towards the outcomes that maximize individual well-being while balancing social goals. Really we are already do this science guided morality with issues like climate change, pollution control, public health, occupational and consumer safety, and plenty of other applied fields.

(4) The book does assume a utilitarian approach when plotting average well-being. To be clear, Utilitarianism is a recognized philosophical moral system that some modern philosopher still advocate for, however, it has come into much controversy as people have demonstrated how pure Utilitarianism can produce awkward conclusions. For example, pure Utilitarianism has a hard time grappling with the difference between a system which achieves a high average well-being through individual liberty for all versus a system which achieves high average well-being through a system which greatly benefits a majority at the oppression of a minority.

The Moral Landscape, as is, has this same measurement problem. To solve this, we can add a 4th dimension of time to the landscape to measure the stability of a system. It’s conceivable that some systems will initially produce a huge spike of well-being but are doomed to collapse and average out to a much lower peak over time. An example of such a system would be one where a majority of citizens initially benefit from the oppression of a minority group but the eventual violent rebellion of the oppressed minority will destabilize and/or collapse the system.

(5) I think this is just a misunderstanding of the book. Plotting out different moral systems for average well-being and stability does abstract up to the State level, but it can also be embraced at the individual level. Morality at the State and individual level ultimately comes down to the choices of individuals. I think Sam Harris's book is calling for a type of science to better equip people to make moral choices easier and organize institutions to increase one's ability to make moral choices. Certainly, if we all better understood how the normalization of a specific behavior or public policy would bring down the well-being of society this would dis-incentivize this behavior from being embraced.

#the moral landscape #moral landscape #objective morality #subjective morality #ethics #science #philosophy #thoughts #book #book review

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theculturedmarxist · 4 years

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My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad’s first memories was seeing his sister’s tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever. In 1923, my dad was hit by a car and spent two weeks in a hospital with a fractured skull as well as a lacerated thumb. His immigrant parents had no medical insurance, but the driver of the car gave his father $50 toward the medical bills. The only lasting effect was the scar my father carried for the rest of his life on his right thumb.

The year 1929 brought the Great Depression and lean times. My father’s father had left the family, so my dad, then 12, had to pitch in. He got a newspaper route, which he kept for four years, quitting high school after tenth grade so he could earn money for the family. In 1935, like millions of other young men of that era, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a creation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal that offered work on environmental projects of many kinds. He battled forest fires in Oregon for two years before returning to his family and factory work. In 1942, he was drafted into the Army, going back to a factory job when World War II ended. Times grew a little less lean in 1951 when he became a firefighter, after which he felt he could afford to buy a house and start a family.

I’m offering all this personal history as the context for a prediction of my dad’s that, for obvious reasons, came to my mind again recently. When I was a teenager, he liked to tell me: “I had it tough in the beginning and easy in the end. You, Willy, have had it easy in the beginning, but will likely have it tough in the end.” His prophecy stayed with me, perhaps because even then, somewhere deep down, I already suspected that my dad was right.

The COVID-19 pandemic is now grabbing the headlines, all of them, and a global recession, if not a depression, seems like a near-certainty. The stock market has been tanking and people’s lives are being disrupted in fundamental and scary ways. My dad knew the experience of losing a loved one to disease, of working hard to make ends meet during times of great scarcity, of sacrificing for the good of one’s family. Compared to him, it’s true that, so far, I’ve had an easier life as an officer in the Air Force and then a college teacher and historian. But at age 57, am I finally ready for the hard times to come? Are any of us?

And keep in mind that this is just the beginning. Climate change (recall Australia’s recent and massive wildfires) promises yet more upheavals, more chaos, more diseases. America’s wanton militarism and lying politicians promise more wars. What’s to be done to avert or at least attenuate the tough times to come, assuming my dad’s prediction is indeed now coming true? What can we do?

It’s Time to Reimagine America

Here’s the one thing about major disruptions to normalcy: they can create opportunities for dramatic change. (Disaster capitalists know this, too, unfortunately.) President Franklin Roosevelt recognized this in the 1930s and orchestrated his New Deal to revive the economy and put Americans like my dad back to work.

In 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney capitalized on the shock-and-awe disruption of the 9/11 attacks to inflict on the world their vision of a Pax Americana, effectively a militarized imperium justified (falsely) as enabling greater freedom for all. The inherent contradiction in such a dreamscape was so absurd as to make future calamity inevitable. Recall what an aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scribbled down, only hours after the attack on the Pentagon and the collapse of the Twin Towers, as his boss’s instructions (especially when it came to looking for evidence of Iraqi involvement): “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” And indeed they would do just that, with an emphasis on the “not,” including, of course, the calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003.

To progressive-minded people thinking about this moment of crisis, what kind of opportunities might open to us when (or rather if) Donald Trump is gone from the White House? Perhaps this coronaviral moment is the perfect time to consider what it would mean for us to go truly big, but without the usual hubris or those disastrous invasions of foreign countries. To respond to COVID-19, climate change, and the staggering wealth inequities in this country that, when combined, will cause unbelievable levels of needless suffering, what’s needed is a drastic reordering of our national priorities.

Remember, the Fed’s first move was to inject $1.5 trillion into the stock market. (That would have been enough to forgive all current student debt.) The Trump administration has also promised to help airlines, hotels, and above all oil companies and the fracking industry, a perfect storm when it comes to trying to sustain and enrich those upholding a kleptocratic and amoral status quo.

This should be a time for a genuinely new approach, one fit for a world of rising disruption and disaster, one that would define a new, more democratic, less bellicose America. To that end, here are seven suggestions, focusing — since I’m a retired military officer — mainly on the U.S. military, a subject that continues to preoccupy me, especially since, at present, that military and the rest of the national security state swallow up roughly 60% of federal discretionary spending:

1. If ever there was a time to reduce our massive and wasteful military spending, this is it. There was never, for example, any sense in investing up to $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to “modernize” America’s nuclear arsenal. (Why are new weapons needed to exterminate humanity when the “old” ones still work just fine?) Hundreds of stealth fighters and bombers — it’s estimated that Lockheed Martin’s disappointing F-35 jet fighter alone will cost $1.5 trillion over its life span — do nothing to secure us from pandemics, the devastating effects of climate change, or other all-too-pressing threats. Such weaponry only emboldens a militaristic and chauvinistic foreign policy that will facilitate yet more wars and blowback problems of every sort. And speaking of wars, isn’t it finally time to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? More than $6 trillion has already been wasted on those wars and, in this time of global peril, even more is being wasted on this country’s forever conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. (Roughly $4 billion a month continues to be spent on Afghanistan alone, despite all the talk about “peace” there.)

2. Along with ending profligate weapons programs and quagmire wars, isn’t it time for the U.S. to begin dramatically reducing its military “footprint” on this planet? Roughly 800 U.S. military bases circle the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion at a yearly cost somewhere north of $100 billion. Cutting such numbers in half over the next decade would be a more than achievable goal. Permanently cutting provocative “war games” in South Korea, Europe, and elsewhere would be no less sensible. Are North Korea and Russia truly deterred by such dramatic displays of destructive military might?

3. Come to think of it, why does the U.S. need the immediate military capacity to fight two major foreign wars simultaneously, as the Pentagon continues to insist we do and plan for, in the name of “defending” our country? Here’s a radical proposal: if you add 70,000 Special Operations forces to 186,000 Marine Corps personnel, the U.S. already possesses a potent quick-strike force of roughly 250,000 troops. Now, add in the Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions and the 10th Mountain Division. What you have is more than enough military power to provide for America’s actual national security. All other Army divisions could be reduced to cadres, expandable only if our borders are directly threatened by war. Similarly, restructure the Air Force and Navy to de-emphasize the present “global strike” vision of those services, while getting rid of Donald Trump’s newest service, the Space Force, and the absurdist idea of taking war into low earth orbit. Doesn’t America already have enough war here on this small planet of ours?

4. Bring back the draft, just not for military purposes. Make it part of a national service program for improving America. It’s time for a new Civilian Conservation Corps focused on fostering a Green New Deal. It’s time for a new Works Progress Administration to rebuild America’s infrastructure and reinvigorate our culture, as that organization did in the Great Depression years. It’s time to engage young people in service to this country. Tackling COVID-19 or future pandemics would be far easier if there were quickly trained medical aides who could help free doctors and nurses to focus on the more difficult cases. Tackling climate change will likely require more young men and women fighting forest fires on the west coast, as my dad did while in the CCC — and in a climate-changing world there will be no shortage of other necessary projects to save our planet. Isn’t it time America’s youth answered a call to service? Better yet, isn’t it time we offered them the opportunity to truly put America, rather than themselves, first?

5. And speaking of “America First,” that eternal Trumpian catch-phrase, isn’t it time for all Americans to recognize that global pandemics and climate change make a mockery of walls and go-it-alone nationalism, not to speak of politics that divide, distract, and keep so many down? President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said that only Americans can truly hurt America, but there’s a corollary to that: only Americans can truly save America — by uniting, focusing on our common problems, and uplifting one another. To do so, it’s vitally necessary to put an end to fear-mongering (and warmongering). As President Roosevelt famously said in his first inaugural address in the depths of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear inhibits our ability to think clearly, to cooperate fully, to change things radically as a community.

6. To cite Yoda, the Jedi master, we must unlearn what we have learned. For example, America’s real heroes shouldn’t be “warriors” who kill or sports stars who throw footballs and dunk basketballs. We’re witnessing our true heroes in action right now: our doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, together with our first responders, and those workers who stay in grocery stores, pharmacies, and the like and continue to serve us all despite the danger of contracting the coronavirus from customers. They are all selflessly resisting a threat too many of us either didn’t foresee or refused to treat seriously, most notably, of course, President Donald Trump: a pandemic that transcends borders and boundaries. But can Americans transcend the increasingly harsh and divisive borders and boundaries of our own minds? Can we come to work selflessly to save and improve the lives of others? Can we become, in a sense, lovers of humanity?

7. Finally, we must extend our love to encompass nature, our planet. For if we keep treating our lands, our waters, and our skies like a set of trash cans and garbage bins, our children and their children will inherit far harder times than the present moment, hard as it may be.

What these seven suggestions really amount to is rejecting a militarized mindset of aggression and a corporate mindset of exploitation for one that sees humanity and this planet more holistically. Isn’t it time to regain that vision of the earth we shared collectively during the Apollo moon missions: a fragile blue sanctuary floating in the velvety darkness of space, an irreplaceable home to be cared for and respected since there’s no other place for us to go? Otherwise, I fear that my father’s prediction will come true not just for me, but for generations to come and in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined.

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basicsofislam · 4 years

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ISLAM 101: Muslim Culture and Character: Embracing The World:

FORGIVENESS

Jesus Christ said to a crowd that was waiting rocks in hand to stone a sinner: “If anyone of you is without sin let him be the first to throw a stone.”[1] Can anyone with a sin on their conscience still be inclined to stone another if they truly understand this idea? If only those unfortunate ones of today who spend their lives putting the lives of others to the litmus test could understand this! In fact, if the reason for stoning a person is our malice and hatred, if this is the reason why we have passed judgment on them, then it is not possible to pass this sentence on them. The truth is, unless we destroy the idols in our ego as courageously as Abraham destroyed the idols, we will never be able to make a correct decision in the name of our selves or in the name of others.

Forgiveness emerged with and reached perfection through humanity. In this respect, we can witness the greatest forgiveness and the most impeccable tolerance in the greatest exemplars of humanity.

A generation which was raised in a particular past under constant hostile pressure saw continuous horror and brutality in the dark world into which they had been pushed. They saw blood and pus, not just in the dark of night, but also at the break of day. What could be learned from a society whose voice, breath, thought, and smile were tainted with blood? The things that were presented to this generation were the complete opposite and totally contrary to what they needed and what they desired. This generation took on a second nature, caused by years of neglect and misleading suggestions; the disorder and sedition caused by these became a flood. If only by now we could have understood them. Alas! Where is such insight?

We believe that forgiveness and tolerance will heal most of our wounds, if only this celestial instrument will be in the hands of those who understand its language. Otherwise, the incorrect methods of behavior, those used up until now, will cause many complications and will only confuse us from now on.

Diagnose the illness, then set out to treat it:

Do you think any ointment will be a cure for every wound?

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kny111 · 5 years

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The Algorithmic Rise of the “Alt-Right”

While furthering my reading on the synergies being formed through our recent presidency and the resurgence of white extremist terrorism the data many seem to be pointing to is how important technology is in the rise of such ass backwards systems. Here’s a great review on the way in which capitalists adored ‘big tech’ itself has been infiltrated by such oppressive forces that have, as many of us realized, been with us since the creation of this country. Here are some highlight excerpts off this delve into white supremacist ideals in technologically based network systems:

In a sense, we’ve managed to push white nationalism into a very mainstream position,” @JaredTSwift said. “Now, we’ve pushed the Overton window,” referring to the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. Twitter is the key platform for shaping that discourse. “People have adopted our rhetoric, sometimes without even realizing it. We’re setting up for a massive cultural shift,” @JaredTSwift said. Among White supremacists, the thinking goes: if today we can get “normies” talking about Pepe the Frog, then tomorrow we can get them to ask the other questions on our agenda: “Are Jews people?” or “What about black on white crime?” And, when they have a sitting President who will re-tweet accounts that use #whitegenocide hashtags and defend them after a deadly rally, it is fair to say that White supremacists are succeeding at using media and technology to take their message mainstream.

Networked White RageCNN commentator Van Jones dubbed the 2016 election a “Whitelash,” a very real political backlash by White voters. Across all income levels, White voters (including 53% of White women) preferred the candidate who had retweeted #whitegenocide over the one warning against the alt-right. For many, the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement coupled with the putative insult of a Black man in the White House were such a threat to personal and national identity that it provoked what Carol Anderson identifies as White Rage.In the span of U.S. racial history, the first election of President Barack Obama was heralded as a high point for so-called American “race relations.” His second term was the apotheosis of this symbolic progress. Some even suggested we were now “post-racial.” But the post-Obama era proves the lie that we were ever post-racial, and it may, when we have the clarity of hindsight, mark the end of an era. If one charts a course from the Civil Rights movement, taking 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) as a rough starting point and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the close of Obama’s second term as the end point, we might see this as a five-decades-long “second reconstruction” culminating in the 2016 presidential election.

Taking the long view makes the rise of the alt-right look less like a unique eruption and more like a continuation of our national story of systemic racism. Historian Rayford Logan made the persuasive argument that retrenchment and the brutal reassertion of White supremacy through Jim Crow laws and the systematic violence of lynching was the White response to “too much” progress by those just a generation from slavery. He called this period, 1877–1920, the “nadir of American race relations.” And the rise of the alt-right may signal the start of a second nadir, itself a reaction to progress of Black Americans. The difference this time is that the “Whitelash” is algorithmically amplified, sped up, and circulated through networks to other White ethno-nationalist movements around the world, ignored all the while by a tech industry that “doesn’t see race” in the tools it creates.

Media, Technology, and White NationalismToday, there is a new technological and media paradigm emerging and no one is sure what we will call it. Some refer to it as “the outrage industry,” and others refer to “the mediated construction of reality.” With great respect for these contributions, neither term quite captures the scope of what we are witnessing, especially when it comes to the alt-right. We are certainly no longer in the era of “one-to-many” broadcast distribution, but the power of algorithms and cable news networks to amplify social media conversations suggests that we are no longer in a “peer-to-peer” model either. And very little of our scholarship has caught up in trying to explain the role that “dark money” plays in driving all of this. For example, Rebekah Mercer (daughter of hedge-fund billionaire and libertarian Robert Mercer), has been called the “First Lady of the Alt-Right” for her $10-million underwriting of Brietbart News, helmed for most of its existence by former White House Senior Advisor Steve Bannon, who called it the “platform of the alt-right.” White nationalists have clearly sighted this emerging media paradigm and are seizing—and being provided with millions to help them take hold of—opportunities to exploit these innovations with alacrity. For their part, the tech industry has done shockingly little to stop White nationalists, blinded by their unwillingness to see how the platforms they build are suited for speeding us along to the next genocide.

The second nadir, if that’s what this is, is disorienting because of the swirl of competing articulations of racism across a distracting media ecosystem. Yet, the view that circulates in popular understandings of the alt-right and of tech culture by mostly White liberal writers, scholars, and journalists is one in which racism is a “bug” rather than a “feature” of the system. They report with alarm that there’s racism on the Internet (or, in the last election), as if this is a revelation, or they “journey” into the heart of the racist right, as if it isn’t everywhere in plain sight. Or, they write with a kind of shock mixed with reassurance that alt-right proponents live next door, have gone to college, gotten a proper haircut, look like a hipster, or, sometimes, put on a suit and tie. Our understanding of the algorithmic rise of the alt-right must do better than these quick, hot takes.

If we’re to stop the next Charlottesville or the next Emanuel AME Church massacre, we have to recognize that the algorithms of search engines and social media platforms facilitated these hate crimes. To grasp the 21st century world around us involves parsing different inflections of contemporary racism: the overt and ideologically committed White nationalists co-mingle with the tech industry, run by boy-kings steeped in cyberlibertarian notions of freedom, racelessness, and an ethos in which the only evil is restricting the flow of information on the Internet (and, thereby, their profits). In the wake of Charleston and Charlottesville, it is becoming harder and harder to sell the idea of an Internet “where there is no race… only minds.” Yet, here we are, locked in this iron cage.

Head over to SagePub for full article

#news #white supremacy #infiltration #history #white history #journalism #tech #big tech #intersectional activism #white terrorism #state terrorism

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