#(and he's still like. the only new jewish human character in the campaign.)

[supercantaloupe]

What is the antisemitism in TUC season 1? Does it have to do with Wally the golem?/gen

[ID: an ask from an anonymous tumblr user that reads "would love to hear more about the antisemitism in unsleeping city! was a while ago that i watched it and can't remember what you might be referencing but definitely want to be aware of it.]

no, it's not about willy the golem -- i actually think willy is a great addition to the season (even if i wish we got to see more of him), and an indication to me that brennan/the showrunners were definitely trying to be sincere and inclusive. i want to make it clear that i don't think anything antisemitic in tuc is there intentionally; i think it's there out of simple ignorance, which is also why i think fans don't frequently see/comment on it either. but i don't think that's an excuse, either.

my grief with tuc1 is largely centered around its portrayal of robert moses as the villain. especially by making him a greedy, power-hungry lich working en league with bloodsucking vampires. (also his mini is literally a green skinned skull man in a suit. yikes.) here's the thing; i know robert moses was a real life horrible person, who actually was racist and powerhungry etc etc. and i know that robert moses, the real actual person, was jewish. my grief with tuc1 is not that they chose to use robert moses over literally any other person (real or fictional) to be their season villain (though i'd be really curious to know what tuc1 would have looked like with a different villain), but that they chose to take a real jewish person, turn them into an antisemitic caricature, and then only barely add other portrayals of judaism to balance that out.

like, tuc isn't completely devoid of other jewish representation. as you mention, there's willy the golem -- and again, i really like willy, and i love that it's a portrayal of a golem that's faithful to jewish folklore (ie as a benevolent, guardian construct rather than a mindless destructive monster. i am not a fan of how 'golem' is so frequently misused as a generic enemy creature in other fantasy and ttrpg spaces, including other seasons of d20). but as i said earlier, i wish we see more of him in the season, because he's not around very much, and feels a little more like worldbuilding than a full character to me. also, he's not human. jews are people.

the only other human jewish character in tuc1 is...stephen sondheim. which, again, yeah, that's a real person who really was jewish. but i really wouldn't blame you if you had no idea of that when watching tuc1. maybe from the name you could guess he might be jewish, but i don't think people ought to make a habit of trying to 'clock' someone being jewish by having a 'jewish-sounding' surname. as he's portrayed in tuc1, you'd never know he's jewish, unless you happen to already be pretty knowledgeable about the man in real life. it's far more likely you'll know him as a theater legend than anything else (may his memory be a blessing).

now i'm not saying that brennan or the showrunners should have played up the jewishness of Real Person Stephen Sondheim to counterbalance the depiction of robert moses; that just feels weird to me, especially considering that sondheim was literally alive when tuc1 was filmed and released. it's a tricky thing to portray real people in fiction alongside made up characters, especially when they are contemporaries, and i don't think 'outright caricature' is the way to go about that. nor do i think that moses' jewishness should have been played up at all, because again i don't think that would have been particularly true to the person/character, and also Fucking Yikes. but, c'mon, if you hear the names 'moses' and 'sondheim' next to each other, which one do you associate more with judaism?

and as it stands, these are the only representations of judaism in tuc1. one admittedly nice but very minor nonhuman character; one human character you'd never be able to tell was jewish; and a third human character who, while never explicitly referenced as jewish, plays into some really hurtful antisemitic stereotyping. and it was a choice to not include anything else. maybe not a deliberate one, probably more likely one made out of simple ignorance than anything else, but a choice nonetheless. in a city with one of the largest and most visibly jewish populations in the country, and a culture that is inextricably influenced by that jewish population. a jewish population which has been and continues the target of rising hate crimes for years. i know that nyc means different things to different people, and everyone's nyc is their own -- but my nyc is jewish, and it sucks that that its jewishness is referenced directly in only one very minor way, which is greatly overshadowed by its, in my view, really insidious indirect references.

i don't know exactly how to go about addressing this. obviously, the show can't be changed by now. even if it could, i think the final product would be very significantly different from what it is now if the villain was something/someone else. i think including more references to jews in new york, more (human) jewish characters, hell, even mentioning hanukkah celebrations and menorahs in windows (it takes place in late december, after all; depending on the year it's not at all out of place for hanukkah to coincide with xmas!) would help. having literally any more positive jewish representation in tuc1 would, i think, help balance the bad stuff that's there. because, yeah, robert moses was real and he was terrible and he was jewish. but he's one jewish guy in a city with over a million jews, the vast majority of whom are just normal people. i don't want him to be the only vision of us that people get, in tuc1 alone or in any media. i'm not saying that jews can't or shouldn't be villains in fiction; but especially if you are a goyische creator, you should be really careful in how you're portraying us, and if there are other contrasting depictions in your work, too, in order to not (even accidentally) demonize jewish people as a whole.

#sasha answers #anon #unsleeping city #the unsleeping city #long post #sorry for not putting this under a read more but i think people ought to see this. or at least #if two people felt the need to ask me about it then at least they would want to see the full thing uncovered #also fwiw i do think that they tried to address this to some extent when they made tuc2 #with more scenes with willy (and incorporating more golem folklore with the animating word in his mouth -- nice touch!) #the jewish immigrant family in the photo flashback encounter (even if the hanukkiah in the picture isn't exactly kosher lol) #and ESPECIALLY rabbi mike. i ADORE rabbi mike. i think he's a WONDERFUL addition #i do still wish he was a more important/prominent character. cause again he isn't in it all that much. #(and he's still like. the only new jewish human character in the campaign.) #but i recognize what he represents and i am happy about it #i do think brennan & the d20 crew tried to improve after tuc1. i do. i see their efforts and i applaud them for it #but still to my knowledge they haven't ever directly addressed the errors made in season 1 #and it's extremely rare that i even see other fans mention it #and like. sorry but i am tired. i am. we deserve better. we deserve portrayals in media that show us as People #not just as evil monsters #anyway you're welcome to rb this but be cool in the notes esp if you're a goy #other jews are welcome to (respectfully) disagree with me if they want #also if you so much as mention the word israel on this post you're getting blocked end of

[ruckystarnes]

Title: D&D Night

Author: RuckyStarnes

Card: B018

Characters: Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers, Wanda Maximoff, Natasha Romanoff

Words: 273

Warnings: just cute nerdy stuff

Rating: G

Written for: @buckybarnesbingo

Square/Prompt: Adopted: dungeons & dragons

Summary: Wanda managed to convince some of the others to try Dungeons & Dragons

Type: Moodboard | Drabble

Wanda was the one to first bring it up. Slowly roping in a new person each Saturday night until she had Bucky, Steve, and Natasha coming over every weekend (after taking them shopping for their own dice set) to sit down and play. She was giddy the first night the four of them sat at the round table, each with their own bag of dice and with various facial expressions worn.

Steve was curious, always one to try something new, and this was on his list.

Natasha was more than happy to entertain the witch's idea.

And Bucky?

He had a small crush on the Jewish ginger, even though he confided in Steve that he felt it was inappropriate for a man his age to even entertain the idea of liking her. But Steve reassured him, that even though the two of them were born more than a hundred years ago, they were still only in their 30s and there was nothing inappropriate about it.

So here he was, agreeing to be a one armed rogue elf with the proclivity to be bitter if he wasn't the center attention, which, to him, was hilarious. Natasha was a human fighter and Steve a changeling paladin.

And Wanda?

She was a variant aasimar sorcerer. And she made herself badass in Bucky's eyes, which is how he viewed the shy woman. And as they started the game, he saw her be a different person. The passion in her voice made him smile as she started the campaign, setting the scene and the objectived.

By the end of the night, he was going to ask her out.

#bbb2022 #bucky barnes #steve rogers #natasha romanoff #wanda maximoff #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes fanfic #buckybarnesbingo2022 #steve rogers fanfiction #steve rogers fanfic #natasha romanoff fanfiction #natasha romanoff fanfic #wanda maximoff fanfic #wanda maximoff fanfiction #bucky barnes moodboard #steve rogers moodboard #natasha romanoff moodboard #wanda maximoff moodboard

[ace-apple]

cbuUgw

(chumlochcaight so since i recently made a new ref for her CHORAN MASTERPOST (aka infodumping on my fave oc)

ALL HER INFO UNDER THE CUT (its really fucking long!!)

Part 1: Lochainin

aight so first off ill need to explain lochainin

(the lochainin campaign is set in the year 1987 in michigan (well when they’re not in lochainin) btw!)

choran is actually a dnd character of mine in a campain called lochainin im doing with a couple friends

and this is a group pic of all the player characters i made a while back! ill summarize them from left to right (pls remember that only choran is mine!!)

quinn- 11 yrs old, he/him, jewish, has an affinity for moss and pretty much lives in the woods. druid

hans- 10 years old, he/him, german, loves frogs and is all around baby. druid

emerson- 10 years old, she/her, german, hans’ twin sister. more levelheaded. barbarian (both hans and emerson are technically npcs now, since the person who played the two of them left the campaign) 

choran: 15 years old, she/her, caucasian, chaotic bastard. rogue

delilah- 15 years old, she/her, jersy-italian, her parents have ties to the mafia, choran’s girlfriend, jersey accent. monk

aight so here’s the story/lore

lochainin is an alternate dimension that humans sometimes fall into through puddles. the gang (shown above) jumps in a puddle and falls down into Lochainin. lochainin is a very swamp-like place, but also has other terrain such as forests and caverns. lochainin is inhabited by humanoid frogs and toads (called losgann and buaf/buof respectively), they have human intelligence, posture, and speech capabilities, but some things like modern medicine are foreign to them. 

now there’s this Empire we barely know jack shit about but it exists and most of the humans that fall down end up with the Empire. currently in this campaign all we know is that a lot of people dont like the empire. we just know the empire exists

aight here are the npcs (that i can remember lol) 

- Crecil (losgann, he/him, tavern worker, party found him in a sewer not long after falling into lochainin)

-Ugma (buof, she/her, captain of the local guard in one of the villages)

-Zax (buof, they/them, good at navigating, at the time of writing this we’re going with him to the north to look for dryads cause they might know the way back home)

-Iris (buof, witch in t’og swamp who gives quinn and hans a weird potion that essentially takes them on an acid trip where they both get their druid levels)

locations: T’og swamp- village the party comes across after finding Crecil, has a tavern, local guard (Ugma is the captain) that is pretty much all volunteer work (choran joins up with them for a day at one point), and a market.

Crystal path- cavern with lots of crystals. they have fiberglass like shards when you lick them (we know this because choran licked one of the rocks). has large crystal beetles who’s blood can be cooked for good nutrition.

Part 2: Story

this is just a summary of the stuff that has happened in the campaign so far (as of writing this) (might not be accurate since none of us took any fucking notes lol)

they fall into a puddle and end up in lochainin. choran finds a human skull in a sewer and decides to keep it. they fight a strange acid spitting monster that almost killed choran by getting acid on her arm (that’s where her arm scar is from!) they find crecil in a cage but had found a key earlier. choran takes an axe out of a block of wood they found in a dead end.

they show up at t’og swamp and stay at the tavern. at one point choran gets drunk off of a substance known as death cap ale (death cap being a type of mushroom). we still have no idea if that was poisonous or not. 

uhhh a lot of stuff i dont remember cause it was a while ago and i spaced out a bunch

eventually they come across some tower place i also dont remember why we were there. a couple of losgann were fighting each other, eventually they notice us after one of the party members failed a sneak roll, we fought them but choran killed one of them after getting stabbed in the ankle (she sliced their neck with an axe). since their death was completely unnecessary nobody is very happy with choran for doing this. delilah is especially unhappy with her girlfriend for commiting homicide.

 fasldkjfasolfjasdo;lf and now theyre in the crystal path with zax going to look for the dryads since they might know a way for the party to get out of the place.

Part 3: Choran

oh hey now we finally get to my girl!!! might as well start with the basics of a dnd character: stats and shit

Strength: 13 Dexterity: 17  Constitution: 13  Intelligence: 13  Wisdom: 13  Charisma: 17

(yeah my stat rolls were really crazy)

Alighment: Chaotic Neutral

Race: Human (all of the party is!)

Class: Rogue

unfortunately, i don’t have my character sheet and i dont have it listed elsewhere so i dont remember any of my proficiencies or most of my items, but i do know she has a human skull on her that she found in the sewer they found crecil in

she’s a bit of a wild child, rebellious teen phase is turned up to 11 with her. she got a tattoo that may or may not have been legally obtained (the warning symbol on her right shoulder). her and delilah have been banned from their local cvs pharmacy. 

now for backstory, and hoo boy.

alright so choran was born to two rich parents who were very strict about her life. textbook helicopter parenthood and then some, really. they didn’t let her make friends, enrolled her in a private school (the kind with uniforms and shit, not the kind too poor for a janitor like my private school). they often told her exactly how to behave, with their own words contradicting themselves! (aka one time theyll tell her to speak up and another time theyll tell her to be quiet). she felt like her parents could never make up their minds about what they wanted her to be.  Eventually in 5th grade they let her go to a public school, but still forced her to wear skirts and proper clothes and not really express herself. By the end of 6th grade her parents sent her to live with her aunt on the other side of town, despite having always called her a “bad influence”. turns out that bad influence was actually being a decent human being to choran, letting her actually have friends over, go to parks, choose her own clothes, etc. in middle school she met delilah and quinn, and eventually through delilah she met the german twins.  her original name wasnt actually choran by the way! her full legal name is Lalia Ouroban, but since she moved and got her own life away from her parents she decided to go by Choran. the only member of the party to know her real name is Delilah. and then in 8th grade choran and delilah started dating and then the lochainin events happened!

#apple draws #choran post #<- gonna use that for posts of her from now on btw #apple rambles #dnd #infodump #i literally love her you have no idea #she's my fave oc im so attached to her #like her design? love #her personality? love #her story? love #maybe illl post the short story for her backstory i wrote one day........

[sparkles-rainbows-severed-heads]

Nazi-Hating, Bisexual King, and German actor, Conrad Veidt (1893-1943) whose performances inspired the creation of Edward Scissorhands, Jafar from Aladdin, and The Joker, was a gem in real life. Be like Connie. Do it for him.

Here’s some information on how great he was:

https://aikainkauna.tumblr.com/post/41163268378/ten-reasons-why-you-should-love-conrad-veidt

“In honour of Conrad Veidt’s 120th birthday, let us present you with a list of reasons why you should love him. Because, let’s face it, he kicked more arse than you ever will. While wearing your great-grandmother’s dress.

1. He was an awesome actor who could hypnotise the screen in both the silents and the sounds. He could do amazing things with his body language, his eyes and his voice and move like an actual cat. Oh, and he was Method before it became popular. To the point where his friends and colleagues would get worried because his entire body language and way of speaking would change. He genuinely believed he was possessed by some greater spirit when he was acting. And it shows. 2. He was an amazing human being—everybody loved working with him because he was incredibly polite and jovial and charming, but he was even more amazing off the screen. Let us tell you why.

3. This guy starred in the first gay rights movie ever and played the first explicitly-referred-to-as-gay character on screen, and the first sympathetic gay character on screen. In a movie that said it was okay to be gay and that some people were just born that way. In 1919. The makers of the film and Connie himself were flooded with death threats from the far right. They would arrange riots in theatres and release gas and rabid rodents into the aisles. But the makers of the film stood their ground. Later, the Nazis tried to burn all copies of the film but over half of it still survives and a reconstruction can be seen here.

 4. Oh yeah, and this guy also starred in an early pro-choice film, had a high opinion on women (with some progressive views for his time, when the right to vote and to wear trousers were still seen as new and scandalous things) and was a fierce campaigner for human rights and a vehement anti-Nazi for his entire life. Speaking of which… 

 5. In the Thirties, he starred in two British movies sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. While still a German citizen. Hitler sent him personal hate mail, Goebbels tried to persuade him into doing propaganda films for the Nazis instead and he told them to go stuff themselves. This was after some of his Jewish and gay friends had already been killed by the Nazis, too, so he knew exactly the sort of danger he was in. Oh, and they imprisoned him and tortured him with sleep deprivation and put him on the Gestapo hitlist. Guess what? He didn’t budge. He never raised his hand in the Heil Hitler salute, once. And when, finally, the British authorities helped him escape to England, he never went back to Germany again. Also? Despite being Protestant, he identified himself as Jewish on official forms as a form of protest. In. Nazi. Germany. I’m sorry, but Conrad Veidt’s balls»»»>yours. 

 6. He spent a huge amount of money supporting the British war effort and personally smuggled people out of the hands of the Nazis. Including driving his third wife’s Jewish parents out to Switzerland in his car under the cover of night after much bribery and passport shenanigans. In the Forties, he participated in a fund helping fellow Europeans escape Nazis and settle in the UK and the US. One of the people he helped was his Casablanca co-star, Paul Henreid. By the time Henreid had reached the UK, the war was in full swing and he was treated as an enemy alien. Connie (who had managed to acquire British citizenship just before war broke out) personally rang the British authorities and vouched for him until Henreid could finally cross the Atlantic to safety (with some monetary assistance from Connie himself). So, kids, when you watch Major Strasser menacing Laszlo in Casablanca, remember this guy actually helped him escape the Nazis in real life. 

 7. While living in London in the late Thirties, he and his wife would regularly shelter war children at their house. When the air raid sirens came on, he’d rather run back home to be with the kids rather than stay safe at the studio’s bomb shelter. No, really. And even when he’d left for Hollywood in the 40s, he would do stuff like this for the poor kids of London huddled in bomb shelters. You might need tissues. 

 8. He was made of actual sex on and off the screen. He possessed an amazing, androgynous sexual aura that would take no prisoners. He could be feminine without being effeminate, seductive and possessing and powerful without being gruff or macho, incredibly catlike and soft without being weak. Despite being skinny as hell and 6’3” tall, he was as graceful as a dancer, gliding around so smoothly it was uncanny, slightly unnatural (when Disney were making Aladdin, they deliberately based the cartoon Jafar on his performance in The Thief of Bagdad and told the animators to make him glide like Connie did. Yeah, that’s right, Disney villains were based on him. No wonder. No, really, look at that). From the Thirties onwards, he was repeatedly described as pantherlike. He had a sensuous, cruel mouth (always a little more red and open and wet than it should have been in order to be decent), large, pale blue piercing eyes (oh yeah, he was well-read in hypnotism and occultism, so he is actually hypnotising and possessing you for real), finely manicured fingernails (sometimes filed into sharp points) and a voice to melt knickers off anyone within a five-mile radius. When he smoked, it looked like he was giving oral sex to a woman and a man at the same time. Watch A Woman’s Face, The Thief of Bagdad and Dark Journey for good examples of this amazing man’s slinking, slithering, purring charm. 

 9. Oh yeah, speaking of the off-screen sex… Merle Oberon said “he would have sex with a butterfly”, Anita Loos quipped “the prettiest girl on the [Berlin] street was Conrad Veidt” and he was a major gay icon in 1920s Germany thanks to the aforementioned gay rights movie and his androgynous looks and style. Let us remember this guy spent his youth in Weimar Berlin and its cabarets, a modern Babylon where “anything goes” was an understatement. Drugs, wild parties and sexual diversions of every sort imaginable were the done thing in those days. You were considered unfashionable if you didn’t dress in drag and experiment with bisexuality. In that, he was hardly different from his peers (like, for example, his good friend Marlene Dietrich). But then again… there were people who experimented and there were people for whom it was all a phase, but according to numerous sources, he was a natural, voracious bisexual and so in love with everything feminine he genuinely loved to dress as a lady. And apparently he would fall in love all the time, so the Twenties were… busy years for him, especially when his second marriage had started to fall apart. Just don’t ask what he did to Olivier. And according to a couple of sources, Gary Cooper. Oh, and his first wife left him after she found him wearing her dress (her loss). Most of the time, his friends would describe him as a ladies’ man during the day, and going after the men as well after he’d had a few drinks in the evening. He seems to have calmed down a lot in the Thirties after he found genuine happiness with his third wife and escaped the Nazis to the UK, but apparently he was still an incorrigible flirt with both sexes until the end of his life. If you think he looks seductive and deliciously perverse on screen, that’s all real and then some. So, yep, this was a guy who was a genuine saint and an amazing human being and a naughty, naughty man at the same time. How often do you hear of both sides coexisting in the same person? 

 10. He was, basically, the last lingering sigh of Romanticism as a genuine cultural movement. On screen, he played the Gothic, Byronic hero to the hilt (The Student of Prague being one of the greatest examples of the type). In the silents, he played degenerate dandies, tortured painters and pianists and violinists, cruel yet seductive tyrants, men haunted by their doppelgängers, possessed creatures wanting to crawl out of their own bodies, sleepwalking and twitching and writhing on the screen, turning everything into a dark, exquisite ballet. In the sound films, he turned that demonic energy outwards and would pin people down with his gaze as he cursed them, would undress women with a flick of his pitch-black lashes, would curl his long fingers around their arms in a sadomasochistic, erotic stranglehold. He never completely lost his accent, but he compensated for it with pitch-perfect softness and tone, speaking very slowly and quietly when everybody else would speak loud and fast. His voice in The Thief of Bagdad was compared to poisoned honey. The MGM bosses were surprised at the mountains of fanmail he received from women in the Forties, even if they had never given him a starring role, only supporting, villainous ones. And the ladies wanted this villain, oh yes. A woman moviegoer (presumably after seeing his performance in A Woman’s Face) described him thus: “Conrad Veidt has wicked eyes, a sinister mouth, strange hands and a half-man/half- woman quality about him. His walk is frightening. There is something not quite normal about him. And yet, he was totally fascinating, charming and appealing to me at the same time!”

So, there you have it. There are many more reasons to love him, but it would take forever to try and list all of them. I suggest you watch his movies and read up on him yourself, because he deserves to live forever.”

#conrad veidt #do it for him #do it for her #the cabinet of doctor caligari #the cabinet of dr. caligari #the man who laughs #gwynplaine #casablanca #the hands of orlac

[arcticdementor]

Can you believe ...?

Perhaps no question has been repeated more times in reaction to more events this year than that one.

The most recent major outrage in the Jewish community, now several news cycles behind us, came on the Shabbat before Yom Kippur—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—when many American Jews seemed dumbfounded by what was to me predictable news: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, progressive superstar, had pulled out of an event honoring Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister assassinated because of his efforts to make peace with the Palestinians. Rabin was, as Bill Clinton said at his funeral, “a martyr for his nation’s peace.”

…

But it wasn’t AOC who was mixed up. The savvy politician had read the room and was sending a clear signal about who belongs in the new progressive coalition and who does not. The confusion—and there seems to be a good deal of it these days—is among American Jews who think that by submitting to ever-changing loyalty tests they can somehow maintain the old status quo and their place inside of it.

Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people? Did you see that Mayor Bill de Blasio scapegoated “the Jewish community” for the spread of COVID in New York, while defending mass protests on the grounds that this is a “historic moment of change”?

Listen, it’s been a hell of a year. We all have a lot going on, much of it unnerving and some of it dire. Moreover, many of these stories only surface on places like Twitter; they don’t make it into the pages of The New York Times or your friends’ Facebook feeds, which is where most Americans get their news these days. Reporters don’t cover these stories adequately, contextualizing them, telling readers which ones are true and which ones aren’t, which ones matter and which ones don't.

So it makes sense that many smart, well-intentioned people are confused. Or rather: Looking for someone to explain why an emerging movement that purports to advance the ideals they have always supported—fairness, justice, righting historical wrongs—feels like it is doing the opposite.

…

To understand the enormity of the change we are now living through, take a moment to understand America as the overwhelming majority of its Jews believed it was—and perhaps as we always assumed it would be.

It was liberal.

Not liberal in the narrow, partisan sense, but liberal in the most capacious and distinctly American sense of that word: the belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. The belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group or the tribe. The belief that the rule of law—and equality under that law—is the foundation of a free society. The belief that due process and the presumption of innocence are good and that mob violence is bad. The belief that pluralism is a source of our strength; that tolerance is a reason for pride; and that liberty of thought, faith, and speech are the bedrocks of democracy.

The liberal worldview was one that recognized that there were things—indeed, the most important things—in life that were located outside of the realm of politics: friendships, art, music, family, love. This was a world in which Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be close friends. Because, as Scalia once said, some things are more important than votes.

Crucially, this liberalism relied on the view that the Enlightenment tools of reason and the scientific method might have been designed by dead white guys, but they belonged to everyone, and they were the best tools for human progress that have ever been devised.

Racism was evil because it contradicted the foundations of this worldview, since it judged people not based on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin. And while America’s founders were guilty of undeniable hypocrisy, their own moral failings did not invalidate their transformational project. The founding documents were not evil to the core but “magnificent,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, because they were “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” In other words: The founders themselves planted the seeds of slavery’s destruction. And our second founding fathers—abolitionists like Frederick Douglass—made it so. America would never be perfect, but we could always strive toward building a more perfect union.

I didn’t even know that this worldview had a name because it was baked into everything I came into contact with—my parents’ worldviews, the schools they sent me to, the synagogues we attended, the magazines and newspapers we read, and so on.

…

No longer. American liberalism is under siege. There is a new ideology vying to replace it.

No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.

…

The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game—due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself—must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with—designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.

…

Critical race theory says there is no such thing as neutrality, not even in the law, which is why the very notion of colorblindness—the Kingian dream of judging people not based on the color of their skin but by the content of their character—must itself be deemed racist. Racism is no longer about individual discrimination. It is about systems that allow for disparate outcomes among racial groups. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, then the course must have been flawed and should be dismantled.

…

In fact, any feature of human existence that creates disparity of outcomes must be eradicated: The nuclear family, politeness, even rationality itself can be defined as inherently racist or evidence of white supremacy, as a Smithsonian institution suggested this summer. The KIPP charter schools recently eliminated the phrase “work hard” from its famous motto “Work Hard. Be Nice.” because the idea of working hard “supports the illusion of meritocracy.” Denise Young Smith, one of the first Black people to reach Apple’s executive team, left her job in the wake of asserting that skin color wasn’t the only legitimate marker of diversity—the victim of a “diversity culture” that, as the writer Zaid Jilani has noted, is spreading “across the entire corporate world and is enforced by a highly educated activist class.”

The most powerful exponent of this worldview is Ibram X. Kendi. His book “How to Be an Antiracist” is on the top of every bestseller list; his photograph graces GQ; he is on Time’s most influential people of the year; and his outfit at Boston University was recently awarded $10 million from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

…

And just in case moral suasion is ineffective, Kendi has backup: Use the power of the federal government to make it so. “To fix the original sin of racism,” he wrote in Politico, “Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals [sic]: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.” To back up the amendment, he proposes a Department of Anti-Racism. This department would have the power to investigate not just local governments but private businesses and would punish those “who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” Imagine how such a department would view a Jewish day school, which suggests that the Jews are God’s chosen people, let alone one that teaches Zionism.

Kendi—who, it should be noted, now holds Elie Wiesel’s old chair at Boston University—believes that “to be antiracist is to see all cultures in their differences as on the same level, as equals.” He writes: “When we see cultural difference we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less.” It’s hard to imagine that anyone could believe that cultures that condone honor killings of unchaste young women are “nothing more, nothing less” than culturally different from our own. But whether he believes it or not, it’s obvious that embracing such relativism is a highly effective tool for ascension and seizing power.

It should go without saying that, for Jews, an ideology that contends that there are no meaningful differences between cultures is not simply ridiculous—we have an obviously distinct history, tradition and religion that has been the source of both enormous tragedy as well as boundless gifts—but is also, as history has shown, lethal.

By simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed: Zionism is refashioned as colonialism; government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews in Jersey City; Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews “are the face of capital.” Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”

This is no longer a fringe view. As the philosopher Peter Boghossian has noted: “This ideology is the dominant moral orthodoxy in our universities, and has seeped out and spread to every facet of American life— publishing houses, tech, arts, theater, newspapers, media,” and, increasingly, corporations. It has not grabbed power by dictates from above, but by seizing the means of sense-making from below.

Over the past few decades and with increasing velocity over the last several years, a determined young cohort has captured nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life. Rather than the institutions shaping them, they have reshaped the institutions. You don’t need the majority inside an institution to espouse these views. You only need them to remain silent, cowed by a fearless and zealous minority who can smear them as racists if they dare disagree.

It is why California attempted to pass an ethnic studies curriculum whose only mention of Jews was to explain how they, along with Irish immigrants, were invited into whiteness.

It is why those who claim to care about diversity and inclusion don’t seem to care about the deep-seated racism against Asian Americans at schools like Harvard.

It is why a young Jewish woman named Rose Ritch was recently run out of the USC student government. Ms. Ritch stood accused of complicity in racism because, following the Soviet lie, to be a Zionist is to be nothing less than a racist. Her fellow students waged a campaign to hound her out of her position: “Impeach her Zionist ass,” they insisted.

It is why the Democratic Socialists of America, the emerging power center of the Democratic Party in New York, sent a questionnaire to New York City Council candidates that included a pledge not to travel to Israel.

It is why Tamika Mallory, an outspoken fan of Louis Farrakhan, gets the glamour treatment in a photoshoot for Vogue.

And this is why AOC, the standard bearer of America’s new left, didn’t think Yitzhak Rabin was worth the political capital, but goes out of her way, a few days later, to praise the Black Panthers. She is the harbinger of a political reality in which Jews will have little power.

It does not matter how progressive you are, how vegan or how gay, how much you want universal health care and pre-K and to end the drug war. To believe in the justness of the existence of the Jewish state—to believe in Jewish particularism at all—is to make yourself an enemy of this movement.

…

If you’re nearing the end of the essay wondering why this hasn’t been explained to you before, the answer is because, yet again, we find ourselves in another moment in Jewish history at a time of great need and urgency with communal leadership who, with rare exception, will not address the danger.

I understand why people have been blind to this. Life has been good—exceedingly good—for American Jews for half a century. Many older communal leaders seem to lack the moral imagination to see this threat. It’s also hard for anyone to hear the words: They’re just not that into you.

So when I try to discuss this with many Jews in leadership positions, what I face is either boomer-esque entitlement—a sense that the way the world worked for them must be the way it will always work—or outright resistance. Oh please, wokeness isn’t important anywhere but in silly Twitter microclimates. When you explain that no, in fact, this ideology has taken over universities, publishing houses, the media, museums and is now making quick work of corporate America, you hit another roadblock: Isn’t this just righting some historical injustices? What could go wrong? You then have to explain what could go wrong—what is already going wrong—is that it is ruining the lives of regular, good people, and the more institutions and companies fall prey to it, the more lives it will ruin.

…

Last month, I participated in a Zoom event attended by several major Jewish philanthropists. After briefly talking about my experience at The New York Times, I noted that if they wanted to understand what happened to me, they needed to appreciate the power of that new, still-nameless creed that has hijacked the paper and so many other institutions essential to American life. I’ve been thinking about what happened next ever since.

One of the funders on the call launched into me, explaining that Ibram X. Kendi’s work was vital, and portrayed me as retrograde and uncool for opposing the ideology du jour. Because this person is prominent and powerful enough to send signals that others in the Jewish world follow, the comments managed to both sideline me and stun almost everyone else into silence.

These people may be the most enraging: those with the financial security to oppose this ideology and demur, so desperate to be seen as hip; for their children to keep their spots at the right prep schools; so that they can be seated at the right tables at the right benefits; so that they are honored at Brown or Harvard; so that business does well enough that they can renovate their house in Aspen or East Hampton. Desperate to remain in good odor with the right people, they are willing to close their eyes to what is coming for the rest of us.

Young Jews who grasp the scope of this problem and want to fight it thus find themselves up against two fronts: their ideological enemies and their own communal leadership. But it is among this group—people with no social or political capital to hoard, some of them not even out of college—that I find our community’s seers. The dynamic reminds me of the one Theodor Herzl faced: The communal establishment of his time was deeply opposed to his Zionist project. It was the poorer, younger Jews—especially those from Russia—who first saw the necessity of Zionism’s lifesaving vision.

Funders and communal leaders who are falling over themselves to make alliances with fashionable activists and ideas enjoy a decadent indulgence that these young proud Jews cannot afford. They live far from the violence that affects Jews in places like Crown Heights and Borough Park. If things go south in one city, they can take refuge in a second home. It may be cost-free for the wealthy to flirt with an ideology that suggests abolishing the police or the nuclear family or capitalism. But for most Jews and most Americans, losing those ideas comes with a heavy price.

#bari weiss #tablet magazine #anti-semitism #cancel culture

[night-filled-mountain]

For the Hozier ask thing: No Plan, Be, Talk

- No Plan - Do you believe in a pre-determined purpose in life?

No, but I think it can be helpful–for some people!–to think and act like you have a pre-determined purpose, as long as you’re not too rigid about it. Sometimes the random twists and turns of life just get overwhelming, you know? And you need to weave them into some sort of pattern–“A, B, and C all happened in order to lead me to D,” or “Despite X obstacle, I know I’m meant to accomplish Y.” Humans are pattern-finding creatures–that’s why we like stories so much. I can’t imagine getting through life without periodically making it into a story, whether you actually believe in some divine Plan and Author or not. (This is reminding me once again of that Brian W. Foster lyric I’ve become obsessed with: “And if it wasn’t designed, then I’ll be damned if I ever know why.”)

Though honestly, for me? The opposite is true. I’ve faced, and continue to face, so many mental-health barriers to having the kind of life I’d like to have, and I’ve fought (and continue to fight!) such a harrowing, hard-scrabble fight to make that life happen anyway. It’s a massive struggle, it’s ongoing, it’s every day. It’s exhausting and humiliating and entirely without dignity. So the thing that I like to tell myself about the life I want? Is that I wasn’t meant to have it. Some particularly nasty gods have played a trick on me since birth, crafting a person for whom friends/romance/productive work/artistic fulfillment/Happiness are impossible–and day after day, I’m fighting them, trying to prove them wrong. Clawing and biting at them with everything I have in me. Forcing my way out of their boxes, grasping at what I want, and spitting in their eye for good measure.

I’m sure my preference for this narrative says something about me as a person, but I leave that up to you, anon!

- Be - Have you changed much as a person in the last year? 

…I literally don’t know where to start.

In August 2018, I wasn’t married yet. I lived in a small town in New Jersey with my parents and sister, and was desperately terrified of moving (permanently) anywhere else. I had completed two master’s degrees just a few months before, but I’d never had a full-time job, and I was 250% convinced (for the aforementioned mental-health reasons, and a chronic physical illness to boot!) that I could never, ever have one. Oh, and I’d just gotten back from a visit to my former roommate (which remains the last time I saw her, not counting Skype), and I was suffering constant agony over the intense, passionate, mutually pining, emotionally needy, co-dependent mess that was that relationship.

And now?

I’m married. I live in Boston, in an apartment where I’ve paid 100% of the rent for the past six months (though that will soon be changing!). I have a full-time job that has challenged and transformed me in ways that I could not possibly have imagined six months ago. Like…literally could not have fathomed. Outside the scope of my brainpower. Beyond my wildest dreams.

I’m the head of my department…because I’m the entire department. I do heavy-duty customer service. I interact with dozens of strangers every day–children, teens, and adults–and I usually do it without a whisper of social anxiety. I pick up my desk phone when it rings. I make phone calls when I have to. I send and receive dozens of e-mails a week. I manage a budget! I place orders! I schedule programs! I answer reference questions! I operate and troubleshoot various forms of technology constantly, and teach others how to use them. I reason with, joke with, assist, educate, entertain, chastise, and discipline 20+ rowdy teenagers ON A DAILY BASIS. There have been many days, and once an entire week, when I was literally in charge of my entire workplace and everyone in it. And it was all still functioning when my boss got back.

…And it’s actually really timely that I should write about all this now, because I’m smack-dab in the middle of an extremely daunting work task, one that’s causing my ADD to kick my ass to hell and back. And I’ve spent the past few days wondering just how fucking desperate this place must have been to hire someone who’s been wretchedly sobbing over her utter lack of focus and organizational skills for almost 30 years. So it’s…quite the morale-booster to look at these paragraphs about just how goddamn far I’ve come in a year.

…Also, Ex-Roommate and I have gone no-contact, and most days, I don’t think about her. And if I do, it doesn’t hurt so much.

- Talk - What’s your best friend like? 

I have three (3) best friends, and they are MY WORLD, so get ready for this.

(1.) My husband. We’ll call him Kit, which is, in fact, a name he often goes by. He is a Gemini, which I mention only because he’s a very classic Gemini: bursting with curiosity, interested in everything, with a dizzying array of hobbies and interests that seem to change and shift by the moment. He teaches science, and used to teach history. He loves camping, sea shanties, Lawrence of Arabia, board games, and tabletop RPGs. Being a teacher, he’s had the summer off, and he’s spent it being a house-husband: cleaning our apartment, buying all the groceries, doing my laundry an embarrassing number of times, and cooking me dinner every single night. He loves being useful to people and making people happy. He’s terrific at long-term planning, but has no sense of time, and he’d be late to everything without my intervention. We have separate bedrooms, and mine is obsessively neat, and his is…not. He was once bitten by a squirrel that he was hand-feeding on the Boston Common. A few days later, he received a serious electric shock from a string of Christmas lights, and the bandage he’d placed over the squirrel bite was burned black instead of his hand. This perfect balance of cursed and blessed is, in a way, all you really need to know about Kit.

We love to watch movies and TV shows together and discuss/analyze them obsessively. We love to have looong philosophical discussions and/or debates. We take walks, we get Italian food and/or ice cream far too often, we go on jolly road-trip adventures, and we read out loud to each other. He’s currently reading me Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, which I have read before (twice) and he has not, because I love it so intensely, and I know that he will too. He’s the best person on earth to discuss virtually anything with, to be honest. He’s my DM in the best D&D campaign I’ve ever been part of. I’ve just made a new D&D character, although I don’t have a campaign for her yet, and Kit cannot stop lavishing praise on her and getting excited about her…even though she’s a hobgoblin, and he spent a significant portion of a recent car ride passionately arguing with me about the viability of hobgoblins as player characters.

He is absolutely extraordinary at admitting when he’s wrong, owning it fully, changing his opinions, pursuing personal growth, and just becoming a better and better person all the time. And I’m so damn honored that I get to be here for it.

(2.) We’ll call my second best friend Unicorn, which is a multilayered inside joke.

I met Unicorn during my freshman year of college. We lived on the same floor. I was the odd woman out among my suitemates because I had crippling social anxiety; he was the odd man out among his because he was gay. Somehow we started watching movies and TV shows together, and it became our Thing; I think our current marathon record is six or seven movies in a row. We’re both from New Jersey, and he still lives there, and there are few places in the world I feel safer than on his giant couch, in front of his giant TV, with snacks and glasses of Limeade close at hand, and his neurotic little dog nosing about. He has a pool, a massive movie collection, and an encyclopedic knowledge of state politics, because he works as a full-time environmental canvasser. His hours are absolutely terrifying, as are the physical and social demands of his job, but he still finds time to run a D&D campaign for his coworkers, and to visit the rest of us in Boston at every possible opportunity.

Unicorn is barely a month older than I am (a fellow Leo, though I think it suits him a hell of a lot better than it suits me), and he understands me in specific ways that the other two members of our little quartet just can’t. We get each other’s humor, we have similar tastes in men, we both love to swim. When the four members of our found family are all together, he is invariably the only person who notices all my little puns and innuendos, and laughs every time.  He listens to me, and asks me questions, in a way that no one else in the world quite seems to do. He made a speech at my wedding that reduced me to a blubbering mess. And, most importantly of all: He started inviting me to our college’s LGBT group when we were juniors (right after Kit and I started dating), which was how I met my third best friend, and how we all became a family.

(3.) I’m going to refer to Best Friend #3 as “Dragon,” because…he loves dragons, and because he was Unicorn’s roommate when I first met him, and it keeps the mythological-creature theme going. …And once again, I don’t know where to start, so I’m going to go dig up an old post I made about Dragon, copy and paste it below, and then figure out how to elaborate on someone who both my husband and I have identified as the best human being we have ever met.

This is a friend who invites the whole gang of us to his apartment for entire long weekends, and cooks for us, repeatedly. Who hosts “fake Christmas” every year, complete with a tree decorated with blue and silver ornaments because he is Jewish, and made all of us hand-stitched, personalized stockings, and fills them with gifts and sweets purchased specially for each of us. Who once baked me a cake just because I was coming to visit him. Who organized and directed my entire move from New Jersey to Boston because his Tetris-like car-packing skills and his utter laidback unshakable calm in the face of any task are absolutely unparalleled. Who is a goddamn wizard at literally everything, from cooking and baking and sewing to Photoshop and graphic design to painting D&D miniatures to putting together elaborate cosplays to theater tech to writing and research to courageous and tireless activism to law (did I mention he’s a lawyer?).

…That was my old paragraph, so let me add a few things. I can’t emphasize enough how much he carries that aura of calm and kindness and competence about him at all times. Never in my life had I had a cooking/baking experience that didn’t stress me out until Dragon let me help him make an entire dinner and various desserts for our friend group, and it was just…so chill. So well-organized and perfectly timed, but without ever feeling like those things took any effort whatsoever. He was so kind and patient with me, demonstrating each task step by step, then being entirely confident in my ability to perform said tasks, and never trying to nitpick at the way I did them or take them over himself. Part of his job involves teaching, and I know he must be fantastic at it, because no one else has ever been such a soothing balm and a stimulant (both at once, somehow!) to my poor, tormented ADD brain. Someday (maybe soonish!), our whole found family is going to live together, and the thought of being around Dragon all the time just makes me weep with joy. And did I mention his sweet, child-like enthusiasm for holiday celebrations and ghost tours and spooky TV shows and musicals and fantasy novels and text RP and all other Best Things? (Ok, he also loves dogs and Marvel movies, and I love neither, but I forgive him for this.)

Oh, he also officiated my wedding. And he also had top surgery today, and I have maybe never been this happy about anything ever, what an auspicious day to finish this post!

#asks from the askbox #personal #long post #she's just about to close up the library! #dungeons & dragons #d&d #dnd #this got RIDICULOUSLY long holy moly #i have a lot of feelings about my job and my friends guys

[walterisaacson-blog]

Holbrooke in Heat

A review in the New York Times

Walter Isaacson

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

By George Packer

608 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.00

​Richard Holbrooke was a large man with gargantuan appetites – for food and women and movies and acclaim and, above all, diplomatic and undiplomatic maneuvering – appetitesthat struggled to feed an outsized ego that was matched only by his insecurities. As the last great freewheeling diplomat of the American Century, his turbocharged zeal and laughable lack of self-awareness earned him fervent admirers and fevered enemies, including a few longstanding colleagues who fell passionately and paradoxically into both camps. In fact, Holbrooke himself was caught in this duality of being his own most fervent admirer and worst enemy (although when someone once commented that he was his own worst enemy, a national security adviser he had worked with snapped, “not as long asI’m around.”)

​I doubt that any novel, not even one coauthored by Graham Greene and F. Scott Fitzgerald, could have captured Holbrooke fully, and I certainly thought that no biography ever would. But now one has. George Packer’s Our Man portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory: relentless, ambitious, voracious, brilliant, idealistic, noble,needy, and containing multitudes. It’s both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy, with Holbrooke strutting and fretting his hour on the stage.

​Perhaps intentionally, the book emulates the rollicking cadences, lapidary character descriptions and exhaustive reporting of The Best and the Brightest by Holbrooke’s close friend David Halberstam. (Packer on Halberstam: “Jewish and middle-class, with thick-framed glasses and big hairy hands and violent gestures and moral certainties, with his gift for dramatizing everything, including himself.”) Informed by complete access to Holbrooke’s intimate diaries and letters along with more than 250 interviews, the book overflows with the trait that was Holbrooke’s saving grace: an in-your-face intellectual honesty that is not tainted, as Holbrooke’s was, by being manipulative. The result is so bracing that Our Man not only revitalizes but in some ways reinvents the art of journalistic biography.

​Packer pulls no punches, and the complex shadings of the all-too-human personalities – including Holbrooke’s widow Kati Marton, his lifelong frenemy Tony Lake, his patron Hillary Clinton and his nemesis Barack Obama – are painted with vibrant complexity. They will likely wince but then nod as they read. So too, I think, would Holbrooke himself, who died in December 2010 when his heart exploded from the strain of unappreciated diplomatic exertions. I can almost hear him howling at Packer from the grave, berating him for the brutalpassages, and then, after realizing how brilliant and brilliantly he has been portrayed, pouring on his flattery and ham-handed charm. (Full disclosure: when I was a journalist, I fell into the camp of his alloyed admirers, and he would do all of that to me, albeit while looking over my shoulder to see if there was someone more important to flatter and berate.)

​Packer establishes a Holbrookian intimacy by talking directly to the reader at times. “Holbrooke?” he begins. “Yes I knew him. I can’t get his voice out of my head.” And a few pages later, “Do you mind if we hurry through the early years? There are no mysteries here that can be unlocked by nursery school.”

​The key to the mysteries, instead, begins with Vietnam. When Holbrooke arrived in Saigon in 1963 as a newly minted foreign service officer, America was not yet waist-deep in a quagmire. His role as a rural affairs advisor was to help win “hearts and minds” in “strategic hamlets” as part of the “pacification” program, before napalm and Zippo lighters had imbued those words with an ironic and then sinister stench. He and his colleagues read Graham Greene’s Vietnam novel The Quiet American, but they did not yet fully appreciate Greene’s deft description of his title character: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

​Holbrooke was among the first diplomats to harbor doubts about the war. “I sometimes think this first year in Vietnam was the best of Richard Holbrooke,” Packer writes. “His ambition still had a clean smell, and youth was working in his favor – physical courage, moral passion, the boundless energy and enthusiasm and sheer sense of fun, the skepticism, the readiness to talk straight to ambassadors and generals.”

​In Vietnam Holbrooke became best friends with Tony Lake, a fellow foreign service officer “who kept his ambition more tightly wrapped,” a talent that came naturally to someone born into the WASP establishment that Holbrooke hungered to join. The intensity of their friendship and then their falling out provides one of the many wrenching plots in the book. They play tennis, invent games, party, smoke pot, and travel together. But when they return to Washington, Holbrooke’s social-climbing among the Harrimans and Alsops of the Georgetown elite turned Lake sour. “Friendship with Holbrooke had acquired a whiff of the instrumental,” Packer writes. Eventually almost all of Holbrooke’s colleagues, even the admiring ones, came to feel used.

​Also at times abused. With his appetites, Holbrooke couldn’t help himself. In one of the most egregious examples, he decided to pursue a romance with Lake’s wife. “Holbrooke’s betrayal,” Packer writes, “would stay secret from almost everyone, while the acid it released would take years to eat silently at the bonds of youthful ambition and Vietnam and tennis and American greatness that had held the two men together.”

​Holbrooke’s compulsion for cheating on or with women – and also Packer’s willingness to report with gusto the psychological and physical details involved – would seem shocking were these passions not so interwoven with the neediness and drive that was at the core of his professional life.Holbrooke was perpetually in heat. Chapters recounting feveredstatecraft are interspersed with those chronicling Holbrooke’s three marriages and multiple affairs and romances, including one with Dianne Sawyer, all featuring the same detailed reporting and sharp personality portraiture.

​The most intense and intensely described relationship is with his last wife, Kati Marton, who gave Packer exclusive access to his papers. A vibrant reporter and writer of nine highly-acclaimed books, including an extraordinarily powerful memoir of the family betrayals and secret love affairs that accompanied her parents’ escape from Nazi and then Communist Hungary, Marton’s career ascended during periods when her husband’s languished. This was not a recipe for marital harmony. Each has dramatic affairs, but they were tethered by ambition. “She became what he never had,” Packer writes, “a climbing partner.”

​The peak of Holbrooke’s career came under President Bill Clinton, when he shuttled around the Balkans cajoling Bosnian warlords and Serbian war criminals to make peace. His work culminated with three weeks of negotiations in November 1995 at an air force base near Dayton, Ohio, where he pushed Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and others into a peace agreement.“Let’s given him his due. He ended a war,” Packer writes. “Diplomacy is not for the short of breath.”

​True to form, Holbrooke personally led his own lobbying campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize. He wrote letters extolling his accomplishment and pressed others to sign them. He also repeatedly found excuses to travel to Oslo, where he made a point of meeting several times with the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. “He campaigned so hard for that Nobel Prize that that’s probably one reason he didn’t get it,” President Clinton remarked.

​He also did not get the other prize he wanted. After Dayton, Clinton passed him over for Secretary of State and gave the job to Madeleine Albright. Even though (or perhaps because) they agreed on most major issues, Holbrooke’s contempt for Albright, which mixed sexism with rivalry, oozed out regularly. On the back of a menu card at a lunch she hosted, he jotted his unfair opinion of her: “MKA – very articulate, even eloquent on values – weak on process, policy + diplomacy – uneven, unpredictable – charming + mean – insecure – her biography was her career – very strong will.” In this universe, particles of like charge are destined to repel each other.

​When Barack Obama was elected president, Holbrooke again lobbied hard to be Secretary of State, but the incoming president became allergic to him. Obama, who took as much pride in telling people he hadn’t read their books as Holbrooke did saying that he had, was disdainful of Holbrooke’s compulsion to flatter and be flattered. When the president called him Dick at their first meeting, Holbrooke stopped him and, as Marton had instructed him to do, asked the president to call him Richard instead. “If Holbrooke had tried to repel him in their first minute together he couldn’t have done a better job,” Packer reports.

​Instead, Obama recruited Hillary Clinton to be secretary and Holbrooke’s erstwhile friend Tony Lake to be National Security Advisor. Bravely defying intense resistance from the White House, Secretary Clinton appointed Holbrooke as her special representative to handle Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unlike the no-drama Obama crowd, she understood that what made Holbrooke a handful also made him effective.

​Holbrooke’s tenacity as he whirled relentlessly through the region might have, if he had been given time and support, allowed him to cajole and browbeat the prideful warlords there like he had done in the Balkans. But it soon became clear he was completely lacking in support from the President.

​Obama thought that Holbrooke was “disruptive,” and Holbrooke thought, as he told a young woman he had an affair with, “Obama has ice water running in his veins.” The problem was they were both right. When Obama made a surprise trip to Kabul in November of 2010, he didn’t invite Holbrooke aboard Air Force One or even let him know about the trip in advance.

​Exhausted by his missions and drained by his tumultuous commuter marriage with Kati Marton, Holbrooke woke up anxious on the morning of December 10, and barreled into the White House, sweating and pasty-faced, to make yet another effort to wrangle a private session with Obama. He was rebuffed. He then dashed to the State Department for a meeting with Secretary Clinton. Suddenly, his face turned red, his legs collapsed. An aneurysm in his heart had burst, ripping a hole in his aorta. When he arrived at the trauma bay of the hospital, the doctor told him to relax. “I can’t relax,” he replied. “I am in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Three days later he died.

​His multiple memorial services were packed with friends and enemies. Marton later took pride that she had choreographed the one at the Kennedy Center so that Obama had to sit through two hours of testimonials. “I could never understand people who didn’t appreciate him,” Bill Clinton said in his eulogy. “Most of the people who didn’t were not nearly as good at doing.” At aservice a few weeks later in the U.N. General Assembly chamber in New York, Tony Lake, with a gray beard, sat alone in the balcony, feeling conflicted as always.

​The overriding theme of Holbrooke’s life, detailed with unnerving accuracy in this book, was ambition. He was relentless in forcing his way into meetings to which he wasn’t invited and clambering into motorcades where he wasn’t manifested. During the Carter Administration, when Holbrook was an assistant secretary, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s personal secretary had to send him a memo. “Henceforth, you may not insert yourself as a passenger in the Secretary’s car unless this office has specifically approved,” it said, adding that the security detail had been given instructions to enforce this edict. As Packer notes, “Holbrooke, undeterred, had the memo framed.”

​“Ambition is not a pretty thing up close,” Packer writes. “It’s wild and crass, and mortifying in the details. It brings a noticeable smell into the room… Because of Holbrooke’s psychological mutation of not being able to see himself, and maybe not give a shit anyway, he let us ogle ambition in the nude.” Lurking in this description is a more subtle point. It wasn’t just Holbrooke’s ambition that hobbled him, it was his inability to cloak his ambition like the more polished members of Washington’s striving elite.

​The difficulty in writing biographies of grand players, as I know from trying to do it with Steve Jobs, is to be honest about their rough personalities while guiding a reader to the conclusion, which is as true for Holbrooke as it was for Jobs, that their unvarnished drives were part and parcel of their true greatness. “I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face,” Jobs once said. “I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. Maybe there’s a better way – a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words – but I don’t know that way.” Or as he put it more poetically: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

​In corporate as well as government realms, leaders often prefer, as Obama did, teammates who are low-maintenance. But as Packer shows, there can be a payoff for those able to harness a Holbrooke. “Don’t forget that inside most people you read about in history books is a child who fiercely resisted toilet training. Suppose the mess they leave is inseparable from their reach and grasp? Then our judgment depends on what they’re ambitious for – the saving glimmer of wanting something worthy.”

​Why such a mammoth book – and such a long review of it – about a mid-level diplomat whose only major achievement was helping settle a war in a faraway place with unpronounceable names? Because if you could read only one book to comprehend America’s foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past fifty years, this would be it.You have to begin in Vietnam, as Holbrooke did, and understand that U.S. involvement there was a complex mix of sincerity and blindness and idealism and hubris. Likewise, our subsequent involvements, including Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan, have involved good intentions, outsized ambitions, and a deficit of humility. Just like Holbrooke. “Our confidence and energy, our reach and our grasp, our excess and blindness – they were not so different from Holbrooke’s,” Packer writes. “He was our man.”

​Our man, our man in full. “I still can’t get his voice out of my head,” Packer concludes. “One day I know it will start to fade, along with his memory, along with the idea of a life lived as if the world needed an American hand to help set things right. By this point you’re familiar with its every failing. But now that Holbrooke is gone, and we’re getting to know the alternatives, don’t you, too, feel some regret? History is cruel that way. He loved it all the same.”

Walter Isaacson, a professor of history at Tulane, is the coauthor, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men and the author of biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci.

[aprille-spatial-design]

Symbols that represent guidance :

The dove is often associated with peace, tranquility and grace. Its meaning has become so universal that major world religions such as Christianity and Judaism have used the symbol as the truest representation of peace, grace and divinity.

In modern times, it has also become synonymous with pacifism and the end of a conflict. Its progression from a religious to a political symbol is evidenced in its adoption as the symbol of anti-violence campaigns and the Olympic games, which has become a means to promote international cooperation and peace.

Communicators of all types can use the symbol to communicate serenity, harmony, unity and the absence of violence.

All over the world, in both myth and art, the butterfly is seen as a symbol of transformation and change, thanks to its metamorphosis from a wormy caterpillar to a stunning insect with vividly coloured wings.

In certain cultures, this conspicuous insect is a representation of the soul and is used in tales and myths to signal a visit from someone who passed away or signal the possibility of life after death. For example, in the movie “Titanic,” the decorative butterflies on Rose’s hair comb were used to represent her freedom from the “cocoon” of her engagement to a man she did not love.

Communicators of all types can use this symbol to visually represent any type of change or transformation, both internal and external.

Water historically represents life to a community since it’s a requirement for human survival. Thus, symbols for water were especially common throughout time, representing birth, fertility, and refreshment. In fact, water is often viewed as the source of life itself, as we see evidence in countless creation myths in which life emerges from primordial waters.

Just as we use water to wash away dirt, sweat and soil, water cleanses a canvas. But  it also becomes a symbol of obstacles, such as a river or ocean to cross. Either way, water can be a symbol of power in visual stories, with the ability to claim audiences and characters, as well as free them.

The use of the owl as a symbol is as popular today as it ever was: You see them everywhere, from accessories and clothing to interior design and home décor. But the symbol’s popularity is nothing new.

Its historical popularity as a symbol is also due to the fact that an owl always accompanied Athena, the Greek goddess of learning. In Native American cultures, the owl is seen as a creature of the night, and so is associated with the supernatural and even death.

Because they are usually nocturnal, owls have often been seen as mysterious and even magical creatures that dwell in and emerge from the darkness. Europeans in the Medieval Ages even believed the creatures might be sorcerers in disguise. Likewise, West African and Aboriginal Australian cultures viewed the owl as a messenger of secrets and a companion of sorcerers.

In a visual message such as a logo or design, an owl can be used to represent wisdom, intelligence or a lesson that needs to be learned.

This symbol may bring to mind bows and arrows, like the kind used by Robin Hood and his merry men, but they are also ubiquitous in the modern world: Think of the cursor on your screen or the arrows you see on websites to draw attention to certain elements on the screen. You also see them on highways, where they serve to direct your gaze and steer you in the right direction.

In logos, arrows often signify movement, progress, ambition and direction. Arrows can even be used as a symbol that only our subconscious minds immediately recognize. Examine the famous FedEx logo, for example. Hidden in the white space between the E and the X is an arrow pointing to the right. Since we read from left to right, pointing right signifies moving forward, and the arrow is speed.

One of the most widely recognized symbols is the heart. While it still means “love,” it can carry much more subtle meanings, and it has many variants that have evolved through time. For example, some of the early versions of the symbols were more realistic and rounded, while newer representations are simplified renditions in the form of pictograms.

The first known use of the heart symbol is found in a 13th-century miniature representing a suitor offering his heart to the woman he is courting. The heart symbol also has been a common feature on coats of arms. In such uses, the symbol can stand for many of the ideas we associate with hearts today, including love, valor, loyalty and kindness. Hearts can also carry a religious connotation, such as when they’re depicted surrounded by flames or thorns.

Just like symbols, colors have also been assigned meanings, depending on the context.

Blue, for example, may symbolize disparate ideas, such as calmness and melancholy, at the same time. Another example is the color red. While it is often used to signify danger, it is also frequently associated with romance and love.

Color symbolism can vary greatly because meanings are assigned to different symbols and colors at an individual, cultural and international level.

Just as the cross is associated with Christianity and the star of David is a universal symbol of Judaism, a crescent symbolizes another major world religion. But the use of the crescent moon as a symbol predates Islam by several thousand years. In fact, the symbol was in use by ancient cultures in Central Asia and Siberia in their worship of the sun, moon and sky gods.

Because it’s literally a drawing of the second lunar phase, the crescent, also referred to as the sickle, is the astrological sign representing the moon. Since the crescent moon literally means to grow and increase, the shape often symbolizes new beginnings and the making of dreams into reality. It can even be connected to rebirth and immortality.

An ancient symbol with many uses, the star can take on different meaning based on both its context and its number of points. Because they are some of the most distant bodies we can see with the naked eye, stars can symbolize physical distance, such as a journey, or emotional distance, such as a misunderstanding.

Before advancements in science were made that allowed humans to understand the nature of our galaxy and its celestial bodies, stars were seen as a symbol of the struggle between light and darkness, between the spiritual and material worlds.

Stars are also commonly associated with magic. Thus, wizards and magicians are often seen with stars on their clothes, and the act of magic can be visually depicted with stars and starbursts. A shooting star is associated with wishes, hope and dreams.

Light is used by many cultures to symbolize illumination in the metaphoric state. It can symbolize purity, goodness, clarity, insight and knowledge.

Light is the symbol of joy and of life-giving power, as darkness is of death and destruction. Therefore, in religion, light is often associated with immortality and a higher power. For example, in the Jewish Holy of Holies,  a cloud of light symbolized of the presence of Yahweh.

In our physical world we see things through the medium of light. In the symbolic world, we see not with light but with wisdom. Therefore, light is often associated with enlightenment.

[haberdashing]

Since some of you expressed interest in hearing about my OCs, here is the promised rambling about them!

Note: I’m leaving out ones that I’ve already published fic for, and there are probably (definitely) more that I can’t remember off the top of my head.

Putting this under a readmore since it's rather long.

First, the fandom OCs that I haven’t written fic for yet:

I’ve made a few posts referencing Ophelia Jane Smith, but I haven’t given any general description of her, so here goes.

She’s my character in a Pokemon RPG campaign, with @lordlyhour as a fellow player and @verldra as the DM. (If you’re intrigued by the idea of a Pokemon RPG, I can throw a copy of the rulebook and associated info your way, just say the word!)

She’s a twin- or was, anyway, the tense changes depending on who you ask. (Her name wasn’t actually chosen for the Shakespeare reference, but because I was poking around on baby name sites looking for twin names, and found the suggestion of Ophelia and Ezra, which both mean “help” but from different languages of origin.) See, when she was... seven or eight or so (haven’t quite pinned down the timing), she went for a walk in the woods and lost track of her brother. And nobody ever saw him again... at least, not in human form. But while searching, Ophelia did find a Phantump that felt strangely familiar, and- knowing, perhaps, about the lore that Phantumps are the ghosts of children lost in the woods- she decided that the Phantump was her brother transformed, and brought him home and treated him as such from then on.

(...this backstory was approved specifically with the caveat that the Phantump in question is NOT actually her brother. Sorry, Ophelia, everything you think you know is a lie. Whoops.)

Also, like most Pokemon protagonists, by the time she heads off on her journey she has a mother but no father in the picture. In Ophelia’s case, a few months after... whatever happened to Ezra, her father left for what she had assumed was a business trip (her father is/was a freelance occult specialist, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to leave abruptly to go on a trip to where his expertise was needed), but he never came back. Ophelia’s mother knows more about what happened to him than Ophelia does, but she gets upset whenever the topic is broached, so Ophelia still doesn’t know what exactly became of him.

On the topic of her parents: Ophelia’s mom is the town medic for the little town in Orre where she resides, and as mentioned above, her father was an occult specialist; Ophelia’s inherited some of the personality of them both. Like her father, she loves to learn new things, even if the knowledge isn’t something terribly practical, and is fascinated with the occult (much to her mother’s chagrin); like her mother, she cares deeply about helping people and Pokemon and wants to make the world a better place, at least in some small way.

The campaign’s still in its early days, but right now her team consists of “Ezra” the Phantump and a Houndour from the woods near her hometown that willingly joined her team and was given the nickname Queen.

(I’d promise that these aren’t all going to be this long, but... well...)

The other fandom OC I haven’t touched via fic yet is Franklin Clark, who’s from the world of the Avarice AU. He’s Ford’s first reincarnation, and is as much of a nerd as you would imagine based on that information. He’s also black, has a very noticeable case of vitiligo (mostly on his face and neck, with some spots on his chest and upper arm as well), has a single mother (his dad died shortly after he was born) who struggles to keep their family in the lower-middle-class range rather than plunging into poverty... And he lives in the small town of Mud Bluffs, Arkansas.

...yeah, his school years would be tough enough even without getting into the whole “friends with a demon” thing. As it is, well... at least he gets good grades?

He’s an only child, but is somewhat close with his relative Ellie, who is technically his niece even though she was born a couple months before him. (Weird family trees are weird.) As time goes by, he eventually gets to know the Pines family as well, and learns more about who exactly this “Ford” person was and why it’s such a big deal to Stan/Mercuriat that they have the same soul.

As an aside, his name is Franklin. If you call him Frank, he’ll ignore you, or at least try to do so. And the only two people who get to call him Frankie are his mom and Stan, and even then he rolls his eyes and plays annoyed half the time.

On to the original OCs! Otherwise known as characters in search of a story... or, really, characters for whom I have a small snippet of story in mind but have no idea how to turn that into a whole Thing.

I’ll start this section with Scott Carlin, who I came up with way back in high school and hadn’t touched for some time before I started thinking about him again for some reason a couple weeks ago.

I can’t decide whether I’m going to use real place names and such in the story I have in mind or fictionalize them all, but for the sake of comprehension I’ll use the real names in this description.

Scott Carlin’s a teenage genius with particular aptitude for math and science who skipped a grade or two to get into college. He really wanted to get into a top-tier school- Caltech, MIT, Harvard- but all of those schools didn’t accept him, so he ends up going to NYU, or a school like it- not a BAD school per se, but not what he was really hoping for. It doesn’t help that it’s annoyingly close to his home in NYC when all he wants to do is revel in being away from his less-than-supportive father and their small, cramped apartment.

Another thing that annoys Scott is that of all the roommates he could’ve been placed with, he got stuck with Ryan (last name tbd because the one my high school self picked is super unsubtle). Ryan seems in many ways to be the opposite of Scott- he’s super-wealthy, takes luxuries for granted, and spends more time partying than studying. What Scott doesn’t quite realize until some ways into the story is that there’s more to Ryan than meets the eye- yes, he’s a rich kid, but he’s also something of a genius himself. (I imagine Ryan as being a bit like a young Tony Stark- yes, he’s brilliant, but he hides that part of himself often, being content to be seen as a rich playboy alone.)

If I stick with the story idea I came up with in high school, the plot starts with Scott, who’s bored with his classes and needs to occupy himself with some project or another, cobbles together a machine that theoretically could act as a time machine. He turns it on, not really expecting it to work... but it does.

...It also explodes in the process, stranding him several decades into the future.

Scott struggles to find a way to get back to his own time while learning what he can from the future, including the surprising (or at least, surprising to Scott) news that his old roommate Ryan turned out to be quite the successful entrepreneur.

All I’ve decided thus far while thinking about this story lately is that Scott’s trans and mixed-race, and that the love interest I had initially thrown into the narrative is entirely unnecessary.

Next up is Niklass (last name tbd, though it’s possible that he doesn’t go by a traditional last name, or any at all), who I first came up with in high school as well.

Niklass can’t lie. Or, more specifically, he cannot say something that he knows or believes to be untrue.

If you were to ask Niklass about this, he’d tell you that he was something of a spoiled brat as a kid, causing all sorts of problems at school and then lying when asked by his father what he had done, leaving his father more disenchanted with the school than with his son. Eventually, one of his teachers- the one who specialized in the study of magic- got sick of having to put up with Niklass’ chronic lying and cast a spell on him; Niklass woke up one day and found that when he tried to tell a lie, the words just wouldn’t come out. His father was (understandably) not happy about this, and tried to get the teacher to reverse the spell, but to no avail.

All of this is, of course, true.

But what he leaves out is that his father wasn’t just some random guy who spoiled his kid- he was an evil dictator that controlled the region. And the teacher who put the spell on Niklass didn’t just get a stern talking-to, but was tortured for days, maybe weeks, in the hopes of getting him to reverse the spell and finally was killed once it became clear that the teacher wasn’t going to give in.

Niklass got into the study of magic himself, initially with the hopes of reversing the spell himself, but later on he learned to admire magic on its own merits. He never did find a way of reversing the spell, but he’s made his peace with it. What he hasn’t made peace with is his father; Niklass has spent years running as far as he can from his father, even possibly into other dimensions (that was the original story line I had in mind for him, but now I’m not so sure).

Also, if you’ve noticed some loopholes in the “cannot say what he knows/believes to be untrue” phrasing of the spell... well... let’s just say Niklass has noticed them, too. Just because he’s stopped trying to get out of the spell entirely doesn’t mean he isn’t willing to test the boundaries and use what loopholes he can find to his advantage.

Last but not least, a relatively new one among the original OCs (from college or shortly afterwards, I forget exactly), Isaac Kaufman.

Isaac was raised in a Conservative Jewish family. He’s trans, and when he came out to his family in his teenage years, they continued to misgender/deadname him repeatedly and also made it crystal-clear that once he turned 18, he was on his own, and they weren’t going to give him a cent for college.

Between student loans, scholarships, and work, Isaac was able to scrounge together enough money to go to college on his own. While there, he got involved in the party scene, using his newfound freedom to indulge in some things that his parents definitely wouldn’t have approved on.

While walking to a nearby bar to join some friends in festivities there, a mugger pulled Isaac into an alley, got out a gun, and said to give him everything he had or else he’d shoot.

Isaac had gone through some rough times before, but this was the first time that he’d really feared for his life in an immediate sense. His brain went into fight-or-flight mode, and he chose flight.

Adrenaline rushing, Isaac sprinted away from the alley, not really concerned with where he was going so long as it was away from the mugger...

...and got run over by a car.

...several blocks away from the scene of the mugging.

While in the hospital, Isaac noticed that it felt like the rest of the world was slowed down, like people were drawing out every syllable they spoke. At first he wasn’t sure what to make of it- was it a side effect of some medication they’d put him on, or his brain not quite working right because of the accident? But after a while, Isaac figured out what was really going on.

It wasn’t that the rest of the world had gotten slow; instead, he was the one who had gotten fast. Super-speed fast.

For a bit, after getting out of the hospital and struggling to coordinate his return to school, Isaac didn’t really do much with his powers, save for things like snatching an expensive bottle of wine from a store too fast for anyone to spot him. But that all changed when he happened upon an old lady who was getting held up at gunpoint by a mugger; Isaac remembered when he had been in the same situation and decided to intervene.

The old lady’s improbable escape from the mugging made local news, and one clip in particular went viral- the old lady’s statement that she couldn’t see her savior’s face or make out anything about them save for “a black blur” (he happened to be wearing black clothes that day). Isaac weighs his options and decides to embrace the name Black Blur and become the superhero that some of the media had already proclaimed him to be, fighting crime in the city whenever he can.

He also ends up becoming a philosophy professor, one who deals specifically with the subject of superheroes and others who act to carry out vigilante justice- and his view of the subject as published in papers isn’t all positive. (It’s not that he’s faking the perspective, either- Isaac does grapple with the morality of his own actions on a regular basis.) He also has a loving wife and, eventually, a daughter, and he cares for them both very, very deeply.

Balancing work, family, and superheroics might be hard for some people... but hey, Isaac’s got the time for it.

Also, word to the wise: don’t mess with his family. Just don’t. He’s got literally hundreds of plans drawn up for various things that could go wrong re: his superhero identity interfering with his personal life, and none of them end well for the one who forces his hand.

(I do actually have a few half-formed ideas for other superheroes in Isaac’s world- a college student who doesn’t realize for a while that he’s turned invisible to others’ eyes, a mother-and-daughter pair who both don’t realize that the other is also a superhero- and I’ve considered combining them all into some sort of superhero autobiography anthology, but if that ever happens, it won’t be any time soon.)

#personal #feel free to reblog

[supercantaloupe]

okay yeah actually, i’ll bite. i’ve got some of my own thoughts about the unsleeping city and cultural representation and i’m gonna make a post about them now, i guess. i’ll put it under a cut though because this post is gonna be long.

i wanna start by saying i love dimension 20 and i really really enjoy the unsleeping city. i look forward to watching new episodes every week, and getting hooked on d20 as a whole last summer really helped pull me out of a pandemic depression, and i’m grateful to have this cool show to be excited about and interested in and to have met so many cool people to talk about it with.

that being said, however, i think there is a risk run in representing any group of people/their culture when you have the kind of setting that tuc has. by which i mean, tuc is set in a real world with real people and real human cultures in it. unlike fantasy high or a crown of candy where everything is made up (even if rooted in real-world cultures), tuc is explicitly rooted in reality, and all of its diversity -- both the ups and downs that go with it. and especially set in new york of all places, one of the most densely, diversely populated cities on earth. the cast is 7 people; it’s great that those 7 people come from a variety of backgrounds and identities and all bring their own unique perspectives to the table, and it’s great that those people and the entire crew are generally conscious of themselves and desire to tell stories/represent perspectives ethically. but you simply cannot authentically represent every culture or every perspective in the world (or even just in a city) when your cast is 7 people. it’s an impossible task. this is inherent to the setting, and acknowledged by the cast, and by brennan especially, who has been on record saying how one of the exciting aspects of doing a campaign set in nyc is its diversity, the fact that no two new yorkers have the same perspective of new york. i think that’s a good thing -- but it does have its challenges too, clearly.

i’m not going to go into detail on the question of whether or not tuc’s presentation of asian and asian american culture is appropriative/offensive or not. first of all, i don’t feel like it’s 100% fair to judge the show completely yet, since it’s a prerecorded season and currently airing midseason, so i don’t yet know how things wrap up. secondly, i’m not asian or asian american. i can have my own opinions on that content in the show, but i think it’s worth more to hear actual asian and asian american voices on this specific aspect of the show. having an asian american cast member doesn’t automatically absolve the show of any criticisms with regard to asian american cultural representation/appropriation, whether those criticisms are made by dozens of viewers or only a handful of them. regardless, i don’t think it’s my place as someone who is not asian to speak with any authority on that issue, and i know for a fact that there are asian american viewers sharing their own opinions. their thoughts in this instance hold more water than mine, i think.

what i will comment on in more depth, though, is a personal frustration with tuc. i’m jewish; i’ve never really been shy about that fact on my page here. i’m not from new york, but i visit a few times a year (or i did before covid anyway, lol), and i have some family from nyc. nyc, to me, is a jewish city. and for good reason, since it’s home to one of the largest jewish populations of the country, and even the world, and aspects of jewish culture (including culinary, like bagels and pastrami, and linguistic, like the common use of yiddish words and phrases in english colloquial speech) are prevalent and celebrated among jews and goyim alike. when i think of nyc, i think of a jewish city; that’s not everybody’s new york, but that’s my new york, and thats plenty of other people’s new york too. so i do find myself slightly disappointed or frustrated in tuc for its, in my opinion, rather stark lack of jewish representation.

now, i’m not saying that one of the PCs should have been jewish, full stop. i love to headcanon iga as jewish even though canon does not support that interpretation, and i’m fine with that. she’s not my character. it’s possible that simply no one thought of playing a jewish character, i dunno. but also, and i can’t be sure about this, i’m willing to bet that none of the players really wanted to play a jewish character because they didn’t want to play a character of a marginalized culture they dont belong to in the interest of avoiding stereotyping or offensive representation/cultural appropriation. (i don’t know if any of the cast members are jewish, but i’m assuming not.) and the concern there is certainly appreciated; there’s not a ton of mainstream jewish rep out there, and often what we get is either “unlikeable overly conservative hassidic jew” or “jokes about their bar mitzvah/one-off joke about hanukkah and then their jewishness is never mentioned ever again,” which sucks. it would be really cool to see some more good casual jewish rep in a well-rounded, three-dimensional character in the main cast of a show! even if there are a couple of stumbles along the way -- nobody is perfect and no two jews have the same level of knowledge, dedication, and adherence to their culture.

but at the same time, i look at characters like iga and i really do long for a jewish character to be there. siobhan isn’t polish, yet she’s playing a characters whose identity as a polish immigrant to new york is very central to her story and arc. and part of me wonders why we can’t have the same for a jewish character. if not a PC, then why not an NPC? again, i’m jewish, and i am not native, but in my opinion i think the inclusion of jj is wonderful -- i think there are even fewer native main characters in mainstream media than there are jewish ones, and it’s great to see a native character who is both in touch with their culture as well as not being defined solely by their native-ness. to what extent does it count as ‘appropriative’ because brennan is a white dude? i dunno, but i’m like 99% sure they talked to sensitivity consultants to make sure the representation was as ethical as they could get it, and anyway, i can’t personally see and glaring missteps so far. but again, i’m not native, and if there are native viewers with their own opinions on jj, i’d be really interested in hearing them.

but getting back to the relative lack of jewish representation. it just...disappoints me that jewishness in new york is hardly ever even really mentioned? again, i know we’re only just over halfway through season 2, but also, we had a whole first season too. and it’s definitely not all bad. for example: willy! gd, i love willy so much. him being a golem of williamsburg makes me really really happy -- a jewish mythological creature animated from clay/mud (in this case bricks) to protect a jewish community (like that of williamsburg, a center for many of nyc’s jews) from threat. golem have so often been taken out of their original context and turned into evil monsters in fantasy settings, especially including dnd. (even within other seasons of d20! crush in fh being referred to as a “pavement golem” always rubbed me the wrong way, and i had hoped they’d learned better after tuc but in acoc they refer to another monster as a “corn golem” which just disappointed me all over again.) so the fact that tuc gets golems right makes my jewish heart very happy.

and yet...he doesn’t show up that much? sure, in s1, he’s very helpful when he does, but in s2 so far he shows up once and really does not say or do much of anything. he speaks with a lot more yiddish-influenced language than other characters, but if you didn’t know those words were specifically yiddish/jewish, you might not be able to otherwise clock the fact that willy is jewish. and while willy is a jewish mythological creature who is jewish in canon, he isn’t human. there are no other direct references to judaism, jewish characters, or jewish culture in the unsleeping city beyond him.

there are, in fact, two other canon jewish characters in tuc. but...here’s where i feel the most frustration, i think. the two canon jewish humans in tuc are stephen sondheim and robert moses. both of whom are real actual people, so it’s not like we can just pick and choose what their cultural backgrounds are. as much as i love stephen sondheim, i think there are inherent issues with including real world people as characters in a fictional setting, especially if they are from living/recent memory (sondheim is literally still alive), but anyway, sondheim and moses are both actual jewish people. from watching tuc alone you probably would not be able to guess that sondheim is jewish -- nothing from his character except name suggests it, and i wouldn’t even fault you for not thinking ‘sondheim’ is a jewish-sounding surname (and i dislike the idea/attitude/belief that you can tell who is or isn’t jewish by the sound of their name). and yeah, i’m not going to sit here and be like “brennan should have made sondheim more visibly jewish in canon!” because, like, he’s a real human being and it’s fucking weird to portray him in a way that isn’t as close to how he publicly presents himself, which is not in fact very identifiably jewish? i don’t know, this is what i mean by it’s inherently weird and arguably problematic to portray real living people as characters in a fictional setting, but i digress. sondheim’s jewish, even if you wouldn’t know it; not exactly a representation win.

and then there’s bob moses. you might be able to guess that he’s jewish from canon, actually. there’s the name, of course. but more insidious to me are the specifics of his villainy. greedy and powerhungry, a moneyman, a lich whose power is stored in a phylactery...it does kind of all add up to a Yikes from me. (in the stock market fight there’s a one-off line asking if he has green skin; it’s never really directly acknowledged or answered, but it made me really uncomfortable to hear at first and it’s stuck with me since viewing for the first time.) the issue for me here is that the most obviously jewish human character is the season’s bbeg, and his villainy is rooted in very antisemitic tropes and stereotypes.

i know this isn’t all brennan’s fault -- robert moses was a real ass person and he was in fact jewish, a powerhungry and greedy moneyman, a big giant racist asshole, etc. i’m not saying that jewish characters can’t be evil, and i’m not saying brennan should have tried to be like “this is my NPC robert christian he’s just like bob moses but instead he’s a goy so it’s okay” because...that would be fuckin weird bro. and bob moses was a real person who was jewish and really did do some heinous shit with his municipal power. i’m not necessarily saying brennan should have picked/created a different character to be the villain. i’m not even saying that he shouldn’t have made bob moses a lich (although, again, it doesn’t 100% sit right with me). but my point here is that bob moses is one of a grand total of three canon jewish characters in tuc, of which only two humans, of whom he is the one you’d most easily guess would be jewish and is the most influenced by antisemitic stereotypes/tropes. had there been more jewish representation in the show at all, even just some neutral jewish NPCs, this would not be as much of a problem as it is to me. but halfway through season 2, so far, this is literally all we get. and that bums me out.

listen, i really like tuc. i love d20. but the fact that it is set in a real world place with real world people does inherently raise challenges when it comes to ethical cultural representation. especially when the medium of the show is a game whose creatures, lore, and mechanics have been historically rooted in some questionable racial/cultural views. and dnd is making progress to correct some of those misguided views of older sourcebooks by updating them to more equitably reflect real world racial/cultural sensitivities; that’s a good thing! but these seasons, of course, were recorded before that. the game itself has some questionable cultural stuff baked into it, and that is (almost necessarily) going to be brought to the table in a campaign set in a real-world place filled with real-world people of diverse real-world cultures. the cast can have sensitivity consultants and empathy and the best intentions in the world, and they’ll still fuck up from time to time, that’s okay. your mileage may vary on whether or not it’s still worth sticking around with the show (or the fandom) through that. for me, it does not yet outweigh all the things i like about the show, and i’m gonna continue watching it. but it’s still very worth acknowledging that the cast is 7 people who cannot possibly hope to authentically or gracefully represent every culture in nyc. it’s an unfortunate limitation of the medium. yet it’s also still worthwhile to acknowledge and discuss the cultural representation as it is in the show -- both the goods and the bads, the ethically solid and the questionably appropriative -- and even to hold the creators accountable. (decently, though. i’m definitely not advocating anybody cyberbully brennan on twitter or whatever.) the show and its representation is far from perfect, but i also don’t think it ever could be. still, though, it could always be better, and there’s a worthwhile discussion to be had in the wheres, hows, and whys of that.

#sasha reviews #sasha speaks #the unsleeping city #unsleeping city #long post #dimension 20 #gd i stayed up way too late to write this #tuc #the unsleeping city chapter 2 #the unsleeping city 2 #tuc2 #antisemitism

[redorblue]

Book 16/2017 - Look who’s back by Timur Vermes

I think I might just start with the ending. Because it’s creepy as fuck and it perfectly captures the atmosphere that this book has built up over the past 400 pages. And because I’ve heard those words before, in real life, which makes it so much mure realistic and so much more terrifying. It goes like this (in my inexpert translation, because it’s a German book):

I could now use the momentum of publishing a book and broadcasting a new TV show to start a propaganda offensive and then found a social movement. My publisher has already sent me some designs for posters [...]. I like them. I really like them. The slogan reads: “It wasn’t all bad.” I can work with that.

Those are the last words of Adolf Hitler after 400 pages of inner monologue during which he is resurrected in Berlin in 2011 and then proceeds to once again win the hearts and minds of millions of Germans by ways of a media landscape ever hungrier for clicks. The book ends with him in the hospital, recovering from an attack by neonazis (who think he’s Jewish, ironically... Not even they realize he’s the real deal, although he’s as unapologetic as ever), getting calls from all the major parties in Germany, a book publisher and various media outlets - and just leaves it at that. No epilogue, no comment on how the story continues, on how he’s finally brought low because someone must have noticed, someone must have seen the signs, someone must have recognized the abyss looming behind his words - only no one has. And worse, no one will. Because just like last time, in spite of his machinations, he has been nothing but straightforward with his intentions and worldview. It’s just that no one takes him seriously. Just like last time. I guess this is why there’s such an open ending: the author doesn’t need to be any more explicit. Everyone who picked up this book and read it already knows where it’s going. Maybe not with the war, because the international climate has changed during the last 70 years, but the rest? It sure seems like it.

It’s actually kinda funny. There’s this huge contrast between the story itself, which is incredibly realistic, and the beginning, which isn’t realistic at all. This is not supposed to be a critique, I love fantasy and science fiction and all that, so I obviously don’t mind unrealistic events as long as they are logical in the universe they take place in. Admittedly this particular beginning doesn’t make much sense in the universe it takes place in either, which seems to be ours without any magical or scientific upgrades, but in this case, for the sake of contrast, it’s okay. The book starts with Hitler waking up on some kind of yard in the middle of Berlin, where his bunker used to be. Just like that - no explanations, no justifications, no similar events with other people, it just stands there like a run-down shack wedged between skyscrapers. This wildly unrealistic event gets handed to you on the very first page, and maybe it makes you believe that this is some kind of alternate universe thing, or some dystopian thing, or science fiction - something that doesn’t directly apply to us human beings living in a universe where things like that don’t happen - but this story is not any of those. From then on it gets awfully realistic, because we all know how TV shows work, we all know how twitter and youtube work, and we all know that we usually don’t see things as they are, but as we are, to borrow from Anais Nin - which means that we hear what we want and expect to hear, and just ignore, misinterpret and excuse all the rest.

I just realized that I make this book appear more sinister than it is. It’s very, very creepy, yes, but that alone doesn’t do the book or the author justice because it’s also so funny! That really doesn’t happen often, but I laughed out loud a few times while reading it, and this was my second time through, so the jokes weren’t even new. Some situations are just so absurd (and luckily innocent enough to laugh about), like when he constantly spells modern names like Mandy (Menndi), Cindy (Sinndi) or handy (the German word for mobile phone = Henndi) wrong in his head, or when he’s absolutely convinced that elderly women who pick up their dogs’ poop with plastic bags are mentally ill. Sometimes it’s so funny I even forgot whose inner monologue you’re listening to, which is terrifying in and of itself, and most times I couldn’t decide whether to roll on the floor laughing or run around outside screaming with terror. Spoiler, I went with laughing and ignored the other urges. How very human of me. But this paradox is great, actually, I think the humorous part is what really hammers the message home: For all our engaging with our past and looking for wrong turns and swearing that something like Hitler will never happen again, we are not safe. And we won’t ever be, which is why we will always have to be on the lookout for people like him, for rhetoric like his, for patterns like 80, 90 years ago.

I’m talking mainly Germany here because I’m German and I know German society best, but we’re not the only ones who have experienced populist and exclusive dictatorian regimes rise to power, and especially these days we all need to be extra attentive. The people that Hitler interacts with are mostly not even stupid uneducated and exploited, but reasonably successful and sometimes even university graduates (so here’s to stereotypes of your typical neonazi) and they still support and enable him. Because they profit off him, because they think they can contain him, because they ignore the parts about him that make them uneasy. Point is, they’re not safe from his charisma in spite of 16 years of education, give or take, because he doesn’t look like a monster but like a guy with a slightly antiquated vocabulary and a weird thing for old suits who happens to have a baffling resemblance to, but none of the monstrosity of the person they’ve been taught to fear. At least not with regard to manners and behaviour, which is all that seems to matter. What he says is not all that important, then, and obviously he can’t mean everything literally because of course we’re way past that dark chapter in our history - only that apparently we’re still vulnerable, and it’s enough that he puts on a normal-looking suit instead of a military uniform to get our attention (which he full well knows). He doesn’t even have to lie, his misanthropic worldview is just as much out in the open as it was back then. And I’m thoroughly creeped out by how realistic this is presented in this book, especially with regards to the US where the current president boasted during his campaign that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still get away with it. Because I guess he could, if not juridically then at least in the eyes of his followers, which is all that matters, in the end. He’s said awful things during his campaign and done/tried to do awful things during his presidency, and it does not matter. I know you can’t directly compare the two without devaluing and ignoring the millions of lives Hitler destroyed, but... the pattern is there.

I’m sorry, I’m ranting, and I’m not even sure this makes much sense any more, but I’m getting... passionate, one might call it. For the lessons it contains I’d definitely recommend this book, but I’m not sure how understandable it is for someone who doesn’t speak German and doesn’t know the society and political system here. There’s a lot of inside jokes and references which probably don’t make sense without footnotes and/or some thorough research, and I honestly pity all those translators who’ve tried to get the language of this book across in another language. Because the writing is superb. The dialogues feel realistic, all the main characters have distinctive speech patterns including dialects and local expressions, and Hitler’s inner monologue itself feels incredibly authentic. I can’t imagine the amount of research that must have gone into this story. But I’m so glad that Timur Vermes put in all this work, and I’m so glad that it was very successful in Germany and abroad, because it raises awareness in an entertaining way and asks important questions about society, the media, and how the human race just never seems to learn from history.

#books #2017 #look who's back #er ist wieder da #timur vermes

[catcomixzstudios]

How To Life Chapter 43 - Christianity

The Abrahamic God Quartet Part 2: God Takes A Fucking Chill Pill

You remember the God of Abraham, don’t you? That weird genocidal asshole who could never quite get humanity to be the way he wanted? Well, he’s back and… oddly much more chill than before.

Welcome to the second part of the Abrahamic God Quartet: Christianity. My personal feelings on this one are mixed to say the least. On the one hand, it is currently the largest faith in the world and has historically and currently done tons of good for it. It’s considered pretty much the foundation for Western culture (for better or worse) and has influenced many people to do and create great things.

But you can’t be a part of the largest religion in the world and not have some horrible things come out of it too. Along with the good, Christianity has also brought us the Crusades, Inquisitions, and televangelists. The story behind the faith itself has way less bloodshed than the prequel, which instead gets largely replaced with guilt-tripping. So there’s that.

Like most religions before it, I’m willing to wager that a majority of people involved are reasonably decent people. I may have some disagreements about certain aspects of their faith, but I’m by no means trying to take away people’s ability to believe in what they do. In exchange, however, I plan to poke fun and point out serious flaws to it because I also have the right to believe what I do.

You remember back in the first part, the scene where God got pissed at Adam and Eve from eating an apple that gave them knowledge of good and evil? Well God still has a hate-on about that. Because of that (completely preventable) event, humanity was forever doomed to be sinful (sin being something that upsets God). After how things went with the last Testament, God had decided to take a new approach to try and fix this issue he’s technically responsible for. Much like getting cold diarrhea on a hot day, God’s way of helping seems like it would make things better, but it really just makes a bigger mess.

Christianity kind of picks up where the Old Testament left off; God had kind of just fucked off after multiple bouts of genocide and strange dickitry. Things were quiet for a while, until God told a woman, Mary, that she is going to have a surprise baby complements of the holy spirit (whatever that used to be slang for). Her husband Joseph was naturally thrown off by this (since the two have never had sex), but he eventually dreamed about an angel telling him that God’s the baby-daddy, so everything’s good.

The baby, Jesus, was kind of a big deal. Many considered him to be the King of the Jews. Word began to spread about this and eventually reached the ears of King Herod. Being kind of a prick, he ordered all of the male infants be put to death in the city the family is residing him, Bethlehem. Luckily, Joseph got another angel dream warning him to get the fuck out before said baby massacre. They eventually found themselves in Nazareth.

We jump ahead to Jesus working to become a minister. The first step was his baptism. The man Jesus picked for the job, John, was immediately in awe of Jesus. That probably got exacerbated by the sky opening up and a booming voice telling John that Jesus is his son. (Jesus is kind of also God himself too, but explaining that particular relationship would take a whole other book.) More people reasonably began to believe that Jesus might just be an important figure. So important is he that the Devil (an alleged douchebag) visited Jesus while he’s alone fasting (or rather, starving) in a desert. The Devil tempted Jesus, but he ain’t having none of that shit.

Jesus really started to gain followers by that point. He had a relatively successful sermon with some good points, turned loaves of bread into fish (thanks?), and walked on water. He appointed twelve apostles to act as his main bros and help spread the overall mostly good messages he had. Jesus was on a roll.

He continued to travel around, magically curing diseases and preaching about ridding yourself of sin and devoting yourself to God. And it’s easy to make a good case for yourself when you’re literally bringing people back from the dead with your magic powers. Jesus even made time to hang with some of his apostle bros, where he is surrounded by a cloud that claims him as his son. They chose to believe that it was the voice of God, and not some jackass with a fog machine and a megaphone behind some rocks.

Shit started getting a little more heavy around this point, though. Jesus had gained enemies as well as followers, and their time for retribution is coming. The Man himself, meanwhile, started getting more aggressive with his campaign, including one instance where he starts wrecking up a temple that he alleges is full of thieves and scoundrels. He began prophesying about stuff like wars, earthquakes, and the cosmos themselves going ape-shit within the time of the people listening to his words. He even started getting in conflicts with the other Jewish leaders of the time.

The enemies Jesus had gained finally catch up with him. During what was dubbed “The Last Supper”, he foresaw that one of his apostles would betray him. I imagine one of them, Judas, was probably very nervous at that dinner after that for no particular reason. Immediately after that bummer of a dinner, Jesus was caught by the cops. Surprise surprise, it turned out that Judas sold him out to a Jewish elder who had gotten quite sick of Jesus muscling in on their turf.

Jesus was put on trial. The overseeing judge was reluctant to punish Jesus, but luck was not on his side, and he got sent to be crucified anyway. After his death, he was wrapped up and they store him in a rock tomb. The tomb was put under guard by the request of the Jewish priests.

That isn’t the end of the story, however. When someone went to check up on what should have been Jesus’ dead body, they find the place empty! The only logical answer was that he rose from the dead. This got apparently proven as he began appearing to the apostles who didn’t betray him and telling them to spread the word about his teachings. Once he was done screwing around on Earth, he got beamed up by a ray of light up to Heaven (or possibly to an alien spaceship) to be the right hand of God (whatever that used to be slang for).

That’s pretty much the end of the interesting stuff in the New Testament. Alot of it is repeating stuff from before followed by boring stories. The only other point of interest I found was the very last book, The Book of Revelations. Man, it’s mostly boring up to that point, but the New Testament goes out in a spectacular bang of insanity.

As for afterlife beliefs, Christianity comes with Heaven (the good afterlife) and Hell (the bad one). Whether you end up where you do is because of deeds or how you worship depends on what branch you believe in. Honestly, neither is really to my tastes; Heaven seems to boringly good, and Hell seems too full of fire and pain.

GOOD IDEAS:

- Jesus did teach some good ideas (treat others the way you want to be treated, judge not or you’ll be judged, respect others, etc)

- I will give it props for being the most “down-to-Earth” religion that has been covered so far. Most are just about Gods dicking around humanity, but this one actually seems to care about us

- Revelations is completely bat-shit insane and hilarious read

BAD IDEAS:

- Jesus didn’t come up with the golden rule before anyone else did

- Judaism didn’t really have a concept of an afterlife, but Christianity just had to bring one in

- Jesus is a mary-sue

LIKELIHOOD OF TRUTH: ~51%. While Christianity does bring forth many good morals, some of these end up ignored by the people who still believe in it today. The story itself does have a more personal touch since the human characters actually have a role in the story (besides being targets for sex/murder from gods). The suffering that Jesus went through loses a bit of its edge when you consider that, as Matt Dillahunty of the Atheist Experience best described it, it’s basically “God sacrificing himself to himself to serve as a loophole for rules he himself created.” I get that he apparently died for our sins, but usually the tragic part of martyrs is the fact that they die and stay dead for a cause. In terms of content, it’s certainly not the worst. It is followed by all kinds of people (for better or worse) and remains a cornerstone of Western culture. And for what it’s worth, has a way more interesting story than the next entry in the Abrahamic God Quartet.

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#how to life #htl #chapter 43 #christianity #religions #advice #humanity #life #philosophy #humor

[lichfucker]

hey sorry can i ask... what foreververse is and if its worth getting into?

foreververse is an rpg show from geek & sundry (it airs live on twitch and alpha wednesdays at 4:30 pacific time) that follows a group of characters as they move through multiple rpg systems in search of... something.

it gets a little confusing bc each player has their “prime” character / “alpha” character (terms used interchangeably) who they play mostly in flashback sequences and who ultimately underscore all their subsequent characters, and they also have characters that are specific to each system they play. so far they’ve played pugmire (which was technically the last mini-campaign of no survivors before it turned officially into foreververse (no survivors was an rpg show that ran on geek and sundry for like a year or something that was a series of completely unconnected mini-campaigns-- if you saw the paranoia oneshot on the g&s youtube featuring wil wheaton, felicia day, laura bailey, matt mercer, and the regular cast, that was no survivors) but they still count pugmire as foreververse canon), world of darkness, 7th sea, the witch is dead, and puppetland, and they either have just started or are just about to start playing eclipse phase, not to mention the 3572037234 one-shots they’ve done.

if you like sci-fi, foreververse has got it. if you like fantasy, foreververse has got it. if you particularly like fantasy where instead of orcs and elves and humans everyone are dogs, foreververse has got it. if you like pirates, foreververse has got it. if you like strong sibling relationships, foreververse has got it (seriously, the most enduring and profound relationship in the entire show is between two siblings. the only “romances” are played 100% as jokes and have no major impact on the story or the characters at all).

if you find yourself particularly frustrated about popular rpg shows being overwhelmingly white, foreververse has your back there, too: of the six current cast members (gm not included), one is hector navarro (a latino man, whose primary character and 7th sea character both speak with spanish accents), damion poitier (a black man), and erika ishii (an asian woman). half of the players are nonwhite (disclaimer: damion doesn’t show up until 7th sea and erika doesn’t show up until the witch is dead).

it’s not a perfect show (one npc in particular comes across, at least to me, like a weird stereotype of a developmentally disabled person? but I’m abled so I’m not really qualified to speak on that, and he disappears pretty quickly once world of darkness ends), but it is very, very good.

its following is tiny-- it averages roughly 300 views on twitch per episode, and any tumblr fandom presence is pretty much just me, so if you’re looking for a new fandom to jump into with lots of art and fanfiction (there’s a bunch of art on twitter though!) this show can’t really fulfill that need. if you’re looking for really innovative storytelling, foreververse is unlike any show I have ever seen before. I, personally, highly recommend it.

the backlog of episodes is very slowly being uploaded to youtube and the g&s website, but they started doing that a number of months after the show actually started (it officially switched over from no survivors to foreververse in october) so don’t expect to get caught up that way. I also don’t suggest watching them on alpha, because alpha only has, like, 2/3 of the episodes and they’re numbered as though none of them are missing, so it’s a confusing and, frankly, misleading option. it’s not ideal, but the best bet, I’ve found, is to scroll through the g&s twitch backlog and watch the vods there. I know that’s a lot of work, but I’ve found it’s the most reliable option.

I used to keep a sort of database of where each episode can be found over on foreververse dot tumblr dot com but I haven’t updated it in close to 2 months (life got in the way).

anyway, it’s a really good show. I, personally, cherish it dearly. I’ve been watching no survivors since before foreververse was even a twinkle in ivan van norman’s eye, and I’m gonna see this show through to the end. I love it. but I understand that it’s a big commitment-- it’s a lot of episodes-- and it’s inconvenient and fandom-wise it’s high-risk-no-reward, since pretty much nobody makes any sort of content for it (once I’m caught up I’ll get back into gif-making). but it’s a really good show with a lot of heart and it is so much more than just a high-fantasy dnd romp; they make it a point to feature up-and-coming and indie rpgs, so who knows? you might just find your new favorite system.

plus! amy vorpahl and jason charles miller write songs about the previous week’s adventure and play them at the beginning of each episode! how fucking sweet is that!!

plus plus! one of their wold of darkness characters is a gay jewish werewolf and truly no fictional character could ever even dream of representing me better. truly my pinnacle.

#andsotheuniverseended #long post //////// #foreververse #bluh bluh #actually blease watch this show so I have somebody to talk to about it... #ableism mention /?

[iamastrongchristian-blog]

Read Your Bible: Twenty-Nine Reasons Why the Bible Is Superior to Every Other Book

Most people do not understand the uniqueness and superiority of this great book.  It is a book like no other book.  If someone asks you for the meaning of the word unique, you might as well say it means “Bible”.  Unique in the dictionary is defined as: the one and only.  It also means: to be different from all others, having no like or equal.

1. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN THE FACT THAT IT IS THE MOST RELIABLE HISTORIC DOCUMENT OF ALL TIME.   When we do not have the original historical document, we must establish how reliable the copies are.  This is done in two ways: I. The more identical manuscript copies of the original we have, the more sure we are that the copies reflect what is in the original document. II. The shorter the time interval between the copy and the original, the more sure we are that the copy reflects what is in the original.

“There are more than 5,300 known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.  Add over 10,000 Latin Vulgate and at least 9,300 other early versions (MSS) and we have more than 24,000 manuscripts copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today.” “No other document even begins to approach such numbers and attestation.  In comparison, the book “Iliad” by Homer is second to the Bible and it has only 643 manuscripts that still survive.  The first complete preserved text of Homer dates from the 13th century.” John Warwick Montgomery says that “To be sceptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.” Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, who was the director and principal librarian of the British Museum says, “…besides number, the manuscripts of the New Testament differ from those of the classical authors, and this time the difference is clear gain.  In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest extant manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament.  The books of the New Testament were written in the latter part of the first century; the earliest extant manuscripts (trifling scraps excepted) are of the fourth century - say from 250 to 300 years later.” “This may sound a considerable interval, but it is nothing to that which parts most of the great classical authors from their earliest manuscripts.  We believe that we have in all essentials an accurate text of the seven extant plays of Sophocles; yet the earliest substantial manuscript upon which it is based was written more than 1400 years after the poet’s death.”

Kenyon continues in The Bible and Archaeology: “The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.  Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.”

2.  THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR TO OTHER BOOKS BECAUSE ARCHAEOLOGY HAS CONSTANTLY CONFIRMED ITS HISTORICAL ACCURACY AND VALIDITY. “Nelson Glueck, the renowned Jewish archaeologist, wrote: “It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.”  He continued his assertion of “the almost incredibly accurate historical memory of the Bible, and particularly so when it is fortified by archaeological fact.” William F. Albright, known for his reputation as one of the great archaeologists, states: “There can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of Old Testament tradition.”

Albright adds: “The excessive scepticism shown toward the Bible by important historical schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain phases of which still appear periodically, has been progressively discredited.  Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition to the value of the Bible as a source of history.”

3. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS UNITY AND CONTINUITY. Over forty authors wrote sixty-six books over a period of 1,500 years.  Many never saw the writings of the others and yet there is no contradiction between any two of them. It is very unlikely, if not impossible, to collect any group of books of any other forty men on any subject and find that they agree, as it is with the Bible.

Nine Facts about the Unity and Continuity of the Bible

1. The Bible was written over a 1,500 years span. 

2. The Bible was written over 40 generations. 

3. The Bible was written by over 40 authors from every walk of life: 

§ Moses, a political leader, trained in the universities of  Egypt § Peter, a fisherman § Amos, a herdsman § Joshua, a military general § Nehemiah, a cupbearer § Daniel, a prime minister § Luke, a doctor § Solomon, a king § Matthew, a tax collector § Paul, a rabbi 4. The Bible was written in different places:

§ Moses in the wilderness § Jeremiah in a dungeon § Daniel on a hillside and in a palace § Paul, inside prison walls § Luke, while travelling § John, on the isle of Patmos § Others in the rigors of a military campaign

5. The Bible was written at different times:

§ David in times of war § Solomon in times of peace 6. The Bible was written during different moods:

§ Some writing from the heights of joy and others writing from depths of sorrow and despair 7. The Bible was written on three continents:

§ Asia, Africa and Europe 8. The Bible was written in three languages:

§ Hebrew: The language of the Old Testament.  It was called “the language of Judah” in 2 Kings 18:26-28 and in Isaiah 19:18, “the language of Canaan” § Aramaic: This was the “common language” of the Near East until the time of   Alexander the Great (6th century BC - 4th century BC) § Greek: The New Testament language.  This was the international language at the time of Christ 9. The Bible includes in its subject matter hundreds of controversial subjects.  A controversial subject is one, which creates opposing opinion when mentioned or discussed. 

 Biblical authors spoke on hundreds of controversial subjects with harmony and continuity from Genesis to Revelation. The result is one unfolding story: “God’s redemption of man!” 

What F.F. Bruce said about the Bible “Any part of the human body can only be properly explained in reference to the whole body.  And any part of the Bible can only be properly explained in reference to the whole Bible.” “The Bible, at first sight, appears to be a collection of literature - mainly Jewish.  If we inquire into the circumstance under which the various Biblical documents were written, we find that they were written at intervals over a space of nearly 1400 years.”

“The writers wrote in various lands, from Italy in the west to Mesopotamia and possibly Persia in the east.” “The writers themselves were a heterogeneous number of people, not only separated from each other by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles, but also belonging to the most diverse walks of life.  In their ranks we have kings, herdsmen, soldiers, legislators, fishermen, statesmen, courtiers, priests and prophets, a tent-making Rabbi and a Gentile physician, not to speak of others of whom we know nothing apart from the writings they have left us.” “The writings themselves belong to a great variety of literary types.  They include history, law (civil, criminal, ethical, ritual, and sanitary), religious poetry, didactic treatises, lyric poetry, parable and allegory, biography, personal correspondence, personal memoirs and diaries.”

4. THE BIBLE IS MORE DISTINCTIVE THAN EVERY OTHER BOOK EVER PUBLISHED.   The Bible is superior to other books in its origin, formation, doctrines, principles, claims, moral tone, histories, prophecies, revelation, literature, present redemption and eternal benefits.

5. UNLIKE OTHER BOOKS PUBLISHED, THE BIBLE HAS A VAST INFLUENCE IN THIS WORLD.   The Bible has blessed millions of people of every generation.  The Bible has contributed to the creation of the greatest civilizations on earth.  It has given man the highest hope and destiny.

6. THE WISEST MOST GODLY AND HONEST MEN IN THIS WORLD ACKNOWLEDGE THE BIBLE AS THE WORD OF GOD.  

Only infidels and ungodly people reject the Bible. 7. UNLIKE MANY OTHER BOOKS, THE BIBLE WAS WRITTEN BY HONEST AND GODLY MEN.  

This is because it condemns all sin and records the sins and faults of its writers as well as others.  This is something evil men would not do.  Even good men would not do this unless they were inspired to do so to help others. 8. THE BIBLE MEETS ALL THE NEEDS OF MANKIND.  

All man’s present and eternal needs are met by the Bible.

9. THE BIBLE HAS BEEN PRESERVED THROUGH THE AGES.  

Whole kingdoms and religions have sought in vain to destroy it.  God has made the Bible indestructible and victorious. 10. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR TO OTHER BOOKS BECAUSE THE HEAVENLY AND ETERNAL CHARACTER OF ITS CONTENTS PROVE IT TO BE OF GOD.

11. THE PREACHING OF THE BIBLE CHANGES THE LIVES OF PEOPLE.   The response of humanity to this great book shows that it is of a supernatural and superior nature.

12. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS INFINITE DEPTHS AND LOFTY IDEALS.

13. THE BIBLE STANDS OUT IN SUPREMACY BY THE UNBELIEVABLE NUMBER OF PROPHECIES THAT IT CONTAINS.   About three thousand three hundred prophecies have been fulfilled.  Predictions made hundreds and even thousands of years earlier have been fulfilled.  Not one detail has failed yet.  About 2,908 verses are being fulfilled or will be fulfilled.

14. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS MIRACULOUS NATURE.   Hundreds of miracles are recorded in the scriptures.  Miracles happen daily among those who pray and claim Bible promises.

15. THE BIBLE IS ALONE IN ITS FLAWLESSNESS.   The Bible is scientifically and historically correct.  No one man has found the Bible at fault in any of its many hundreds of statements of history, astronomy, botany, geology, geography or any other branch of learning.

16. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS ADAPTABILITY.   The Bible is always up to date on every subject.  It can be applied to the lives of people who live in Africa, Asia, Europe or America.  It was useful to people who lived a thousand years ago and it is still relevant to the people who live in the twenty first century.

17. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS MORAL AND SPIRITUAL POWER.   It meets perfectly every spiritual and moral need of man.

18. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS DOCTRINES.   The doctrines of the Bible surpass all human ideas or principles of relationships, religion and culture.

19. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR BECAUSE IT CLAIMS TO BE THE WORD OF GOD.   Over three thousand eight hundred times, Bible writers claimed that God spoke what they wrote.  In other words, the Bible itself claims to be the Word of God.

20. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN SECULAR HISTORY. Many pagan, Jewish and Christian writers confirm the facts of the Bible.  They actually quote the Bible as being genuine, authentic and inspired of God.

21. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS WORLDWIDE CIRCULATION.  

Most authors have their books circulated within communities.  You will be surprised to find that many authors who are very popular are not known at all in other parts of the world.  Not so with the Bible! ”The Bible has been read by more people and published in more languages than any other book.  There have been more copies produced of its entirety and more portions and selections than any other book in history. Some will argue that in a designated month or year more of a certain book was sold.  However, over all there is absolutely no book that reaches or even begins to compare to the circulation of the Scriptures.”

What HY Pickering said about the Bible

Hy Pickering said that about 30 years ago, for the British and Foreign Bible Society to meet its demands, it had to publish: “One copy every three seconds day and night, 22 copies every minute day and night, 1,369 copies every hour day and night, 32,876 copies every day in the year.” It is deeply interesting to know that this amazing number of Bibles was dispatched to various parts of the world in 4,583 cases weighing 490 tons!

22. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS WORLDWIDE TRANSLATIONS. The Bible was one of the first major books translated (Septuagint: Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, ca 250 BC).  It has been translated and retranslated and paraphrased more than any other book in existence. Encyclopaedia Britannica says, “By 1966 the whole Bible had appeared… in 240 languages and dialects… one or more whole books of the Bible in 739 additional ones, a total publication of 1,280 languages.” Three thousand Bible translators between 1950-1960 were at work translating the Scriptures. The Bible factually stands unique (“one of a kind; alone in its class”) in its translation.

23. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS CONTINUED EXISTENCE THROUGH THE YEARS. Being written on material that perishes, having to be copied and recopied for hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press, did not diminish its style, correctness or existence.  The Bible, compared with other ancient writings, has more manuscript evidence than any 10 pieces of classical literature combined. What John Warwick Montgomery said about the Bible “To be sceptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.” What John Lea said about the Bible John Lea in The Greatest Book in the World compared the Bible with Shakespeare’s writings.  He had this to say: “It seems strange that the text of Shakespeare, which has been in existence less than two hundred and eight years, should be far more uncertain and corrupt than that of the New Testament, now over eighteen centuries old, during  nearly fifteen of which it existed only in manuscript. …With perhaps a dozen or twenty exceptions, the text of every verse in the New Testament may be said to be so far settled by general consent of scholars, that any dispute as to its readings must relate rather to the interpretation of the words than to any doubts respecting the words themselves.  But in everyone of Shakespeare’s thirty seven plays there are probably a hundred readings still in dispute, a large portion of which materially affects the meaning of the passages in which they occur.”

24.  THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS ABILITY TO SURVIVE PERSECUTION. What Sidney Collett said about the Bible Voltaire, the noted French infidel who died in 1778, said that in one hundred years from his time Christianity would be swept from existence and passed into history.  But what has happened?  Voltaire has passed into history, while the circulation of the Bible continues to increase in almost all parts of the world, carrying blessing wherever it goes. Concerning the boast of Voltaire on the extinction of Christianity and the Bible in 100 years, Geisler and Nix point out that “only fifty years after his death the Geneva Bible Society used his press and house to produce stacks of Bibles.” What an irony of history! In AD 303, Diocletian issued an edict (Cambridge History of the Bible, Cambridge University Press, 1963) to stop Christians from worshipping and to destroy their Scriptures. “…An imperial letter was everywhere promulgated, ordering the razing of the churches to the ground and the destruction by fire of the Scriptures, and proclaiming that those who held high positions would lose all civil rights while those in households, if they persisted in the profession of Christianity, would be deprived of their liberty.” The historic irony of the above edict to destroy the Bible is that Eusebius records an edict given 25 years later by Constantine, the emperor of Diocletian, that 50 copies of the Scriptures should be prepared at the expense of the government.

25. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS ABILITY TO ENDURE CRITICISM. What H.L. Hastings said about the Bible H.L. Hastings has forcibly illustrated the unique way the Bible has withstood the attacks of infidels and sceptics. “Infidels for eighteen hundred years have been refuting and overthrowing this book, and yet it stands today as solid as a rock.  Its circulation increases, and it is more loved and cherished and read today than ever before. Infidels, with all their assaults, make about as much impression on this book as a man with a tack hammer would on the Pyramids of Egypt. When the French monarch proposed the persecution of the Christians in his dominion, an old statesman and warrior said to him, “Sire, the church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.”  So the hammers of infidels have been pecking away at this book for ages, but the hammers are worn out, and the anvil still endures. If this book had not been the book of God, men would have destroyed it long ago.  Emperors and popes, kings and priests, princes and rulers have all tried their hand at it; they die and the book still lives.” What Bernard Ramm said about the Bible “A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, and committal read.  But somehow the corpse never stays put. No other book has been so chopped, knifed, sifted, scrutinized, and vilified.  What book on philosophy or religion or psychology or belles letters of classical or modern times has been the subject to such a mass attack as the Bible?  With such venom and scepticism?  With such thoroughness and erudition?  Upon every chapter, line and tenet? The Bible is still loved by millions, read by millions, and studied by millions.”

26.  THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN THE NATURE OF ITS PROPHECIES.   Wilbur Smith who compiled a personal library of 25,000 volumes writes: “It is the only volume ever produced by man, or a group of men in which is to be found a large body of prophecies relating to individual nations, to Israel, to all the peoples of the earth, to certain cities, and to the coming of One who was to be the Messiah; The ancient world had many different devices for determining the future, known as divination, but not in the entire gamut of Greek and Latin literature, even though they use the words prophet and prophecy, can we find any real specific prophecy of a great historic event to come in the distant future, nor any prophecy of a Saviour to arise in the human race. “Mohammedanism cannot point to any prophecies of the coming of Mohammed uttered hundreds of years before his birth.  Neither can the founders of any cult in this country rightly identify any ancient text specifically foretelling their appearance.” 27. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS HONESTY. The Bible deals very frankly with the sins of its characters.  Read the biographies today, and see how they try to cover up, overlook or ignore the shady side of people.  Take the great literary geniuses; most are painted as saints.  The Bible does not do it that way.  It simply tells it like it is.

28. THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR IN ITS INFLUENCE ON SURROUNDING LITERATURE. What Cleland B. McAfee said about the Bible Cleland B. McAfee writes in The Greatest English Classic: ”If every Bible in any considerable city were destroyed, the Book could be restored in all its essential parts from the quotations on the shelves of the city public library.  There are works, covering almost all the great literary writers, devoted especially to showing how much the Bible has influenced them.” What Kenneth Scott Latourette Said about Jesus Kenneth Scott Latourette, former Yale historian, says: “It is evidence of His importance, of the effect that He has had upon history and presumably, of the baffling mystery of His being that no other life ever lived on this planet has evoked so huge a volume of literature among so many peoples and languages, and that, far from ebbing, the flood continues to mount.” A professor once remarked:  “If you are an intelligent person, you will read the one book that has drawn more attention than any other, if you are searching for the truth!” 

29.  THE BIBLE IS SUPERIOR BECAUSE IT HAS SET UNUSUAL RECORDS. i. The Bible is the first religious book to be taken into outer space. ii. It is also one of the (if not the) most expensive books. Gutenberg’s Latin Vulgate Bible sold for over $100,000.  The Russians sold the Codex Sinaiticus (an early copy of the Bible) to England for $510,000. iii. The longest telegram in the world was the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament sent from New York to Chicago.

by Dag Heward-Mills

[everydaynuggets-blog]

Why the Bible Is Superior to Every Other Book

Most people do not understand the uniqueness and superiority of this great book. It is a book like no other book. If someone asks you for the meaning of the word unique, you might as well say it means "Bible". Unique in the dictionary is defined as: the one and only. It also means: to be different from all others, having no like or equal.

Twenty-Nine Reasons Why the Bible Is Superior to Every Other Book on Earth

1. The Bible is superior in the fact that it is the most reliable historic document of all time.

When we do not have the original historical document, we must establish how reliable the copies are. This is done in two ways:

i. The more identical manuscript copies of the original we have, the more sure we are that the copies reflect what is in the original document.

ii. The shorter the time interval between the copy and the original, the more sure we are that the copy reflects what is in the original.

"There are more than 5,300 known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Add over 10,000 Latin Vulgate and at least 9,300 other early versions (MSS) and we have more than 24,000 manuscripts copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today."

"No other document of antiquity even begins to approach such numbers and attestation. In comparison, the book Iliad by Homer is second with only 643 manuscripts that still survive. The first complete preserved text of Homer dates from the 13th century."

John Warwick Montgomery says that "to be sceptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament."

Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, who was the director and principal librarian of the British Museum and second to none in authority for issuing statements about MSS, says, "…besides number, the manuscripts of the New Testament differ from those of the classical authors, and this time the difference is clear gain. In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest extant manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament. The books of the New Testament were written in the latter part of the first century; the earliest extant manuscripts (trifling scraps excepted) are of the fourth century - say from 250 to 300 years later."

"This may sound a considerable interval, but it is nothing to that which parts most of the great classical authors from their earliest manuscripts. We believe that we have in all essentials an accurate text of the seven extant plays of Sophocles; yet the earliest substantial manuscript upon which it is based was written more than 1400 years after the poet's death."

Kenyon continues in The Bible and Archaeology: "The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established."

2. The Bible is superior to other books because archaeology has constantly confirmed its historical accuracy and validity.

"Nelson Glueck, the renowned Jewish archaeologist, wrote: "It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference." He continued his assertion of "the almost incredibly accurate historical memory of the Bible, and particularly so when it is fortified by archaeological fact."

William F. Albright, known for his reputation as one of the great archaeologists, states: "There can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of Old Testament tradition."

Albright adds: "The excessive scepticism shown toward the Bible by important historical schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain phases of which still appear periodically, has been progressively discredited. Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition to the value of the Bible as a source of history."

3. The Bible is superior in its unity and continuity. Over forty authors wrote sixty-six books over a period of 1,500 years. Many never saw the writings of the others and yet there is no contradiction between any two of them.

Collect any group of books of any other forty men on any subject and see if they agree.

Nine Facts about the Unity and Continuity of the Bible

a. The Bible was written over a 1,500 years span.

b. The Bible was written over 40 generations.

c. The Bible was written by over 40 authors from every walk of life:

§ Moses, a political leader, trained in the universities of Egypt

§ Peter, a fisherman

§ Amos, a herdsman

§ Joshua, a military general

§ Nehemiah, a cupbearer

§ Daniel, a prime minister

§ Luke, a doctor

§ Solomon, a king

§ Matthew, a tax collector

§ Paul, a rabbi

d. The Bible was written in different places:

§ Moses in the wilderness

§ Jeremiah in a dungeon

§ Daniel on a hillside and in a palace

§ Paul, inside prison walls

§ Luke, while travelling

§ Others in the rigors of a military campaign.

e. The Bible was written at different times:

§ David in times of war

§ Solomon in times of peace

f. The Bible was written during different moods:

§ Some writing from the heights of joy and others writing from depths of sorrow and despair. g. The Bible was written on three continents:

§ Asia, Africa and Europe

h. The Bible was written in three languages:

§ Hebrew: The language of the Old Testament. It was called "the language of Judah" in 2 Kings 18:26-28 and in Isaiah 19:18, "the language of Canaan".

§ Aramaic: This was the "common language" of the Near East until the time of Alexander the Great (6th century BC - 4th century BC).

§ Greek: The New Testament language. This was the international language at the time of Christ.

i. The Bible includes in its subject matter hundreds of controversial subjects. A controversial subject is one, which creates opposing opinions when mentioned or discussed. Biblical authors spoke on hundreds of controversial subjects with harmony and continuity from Genesis to Revelation. The result is one unfolding story: "God's redemption of man!"

What F.F. Bruce Said about the Bible

"Any part of the human body can only be properly explained in reference to the whole body. And any part of the Bible can only be properly explained in reference to the whole Bible."

"The Bible, at first sight, appears to be a collection of literature - mainly Jewish. If we inquire into the circumstance under which the various Biblical documents were written, we find that they were written at intervals over a space of nearly 1400 years."

"The writers wrote in various lands, from Italy in the west to Mesopotamia and possibly Persia in the east."

"The writers themselves were a heterogeneous number of people, not only separated from each other by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles, but also belonging to the most diverse walks of life. In their ranks we have kings, herdsmen, soldiers, legislators, fishermen, statesmen, courtiers, priests and prophets, a tent-making Rabbi and a Gentile physician, not to speak of others of whom we know nothing apart from the writings they have left us."

"The writings themselves belong to a great variety of literary types. They include history, law (civil, criminal, ethical, ritual, and sanitary), religious poetry, didactic treatises, lyric poetry, parable and allegory, biography, personal correspondence, personal memoirs and diaries."

4. The Bible is more distinctive than every other book ever published. The Bible is superior to other books in its origin, formation, doctrines, principles, claims, moral tone, histories, prophecies, revelation, literature, present redemption and eternal benefits.

5. Unlike other books published, the Bible has a vast influence in this world. The Bible has blessed millions of people of every generation. The Bible has contributed to the creation of the greatest civilizations on earth. It has given man the highest hope and destiny.

6. The wisest most godly and honest men in this world acknowledge the Bible as the Word of God. Only infidels and ungodly people reject the Bible.

7. Unlike many other books, the Bible was written by honest and godly men. This is because it condemns all sin and records the sins and faults of its writers as well as others. This is something evil men would not do. Even good men would not do this unless they were inspired to do so to help others.

8. The Bible meets all the needs of mankind. All man's present and eternal needs are met by the Bible.

9. The Bible has been preserved through the ages. Whole kingdoms and religions have sought in vain to destroy it. God has made the Bible indestructible and victorious.

10. The Bible is superior to other books because the heavenly and eternal character of its contents prove it to be of God.

11. The preaching of the Bible changes the lives of people. The response of humanity to this great book shows that it is of a supernatural and superior nature.

12. The Bible is superior in its infinite depths and lofty ideals.

13. The Bible stands out in supremacy by the unbelievable number of prophecies that it contains. About three thousand three hundred prophecies have been fulfilled. Predictions made hundreds and even thousands of years earlier have been fulfilled. Not one detail has failed yet. About 2,908 verses are being fulfilled or will be fulfilled.

14. The Bible is superior in its miraculous nature. Hundreds of miracles are recorded in the scriptures.

Miracles happen daily among those who pray and claim Bible promises.

15. The Bible is alone in its flawlessness. The Bible is scientifically and historically correct. No one man has found the Bible at fault in any of its many hundreds of statements of history, astronomy, botany, geology, geography or any other branch of learning.

16. The Bible is superior in its adaptability. The Bible is always up to date on every subject. It can be applied to the lives of people who live in Africa, Asia, Europe or America. It was useful to people who lived a thousand years ago and it is still relevant to the people who live in the twenty first century.

17. The Bible is superior in its moral and spiritual power. It meets perfectly every spiritual and moral need of man.

18. The Bible is superior in its doctrines. The doctrines of the Bible surpass all human ideas or principles of relationships, religion and culture.

19. The Bible is superior because it claims to be the Word of God. Over three thousand eight hundred times, Bible writers claimed that God spoke what they wrote. In other words, the Bible itself claims to be the Word of God.

20. The Bible is superior in secular history. Many pagan, Jewish and Christian writers confirm the facts of the Bible. They actually quote the Bible as being genuine, authentic and inspired of God.

21. The Bible is superior in its worldwide circulation. Most authors have their books circulated within communities. You will be surprised to find that many authors who are very popular are not known at all in other parts of the world. Not so with the Bible!

23"The Bible has been read by more people and published in more languages than any other book. There have been more copies produced of its entirety and more portions and selections than any other book in history.

Some will argue that in a designated month or year more of a certain book was sold. However, over all there is absolutely no book that reaches or even begins to compare to the circulation of the Scriptures."

What HY Pickering said about the Bible

Hy Pickering said that about 30 years ago, for the British and Foreign Bible Society to meet its demands, it had to publish:

One copy every three seconds day and night, 22 copies every minute day and night, 1,369 copies every hour day and night, 32,876 copies every day in the year.

It is deeply interesting to know that this amazing number of Bibles was dispatched to various parts of the world in 4,583 cases weighing 490 tons!23

22. The Bible is superior in its worldwide translations.

The Bible was one of the first major books translated (Septuagint: Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, ca 250 BC). It has been translated and retranslated and paraphrased more than any other book in existence.

Encyclopaedia Britannica says "by 1966 the whole Bible had appeared… in 240 languages and dialects… one or more whole books of the Bible in 739 additional ones, a total publication of 1,280 languages."

Three thousand Bible translators between 1950-1960 were at work translating the Scriptures.

The Bible factually stands unique ("one of a kind; alone in its class") in its translation.

The Bible is superior in its continued existence through the years.

Being written on material that perishes, having to be copied and recopied for hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press, did not diminish its style, correctness or existence. The Bible, compared with other ancient writings, has more manuscript evidence than any 10 pieces of classical literature combined.

What John Warwick Montgomery Said about the Bible

"To be sceptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament."

What John Lea Said about the Bible

John Lea in The Greatest Book in the World compared the Bible with Shakespeare's writings. He had this to say:

"It seems strange that the text of Shakespeare, which has been in existence less than two hundred and eight years, should be far more uncertain and corrupt than that of the New Testament, now over eighteen centuries old, during nearly fifteen of which it existed only in manuscript.

With perhaps a dozen or twenty exceptions, the text of every verse in the New Testament may be said to be so far settled by general consent of scholars, that any dispute as to its readings must relate rather to the interpretation of the words than to any doubts respecting the words themselves. But in everyone of Shakespeare's thirty seven plays there are probably a hundred readings still in dispute, a large portion of which materially affects the meaning of the passages in which they occur."

24. The Bible is superior in its ability to survive persecution.

What Sidney Collett Said about the Bible:

Voltaire, the noted French infidel who died in 1778, said that in one hundred years from his time Christianity would be swept from existence and passed into history. But what has happened? Voltaire has passed into history, while the circulation of the Bible continues to increase in almost all parts of the world, carrying blessing wherever it goes.

Concerning the boast of Voltaire on the extinction of Christianity and the Bible in 100 years, Geisler and Nix point out that "only fifty years after his death the Geneva Bible Society used his press and house to produce stacks of Bibles." What An irony of history!

In AD 303, Diocletian issued an edict (Cambridge History of the Bible, Cambridge University Press, 1963) to stop Christians from worshipping and to destroy their Scriptures.

"…An imperial letter was everywhere promulgated, ordering the razing of the churches to the ground and the destruction by fire of the Scriptures, and proclaiming that those who held high positions would lose all civil rights while those in households, if they persisted in the profession of Christianity, would be deprived of their liberty."

The historic irony of the above edict to destroy the Bible is that Eusebius records the edict given 25 years later by Constantine, the emperor of Diocletian, that 50 copies of the Scriptures should be prepared at the expense of the government. 

25. The Bible is superior in its ability to endure criticism.

What H.L. Hastings Said about the Bible

H.L. Hastings has forcibly illustrated the unique way the Bible has withstood the attacks of infidels and sceptics.

"Infidels for eighteen hundred years have been refuting and overthrowing this book, and yet it stands today as solid as a rock. Its circulation increases, and it is more loved and cherished and read today than ever before.

Infidels, with all their assaults, make about as much impression on this book as a man with a tack hammer would on the Pyramids of Egypt.

When the French monarch proposed the persecution of the Christians in his dominion, an old statesman and warrior said to him, "Sire, the church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers." So the hammers of infidels have been pecking away at this book for ages, but the hammers are worn out, and the anvil still endures.

If this book had not been the book of God, men would have destroyed it long ago. Emperors and popes, kings and priests, princes and rulers have all tried their hand at it; they die and the book still lives."

What Bernard Ramm Said about the Bible

"A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, and committal read. But somehow the corpse never stays put. No other book has been so chopped, knifed, sifted, scrutinized, and vilified. What book on philosophy or religion or psychology or belles letters of classical or modern times has been the subject to such a mass attack as the Bible? With such venom and scepticism? With such thoroughness and erudition? Upon every chapter, line and tenet?

The Bible is still loved by millions, read by millions, and studied by millions."

26. The Bible is superior in the nature of its prophecies.

Wilbur Smith who compiled a personal library of 25,000 volumes writes:

"It is the only volume ever produced by man, or a group of men in which is to be found a large body of prophecies relating to individual nations, to Israel, to all the peoples of the earth, to certain cities, and to the coming of One who was to be the Messiah;

The ancient world had many different devices for determining the future, known as divination, but not in the entire gamut of Greek and Latin literature, even though they use the words prophet and prophecy, can we find any real specific prophecy of a great historic event to come in the distant future, nor any prophecy of a Saviour to arise in the human race.

"Mohammedanism cannot point to any prophecies of the coming of Mohammed uttered hundreds of years before his birth. Neither can the founders of any cult in this country rightly identify any ancient text specifically foretelling their appearance." 

27. The Bible is superior in its honesty. The Bible deals very frankly with the sins of its characters. Read the biographies today, and see how they try to cover up, overlook or ignore the shady side of people. Take the great literary geniuses; most are painted as saints. The Bible does not do it that way. It simply tells it like it is.

28. The Bible is superior in its influence on surrounding literature.

What Cleland B. McAfee Said about the Bible

Cleland B. McAfee writes in The Greatest English Classic:

29"If every Bible in any considerable city were destroyed, the Book could be restored in all its essential parts from the quotations on the shelves of the city public library. There are works, covering almost all the great literary writers, devoted especially to showing how much the Bible has influenced them."

What Kenneth Scott Latourette Said about Jesus

Kenneth Scott Latourette, former Yale historian, says:

"It is evidence of His importance, of the effect that He has had upon history and presumably, of the baffling mystery of His being that no other life ever lived on this planet has evoked so huge a volume of literature among so many peoples and languages, and that, far from ebbing, the flood continues to mount."

A professor once remarked: "If you are an intelligent person, you will read the one book that has drawn mo 29. The Bible is superior because it has set unusual records.

i. The Bible is the first religious book to be taken into outer space.

ii. It is also one of the (if not the) most expensive books.

Gutenberg's Latin Vulgate Bible sold for over $100,000. The Russians sold the Codex Sinaiticus (an early copy of the Bible) to England for $510,000.

ii The longest telegram in the world was the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament sent from New York to Chicago.

by Dag Heward-Mills

[newagesispage]

                                                                    SEPTEMBER       2019  

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 July 2019 was the hottest month in human history.

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This Ordinary Life has sent the world their new EP, Sadderdays!! Give it a listen!

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Judd Apatow is putting out a book about Garry Shandling.

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Debbie Harry: Face it will be out on Oct. 1

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This year the Kennedy center will honor Big Bird, Linda Ronstadt, Earth, Wind and Fire, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Sally Field.

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Kentucky principal Phillip Wilson who banned books from his high school in 2009 for homosexual content has been arrested on possession and distribution of child porn.

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In Illinois, the capital bill is funded through a doubling of gas tax and an increase in license plate fees. The money is supposed to be for roads, public buildings and bridges. The state constitution tells us the state shall not pay for aid in any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution controlled by any church or sectarian denomination. Organizations that are now receiving some of the funding are, Catholic charities, The ARK of Sabina, Inner-city Muslim action network, Gifts from God ministry, Chicago center for Torah and Chesed, Hatzalah, Keshet, Jewish united fund, Lewis University, St. Ann Catholic school and Mt. Sinai hospital, among others.

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Gary Busey will appear in the off Broadway musical, Only Human where he will play God.

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Eastwood’s The Ballad of Richard Jewell is in production with Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde, Kathy Bates and Jon Hamm.

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For a look into Brian Jones death catch the doc ‘Who killed Christopher Robin?’

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Dale Jr. and family were in a plane crash but everybody seems to be ok.

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I hear that Porn hub is planting a tree for every 100 videos watched.

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Days alert: Rex is out. What about Chloe? Who will love her now? They still had the chemistry. Oh, never mind, Chloe is gone too!** Ted is out. Tripp is out. Jordan will be back briefly.** OMG How my heart fluttered when Tony and Anna saw each other again. Oh, the magic of a soap!! **At last Robin Strasser is on the way as Vivian. ** Greg Vaughan is dating Angie Harmon and they are a pretty adorable couple.**Why don’t they try to charge Kristen with Holly’s murder? She may want to tell them where they are then.  And I am so sick of Eric leaving sweet women to sniff after Nicole, enough. He used to be one of my favorite characters but it has gotten old. ** Please Please put Xander and Sarah together!!!!!

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Dolly Parton’s America: A podcast will begin this fall.

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The new owners of the LA sex club that was known as Snctm are taking apps and promising carnal bliss.

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Scary Clown told workers in a GM plant in Michigan not to sell their homes. He promised the plant would not shut down and guess what? Lie!** Trump owes El Paso 470 thousand for his MAGA rally. ** Perhaps we should all refer to him as he refers to himself, Ttump.** A Nazi rally in Germany handed out hats inspired by the Trump campaign that read: Make Germany Hate Again.** We have to hit him where it hurts..$.. This is all he understands.** The evangelicals finally got a little upset when Trump took the lords name in vain. ** Trump wanted to buy Greenland, they wouldn’t bite and he cancelled his trip to Denmark.** Now he is The King of Isreal? The chosen one? The second coming of God? ** Word is that half of Trumps twitter followers are fake. Also, the US Labor Dept. says America created 500,000 fewer jobs in 2018 and 2019 than previously reported. **Rural farmers are 50-50 on Trump like the rest of us. Why do we categorize people? Things like this show that our differences don’t usually have anything to do with our religion, the color of our skin,$, job or location. We are different at our cores in what we think and feel about others and the world around us.** Scary Clown has told some staff to get this wall started no matter the coast and to just, ”take the land” if necessary and he will pardon them later. He has taken FEMA money to get the ball rolling as a hurricane bears down on the U.S.

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Why do we vote in those that allow the drug, insurance and credit card, lender companies to make all the dough?? Let’s ALL enjoy America.

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A newly invented bag can be dissolved in water after use.

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Pardon Blagoevich?? What??

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The Black Jewel Coal Co. has filed for bankruptcy. The miner’s last paychecks bounced. Nobody will answer their questions about their 4o1k’s. Since they are not technically laid off yet, they can’t receive unemployment. The company got 5 mil in emergency funds from the bank and they owe 976 thousand in fines.

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Kelly Craft, a major Trump donor is the new UN ambassador.**US ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman is out.

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I have to say, I don’t get why people aren’t more excited about the democratic candidates. There are a few that could go away but there are some really fabulous ideas there. I hope they put their egos aside when the last is standing. The lot of them would compose a great cabinet. And how do you not get excited about the future of our country?? How can you be so inside your own head that you put our own day to day ahead of your country? We all have to pay our bills, work, care for others and enjoy our passions from time to time but this is crunch time people!!! Pay attention!!** Beto’s REAL reaction to the El Paso shootings did more for him than all his relaunches. He was himself and not what he thought he should be. Trump and Biden were giving sympathy to the wrong cities for goodness sake!  Trump couldn’t even show any true feelings as he gave the thumbs up beside an orphan and tweeted about how lousy Shep Smith as he flew to the next photo op of victims.** It’s hard to look away from the freak show.** The next Dem debate is Sept.12.

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With no notice, immigrants who are here for life saving treatments have been given 33 days to clear out of the country.** Scary Clown is fighting with Comey again. What an unhappy schmuck this President is.

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It seems to me that if 2 people had run for student council president and the winner cheated and abused his office, they would make him step down. Would they have another vote or let the opponent step in?? The President of the US post is a bit more important than student council President. ** Now Trump is thinking that nuking hurricanes might be a good idea.

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If elected, Bernie says he will tell us what is known about aliens from outer space.** Hickenlooper is out.** Seth Moulton is out.**Jay Inslee is out (oooh, that one hurts). I love ya Jay!! He is now running for reelection as Governor.** Gillibrand is out** Former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh and former Massachusetts  Governor Bill Weld are in for the Republican side.

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Some studies show that over 50% of inmates have dyslexia.

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Jim Gaffigan made some jokes about craft beers including how labels might have say a penguin wrestling a cactus. Well, a small brewery in NY has made it happen with their blend called Penguin and Cactus

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6000 people of Oklahoma are dead from opiods and Johnson and Johnson have been ordered to pay $572 mil per the court verdict.

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The International wildlife regulator has banned the capture and export of baby African elephants.

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Leslie Jones is out at SNL.

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“Under the Trump administration, the pledge ”the right to bear arms,”  has morphed into “Don’t just stand there, shoot somebody.” – Carl Reiner

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In the event I am killed, organize, mobilize and get the peace plan passed and put my body on the NRA’s doorstep in Fairfax, Va. – David Hogg

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The trailer for this Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix, Marc Maron and Robert DeNiro looks fucking amazing!! Hurry up Oct.4!!

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The NRA has 5 million members but one still has to wonder why the rights of gun owners supersede the rights of everybody else. Why don’t we hear more about their money scandals? Just when you hear that Trump is asking his people behind the scenes if the NRA still has power, he and LaPierre talk and the Pres backs off his tough gun talk. We know who is Wayne’s bitch. ** A group of surgeons have been showing X-Rays of what a gun can do as they protest gun violence.** The world now has bulletproof backpacks.**New schools are being designed to cut down the number of victims of a shooter. Hallways are curved and classrooms can lock.

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The Firearm dealer license certification act in Illinois requires those who hold a Federal firearm license to also obtain a state certificate of license and comply with state regulations. All dealers will be required to have security alarms where guns are stored in case of intrusion. Dealers will also have to keep electronic records of their inventory. Gun dealers and the Illinois state rifle association are challenging, of course before this all takes effect in 2020.

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“We don’t have an actual Presidency right now. We have a reality show whose ratings have begun to slide and whose fading star sees cancellation on the way.” – Eugene Robinson.

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The Bruce Lee philosophy , Be Water, is being used by the Hong Kong protesters. Be Strong like ice. Be fluid like water. Gather like Dew. Scatter like mist.

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As the crackdown on immigrants continues, word is that Trump still employs many undocumented workers. And why aren’t the employers arrested?** The administration wants to make it easy  for the wealthy and educated immigrants to come to this country. Again, only the rich have rights.** Trump has moved $150 mil from FEMA to the immigration courts as hurricane Dorian heads this way. ** He is telling his staff to just “take the land” and build the wall, disregard environmental rules and he will pardon them. A joke?? I wouldn’t be so sure.**

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Jews against Ice really let ‘em have it. They shut down Amazon as they marched against the internment of immigrants. The rally cry: We will not stay silent while tech companies profit off of cruelty.

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Jeff Epstein is dead and the conspiracy theories have begun. Many are glad that Epstein is dead and some wish he had lived to pay for his crimes. Would he have turned on his high end friends?  David Koch is also dead.** Word is that in 2008 Epstein bought female undies from the jail shop.

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A recent survey shows that 45% of people wear underwear for 2 days, 13% for a week. Tell me this can’t be true.

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Chris Christie and Anthony Scaramuchi are always everywhere and now Sean Spicer on Dancing with the Stars?? OMG.. Can we stop seeing these people?** Sarah Huckabee Sanders is joining Fox news.

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White Supremacy is officially the majority of domestic terrorism in the U.S. Now, let me see, who seems to want to be their leader?** Advertisers pulled out of Tucker Carlson’s show after he called white supremacy ,’not a thing.’

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Truckers have been really hurt by the tax cuts. Longer hours and less money have come since they can’t deduct expenses the way they used to. Regulations have been relaxed that limits hours on the road.

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The Department of labor is proposing a rule that would allow government contractors to fire workers who are unmarried and pregnant or LGBTQ.

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David Gilmour sold his guitars for 20 thou and used the money to fight climate change.

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Michael Cohen claims that Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife and a pool boy they met at a hotel became fast friends. Eventually Cohen had to intervene because of some lurid photos. He claims that the Falwell’s are quite kinky. The couple gave the pool boy over a mil to buy a resort that has become trendy with the LGBTQ community.  Apparently nobody else knows what is on those photos that Cohen brokered a deal for.

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Kathy Griffin: A Hell of a story won the Freedom of Speech award at the Traverse city film fest. She announced the release of the film by giving a heads up to hashtag emmyless Donald.

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California is trying to make those that run for President show us their tax returns. Illinois rejected that idea.

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Blaze it forward

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U.S. Fencer, Rick Imboden took a knee during the national anthem after taking gold at the Pan Am games.

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Stumptown looks like a good show but boy what a terrible name.

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Check out the new book, Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow.

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Ron Burgundy has been making the rounds.

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Yada Yada Yada politics has made its way into our thoughts with Marianne Williamson warning us of business as usual.

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Geena Davis is getting the humanitarian Oscar.

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In a joke that Seth Meyers told he said, ”Cleveland Browns win Super Bowl!”  So it may never happen but it was nice to hear.

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Chairman of the parent company of Equinox and Soul Cycle and owner of the Dolphins, Stephen Ross, caused a stir when he held a fundraiser for Trump.

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Liam and Miley broke up.

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Someone started a little joke about renaming the street in front of Trump tower. But people have started to take it seriously and NY is considering the name President Barack Obama Avenue.

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The administration is rolling back regs on the endangered species act. It has been a great success but Trump and the lobbyists think it just stands in the way of their profits.

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28% of delivery drivers have eaten some of your food.

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The Rolling Stones are trying to push a green agenda on the latest tour. At some venues fans can purchase a tones cup for $3, use it all night and then take it home or turn it in for your $3 back.** In 1964 the first Stones album came out and the Mariner 4 fly by satellite had its first look at Mars. In November last year the Insight lander thrusters disturbed a rock on Mars which has been dubbed Rolling Stones rock.

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Studies show that the most dangerous years of our lives are the year we are born and the year we retire. Depression spikes 40% after retirement. In Okinawa, Japan they don’t even have a word for retire. On the whole they eat a lot of fresh seafood and eat smaller portions. They seem to live the longest, healthiest lives.

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The green shirt guy was a thing for a few minutes.

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Wal Mart is really cracking down on security, one store at a time. Some people are asking the store to stop selling guns and donating to NRA backed lawmakers.

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The Black lady sketch show is Robin Thede’s new thing which is good but her last show was good too.

 R.I.P. Saoirse Kennedy Hill, Hal Prince, the El Paso and Dayton and Odessa/Midland shooting victims, D.A. Pennebaker, Toni Morrison, Jimmy Aldaoud, Valerie Harper and Peter Fonda.