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thecaffeinebookwarrior · 4 years

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The Importance of Antiheroes

By Brooksie C. Fontaine (me) and Sara R. McKearney

Few tropes are as ubiquitous as that of the hero. He takes the form of Superman, ethically and non-lethally thwarting Lex Luthor. Of Luke Skywalker, gazing wistfully at twin suns and waiting for his adventure to begin. In pre-Eastwood era films, a white Stetson made the law-abiding hero easily distinguishable from his black-hatted antagonists. He is Harry Potter, Jon Snow, T’Challa, Simba. He is of many incarnations, he is virtually inescapable, and he serves a necessary function: he reminds us of what we can achieve, and that regardless of circumstance, we can choose to be good. We need our heroes, and always will.

But equally vital to the life-blood of any culture is his more nebulous and difficult to define counterpart: the antihero. Whereas the hero is defined, more or less, by his morality and exceptionalism, the antihero doesn’t cleanly meet these criteria. Where the hero tends to be confident and self-assured, the antihero may have justifiable insecurities. While the hero has faith in the goodness of humanity, the anthero knows from experience how vile humans can be. While the hero typically respects and adheres to authority figures and social norms, the antihero may rail against them for any number of reasons. While the hero always embraces good and rejects evil, the antihero may do either. And though the hero might always be buff, physically capable, and mentally astute, the antihero may be average or below. The antihero scoffs at the obligation to be perfect, and our culture's demand for martyrdom. And somehow, he is at least as timeless and enduring as his sparklingly heroic peers.

Which begs the question: where did the antihero come from, and why do we need him?

The Birth of the Anti-Hero:

It is worth noting that many of the oldest and most enduring heroes would now be considered antiheroes. The Greek Heracles was driven to madness, murdered his family, and upon recovering had to complete a series of tasks to atone for his actions. Theseus, son of Poseidon and slayer of the Minotaur, straight-up abandoned the woman who helped him do it. And we all know what happened to Oedipus, whose life was so messed up he got a complex named after him.

And this isn’t just limited to Ancient Greece: before he became a god, the Mesoamerican Quetzalcoatl committed suicide after drunkenly sleeping with his sister. The Mesopotamian Gilgamesh – arguably the first hero in literature – began his journey as a slovenly, hedonistic tyrant. Shakespearian heroes were denoted with an equal number of gifts and flaws – the cunning but paranoid Hamlet, the honorable but gullible Othello, the humble but power-hungry MacBeth – which were just as likely to lead to their downfall as to their apotheosis.

There’s probably a definitive cause for our current definition of hero as someone who’s squeaky clean: censorship. With the birth of television and film as we know it, it was, for a time, illegal to depict criminals as protagonists, and law enforcement as antagonists. The perceived morality of mainstream cinema was also strictly monitored, limiting what could be portrayed. Bonnie and Clyde, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Scarface, The Godfather, Goodfellas, and countless other cinematic staples prove that such policies did not endure, but these censorship laws divorced us, culturally, from the moral complexity of our most resonant heroes.

Perhaps because of the nature of the medium, literature arguably has never been as infatuated with moral purity as its early cinematic and T.V. counterparts. From the Byronic male love interests of the Bronte sisters, to “Doctor” Frankenstein (that little college dropout never got a PhD), to Dorian Grey, to Anna Karenina, to Scarlett O’Hara, to Holden Caulfield, literature seems to thrive on morally and emotionally complex individuals and situations. Superman punching a villain and saving Lois Lane is compelling television, but doesn’t make for a particularly thought-provoking read.

It is also worth noting, however, that what we now consider to be universal moral standards were once met with controversy: Superman’s story and real name – Kal El – are distinctly Jewish, in which his doomed parents were forced to send him to an uncertain future in a foreign culture. Captain America punching Nazis now seems like a no-brainer, but at the time it was not a popular opinion, and earned his Jewish creators a great deal of controversy. So in a manner of speaking, some of the most morally upstanding heroes are also antiheroes, in that they defied society’s rules.

This brings us to our concluding point: that anti-heroes can be morally good. The complex and sometimes tragic heroes of old, and today’s antiheroes, are not necessarily immoral, but must often make difficult choices, compromises, and sacrifices. They are flawed, fallible, and can sometimes lead to their own downfall. But sometimes, they triumph, and we can cheer them for it. This is what makes their stories so powerful, so relatable, and so necessary to the fabric of our culture. So without further ado, let’s have a look at some of pop-culture’s most interesting antiheroes, and what makes them so damn compelling.

Note: For the purposes of this essay, we will only be looking at male antiheroes. Because the hero’s journey is traditionally so male-oriented, different standards of subversiveness, morality, and heroism apply to female protagonists, and the antiheroine deserves an article all her own.

Antiheroes show us the negative effects of systematic inequalities (and what they can do to gifted people.)

As demonstrated by: Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders.

Why he could be a hero: He’s incredibly charismatic, intelligent, and courageous. He deeply cares for his loved ones, has a strict code of honor, reacts violently to the mistreatment of innocents, and demonstrates surprisingly high levels of empathy.

Why he’s an antihero: He also happens to be a ruthless, incredibly violent crime lord who regularly slashes out his enemies’ eyes.

What he can teach us: From the moment Tommy Shelby makes his entrance, it becomes apparent that Peaky Blinders will not unfold like the archetypical crime drama. Evocative of the outlaw mythos of the Old West, Tommy rides across a smoky, industrialized landscape. He is immaculately dressed, bareback, on a magnificent black horse. A rogue element, his presence carries immediate power, causing pedestrians to hurriedly clear a path. You get the sense that he does not conform to this time or era, nor does he abide by the rules of society.

The ONLY acceptable way to introduce a protagonist.

Set in the decades between World War I and II, Peaky Blinders differentiates itself from its peers, not just because of its distinctive, almost Shakespearian style of storytelling, powerful visual style, and use of contemporary music, but also in the manner in which it shows that society provokes the very criminality it attempts to vanquish. Moreover, it dedicates time to demonstrating why this form of criminality is sometimes the only option for success in an unfair system. When the law wants to keep you relegated to the station in which you were born, success almost inevitably means breaking the rules. Tommy is considered one of the most influential characters of the decade because of the manner in which he embodies this phenomenon, and the reason why antiheroes pervade folklore across the decades.

Peaky Blinders engenders a unique level of empathy within its first episodes, in which we are not just immersed in the glamour of the gangster lifestyle, but we understand the background that provoked it. Tommy, who grew up impoverished and discriminated against due to his “didicoy” Romany background, volunteered to fight for his country, and went to war as a highly intelligent, empathetic young man. He returned with the knowledge that the country he had served had essentially used him and others like him as canon fodder, with no regard for their lives, well-being, or future. Such veterans were often looked down upon or disregarded by a society eager to forget the war. Having served as a tunneler – regarded to be the worst possible position in a war already beset by unprecedented brutality – Tommy’s constant proximity to death not only destroyed his faith in authority, but also his fear of mortality. This absence of fear and deference, coupled with his incredible intelligence, ambition, ruthlessness, and strategic abilities, makes him a dangerous weapon, now pointed at the very society that constructed him to begin with.

It is also difficult to critique Tommy’s criminality, when we take into account that society would have completely stifled him if he had abided by its rules. As someone of Romany heritage, he was raised in abject poverty, and never would have been admitted into situations of higher social class. Even at his most powerful, we see the disdain his colleagues have at being obligated to treat him as an equal. In one particularly powerful scene, he begins shoveling horse manure, explaining that, “I’m reminding myself of what I’d be if I wasn’t who I am.” If he hadn’t left behind society’s rules, his brilliant mind would be occupied only with cleaning stables.

However, the necessity of criminality isn’t depicted as positive: it is one of the greatest tragedies of the narrative that society does not naturally reward the most intelligent or gifted, but instead rewards those born into positions of unjust privilege, and those who are willing to break the rules with intelligence and ruthlessness. Each year, the trauma of killing, nearly being killed, and losing loved ones makes Tommy’s PTSD increasingly worse, to the point at which he regularly contemplates suicide. Cillian Murphy has remarked that Tommy gets little enjoyment out of his wealth and power, doing what he does only for his family and “because he can.” Steven Knight cites the philosophy of Francis Bacon as a driving force behind Tommy’s psychology: “Since it’s all so meaningless, we might as well be extraordinary.”

This is further complicated when it becomes apparent that the upper class he’s worked so arduously to join is not only ruthlessly exclusionary, but also more corrupt than he’s ever been. There are no easy answers, no easy to pinpoint sources of societal or personal issues, no easy divisibility of positive and negative. This duality is something embraced by the narrative, and embodied by its protagonist. An intriguingly androgynous figure, Tommy emulated the strength and tenacity of the women in his life, particularly his mother; however, he also internalized her application of violence, even laughing about how she used to beat him with a frying pan. His family is his greatest source of strength and his greatest weakness, often exploited by his enemies who realize they cannot fall back on his fear of mortality. He feels emotions more strongly than the other characters, and ironically must numb himself to the world around him in order to cope with it.

However, all hope is not lost. Creator Steven Knight has stated that his hope is ultimately to redeem Tommy, so by the show’s end he is “a good man doing good things.” There are already whispers of what this may look like: as an MP, Tommy cares for Birmingham and its citizens far more than any “legitimate” politicians, meeting with them personally to ensure their needs are met; as of last season, he attempted a Sinatra-style assassination of a rising fascist simply because it was the right thing to do. “Goodness” is an option in the world of Peaky Blinders; the only question is what form it will take on a landscape plagued by corruption at every turn.

Regardless of what form his “redemption” might take, it’s negligible that Tommy will ever meet all the criteria of an archetypal hero as we understand it today. He is far more evocative of the heroes of Ancient Greece, of the Old West, of the Golden Age of Piracy, of Feudal Japan – ferocious, magnitudinous figures who move and make the earth turn with them, who navigate the ever-changing landscapes of society and refuse to abide by its rules, simultaneously destructive and life-affirming. And that’s what makes him so damn compelling.

Who needs traditional morality, when you look this damn good?

Other examples:

Alfie Solomons from Peaky Blinders. Tommy’s friend and sometimes mortal enemy, the two develop an intriguing, almost romantic connection due to their shared experiences of oppression and powerful intellects. Steven Knight has referred to Alfie as “the only person Tommy can really talk to,” possibly because he is Tommy’s only intellectual equal, resulting in a strange form of spiritual matrimony between the two.

Omar Little from The Wire, an oftentimes tender and compassionate man who cares deeply for his loved ones, and does his best to promote morality and idealism in a society which offers him few viable methods of doing so. He may rob drug dealers at gunpoint, but he also refuses to harm innocents, dislikes swearing, and views his actions as a method of decreasing crime in the area.

Chiron from Moonlight, a sensitive and empathetic young man who became a drug dealer because society had provided him with virtually no other options for self-sustenance. The same could be said for Chiron’s mentor and father figure, Juan, a kind and nurturing man who is also a drug dealer.

To a lesser extent, Tony from The Sopranos, and other fictional Italian American gangsters. The Sopranos often negotiates the roots of mob culture as a response to inequalities, while also holding its characters accountable for their actions by pointing out that Tony and his ilk are now rich and privileged and face little systematic discrimination.

Walter White from Breaking Bad – an underpaid, chronically disrespected teacher who has to work two jobs and still can’t afford to pay for medical treatment. More on him on the next page.

Antiheroes show us how we can be the villains.

As demonstrated by: Walter White from Breaking Bad.

Why he could be a hero: He’s a brilliant, underappreciated chemist whose work contributed to the winning of a Nobel Prize. He’s also forging his own path in the face of incredible adversity, and attempting to provide for his family in the event of his death.

Why he’s an antihero: In his pre-meth days, Walt failed to meet the exceptionalism associated with heroes, as a moral but socially passive underachiever living an unremarkable life. At the end of his transformation, he is exceptional at what he does, but has completely lost his moral standards.

What he can teach us: G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Fairy tales do not tell children that the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” Following this analogy, it is equally important that our stories show us we, ourselves, can be the dragon. Or the villain, to be more specific, because being a dragon sounds strangely awesome.

Walter White of Breaking Bad is a paragon of antiheroism for a reason: he subverts almost every traditional aspect of heroism. From the opening shots of Walt careening along in an RV, clad in tighty whities and a gas mask, we recognize that he is neither physically capable, nor competent in the manner we’ve come to expect from our heroes. He is not especially conventionally attractive, nor are women particularly drawn to him. He does not excel at his career or garner respect. As the series progresses, Walt does develop the competence, confidence, courage, and resilience we expect of heroes, but he is no longer the moral protagonist: he is self-motivated, vindictive, and callous. And somehow, he still remains identifiable, which is integral to his efficacy.

But let us return to the beginning of the series, and talk about how, exactly, Walt subverts our expectations from the get-go. Walt is the epitome of an everyman: he’s fifty years old, middle class, passive, and worried about identifiable problems – his health, his bills, his physically disabled son, and his unborn baby. Whereas Tommy Shelby’s angelic looks, courage, and intellect subvert our preconceptions about what a criminal can be, Walt’s initial unremarkability subverts our preconceptions about who can be a criminal. The hook of the series is the idea that a man so chronically average could make and distribute meth.

Just because an audience is hooked by a concept, however, does not mean that they’ll necessarily continue watching. Breaking Bad could have easily veered into ludicrosity, if it weren’t for another important factor: character. Walt is immediately and intensely relatable, and he somehow retains our empathy for the entirety of the series, even at his least forgivable.

When we first meet Walt, his talents are underappreciated, he’s overqualified for his menial jobs, chronically disrespected by everyone around him, underpaid, and trapped in a joyless, passionless life in which the highlight of his day is a halfhearted handjob from his distracted wife. And to top it all off? He has terminal lung cancer. Happy birthday, Walt.

We root for him for the same reason we root for Dumbo, Rudolph, Harry Potter: he’s an underdog. The odds are stacked against him, and we want to see him triumph. Which is why it’s cathartic, for us and for Walt, when he finally finds a profession in which he can excel – even if that profession is the ability to manufacture incredibly high-quality meth. His former student Jesse Pinkman – a character so interesting that there’s a genuine risk he’ll hijack this essay – appreciates his skill, and this early appreciation is what makes his relationship with Jesse feel so much more genuine than Walt’s relationship with his family, even as their dynamic becomes increasingly unhealthy and Walt uses Jesse to bolster his meth business and his ego. This deeply dysfunctional but heartfelt father-son connection is Walt’s tether to humanity as he becomes increasingly inhumane, while also demonstrating his descent from morality. It has been pointed out that one can gauge how far-gone Walt is from his moral ideals by how much Jesse is suffering.

But to return to the initial point, it is imperative that we first empathize with Walt in order to adequately understand his descent. Aside from the fact that almost all characters are more interesting if the audience can or wants to empathize with them, Walt’s relatability makes it easy to understand our own potential for toxic and destructive behaviors. We are the protagonist of our own story, but we aren’t necessarily its hero.

Similarly, we understand how easily we can justify destructive actions, and how quickly reasonable feelings of anger and injustice swerve into self-indulgent vindication and entitlement. Walt claims to be cooking meth to provide for his family, and this may be partially true; but he also denies financial help from his rich friends out of spite, and admits later to his wife Skylar that he primarily did it for himself because he was good at it and “it made (him) feel alive.”

This also forces us to examine our preconceptions, and essentially do Walt’s introspections for him: whereas Peaky Blinders emphasize the fact that Tommy and his family would never have been able to achieve prosperity by obeying society’s laws, Walt feels jilted out of success he was promised by a meritocratic system that doesn’t currently exist. He has essentially achieved our current understanding of the American dream – a house with a pool, a beautiful wife and family, an honest job – but it left him unable to provide for his wife and children or even pay for his cancer treatment. He’s also unhappy and alienated from his passions and fellow human beings. With this in mind, it’s understandable – if absurd – that the only way he can attain genuine happiness and excel is through becoming a meth cook. In this way, Breaking Bad is both a scathing critique of our current society, and a haunting reminder that there’s not as much standing between ourselves and villainy as we might like to believe.

So are we all slaves to this system of entitlement and resentment, of shattered and unfulfilling dreams? No, because Breaking Bad provides us with an intriguing and vital counterpoint: Jesse Pinkman. Whereas Walt was bolstered with promises that he was gifted and had a bright future ahead of him, Jesse was assured by every authority figure in his life that he would never amount to anything. However, Jesse proves himself skilled at what he’s passionate about: art, carpentry, and of course, cooking meth. Whereas Walt perpetually rationalizes and shirks responsibility, Jesse compulsively takes responsibility, even for things that weren’t his fault. Whereas Walt found it increasingly acceptable to endanger or harm bystanders, Jesse continuously worked to protect innocents – especially children – from getting hurt. Though Jesse suffered immensely throughout the course of the show – and the subsequent movie, El Camino – the creators say that he successfully made it to Alaska and started a carpentry business. Some theorists have supposed that Jesse might be a Jesus allegory – a carpenter who suffers for the sins of others. Regardless of whether this is true, it is interesting, and amusing to imagine Jesus using the word “bitch” so often. Though he didn’t get the instant gratification of immediate success that Walt got, he was able to carve (no pun intended – carpentry, you know) a place for himself in the world.

Jesse isn’t a perfect person, but he reminds us that improving ourselves and creating a better life is an option, even if Walt’s rise to power was more initially thrilling. So take heart: there’s a bit of Heisenberg in all of us, but there’s also a bit of Jesse Pinkman.

The savior we all need, but don’t deserve.

Other examples:

Bojack from Bojack Horseman. Like Walt, the audience can’t help but empathize with Bojack, understand his decision-making, and even see ourselves in him. However, the narrative ruthlessly demonstrates the consequences of his actions, and shows us how negatively his selfishness and self-destructive qualities impact others.

Again, Tony Soprano. Tony, even at his very worst, is easy to like and empathize with. Despite his position as a mafia Godfather, he’s unfailingly human. Which makes the destruction caused by his actions all the more resonant.

Antiheroes emphasize the absurdity of contemporary culture (and how we must operate in it.)

As demonstrated by: Marty Byrde from Ozark.

Why he could be a hero: He’s a loving father who ultimately just wants to provide for and ensure the safety of his family. He’s also fiercely intelligent, with excellent negotiative, interpersonal, and strategic skills that allows him to talk his way out of almost any situation without the use of violence.

Why he’s an antihero: He launders money for a ruthless drug cartel, and has no issue dipping his toes into various illegal activities.

Why he’s compelling: Marty is an antihero of the modern era. He has a remarkable ability to talk his way into or out of any situation, and he’s also a master of using a pre-constructed system of rules and privileges to his benefit.

In the very first episode, he goes from literally selling the American Dream, to avoiding murder at the hands of a ruthless drug cartel by planning to launder money for them in the titular Ozarks. Despite his long history of dabbling in illegality, Marty has no firearms – a questionable choice for someone on the run from violent drug kingpins, but a testament to his ability to rely on his oratory skills and nothing else. He doesn’t hesitate to engage an apparently violent group of hillbillies to request the return of his stolen cash, because he knows he can talk them into giving it back to him. The only time he engages other characters in physical violence, he immediately gets pummeled, because physical altercation has never been his form of currency. Not that he’s subjected to physical violence particularly often, either: Marty is a master of the corporate landscape, which makes him a master of the criminal landscape. He is brilliant at avoiding the consequences of his actions.

It’s easy to like and admire Marty for his cleverness, for being able to escape from apparently impermeable situations with words as his only weapon. He’s got a reassuring, dad-ly sort of charisma that immediately endears the viewer, and offers respite from the seemingly endless threats coming from every direction. He unquestionably loves his family, including his adulterous wife. As such, it’s easy to forget that Marty is being exploited by the same system that exploits all of us: crony capitalism. The polar opposite of meritocratic capitalism – in which success is based on hard work, ingenuity, and, hence the name, merit – crony capitalism benefits only the conglomerates that plague the global landscape like cancerous warts, siphoning money off of workers and natural capital, keeping them indentured with basic necessities and the idle promise of success.

Marty isn’t benefiting from his hard work in the Ozarks. Everything he makes goes right back to the drug cartel who continuously threatens the life of him and his family. He is rewarded for his efforts with a picturesque house, a boat, and the appearance of success, but he is not allowed to keep the fruits of his labor. Marty may be an expert at navigating the corporate and criminal landscape, but it still exploits him. In this manner, Marty embodies both the American business, the American worker, and a sort of inversion of the American dream.

In this same manner, Marty, the other characters, and even the Ozarks themselves embody the modern dissonance between appearance and reality. Marty’s family looks like something you’d respect to see on a Christmas card from your DILF-y, successful coworker, but it’s bubbling with dysfunctionality. His wife is cheating on him with a much-older man, and instead of confronting her about it, he first hired a private investigator and then spent weeks rewatching the footage, paralyzed with options and debating what to do. The problem somewhat solves itself when his wife’s lover is unceremoniously murdered by the cartel, and Wendy and Marty are driven into a sort of matrimonial business partnership motivated by the shared interest of protecting their children, but this also further demonstrates how corporate even their family dealings have become. His children, though precocious, are forced to contend with age-inappropriate levels of responsibility and the trauma of sudden relocation, juxtaposed with a childhood of complete privilege up until this point.

Conversely, the shadow of the Byrde family is arguably the Langmores. Precocious teenagers Ruth and Wyatt can initially be shrugged off as local hillbillies and budding con-artists, but much like the Shelby family of the Peaky Blinders, they prove to be extremely intelligent individuals suffering beneath a society that doesn’t care about their stifled potential. Systemic poverty is a bushfire that spreads from one generation to the next, stoked by the prejudices of authority figures and abusive parental figures who refuse to embrace change out of a misguided sense of class-loyalty.

Almost every other character we meet eventually inverts our expectations of them: from the folksy, salt-of-the-earth farmers who grow poppies for opium and murder more remorselessly than the cartel itself, to the cookie-cutter FBI agent whose behavior becomes increasingly volatile and chaotic, to the heroin-filled Bibles handed out by an unknowing preacher, to the secrets hidden by the lake itself, every detail conveys corruption hidden behind a postcard-pretty picture of tranquility and success.

Marty’s awareness of this illusion, and what lurks behind it, is perhaps the greatest subversion of all. Marty knows that the world of appearance and the world of reality coexist, and he was blessed with a natural talent for navigating within the two. Like Walter White, Marty makes us question our assumptions about who a criminal can be – despite the fact that many successful, attractive, middle-aged family men launder money and juggle criminal activities, it’s still jarring to witness, which tells us something about how image informs our understanding of reality. Socially privileged, white-collar criminals simply have more control over how they’re portrayed than an inner-city gang, or impoverished teenagers. However, unlike Walt, Marty’s criminal activities are not any kind of middle-aged catharsis: they’re a way of life, firmly ingrained in the corporate landscape. They were present long before he arrived on the scene, and he knows it. He just has to navigate them.

Just like our shining, messianic heroes can teach us about truth, justice, and the American way, so too does each antihero have something to teach us: they teach us that society doesn’t reward those who follow its instructions, nor does it often provide an avenue of morality. Even if you live a life devoid of apparent sin, every privilege is paid for by someone else’s sacrifice. But the best antiheroes are not beacons of nihilism – they show us the beauty that can emerge from even the ugliest of situations. Peaky Blinders is, at its core, a love story between Tommy Shelby and the family he crawled out of his grave for, just as Breaking Bad is ultimately a deeply dysfunctional tale of a father figure and son. Ozark, like its predecessors, is about family – the only authenticity in a society that operates on deception, illusion, and corruption. They teach us that even in the worst times and situations, love can compel us, redeem us, bind us closer together. Only then can we face the dragons of life, and feel just a bit more heroic.

Other examples:

Don Draper from Mad Men. A similarly Shakespearian figure for the modern era, Don is a man who appears to have everything – perfect looks, a beautiful wife and children, a prestigious job. He could have stepped out of an ad for the American Dream. And yet, he feels disconnected from his life, isolated from others by the very societal rules he, as a member of the ad agency, helps to propagate. It helps that he’s literally leading a borrowed life, inherited from the stolen identity of his deceased fellow soldier, and was actually an impoverished, illegitimate farmboy whose childhood abuse permanently damaged his ability to form relationships. The Hopper-esque alienation evoked by the world of Mad Men really deserves an essay all it’s own, and his wife Betty – whose Stepford-level mask of cheerful subservience hides seething unhappiness and unfulfilled potential – is a particularly intriguing figure to explore. Maybe in my next essay, on the importance of the antiheroine.

#my writing tips #writing tips #tommy shelby #peaky blinders #walter white #breaking bad #jesse pinkman #bojack horseman #don draper #writing advice #antihero #the types of antiheroes #long post for ts

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dauntingdarling · 4 years

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In Defense of the Weeping Monk

So during my first ramped scrolling of Weeping Monk content post-completion of the series, I came across a number of people against the Weeping Monk not just for this storyline but because of how people have been quick to obsess over him and ship Nimulot.

In particular, calling the Nimulot ship racist or homophobic, his character a predator, and those shipping him with anyone toxic. While these points are valid and come from a place (I would assume) of good intentions (anti-homophobia, anti-racist, protect the children etc.) they are strong accusations that should not be linked to this character. And here’s why:

Racism:

-I’m going to be blunt here. Seeing as Racism isn’t a joke, it shouldn’t be thrown around as an excuse not to like WM just because said character didn’t end up with a person of color. If you don’t like him, you don’t like him. Don’t blanket cover your reasoning with a serious accusation that even today is still running rampid and needs to be taken seriously in today’s society (see George Floyd)

-It would be one thing to call out a show if they were expressing Racist undertones, but Cursed hasn't. Two of the most powerful characters in King Arthur lore are played by wonderful actors of color (Arthur and sister Morgana) and should this show continue, we will see the pair of them raise in the ranks of power for both good (King Arthur) and evil (Morgan le fay).

-People are stating that WM should have been black, as we’ve had more than enough white edgy boys out in shows and movies (see Winter Solider, Kylo Ren/Ben solo...) I’m not against the idea of a black or someone other than white actor portraying WM. That’s not my fight. My fight is over disliking Daniel Sharman’s casting because of his race rather than his acting skill. The guy plays WM fantastically and shouldn’t be docked points just because he’s a white British guy. Like... come on.

-I could go on, but we have more topics to cover so I’ll close this part with this: keep up the good fight to end Racism, but don’t use it to elevate your own ship/actor profile/ etc.

Throwing around this topic to benefit your own belief (more than just in media) is what makes people degrade racism in the first place. Don’t be that person.

Homophobia:

-WHY WOULD SHIPPING NIMULOT BE HOMOPHOBIC? WHY

-I would have thought this show already established that they were not homophobic seen by the great response Nimue gave to Morgana after spotting the scene above^. She normalized their relationship as any other and that was beautiful *chef’s kiss*

-Back to WM, from what I read on the topic from a person with this view, they stated that because people are shipping Nimulot over Nimue and Morgana (I’m sorry I don’t know their ship name), they are homophobic? WHAT

-Dude that’s great that you saw the fantastic chemistry between Morgana and Nimue, but do you really want Nimue to bed both siblings like that?

-What I just stated isn’t my real fight on the topic, it’s just something I just thought of as I am here typing away. My fight here is just because Nimue hasn't entertained the possibility of a romantic relationship with Morgana doesn’t mean those shipping Nimue and WM together are homophobic. We just are ex-reylo trash (as I’m noticing so far) and love the enemies to lovers trop.

-Also I am pretty sure that those shipping Nimulot adore the relationship Nimue has with Morgana as they give off major feminism vibes. And have a healthy relationship overall.

Which brings me to my next point:

Toxic Shipping:

-No one is stating that WM should hook up with Nimue immediately. And if they are, take notes. WM still needs to grow from the horrors he has done in the past and what he has ahead of him. Only then would he be deserving of Nimue (should she take him)

-I honestly believe people are not shipping Nimulot because it’s toxic, but rather because they hope that WM will come around on the other side as a better man (for he has been through the ringer) and should find peace. With Nimue? Sure, if the storyline fits.

-I’ve read that some don’t want Nimue to be the fixer upper of WM, and I agree, but do not find this statement to be enough to call the Nimue ship toxic by any means. We just want to see everyone happy, is that so bad?

-And after growing up idolizing the major character arch of Zuko from Avatar the Last Airbender, I can’t help but hope (as the optimist that I am) that WM will get a similar ending to Zuko.

-As for why people want Nimue with him and not, say Gwenevere, it is because of all the similarities they carry so far that complement each other (while also playing the opposites attract card). Similarities include:

cursed out fay (N- the villagers scorning her, WM- the monks attitude toward him as a weapon and not a being)

lingering on the edge of dark and light (N with the cursed sword, WM with his faith)

scars (that happen to be on their backs)

their relationship with Squirrel (both protective, not smothering)

Symbols of their side in war (WM is the monk’s best fighter, N is their queen)

I’m sure people can give you more reasons. This is just what I came up with on the spot after one watch through of the series. If you have others, please write them below, I’m curious.

Now onto the topic that I find to be atrocious:

Predator:

-EXCUSE ME, a predator prays on others. How on God’s green earth is WM that? He was a literal sword for hire/raised to fight against his kind through mental strain from this messed up ideology of christianity.

-And for those calling his relationship with Squirrel unhealthy... fair point but I’m not done yet.

-I don’t mean all this to say that what he did under the red monks was good or even acceptable. No it wasn’t, the dude was practicing mass genocide of his own race, that’s fucked up. (That torture scene in front of the mill was really something)

-But as we learn in later episodes, all of his actions linger on not being damed and going to heaven (I assume) as seen in the scene when we got a nice look of him shirtless while he was having a moral crisis.

-Speaking of moral crisis, did you notice that he had one when the rest of the villains present in this show do not? Even Iris (a fantastic villain) had a tragic backstory with her family like WM, but rather than question her motives, she starts on the villain path.

-Now while I do admit he doesn’t treat Squirrel right in the beginning, it makes sense for his character and where he is at. Not to say that hurting a child and using him as a pawn to kill leftover tribe members is justified.

-But the writers always wrote the interactions between Squirrel and WM with a hint of humor. Squirrel was always talking back, calling WM and his horse ugly, and even hissing out “you” in front of the red monks. All this going on while WM maintains a blank expression, that to viewers is almost comical (because it breaks away from the sad emo boy cliche)

-In the end, WM needed someone like Squirrel to get out of the disastrous rut the red monks had WM in. For WM to start on this journey of his (that I’m sure will continue through season 2) he needed to show he had a moral code.

-Also, like many complicated characters, WM never thought through the damage he has done and how his work impacted children up until G called him out for it. For this reason, I think G had just as much a part of getting WM to revolt as Squirrel did.

- I think his relationship with Squirrel will continue to grow into a more protective association now that G is dead. G made Squirrel into a knight, the next step is for this kid to train like one. Who better than Mr. Lancelot himself. (They better have a training scene in next season or I will riot)

-And lastly, all of you who know the lore of Lancelot understand that he will become the best of the best and also the most loyal and chivalrous knight out there. What a better way to love a character with these attributes than if he started in the proverbial gutter and grows to understand and value these characteristics? It’s the shiny ending that he needs to work hard to achieve and that is what, at the end of the day, all lovers of WM want to see in the next few seasons.

Him becoming that knight in shining armor.

#cursed netflix #weeping monk #lancelot #nimue #purcival #rant #daniel sharman #katherine langford #nimulot #anti nimulot

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vanillawhiskeyflavoredkisses · 3 years

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I just have to get this off my chest after seeing some very disturbing posts about 9/11 floating around on my dash as well as some truly crude commentary. A lot probably won't agree with my sentiments but I feel like this needs to be said.

I've seen a lot of things on Tumblr in the past that maybe I consider to be in poor taste or don't agree with but I usually just scroll past, sometimes block for curating sake, but today is the first time I truly was shell-shocked. To see the memes and blasé jokes people are making about this day are just absolutely horrific and appalling.

I get that a lot of people on this site now may not remember what happened that day and only learned second hand through school or media or other people telling them. I get that a lot occurred after this that wasn't right which we definitely should be learning from. I also get that there is a lot of anti-American and anti-white sentiments going around currently, especially on this site.

But here's the thing:

Not only Americans died that day. Not only white people died that day. That's the thing about terrorists and what these hijackers did: they don't care about your skin color, your culture, your religious preference, your sexual orientation, your gender orientation, your age, your economic status, your personality, whether you support them or not, your political persuasion, your job, or any of it. Everyone is fair game to them. For crying out loud, look at what the Afghani people are currently going through and how the Taliban are treating their own country's people, women especially. If you think this is bad (which it truly is), have you seen how things went under their rule before 9/11 even happened? Do you know their terrifyingly violent and brutal history? Women had acid thrown in their faces if they didn't wear a full hijab. People were mutilated or executed if they didn't fall in line with the law of the Taliban. And this doesn't even begin to go into Al-Qaeda or Isis. But I'm not here to talk about that or delve into that topic too much.

My point in mentioning all of this is that white Americans weren't the only ones that were killed that day. People of all faiths, of all colors, of different countries, died that day, too. And the unity that is consistently discussed every 9/11 anniversary is in regards to us being aware of that fact, us mourning all of their losses together, and the collective desire to come together and help once the planes hit and after the towers collapsed.

So when people say "why am I supposed to cry over white Americans getting killed that day" think about that. Not only white Americans died that day. And regardless of their color, their nationality, their culture, their religion, etc. anyone dying is always sad. Whether it be a jetliner being used as a weapon that crashed into their floor or someone dying of cancer or someone being killed in a mudslide or someone dying in a car accident -- it is always sad. And empathy should always be shown in response, even if it doesn't impact you personally. Let's not forget these people have loved ones that got left behind, that are still here.

So when people say "if something knocks into a cow and knocks it over, I'm not expected to care, but if something knocks into a building and knocks it over, suddenly I'm supposed to care?" think about that. People aren't grieving two large pieces of steel architecture. People aren't saying "always remember those two towers". The WTC Towers were a symbol (yes, for American wealth, I get it) but became so much more of a multi-faceted powerful symbol after 9/11. The towers represent a way of life before 9/11 happened, but more importantly they represent the people lost that day, who were in the towers when they collapsed. For all of the first responders who were stuck on those floors still trying to help evacuate people to safety when the buildings finally gave. The two footprints and two blue lights aren't a symbol of American wealth or a naivete and simpler way of life pre-9/11 - they are a symbol of memorialization for that day. The Freedom Tower was erected to show that despite the loss of that day, we stood united (even if there seems to be more and more division these days). It's a message to the world that yes, destruction and death happened that day in NYC, but so did rebuilding and life carrying on. It's a symbol of strength, resilience, and unity - something that was everywhere you looked days after this event occurred. The two towers (aka NYC) may have gotten knocked down but the city got back up. They weren't kept down - that's the point of the Freedom Tower.

When people say "I don't understand, what is it that I shouldn't be forgetting since I can't remember it anyway" here is what we all should be remembering despite our age or our connection (or lack thereof) with this event:

2,997 innocent civilians died that day. Among them were 343 firefighters, 37 police officers, 23 Port Authority police officers, 8 EMS workers, and 4 other first responders. Also among them were 246 people on the four planes that crashed.

The passengers of United Flight 93 made a choice to fight back against the hijackers and saved lives that day by sacrificing their own.

Many children lost parents. Many parents lost children. Many brothers lost sisters, and many sisters lost brothers. Many spouses lost their significant others. Many lost friends, family, and loved ones.

For those who want a better connection to this day who didn't experience it and/or don't remember it, and for those others who are seriously lacking in empathy: yes, it was a highly publicized event due to the hundreds of cameras (including media outlets) watching that day, but if the horrific images aren't enough to garner some of your empathy, then there are plenty of other resources at your disposal. Documentaries like 9/11 by James Hanlon and the Naudet brothers, 102 Minutes That Changed America (which shows you not only all of the first-hand eyewitness accounts that day but also lets you hear 911 calls, radio transmissions between firefighters, and people's reactions to the event and each other who were there), 9/11 Firefighters (on Discovery Plus) and even more recently, 9/11: The Turning Point (on Netflix) which provides a 360 degree view of the events that led up to 9/11, 9/11 itself, and what came after, displaying all different viewpoints. You can read the 9/11 Commission Report or there are several books and memoirs out there like Wake-Up Call by Kristen Breitweiser, or even historical accounts in books, newspaper articles, and online. But most importantly, listen to people's stories. The ones who were there, the ones who saw it happen, the ones who ran in to help, the ones who lost loved ones. That is the most important part and the most powerful. On Hulu, ABC News ran segments of 9/11 Twenty Years Later, "Women Of Resilience" being especially powerful. It's hard not to feel a human connection to these stories or any kind of empathy.

For those who are making these jokes and memes, if you like shows like 9-1-1 and Chicago Fire, etc, imagine those first responder characters rushing into those buildings to save lives and losing theirs in the process. If you don't remember 9/11 or feel any connection or empathy, imagine hundreds of Bucks or Eddies or Bobbys or Hens or Chimneys dying that day as they worked to save so many. Sorry to be so blunt because I love those characters too, but do you get a little bit of the connection now? Do you feel any empathy? I'm not trying to equate real life heroes and sheroes with fictional characters of course, but if it helps you to understand a little better in some way, well...I'm throwing it out there.

I myself lived in the Tri-State area at the time of the attacks. I remember seeing the second plane seconds before it crashed into the second building. I remember the devastation I felt watching the first tower collapse knowing that a loved one was most likely inside and how hard I cried thinking he was dead. (thankfully, he had been late to work that day and he got out of the area before the towers came down) I remember the relief and gratefulness we all felt hearing from him to assure us that he was alive when he finally was able to get to a phone, stating he was covered in dust and ash from the buildings. I remember the panic and fear we all felt, thinking the world was ending and we were all going to die, that this was it, this was World War III, after it was confirmed that the Pentagon had also been hit and there was also a downed plane in Pennsylvania. I remember the grief another loved one suffered because she lost her entire floor (she had been out sick that day) and every single one of her co-workers. I remember the race to pick up children from school and get them home as soon as possible. I remember the rage that coursed through us seeing the footage of some people in certain countries celebrating the attacks in the streets, enjoying the deaths of so many Americans, a couple of these countries who lost citizens themselves in these attacks. I remember the camping out in front of the televisions night after night for a week straight afterwards, watching the news 24/7, worrying that there might be more attacks. I remember the feeling of sheer terror anytime a plane was heard overhead or seen appearing low enough in the sky that you could practically make out which airline it was for months afterwards. I remember seeing the lights the first time they were lit from our home. I remember feeling pure fear not only for what happened that day but also what came afterwards (not yet understanding that these weren't practitioners of Islam that did this but radical extremists who had literally hijacked the religion). I remember seeing the devastation at Ground Zero through a tear in the fabric over a fence as we walked through the city months afterwards. I remember not wanting to fly for years. I remember the anger I felt that our government had failed us due to political bs between agencies and countless others (which we found out especially when the 9/11 Commission Report came out) and that because of this horrific and absurd failure, thousands of innocent people had died. I remember seeing the crushed ladder truck, and the toy of the little girl who was on one of the planes at the 9/11 Memorial Museum and all of the pictures in that room that just floored me. (I also remember being pissed off that many were treating it as a selfie op where they were allowed to take pictures, completely missing the point of the museum's existence) But most of all, I remember feeling that life would never be the same for any of us ever again, and that the feeling of safety we had naively enjoyed on September 10, 2001 would never return.

But I also remember the compassion and unity we saw rising in the country after those attacks. I remember the gratitude for all of our first responders, those we lost that day and those who were still with us, actively working to recover those lost and to clear Ground Zero. I remember the feeling of collectiveness, that we all shared grief and showed support to one another in those days afterwards. I remember the fallen heroes and sheroes who ran into those buildings, who were off duty but raced from wherever they were that day to come and help. I remember The Man In the Red Bandana aka Welles Crowther (and many like him who worked to save others) who has become another important symbol of that day. I remember hearing all of the stories of people helping one another before and after the towers collapsed. I remember the good that this day represents. That while we may have seen some of the worst of humanity that day in the form of violence, death, weaponized airplanes, and devastation, we also saw the very best of humanity in the form of our first responders and people helping one another.

Look, did Islamophobia happen? Yes. Was it right? No, absolutely not. As I stated above, I myself feared the idea of the religion until I was educated by a friend of mine about the difference between the religion and extremism. This form of hijacking ideology can be seen in examples like the Westboro Baptist Church or even Hitler. Terrorists do not represent the true spirit of Islam no matter what the former tries to force people to believe. Just as the WBC is not the true spirit of Christianity, and so on and so forth. But even during the time I had feared the religion before gaining understanding and clarity, I never confronted or mistreated any practicing Muslim or Arab-American. Ever. I never posted hate or spewed vitriol against them. Just like with the current pandemic, I still cannot believe there are people out there attack Asian-Americans as if this whole thing is their fault. That's still mind boggling to me and it is absolutely 100% WRONG. It should not be happening. Same with Islamophobia. And it breaks my heart to read that many Arab-Americans and practicing Muslims still worry when this anniversary comes around that they may be attacked. It might not mean much, but I just want to say I am truly sorry for that and you have my full support. Always.

Did we go to war and was it just? Yes we did go to war. Was it just? Afghanistan? I need more information in order to have a fully-formed opinion but there are plenty who say yes and plenty who say no. Plenty who say we made things better over there (before we exited and the Taliban advanced) and plenty who say we didn't and only made it worse. I truly cannot say which assertion is correct and I think it would be narrow-minded and completely moronic (and possibly arrogant and presumptuous?) of me to speak on a subject I know so little about, one way or the other. Iraq? No, I don't think it was just and I honestly wish we could go back and do things differently.

But coming back to 9/11 and what this day means for so many, the people who died, the people who rushed headfirst into danger, the people who lost their loved ones. We saw incredible bravery, selflessness, and compassion for your fellow human that day despite what happened. We saw the strength within ourselves despite the fear and anger. We saw resilience. That is what the anniversary is meant to be a reminder of. The sacrifices, the loss, the courage, and the strength. Black, White, Gay, Straight, Christian, Muslim, Man, Woman, Young, Old -- it didn't matter. We all came together.

So regardless of whether it's the cool thing to do right now on this site (or elsewhere) to hate on America or 9/11 or white Americans or the anniversary itself on the very anniversary of these attacks, I ask that you please consider when posting these hurtful (and frankly harmful) words of hatred and vitriol such as referenced above that there are people out there who lost their loved ones on 9/11, that yes some of them may be on this very site and going through the 9/11 tag, and that some of them may have even lost a loved one in either war and are again on this site reading your words. Regardless of what you think or feel, please consider them and tag appropriately if you're going to post. Please consider that some of these people are currently losing their loved ones due to 9/11-related illnesses because of the cleanup at Ground Zero. Please consider that there are children who lost a parent or loved one, or who were orphaned that day (yes, they exist, we had some in our school district) who are also on this site reading your words. Basically, please just consider and be considerate. Please stop spreading hatred on a day that happened due to hatred; please stop perpetuating that cycle.

Like Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that."

TLDR: Love and light, my friends. Love and light. ✌️❤️

#9/11 #never forget #remember 9/11 #9/11 isnt a joke or a meme

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blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years

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Anonymous asked: I love your blog it’s definitely one of the most smartest and cultured ones around. Since you are a super chilled out military vet (flying combat helicopters, how cool is that?!) and also a very thoughtful and devout Christian (I think you talked about being an Anglican) I know this is a cheeky question but I’ll ask it anyway. Would you rather live in a military dictatorship or a theocratic dictatorship?

Now this is an interesting question you play at 2am and the wine is dangerously low.

I have to correct you on a couple of things. Yes, it was ‘cool’ to fly combat helicopters especially in a battlefield setting but it was just a job, like any other. And it’s never about the pilot it’s about the rest of the team behind you, especially your ground crew who make sure you go up and come back in one piece. As for being super chilled you clearly have never seen how sweaty one gets flying in high stress situations. Oh and the stink! A skunk wouldn’t last 5 minutes in my cockpit.

As for my Christian beliefs, I’ll settle for being a believing one. My faith, such as it is, is about living - and failing - by grace day by day than being fervently devout. Faith is a struggle to not rely upon one’s own strength but on divine mercy and grace.

Anyway....

Would I rather live in a military dictatorship or a theocratic dictatorship?

History has shown there's not a lot of difference between the two...

No, wait. On second thoughts maybe I would rather live in a military dictatorship as the lesser evil.

As an ex-officer in her HM armed forces, I know things will be run pretty efficiently with no dilly-dallying. So there’s that.

I suppose even if one does say it’s preferable to live under military rule rather than a theocratic one there is still the question of what kind of military rule? Every nation that has been under military rule came to power and sustained their hold under different dynamics. And of course it also depends on how mature civil society and the rule of law as well as the democratic culture really was in the first place. A lot is tied up with the brutal nature of the personality of the regime leader too. There are simply too many variables.

So one is forced to generalise. So l can’t get too serious in answering this question.

Rather than focus on the negative side let’s look on the bright side.

Just off the top of my head I can think of these reasons why I would choose to ‘live’ under military rule than a theocratic one. There are in no real order:

Beds will be made properly subject to inspection.

Families will be run like military units with the man at the head of the table.

Family meals will be taken at set times.

Public civility will make a return (e.g. no public spitting, drunken, or loutish behaviour).

Freedom of speech will more likely be censored than abolished (better than nothing I suppose)

Elections would be rigged rather than banned (but who really votes anyway these days?) 

They will most likely make the trains run on time (unless you’re British or Italian).

Military leaders often enjoy genuine popularity - albeit after eliminating plausible rivals - that is based on “performance legitimacy,” a perceived competence at securing prosperity and defending the nation against external or internal threats. The new autocrats of today are more surgical: they aim only to convince citizens of their competence to govern.

Maintaining power, for military dictators and their court, is less a matter of terrorising and persecuting victims than of manipulating beliefs about the world. But of course they can do both if backed into a corner to survive.

State propaganda aims not to re-engineer human souls but to boost the military regime leader’s ratings.

The military tend to stay out of personal lives. They have a political police but not necessarily a moral police.

Economic growth is more likely to be stable than under a theocratic state.

Military dictatorships are more likely to build vast bureaucracies to run the state - more jobs for everyone

The military put on great events. Their parades are more colourful and spectacular.

Having a sense of humour is more likely to get you imprisoned than executed for telling an anti-regime joke. It’s no joke to say that people develop a more refinery subversive sense of humour when oppressed. Take for example a famous comedian in Myanmar, Zarganar, for whom comedy is a shield and a weapon. During the time of the military dictatorship (1962-2010) he would make jokes like, “The American says, 'We have a one-legged guy who climbed Mount Everest.' The Brit says, 'We recently had a guy with no arms who swam the Atlantic Ocean. But the Burmese guy says, 'That's nothing! We had a leader who ruled for 18 years without a brain!" It was for jokes like this that Zarganar received a prison sentence in 2008 - for up to 59 years.

Military dictatorships don’t last long. They are more unstable. They tend to fall from the weight of their own contradictions.

One of the problems of living in a theocracy is how absolutist it would be in looking at life in terms of clear cut black and white according to those who rule over you. I strongly suspect in a theocratic state the morality secret police will be all over you looking for any social or moral infraction. In a Christian Theocracy, you'll never be Christian enough - the same would be for states that were Islamic, Judaic or Hindu etc. There's always going to be some pious asshole there with another version of Christianity that is more Christian than you and you're going to lose the freedom to make your own choices.

Under theocracies, unlike other authoritarian regimes, the rulers are the moral authorities that legitimises and fuels their political legitimacy to govern. It assumes its own moral correctness married to its political destiny to rule over others. As C.S Lewis memorably puts it, “Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.”

Finally, I’ll go with the military dictatorship with the hope that there might be some way of bringing the system down with a bit of logic and rationality. Hell knows that wouldn't be possible in a theocratic system!

I agree with Margaret Atwood when she said, “If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil.” There’s more wriggle room with fighting against a military dictatorship because it’s usually against an asshole tyrant - or a ruling oligarchy of a military junta - and not a pernicious idea soaked in theological bullshit or an entire ideology divinely santificated by God himself.

A more interesting question is not to ask is why many people are so readily drawn to be ruled under a military rule or a theocratic one and especially a benevolent dictatorship (like Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore or Paul Kagame in Rwanda) but why increasingly more people in the Western world look to authoritarian figures to rule and shape their lives?

Why do Silicon Valley titans like Peter Thiel and others like him think fondly of ditching democracy in the name of some utopian hyper-capitalist vision of ‘freedom’?

I hear murmurs of the same talk when I interact with corporate colleagues and high net worth individuals I hear it around dinner tables about how democracy is bad for business and profit. Often it’s accompanied by praise for China's ability to "get things done." I just roll my eyes and smile politely.

I think - outside of the legitimate concern of the decay of civil discourse, the corruption of politicians, and corrosiveness of crony capitalism - it’s because democratic politics is hard. Damn hard.

Moreover democratic politics does not have a "right" answer. There never is.

In our Western societies it is the playing field (or market place?) where our values compete. Surely, you say, there is a right way to get the job done: to fill in the potholes, build the roads, keep our streets safe, get our kids to learn reading and math. Ah, but look how quickly those issues get contentious.

Whose potholes should get filled first? Do we try to keep our streets safe through community policing or long prison sentences? Should teachers be given merit pay, are small classrooms better, or should we lengthen the school day? These issues engender deep political fights, all - even in the few debates where research provides clear, technocratic answers. That is because the area of politics is an area for values disputes, not technical solutions.

One person's "right" is not another's because people prioritise different values: equity versus excellence, efficiency versus voice and participation, security versus social justice, short-term versus long-term gains.

Democratic politics allows many ideas of "right" to flourish. It is less efficient than dictatorship. It also makes fewer tremendous mistakes.

The longing for a leader who knows what is in her people's best interests, who rules with care and guides the nation on a wise path, was Plato's idea of a philosopher-king. It's a tempting picture, but it's asking the wrong question.

In political history, philosophers moved from a preference for such benevolent dictators to the ugly realities of democracy when they switched the question from "who could best rule?" to "what system prevents the worst rule?"

But clearly democracy is buckling under pressure in our torrid times. Populism - the logical end consequence of a purer democracy - is chipping away at the edifice of democratic norms and conventions. Increasingly inward looking nativism and nationalism fuel passions beyond the control of reason.

Perhaps it is time we went back to the tried and tested example of a monarchy, a constitutional one that is.

A revitalised monarchy in Britain needs a Head of State that can provide a personal identity to an impersonal State, and a collective sense of itself. A Head of State who does not owe his or her position to either patronage or a vote can more properly represent all the people. Consider that a President who has been elected, often by a minority of a minority of the electorate, cannot adequately speak for the people who did not vote for him or her. It is even worse if the President has been appointed, because then he owes his position to a small clique.So, the accident of birth is the best means of appointing a Head of State. Someone who has no party political axe to grind, or special favours to repay to a vested interest. Someone whose allegiance is to the people. Not just allegiance to the people who voted for him or his political party, but allegiance to all the people of the country equally. Far from being "incompatible" with democracy, a Monarchy can thereby enhance the government of the land.

The Monarch is a national icon. An icon which cannot be replaced adequately by any other politician or personality. This is because the British Monarchy embodies British history and identity in all its aspects, both good and bad.

When you see the Queen you not only see history since 1952, when she took the throne, but you see a person who provides a living sense of historical continuity with the past. Someone who embodies in her person a history which extends back through time, back through the Victorian era, back into the Stuart era and beyond. You see the national history of all parts of our islands, together, going right back in time.

As Edmund Burke, Roger Scruton and Michael Oakeshott would say, the monarchy is a living continuity between the past, the present and the future.

With its traditions, its history, its ceremonial, and with its standing and respect throughout the world, the British Monarchy represents a unique national treasure, without which the United Kingdom would be sorely impoverished.

If you value national distinctiveness, you should be a Monarchist.

If you are anti-globalist you should be a Monarchist because Monarchies represent the different national traditions and distinctions among the nations.

The desire to secure, strengthen and promote your own distinct national icons, whether your Monarch, or your own unique national identity, should be your concern, whether you live here in St Andrews, or whether you live in St Petersburg, or whether you live in St Paulo.

As the global financial system rushes us all towards a world intended to eradicate all local and national distinctions, the Monarchy stands out as different, distinct and valuable. Constitutionally, practically, spiritually and symbolically the Monarchy is a national treasure, the continued erosion of which would change the character of Britain, and not in a good way!

I’m speaking as a High Tory now, sorry. And so of course I only see it working for the United Kingdom....and the Commonwealth (slip that discreetly in there for you India, Australia, Canada, and Africa).

Still, if you want egalitarianism then look at Norway and the Netherlands - both highly "egalitarian" societies, and both monarchies.

Everyone else will just have to jolly well do without or ask us politely to come back (I’m looking at you my dear American colonial cousins, all will be forgiven).

The best of all worlds? Time will tell.

At your service, Ma’am....

Thanks for your question.

#question #ask #military dictatorship #government #rule #democracy #culture #society #theocracy #army #christianity #religion #nd high net worth individuals

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theregoesmylurkerstatus · 5 years

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The Mighty Nein keep self describing their group as a bunch of “assholes” but now that I think about it, they’ve kind of... won over the vast majority of people they’ve come across who they weren't trying to kill?

They got a wary mob boss to hire them and give them professional trust and leniency. They got an ENEMY SPY in the middle of a mission to speak with them honestly after about five minutes of talking. They got an anti-social, grumpy old wizard who’s house they almost broke into to give them the time of day and the ability to jump in and out of his house. Two of those they just did on a whim.

They were almost hired on by contract for the Empire, officially. They got a hostile Queen from an enemy nation that was at war with the land she assumed they came from to grant them her favour. They got a fucking Pirate King who KNEW that they’d broken pretty much the only rules he (lethally) enforced to let them go.

All of these people had legitimate reasons to do so -- given that the Nein had done a them favours or proved their competency -- but the fact remains that the Mighty Nein were able to ingratiate themselves. Have consistently been able to wriggle their way out of bad situations not with their skill in battle, but with forthrightness and communication. They've charmed and deceived and negotiated, yeah. But ultimately what that means is that people were won over by them, by their arguments and gestures of good faith. Because most of these are ongoing connections they’ve made. They didn’t just sweet talk in the moment, they’ve maintained these relationships in some capacity. Very few could have made those relationships in the first place.

How many friends have they made, now? Shakaste, Nila, Twiggy, Keg, Calianna, all out there somewhere. Kiri, Kiri’s adopted family, Bryce, Rissa and her father Cleff, Gustav, Orly. How many allies? Yussah, Essik, potentially Ophelia and the Gentlemen, perhaps Dairon if they don’t step on each other’s toes, Waccoh if they stay on her good side. They’ve gotten guest PCs they’ve met to be willing to die for them (Twiggy and Keg, most notably). Of course, that’s partially just due to the nature of the game, but in-universe the point stands.

Calianna’s letter is what got me thinking about all this. She points out, very correctly, that though they’re suspicious and not terribly polite, they give pretty much everyone the time of day and effort at the slightest incentive. And yet they never think people like them in particular.

They’ve gotten on just about everyone they’ve encountered’s good side, somehow, which is impressive, but they don’t seem to realize anyone is going to continue looking at them with anything other than annoyance or tolerance. There were a lot of great metas floating around over the last week discussing (or just joking) about how they were so close to running last week after a single screw up, and in the end the Bright Queen... thanked them for what they’d already done, instead of punishing them from their failure like they expected.

The Nein think they have to prove, over and over and over again to the same people, that they’re competent and useful and not liabilities. Because otherwise they’ll be tossed aside at the slightest provocation.

Of course, that’s not news. We’ve known this whole time that they have these issues because it’s pretty obvious in how they interact with one another. It’s taken them this long for them to come to terms, individually, with the fact that people within the Nein actually like them. Hell, that lesson still may have not sunk in all the way! But they clearly still think that no one outside the group will want them around them for any length of time. They think they have to go above and beyond to prove that they’re trustworthy, all the time, and still assume they’re on thin ice. It doesn’t even occur to them that people might find them likeable in any capacity (excluding, of course, Caduceus and Jester. Everyone likes Caduceus and Jester.)

I’m not saying that’s not the case. They’ve had to prove themselves to many, many people, and if they hadn’t then most of these connections probably wouldn’t exist at all. They’re on shaky territory with many of their allegiances. But the fact that they’ve made them at all speaks to them NOT being nearly as bad at gaining trust and good will as they all seem to think. Their general attitude is that these are a series of flukes that will inevitably collapse, and not a pattern that speaks to their general reputation. They think they’re bullshitting their way through everything, and while they may be making it up as they go along, they’ve actually been pretty honest and rather lacking in ill intent, exercising and improving a decent personable front. And the people around them can see that, and have potentially formed favourable opinions from that.

The default, patented Mighty Nein assumption is “we’re skating by.” Yes, Caduceus, you’re right, none of the rest of them HAVE had the experience of being trusted to do the right thing. Not only that, it straight up doesn’t occur to them that they ever could be. It’s a surprise when anyone says anything positive about them aside from “they can do their jobs.” That people might reluctantly find them charming, if they’re not actively trying to seem that way? That people might grow fond of them, value them? There’s a constant clock ticking in most of their heads, counting down until they inevitably burn any and all bridges they’ve made.

I don’t believe any of the Nein realized the impression they’d made on Calianna until that letter. That they might not only have done the bare minimum, but actually raised her bar for how she’d like to be treated. That (shocker) they might actually be... better, and kinder, than the average person.

(And, well. Why would they? Fjord, bullied and outcast his whole life, eyed with suspicion, tolerated at best. Beau, scolded and outcast her whole life, having her own parents fail to give her positive attention, lacking almost entirely for friends and role models. Nott, bullied and outcast her whole life (are we noticing a patten here?), first by her own community and family, then by a community she hated. Caleb, trained up as a ruthless weapon, discarded when no longer useful, locked up alone for a decade, and (you guessed it) outcast once he was free. Jester, alone and sheltered, friendless for all but her most recent months of life, forced out of the only place she’d ever lived under threat of death for a single silly mistake. Yasha! Has never mentioned friends! Lost her only loved one! Kicked out of her only known home. And then Caduceus. Who came from a big family who seems to have loved him, was given legitimate responsibilities, and feels comfortable within them. Is any of this a mystery? Why would most of the Nein EVER expect people to want them around? They never have before.)

I feel like I’m not necessarily saying anything unique here. But I often wonder what people think of the Nein as a whole, and while “crazy” and “competent” are the popular answers (and I’m sure they’re true), “liked” or “thought well of” to ANY degree generally isn’t up there. Certainly not among the Nein themselves. And yet positive inclinations towards them (from Essik, and Calianna, and many others) are perhaps not such uncommon reactions, regardless.

Am I wrong? Are they actually generally disliked or considered annoying? Possibly. It’s hard to know the inner workings of most NPC’s heads. But they certainly have gained better reactions than they give themselves credit for. And the dislike they seem to assume as the default is maybe not as much of a default as they think.

#@ that one sentence: that pretty much sums up how fjord beau and caleb balance taking the lead for the mighty nein #'charmed' fjords specialty 'deceived' beaus specialty 'negotiated' calebs specialty #there's a whole other interesting post in that that i... still haven't finished writing #idk how accurate this is and (as usual) i don't know if what I'm trying to say comes across #but ay I've word vomited some thoughts prompted by both caliannas letter and essik's amusement at their dumb prank #as well as the whole bright queen thing last week #so maybe there's something interesting and accurate buried in this dfhgjhkj #critical role #cr spoilers #c2e71 #ramblings #the mighty nein #speculation

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mrmallard · 4 years

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The Last of Us 2 post - NO SPOILERS

So The Last of Us 2 launched, and as expected it's facing heavy criticism from the Gamergate, alt-right turd sort of crowd. There's a lot to be said for the homophobia and anti-semitism that's being shown by detractors of the game, but I don't think I'm fully qualified to speak on that.

One think I will mention is that I think it's clear to anyone who's paid attention to the game's reception that this backlash started with the game's announcement - the reception was instantly divided when Ellie was shown kissing a woman, and it's that reactionary kneejerk negative reaction to that which informs this current backlash. This backlash didn't spring up overnight - it's been cooking for years.

But again, I'll leave the content of those points to people who are better equipped to go over them. I've seen some really gross shit already, but I don't think I can articulate the issues in a way that would do them justice.

What I want to talk about is discourse.

Discourse has been on my mind lately, I had a moment recently where I dipped into an old fandom to talk about my fandom experiences as a teenager. One topic that I tried to articulate was that of discourse - not Tumblr drama, but actual civil discourse.

Because discourse isn't a dirty word - it's just a term to describe the process of debating and discussing something. Tumblr has a really unhealthy relationship with the term, to the point that it's synonymous with bad-faith arguments and hot takes on here, but at a baseline, there's nothing wrong with the concept or the term. It's just how you engage with the concept.

Discourse is one of the first things I began thinking about in the wake of The Last of Us 2's launch. Because I honestly wouldn't begrudge anyone for not enjoying the game, considering all the times I haven't agreed with the zeitgeist. So far I've really enjoyed this game, but a part of my growth as a person has been to try and understand and respect viewpoints which I don't necessarily share. I think healthy discourse is built on the back of understanding and respect, and so even if I disagree with a viewpoint, I can engage with it respectfully given that it's reasonable.

Unfortunately, I can't say that the TLoU2 backlash is anywhere approaching reasonable at the moment. At least, I don't think it is.

That's not to say that you can't dislike TLoU2 and disagree with what direction it goes in. What I mean by "the backlash is unreasonable" is that a lot of what I'm seeing is predicated on a bunch of bullshit. The flames have been stoked by a bunch of leaks that paint the game in the worst light possible - which have been challenged by counter-leaks that give more context to the most controversial scenes of the game, which didn't make as many waves as the initial leaks did - and it's clear as day that the game's being review bombed by a bunch of bot accounts.

I'm also seeing comments that are genuinely adversarial towards minorities due to a gameplay section where weapon control is limited - no spoilers, but it's being touted as a failure of game design and PC culture going mad when gameplay shit has been getting limited in slow, story-based video game moments for decades. I don't think the backlash to this game is being made in good faith.

Over the course of 6 years, The Last of Us garnered 9,500 user reviews on Metacritic, a majority of which were positive. TLoU was a big game - people have been bending over backwards to lick this game's boots for half a decade. 9,500 user reviews is a lot of reviews, let alone the amount of 10/10 scores it's gotten.

TLoU2 got 35,000 user reviews in the first 48 hours of its release. Its user score is down to around 3-4 out of 10. There is no way that a majority of those reviews are legit, this soon after the game launched.

That's not to say that games can't be legitimately review bombed on launch - it happened to Diablo 3, and that was a single player game which was inaccessible to each and every one of its paying customers due to server issues. Things do get review bombed on release, but this doesn't feel organic. Considering how long petty dissent has been building over this title, there's no doubt in my mind that this review bombing is a bunch of ideological culture war bullshit.

Diablo 3's review bombing felt like it was coming from a legitimate place, considering that customers were being deprived of an experience that they paid for, and which would be easily experienced without the need for an internet connection in any other circumstance. I don't think TLoU2's review bombing is comparable - I think it's being made in bad faith.

And outside of all the crazy, awful shit that the most toxic and reactionary detractors are doing - one of the groups of people who will be disadvantaged by this backlash the most will be people who legitimately didn't like the game.

Personally, I'm really enjoying TLoU2. I'm sure that there's someone out there with tastes that are completely at ends with what I like, who isn't coming after this game with ulterior motives. They won't like the long cinematics, or the dialogue, or they think that the pursuit of realism in games is a fool's errand and the game will age like milk. They got swept up in the hype expecting to like it, and they just didn't - it happens.

Even if that opinion runs counter to a majority of the people who play the game, or is made in a space where most people liked the game, that opinion can come from a place of good faith and a desire for genuine discussion. Of course, it isn't that simple most of the time - it's not hard to troll about something while pretending to have the best possible intentions. But a negative opinion can be made with genuine intentions to discuss what you mean, or to co-exist with more positive coverage of the thing you don't like.

How the fuck are people going to be open to that sort of discourse when the negative side to this discourse is associated with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories?

No-one is going to take this discourse seriously except a bunch of radicalised shitheads who've been frothing at the mouth since they saw Ellie kiss a woman, who've been complaining about the woke essjaydubya agenda ever since. The backlash is just going to prove itself to be an explosive, vitriolic circlejerk by some alt right dipshits, and people who genuinely have something to bring to the table and talk about are going to be swept away with all that garbage.

I like civil discourse. I like to challenge myself, I like to talk stuff out from different viewpoints. It lets me step into someone else's shoes, and it's interesting to confront my own opinion through a different lens like that. Wholly different opinions can coexist within the bounds of civil discourse.

The issue with the current TLoU2 discourse is that there are so many scumbags poisoning the well that a genuine, earnest critical opinion of the game will slip through the cracks. The people who don't hate the game will get defensive, the people who are there to shitpost and troll about a product they have no intention on engaging with will keep pushing the envelope in bad faith, and anyone who actually wants to have a nuanced discussion on the pros and cons of the game will be sorted into the SJW boogeyman pile or the anti-semitic alt-right dipshit pile.

In short - the side that's review bombing the game right now, claiming to care about the average consumer and who positions themselves as the underdog against a dishonest machine of lies and corruption, is shooting their argument in the foot. This isn't about The Last of Us 2 - this is about being the biggest assholes they can be and radicalising as many people as they can to go to bat for a bunch of alt-right dogshit. Again, I want to believe that there are people looking for a genuine conversation here, but that won't happen while tensions are this high, when aggression towards the game is this thick and blatant. All that this sort of atmosphere does is make it harder to talk about the game in a critical, respectful way.

To have civil discourse, you need to have a sense of understanding and respect for the ideas being brought to the table. A backlash this large and this toxic only serves to politicise the topic, which makes it so much harder to have an unbiased talk about something when everyone has a bunch of ideological hang-ups they need to address. This is being done intentionally.

I want to finish this post by saying that I don't care if TLoU2 is your favourite game of the last 10 years, or if you think it's even more of an extravagant mess than Death Stranding ended up being. I've played about 5 hours of the game, including side content and some aimless dicking around between side content, and I really like it - if you don't like it so much, I can respect that. With that being said, I don't think I can take TLoU2 discourse at face value at the moment - I won't be able to offer a conclusive opinion for a while yet, and there's every chance that something will happen that I don't like.

I just wanted to write some thoughts down about the current climate surrounding the game, and how that ties into civil discourse. I think it's possible to dislike this game and be perfectly civil about it, but the backlash has been conducted in a way to shut down any and all nuanced discussion about the game. As someone who really likes talking shit out about video games and stuff, and challenging my opinions by viewing them from another perspective, that really bugs me. Gamergaters ruin everything.

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twiststreet · 5 years

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Joaquin Phoenix’s “Joker” scored a record $13.3 million on Thursday night in North America. [...] The Joaquin Phoenix-starrer is now looking at a possible offshore weekend bow of $110M+. If that holds, along with domestic expectations, it is also looking at a $200M+ global opening, and further has a shot at overtaking Venom‘s 2018 record October global debut. [...] Weeks of speculation as to ‘Joker’s’ opening weekend performance and its status as one of the most talked about movies of the year have made the acclaimed (and controversial) film a must-see cinematic event,” Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian said.

Feel like Rambling Instead of Doing My Chorin’ Dept.: I have zero interest in this Joker movie since I prefer cinema and/or low-grade Japanese pornography (which in my estimation is cinema in the Scorsese of sense of the word because you learn a lot about psychology, the punishing psychology of sempais). I have zero interest in like adult super-clown movies or whatever the fuck’s going on here-- and I don’t want to understand the psychology of someone who doesn’t have enough sex, I’m just too afraid that letting those kind of thoughts into my head might make me slightly less excellent at intercourse and the world would be robbed forever (Ladies). And add in even a remote chance of some shiny chrome War Boy blowing away my theater...? Imma pass. The only Batman villain I’m risking death for is Egghead...

But boy, watching people talk about and around this movie-- what a giant pile of yikes, which has ended exactly how all moral panics about art invariably end, with a giant pile of cash changing hands. And only “We want to generate TV ratings from normal people who hate arty shit we usually reward”-style award nominations no doubt await (aka the Black Panther slot).

What a stupid time to be alive... Its always been a stupid time to be alive because we’re not a really brilliant species, but I mean... moral panics over super-clown movies which are poised to make hundreds of millions of dollars where the moral panic isn’t just “oh my god it’s a billboard you can see from outer space about how we stopped funding our education system”... Boy...

I mean, I don’t think everyone was in bad faith, necessarily-- like if I were a lady who had to worry about incels coming and blowing away my yoga class or whatever, everytime I’m downward-facing my dogs, I’d probably be kinda not super-hot for a Joker movie either, like the world needs one more thing zooming-up the limp-dicks of this world. Or I mean, just generally, on the one hand, you want to talk about the world, right, because you live there or whatever? But on the other hand, it’s that thing you learn if you write about comics, especially-- being the guy talking about the thing just helps the thing, no matter what you say about it. I don’t know-- I never figured out how to square that circle. Like, I don’t know that I’m the audience for a lot of the moral panic, but it’s not like it was unreasonable for people to be like “can’t we just not”...

It just fucking got pretty wild in the last few days though-- because it got sucked into a second entirely different jetstream. You had the “Art is the exact same thing as an instruction manual for stupid people” elitism that kinda kicked off by that awful Mother Jones editor, or people who just want to childproof the entire world because they desperately think that’s a necessary response to living in a horror world (which I don’t think I sign up for but I can see my “we are all damned anyway and deserve to die” position not winning a lot of adherents)... but then thanks to the weird-ass marketing strategy (positioning Joker explicitly as a weapon in the Great American Culture War...? That’s how they sold Lady Ghostbusters, “come see this movie to send a message”, but it was just weird seeing a Reverse-Ghostbust)... it got sucked into the constant thriving secondary hum on the internet of unfunny people who are super-online and who have a constant axe to grind about comedy, because they don’t get jokes, don’t understand why people laugh at them or anything, and they’re narcissists who think we’re all actually laughing at them when we laugh at jokes because they’re so fucking insecure about their outsized-perception of themselves especially as victims?

At some point it just wound its way where a lot of people going “The Hangover wasn’t funny to begin with, even though it was one of the highest grossing R-Rated comedies ever made, because we’re all evolved now”-- arguing that movie’s half-billion dollars of revenue generated all magically rendered meaningless cause the director said some stupid-ass jackass shit...? Yeah, good luck with that. “Did you know the Hangover had Mike Tyson in it??? The internet’s going to win this fight against one of the biggest comedy hits of my lifetime, ten years later-- how dare people have laughed, according to me, someone who sounds totally normal and cool and fun to be around? I’m going to buy two tickets to the next movie by the Thor guy-- he’s making anti-hate satires-- why can’t you all be like a guy who makes fucking Thor movies?” Maybe I’m wrong, I’m on the side I’m on, but I just don’t think the internet’s going to win this nonstop war against jokes, no matter how many anti-hate satires the Thor guy’s got in him! (Anti-hate satire... go fuck yourself...)

And then the other side of things you had people who are like “nothing ever matters wheeee” where you just have to ignore, like, just the completely stupid world we’re stuck in full of absolute shitheads who obviously have us all surrounded and just are nontop dripping abject fucking brain-deadening bullshit into their ear, day after day, like Chinese Water Torture that these cretins are lining up to take part in, just salivating for to help make the world that much dumber and shittier, happy New York Comicon everybody! We really need Joker when there are 10 hour Youtube videos of guys complaining about a lady working the counter at Wendy’s who turned down their extra-large bottle of perfume they bought her or I don’t even know what the fuck’s going on with Youtube, nevermind games-- we really needed to make that avalanche of stupid any scarier or stupider..? I mean, “shit in, shit out” seems kinda like a reasonable proposition to me. You can’t feed people shit all day and then be like “why does this place smell?” It’s all the shit! I call it my Carl’s Jr. theory of human civilization.

But I mean, you look at the massive loneliness in the world, and even a cursory examination of what’s happening with men in this country statistically, at the same time as all kinds of people are getting stepped onby economic pressures and then you layer on climate change on top of everything else which kinda has to put some kinda dampener on human optimism generally, even if crazy people want to pretend it’s not happening... And then you’re going to tell people not to want entertainment that goes to a dark place, or that the movie they should see instead is Ad Astra (which was just Star Wars for men who hate their penises)??? “You should spend more time contemplating how being a man is bad, like Brad Pitt in Ad Astra.” A lot of people online (and not just Republicans) just seem angry and isolated and disconnected and sad, and I just don’t think “what if we tried to not have art or entertainment that speaks to that and instead gave them a DVD of Booksmart instead” is just even remotely realistic, or even worth contemplating, from a how-people-function standpoint. People who get upset about art being a valve, like ... I don’t understand how they comprehend the history of art in the 20th century, let alone modern day stuff...

Is there going to be a violent cost to it? I don’t know-- you go look at Falling Down’s wikipedia page and they mention a guy who shot up some folks whose favorite movie was Falling Down. But... I think there’s a gap between knowing that and then judging Falling Down for it, or that being a relevant data point when talking about Falling Down, that I don’t go over that gap and other people do. Maybe it’s my age or my own selfishness, I don’t know...

I don’t know. As usual, maybe I don’t know what I think. Anyways, it’s at least nice that it’s finally out and we just have to wait and see what the next bullshit-ass bullshit that causes some moral panic is going to be. There was cancelling Stephen Colbert because a hashtag inventor told people he hated Asians or some shit. There was people saying Isle of Dogs hated the Japanese. Bruce Lee’s daughter yelling at Once Upon a Time in Hollywood -- that was cute, I guess; I guess Bruce Lee’s no longer a public figure who we can comment on and re-purpose as artists have been doing since Warhol or before, because Bruce Lee came in his wife one time, good to know. I can’t remember all the panics with stand-up comedians, all that stuff, whoof. There was that time people got angry cause a guy on Youtube didn’t want to see the Lady Ghostbuster movie-- that’s not even an exaggeration there was like one youtube guy everyone got mad at. I don’t know. We’ve reached evil super-clowns. I don’t know how much stupider things can get, only that they will get infinitely, infinitely, infinitey stupider until the sun melts us because we’re definitely not surviving climate change, this isn’t a species built to last...

Anyways, felt like rambling.

#I am Pointless!

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ipraygreywords · 5 years

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Slayers Week 2 Day 2: Villains

But is he really?

“I am both better and worse than you thought” (Sylvia Plath).

Of all the many characters for whom I have written, none is more difficult to pinpoint than Rezo, in this particular regard. This is the man who heals stray kittens for little boys when nobody is looking, who devoted 150 years of life to traveling nonstop and healing hundreds of thousands of people of illness, but also steals another preteen boy’s body for the chance to cure his own blindness. See what I mean?

My ultimate conclusion is that Rezo is a good person who has had to compensate for personal impediments using opportunistic means, and because Rezo was never fully in control of Rezo’s own judgment or Rezo’s own choices, these actions became increasingly abhorrent in the two to three years before his death: but he still did a great deal of good in his life, and, were he to live free of that influence, he would be unequivocally good. That is WHY he was chosen to be corrupted. Bad people attack symbols of goodness to demoralize their enemies. But let me back up. Because woosh. This is a complex topic.

Sussing out Rezo’s moral alignment is difficult because Rezo, as we see him in canon, never does anything without the powerful, corrupting presence of a ma-oh (the strongest tier of demon in all his world, one of only four in the universe, who are eclipsed by only one other being) which was affixed to his soul from birth. This ma-oh (the mouthful name of “Ruby-Eyed Shabranigdu”) chose Rezo intentionally as a vessel, from which he hoped to eventually be resurrected (in the process, killing Rezo–a fact which alone is intriguing, because Shabranigdu has done this before to other humans, who survived his resurrected and far more comfortably cohabited with him). So when one analyzes Rezo’s actions as a human being, one always has to try and separate out Shabranigdu’s manipulations from Rezo’s natural inclinations. Let’s get a couple (overly simplistic, imho) anti arguments out of the way first:

–People who dislike Rezo often point out that Shabranigdu picked Rezo because he saw vulnerabilities that he could exploit to the point of serious moral corruption. That means it was possible to break Rezo: but I–and Lina Inverse, the chief protagonist of the Slayers series–believe that still doesn’t condemn Rezo as a “bad” or “weak” person. It just means that Shabranigdu, who is a master manipulator, could find a strategy with which to erode Rezo’s will. I also believe that because Rezo was born with a famously powerful capacity for white/healing magic, and a demonstrable urge to serve others in ways that could not possibly benefit him, Shabranigdu thought it would be perversely hilarious to target a cleric: a person in whom people placed their trust, to have their best interests at heart, and to make them well. (Shabranigdu’s main goal is to wreak despair and violence on the world, and return it to a state of chaos, so why not take down a few more people beyond Rezo, ruin their faith in the benevolence of their healers, while he’s at it? But I’ll get to this more later.)

–People who dislike Rezo also often assume that Shabranigdu was the cause of Rezo’s eyes being sealed shut, causing him “blindness,” from birth. Why is this important to your question? Because when we analyze the series more closely, it becomes clear that Rezo’s eyes are a protective seal AGAINST Shabranigdu’s resurrection, which means that the ma-oh cannot complete his resurrection unless Rezo opens his eyes (we see this both in Slayers Season One and in Slayers Evolution-R). When Rezo was born, his eyes acted as a failsafe shielding the world FROM Shabranigdu. Shabranigdu had to act against that failsafe to be reborn. So Shabranigdu turned the VIRTUE of the sealed-shut eyes into a HANDICAP which embarrassed, discouraged, and isolated Rezo, because he could cure everyone else with his amazing healing skills, but not himself (and even a saint must eventually feel jealousy and resentment from that)–such that EVEN THE THING THAT MADE HIM FAMOUS, AND GOOD, AND LOVED BY OTHERS, BECAME A SYMBOL OF “BUT NOT YOU: YOU DON’T GET TO BE HAPPY LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. NEVER YOU.” A person who is depressed and angry and alone is much easier to break. See below.

–People who dislike Rezo almost always cite what he did to his own grandson Zelgadis as the most condemnation-worthy “evidence” that he is rotten to the core. While there is NO EXCUSING WHAT HE DID, and I will NEVER think what he did is okay, I could not disagree with these individuals more. Rezo is capable of forming and maintaining loving attachments; in the end, Shabranigdu USES precisely those loving attachments to isolate Rezo, by perverting their purity, and breaking his loved ones WITH HIS OWN HANDS. What better way to demoralize a good person than to make them SEEM to choose being a monster? There are actual contemporary scientific studies that prove that one of the best ways to torture prisoners of war is to make them torture others. It dehumanizes them, renders them weapons, and lowers their resolve to fight back. This is what happened when Rezo took Zelgadis’s words “we need to do small evils for great good, and get stronger” and twisted them into an excuse to make Zelgadis a chimera–effectively alienating Zelgadis from the world just as Shabrranigdu had Rezo–as part of his research to cure his own eyes. (People reading this who have the “but he knew Zel could never be cured, and Evo-R proves that!” rebuttal, let me know, because I have a whole separate meta theory on that, which does not exonerate Rezo, but does cast serious doubt on the allegation that the chimera process can never be reversed). –Rezo does terrible evils (the other big whoppers are creating and experimenting on a clone of himself, and deliberately spreading a disease to an isolated kingdom to take advantage of its ill as test subjects). But, and while this isn’t a make it or break it thing, he lso more than once shows genuine contrition for the evil he has done, when it will benefit him in no way to do so. This is rare, and sometimes it is on the tail end of a lot of emotionally manipulative bargaining and self-justification (borne primarily of pride), but he has either apologized or openly acknowledged that his choices were evil and unconscionable, on both the occasions that he was confronted by the heroes for his choices. –People who dislike Rezo like to say “he only started his white magical career to try and heal his own eyes!” to which I answer: yes, and? The subsequent entire life he spent healing people while continuing to master other magics to heal himself were not mandatory. No one was forcing Rezo to share his findings with others. That was an act of selflessness. –Both times that Shabranigdu is reborn out of Rezo (which…rips apart his body, fun times) and he realizes it, he helps the heroes kill Shabranigdu, and without him they would have failed to do so. Which. You know. BIG INDICATION that he’s not, at heart, a bad guy lol. –Rezo plans ahead to try to do damage control for potential collateral, when he does selfish and reckless things. It’s usually not enough, and he puts new meaning to the word “quixotic.” But it still matters for the purposes of your question. For instance, when he finally breaks down and chooses to resurrect Shabranigdu, he plans to create an arguably evenly-matched creature called a “Zanaffar” with which to kill the demon the moment he gains vision. He also creates laboratories deep underground so that explosions can be contained and do less damage to the surrounding area. He also thinks (wrongly) that he can heal all the people in Taforashia before they die, once he can see. Rezo’s fatal flaw in all these cases is to assume, out of desperation, that he is capable of more than any one human being ever could be.

Which is not good or evil, really, but HUMAN: pulling us back toward a consistent, perennial theme of Slayers, that humans are flawed but redeemable creatures, neither gods nor demons, who exist to maintain the *balance* of the cosmos (the true plan, according to Xelloss, of the most powerful of all beings, referred to as LoN).

–People expect too much of Rezo, which I think was a genuine, conscious point the Slayers writers wanted to make.

It doesn’t excuse anything he did that was evil. At the same time, there are two ways to dehumanize a person. One is to vilify them.

The other is to idolize them. Zelgadis idolized Rezo. Eris idolized Rezo. Pokota idolized Rezo. And Rezo took advantage of that, and that’s wrong. But think about that for a moment. It is wrong, on a moral level, to idolize a living person, and expect god-tier ethical purity at all times and under all forms of pressure. It is wrong, and it is hurtful. Sometimes it’s done out of naivety, sometimes emotional codependence, but in any case, it is wrong. I speak here from painful experience on the receiving end of idolization. It exerts impossible pressure on a person. And it is scary.

Hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people idolized Rezo. They built statues and made paintings of him. They installed him as one of the “Five Great Sages”–literally the most revered of magical users/scholars of ALL RECORDED HISTORY. They threw so much money at him that he owned “several” mansions by the time of his death. Rezo was good at maintaining the facade of authoritative serenity. But my God, was it ever that: a facade. He was tired, angry, and afraid: so afraid that he once told his servant Ozel, in strictest confidence, knowing she would tell no one else, and in a tone of deep depression, “Sometimes I lose my sense of what it is to be a person.”

And don’t we all know the feeling, when we too are at a crossroads? Isn’t that HUMAN?

I genuinely believe the Slayers writers wanted the audience to sort of meta-replicate the feelings of Rezo’s disciples, and expect Rezo to be a saint, and then be horrified and angry when his worst actions proved seriously otherwise. And then by the end of the story, I think they were meant to realize, this was just a guy. This was just a guy who had the rough equivalent of Satan possessing his body and soul, a guy who was meant to be a healer but had his whole life rendered a farce because of his own soul’s attempt to keep a monster sealed inside. Rezo became a living prison for a demon, and he could not contain it. No one, in fact, who has served as the vessel of Shabranigdu has been able, ultimately, to resist him.

#Rezo the Red Priest #Slayers Week #Rezo #Rezo Greywords

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enamis1 · 5 years

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OC INTERVIEW

it’s that time again where I ramble about stuff only i care about! i got tagged, as always by the lovely @courierspikeee and i'm tagging @worthlesssix if they're still around and wanna do stuff 1. Choose an OC. 2. Answer them as that OC. 3. Tag 5 people to do the same.

[Three months after the Second Battle of Hoover Dam and the declaration of Vegas’s independance a young ‘news courier’ managed to orchestrate an interview with the local courier-turned-leader on the casino floor of the Lucky 38]

1. What is your name? Viva. Or Empress Vivianne if you wanna be fancy.

2. How old are you? [she rubs the back of her head] somewhere in the ‘thirty’ ballpark I’m guessing

3. What do you look like? You have eyes don’t you? And yes the white hair is natural. No, I don’t really know why it’s like that. Apparently it’s some genetic condition.

4. Where are you from? Where do you live now? I'm from the West. I've been told. [pause] Maybe. But as far as anyone’s concerned I might as well be a native Mojave-ian. Won't be leaving Vegas or, hell, even the Lucky 38 anytime soon.

5. What was your childhood like? I’m sure it was fine. I mean, I have no memory of it, but I’m sure it was /fine/

6. What groups are you friendly with? Are you allied with any factions? [she groans] As you can imagine politics are a bit uhh… tense at the moment, what with me kicking the NCR out of my city and all. Our current alliance consists of the Families, the Kings, Freesiders, the Boomers, and the Followers. Once we get our issues here sorted I'm extending my hand to all the independent settlements in the area and we’ll go from there

7. Tell me about your best friend. Which one exactly? ‘Cuz I have a few. Oh, I know, I can tell you about this guy [she points over her shoulder to a securitron with a static smiley on its screen] This is Yes Man, he’s my second in command. [the robot raises a clawed hand and gives a cheerful ‘howdy’] It's not that i couldn't manage coordinating a brand new, independent nation by myself, but he does make all the busywork and number running and security that much easier. And he yells at me if I forget to eat or sleep for a few nights [Viva proceeds to glare at the robot, its smile unchanging]

8. Do you have a family? Tell me about them! [Viva glances away for a moment] My friends are my family. [pause] and even if we don't get along entirely, that's just how it is. I wouldn't trade any of those fuckwits for the world.

9. What about a partner or partners? [she gives a single loud laugh] Do I look like I have time for shit like that? Especially now of all times?

10. Who are your enemies, and why? I’d hazard a guess and say at this point everyone who’s not my explicit ally [Viva drums her fingers for a moment] Of course the NCR is going to pretend to be nice for now, but politics is like chess. Complex, and annoying and I hate it. Give me a year and i’ll be begging for the Legion and their blunt insanity

11. Have you ever heard of The Brotherhood of Steel? What do you think about them? Oh I’ve heard of them alright. [she grumbles under her breath] Good people. Bad priorities though.

12. What about The Enclave? [shrug] no comment

13. How do you feel about Super Mutants? What you mean the ones up north? They're great and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I mean, yeah sure they're pretty scary to be around, especially if the nightkin get antsy, but they're decent people. Marcus is… Marcus is a good man.

14. What’s the craziest fight you’ve ever been in? I… [she trails off, thinking] There was… /is/ a man. Who knew me from before. Long before. He challenged me to face him in a grave of ash and… I consider the three weeks it took to track him though the pits of hell as one very, very long and very exhausting fight. [she pauses again] That and all the verbal sparring along the way. And… everything after, too.

15. Have you ever fought a Deathclaw? I mean… I've shot Deathclaws. And they're about as pants-shittingly terrifying as they've always been. But that's what the .50 cal is for

16. Do you like fighting? [she grins] I like shooting, I’ll tell you that much

17. What’s your weapon of choice? [Viva holds up her finger to pause and proceeds to heft up an Anti-material Rifle. It’s new with a faint silvery sheen, and only a little scuffed from use, the Gun Runners logo still visible on the side. It is custom made, with every possible attachment, some parts are black carbon fiber. There are three bands of color around the stock and several engravings including six letters -CALBVR] [Viva is gleefully beaming as she wordlessly shows off the gun]

18. How do you survive? Your wits, your charm, your skills, brute force, some combination? (a.k.a. what’s your S.P.E.C.I.A.L?) You don't get to where I am without a bit of everything. But you could say my speciality is shooting, robotics, and outplaying people in the games they weave. [she tilts her head back and hums] Back when I was still just a mailman i knew how to hide in plain sight. Saved my life more often than not. That and brass knuckles. Very effective. Anything mechanical is child’s play too. Can't figure out how to cook geko without burning it though, so all the money I saved on gear i spent on food. [she rubs the back of her head and mutters through her teeth] and bandages. so. many. bandages. I swear the world really wants me dead and is having better luck at it than I am

19. Have you ever been in a vault? What do you think about them? Plenty ‘round these parts. Can't say I'm fond of lurking around /in/ them but… Marvels of tech those things, shame most of them failed. There's actually one or two I want to strip for parts in the future. If I can get the wildlife out beforehand that is.

20. How do you beat all the radiation around here? Has it affected you? Radiation and I have a… complicated relationship. [she turns to the securitron and mutters something with a slight smirk. Suddenly the lights of the bottom floor wink out. Viva faces forward once more, her already unnaturally green eyes now glowing with a faint, sickly light. The lights flick on just as suddenly with a loud clack and the woman giggles] Honestly if I don't end up as a ghoul by the end of my life I will be /very/ surprised

21. What’s your favorite wasteland critter? Do… Do the robots count? Because I'm going with the robots anyway.

22. What’s your least favorite wasteland critter? I’d say it starts with death and ends with claw, but that's not right. At least with those fuckers I know where to aim, no, first place goes to cazadores, the best reason for carrying around a shotgun.

23. How do you feel about robots? [she gestures to the dozens of securitrons surrounding them with a wide grin] Bliss, home, paradise and then some.

24. How many caps do you have on you right now? I mean- [she rummages in her pockets] I don't have my bag with me. 23. I can't fit more into these pockets they're too full of specialty ammo.

25. Nuka Cola or Sunset Sarsaparilla? Nuka. I fucking hate Sarsaparilla and I know it's blasphemy in these parts, but listen, if you're dehydrated and all you have to drink is that mind-meltingly awful shit i'm looking for the nearest cactus to suck on

26. Do you do chems? Uh. [she rubs her neck and nervously bounces her leg] I mean. Mentats are uh. Pretty… pretty great. [she bites her lip] Next question?

27. Do you ever think about the Pre-War world? It fascinates me. What a life they lead to have created tech of this calibre [she gestures to the casino once more] I keep on finding parts of the old world that shine though, all the good, all the awful, all the same, always there. [she thinks for a moment] Like the past isn't as distant as people want to believe. But maybe that's just me… I've had more run-ins with old world ghosts that you’d believe. And I don't mean my previous employer either.

28. What’s your deepest regret? What would you do differently? [her expression darkens] [after a minute of silence she shakes her head] Can't change what was done. No point dwelling.

29. What’s your biggest achievement? Or what do you hope to achieve? [she exchanges a look with the smiling securitron] Right now? We’re in step four. There's a lot of steps to go. [exhale] And every single step takes more effort than anyone realizes. Because a lot of people don't think. Don't think about food, don't think about water, don't think about safety, don't think about business, don't think about what's next. I have to. And it's hard yaknow? But I've done more than I could ever imagine. I dethroned House, I defeated the Legion, I defanged the NCR. That’s more than most can say…

30. What do you want for the future? For yourself? Your friends? The world? [she sinks into her seat] I didn't do all of this because I thought it’d be fun. [her expression darkens to a cold seriousness] Vegas is something else. Vegas and the Mojave. Everything that's happened here is that much more important than anyone realizes. This place is a crossing point. A bridge. Between the West and the East. And bridges can't belong to either side. I need to make sure it stays that way. I need to make sure this place, everyone who put their faith in me, /my/ people are safe. Are fed. Are… Vegas has to prosper as it stands and everything else’ll be sorted out in time. That's what I want. The Mojave to thrive. And so help me I haven't walked through storms of fire and death to let all of this fall apart. [she raises her eyes, a haunting look with a smile] So tell everyone who’s gonna be listening - I have the shadow of a nation behind me. I won't waste it this time.

#fallout new vegas #fallout #courier six #courier OC #courier viva #meme #ask meme

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wendynerdwrites · 6 years

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On the Ice Dragon and Consequences for Daenerys in the North

Let’s face it, regardless of whether or not you think Daenerys is really going to “save” the North in Season 8, whether or not you think she’s a good leader, or whatever, it should occur to pretty much anyone that despite Jon’s promises, Daenerys will probably be facing a bit of an uphill climb in getting The North to accept her.

For one thing, the Targaryens were about as destructive towards House Stark as House Lannister, especially in the eyes of the Northmen. Rhaegar (to their knowledge) kidnapped, raped, killed Lyanna Stark. Aerys II barbecued Rickard and Brandon Stark personally, then demanded Ned’s head for good measure. And in the process of avenging/protecting House Stark, countless Northmen died rebelling against the Mad King. The Lannisters took Ned, Cat, Robb, (arguably) Rickon, and a TON of good Northerners like Greatjon Umber and Maege Mormont. The Targaryens took Rickard, Brandon, and Lyanna Stark, tried to take Ned, and a bunch of prominent Northmen like Lord Dustin died in the process. Most of the Northern lords are definitely old enough to not only remember, but have fought against the Mad King.

And Daenerys isn’t just a random Dragonseed, she’s the Mad King’s Daughter, sister to the rapist Rhaegar. Also a foreigner with a VERY sketchy reputation (crucifying Meereenese nobles, sacking cities) and three WMDs. So, in the eyes of, say, a Lord Glover, a Lord Reed, a Lord Royce, or a Lord Manderly, voluntarily bending the knee to Daenerys is basically the equivalent of voluntarily bending the knee to Jaime or Tyrion Lannister.

While their chosen king might vouch for her, the show has made it clear that his vassals have already lost a TON of confidence and faith in him. And even if they still hold a torch for him, Jon’s been gone for nearly a year, sending only one letter, ventured North of the Wall without so much as a pit stop at White Harbor or a letter, to bring a wight to a parlay with Cersei Lannister to secure a ceasefire for the Mad King’s Daughter. There is literally nothing about that scenario that shouldn’t seem suspicious. They have every reason to believe Jon was taken prisoner (not an inaccurate assumption), tortured, brainwashed, and under duress in his advocacy of Daenerys.

The prospective revelations that a) he’s been sleeping with her and b) that he’s a Targaryen himself, won’t help things.

But still, it is maybe possible that Daenerys might have salvaged all that with, perhaps, a really well-timed introductory blow or two to the White Walkers. Then the people of the North and Vale might be able to get over their presuppositions and grievances when she rides in and saves a Northern town.

Unfortunately...

Yeah, no, Daenerys’s prospects of being a heralded savior went the way of the Wall with Viserion’s resurrection.

First of all, regardless of how much fault you think Daenerys has in the Ice Dragon’s creation, that’s not going to cut it with the Northerners, who will certainly now be watching as entire swaths of countryside and towns are laid waste in the space of a couple of hours by the enemy’s shiny new dragon. Daenerys brings three dragons to Westeros. Then an ice dragon appears, wrecks their biggest defensive structure just in time for Daenerys to come north with only two dragons now. The correlation is a causality in this case. And whether or not you think that Viserion’s death was a terrible, completely unpreventable misfortune, or the result of obscene levels of incompetence and negligence on the part of Team Dragon, do you really think that Joey Northman, now homeless, widowed, childless, and missing an arm is going to take the sympathetic view?

Even if you think Daenerys is totally blameless in Viserion’s death... there’s still also the matter of her leaving a dragon corpse with an enemy whose superpower is literally re-animating corpses... And yet not taking the time during her recovery at Eastwatch or voyage to King’s Landing to maybe send a raven to the people she intends to “save” with a head’s up? Even if, somehow the possibility of an Ice Dragon never occurred to her or any of her learned advisors (including one who spent much of his childhood fantasizing and reading everything he could get his hands on about dragons), she’s still down one dragon. And since she apparently intends to sail north once she makes nice with Cersei, maybe that severe drop in her main arsenal might be something the Northerners should know about, if only for logistical purposes since she DOES intend to bunk with them pretty soon.

Daenerys had no problem announcing to her sworn enemy that she was officially down one dragon, and that her main weapons have vulnerabilities...

... But not her allies. The ones who she is trying to convince to surrender their independence.

In addition to the absurd levels of devastation the Ice Dragon will cause, there’s also the matter of fallout and collateral damage.

Best case scenario for the North would be the lords of the North using Bran’s powers to predict the time and place of upcoming attacks and getting people evacuated and some resources salvaged.

Now, assuming that happens, that still means there will be a proverbial shit-ton of refugees being sheltered/relocated to any and all viable shelters/population centers after watching as their homes were destroyed by this:

Most likely, even under the best conditions, these people will have to be somewhat dispersed among various landmarks. And all of them will still be recovering from the immense trauma and panic of the Ice Dragon attack.

Now, even if we assume that Sansa Stark’s proven herself psychic infrastructure prodigy in the time Jon’s been gone and has somehow managed to create top-quality accommodations for refugees out of the already winter-laden, raid-ravaged, Bolton-governed North in the space of a year, keeping whatever people that can be saved safe and provided for, not to mention peaceful, will be hard. But let’s assume that somehow the Starks have managed to become everything FEMA should be and that they manage to relocate, settle, and provide for swaths of the displaced brilliantly.

How do you think all those traumatized northerners who lost their homes and loved ones to this:

... Are going to react to seeing this....

and this...

...Flying overhead?

Answer: Mass panic. Mass panic is what will happen. Involving riots. Trampling. Harm to people and the destruction of precious resources.

Another query: How do you think Daenerys is likely to respond to being told that the mere presence of her children within viewing range of a landmark is destructive and too dangerous to be tolerated?

My guess? Not well. Especially since one of Dany’s major selling points on her “I’m going to save the North so kneel!” campaign hinges on said dragons.

Not to mention trying to keep them away from where they might do harm (ie, away from any major population/community area) is likely to hinder their efficacy as a weapon.

On top of that, it has to be assumed that, in response to the Ice Dragon, some major Northern holdfasts may decide to develop employ anti-dragon defenses/weaponry, such as the ballista that the Lannisters hit Drogon with in Season 7. Now, barring the ice dragon, how do Dany’s living dragons look in a blizzard?

Ah, right, basically indistinguishable from their undead brother as long as they’re not breathing fire. Perfect. That shouldn’t lead to any confusion or mishaps...

...Yeah, that probably won’t go over well, either.

So, as far as the Northerners will be concerned, they’ll have the less-than-respectable daughter of the Mad King, hailing from an impressive line of Stark-killers, who has ostensibly kidnapped their king for a year. She’ll have already put the North in a vastly worse and more dangerous position than they were in before, thanks to her dragons and the pursuit of her own political goals (which she roped their king into). Their main enemy is more powerful than ever and is destroying most of their country without any warning, and it’s because of a monster she brought to Westeros. Now she arrives, flanked by two more dragons that are guaranteed to cause deadly pandemonium among their collected survivors with their mere presence, her only positive credentials coming on the word of a king they don’t trust, they haven’t seen or heard from in months, and who is not who he’s claimed to be his entire life.

And she intends to arrive at White Harbor all, “Hey, I’m your new ruler, here to save you!”

Somehow, I doubt their response to this will be the fawning, body-surfing worship she’s used to.

Then again, this is the show that gave us “bad pussy”, the Sansa-marries-Ramsay-for-revenge plot, and Jaime and Bronn’s Dornish Vacation, so who the fuck knows. But assuming that the show decides to make some sort of sense in season eight and the North DOES have a logical response to Daenerys... What’s her general response to people who say they won’t kneel to her again?

I can’t wait to see Daenerys save the North.

#GoT #Game of Thrones meta #anti-Daenerys #Season 8 predictions #dragons #The North #House Targaryen #house stark #Daenerys Targaryen

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fivestarglam · 3 years

Link

Occasionally, my nine-year-old son and I indulge in something we call the “Misunderstanding Game”.

Thomas: “Mom, I want another round of Among Us.”

Me: “Of course, darling, you are absolutely welcome to be among us, you know you don’t have to ask.”

Thomas, giggling and rolling his eyes, patiently explains yet again that there is a computer game called Among Us. In other words, he wants more screen time. I carry on pretending not to understand what he wants. Games, I say, what a good idea. Which one would you like to play? On and on it goes, as I keep on deliberately misunderstanding him.

I do, of course, have a hidden agenda: all this time that he is fooling around with me means less screen time. He also enjoys the maternal attention. I think of it at times as a useful activity, at times as amusing and entirely harmless.

When I listen to people discuss today’s encounters between Islam and the West, I am reminded of this game. The only problem is that these conversations are rarely useful and not in the least amusing. Quite often they lead to more harm than good.

The best illustration of this Misunderstanding Game relates to the issue of immigration from Muslim countries and how European societies should absorb Muslim immigrants.

The first deliberate misunderstanding is the pretence that unskilled immigrants with little formal education are absolutely necessary for advanced economies. With Europe’s shrinking populations and falling fertility rates, the woke and Leftist enablers say, surely no one can argue that enticing young and vibrant people to immigrate is a bad thing. Those terrible xenophobes who fixate on cost/benefit exercises — how much, in monetary terms, immigrants cost society versus how much they contribute — simply don’t get it. Those who point out the large-scale welfare dependency of those immigrants and even of their children a generation later, let alone the emergence of an underclass of ethnic and religious enclaves, are met with cheerful accounts of benefits that cannot be quantified in material terms: the cuisine, attire, sights and sounds of new exotic cultures that locals can now sample at leisure.

Related to this wilful misunderstanding is the argument of compassion. Let’s reject the economic immigrants, say some, and only allow in those who qualify for asylum. In any case, it is just a temporary measure until their countries return to normal. But this approach raises myriad questions. How on earth do we design a vetting process that can distinguish those in search of economic opportunity from those who are true victims of civil strife? When will their countries return to normal? What will they do in the meantime? And who will pay for it all?

Those adept at playing the Misunderstanding Game, however, have some very compelling distractions. Empathy is required, they say. Imagine if it were you or your family who had to endure the ravages of war and upheaval. It wasn’t that long ago that Europe was going through such turmoil. Would you have turned away Jews fleeing what would become the Holocaust?

In any case, we’re told, it is our own fault that these societies are falling apart because we colonised them in the first place. Worse, we even profited from the slave trade before and during the colonial years. Here the conclusion of the Misunderstanding Game is made clear: the moral atonement for historical wrongs is more compelling than any rational attempt to analyse the issues on the table.

A third version of the Misunderstanding Game is the assertion that immigrants are all the same. This approach is partly a response to those such as Dutch sociologist Professor Ruud Koopmans, who has questioned why is it so much harder for immigrants from Muslim societies to integrate into Western countries. Why, for instance, are Lebanese Christians Lebanese more likely to become fully assimilated in Australia than Lebanese Muslims when their circumstances of arrival and departure are practically the same? Or why do Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants struggle to integrate in the UK, while their Hindu and Sikh counterparts flourish and, in some cases, even do better than the natives?

Koopmans has compelling data to explain these trends. But who is interested in such questions, let alone such tedious things as data? The game is to misunderstand, to mix up and muddle. So Mr Koopmans, they say, let’s talk about your intent. Your work may be empirical but it is your underbelly that matters: for even though you claim to be a Social Democrat, you are in fact a racist. Busted. You can’t hide behind that pro-labour façade when you defame the true workers of the world with your anti-social science.

Finally, when played at its most mischievous, the Misunderstanding Game simply insists that we all want the same things. We all want to be free and equal; we all want to abide by the law; we all share the same basic values and we all want to respect the dignity of others. For those of us who are men and women of faith, in the end we all pray to the same God. For those of us who are secular, we are all led by our reason. Save for a subset of misfits — and every society has those — we are all just human beings.

To this kind of argument, I always have the same response: not everyone’s concept of God is identical. How else would you explain the existence of Islamist sermons of hatred? Or the harassment of women, gays, Jews and others? What would you say to the victims of the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs or the Muslim girls who are forced into marriage? If we all pray to the “same” God, then what about the knife attacks, the beheadings and the use of trucks as weapons of murder by perpetrators screaming Allahu-Akbar? What about ISIS and Al-Qaeda? Radical views exist and we urgently need to grapple with them.

Hold it right there, the misunderstanders reply. Didn’t we already make it clear? There are misfits in every society, including ours. Sexual violence against women is universal. And look at the latest report from the UK Home Office. It concludes clearly — after an allegedly long and rigorous research process — that the whole gory business of grooming gangs had nothing to do with Pakistanis and absolutely nothing to do with Islam.

So who is playing this Misunderstanding Game? A class of undergraduates doing a workshop on Public Policy? No. It is in fact our elected political leaders, as well as senior editors from highly regarded news outlets, professors from reputable universities and think tanks, senior civil servants and, at times, EU leaders. These conversations on the thorniest issues facing Europe are taking place in parliamentary committees, debating chambers, international seminars and on national television.

Scrutinise the transcripts of these talks, replay the recordings, read the numerous reports, books and articles generated over the last three decades on immigration, Islam and integration, and the picture that emerges is the same: it is an endless version of the Misunderstanding Game.

Meanwhile, the numbers of immigrants in Europe from Muslim-majority countries has swelled to… who knows? In 2017, the Pew Research Center projected that the Muslim share of Europe’s population could rise from 4.9% to between 7.4% (if there is no more immigration) and 14% (if there is a lot) by 2050. Even if there is less blitheness today about the wonderful ways immigrants from Muslim countries will enrich Europe — especially in France — an end to immigration is not in sight. Europe’s borders continue to be porous, the reasons that compel people to leave their countries get increasingly compelling.

It is, perhaps, a disappointment to those who have always insisted that we humans are all the same to see so many Muslim groups form organisations and movements with the objective of isolating their communities from the rest of society. In some countries, like France, they have succeeded enough to alarm the president to introduce new legislation that signals he has had enough of the Misunderstanding Game. And yet President Macron can hardly be said to be leading a Europe-wide change of sentiment. In most countries, the Misunderstanding Game goes on. Why?

One theory is that there is a genuine desire within the European political elite to atone for the past; today’s leaders don’t want to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. Another possibility is that Western leaders have simply lost confidence in Western Civilisation. It has all been one long tale of horrors: slavery, oppression, colonialism, genocides, misogyny and massacres. Hence there are no values to protect from large numbers of outsiders and certainly nothing worthwhile to ask immigrants to integrate into. A third explanation is that some European leaders genuinely wish to do away with borders. For them it is a matter of principle and they couldn’t care less who pays the price for the pursuit of a borderless planet.

But I believe there is one more reason: incompetence. Quite simply, none of the leaders whose job it is to resolve the issues of Muslim immigration and integration has a clue as to how to go about it. These politicians around the table who do have the right sort of principles but lack the ability to persuade the others. Some grasp the fine details of the issue but are incapable of seeing the big picture. And as with all policy areas of this magnitude and complexity, there are also those leaders who parrot the interests of organised groups who benefit from the status quo. It is they, I assume, who enjoy the Misunderstanding Game the most.

The incompetence of each set of leaders is often masked by an eye-catching political photo-op expressing a grand gesture or a soundbite along the lines of “history will be our judge”. But, as they know all too well, history does not vote; it does not promote or appoint a politician to a senior level. So let it judge away.

In the meantime, the flow of migrants has abated somewhat in the past few years, but large numbers of people still attempt to reach Europe, even during the pandemic. Last year Europe saw more than 336,000 first-time asylum applications and, from January to November, 114,300 illegal entries.

Looking forward, it seems inevitable that as European countries emerge out of Covid lockdowns and their economies reopen, some countries in Africa will face food shortages and other economic problems arising from pandemic-induced disruption. You don’t have to be a sage to foresee masses of young men heading towards Europe. As they attempt to cross the Eastern and Southern points of entry into the EU, be ready for European politicians to speak of a sudden surge and an unforeseeable crisis.

Then watch them play the Misunderstanding Game once again.

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desroundtree · 4 years

Text

Vote - A Definition

Vote - a formal indication of a choice between two or more candidates expressed typically through a ballot.

There are reasons for all of us to feel unsure about the 2020 presidential election. Many things stand in the way of what feels like a fair and equitable solutions for all involved. The current administration’s attack on the US Postal Service, which would be key to having a safe and fair election, has been crystal clear. In the middle of a pandemic, his intention is for people, both Democrats and Republicans, to vote in person or simply have the chance of your vote not counting at all.

He intends to stop us from voting.

Democrats seems to think that we are the only ones that fear COVID. We have all seen the media coverage of Trump supporters arguing about the legitimacy of a disease that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. We have seen video after video of people screaming in stores about mask requirements that not only protect them, but others around them. We’ve seen it all at this point, so much so that nothing surprises us. We are unmoved by the bad behavior. It’s become normal and day to day. That taints our version of every Republican - as media coverage does to Democrats who often appear with their hands out and no solutions to pay for any of what Dems feel are basic social needs.

I will admit I know Republicans that are not hard headed cavemen. I know Republicans that wear masks. I know Republicans that are voting on the side of their religion, though the man in the White House reflects none of the values present in any Bible story I can recall. Republicans that seem to have common sense and decency but can still legitimize everything that has happened. But still Republicans that I would normally consider kind people are accepting of the most unkind behavior I’ve seen in years in politics.

I know that racism and racist tropes did not stop those same Republicans from voting for a man that has continually disregarded the Constitution, skirted laws, ran the economy into the ground, refused to condemn racist behavior and ideology, attacked US citizens exercising their right to protest and to be honest, has stopped at nothing to destroy every single path to growth the Obama administration had set forth for us. There is such a vast difference in presidencies of course. For some this is what they’ve always wanted, this false sense of power and control applauded by the highest office in the land. This giant leap backward into a time that had BIPOC living in a space that others created for us. A space that they constantly changed to keep us just a rung lower on any ladder of success, if we were even allowed on the ladder at all.

But the rest of us lived through the Obama administration and came away with something different. It wasn’t perfect and the best decisions weren’t always made, but admittance of fault is something we haven’t seen in the last four years from the Trump administration. Instead of blame, we saw acceptance that maybe just maybe the President was human. We were forever changed at the thought, then understood we were deserving of change, and hope. We as a whole people deserved the respect often given only to some. We were deserving too.

It is hard to reconcile the two. It’s hard to understand how we ended up here - with white supremacy at its peak, people who believe it’s their constitutional right to possibly infect other people with a virus that could kill them, humans feeling the distinct power to degrade and dehumanize others simply because of the color of their skin, their gender, their choices.

In my opinion, a vote for Donald Trump was and still is a vote for racism, patriarchy, Zionism, and rape culture. It is anti-science, anti-love, anti-acceptance. It is the antithesis of anything religion has ever taught me. It is the opposite of anything that could possibly help this country continue on the trajectory that it was once on. It is the end all be all of a lot of things that once garnered respect and faith. It ended relationships because it had to, there was just no way to salvage or respect that much of a difference in not only opinions but morals.

We have asked Mother May I for four giant leaps back, though we keep fighting to march forward. We keep reaching for that golden ring, that pass that can take us back to a place where we could at least be proud of where we stand as a nation. Even with the birtherism and the outright racism, it felt like we were more together than we are now.

Maybe this Democratic ticket wasn’t what you wanted. I can tell you it certainly wasn’t my first choice either. To be honest, voting is important but I understand the disenfranchised feeling it can bring. The idea that your vote doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. What does one vote matter?

The answer to that question is a whole damn lot. If your vote wasn’t important there wouldn’t be these obstacles. This complete and total acceptance of ignoring the very law and order this administration promised its constituents. Voting is the only way to create real change - from your local elections to the presidential election. Your vote should be educated, though I cannot lie, this time mine is emotional.

I am completely over feeling as if I am being held hostage by the administration. I am tired of listening to the barrage of lies, inconsistencies and downright travesties that leave the mouth of the current occupant of the WH. I am tired and if I’m tired, I know other people are tired too.

We can protest. We can take to the streets and sign the petitions. We can donate and continue to push the idea that Black Lives Matter. But if we don’t place an administration that follows those same ideals, we will spend the next four years slipping further into what feels like an existence filled with more and more disconnect, more and more violence and less and less understanding.

Vote. Respect the importance of your vote. Even if it feels powerless, it’s the most powerful weapon we have right now. Prepare for what you might encounter if voting by mail - request whatever you need to start the process as a deterred US Postal Service struggles to ensure our democracy and keep us safe.

Watching mailboxes removed from our streets is not normal. This is not normal. There is no way, even if you cast your vote for him that this can seem normal. Don’t tell me this doesn’t feel like something you’ve seen before. There is no way that you can’t feel as if this is a violation of your rights too.

There is so much more I could say and certainly so much more I feel. But understanding that your vote is key in this election is necessary, and maybe you’ll never vote again (I hope that’s not the case) but this one right now is important.

Everything is on the line so if he wants us to stand on lines to vote - then I guess that’s what we have to do.

Voting resources -

Are you registered?

https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

How to register

https://www.usa.gov/register-to-vote#item-212645

Contact your elected officials about USPS cuts

Text USPS to 50409 to use Resistbot to draft a letter/fax to your representatives

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mentaldisordercartooncharac-blog · 7 years

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The trickiest thing about tumblr is its level of anonymity, and the ability it gives a person to not be entirely truthful about who they are. You can be whoever you want to be! Nobody will know. You can roleplay anyone and no one can question you. In most cases, this is a good thing. Protecting one’s privacy is important, especially online. But in a lot of cases, it creates awkward situations where you might need to question the legitimacy of someone’s claim because they’re dropping red flags that they’re lying just to have an excuse to be abusive and avoid criticism, but in doing so you risk being labeled -phobic or -ist or a horrible person in general for daring to invalidate someone’s experience or abuse.

so when I see someone throwing a tantrum all over ship tags and equating shippers with pedophiles, while blatantly misusing that word in the same sentence as claiming to be CSA survivors themselves, that really makes me doubt that they’re being entirely truthful about their trauma, and that they’re likely just making up some story out of the mistaken assumption it will add some legitimacy to their false accusations. If you were really a victim of child sexual abuse, you wouldn’t belittle it so candidly just for a cheap attempt at policing strangers on the internet, you wouldn’t exploit it as a manipulation tactic, and you’d have a little more respect for the term (and actual survivors of it) and use it appropriately.

that goes for the transtrender thing too. Believe it or not, I dislike transphobes and terfs as much as the next guy, but when it seems like being a trans guy is the new iteration of last decade’s empty boast of “not like other girls”, and then seeing so many teenagers on here who have clearly never experienced dysphoria in their lives and are solely using that identity as a means to shit on girls for shipping the wrong ship and backing up their reasoning with “well AS A GAY MAN~~ I’M TELLING YOU HOW STUPID YOU ARE BECAUSE I’M TOTALLY A GAY MAN THEREFORE I’M THE ULTIMATE AUTHORITY ON GAY MEN,” you’ll see why I’m so doubtful of a lot of people about who they claim to be. I doubt actual trans men would dedicate such a large portion of their leisure time to yelling at strangers on the internet over inane trivia, because I’m assuming they’d have bigger fish to fry, and actual real life problems to worry about. And probably also a considerable level of empathy on the subject of bullying and harassment, so…needless to say, that sort of behavior would likely be, erm…beneath them. Also, maybe let’s not appropriate that identity, because I imagine it’s demeaning to actual trans guys and the shit they’ve had to go through when all you’ve done is tapped off a hasty afterthought of pronouns in your bio and then assume to speak for them.

There’s also the implication it carries that it’s apparently a lot more beneficial on this site to be othergendered than it is to be female, that we’re still stuck in this shitty online culture where being female is still considered unfashionable and the Absolute Worst Possible Thing a person can be and that claiming to be anything but female is ideal, but that’s a conversation for another time. It’s just, illuminating, I suppose.

Don’t think I don’t feel bad for pointing this out. I really don’t intend to invalidate anyone’s identity or past abuse, but when it seems like most of you are simply using those labels as weapons for the lone purpose of being huge steaming shitbags to people in fan spaces, you’ll understand why I can’t really take anyone seriously, and why my knee-jerk reaction on this site is to immediately disbelieve that anyone is really who they say they are and not just catfishing for catfishing’s sake. It’s a red flag that goes up whenever someone makes claims as to their identity or education or general worldly experience, when everything about their personality and claims suggest otherwise. Like CSA survivors misusing the word pedophilia, presumed law students making serious accusations of federal crimes with absolutely no evidence to corroborate it, trans people whose only motivation to be on this site is bullying and harassment.

Pardon if I’m way off base here, I don’t mean to assume what might be considered “normal” behavior for any of these groups of people, but these traits seem a little out of character for those identities, so you’ll forgive me for my skepticism. I think a lot of people here are exaggerating a little about who they say they are. I know it must have been unpleasant, but accidentally stumbling across your parents’ porn stash doesn’t make you a CSA survivor. Occasionally attending a paralegal night class at your local community college for burnouts and recent divorcees doesn’t make you a law student. If you really want to make a convincing case for any of these things that you kids are impersonating, you need to start…well, playing the part a little more convincingly. You’re too obvious in your lie.

So just a little litmus test the next time you find yourself arrogantly opening any rebuttal with “As a _______, I’m telling you with unassailable authority that you’re wrong/immoral/harmful for liking this thing”, perhaps delete that and try again with something a little more substantial. Because for any of you that haven’t yet made it to sophomore-level debate class, that is a fallacy called “Appeal to Authority,” and it fails from the start because it assumes an individual’s dubious claim on an identity/experience gives them justification to speak for all people in that group.

This is flawed because it doesn’t rule out the imperfections of personal bias or intersectionality. Instead of using your identity to condescendingly explain why you’re right, try using factual evidence or actual statistics from reliable sources and studies rather than anecdotal evidence. We’re in a post-truth world now (in case any of you haven’t peeked out from under the tumblr-echo-chamber-induced rock you all obviously like to hide under and haven’t noticed), and you’d do best to not contribute to it if you want anyone to take you even remotely seriously when you claim to represent the rights of all those innocents and Others that make up the downtrodden minority of society. Just remember, anecdotal evidence cannot be proven, and it’s useless because literally anyone can just make up some bullshit and apply it to a situation to make themselves look right.

You know who else does this? Donald Trump. Donald Trump and his lackeys. This little missive is directed mostly at fandom antis, but this can apply to anyone on here who claims to be of any left-leaning persuasion: maybe don’t do that, because you start looking like the very people you claim to oppose, and it weakens every argument you’ll ever make. And I have faith in all of you, that you’re better than that. That you’re smarter than that. Even if your anecdotal evidence is true, it’s inadmissible because it can’t be proven. And it shouldn’t be, for that matter, because you don’t owe that to anyone. All it’s going to do is result in some asshole at some point coming out with their own anecdotal data that’s made up or highly embellished for the sole purpose of belittling yours, and then you’re at an impasse because A) you just spilled your most painful, humiliating memories in vain and B) you either have to acknowledge both accounts or acknowledge neither, and everybody loses. You’ve achieved nothing.

So we’re not here to play oppression olympics or win edgiest blogger award. There’s this really gross thing about tumblr where people are pressured into exposing their traumatic histories and deeply personal information in order to validate enjoyment of their fucking hobbies, and in turn it inspires the children harassing them to “beat the score” or whatever, and that’s when you have them firing back with really dubious accounts of their own, more seriouser trauma that makes them totally righter than you!!! (and is in actuality just a regurgitation of a Law & Order episode they saw once, and very obviously never fucking happened). Fake Tumblr Stories are everywhere, we all know this, we’ve all encountered plenty, but you’re not allowed to question the veracity of any of them or you risk being labeled an abuse apologist or victim blamer or something.

That’s fucking psychotic. Someone shouldn’t have to bleed their darkest moments to some snot-nosed 16 year old brat just to keep from being harassed or falsely reported as a pedophile, and some asshole who arrogantly self-identifies as the fucking moral police shouldn’t be so obsessed with getting the last word on trivial nonsense that they feel obligated to play this woker-than-thou pissing contest with people who have experienced *actual* trauma. I mean, do you kids not see how completely unhinged this behavior is? You children need to be fucking sedated. You’re goddamn nuts. I fear for the day we have to rely on you assholes in the job market, because you’re just gunna fuck everything up. You’ll always be failures. You’ll make a trainwreck of everything.

For lack of a better word,

Yikes.

Anyway, the point is just a reminder that your identity shouldn’t be relevant when you’re trying to prove a logical point or have any of your arguments taken seriously, if you really are right or justified in your stance. If your argument has any basis in sustainable fact, then your gender/orientation/mental illness/personal history will have no impact whatsoever. So lying about them really isn’t worth it and gains nothing. Just be yourself! I know at the tender ages of ~14-20 you’re desperate to be recognized for how unique you are and you’re struggling to be celebrated as a special individual when you’ve done absolutely nothing, but realistically…that’s a pretty tall order, there are like 7 billion people on the planet, so nothing you can make up about yourself will ever really be that impressive. Stop trying so hard and enjoy your fucking childhood.

And if you find you can’t make a stable argument without using a desperate appeal to authority like that, then maybe you should reassess your stance on things because chances are, it’s because you’re wrong.

#fandom wank #antis #sjw logic #purity politics #transtrenders #ship discourse #tumblr is not your safe space

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hatant · 7 years

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HEY, DONALD TRUMP, BACK THE F**K OFF OUR MAYOR

Stuart McGurk’s open letter to Donald Trump in GQ Magazine, 05/06/2017 http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/hey-donald-back-the-fk-off-our-mayor

“Dear Donald, I see you’ve been tweeting about our Mayor Sadiq Khan again.

So, let me just say something on behalf of all Londoners: Go. To. Bed. Would. You. Please.

Granted, I know it must upset you, how he won his election by actually winning the most votes. That must be infuriating. In fact, Donald, he was elected with the largest personal mandate in British political history. Oh boy, that must sting, not least as someone who hasn’t won a popular vote.

Perhaps it enrages you that, when you were running for election, he called your views on Islam “ignorant”. You responded by challenging him to an IQ test. Aw, bless, you little dummy. You’re so ignorant you don’t know the meaning of the word ignorant, do you? Buddy, it’ll be a mystery to the ages how the stupidest man in America became its most powerful. But here we are. Let’s face it, it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve been willing to let the world burn because of a personal feud, would it? Hell, by all reports you withdrew from the Paris climate change agreement because of the French president’s handshake. Awww, did the bad French man shake Donald’s hand too hardy-wardy? So Donny go cry-cry and stamp-stamp on planet Earth?

Grow up, you ludicrous horror-toddler.

It’s hard to parse your tweets to Mr Khan yesterday and today, because it’s impossible to attack you with logic, isn’t it? You don’t play by those rules. You’re impervious. Like in horror movie The Blob, any attacks only make you more destructive.

But for this sake of this letter, let’s at least try.

The bodies of the victims were barely cold when you launched your first Twitter attack on our mayor. Yesterday, Khan told Londoners there would be more police on the streets, but that we should stay calm. This is what leaders do, Donald. They attempt to calm their people. It’s called terrorism, you see, because it only works if it makes people afraid. Our mayor acted like a statesman and a leader.

And what did you do? Because of your pathetic feud last year, you, the tantrum-in-chief, the largest ego in the free world, chose this point to mock him: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’”

One, surely even someone as monstrously stupid as you knew he was talking about the police presence. But what kind of leader tells people they should panic? I mean, really, how stupid are you?

But you didn’t stop there, did you Donald? No, because today you doubled down. You tweeted, “Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his "no reason to be alarmed" statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!”

In what way did he “think fast” Donald? What do the media have to sell? The context was all there in the first part of his tweet. He’s changed his message not one bit.

Last year, this magazine rightly gave Khan our Politician of the Year award. In fact, GQ nailed its colours to Khan’s mast early. When Alastair Campbell interviewed him months before the election, we were so impressed with him, we called it right then and there: “The next mayor of London,” read the coverline.

And here’s what I bet annoys you the most about Khan, Donald. Beyond the fact he’s got more decency in his little finger that you have in your entire blancmange body, beyond the fact he’s popular, beyond the votes he got and the dignity he’s shown, it’s the fact he’s a Muslim mayor of one of the greatest cities on earth.

You see, Donald, Khan’s greatest weapon against the terrorists is not the brilliant anti-terror police that he, as London’s mayor, controls. But, rather, it’s himself. The fact that he made it. And the fact us Londoners – Londoners from every corner of the world, practicing every religion – love him.

Where you and your ilk seek to divide and ban – the very thing, you monstrous pea-brain, that causes terrorism in the first place, that sees young boys growing up angry, that sees young men on the internet taught to hate – Sadiq rising to be London’s mayor sends a message, not just to London, but to the world.

Sadiq speaks to London’s inclusiveness. We’re not perfect, no city is. But we try. He speaks to our resolve. And though he’s mentioned it so much at this stage to be something of a running joke, he reflects the idea in London that anyone can be anything, no matter your background, or connections. That, yes kids, it really is true: a bus-driver’s son can become the mayor.

You, I guess, having been born with a silver pitchfork in your mouth, wouldn’t know anything about that either.

Tonight, Donald, at 6pm, our Muslim mayor will lead a vigil for those who died in Saturday’s terrorist atrocity. He will be joined by senior Met officers, and Londoners of all descriptions and faiths. He will speak of resolve, of security and vigilance, but not of panic and not of hate. And maybe you should watch. Because, Donald, you might just see what a leader is supposed to look like.

And so, on behalf of the brilliant city I love, and one, for almost 20 years now, I’ve been lucky enough to call my home, let me say this to you, with all my heart, and as loud as I possibly can: back the f**k off our mayor.

Because us Londoners have got his back.”

#absolutely spot on #sadiq khan #london #politics #british politics #uk politics #donald trump #trump #fuck donald trump

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libertariantaoist · 7 years

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A few libertarians and other principled opponents of the warfare state assured us we likely would sleep easier with Donald Trump, rather than any neoconservative or humanitarian interventionist, in the White House. How’s that working out? Not so well. I’m hoarding melatonin and buying stock in Lunesta.

In its opening days, the Trump administration has rattled the saber at Iran, China, and North Korea. This is hardly comforting, considering that pronouncements from Trump and his closest advisers could have come from the foreign-policy establishment he supposedly upended. If this is disruption, I’d hate to see what an embrace of The Consensus would look like. The possible appointment of Elliott Abrams, the quintessential neoconservative — architect of and apologist for mass murder in the Middle East — as deputy secretary of state is just one more sign that Peaceniks for Trump have been gulled.

What about Trump’s position on Russia? they will ask. What about it? Not taking Bill O’Reilly’s bait (transcript here) doesn’t count as being pro-peace, especially when Trump had his UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, warn that sanctions against Russia won’t be removed until Vladimir Putin relinquishes Crimea. Haley’s declaration was a reversal of Trump’s earlier, better (though flawed) position that sanctions would be tied to a mutual reduction of both countries’ nuclear arsenals. Now we’re back to the Obama position. One need not defend Russia’s move on Crimea (even if most inhabitants favored it) to see the context: the U.S.-engineered coup (backed by neo-Nazi elements) against Ukraine’s elected president in favor of a neocon favorite — not to mention the larger context, the decades-long expansion of NATO to the Russian border and incorporation of former Russian allies into the U.S-led sphere. Provocation begets counter-moves, which in the Ukrainian case were hardly surprising, considering the historical and strategic importance of Crimea to Russia. The Soviet Union is not being reconstructed.

As we’ll see, whatever good Trump has in mind regarding relations with Russia will be undercut by other attitudes he harbors, particularly his bellicosity toward Iran, Russia’s ally. When it comes time to choose between detente with Russia or confrontation with Iran, I have no confidence Trump will make the right choice.

It is fascinating, I will concede, to see the elite’s and its news media’s hysteria over Trump’s reference to America’s lack of innocence when discussing Putin’s alleged homicidal conduct. Presidents are not supposed to refer to such things (even if they are true). Unfortunately, Trump does not appear disturbed by the U.S. government’s lethal record and did not vow to change things. Moreover, “[t]he president wasn’t just suggesting that government is a morally gray business that always involves some violence and wrongdoing,” Jacob T. Levy writes. “In his comments, he seemed to give up on the idea that there is such a thing as wrongdoing at all.”

Trump’s amoralism aside, are we all really supposed to believe — or is it pretend — that government’s hands were not blood-stained from day one in America, notwithstanding sugared words? Is that what the civil religion requires — that we ignore the crimes against American Indians, Africans, Filipinos, Japanese, Germans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Latin Americans, Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Libyans, Somalis, and Syrians? And those are just direct victims of official U.S. atrocities. The list of atrocities merely enabled by American presidents and their henchmen is much longer. (For two examples see the cases of Bangladesh and East Timor.) The list of regime changes (Iran, 1953, most relevantly) and assassinations is also long. (I have not ventured into the government’s many domestic crimes, such as biological, chemical, and psychological experimentation on unwitting Americans.) A self-styled exceptional nation, a global empire, and the world’s arms merchant is bound to get its hands soiled.

That even hinting at this bloody history is forbidden tells us a lot about “secular” America. Trump’s blasphemy was especially egregious because he was discussing Russia, the anti-America. (For a more reasonable, realistic take on Russia, see the British conservative writer Peter Hitchens’s “The Cold War Is Over.”) The news media and the high priests of America’s civil religion could not condemn Trump’s insult to the Holy National Church — the American State — in harsh enough terms. (For details on America’s civil religion, see chapter 2 of William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict.) Trump may want to strip the citizenship from and imprison those who burn the sacred flag, but that’s not enough for the defenders of the American faith, who contradictorily accuse him of endorsing both moral equivalence and moral relativism. (He can’t be doing both.) He must show he believes that America (i.e., the American State) is innocent — that all violence committed in its name was done so in a holy cause, unlike that of other nations (excluding Israel, of course, the other exceptional nation).

Not that Trump — who tries hard to look like a serious man who knows what he’s talking about — shows any sign of understanding this history (remember, he wants to make America great again) or of having any inclination to reverse course. When O’Reilly asked Trump to defend his statement that “We’ve got a lot of killers [too],” — O’Reilly had accused Putin of being a “killer” and therefore unworthy of Trump’s respect — all Trump could do was feebly name the “mistake” of the 2003 Iraq invasion (which he favored in the run-up). O’Reilly replied that mistakes are not comparable. Trump said: “A lot of mistakes, but a lot of people were killed. A lot of killers around, believe me.” Again, Trump didn’t condemn those killers. But also, Iraq was no mistake. It was a war of aggression and a violation of the Nuremberg principles. (Trump once said Americans were lied into Iraq, but then wimpily backed down when confronted by an offended veteran in South Carolina.)

Trump’s reply to O’Reilly was so bad it destroyed what might have been a valuable teaching moment. Instead, Trump looked like an idiot. He certainly did not help his objective to “get along with Russia.”

What he should have said is that the dramatic indignation at Putin’s crimes (whatever they are; evidence of his complicity is scant, although the number of killings is ominous and his regime is hardly liberty-friendly) is highly selective, that the U.S. government has a record of embracing brutal rulers (Egypt’s al-Sisi and Turkey’s Erdogan some to mind), and that Russia has a nuclear arsenal to match America’s, so the two countries ought to cooperate in getting rid of those monstrous weapons. When O’Reilly said, “I don’t know of any [American] government leaders that are killers,” Trump might have pointed out that, to take but one recent example, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Barack Obama drew up a list of people to be killed by drones every week. Trump might have also said that the botched raid in Yemen put him in the class of “government leaders that are killers.”

As noted, after Russia, it’s all downhill with Trump. He and his closest advisers are obsessed with Iran, which represents no threat to Americans and with whom, by the way, the U.S. government is tacitly allied in Iraq against the Islamic State. Iran has no nuclear-weapons program — never had one — and not much of a military, yet it has been continually threatened and subjected to covert warfare by the United States and Israel, the Middle East’s sole nuclear power. Saudi Arabia also has missiles that could hit Iran. So Iran’s claim that the mid-range missiles it’s testing are for deterrence is credible, and they violate no UN resolution. But Trump used the missile test as an occasion for saber-rattling: once again an American president has said that for Iran “all options are on the table.” If Trump is supposed to be such a disrupter of establishment foreign policy, why doesn’t he see that his demonization of Iran is absurdly dangerous and contrary to the interests of most Americans? Is it in part because the Israeli government needs to demonize the Islamic Republic in order to divert attention from its continued usurpation of Palestinian-owned land? Does it have something to do with keeping close relations with Saudi Arabia, the cradle of “radical Islamic terrorism”?

Now Trump is carrying his anti-Iran animus over to pathetic Yemen, scene of a two-year-old U.S.-enabled Saudi onslaught and siege, which is inflicting mass starvation among other unspeakable consequences. There is no excuse for the United States’ helping Saudi Arabia and its gulf allies to pulverize the poorest country in the Middle East. While on the one hand, the United States strikes at al-Qaeda there (the recent botched raid killed many noncombatants and cost one American Navy SEAL’s life), on the other it helps al-Qaeda by enabling the Saudi war on the Houthis, who are misleadingly portrayed as Iran’s agents. (The Houthis have in fact acted contrary to Iran’s wishes.) Trump national-security adviser Michael Flynn recently described a Houthi attack on a Saudi warship as an “Iranian action,” and press secretary Sean Spicer went further by charging, until corrected, that the attack was on an American ship. What advantage does Trump see in a confrontation and perhaps war with Iran?

Isn’t the incoherent and seemingly pointless intervention in Yemen just the sort of irrational policy Trump criticized in his campaign, however inarticulately? (Maybe it’s not really pointless: see Gareth Porter’s “Trump’s Hard Line on Iran Will Give Saudis Free Hand in Yemen.”) Enabling this destruction is yet another stain on America, and it supports Trump’s statement about the country’s lack of innocence — yet he’s the one now carrying it on.

We must also wonder if he has overlooked the fact that Russia, with which he says he wants to cooperate, is Iran’s ally and benefactor and that Iran is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s ally. Laying off Assad and concentrating on the Islamic State, which Trump says he wants to do, will benefit Iran, just as the intervention in Iraq does. Then what? Has no adviser pointed out the collision course Trump is on?

Contrary to assurances from Trump’s pro-peace cheerleaders, his narcissism, petulance, and conceit provide strong grounds to fear his conduct of foreign policy. He has vowed to make America so powerful (at what price?) that “no one will mess with us.” But rather than being reassuring, that kind of talk should make us worry about what he will do when he believes that some head of state is testing him. Russia and Iran are not the sorts of countries that take well to being assigned their place in the world by any American president.

I’m not one for quoting Madison, but among his keenest insights was that war is the gravest of all threats to liberty because it contains the germs of all the others. Or as Randolph Bourne put it, “War is the health of the State.” Therefore stripping the U.S. government’s capacity to operate a global empire and to wage war anywhere everywhere should be our priority. Trump’s taunting of the foreign-policy establishment is so far unmatched by deeds; on the contrary, his conduct to date undermines the better parts of his message. Trump provides no reason to expect anything else.

#sheldon richman #tgif_the goal is freedom #war #donald trump #empire #iran #non-intervention #russia #libertarian institute

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