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the-expose-on-girls · 5 months

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Toxic Policing of Arbitrary "Modesty" rules in the Church

How a Biblical virtue has been twisted into a weapon and a disguise for the jealous and insecure

Those were the days, when church summer camp was the best week out of the entire year---even better than Christmas morning. Days spent adventuring in the great outdoors, evenings spent in worship, late nights playing crazy games with friends, hearty food, and the level of sleep deprivation that makes everything hilarious. The first morning after camp was over, after sleeping for twelve hours straight to make up for the past week, we all began looking forward to next year's camp.

Sadly, the magic at that camp ended well before my friends and I aged out of attending. It ended when some people hit a point where they started stupid heart-breaking, friendship-ending drama everywhere they went, especially at camp. One of these little episodes involved a fresh-out-of-high-school youth leader, who was also the leader of the popular girl clique at church. She was the darling of worship team (guitar player AND lead vocalist), the Dream Christian Girl who everyone wondered how she could be single. (If asked, she would say that she was waiting for God to bring her The One.) She was the girl all the guys 13 through 22 had a crush on at some point. She was the prettiest, the most pure, the most Godly, the most talented, the most selfless, the most kind. She was THE Proverbs 31 Woman and any guy who got her would be the luckiest guy in the world, right? Of course.

It was the summer of 2014 and everyone was preparing to board the buses for an excursion to the lake. Sunscreen? Check. Towel? Check. Change of dry clothes? Check. I had all my things ready to go and stood in the lobby talking with my friends while I waited for the call to board the bus. Miss Popular meandered through the groups of kids, making sure everyone had a towel in hand. Suddenly, she approached me and ordered me to go put on longer shorts, saying that mine did not meet the Modesty Rules. I was surprised, explaining that I had bought these specifically for camp because they were the longest pair the store had. They were the longest pair of shorts I had. For the record, they reached the tip of my thumbs when my hands were at my sides, only a couple inches away from the fingertip Modesty Rule. Did I not get credit for trying? What did she want me to do, sew my own clothes?

"I don't care, go put on longer shorts," she demanded, her Proverbs 31 Woman smile fading away. The whole lobby was staring at me now, eyeing my "scandalous" clothing.

"I don't have anything longer. And even if I did, there is no way my mom could bring some from home in time for us to leave for the lake," I defended myself, justly upset at this point.

There was no arguing with my defense at that point, so she fell back on an accusatory lecture about modesty as everyone continued to watch the show. Basically, she implied that I was a slut (without actually saying a non-G-rated word like "slut"), was trying to get male attention, and wasn't a Good Christian Girl. NOTHING could be further from my mind than getting guys' attention; I just wanted to go have fun at the lake with my friends. After dropping that bomb on my head, she marched off, feeling in control for humiliating me.

The excitement of the bus ride quickly got my mind on better things after that run-in. We swam, played games, picked berries, had a picnic, then swam some more, for HOURS in the summer sun. At one point, I sat down on a log in the shallows to rest and that's when I noticed Miss Popular for the first time since we arrived. She was soaked after participating in a game and her thin, low-cut tank top had only sunk lower and gotten more see-through from the lake water, revealing her skimpy bikini underneath. When she leaned forward even a little bit, she flashed everyone in front of her. Her short shorts had ridden up her legs after all the running around, making my shorts look like guys basketball shorts by comparison. When she leaned forward even a little bit, she flashed everyone behind her. She looked ready to strike some teasing poses on a Hawaiian beach for a magazine cover. Although, in some circles, they would refer to her look as a wardrobe malfunction.

She frolicked around the lake like that all day and no one said a word to her---not the youth pastor, not a fellow leader, not one of her friends. No one. Oh, but the guys sure stared and enjoyed the show. Whenever she sat down, she had a nice little posse of admirers around her, looking SO not casual. Afterwards, the way she interacted with me was as if nothing had happened.

It's also worth noting that another camper that year had a similar wardrobe malfunction during our pool trip and no one, not even Miss Popular, said anything to her. I still wonder why.

Meanwhile, 17-year-old little me looked in the mirror and saw an ugly duckling, a half-drowned rat in my prudish shorts, raggedy old t-shirt, half-dried frizzy hair, concealer-free face, and scuffs of lake mud everywhere. I had a blast at the lake that day. But the conflict with Miss Popular annoyed me. I already hated the way I looked; did she have to humiliate me in front of everyone on top of it? And then the mustard on the paper cut was her strutting around like a half-dressed Vogue model the whole day. I felt even worse about my appearance.

For context, the church's Modesty Rules stated that for swimming trips, girls were required to wear a one-piece swimsuit with a baggy t-shirt and long shorts over the top. (Why the swimsuit type mattered if it was just going to be thoroughly covered up, I have no clue.) Miss Popular broke every part of that rule, but insisted on policing me about my shorts that were longer than hers. AND she said nothing to the other camper dressed like her!

That episode has annoyed me for years. The hypocrisy, the injustice, the unfairness eats at me. Plus, the way she embarrassed me in front of everyone and twisted the knife in my self esteem as a nice little cherry on top. (Not to mention, the slander against my character, accusing me of being a boy-crazy attention whore.) It has taken me YEARS to build up my self esteem and conquer my body image issues. I know, "forgive and forget", right? I don't hold a grudge about it, but I hold onto it to remind myself that she is not truly the nice person she pretends to be at church and not a safe person to be close to. I retell that story to teach myself and others a lesson about seeing the spec in your brother's eye, but not the log in your own. (Matthew 7:3-5) Basically, don't police others about shortcomings that you yourself suffer from.

Now, we come to the point where we try to unpack the motive, the reasons behind the whole incident. Why did she do that to me and no one else? Why did no one say anything to her about the way she was dressed? WHY? A few theories spring to mind...

She has since posted quite a bit on social media about how she felt pressured over the years by people around her to maintain a slim figure. She lived on salad and spent a lot of time at the gym trying to maintain that look. It's possible that my super skinny figure made her feel insecure to the point that she would resort to verbally attacking me to make me hide the figure that bothered her. She didn't do the same to the other girl dressed like her because that girl's figure didn't make her feel insecure.

Male attention was obviously something she enjoyed on that trip. Maybe (though very unlikely), I wasn't as ugly as I thought I was and she felt threatened by me. She saw me as competition for the attention of a particular guy, and wanted to cover up that competition. It bothered her enough that she lashed out.

Maybe she was upset about something else unrelated and felt like venting that anger on someone. Once she did, she felt no need to do that to anyone else breaking Modesty Rules.

Maybe she's just genuinely a mean person underneath all that Good Christian Girl coverup and saw me as an easy target that day.

Whatever the reason(s), it's clear that the motivation wasn't teaching a fellow young lady to be more righteous, or she would have done the same to the other camper dressed just like her. If that was her motivation, then she also would have been leading by example. No, the scriptures were just used as a disguise to hide a very non-Biblical motive and a weapon to carry out a non-Biblical attack. If it was truly about the Bible, then all the girls there would have been held to the exact same standard by all of the leadership staff. But she was the only one doing the policing and she only had one target.

No one said anything to her about her own clothing because she was the golden girl and above reproach.

No one said anything to her about her own clothing because they enjoyed the show.

Am I a hypocrite for calling out what she was wearing? No. BY HER OWN WORDS (not mine), BY HER OWN RULES (not mine), she was intentionally dressing like a slut. Expecting her to live by her own rules she put in place is not hypocrisy.

This is just one, personal example of how modesty policing within and by the community of Christian women can be EXTREMELY toxic. It is selective, used as an excuse to shame only those fellow women who look "too good". It is an excuse to body shame, to make others feel bad about their bodies and cover them up, so the police-er feels better about her own body. It is a disguise for jealousy, used to slander and take down women who rattle one's insecurities just by existing.

#girl vs girl #mean girls #bullies #fake girls #hypocrites #modesty culture #purity culture

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bluthundr-will-slatra · 3 years

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Legends as Greyhound passengers

Crypto: The guy in the row across from you playing his switch the whole night. You can hear pop-ish music play from his headphones even at that distance. Stardew Valley reflects in his glasses.

Gibraltar: The tired dad who claimed the far back left row and peacefully sleeps the whole trip. Lets out the occasional Dad Snore™ (you know the one)

Loba/Bangalore: The bougie woman in designer clothes who is too tired to deal with anything and puts up with no ones shit. Why are you taking a Greyhound queen? What happened?

Octane/Mirage: The absolute fuckhead in the row in front of you blatantly watching hardcore porn. What in life brought you to the point where you think the best time to jack it is in public transportation. Have you no shame? Nonetheless you loudly clear your throat and tell him to not and he’s too ashamed to use his phone for the entire rest of the trip. Fuck that guy.

Caustic: The guy near the front who wears his mask under his nose to cover more of his beard for some reason. Loudly coughs every 10 minutes. No one sits around him.

Wraith: The girl sitting in the row behind you who has some calming music and seemingly sleeps the whole ride. Sometimes you can see her staring out the window at the moon in the reflection of the window. Were it morning you feel as though you could be friends.

Rampart/Wattson: The ‘too friendly for their own good’ passenger near the back who no one has the heart to tell them to please be quiet. We would appreciate it if you didnt talk on the phone/to another passenger at 3 in the morning but we appreciate your attempt at whispering.

Bloodhound: The only person at the 4am stop. Lightly packed but well traveled, looks like a modern outlander rpg character. You try to imagine what their life is like but nothing you think of seems to do them justice.

#apex legends #Listen overnight Greyhounds are an otherworldly experience #I WILL be the defender of my bus' virtue #Crypto #Gibraltar #Loba #Bangalore #octane #mirage #Caustic #Wraith #Wattson #Rampart #Bloodhound #apex

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tazwren · 3 years

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My two cents on the devolution of fandom spaces...

As a former mod of a fandom space and a woman of colour, I do not feel safe.

Seeing what has been done to so many in this fandom, by a particular group of white American women, in the name of moral policing is both abhorrent and demoralising. As it also is to repeatedly see the same narrative being shoved at everyone as the gospel truth.

A narrative that very conveniently either becomes about fic or has nothing to do with fic, depending on how people want to swing things. A narrative that will accuse a person of Jewish heritage of anti-Semitism, a person of colour of racism, a practising Muslim of being an Islamaphobe. A narrative that will define for you and me and all of us comprising this myriad of multitudes in the world what generational or personal trauma includes and what induces the same.

Those of you who know me, know what I’ve been dealing with the past few days & why I haven’t spoken up before now. Before I logged out a couple days ago, I saw what looked like more of the usual nonsense by the same group of people I’ve kept my distance from once their true colours were revealed. What I didn’t expect is that they would think themselves so above the norms of human decency and accountability that they would go after not one but two women of colour this time around in their rabidity. And many others who spoke up, as it turns out.

It hurts to see what these women, that I know of, have had to endure and to see the passivity of the community, save for a few voices, in sitting back and letting the circus rampage through town. It hurt when I was at the receiving end of it and it hurts now.

Why? Because it shows me a microcosm of the world that I don’t really relate to, that makes no sense to me with the values I was brought up with, and which reduces basic human decency to a commodity to be trampled upon and for you to be seen as weak for having. Because people who willingly laud you for your art / writing / wit, meet you with effusive claims of love and affection and friendship, who have no qualms in taking your help when it suits them, will throw you under the bus and let the wolves ravage you when it doesn't.

Before I get into that, let me talk a little bit about what has transpired over the past few days to a week, and what has been systemically taking place over perhaps the past year in this fandom.

One thing is that everyone who makes a statement about anything suddenly has people in their mentions demanding they show what gives them the right to hold that particular opinion. A critical thing people forget about fandom is that it is a place where people hide their identity for a variety of reasons, all valid, and this approach to fiction and conversations where everyone has to reveal every part of their past and identity as a means of establishing their "credentials" in order to present their views comes in direct contradiction with how fandoms operate. It violates people's rights to privacy.

The other is that there has been an increase in the voices that purportedly stand up to “speak for” the marginalised, the abused, those discriminated against and those who belong to minorities who “need to be protected / kept safe”. An admirable sentiment, to be sure. If it weren’t for the fact that none of these groups of people needed saving, speaking for or the protection of this particular group of voices.

Voices who only want to define and use these people as "model victims" to hurt other white women and establish their supremacy over both them and other POC. Voices that will present their "truth" as they see fit and sans context or present you with screenshots of snippets of conversations held in supposedly secure spaces that they have no qualms in violating in the interest of the "greater good" and claim offense / silencing if the misdemeanour is pointed out or action is taken against them, Voices that will conveniently categorize you as a "token POC" or "white adjacent" when you do not support or align with their narrative. Voices that belong to a predominantly white American group of women, whose real agenda, as is evidenced by their modus operandi, has nothing to do with real altruism or a drive for justice or indeed to right wrongs.

No, their agenda is purely power.

To hold sway over groups of followers, to shepherd them as though they are sheep who cannot think for themselves, and to set themselves up as white saviours who call out those who step out of line, or are deemed to be problematic and toxic and unsafe. To be the owners of the only "safe spaces" in fandom and to drive other groups and spaces to be boycotted or worse.

Now, I've long wondered, who indeed are these women to decide that for anyone? In a world comprising multiple cultures, religions, groups, subgroups, genders and which contains multitudes, who are these women and what gives them the right to foist their puritanical standards on everyone, very conveniently disguised as concern for the moral well being of everyone and the consumption, of all things, of fiction?

Certainly, there are many things in this world that people regard with justifiably equal dislike / horror / sadness. At the same time, there is much that is not shared, that is particular to a culture and to a person’s background. There is a multitude of perspectives that make the whole. And the white women of the United States of America have not cornered the market on what those are, or indeed even own any curatorship or censorship of the same. They cannot, because each person’s culture and background and joy and trauma is their own, as are their ways of dealing with it all.

That being said, let’s talk about their pack behaviour and the devolution I’ve witnessed on social media as basic human decency is bartered for clout.

I’m all for standing up for someone who doesn’t have a voice or a platform, or maybe afraid of repercussions to voice dissent. I’m all for being there for our fellow human beings as they face struggles of often unconscionable and unfathomable proportions. I’m all for holding people accountable for their negative behaviours as they impact the larger community.

What I am unequivocally NOT for is treating such situations as an opportunity to preach, to virtue-signal, to shame and to put on blast the alleged wrong-doers. I say alleged because that’s what most accusations are on these platforms—allegations to do with things that disturb our sense of balance or make us wrinkle our noses or that we deem bad, and therefore make the accused deserving of the full force of the community’s misbehaviour and censure.

I ask you if you were found guilty of a crime in real life—you know, the one away from your phones and keyboards—would you not have an opportunity to retain a lawyer, to plead your case in a court of law, to acquit yourself? Or, if found guilty, would you not have the opportunity for correction and rehabilitation? Yes, you say? (If you say no, then that explains the spate of state-perpetuated injustices across the USA, but that is a different matter).

Why then are people treated so abhorrently in this court of public opinion? What gives you, me, any one of us the right to judge people so vilely and with a metaphorical gun to their heads? What gives anyone the right to say you better agree with everything I say, retract everything you said and grovel for it or we will eviscerate you in public, shame you, force you to change or delete the content that offends us and still ostracise you and in some cases even threaten you with bodily harm or death, or doxx you?

Why is there no grace in how people are approached or dealt with? Whatever happened to allowing people to learn from their mistakes, where applicable, or hearing them out and giving them a chance to explain their side of something we may not fully understand?

Why is there no accountability for such behaviour on the part of the accusers?

What makes the rest of you sit back and allow this to happen? What makes you think this is in any shape or form okay to watch? Today, it is a virtual stranger at the receiving end, one you can distance yourself from quite conveniently saying Oh, she just mods a group I am in, or I only read their fics a couple times or I only followed them for their art or jokes or whatever flavour of excuse you choose. Tomorrow, it will be one of your own - or it may very well be you. And you'd better hope there's someone left to speak up for you.

The irony is you will have allowed it to happen by letting the wolf in the fold. By letting these white women manipulate you, and the community you claim to be a part of, so unapologetically, so maliciously and so unashamedly that before you can do anything about it the cancer has taken hold.

If this was happening in the world outside of social media, they would have to follow due process, to present real evidence based on facts (not based on emotions, rumours or perceptions) and would have to allow the person they are accusing to present a counter-argument, to defend themselves or be defended. Failure to do so is a miscarriage of justice and, depending on whether this is a professional or legal proceeding, they would either seriously risk their jobs or have the case thrown out of court. If not face action themselves for attempting to derail the process of justice.

Why then are they permitted to range so freely through the landscape of fandom, snarling and biting at who they please, or who displeases them?

I have no shame in saying I was at the receiving end of their behaviour for defending a friend they put on blast and I will tell you right here and now, I am a woman of colour who feels unsafe and attacked by these so-called self-appointed white saviours of your social media experience, these so-called upholders of the common morality—whatever that means—who will fight for you the evils of problematic and toxic writers who dare to have an opinion not aligned with theirs and who do not bow to their clout. Not that they care, so long as they can ignore this fact since it doesn’t fit their narrative. So long as they can ignore what has just been done to so many people in the name of cleansing the fandom.

If any one of these women were truly interested in alleviating the troubles and pains of the discriminated, the marginalized, the trauma-affected, I invite them to please come roll their sleeves up and help in the multitudes of troubles that wrack this world, not just in the backyards of their minds. My country is amidst a struggle for the basics of human life in this horrific pandemic and, prior to that, for basic constitutional rights for religious minorities. Do not patronize me and lecture me on trauma and racism and discrimination. Do not marginalise me in your attempt to pontificate and set your pearl-clutching puritanical selves above the rest, or assuage your white guilt.

A largely American audience or fanbase in this fandom is purely a function of access and interest—other cultures have vast followings for things you couldn't begin to fathom—and it doesn't mean you are entitled in any shape or form to be spokespeople for the rest of the world. We have no interest in being colonized again by white oppressors.

If you disagree with what I have said, I congratulate you on being a part of their coterie and wish you much joy in being the sheep in their fold. Kindly unfollow or block me on the way off of this post.

#fandom #fandom culture #bullying #gaslighting #gatekeeping #minorities #people of colour #real talk #toxic people #problematic behaviour #problematic authors #problematic fiction #fanfic #reylo #reylo fanfic book club #reylo fic recs #trauma #safety #accountability

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antoine-roquentin · 5 years

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In the heart of the US Capitol there’s a small men’s room with an uplifting Franklin Delano Roosevelt quotation above the door. Making use of the facilities there after lunch in the nearby House dining room about a year ago, I found myself standing next to Trent Lott. Once a mighty power in the building as Senate Republican leader, he had been forced to resign his post following some imprudently affectionate references to his fellow Republican senator, arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. Now he was visiting the Capitol as a lucratively employed lobbyist.

The bathroom in which we stood, Lott remarked affably, once served a higher purpose. History had been made there. “When I first came to Washington as a junior staffer in 1968,” he explained, “this was the private hideaway office of Bill Colmer, chairman of the House Rules Committee.” Colmer, a long-serving Mississippi Democrat and Lott’s boss, was an influential figure. The committee he ruled controlled whether bills lived or died, the latter being the customary fate of proposed civil-rights legislation that reached his desk. “On Thursday nights,” Lott continued, “he and members of the leadership from both sides of the House would meet here to smoke cigars, drink cheap bourbon, play gin rummy, and discuss business. There was a chemistry, they understood each other. It was a magical thing.” He sighed wistfully at the memory of a more harmonious age, in which our elders and betters could arrange the nation’s affairs behind closed doors.

I don’t know that Joe Biden, currently leading the polls for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, ever frequented that particular restroom, in either its bygone or contemporary manifestation, but it could serve as a fitting shrine to all that he stands for. Biden has long served as high priest of the doctrine that our legislative problems derive merely from superficial disagreements, rather than fundamental differences over matters of principle. “I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart,” he declared in the Rose Garden in 2015, renouncing a much-anticipated White House run. “It’s mean-spirited. It’s petty. And it’s gone on for much too long. I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naïve to talk to Republicans. I don’t think we should look on Republicans as our enemies.”

Given his success in early polling, it would seem that this message resonates with many voters, at least when they are talking to pollsters. After all, according to orthodox wisdom, there is no more commendable virtue in American political custom and practice than bipartisanship. Politicians on the stump fervently assure voters that they will strive with every sinew to “work across the aisle” to deliver “commonsense solutions,” and those who express the sentiment eloquently can expect widespread approval. Barack Obama famously launched himself toward the White House with his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention proclaiming that there is “not a liberal America and a conservative America,” only a “United States of America.”

By tapping into these popular tropes—“The system is broken,” “Why can’t Congress just get along?”—the practitioners of bipartisanship conveniently gloss over the more evident reality: that the system is under sustained assault by an ideology bent on destroying the remnants of the New Deal to the benefit of a greed-driven oligarchy. It was bipartisan accord, after all, that brought us the permanent war economy, the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of black people, 1990s welfare “reform,” Wall Street deregulation and the consequent $16 trillion in bank bailouts, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other atrocities too numerous to mention. If the system is indeed broken, it is because interested parties are doing their best to break it.

Rather than admit this, Biden has long found it more profitable to assert that political divisions can be settled by men endowed with statesmanlike vision and goodwill—in other words, men such as himself. His frequent eulogies for public figures have tended to play heavily on this theme. Thus his memorial speech for Republican standard-bearer John McCain dwelled predictably on the cross-party nature of their relationship, beginning with his opening: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democrat, and I loved John McCain.” Continuing in that vein, he related how he and McCain had once been chided by their respective party leaderships for spending so much time in each other’s company on the Senate floor, and referred fondly to the days when senators Teddy Kennedy and James Eastland, the latter a die-hard racist and ruthless suppressor of civil-rights bills, would “fight like hell on civil rights and then go have lunch together, down in the Senate dining room.”

Clearly, there is merit in the ability to craft compromise between opposing viewpoints in order to produce an effective result. John Ritch, formerly a US ambassador and top aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, worked closely with Biden for two decades, and has nothing but praise for his negotiating skills. “I’ve never seen anyone better at presiding over a group of politicians who represent conflicting egos and interests and using a combination of conciliation, humor, and muscle to cajole them into an agreed way forward,” Ritch told me recently. “Joe Biden has learned the skills to get things done in Washington. And I’ve seen him apply it equally with foreign leaders.”

The value of compromise, however, depends on what result is produced, and who benefits thereby. McCain’s record had at least a few commendable features, such as his opposition to torture (though never, of course, war). But it is hard to find much admirable in the character of a tireless defender of institutional racism like Strom Thurmond. Hence, Trent Lott’s words of praise—regretting that the old racist had lost when he ran as a Dixiecrat in the 1948 presidential election—had been deemed terminally unacceptable.

It fell to Biden to highlight some redeeming qualities when called on, inevitably, to deliver Thurmond’s eulogy following the latter’s death in 2003 at the age of one hundred. Biden reminisced with affection about the unlikely friendship between the deceased and himself. Despite having arrived at the Senate at age twenty-nine “emboldened, angered, and outraged about the treatment of African Americans in this country,” he said, he nevertheless found common cause on important issues with the late senator from South Carolina, who had been wont to describe civil-rights activists as “red pawns and publicity seekers.”

One such issue, as Branko Marcetic has pitilessly chronicled in Jacobin, was a shared opposition to federally mandated busing in the effort to integrate schools, an opposition Biden predicted would be ultimately adopted by liberal holdouts. “The black community justifiably is jittery,” Biden admitted to the Washington Post in 1975 with regard to his position. “I’ve made it—if not respectable—I’ve made it reasonable for longstanding liberals to begin to raise the questions I’ve been the first to raise in the liberal community here on the [Senate] floor.”

Biden was responding to criticism of legislation he had introduced that effectively barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from compelling communities to bus pupils using federal funds. This amendment was meant to be an alternative to a more extreme proposal put forward by a friend of Biden’s, hall-of-fame racist Jesse Helms (Biden had initially supported Helms’s version). Nevertheless, the Washington Post described Biden’s amendment as “denying the possibility for equal educational opportunities to minority youngsters trapped in ill-equipped inner-city schools.” Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, then the sole African-American senator, called Biden’s measure “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.”

By the 1980s, Biden had begun to see political gold in the harsh antidrug legislation that had been pioneered by drug warriors such as Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, and would ultimately lead to the age of mass incarceration for black Americans. One of his Senate staffers at the time recalls him remarking, “Whenever people hear the words ‘drugs’ and ‘crime,’ I want them to think ‘Joe Biden.’” Insisting on anonymity, this former staffer recollected how Biden’s team “had to think up excuses for new hearings on drugs and crime every week—any connection, no matter how remote. He wanted cops at every public meeting—you’d have thought he was running for chief of police.”

The ensuing legislation might also have brought to voters’ minds the name of the venerable Thurmond, Biden’s partner in this effort. Together, the pair sponsored the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which, among other repressive measures, abolished parole for federal prisoners and cut the amount of time by which sentences could be reduced for good behavior. The bipartisan duo also joined hands to cheerlead the passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and its 1988 follow-on, which cumulatively introduced mandatory sentences for drug possession. Biden later took pride in reminding audiences that “through the leadership of Senator Thurmond, and myself, and others,” Congress had passed a law mandating a five-year sentence, with no parole, for anyone caught with a piece of crack cocaine “no bigger than [a] quarter.” That is, they created the infamous disparity in penalties between those caught with powder cocaine (white people) and those carrying crack (black people). Biden also unblushingly cited his and Thurmond’s leading role in enacting laws allowing for the execution of drug dealers convicted of homicide, and expanding the practice of civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement’s plunder of property belonging to people suspected of crimes, even if they are neither charged nor convicted.

Despite pleas from the NAACP and the ACLU, the 1990s brought no relief from Biden’s crime crusade. He vied with the first Bush Administration to introduce ever more draconian laws, including one proposing to expand the number of offenses for which the death penalty would be permitted to fifty-one. Bill Clinton quickly became a reliable ally upon his 1992 election, and Biden encouraged him to “maintain crime as a Democratic initiative” with suitably tough legislation. The ensuing 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, passed with enthusiastic administration pressure, would consign millions of black Americans to a life behind bars.

In subsequent years, as his crime legislation, particularly on mandatory sentences, attracted efforts at reform, Biden began expressing a certain remorse. “I am part of the problem that I have been trying to solve since then, because I think the disparity [between crack and powder cocaine sentences] is way out of line,” he declared at a Senate hearing in 2008. However, there is little indication that his words were matched by actions, especially after he moved to the vice presidency the following year. The executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, Eric Sterling, who worked on the original legislation in the House as a congressional counsel, told me, “During the eight years he was vice president, I never saw him take a leadership role in the area of drug policy, never saw him get out in front on the issue like he did on same-sex marriage, for example. Biden could have taken a stronger line [with Obama] privately or publicly, and he did not.”

While many black Americans will neither forgive nor forget how they, along with relatives and friends, were accorded the lifetime stigma of a felony conviction, many other Americans are only now beginning to count the costs of these viciously repressive initiatives. As a result, criminal justice reform has emerged as a popular issue across the political spectrum, including among conservatives eager to burnish otherwise illiberal credentials. Ironically, this has led, in theory, to a modest unraveling of a portion of Biden’s bipartisan crime-fighting legacy.

Last December, as Donald Trump’s erratic regime was falling into increasing disarray, the political-media class briefly united in celebration of an exercise in bipartisanship: the First Step Act. Billed as a long overdue overhaul of the criminal justice system, the legislation received rapturous reviews for its display of cross-party cooperation, headlined by Jared Kushner’s partnership with liberal talk-show host Van Jones. In truth, this was a very modest first step. It offered the possibility of release to some 2,600 federal inmates, whose relief from excessive sentences would require the goodwill of both prosecutors and police, as well as forbidding some especially barbaric practices in federal prisons, such as the shackling of pregnant inmates. Overall, it amounted to little more than a textbook exercise in aisle bridging, a triumph of form over substance.

In the near term, it’s unlikely that there will be further bipartisan attempts to chip away at Biden’s legislative legacy, a legacy that includes an inconsistent (to put it mildly) record on abortion rights. Roe v. Wade “went too far,” he told an interviewer in 1974. “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” For some years his votes were consistent with that view. He supported the notorious Hyde Amendment prohibiting any and all federal funding for abortions, and fathered the “Biden Amendment” that banned the use of US foreign aid for abortion research.

As the 1980s wore on, however, and Biden’s presidential ambitions started to swell, he began to cast fewer antiabortion votes (with some exceptions), and led the potent opposition to Judge Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Then came Clarence Thomas. Even before Anita Hill reluctantly surfaced with her convincing recollections of unpleasant encounters with the porn-obsessed judge, Biden was fumbling his momentous responsibility of directing the hearings. As Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson report in Strange Justice, their book about the Thomas nomination battle, Biden’s questions were “sometimes so long and convoluted that Thomas would forget what the question was.” Biden prided himself on his legal scholarship, Mayer and Abramson suggest, and thus his questions were often designed “to show off [his] legal acumen rather than to elicit answers.”

More damningly, Biden not only allowed fellow committee members to mount a sustained barrage of vicious attacks on Hill: he wrapped up the hearings without calling at least two potential witnesses who could have convincingly corroborated Hill’s testimony and, by extension, indicated that the nominee had perjured himself on a sustained basis throughout the hearings. As Mayer and Abramson write, “Hill’s reputation was not foremost among the committee’s worries. The Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, appear to have been far more concerned with their own reputations,” and feared a Republican-stoked public backlash if they aired more details of Thomas’s sexual proclivities. Hill was therefore thrown to the wolves, and America was saddled with a Supreme Court justice of limited legal qualifications and extreme right-wing views (which he had taken pains to deny while under oath).

Fifteen years later, Biden would repeat this exercise in hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, yet another grim product of the Republican judicial-selection machinery. True to form, in his opening round of questions, Biden droned on for the better part of half an hour, allowing Alito barely five minutes to explain his views. As the torrent of verbiage washed over the hearing room, fellow Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy could only glower at Biden in impotent frustration.

Biden’s record on race and women did him little damage with the voters of Delaware, who regularly returned him to the Senate with comfortable margins. On race, at least, Biden affected to believe that Delawareans’ views might be closer to those of his old buddy Thurmond than those of the “Northeast liberal” he sometimes claimed to be. “You don’t know my state,” he told Fox as he geared up for his first attempt on the White House in 2006. “My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything [but] a Northeast liberal state.” Months later, in front of a largely Republican audience in South Carolina, he joked that the only reason Delaware had fought with the North in the Civil War was “because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”

Whether or not most Delawareans are proud of their slaveholding history, there are some causes that they, or at least the dominant power brokers in the state, hold especially dear. Foremost among them is Delaware’s status as a freewheeling tax haven. State laws have made Delaware the domicile of choice for corporations, especially banks, and it competes for business with more notorious entrepôts such as the Cayman Islands. Over half of all US public companies are legally headquartered there.

“It’s a corporate whore state, of course,” the anonymous former Biden staffer remarked to me offhandedly in a recent conversation. He stressed that in “a small state with thirty-five thousand bank employees, apart from all the lawyers and others from the financial industry,” Biden was never going to stray too far from the industry’s priorities. We were discussing bankruptcy, an issue that has highlighted Biden’s fealty to the banks. Unsurprisingly, Biden was long a willing foot soldier in the campaign to emasculate laws allowing debtors relief from loans they cannot repay. As far back as 1978, he helped negotiate a deal rolling back bankruptcy protections for graduates with federal student loans, and in 1984 worked to do the same for borrowers with loans for vocational schools. Even when the ostensible objective lay elsewhere, such as drug-related crime, Biden did not forget his banker friends. Thus the 1990 Crime Control Act, with Biden as chief sponsor, further limited debtors’ ability to take advantage of bankruptcy protections.

These initiatives, however, were only precursors to the finance lobby’s magnum opus: the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. This carefully crafted flail of the poor made it almost impossible for borrowers to get traditional “clean slate” Chapter 7 bankruptcy, under which debt forgiveness enables people to rebuild their lives and businesses. Instead, the law subjected them to the far harsher provisions of Chapter 13, effectively turning borrowers into indentured servants of institutions like the credit card companies headquartered in Delaware. It made its way onto the statute books after a lopsided 74–25 vote (bipartisanship!), with Biden, naturally, voting in favor.

It was, in fact, the second version of the bill. An earlier iteration had passed Congress in 2000 with Biden’s support, but President Clinton refused to sign it at the urging of the first lady, who had been briefed on its iniquities by Elizabeth Warren. A Harvard Law School professor at the time, Warren witheringly summarized Biden’s advocacy of the earlier bill in a 2002 paper:

His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.

Furthermore, she added tartly, “This important part of Senator Biden’s legislative work also appears to be missing from his Web site and publicity releases.” No doubt coincidentally, the credit card giant MBNA was Biden’s largest contributor for much of his Senate career, while also employing his son Hunter as an executive and, later, as a well-remunerated consultant.

It should go without saying, then, that Biden was among the ninety senators on one of the fatal (to the rest of us) legislative gifts presented to Wall Street back in the Clinton era: the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999. The act repealed the hallowed Depression-era Glass–Steagall legislation that severed investment banking from commercial banking, thereby permitting the combined operations to gamble with depositors’ money, and ultimately ushering in the 2008 crash. “The worst vote I ever cast in my entire time in the United States Senate,” admitted Biden in December 2016, as he prepared to leave office. Seventeen years too late, he explained that the act had “allowed banks with deposits to take on risky investments, putting the whole system at risk.”

In the meantime, of course, he had been vice president of the United States for eight years, and thus in a position to address the consequences of his (and his fellow senators’) actions by using his power to press for criminal investigations. His longtime faithful aide, Ted Kaufman, in fact, had taken over his Senate seat and was urging such probes. Yet there is not the slightest sign that Biden used his influence to encourage pursuit of the financial fraudsters. As he opined in a 2018 talk at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” Characteristically, he described gross inequalities in wealth mainly as a threat to bipartisanship: “This gap is yawning, and it’s having the effect of pulling us apart. You see the politics of it.”

Biden’s rightward bipartisan inclinations are not the only source of his alleged appeal. In an imitation of Hillary Clinton’s tactics in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Biden has advertised himself as the candidate of “experience.” Indeed, in his self-estimation he is the “most qualified person in the country to be president.” It’s a claim mainly rooted in foreign policy, a field where, theoretically, partisan politics are deposited at the water’s edge and Biden’s negotiating talents and expertise are seen to their best advantage.

He boasts the same potent acquaintances with world leaders that helped earn Clinton a similar “most qualified” label on her failed presidential job application and, like her, has been a reliable hawk, not least when occupying the high-profile chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. An ardent proponent of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, an ill-conceived initiative that has served as an enduring provocation of Russian hostility toward the West, Biden voted enthusiastically to authorize Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, was a major proponent of Clinton’s war in Kosovo, and pushed for military intervention in Sudan.

Presumably in deference to this record, Obama entrusted his vice president with a number of foreign policy tasks over the years, beginning with “quarterbacking,” as Biden put it, US relations with Iraq. “Joe will do Iraq,” the president told his foreign policy team a few weeks after being sworn in. “He knows it, he knows the players.” It proved to be an unfortunate choice, at least for Iraqis. In 2006, the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, had selected Nouri al-Maliki, a relatively obscure Shiite politician, to be the country’s prime minister. “Are you serious?” exclaimed a startled Maliki when Khalilzad informed him of the decision. But Maliki proved to be a determinedly sectarian ruler, persecuting the Sunni tribes that had switched sides to aid US forces during the so-called surge of 2007–08. In addition, he sparked widespread allegations of corruption. According to the Iraqi Commission of Integrity set up after his departure, as much as $500 billion was siphoned off from government coffers during Maliki’s eight years in power.

In the 2010 parliamentary elections, one of Maliki’s rivals, boasting a nonsectarian base of support, won the most seats, though not a majority. According to present and former Iraqi officials, Biden’s emissaries pressed hard to assemble a coalition that would reinstall Maliki as prime minister. “It was clear they were not interested in anyone else,” one Iraqi diplomat told me. “Biden himself was very scrappy—he wouldn’t listen to argument.” The consequences were, in the official’s words, “disastrous.” In keeping with the general corruption of his regime, Maliki allowed the country’s security forces to deteriorate. Command of an army division could be purchased for $2 million, whereupon the buyer might recoup his investment with exactions from the civilian population. Therefore, when the Islamic State erupted out of Syria and moved against major Iraqi cities, there were no effective defenses. With Islamic State fighters an hour’s drive from Baghdad, the United States belatedly rushed to push Maliki aside and install a more competent leader, the Shiite politician and former government minister Haider al-Abadi. (Biden’s camp disputed the Iraqi official’s assertion that the United States pressed for Maliki in 2010. “We had no brief for any individual,” said Tony Blinken, who served as Biden’s national security adviser at the time.)

Biden devotes considerable space to this episode in Promise Me, Dad, his political and personal memoir documenting the year in which his son Beau slowly succumbed to cancer. But although we learn much about Biden’s relationship with Abadi, and the key role he played in getting vital help to the beleaguered Iraqi regime, there is little indication of his past with Maliki aside from a glancing reference to “stubbornly sectarian policies.”

Promise Me, Dad also covers Biden’s involvement in the other countries allotted to him by President Obama: Ukraine, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Anyone seeking insight from the book into the recent history of these regions, or of actual US policy and actions there, should look elsewhere. He has little to say, for example, about the well-chronicled involvement of US officials in the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, still less on whether he himself was involved. He records his strenuous efforts to funnel IMF loans to the country following anti-corruption measures introduced by the government without noting that much of the IMF money was almost immediately stolen and spirited out of Ukraine by an oligarch close to the government. Nor, for that matter, do we learn anything about his son Hunter’s involvement in that nation’s business affairs via his position on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by a former Ukrainian ecology minister accused by the UK government of stealing at least $23 million of Ukrainian taxpayers’ money.

Biden’s recollections of his involvement in Central American affairs are no more forthright, and no more insightful. There is no mention of the 2009 coup in Honduras, endorsed and supported by the United States, that displaced the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, nor of that country’s subsequent descent into the rule of a corrupt oligarchy accused of ties to drug traffickers. He has nothing but warm words for Juan Orlando Hernández, the current president, who financed his 2013 election campaign with $90 million stolen from the Honduran health service and more recently defied his country’s constitution by running for a second term. Instead, we read much about Biden’s shepherding of the Hernández regime, along with its Central American neighbors El Salvador and Guatemala, into the Alliance for Prosperity, an agreement in which the signatories pledged to improve education, health care, women’s rights, justice systems, etc., in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid. In the words of Professor Dana Frank of UC Santa Cruz, the alliance “supports the very economic sectors that are actively destroying the Honduran economy and environment, like mega-dams, mining, tourism, and African palms,” reducing most of the population to poverty and spurring them to seek something better north of the border. The net result has been a tide of refugees fleeing north, most famously exemplified by the “caravan” used by Donald Trump to galvanize support prior to November’s congressional elections.

Biden’s claims of experience on the world stage, therefore, cannot be denied. True, the experience has been routinely disastrous for those on the receiving end, but on the other hand, that is a common fate for those subjected, under any administration, to the operations of our foreign policy apparatus.

Given Biden’s all too evident shortcomings in the fields of domestic and foreign policy, defenders inevitably retreat to the “electability” argument, which contends that he is the only Democrat on the horizon capable of beating Trump—a view that Biden, naturally, endorses. Specifically, this notion rests on the belief that Biden has unequaled appeal among the white working-class voters that many Democrats are eager to court.

To be fair, Biden has earned high ratings from the AFL-CIO thanks to his support for matters such as union organizing rights and a higher minimum wage. On the other hand, he also supported NAFTA in 1994 and permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, two votes that sounded the death knell for America’s manufacturing economy. Regardless of how justified his pro-labor reputation may be, however, it’s far from clear that the working class holds Biden in any special regard—his two presidential races imploded before any blue-collar workers had a chance to vote for him.

It is this fact that makes the electability argument so puzzling. Biden’s initial bid for the prize in 1988 famously blew up when rivals unkindly publicized his plagiarism of a stump speech given by Neil Kinnock, a British Labour Party politician. (In Britain, Kinnock was known as “the Welsh Windbag,” which may have encouraged the logorrheic Biden to feel a kinship.) Biden partisans pointed out that he had cited Kinnock on previous occasions, though he didn’t always remember to do so. Either way, it was a bizarre snafu. It also emerged that Biden had been incorporating chunks of speeches from both Bobby and Jack Kennedy along with Hubert Humphrey in his remarks without attribution (although reportedly some of this was the work of speechwriter Pat Caddell).

Another gaffe helped upend Biden’s second White House bid, in 2007, when he referred to Barack Obama in patronizing terms as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” The campaign cratered at the very first hurdle, the Iowa caucuses, where Biden came in fifth, with less than 1 percent of the votes. “It was humiliating,” recalled the ex-staffer. (The “gaffes” seem to take physical form on occasion. “He has a bit of a Me Too problem,” a leading female Democratic activist and fund-raiser told me, referring to his overly tactile approach to interacting with women. “We never had a talk when he wasn’t stroking my back.” He has already faced heckling on the topic, and videos of this behavior during the course of public events and photo ops have been widely circulated.)

Further to the issue of Biden’s assurances that he is the man to beat Trump is the awkward fact that, as the former staffer told me, “he lacks the discipline to build the nuts and bolts of a modern presidential campaign.” Biden “hated having to take orders from [David] Axelrod and the other Obama people as a vice-presidential candidate in 2008. Campaign aides used to say to him, ‘I’ve got three words for you: Air Force Two.’” My informant stressed that Biden “sucks at fund-raising. He never had to try very hard in Delaware. Staff would do it for him.” Certainly, Biden’s current campaign funds would appear to confirm this contention. His PAC, American Possibilities, had raised only two and a half million dollars by the end of 2018, a surprisingly insignificant amount for a veteran senator and two-term vice president. Furthermore, although the PAC’s stated purpose is to “support candidates who believe in American possibilities,” less than a quarter of the money had found its way to Democratic candidates in time for the November midterms, encouraging speculation that Biden is not really that serious about the essential brass tacks of a presidential campaign—which would include building a strong base of support among Democratic officeholders.

Other organizations in the Biden universe behave similarly, expending much of their income on staff salaries and little on their ostensible function. According to an exhaustive New York Times investigation, salaries accounted for 45 percent of spending by the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children in 2016 and 2017. Similarly, three quarters of the money the Biden Cancer Initiative spent in 2017 went toward salaries and other compensation, including over half a million dollars for its president, Greg Simon, formerly the executive director of Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Task Force during the Obama Administration. Outside the inner circle of senior aides, there does not appear to be an extended Biden network among political professionals standing ready to raise money and perform other tasks necessary to a White House bid, in the way that Hillary Clinton had a network across the political world composed of people who had worked for her and her husband. “Biden doesn’t have that,” his former staffer told me, “because he’s indifferent to staff.” It’s a sentiment that’s been expressed to me by many in the election industry, including a veteran Democratic campaign strategist. “Everyone else is getting everything set up to go once the trigger is pulled,” this individual told me recently. “I myself have firm offers from the [Kamala] Harris and [Cory] Booker campaigns. The Biden people talked to me too, but they could only say, ‘If we run, we’d love to bring you into the fold.’”

At the start of the new year, Biden must have been living in the best of all possible worlds. As he engaged in well-publicized ruminations on whether or not to run, he was enjoying a high profile, with commensurate benefits of sizable book sales and hundred-thousand-dollar speaking engagements. Even more importantly, Biden found himself relevant again. “You’re either on the way up,” he likes to say, “or you’re on the way down,” which is why the temptation to reject the lessons of his two hopelessly bungled White House campaigns has been so overwhelming. Regardless of the current election cycle’s endgame, though, it’s safe to assume that his undimmed ego will never permit any reflection on whether voters who have been eagerly voting for change will ever really settle for Uncle Joe, champion of yesterday’s sordid compromises.

#paywall so it all goes in

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diamondcitydarlin · 5 years

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I’ve seen arguments that ‘well Andy was being inconsiderate bc she didn’t call once to tell her bf she’d be late to his 30 yr old birthday party so he’s allowed to feel bad’ or ‘it wasn’t about the birthday party it’s about how she was changing into someone he didn’t like’ like that justifies it. But yes true she was changing. The movie would have you think she was a good person before she came to Runway but think about who she was in the early stages of the job; she was derisive of fashion and everything the magazine stood for despite it being this amazing opportunity and prolific work that jumpstarted so many successful people, she took herself way, way too seriously, treated the whole opportunity that thousands of girls would trip over their Louboutins to get like a job that just ‘paid the rent’. She was arrogant, conceited, closed-minded, just like her boyfriend and her bullshit friends. She didn’t even bother to do research into the magazine, has no idea who her potential boss will be bc she thinks she’s above it all.

The job opened her mind to a new world and industry and over time she came to respect and value not just the privilege of having the job but the virtues of the business and everyone involved. Her friends and shitty bf don’t like the person she’s becoming bc she’s no longer someone they can be derisive with, she’s no longer someone that’ll flail around in their crab-bucket situation. She’s a more worldly, less judgmental person as the job goes on. Look at them at the beginning of the movie, chastising each other for the jobs they have. This is the only thing they can think to joke about with each other. They’re negative people.

The movie treats her taking the Paris opportunity at Emily’s expense as this sign that she’s turned towards the darkside or something, but that wasn’t her decision it was Miranda’s. Miranda cleverly reworked her throwing Emily under the bus as a situation where Andy doublecrossed her when that wasn’t the particulars at all. In jobs sometimes bosses decide another employee is better suited for a promotion or opportunity and, to be truthful, Miranda was right. Andy became better at the job than Emily over time, memorizing all the guests of a gala in A FEW HOURS when it took Emily several weeks and STILL Emily didn’t remember the senator and his mistress or whoever it was. Andy did. And that says nothing of the fact that Emily happens to get injured to a point where she couldn’t have gone anyway. In my mind Andy should’ve stood up to Emily in the hospital and defended the reasons why she was chosen over her. Maybe they’re becoming friends but they’re still competing employees in a very high paced, cutthroat industry when I’m CERTAIN Emily would’ve done the same if given the opportunity.

Andy and Miranda are both pushovers in their own way; they’re women who crave success but are drawn to people that want to undermine and drag them down to a lower level. The failures of these shitty relationships are treated as a bad thing in the movie when they should be seen as the negative, toxic influences that they are.

Thanks for listening to my ramble. I love this movie and there are SO many layers.

#the devil wears prada

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dukeofriven · 5 years

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‘The AfD declares autistic climate activist to be “mentally challenged” and firms-up its campaign platform around the idea of publicly ridiculing a teenager.’ Throw their pathetic fear of a teen back in their faces. Mock them at every opportunity. Smear their faces in their own shit until they can’t breathe without opening their mouths to swallow it. Remind them always that they are small and weak and frightened by a 15 year old - jeer them, giggle in their presence them, howl with laughter every time they try and pass their crayon scrawl as policy. Make their every waking second a taunting Mean Girls hell in which they can never be free of the knowledge that everyone knows they’re nothing but a pathetic joke. And every time they try and draw strength from that, to try and don the mantle of the oppressed underdog, punch them in the nose and remind them that their bodies are as fragile as their egos and their ideas. Push them down again and again and again. Whisper in their ear that their Nazis forebears used to get treated like this - until one day they found the courage to stand up for themselves and their beliefs and fight. And then they lost. And then we killed them. And then we displayed their bloated corpses for all the world to jeer. And then we destroyed everything they had built and they were powerless to stop us because these failed, pathetic losers put their faith in beliefs that were wrong. Demonstrably false. Literally untrue. The Reich to last a thousand years never grew old enough to get a driver’s license. The Nazis who were humiliated in the Beer Hall Putsch vowed that from that day forward no one would ever treat them like that again. But we did. Because they’re losers who fail. These are people whose ideology gives them cover for advocating some of the most heinous acts this earth has ever seen. The alt-right, whether they openly identify as Nazis or not, are Nazis, and are in accord with the exact same belief system that advocated for genocide, racial supremacy, patriarchy, antiquated conservatism, and other such debunked delusions even if they distance themselves from the Nazi label. When someone’s ideology gives them cover for being a piece of shit like that then you should oblige and treat them as such. Drag them into the nearest restroom and give them a couple swirlies -shit belongs in the toilet, after all. Alright. Despite my bellicose rhetoric above I am a pacifist at heart - violence ultimately begets more violence. So don’t let them drown. Don’t break any bones. Don’t go pulling off fingers the way you might the wings of a tiny, helpless, pathetic, utterly incapable-of-fighting-back mosquito before carelessly squashing it with the tip of the nail on your pinkie finger. Even though you could. Easily. It would not be hard.

But there’s a difference between perpetuating a cycle of violence by starting a blood feud or spending decades abusing someone emotionally and physically and dragging someone who said “you’re a weak effeminate pansy degenerate who wouldn't exist in our pure society and its not hate speech to want a country for white straight men and women with shared moral values” into a park bathroom and demonstrating certain inaccuracies of that argument by clamming their heads into the urinal and forcing them to eat a urinal cake. It’s not the most intellectually robust rebuttal, but you could rephrase “you’re a weak effeminate pansy degenerate who wouldn't exist in our pure society” as “you’re a stinky doo doo head who sucks and when I grow up I’m gonna be strong enough to throw you into space.” They’re functionally identical in terms of tone, content, self-aggrandizement, and mental acuity. There is no intellectually appropriate response to that kind of infantile argument - these are not intelligent people. I don’t mean ‘lacking in formal education.’ I mean they’re stupid. ‘Burn the blankets to warm the bed’ stupid. Leibowitzian ‘Proud To Be A Cretin’ stupid. ‘Smart Men Stay Ignorant; Leaning’s For Libs’ stupid. Their positions should not be treated as intellectually valid out of a misguided belief that a good intellectual should be open-minded to every idea every time it’s proposed. Sure, absolute-free-speech defenders always willing to normalize Nazi “discourse”, I’ll concede that the world-is-flat guy might have had a right to explain what his beliefs were. In 5000 BC, When nobody had heard them before and we didn’t know what he was going to say. Eight thousand years later, though, indulging his ancestor who’s just going to repeat the same points that were wrong eight millennia ago is lunacy.

A good intellectual knowns when something isn’t worth their time and acts accordingly. Sometimes this means not letting someone fill the air with hate speech out of slavish obligation to letter of freedom of expression instead of its spirit (when someone is granted the freedom to debate the idea that everyone who disagrees with them should be purged, you only harm freedom, not celebrate it.) Sometimes this means force-feeding an advocate of genocide a tasty lunchtime treat of urine and quaternary ammonium compounds while cheerfully wondering aloud what might happen if there’s still unswallowed cake in their mouth and you need to resolve certain biological necessities.

The first mistake we ever made with the alt-right was to leave the whoopee cushion at home, when we should have attended their every rally with an armful and play them constantly every time they tried to speak. “There’s nothing wrong with saying I’m pr-THPPTPHTPHPHHPH proud to be THPPTPHTPHPHHPH be white and to stand up for THPPTPHTPHPHHPH the achieveTHPPTPHTPHPHHPHments of the whitTHPPTPHTPHPHHPH of the whTHPPTPHTPHPHHPH white THPPTPHTPHPHHPH white raTPHRRURURURPHH-P-P-P- whiP-P-P-P whP-P-P whiteP-P-P-P WHITE RACTRRHPRPRP-P-P ... ... ... *cough* ... ... WHITE POWFFFFWWWPWPPRPRPRPRPRPRSQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAKTRRRHHPPPP-PPP-RPPP-PPP-P-P-P-PLIPPPP-THRP plip! We should attend their rallies and events with boxes of red noses, rainbow wigs, and buckets of greasepaint and throw ourselves upon them until we’ve forced them into wearing their true colours. Remember: every SS officer who looked so forbidding in their tailored uniform stank of their own disgusting sweat because all that blackened leather couldn’t breathe and every SS trooper standing in that imposing formation was broiling in their own filth. Nothing but bozos in fetish gear. The vaunted Wehrmacht had their uniforms rot off their bodies in the snows of Stalingrad as they had to strip the dead for scraps and rags, freezing to death, starving to death, because Hitler - the great genius who personally involved himself with the running of his forces almost to a tactical level - he didn’t think they needed to be resupplied. The Nazis lost. The Nazis lost so badly their monuments were ground into dust, their leaders bodies destroyed or abandoned in the mud, the dreams of Germania proven nothing but a dusty model in a museum devoted to cursing the Nazi’s memory. Nothing but a shrine to hubris and grossly over-estimating your own abilities. The legacy of the Nazis is humiliation, shame, and utter fucking failure. Neo-Nazis, this ‘new’ alt-right whose philosophies are all old, have as their heroes men who did nothing but fail, who achieved nothing but to have their life’s work expunged, debased, destroyed, and condemned by the world not just in their time but for generations after. Not misunderstood geniuses but understood buffoons. Never, ever, let them forget this - and never, ever let them try to turn it into a virtue. No ‘we shall rise again’ narratives. No abyss-to-transformation in some bullshit Cambellian hero’s journey. Their past was not a defeat to inspire them to future victory. They are not the underprivileged hurdle jumper who against all odds and obstacles wins gold at the Olympics, they’re the guy on your track team who once pushed so hard on a door marked pull that he fell through the glass and had to get ten stitches, the guy who got so drunk at an out-of-town meet that he shat his bed at the hotel and tried to hide the dirty sheets in his bags and stunk-up the bus ride home until Coach found out and chewed him out in front of the entire team for being the biggest fucking tool in the whole wide world. Not the guy who was a loner in high school but who found like-minded friends in college, started a cool band where they sang about their sucky pasts, and wound-up a rich and famous with legions of adoring fans. Nah, they’re the guy who was a loner in high school, and in college, and in the job at the napkin distribution company, the guy who retired without a party, spent weeks at a time with no one to talk to, and ultimately died alone - not because he was socially awkward or shy or struggled to communicate, but because he was really unpleasant to be around and even those virtuous folk who try and make sure that nobody is lonely gave up on him because he was such a nasty, loathsome, turd of a human being whose only impact on the world was that he improved it by leaving it. That’s the past of the Nazis. That, too, is their future. Never let them forget this. Their past should embarrass them. Mortify them. There’s is the ideology of pathetic losers. When you march against them, raise high above your heads images of Nazi Germany - not rigid columns of well-armed soldiers or shining tanks rolling off the lines, but the images of their ineptitude. The shuffling columns of defeated, broken men. Their burnt tanks, their downed planes, their sunken ships, their pulverized cities, and all the equipment abandoned in panicked withdrawals or through sheer bureaucratic incompetence. Show images of Jews defiant, the simple act of their still drawing breath spit in the eye of those who thought to see them erased. Humiliate the Nazis again and again and again. They. Failed. The Jews endured, survived, flourished - won. The conquered nations of Europe rebuilt their cultural wonders and their ruined homes and brought back their stolen treasures. They won. The disposed Roma preserved their ways of life despite the will of an entire conquering empire set against them. They won too. The queer communities persecuted for their ‘deviancy’ not only survived they reshaped the post-war world into a place that could no longer sideline them in history. Another victory. The Nazis lost. The Nazi’s failed so completely that they lost not only the territory they had tried to gain but their own nation lay shattered at their feet - politically, socially, economically, spiritually. The Great and Powerful Nazi Party so failed its own people that Germany was sundered into West Germany, East Germany, and Eastern Prussia, promptly swallowed whole by the Societs - the trauma from that lingers generations on. The Nazis not only failed to achieve any of their goals - they failed in the promise made by any such ideology: in joining us we will protect you. They did not just fail to make Germany greater, they literally destroyed it, and left it in pieces. So when you march against the alt-right, these neo-Nazis, Hoist photos of the bloated corpses of the hanged at Nuremberg - their swollen faces distorted in death. Chant the cry “Morons, Not Martyrs!” Remind every alt-right shit-eating soul that they were nothing, are nothing, will always be nothing but failures, losers, and followers of stupid, incompetent, incapable fools. They were, are, shall always, can only ever be wrong. “These are your role models? This is your dream? Failures! Failures! Failures!” “Be A Nazi To Lose It All” Do not, for a single solitary second, treat their ideas as grown-up. Do not, for a moment, give them the cover of adulthood, maturity, or sober discourse. Do not, for one second of time, treat them with respect so long as they seek to hold power over you, to be feared by you, to be thought of as an enemy and not something foul but forgettable to be scrapped off your shoe. Never give them an inch of fear to feed their starving egos. The man who said that rocks were soft as butter and as edible as custard would be given no weight as a person of substantive ideas - Nazis deserve the same derision. And do not allow them a moment of privacy to brood on the indignities you heap upon them, to be like a teen sulking in their bedroom crafting fantasies about how one day they’ll be proven right and everyone will be sorry. Drag them out into the light again and again and again, give them no moment of peace, allow no instant of time to pass when you are not holding images of their ideology’s worthlessness and failure above their heads. No hiding. No sulking. No second to plot or brood or dream. Stake them to the earth, keep them forever in the light, and pummel them with pie until even they can not deny that they are nothing but clowns worthy only of mockery, ridicule, and endless savage laughter.

#climate change #germany #afd #alternative für deutschland (afd)#greenpeace #environment #nazis #alt-right #greta thunberg #neo-nazis #Hitler #Mean Girls #fart sounds #eat shit and die #long post #autism #tw anti-autism

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dewittsend · 5 years

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‘The Defenders’ Review [Episodes 1-4] {REPOST}

So far, so okay.

As of this moment, The Defenders has pretty much met my expectations. That’s not to say it’s great, though. Not yet.

It’s difficult to pick where to begin, because there’s a lot to cover. And I may not talk about scenes in their exact chronological order, because I’m summarizing the important information. And since this series won’t stop shoving his importance down my throat, I guess we’ll start with Iron Fist aka Danny Rand, played by actor Finn Jones—which, while I am on the fence about this, may be the first issue. I was disappointed with Iron Fist’s own Netflix series. To me, it felt rushed. A last-minute collage of sloppy choreography, boring writing, and confusing character choices. I often found Jones’s acting to be cringe-inducing at best, and his is the first character we’re reintroduced to.

SPOILERS AHEAD! Do proceed at thy own caution.

We find Danny in Cambodia, hot on the heels of The Hand after the events of his series left him looking at an empty mountainside where K'un-Lun, the monasterial city he was raised in, used to be, with no trace of his mentors to be found. He is currently joined by friend with benefits and best-part-of-his-show Colleen Wing. Rand gets into a tussle with the revived Elektra [Elodie Yung reprising, and notably annoying me less], who is here hunting down an enemy of The Hand. Brainwashed and merciless, a la the Winter Soldier, she gives Danny a hard time, but he fights her off and she retreats temporarily. Our heroes have a vague conversation with the target of Elektra’s assassination, who tells them that the war they’re fighting will be finished in New York City before croaking.

We’re privileged (and I do mean that because Krysten Ritter is a delight) to catch up with Jessica Jones next, as she’s kicked out of a bar that’s closing at what appears to be 8:00 in the morning and runs into her friend Trish Walker. Jones is still recovering from the psychological toll of her battles with Kilgrave, and as such has indefinitely suspended her investigative services. She is approached by a woman whose husband, named John Raymond, is missing. Jessica initially blows her off, but is driven to take the case when someone calls her office and warns her against taking it. She’s stubborn like that.

Luke Cage is on his way out of a short stint in prison. His fellow inmates are cheering as he is walked out of his cell. We get a great moment where a fumbling rookie cop can’t find the right keys to remove Cage’s cuffs, so he just snaps the chain himself and drops the crumpled rings into the warden’s hand. The supporting cast of these individual series are turning up left and right, and doing so in smart, sensical ways that really make this world seem well-connected. For instance, it turns out that Franklin “Foggy” Nelson was Cage’s attorney, and is the reason he’s out so early.

Foggy, by the way, now works for rich-people lawyer Jeryn Hogarth after he and his best friend Matt Murdock chose to dissolve their law firm. But they’re still friends, sort of. It’s complicated.

And where IS Daredevil? The Man Without Fear and the man who started it all, Matthew is currently a man defeated. Although he now takes the majority of his cases pro bono, the fulfillment of that isn’t enough to stave away the dissatisfaction he feels since choosing to hang up the horns. Karen Page, now officially a reporter, catches up with him over a slightly awkward cuppa. They have a solid scene together, illustrating the romantic tension budding between them. Karen still believes in Daredevil’s ability to affect change, as she always has. Matt thinks those days need to stay behind him. Of course, it’s only so long he can do that.

Promises promises.

This may be a good time to talk about each character’s signature color and lighting palettes. They’ve been used as tonal gauges, and they may have something to tell us about who these people are. For Matt, it’s obviously red, which carries the instant connection to the Devil and brimstone, to rage and blood. Cage’s is yellow, which is well known to be a color invented by God for black people to wear. It also reflects the warmth with which Luke views his community. Danny’s is green {EDIT 2021: representative of his status and wealth as well as a nod toward the importance of jade in kung fu symbolism}, and we’re probably never going to see him rock the Iron Fist costume so just be happy he’s got loose-fitting green clothes that look nice when he’s punching people. Finally, Jessica’s ranges between blue and purple; harking back to the “Purple Man” who consumed so much of her life when she was under his control, and also reflecting her much colder dispotion towards people and their problems, despite being a P.I. There are times when this lighting technique gets kind of oppressive, like when Matt’s entire apartment is bathed in fire-tones, but it helps to create some truly memorable cinematography. Case in point: one of this first half’s best moments is Luke’s bus ride back into Harlem. Set to a silky D'Angelo track, we see the golden glow of the sunset filter in through the bus’s gritty and fingerprint smudged windows. And views of the Manhattan skyline, and of Harlem’s streets, through what looks like avintage film camera, all with a sepia tint. It’s breathtaking, soothing, and probably had a little extra impact because I’m a Harlem resident myself.

Cage reunites with his boo Claire Temple, Rosario Dawson’s nexus character through all of these shows, for a little bit of brown sugar. But before the two can settle into a routine together, Cage is pulled back into the sorrows of the streets by Detective Misty Knight. She informs him that several young men in the community have been getting involved in some seedy affairs, and some of them have gone missing. It seems they’re being used as expendable henchmen, pulling off whatever odd jobs they’re told to, whether it’s delivering drugs or making dead bodies disappear (which is what Danny Rand catches him doing later on). Cage takes it upon himself to investigate the affairs of one young man in particular named Cole.

In between all of this, we’re introduced to our Big Bad. National Treasure and sci-fi icon Sigourney Weaver portrays the enigmatic Alexandra, whose body is beginning to fail her after centuries of life. Weaver is doubtless a tremendous actor, but even she can’t escape some typical mustache-twirling clichés (a friend of mine put it better than I can: “It’s not innovative for the cream white villain to find beauty in Rachmaninov but not in the lives of others, like, we understand!!!”). That aside, she brings something fun to this show just by the virtue of who she is. And at six feet, the actress’ physical presence really makes an impact. Alexandra towers over characters like Madame Gao and is almost eye level with Luke Cage. Her presence feels like a legitimate threat, and Weaver does an excellent job of portraying someone with significantly more power than she lets on. Our first demonstration of this is in a scene between her and Madame Gao, who has been built up throughout these shows as a force to be reckoned with, who had Vincent D'Onofrio’s Kingpin shaking in his shoes. This scene between them ends when Alexandra literally tells Gao to “finish feeding the birds for me,” hands her a bag of seeds, and walks away like the CHIEF CHICK SHE IS GO ‘HEAD SIGOURNEY!!!

*ahem* So sorry.

It is eventually revealed that Alexandra is the person behind Elektra’s revival and reconditioning. Conveniently, Elektra doesn’t remember anything about her past life except how to fight. Thus, Alexandra has been using her to take out The Hand’s enemies and as a personal bodyguard. And after receiving the news that her body is reaching a terminal state of decline, Alexandra decides to accelerate her plans for the destruction of New York. As such, she has her people trigger a massive earthquake (the ramifications of which have not yet been fully uncovered) that affects everyone within the island of Manhattan. Nothing is exactly leveled yet, though. This seems to only be the beginning of her sinister plot.

This brings the first episode to an end, and over the course of the next three, our four vigilante heroes follow individual leads that start to bring them together, at first in pairs. Iron Fist has a confrontation with Luke Cage in an alleyway when Cage catches the Kung Fu kid beating up on Cole. They have an entertaining fight, as the petulant and bewildered Rand keeps striking Cage with no affect. He finally unleashes the iron fist right onto Luke’s jaw and knocks the big man off of his feet into a metal gate. It’s only later, when Luke recants the experience to Claire, that she sets up a meeting between the two, and they have a conversation that is another highlight of the show so far. Cage essentially privilege-checks Danny for being a rich white kid and taking out his frustration on the underprivileged with little regard for their lives, instead of trying to use his wealth and influence to take The Hand down from an administrative level. These two characters are famously friends in the source material, and I can see the direction the writers are trying to take them here, wherein the older Luke is mentoring Danny and opening his eyes to a side of life he’s never considered before, even with all the trauma of losing his parents and being tortured raised by monks. Danny has a tendency to fly off at the handle, so the more patient Luke is there to ground him. It’s more father and son than two good friends, but it’ll have to do for the versions of these characters we’ve been given.

Jessica Jones returns to her office at one point to find John Raymond with a gun to her friend Malcolm’s head. He’s panicked, telling her that there’s no future for him now that The Hand know he’s being investigated. On cue, Elektra crashes down the door to Jessica’s apartment and attacks. Raymond shoots himself before she can kill him, and she escapes before Jessica can catch her. But because of her rooting around in all of this, in addition to stealing evidence from a crime scene, Jessica’s put herself on Misty Knight’s radar. When she’s brought in for questioning, Matt Murdock steps in to defend (ha) her.

At one point, we see that Alexandra has a hostage—Stick, Matt Murdock’s blind mentor. They have an exchange that contains the phrase “old friend” and other related banter. Stick, rather unexpectedly, starts prophesying about the Iron Fist, which confused me because he’d never mentioned him in either season of Daredevil. You’d think he might have in season two, when the Hand presented a more imminent threat to the city. But nah, he just spent the majority of his screen time groaning that Matthew wasn’t joining “the war.” So it seems a bit ham-fisted for him to now have this hard-on for Iron Fist, even if it does make sense that he’d know who he is. I just think it required some more setup. Anywho, big surprise, Stick gets hold of a weapon and slices his own hand off to escape, continuing to cement himself as perhaps the most hardcore old man on television.

See? No biggie.

All our protagonists’ investigations lead them to one building: Midland Circle. Danny arrives there in suit and tie, ready to threaten them with financial and political action, as well as reveal himself to be “The Immortal Iron Fist,” which he says more often than “hello,” but since everyone in this series makes fun of him for it I can kind of excuse it. Alexandra, nonplussed as always, tells him that the only difference between him and the other Iron Fists she’s met over the years is that this time “I won’t kill you.” And GOD do I get chills.

What follows is the action highlight of the series’ first half. Iron Fist gets better choreography than anything we saw in his show. He spends about a minute fighting Alexandra’s security detail, and right when he gets overpowered, Luke Cage busts in. They do battle side-by-side for a while, all until Jessica and Murdock (wearing Jessica’s scarf over his face) arrive on the same floor. It may be this show’s “hallway sequence,” as these Marvel Netflix projects have become known for. It’s well-lit and gives everyone a good amount to do—except Jessica, who might be the most vulnerable of the four as she’s got no real fighting technique, and for all her strength lacks any indestructible skin to fall back on when confronted with weapons. Although for what it’s worth we finally get to see her reunite with Luke Cage. That reunion is built on in the next episode (not that way, pervert) and it’s great to see their chemistry ignite again.

There’s a point in the skirmish when Matt senses that “Someone’s coming. Something.” This something is Elektra, but he doesn’t realize it at first, and they fight for a good while. Matt takes a moment to listen to her breath, which causes him to stop fighting. But she doesn’t have a heartbeat. WHICH IS ACTUALLY SUPER SPOOKY AND COOL! She hesitates when he says her name, then raises her blade to strike Matt down, only to be knocked away yet again by Danny. What a guy, that guy.

The four of them escape together, and in the next episode commandeer a Chinese restaurant as a temporary hideout. This is the first time we get to see all four of them interact, and it’s pretty fun. Cage and Jones muse over how absurd this situation is, because oddly enough, they’re sort of the straight men in this situation. They may have powers, but their worlds have never been touched by the supernatural. Rand and Murdock, however, are well-versed in this field. Thusly, they spend a good deal of time trying to catch the others up. This is also the episode that has some of Charlie Cox’s best acting yet, as a paranoid and frustrated Matt who doesn’t want to give in to the idea that A. what he suspects to be happening is in fact happening and B. he needs to involve these people in his life in order to handle it. And to some extent, all of them feel that way. While Danny is keen to team up, Jessica is immediately against it, and Luke is reluctant as well. All of them are loners by nature, who’ve each experienced pain as a result of opening up to people.

When we’re done watching them bounce dialogue off each other, Stick shows up, sword in one hand, stump as the other, to do what he does best—exposit and tell the heroes what the stakes are. It’s not long before Alexandra ALSO sneaks into the restaurant (everyone can move like a ninja when this show wants them to) and tries to reason with her enemies, saying that if Iron Fist is willing to go with her, she’ll spare the lives of his friends. Which is almost definitely completely 105% a lie. The episode, and the first half of this series, ends with Elektra ready to square off against the four vigilantes + Stick.

To give my overall impression, I’m enjoying Defenders so far, and I think the actors are too. The problem to this point isn’t the actor’s level of chemistry, but that of the characters. I’m still hoping to see the bond between Danny and Luke expand into something more than just “shut up white kid,” even though that may well be what Danny needs to hear a few times. There needs to be a believable dependence between these four people. And although I know it’s a lot to juggle, I hope the supporting characters aren’t just dropped completely. They probably won’t be, though. I expect that as The Hand start getting closer to what they want, the ramifications will spread across the Defenders’ sphere of influence, from Turk to Claire Temple*.

Other expectations/hopes for the latter half include:

A cool introduction of the Hand’s remaining “Fingers”

Colleen v. Elektra!!!!

White Hat will be from, or have ties to Wakanda

Elektra will inevitably snap out of it. The hope here is to see her pick up her signature dual sai and stand with the Defenders

Alexandra could have some further connection to one of these heroes. Preliminarily, I thought it would be interesting if she was Matthew’s long-lost mother. Though, I guess that would really be pushing it

*Claire can’t survive this, right? I mean we all know Luke and Jessica have to end up together, and Claire’s not just going to give him up. I don’t want to see her go, but I also don’t know if there’s any way for her character to develop. Of course, there’s no guarantee Marvel will stick to the comics…but the Jess-Luke romance seems like too much of a fan favorite to pass on.

Stick’s gonna get stuck and tell Matt he’s proud of him

Whatever happened to Stone/maybe Lord Darkwind, the spooky dude Stick was talking to in season one of Daredevil? Let’s get him out here

Someone just say Tony Stark’s name. I mean, come on. The guy lives in the tallest building in New York and no one’s wondering what he’d think about all this? I know we can’t afford RDJ but is his character’s name gonna break the bank? (Yeah, it definitely would.)

Bullseye tease? Maybe? I dunno, man, they already robbed him of his big moment by killing Elektra without him

I already got THAT THING spoiled for me, THAT THING about THE OTHER GUY, but it would be on this list if I hadn’t

Oh and also Blade please

And so conclude my thoughts on the first half of The Defenders. There they are, lookin’ like Nirvana. Which I guess makes sense, given the marketing for this series. I’ll be writing a similarly long-winded and unnecessary reaction to the latter half. I hope you’ll check them both out.

THANK you for reading if indeed you did read! Keep on watching, friends. And as always: Blessings & Blexcellence!

-JKW

#marvel #netflix #superheroes #defenders #charliecox #krystenritter #mikecolter #finnjones #review #analysis

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years

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Brooklyn Nine-Nine season one full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

59.09% (thirteen of twenty-two).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

31.6%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Two (episode four ‘M.E. Time’ (40%), and episode twenty-two, ‘Charges and Specs’ (41.17%)).

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Three (episode eight ‘Old School’ (20%), episode nine ‘Sal’s Pizza’ (20%), and episode fifteen ‘Operation: Broken Feather’ (17.64%)).

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixteen. Four who appear in more than one episode, three who appear in at least half the episodes, and two who appear in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Fifty-two. Thirteen who appear in more than one episode, six who appear in at least half the episodes, and four who appear in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

In a general sense, they score well, but they’re not strong on female characters and the single most prominent narrative thread of the season is bizarrely out-of-touch and repellent. They averaged out ok, but I was a lot more uncomfortable than I expected to be, and certainly uncomfortable more often than I was impressed (average rating of 3).

General Season Quality:

In a general sense, again, this is mostly lovely, the characters are mostly delightful, the whole thing is MOSTLY easy to watch and digest, mostly fun, mostly un-insulting. Mostly. If you’re not watching with a critical eye, it’s no doubt much easier to stomach, but, well...it’s my job to be critical. And I am.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

I know guys: it’s a comedy. The first thing people tend to say when you start trying to be critical of the content of comedies is ‘oh my God, lighten up! It’s not supposed to be serious!’, so let me just assure you all right now that I know Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a comedy. It hasn’t magically escaped my notice. But comedic intention does not somehow elevate the storytelling above reproach, into some fabled realm where everything goes so long as SOMEONE is laughing. In fact, being critical of WHAT we are laughing at (or what we are being expected to laugh at) is every bit as important as questioning why we are presented certain content in dramas or horrors or scifi adventures, it’s all still fair game on the narrative landscape, and refusing to interrogate humour is a gateway to forgiving all manner of sins, so long as they’re packaged as if they’re meant to be funny. ‘It’s a comedy’ is not a valid excuse for presenting or perpetuating bullshit, so let’s just get that idea out of the way.

The thing about comedy is, it works on an in-group/out-group mentality. Humans are pack animals, and whether we like it or not, we are constantly processing and evaluating information to determine who is ‘one of us’ and who is not. The people who find a joke funny are the in-group, the ones who don’t are the out-group. This is why, say, a racist joke is not just a matter of whether or not you’re ‘too sensitive’ or ‘too PC’ to get it, and it’s why hiding behind the line ‘I’m just joking’ is such a weak excuse; the out-group are not just sensitive and/or politically correct, they’re the people who recognise how that ‘joke’ reinforces negative stereotypes and thereby contributes to maintaining hostile mindsets about the subjects, the people who are ‘the butt of the joke’ (in-group/out-group is how comedy works; it’s also literally how discrimination works). The in-group are the people who don’t care: they’re the racists. When you laugh at the joke, you position yourself in the in-group, shoulder to shoulder with those racists, whether you personally consider yourself racist or not. Every time you ‘just’ make a joke, or ‘just’ laugh at one, you’re identifying yourself for those around you as belonging to a certain pack, a certain mindset, a certain outlook on life and the world. The concept of in-group/out-group mentality is actually integral to the thing which impressed me most about Brooklyn Nine-Nine in this first season: the handling of Holt and his sexuality. Bad representation in this case would be the kind that treats Holt and Kevin and - by extension - the entire queer community of the show, the audience, and the world, as if they are the out-group, with the assumption that straight people are the in-group, ‘the norm’. Even seemingly positive-toned representation can be framed as out-grouping if it approaches queer characters as ‘other’ and presumes that the viewer sees them as such (this is the kind of representation I flag as ‘just doing it for the brownie points’). Brooklyn Nine-Nine not only treats Holt as part of the in-group; the audience and the rest of the characters are treated as in-group, regardless of sexuality: it’s not about Holt’s team being good straight allies looking out for their gay Captain, it’s about the team being decent people looking out for one of their own.

So, what does this have to do with my season-long rage against Charles Boyle? Quite simply, we the audience are in-grouped with him. Charles occupies the standard archetype of a bumbling everyman, good-natured but hapless, and the expectation is that we laugh at his misfortunes while also hoping he’ll muddle his way to success. Personally, this irks me outright, because under most circumstances I’m not much into schadenfreude and I don’t find destruction or pain very funny (an exception would be Terry crushing things in his hands, because the comedy derives from him being ludicrously strong rather than from the idea that destruction of property is inherently comedic). Laughing at Charles being inept already rubs me the wrong way, but the way he is framed by the narrative - as part of the in-group with the audience by virtue of being one of our good-guy leads - encourages that laughter to be sympathetic. Yeah, we’re laughing at Charles’ expense, but it’s not supposed to be mean-spirited laughter at an out-group subject, it’s the chuckle you have at your friend who just fell on their ass, a chuckle expressed at the same time as you head over and make sure they’re ok. Now, the problem here is not that I want to laugh at Charles’ misfortunes in a mean-spirited way (as noted, schadenfreude isn’t my style), the problem is that sympathetic in-group framing, and how it extends to the framing of all of Charles behaviour. Because the show doesn’t seem to have realised that Charles is, in fact, a dick.

The big problem is his creepy obsession with Rosa, which the characters all identify as having lasted a full year, and which I have previously identified as workplace harassment. Charles’ relationship with Rosa - such as it is - is the largest narrative thread of the entire season, with a presence in more than half the episodes, and the show does a bafflingly awful job of challenging Charles shitty behaviour, to the point of repeatedly undercutting Rosa in order to have her reaffirm Charles’ sense of self worth at the expense of defending her own right to basic respect. The fact that Charles is presented to the audience as a sympathetic character we should root for is a big part of the problem; the fact that he is much more prominent than Rosa exacerbates this. Until the latter end of the season, any Charles/Rosa plots are pretty exclusively presented from Charles’ perspective, rendering Rosa an object in his story rather than an agent in her own, and since she is given far less screen time or personal stories or subplots that are NOT related to Charles, we as an audience are given very few invitations to view Rosa outside of Charles’ lens. This is already problematic in itself, but it’s even more so when factoring in the schizophrenic way that the show frames Rosa’s reactions to Charles: sometimes rejecting him soundly, sometimes casually palling around with him and accepting his invitations to movies, dinner, etc. TO BE CLEAR: there is nothing wrong with Rosa’s behaviour, she treats Charles as a friend/co-worker/equal, and she also regularly makes it clear to him that she’s not interested in him romantically. BUT the way the show approaches her from Charles’ perspective encourages the audience to feel sorry for him being rejected, rather than understanding Rosa’s difficulty in being harassed no matter how much she tells him no, and then when she isn’t openly hostile at all times we’re encouraged to see how Charles perceives this as an opportunity for him to win her over as if he’s getting past her defenses, instead of recognising overtures of basic human decency. The in-group we are expected to happily occupy is that of a harasser, rather than sympathising with the harassed.

BUT WAIT, it gets worse. First, Charles takes a couple of bullets for Rosa in the line of duty, prompting Rosa to feel conflicted because she’s still not into him but she also feels bad about turning down the guy who saved her life. When Charles later apologises for pursuing Rosa so obsessively, the apology itself - and the idea that Charles was in the wrong - is quickly buried by Rosa complimenting him. When Charles gets engaged and doesn’t invite Rosa to his wedding, she is upset since she has made a concerted effort to be his friend despite his garbage behaviour, and Charles throws his fiancee Vivian under the bus by claiming that SHE had a problem with Rosa coming to the wedding. Rosa later finds out about this, and follows up with...nothing? She sacrifices her and Gina’s secret sanctuary to give Charles a place to call Vivian in private (Charles repays this by immediately spilling the secret to Scully and Hitchcock, because he sucks), and then after Vivian breaks off the engagement, Rosa spearheads the effort to comfort Charles, culminating in her affirming to him yet again that he’s a good guy. The escalation of the whole Rosa/Charles subplot centres firmly around Rosa taking pains to make sure that Charles knows that he’s ~so great~ even though she’s not interested in him, taking it upon herself to comfort his widdle man feelings, as if that’s the most important thing we should be concerned about in this narrative: Charles feelings. By the time the story starts framing any of this from Rosa’s perspective instead of Charles’, Rosa is inexplicably fixating on looking out for him instead of getting any catharsis on her own experience. Rosa is denied her very real right to be angry and upset about the way Charles has treated her - and considering she’s already an angry person, it seems especially egregious that she is denied this feeling with him and instead exhibits the most softness and compassion we’ve seen from her so far - as ever, the narrative reinforces the idea that Charles deserves our sympathy in this scenario and that while Rosa does have the right to refuse his attention, she also owes it to him somehow to coddle his emotions and make efforts for him despite how he has totally disregarded her emotions for the past year. At no point do they imply that Charles is accountable for his actions, or that he has done anything worse than just having a cute unrequited crush. Poor Charles, so hapless, but don’t we all identify with that? From me personally, it’s a resounding NO.

After the season finale, I noted that Jake Peralta’s mature confession of his feelings for Amy creates a great counterpoint to Charles’ behaviour, and I’m gonna wrap this up by explicating that claim. The thing about Jake is that, sure, he’s immature - it’s one of his primary character traits as set out in the Pilot episode - and his immaturity does affect others in his life negatively at times, but mostly it’s self-contained, impacting the way that Jake lives but not adversely affecting others, and when he DOES adversely impact others, he tends to recognise that, apologise, and make it up to them. Jake doesn’t like to be reminded of his shortcomings or forced to focus or dwell on them, but he also takes responsibility for his own behaviour when it threatens the harmony of other people’s lives. Charles is presented to us as a much more mature adult character, and yet he is completely absent Jake’s self-awareness and willingness to shoulder his own emotional labour (or at least not dump it on others instead); he seemingly does not care in the slightest about the impact his behaviour has on others, and he’s happy to take advantage of the compassion of his friends. We see this obviously in the entire Rosa fiasco and the way the show has her pick up his slack, but she only gets the worst of it; see also, the entire squad avoiding Charles after his shooting because of his exhausting exploitation of their gratitude (never presented as malicious exploitation, but lacking any recognition from Charles that he is overwhelming others’ good will), and of course his ridiculous depression-spiral after Vivian breaks up with him, which is entirely attention-seeking rather than mirroring personal unhappiness; his actions are specifically designed to get in everyone else’s faces about how they should be sympathetic to him. He also throws people under the bus rather than dealing with his problems, as he does with Rosa’s wedding invitation as noted above, and again with Jake after he asks Jake to help him talk to Vivian about not wanting to move to Canada. And we’re supposed to sympathise with this guy? We’re supposed to laugh at how poor Charles just isn’t very good at handling confrontation or being basically responsible for his own actions? Compared to Charles, Jake’s immaturity is hardly worth mentioning, because at least Jake has mastered common decency. Charles is a whiny man-baby foisting his emotional labour off onto others and expecting to be coddled in return, a guy who harasses his coworker and then acts blithely ignorant to the meaning of plain words when she tells him she’s not interested (repeatedly), a guy who never had a personal problem that he didn’t try to make someone else handle for him. This show is MOSTLY delightful, but Charles Boyle is not. Charles Boyle is a small nightmare, and not a funny one, and it makes me concerned about the mindset of the creators of the show that they apparently think Charles is a good joke. They’re gonna have to make some really strong changes to the way they handle Charles and Rosa (independently and in interaction) in the future, or I am gonna be an angry out-grouper.

#Brooklyn Nine-Nine #Brooklyn Nine-Nine season one #full season review #Bechdel Test #female representation #B99

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emma-christine-spoole · 6 years

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My Muse Does the Vanity Fair Interview

https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2000/01/proust-questionnaire

Tagging: @normalouisebatesrp @itsnormanbates @leather-lover-massett @xeffie-thredsonx @maggiexesmerelda @tillhumanvxices @foxbelieve @danascullyeffect @costaricaaguitars @theirlament

and anyone else who wants to. (repost, don’t reblog)

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Wow, we’re jumping right into the deep philosophical questions, huh? I don’t know if it’s possible to have completely flawless, perfect happiness in this life. The world has too many flaws and too many people with high capacity for senseless evil. I think the closest we can get to perfect happiness in this life is having strong bonds with those you love, the kind that will give you the strength to face down that evil when you have to face it.

2. What is your greatest fear?

I try to stay out of political discussions and keep my views to myself most of the time. I’ve just found it’s the smartest thing to do, having spent so many years living in the nation’s capital and considering where I was working. But here’s an exception. My greatest fear currently is that we’re sliding toward a Gilead-like nightmare, slowly like a frog in a pot, so we aren’t going to notice until we’re being boiled alive. Scared that women are going to be stripped of all the progress made over the last half-century, including rights my mother and her mother demonstrated in the streets for. But then I look at my daughter @xeffie-thredsonx and know that’s not going to happen without a hell of a fight from the next generation.

3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

I can have a streak of hypocrisy, unfortunately. I can condemn and punish others for the same perceived wrongdoings I’ve been guilty of myself. I do that by rationalizing, believing my reasons are justified and even noble when theirs aren’t, that I’m bending or even breaking the law to protect those I love or to bring down those who otherwise would’ve gotten away.

4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Cowardice. It’s so often an underlying root issue of criminal behavior. I deal primarily with criminals who keep other humans as slaves to be sold. They put on such an act they’re such big, tough dangerous guys. But they’re really cowards; it’s obvious once you know how to scratch the psychological surface. Also cowards are the violence-fetishists who hide behind their keyboards and post death-bounties on my head on 4Chan. Pffft. Whatever. That’s been going on for years. Nothing new at all.

5. Which living person do you most admire?

Captain Tammy Duckworth, U.S. Army. She piloted a Black Hawk helicopter with both her legs and part of one arm blown off after it was shot down by a grenade missile in Iraq. Still landed it and the rest of her crew to safety. I met her once when she was campaigning for the Senate, and she’s an amazing person. That’s a true warrior and American hero. People overcome once-fatal childhood diseases every day now. That’s not a warrior. That’s called advances in modern medicine.

6. What is your greatest extravagance?

My white Mustang convertible. I love that car like no other. I bought it when I still living in D.C. and there was no need to drive, but so what? I got it anyway. In Oregon, there’s nothing comparable to driving along the coastal highway with the top down on a rain-free day!

7. What is your current state of mind?

Guess you could say I’m pretty introspective because of these questions. I’m also curious and a little bit apprehensive how this interview is going to be received once it hits the news stands. I know we talked about me being known in some circles as “The Sex Trade’s Most Hated Woman,” but I’d really NOT like that moniker splashed all over the cover, if you possibly have any control over it.

8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Conformity to “traditions.” I have no patience with people who feel it’s best to be conservative, unremarkable, ordinary, to blend in and to blindly follow the life-script that gets pushed on all of us. To me, that’s consigning yourself to a lifetime of mediocrity and dead dreams.

9. On what occasion do you lie?

I lie when I have to protect my birth family, and that’s not the only thing I’ll do to keep them out of harm’s way. We’re not the typical close-knit family. We even have a dangerous side we show to those we perceive as threats. Spend some time in White Pine Bay, and you’ll soon hear all sorts of whispered rumors about us. And whispered warnings to stay off our bad side. Some of those people even act like we’re the Mafia or something! We might not have quite that much pull, but any of us will lie, defend ourselves, and more, when it comes to protecting our own.

10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?

Nothing, to be honest. I’ve always thought I look pretty damn good. If I had to pick one thing, I might’ve liked to share my sister’s bigger breasts. But trust me: they look best on her.

11. Which living person do you most despise?

It’s almost a tie between Ellen Sanders and Alex Romero. The former: Nearly assassinating the President while taking away another woman’s husband is one thing, BUT the latter: taking emotional and sexual advantage of my sister and trying to have my nephew locked up in an institution for no valid reason: NOW it gets personal.

12. What is the quality you most like in a man?

Knows how to treat a lady. Ripped. Obedient. Has Mommy issues.

13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?

Sweetness. A great body. Willingness to give me complete control. Not only willing, but eager.

14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

“‘Fuck.’ It’s such a blunt, to-the-point, attention-grabbing word in one syllable. Used the right way, it can express anything. Anger, excitement...climax...

15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?

At one time, I didn’t believe having one “great love of your life” existed in reality. That was before I met my sister’s oldest son @leather-lover-massett. My sister’s his mother and my brother’s his father, so the only thing I’ve heard is accurate to call us is “aunt and nephew twice over.” DNA-wise, we’re closer to being mother and son than regular aunt & nephew. We were strongly, inexplicably drawn to each other from the minute we met, and over the course of one evening, we felt like we’d known each other our whole lives. Before anyone gets up in arms over the taboo of it: Genetic sexual attraction is real and happens 50% of the time in cases like mine. I didn’t believe in it either, until that indescribably intense love - and yes: lust - hit me like a ton of bricks. We’re two consenting adults, we’re hurting absolutely no one, and that’s the end of that discussion far as I’m concerned.

16. When and where were you happiest?

Cliche’ as it might sound: when I was an undergrad at Ohio State. I’d wanted to go there since I was 11 or 12 and watching the Buckeyes basketball games with my dad. I was a two-hour bus ride away from my parents, away from home for the first time; everything was so full of possibility. No one’s college experience is perfect. I would of course face challenges and pitfalls, but there were plenty of good times too. I haven’t been as completely, enthusiastically optimistic since.

17. Which talent would you most like to have?

It would have been cool to be able to learn an instrument. I suffered through piano and clarinet lessons before I started middle school, and I was terrible. It sounded like throwing metal trash cans down a flight of stairs, and I feel sorry for our neighbors back then. Tried some of my bandmates’ guitars when I was older, and I wasn’t much better. I can hear all the rhythms, timing, and such when I sing, but instruments: something just never computed.

18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

It’s all in the past now, but I would’ve changed the amount of courage I needed to first contact my birth family. I needed a lot more of it, which is why it took me so long. A lot of years were lost, and it would’ve been so different if we’d met earlier. I never got to meet my birth parents, and in a weird way I have some deep-down gratitude towards them, for putting me up for adoption. But then I start to feel guilty about that when I think of Norma and Caleb left behind with them, and the hell they were put through.

19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

I don’t think about it much, and sometimes I lose sight of it, but yeah it’s achieving the rank of Special Agent. The exams and PT for it are quite challenging, and it can be very taxing mentally, physically, emotionally, every which way. Only 5-10% of field agents make it every year. Sadly, that percentage of women is even smaller. I’ve love to see that number start climbing within my lifetime.

20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

I haven’t thought about that one! If I got to come back as a whole new person and got to do it all over again, I’d want to come back as the rock star who makes it big this time. Recording contracts, sold-out arenas, the whole nine yards. No law enforcement career this time, in this next life.

21. Where would you most like to live?

I’d love to have a private island off the coast of Oregon and Washington State, and have a big fancy cabin built there for Dylan and myself. Since I spent time with my bio family, I’ve also fallen in love with this beautiful area of the country. Our island would have a causeway bridge and of course gorgeous views of the ocean and forests. Definitely with enough space and privacy for all of us in the family.

22. What is your most treasured possession?

My riverfront house I ended up buying, in northern Portland. Not that I don’t miss downtown Bethesda and all the urban excitement of D.C., sometimes. It was a big change, but I felt like I was home. On a deep level I’d never felt before. I can’t see myself living anywhere else, even after not this long a time. Now, if I could only get the city to sign off on the building permit for a hot tub on the back deck, that’d be great.

23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

That’s a tough one to talk about. I’d say it’s the feeling of being alone after a traumatic loss. A sudden loss of someone or something who’d meant the world to you, and you couldn’t have guessed it was coming. People can say they sympathize and understand how you feel, but they don’t. Not really. Not unless they’ve lived through the same kind of loss.

24. What is your favorite occupation?

Ask me that a few years ago, and I would’ve said “Mine is! Working for the FBI, of course!” But lately I have low-key thought about what other career I would’ve pursued given the desire and the circumstances. The first one I came up with: I would’ve gotten my Krav Maga instructor certification and opened my own KM studio. It would be in White Pine Bay, because god knows women there especially need to learn self-defense. Then maybe I’d open another one in Portland, and after that: who knows? Another, very fleeting career thought: If I’d really pursued it seriously when I was younger, I might have ended up singing in a band that made it big, or *laughs* otherwise ended up in show business. But it wasn’t the path meant for me, in reality.

25. What is your most marked characteristic?

I’ve always been told I pull the energy right to me once I walk into a room. Most people already there, their attention gets drawn to me even when they’re doing something else. I suppose that’s defined as magnetism. Others’ attention gets me energized and even more confident, though I’ve also been accused of arrogance. It’s something I’ve honed for years: the need to mentally and emotionally grab people and shut down any flickers of doubts they may have about me, my leadership, and my convictions that my course of action is the right one.

26. What do you most value in your friends?

I don’t have many female friends, except my sister and a few from the Academy or college that I keep in touch with on Facebook. It’s not that easy to make friends with most other women because we end up having nothing in common, and of course I’m guarded about my family. If I did have them, I’d value a lack of jealousy or toxic emotional fuckery that’s so prevalent among adult women who never matured past high school age. When it comes to finding a beautiful fuck-buddy, I don’t have nearly as much trouble ;)

27. Who are your favorite writers?

Anyone who has written a good autobiography or memoir. I love following other people’s journeys and experiences through this crazy life with all its highs and lows. They can be famous or not; it doesn’t matter to me. Everyone’s life is a story to tell. Some of my favorites: I’ll read anything by Haven Kimmel, most of Stacy Layne Wilson’s books, and similar. I’m currently reading “The Woman Who Smashed Codes” by Jason Fagone.

28. Who is your hero of fiction?

Most of what I read is non-fiction, like I said. I think anyone who writes down their life story and all its intricacies is pretty heroic, putting it out there for the world to read. If I had to pick a fictional hero, it would have to be Molly Bolt from Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle. You don’t have to be gay or even female to love this character. It also brought me a long way in realizing how much my own bisexuality is to be owned and celebrated.

29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Gloria Steinem. I consider myself a Steinem-era feminist; I was raised that way and it definitely comes from my mother. I see all the ways feminism has changed over the decades, and it’s funny how some of those beliefs are downright conservative when you compare them to some of what’s considered “feminism” today.

30. Who are your heroes in real life?

I don’t truly have a lot of hero-worship for much of anyone. It goes back to my being a supposed egomaniac, which I still think is an exaggeration. Like a lot of kids, especially cops’ kids, my dad was one of my heroes when I was that young. Until I grew up some, then learned he (and any law enforcement officers) isn’t all-powerful against the evil in this world.

31. What are your favorite names?

Those of us three Calhoun siblings: Emma, Caleb, and Norma. They sound rhythmic together. Even though I take serious issue with what my brother did to my sister, we are still bound by blood and that’ll never change. Caleb and I have a rocky relationship, and I would slap handcuffs on him in a second if he ever tried to hurt her again. But he’s still my brother too. Part of me will always believe there should’ve been three of us growing up together. I still wonder how different our lives would’ve turned out if we had.

32. What is it that you most dislike?

People who exploit and harm those who can’t defend themselves. They don’t even have to technically break the law, although most I’ve encountered do just that, over and over. There are too damn many of them in the world.

33. What is your greatest regret?

Shit, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to talk about this. *deep breath* My greatest regret is losing someone I loved deeply and highly valued as a colleague. He was married and a father of two, and I had no business falling for him. Of course that does nothing to stop it, ever. Neither of us could control falling in love. It’s taken me years to accept and believe David’s murder wasn’t my fault, that there was absolutely nothing I could’ve done to stop it. I’m just now coming to accept that what happened to him after he died isn’t my fault either.

34. How would you like to die?

In the words of John Lennon, “I’ll probably get popped off by some loony.” Haha! I kid! Ideally, I’d like to die naturally as an old lady, surrounded by loved ones. I don’t think the odds are much in my favor for that, but we can only wait and see...

35. What is your motto?

If you’re physically and mentally able to do something to make things better and punish the deserving, then you no longer have the luxury of shirking that responsibility.

Also:

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right--for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” --Eleanor Roosevelt

#character development #ic #rp meme #muse is contemplative #8: both muse and mun

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paraclete0407 · 3 years

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Since I blew my Blakean-Mozartean lightness and sweetness cover and revealed myself not to be an ‘ex sad young literary man’ who evolved from gay guy plaid shirt fashion to respected limited manliness I want to say something about Stalin’s intelligence chief Beria who after the holy(?) sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War took to cruising the streets in search of a new teen girl to rape every night then in the morning would offer her flowers. If she accepted it was taken to be consensual and if not she was murdered and buried in the garden. Eventually during the Kruschev(?) era Beria was hauled before the Politburo(?) and said, ‘Why are you picking flies / fleas from my garment?’ It might’ve been Zhukov himself who arrested Beria and as he was about to be executed, like Indian bus-ride-gang-rapists, just couldn’t believe that it was game over, that your laurel are not going to cover that, communist Heroes of the Soviet Union don’t have an infinite expense-account for the human grocery store and all this time he really wasn’t thinking about death, the Second Death (that I can tell). Their parents (the girls’) must’ve not said anything but made ‘A Gay and Melancholy Sound’ or like sth out of ‘Sansho Dayu’ (’Sansho the Bailiff’). Yeonmi Park again is Enemy of the People for wanting to live, for remembering her father who was a great guy young and old who got cut down by whatever happened to or with KIS that I can tell, Jordan Peterson is like, ‘Behold the voice of 4chan crying in the wilderness’ but it’s still ‘as clear as the sky is blue’ I used to say that 4chan is probably a giant INTERPOL / Future Eastern Roman Empire trap / killzone for pedophiles and murder-hearted moral monsters seeking intellectual figleafs for their total depravity. Like in ‘Dirty Dozen’ when the Nazi party people are all trapped in the basement, douse with petrol, grenades insert through culverts. The only board I ever lingered on was obviously KPG since I felt it was a potential culture of life and love but in retrospect I felt they’re actually gang-rapist parodists as well, rabbit-hunters, their only redeeming virtue their innocence, that they’re young, that they never went to Pocheon, Uijeongbu, Dongducheon, never heard ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ in their heads of had songs no one taught them a la ‘The Illiterate’ how to write on pianoforte. I used to like forgiveness a lot but I’m not against retributive justice b/c it represents value or an ‘overarching culture of life+’ including capital punishment IMO. You affirm one person’s value by mirroring the loss of that value in revoking another’s value whether it’s eliminating the chance for them to actualize their potential or obliterating or marring their physical being as an Image of God.

I became really extreme thinking about auto’s-da-fe, torture, punitive servitude which is still Constitutional in America though I felt that Arpaio and friends had been emptying it in part as a ‘schtick’ rather than mindfully or conscientiously. I Moon Jaein wanted to burn me with a brand amputate me etc. I would trust him to do it but in the American Midwest or so it is like ‘yeehaw.’ These super-predator b/Black men - it is important to hurt people, a lot; ATST anyone can be taught to say the right things + Cosby was a serial rapist no matter what he might’ve said although that’s terrible and tragic to say as well b/c Democrat(?) CCP assclown assassins like John Oliver will just use it to discredit everything. Like cancel Cosby’s concern, cancel his love for his murdered son (’my hero’), b/c he lost his moral compass, was coping instead of authentically or IDK never met Cosby.

Ricky Gervais the exponent of Kim Jongilist murder revenge porn / agitation-propagand for a Maoist doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’ against the weaknesses ‘ of the wealthy creative elite etc & Parasite’ was saying how after WW2 ′Adolf’ ceased to be a baby name, now what, outside ROK, JBP, Grace to You,’ personal responsibility is becoming infinitely assassinatable as well. Historical dialectical materialism / Marxism / hyperMarxism(?), ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ TS, DT Suzuki or so telling Japanese soldiers they’re not even pulling the trigger. No one ever really did anything, it never happened, unreality, as Min Jin Lee might’ve said it’s absurd to impute humanity to Koreans or reality and authenticity to the central concern of the moment which is like this massive convergence of times, places, and new and old beliefs, in or during which the Prince f Darkness, the Father of Lies, is being allowed to attack a lot of people and many are getting super-smart super-fast and as GG might say in 2013 ABC and XYZ are colliding all the time. Yet, still, at a time when people might hold more in common or be more generous and gracious ev1′s becoming super-clannish; I see men at the ATM with thousands in cash but then too what good will cash be in a few days? ‘We all know money burns.’ I remember some stupid Korea hyper-self-fanfic that was like, ‘I used to believe in giving kids a fair life-chance but after getting “promoted to Colonel” in edubusiness I was just all about money, women, and weapons.’

S1 once said of Tom Clancy that he got super-rich and might’ve to started to lose touch long after ‘Red Storm Rising,’ which helped win Cold War One, with the moral factors etc. that actually determine success in war.

But IDK what is automatically absolutely going to happen. If I had a rooftop I might well watch on it tonight. I felt concern for many of these people and rem. talking about ‘the inflictions of the voice of pedagogical authority’ walking w/ someone who had stayed friends with her HS teacher in ‘Rhetoric of Argumentation’ where the prof was telling us to keep commonplace books which I thought was good, then teach said I‘m sorry I didn’t get to know you, but nowadays knowledge appears to have transmogrified into a completely insincere category, a fake value, ground of fake intimacy, for fake friendships. Where are those girls now? I was literally walking to the bridge one night to jump of so s1 else can have my organs and felt this ‘flashlight of c/Charity toward’ some blonde girls at UWM like whos gonna cover them but now they’re all sophisticated and cagey(?) and I have no idea what is meant anymore, feel no gentleness, just relentlessness, game-playing, hey wall want information, they’re writing books of future history + burying the living alive. I wish almost for the first I were less special and more general tho maybe I am just nobody. I wanted to simplify and make one last valiant or else stubborn attempt at creative writings like Taeyeon’s ‘You Love Me’ where she is not really plotting s1′s future downfall / burying the Confucian gentlemen alive by the trillions under future MaoMao Qin Shihuang imperial government. Words like ‘bypass’ and ‘oxygenation’ are starting to mean everything and I wanted to add ‘metabolism’ since it can help with immune-systems and it talks about the ‘interpenetration’ of people’s bodies, the environment, the air, health. I also wanted to talk more about specific details from my past but as everyone is reading everyone that I can tell + tho I had progressed in writing I feel as if it’s just adding more retardant or I’m delaying personal decision-making... Does no one want me or just a few people want me

I wished to go to the place where the best thing ever to happen to me happened which is this bench I sat on after working all night but Liyoung Lee’s ‘A Final Word’ already said more or less that and it was someone else’s future, someone else’s man-wife-child ‘trinity of happiness.’ At Whole Fods I went ‘Selflessness’ but ppl are actually hunting for Shakesperean-Johnsonian ‘Other Selves’ and those that have something. ‘The One Fair Thing’ with this Sana picture that didn’t look like her in that one picture, something about epee(?)-fencing, a McMansion in Livingston NJ that my parents spat on but I thought, ‘It’s a reasonable place to live; it’s new; it’s sober; there are baby black bears in the NJ forests and they’re gentle animals that can help us slow down life and arguably know when to be sort of cold-hearted.’ Evth got kind of sideways-moving and I was thinking, ‘After this, then...’ I believed that it would be a great idea just now to un-adopt my old concerns as people really do appear to be becoming more defended and ‘patronized’ but that too is just conjecture; or do I know what the President’s capabilities are w/r/t holding everyone together as opposed to saying the right things about binding up. During the military dictatorship in the ROK the KCIA were torturing all these people all the time, young students, and it might’ve had to happen but when everyone is their putative brother’s keeper and loving neighbors is conflated with omni-pedagogy and ‘Lives of Others’-esque omni-surveillance things and lives can get pulverized as well as rebuilt - therefore what am I missing?

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katherinemacbride · 3 years

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Slow Burn: Diary of a changing institution

(K MacBride and Miriam Wistreich)

…to maintain is also to keep buoyant; to maintain one's mood could be described as buoying oneself up, keeping oneself or someone else afloat during difficult times. Maintaining that the Earth is round when it looks flat is about upholding an idea, defending, and affirming it when it is challenged or attacked, raising its profile when it has slipped off the agenda. To maintain is to underpin, or prop up from below, to hold up when something or someone is flagging. The time of maintenance lies therefore at the intersection between the lateral axis of stumbling blindly on, and the vertical axis of holding up, orientating us towards a future, even when that future is uncertain, or may not be our own.

(Lisa Baraitser, 2017, Enduring Time. Bloomsbury: London. p. 53)

For more than twenty years Hotel Maria Kapel has been an artists' residency, cinema, and contemporary art space in Hoorn, a town thirty minutes from Amsterdam. The venue, which is located in an impressive sixteenth century chapel, started in 1983 as an artists' initiative in the abandoned Maria Kapel and subsequently grew into what it is today: a publicly funded institution with national and international connections. In 2019, after the departure of Creative Director Irene de Craen who had led the institution through a period of (still ongoing) professionalisation, the board of Hotel Maria Kapel instigated a "year of reflection and reorientation" for which they hired an editorial committee consisting of artists Griet Menschaert and Maja Bekan, and curator Miriam Wistreich. A mix of artistic research and curatorial experimentation, the editorial committee's 2020 programme Slow Burn focuses on questions of care to channel institution building and its entailing questions into HMK's residency and exhibition programme. Through six thematic chapters (space, navigation, work, endurance, community, and time) the team of HMK, with its artists in residence, are trying to understand what it means to practice care — for our artists, our institution, our team, and our publics. Who do we care about and for? How can we qualify care through feminist politics and avoid the pitfalls of caring badly or caring too much? Is this even possible and what happens when we fail? And ultimately: how can we build practices and spaces of care within the limits of an exploitative system with which we are all complicit?

This text was co-written in June 2020 by Miriam Wistreich (Creative Director, HMK) and Katherine MacBride after the latter's residency at HMK. The point of departure for the writing process was a set of journals written by the HMK team — Annelien de Bruin (Coordinator), Miriam, and Rik Dijkhuizen (Communications Manager) — during March 2020, recording their experiences of running the organisation. This exercise was intended to form part of HMK's research into its own working practices, but since the Dutch government's measures to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic came into effect in March, the journals also offer insight into sudden changes in modes of working and the possibilities and challenges this opened up in a small team.

To write this text, Miriam and Katherine drew on four recurring themes that emerged from the journals: buoyancy, stress, structure, and listening. Each wrote two sections of what follows, drawing on differing positions in relation to HMK and wider experiences of collective work; some are descriptive, some propositional. Different voices inhabit the text together. The section "Stress" is formed of direct quotes from the journals that are used here with permission.

Buoyancy

Buoying one another along and up, on the surface, in the air, not drowning or falling, afloat; maintained in space and time. Vulnerable and precarious, buoyancy is a never ending processual task. The buoy will need new air pumped in, its rope replacing, eventually the anchor will rust. Someone will attend to these things, keep them maintained, as long as the buoy and the buoyancy of those who depend on it are deemed necessary, or as long as the maintaining attention itself can be kept buoyant. Otherwise the buoy might degenerate or disappear, bringing risk to those who depend on its buoy function for their own buoyancy. Unplanned parts of the structure, like the algae and small bivalves who grow on the rope, might outlive the maintenance energies, for they are not dependent on the buoy's intended function but will too find their environment disrupted and at risk as the buoy degrades in time. Who is maintaining the buoy in your collective work? Who do you know and not know that depend on it?

Stress

There are not enough hours in the day (and I really value sleeping).

Finished translation of project plan. In the afternoon I had a migraine.

Tired from yesterday, my other job ran late, the day started with a feeling of being behind, underperforming, lacking in discipline and efficiency. I pour myself a coffee before our weekly meeting.

I enter in a state of near panic, thinking of a reprimanding email and all of the funding I am behind on. I do seven day work weeks at the moment and am running behind on deadlines in all of my jobs (currently only around three employers) and feel I am underperforming everywhere.

Institutional trauma is carried in the bodies of the workers.

Things have been evolving rapidly. People are falling ill, we are advised to keep distance, work from home. We close HMK. My friends and community experience the consequences without delay: cancelled jobs, plans put on hold. Over the course of one day, my teaching jobs fall through, my side gig is cancelled, my exhibition is postponed indefinitely, my writing jobs are put on hold. I am tense thinking about them. I reach out to precarious friends (work, mental stability etc.). I go to bed exhausted.

I have a toothache and have to go to the hospital. I go to bed with a numb mouth and exhausted brain.

I spend the day feeling stressed about how to live up to everything that is demanded from me at work, from friends, as a person. I am overwhelmed and unable to focus. I feel lonely, who will be there to comfort me when I collapse?

I lose the day to a migraine.

I finish the day dancing alone in my room. I chose UB40 to get good vibes in my body.

Structure

We maintain the chapel every Thursday, 15.00. We sort through twenty years of paperwork, two years of exhibition materials, wood everywhere, bags of plastic. We haven't seen the mice yet but we know they are there.

We invent meeting protocols.

We mop the floors before opening hours.

We sing together every month.

We disagree on the relationship between structure and freedom and the virtues of each.

Sometimes we don't know what we're doing. Other times we know really well.

A score to prepare listening attention in a meeting

At the last meeting responsibilities for the preparation, happening, and follow-up for this meeting were shared out. These vary for each meeting group but probably cover the following areas (broken down into separate tasks so one person does not cover an entire category by themselves): admin (reminders, agenda, minutes), group process (facilitation, timekeeping, attending to unspoken dynamics), reproductive labour (attending to bodily needs of everyone, including the space). Responsibilities rotate for each meeting regardless of role hierarchies outside meetings.

Someone, or everyone, brings food to the meeting so no one is hungry.

Adjust the temperature. Human bodies do not have universal experiences of hot/cold.

Arrange enough seating. Can everyone in the group sit on the same kind of seats?

Adjust the lighting — bright enough to see each other but not so bright that those with light sensitivity are uncomfortable.

Prepare drinks that everyone can drink.

Develop a group agreement on start and end times based on the needs and capacities of the group. For example, people with caring responsibilities, health issues, or precarious work (often this is the whole group) might not be able to stay over time, or arrive exactly on time.

Develop a practice of checking in at the start of the meeting. This gathers the capacities, needs, and complexity of each individual and draws them together into the group.

If the meeting has an agenda, someone reads it aloud. Agree together what is possible to address in this meeting. It is important to develop a practice of setting realistic agendas over time.

During the meeting, listen: to the threads of the content; to your own thoughts before you speak them, considering if they need to have space in the available time; to learn about processes you are not actively involved in and modes that feel different or difficult for you; for feedback from others; to moods; to the unspoken.

Record something of the meeting so that the people who cannot be present, which is usually some people, can clearly understand something of what happened.

A short reflection on the effects of journaling within the organisation

The journals were shared between the members of the team and discussed during weekly meetings. Journals are tools for self-reflection, channels for venting, and traditionally also containers for secrets and contradictory, sometimes shameful, emotions. Within the HMK team, the journals functioned as access tools into each other's thoughts and allowed conversations to arise that would not otherwise have been given space in a hierarchical, professional context. It allowed the team to discuss subjects such as fears connected to work, differences in coping strategies, levels of engagement and excitement and the histories leading to those emotions, and the pressure we put on ourselves and others. Ultimately the journals led to increased vulnerability and openness within the small team, no doubt aided by a simultaneous feeling of breakdown and dissolution of boundaries between work and life caused by COVID-19 measures.

published https://newiseverything.com/slow-burn-diary-of-a-changing-institution.html

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tomfooleryprime · 7 years

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The illogic of a logical philosophy

The pilot episode of Star Trek: Discovery was titled “The Vulcan Hello,” and Michael Burnham was all about giving one to the Klingons.

Unfortunately, the Vulcan hello she was referring to looked a little less like this:

And a lot more like this:

Apparently, this shocked some fans, but I’m not really sure why. There are a lot of perpetuated ideas that Vulcans are strict pacifists because, after all, war is illogical. But if we really peel back some of the canon, the reality is that Vulcans probably prefer peace, but they’re certainly not above violence, and that’s the problem with living by logic.

Is violence illogical? Who’s to say? Even a philosophy based on pure logic is doomed to be convoluted because spoken language is imprecise and no philosophy is absolute. Yet Vulcan philosophy is often treated as though it must be, as if for any single issue, there is only one perfectly logical solution amid a sea of half-logical alternatives and utter irrationality.

So, what is Vulcan philosophy? Over the years, it’s expanded into a belief system that has two giant scoops of Greek stoicism, a pinch of Jewish mysticism, a dollop of utilitarianism, and a rationalism cherry on top. I would actually argue that this Frankenstein philosophy is whatever it needs to be, so long as it can be defended with a reasonably sound argument delivered in monotone, dispassionate speech. And therein lies the problem. How do we decide what is “reasonably sound?” Worse yet, what is logic?

Believe it or not, there is no universal agreement on the exact scope of this particular discipline. The ancient Greeks studied logic in philosophy, but logic also has more discrete applications in mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. I could type thousands of words dissecting the different branches of logic, but Wikipedia did it so much better than I ever could. Bottom line is, if you’re not using logic to defend mathematical proofs or write code, there’s a whole lot of gray area for what can be considered “logical.”

Me too, Amanda, me too.

So how do stoicism, rationalism, and utilitarianism fit into the Vulcan narrative? Stoicism goes back to the ancient Greeks and championed the idea virtue was based on knowledge, and that wise and virtuous people lived in harmony with reason and were able to accept reality and not allow themselves to be controlled by pain, fear, or desire. If that doesn’t sound like the first page of the Vulcan playbook, I don’t know what does.

Rationalism is a philosophy that sort of bridges ancient stoicism with the modern world and asserts that reason should be the chief source and test of logic rather than religious belief or emotional response. And lastly, utilitarianism is a doctrine that asserts that actions are right if they are useful or benefit a majority. Sound familiar?

If it doesn’t, you’ve never seen The Wrath of Khan. Or shopped at Hallmark.

But the thing is, not one of those philosophical systems says, “No violence.” If The Teachings of Surak has strict rules prohibiting violence, all the Vulcans we’ve ever met across six different series are really shitty Vulcans.

We see many instances of Vulcans preferring to avoid violence and killing—Vulcans often employ a nerve pinch to subdue aggressors rather than smack them around—but they are capable of worse. In the TOS episode, “Journey to Babel,” a Tellarite ambassador is murdered by someone who “knew exactly where to apply pressure to snap the neck instantly,” according to Dr. McCoy. As Kirk ponders who could have possibly committed such an act, Spock is all too quick to throw his dad under the bus and say, “Vulcans.”

While he quickly adds that “Vulcans do not approve of violence” he also mentions that “it would be illogical to kill without reason.” And so:

Backpedaling at warp eight.

Sarek knows how to kill because he’s skilled in a deadly martial arts technique called tal-shaya. The fact that Vulcans train in martial arts, possess weapons like the lirpa and the ahn-woon, and cruise around the quadrant in ships outfitted with weapons suggests they are at least prepared to defend themselves if necessary, which would disqualify them from being absolute pacifists. But that doesn’t necessarily make them warmongers either.

So, what about actually instigating a war? In Enterprise, we got a view of Vulcans that a lot of people weren’t comfortable with. We saw Vulcans spying on their Andorian neighbors, we saw religious factions fighting one another, and we saw a Vulcan High Command that seemed remarkably belligerent. Some fans might argue that after the discovery of the Kir’Shara in the Enterprise story arc that included the episodes “The Forge,” “The Awakening,” and “Kir’Shara” led to a new reformation, Vulcans returned to their true logical roots, ditching their semi-violent ways.

But it’s evident that Vulcans believe that sometimes logic requires violence. Recall those utilitarian principles woven throughout Vulcan philosophy. One of the most well-known philosophical thought experiments is referred to as The Trolley Problem, and it’s a test of utilitarian judgments. There are many variations, but the short one goes like this:

There’s a trolley hurtling down a track with five people on it. The brakes are shot and it’s going to crash, killing all on board. You happen to be standing next to a switch that would divert the trolley onto a separate track where it would gently crash into a sandbank, saving the lives of those five people. The only problem is, there is a person tied to the tracks you want to divert the trolley onto. If you pull the switch, you will actively kill one person to save five. If you do nothing, you will passively allow the person tied to the tracks to live at the expense of the five on the trolley. And so, if we are capable of acting, do we have a duty to act? (Here’s a fascinating quiz if you’d like to explore your own beliefs on the subject.) But what would Vulcans do?

Rather than spend time debating it, I can tell you exactly what most Vulcans would probably do. In the TOS episode, “Operation, Annihilate!,” Deneva colony is infested with neural parasites and Dr. McCoy can’t find a way to kill them. Kirk is struggling to find a way to prevent the spread of these parasites, and Spock points out the only logical solution, though it is “understandably upsetting,” is to destroy the colony and its one million inhabitants because there are billions of people living beyond Deneva colony to think about. McCoy didn’t handle it well.

A real dick move, Mr. Spock. A real dick move.

Now, to his credit, Spock was also infected, so he was willing to die for his principles, but he didn’t bat an eye at the idea of killing a million people. The good news is, it’s old-school Trek so of course they found a solution that didn’t end with the tragic slaughter of a million colonists, but Spock’s initial recommendation was that it was logical to commit an act of violence against one million people to save the lives of billions.

Maybe you agree with him, maybe you don’t, but that being said, is it really such a wild notion to believe that the Vulcans would prefer occasional small acts of aggression against the Klingons if there were sufficient reason to believe it would prevent a war?

When explaining to Captain Georgiou what a Vulcan hello was, Michael Burnham didn’t say the Vulcans slaughtered every Klingon they encountered, simply that they “fired first” in order to “say hello in a language the Klingons understood.” If anything, it sounds like the Vulcan policy was more in line with a warning shot than a Klingon genocide, and from my own simple-minded human perspective, that sounds pretty damn logical if it prevents real and prolific bloodshed.

But that comes back to the initial question of “what is Vulcan philosophy?” Perhaps we should ask ourselves who is the ultimate judge of what is logical? In theory, it should be Surak and his teachings, right?

Surak’s a smart guy who obviously knows a bargain when he sees one, as illustrated by this ensemble that looks a 6th grade home economics project met the clearance rack at the local craft store.

Unfortunately, just because something is written down doesn’t mean everyone is going to agree on the same interpretation, otherwise, the U.S. Supreme Court would be about 99% less busy and history wouldn’t be littered with the bodies of billions of people desperate to prove their version of the God of Abraham is the right one.

I don’t know why Vulcans are so often portrayed as being a culture of homogenous personalities, beliefs, and values, as though logic is logic and there’s no room for variation. Imagine what the series would have been like if we played switcheroo with Spock, Tuvok, and T’Pol. Picture the moody and somewhat emotional T’Pol trying to give advice to Captain Kirk, or the wise and experienced Tuvok trying to talk Archer out of half the shit he did in the Delphic Expanse.

Tuvok’s eyes are clearly asking if it’s too late to go back to the Delta quadrant and get assimilated by the Borg.

The point is, individual Vulcans aren’t interchangeable, and I don’t think their beliefs are either. Just look at what happened in the Enterprise episode, “Carbon Creek.” Three Vulcans are marooned on Earth in the 1950s and are facing starvation when they encounter a pair of deer. Despite the fact that Vulcans eat plant-based diets because their tenets about non-violence extend to animals, Mestral suggests eating one of them because:

A Vulcan Mrs. Donner.

Stron is Vulcan-horrified at the idea of resorting to “savagery,” but thankfully T’Pol/T’Mir agrees to violate the Vulcan version of the Prime Directive instead so they don’t have to murder Bambi’s mom. But that scene raises an interesting point. Who was right, Mestral or Stron? Or both? Or neither?

Put 100 Vulcans in a room and ask them when war is justifiable, I’m sure they’d all spout off some Vulcan version of Just War Theory like the smug, walking information databases that they are. But put 100 Vulcans in charge of making a real-world decision about going to war, and we’d get 100 different answers, some which directly contradicted others, but each defended by iron clad logic.

To wrap this drivel up, Vulcan philosophy is a really bizarre hodgepodge of conflicting ideologies. They believe in infinite diversity in infinite combinations, which means they celebrate the beauty of the countless variables of the universe, unless it’s a Klingon bird-of-prey, in which case, they shoot that shit up. Pacifism is great when it’s convenient, killing is bad, except for when it isn’t, it’s not genocide if you have a really good reason, and eating animals is wrong, except for when it’s necessary. Yeah, logical.

I’m of the opinion that Vulcans are no better than humans—they do their best to grapple with complex issues according to a chaotic and occasionally contradictory set of beliefs. Even if they swear they aren’t driven by emotion, they are still at the mercy of their life experiences and world views when it comes to decision making. Logic is a tool that can help them arrive at answers, but it isn’t the answer. Most importantly, like any tool, logic can be abused or corrupted.

Given the weight of the evidence, I would re-assert that Vulcans are happy to declare anything as being logical, so long as it suits their agenda or personal beliefs. Or perhaps it’s better to say that the writers of Star Trek will call anything logical if it adds to the dialogue or advances the plot.

What say you, T’Pol?

#star trek #star trek discovery #star trek enterprise #star trek the original series #vulcans #vulcan philosophy #spock #t'pol #tuvok #meta #long post #live long and prosper

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madewithonerib · 4 years

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youtube

Shining the Light in a Dark Culture | John MacArthur

AUSTIN: MacArthur?

JOHN: Yes.

AUSTIN: What’s new?

JOHN: A lot.

1.] You’ve been busy; seen you on TV lately

JOHN: Yeah. In a sense, I feel like it took me to get to 80 years before maybe the most critical moment in my life has taken place.

I think it’s because there are more people listening to the WORD of GOD at this particular time from this pulpit than ever in the history of our Church in a �� regular way Sunday after Sunday because of the multiple dire conditions in our world.

And there’s a greater interest in hearing the WORD of GOD.

It’s not just sort of inside the Church, it’s outside – many, many people wanting interviews, wanting me to write articles, & even putting these articles on basically secular websites & things like that to hear from the LORD.

I think this is a new experience; but I’m so thankful for the opportunity to do it.

2.] Increased Need For GOD

AUSTIN: So back in March, the Livestream saw a lot more traffic because everyone was locked down.

So that increased the amount of people looking here.

But you’re talking about not just the Livestream looking at us more & more, you’re talking about the cultural changes taking place & people looking for answers.

2.1] Suicides: Meaningless Pleasure

JOHN: Yeah. I think there’s a level of desperation.

I forget who said it, but people don’t take their life because they’re weary of the pain, they take their life because they’re weary of the pleasure.

People are running out of pleasure.

It’s becoming pretty common among young people, younger & younger all the time to take their lives.

And it isn’t that they suffer from pain, it’s that they suffer from the meaninglessness of even pleasure.

There’s a fear about the future, everything is shifting.

You have a generation of young people who’ve gone through university systems & they have been denied the true knowledge of GOD, true morality, true virtue, true character, & they are lost souls.

2.2] Senseless Violence

I saw the other day 6 young people who were smashing stores, I think it was in Chicago.

Six of them were upper-class, wealthy White kids.

They’re the kids who ran out of pleasure, & so all that was left for them was a kind of nihilism where you start to smash & break things because nothing is left.

So I think it’s a frightened generation who have been told that their truth is the real truth but d̲o̲e̲s̲n̲t̲ s̲e̲l̲l̲ i̲n̲ t̲h̲e̲ s̲o̲u̲l̲.

Somebody can tell you that your truth is all that matters, you should feel no shame, you should believe yourself, you’re the most important person in your world.

I can sell you that, but you can’t sell your soul that, because that’s vacuous, that’s empty.

So you have 2 kind of young people today:

1.] you have the conservative young people– conservative millennials who tend to be truth-seekers.

You know, they’re the ones that listen to Ben Shapiro & people like that. They want to know the truth.

● They want to know what’s right. ● They’re truth-seekers.

And I’ve had the opportunity to do some writing for them, & I love that.

2.] Then there’s liberal millennials who are just iconoclastic.

They’ve run out of pleasure & they just want to tear down, burn & destroy; & it’s a lost generation.

Because the kids are lost, the parents have angst & shame because they’ve lost their children & they have no hope for their grandchildren.

And so there’s a sense of existential emptiness pervading this society; & wherever they might look for help, they don’t want to look to politicians because that’s a terrifying thing.

They can’t look at educators, that’s equally terrifying.

And those people who represent order & kind of sanity are under assault, like the police & any orderly, morally, upstanding kind of approach to life is mocked as hate speech.

So this generation is so utterly lost, & I wouldn’t necessarily expect that somebody my age & my convictions & all would find an opportunity to communicate.

But the LORD has surprised me with that.

So I’m grateful to be able to speak at a time like this when everybody’s wanting to hear a voice of truth; & all I do is open the BIBLE & say what it says.

And that is the truth that GOD uses to transform hearts.

I don’t have to empower that truth, I just have to preach it.

The power is in it by the HOLY SPIRIT.

So, yeah, it’s a pretty amazing time.

For probably the last 15 or 20 years I’ve been kind of a joke to the pragmatists.

To the Church growth, Church strategy people, I’ve been kind of an anachronism, I’ve been kind of like a dinosaur.

anachronism: a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned.

But when the nation starts to burn & people are wanting real answers, they’re not going to go to a show, they’re not going to go to a superficial TED Talk when they want the truth.

When they desperately need the truth they’re going to f̲i̲n̲d̲ t̲h̲e̲ t̲r̲u̲t̲h̲ ̲a̲s̲ G̲O̲D̲ d̲i̲r̲e̲c̲t̲s̲ t̲h̲e̲m̲.

3.] Time Testify Good News of GOSPEL

So this is a time for the truth, & it’s an amazing thing to see this all happening.

The darker the night, the brighter the light, right?

And the more despair there is, the more people reach out for hope.

So just to be there & to have the opportunity to be as ubiquitous as we are because of the Internet is amazing, amazing.

AUSTIN: Shiny new programs have a lot of appeal in a time like this time? More overwhelming.

JOHN: Yeah, this is n̲o̲t̲ a good time for superficial answers.

AUSTIN: No. No, because what are you supposed to do? The streets are on fire, the culture’s polarized, socialism’s on the rise. I mean, these are crazy days, & they’re not looking for some cheesy cartoon-illustrated superficial Church program that’s coming down the pipe, the next thing that the pastor has. They need the truth.

JOHN: No. What is happening is superficial preaching is becoming obsolete. The people who thought they were at the top of the food chain in terms of ministry & effectiveness in a Church are now void. They’re nullified because this is way too desperate for some superficial approach. You’ve got to tell people more than GOD wants them to be happy.

AUSTIN: And to know that GOD bestows the knowledge of HIMSELF only through the SCRIPTURES. And then Calvin said something like that, that that’s where people encounter GOD, & that’s what this generation needs.

JOHN: Yeah. And you know what’s so amazing about it is you don’t have to defend that. There’s a power in the SCRIPTURE that captures even a resistant heart with the reality of its own truthfulness. If I’ve learned anything in over half a century of teaching the BIBLE I’ve learned that it has immense power. It overwhelms people with its truthfulness. Even people who don’t believe it can’t escape the validity of it because it rings true in their own hearts. But just to think about having the opportunity to write articles for these websites where I normally wouldn’t be considered because I’m another generation or 2 removed at least, & I’m just biblical, & they’re saying, “Give us more, give us more, give us more,” because there’s a hunger for this.

AUSTIN: And those of us who know you well know how much of an evangelist you are. And you’ve always had that bent even as a young man preaching in the bus station down in the south. You’ve always been evangelistic. The baptism here is never still water; there’s always people coming to CHRIST in this Church. And you’ve also been an evangelist to the Church. And so as we’ve watched these last weeks – & our Church is full of hundreds of visitors in the morning, & we’re grateful that they’re here – it’s just very clear that you’re mindful that there’s still a need for the GOSPEL.

JOHN: Well, yeah. I’ve spent my whole life basically doing 2 things: trying to evangelize professing Christians so they become genuinely saved, because we know the tares are mixed with the wheat; & 2ndly, trying to feed the true believers the WORD of GOD so they can be sanctified; & I’m very much aware as I’m preaching now & people are listening all over the world. And it’s pretty remarkable, I think within just a very brief time this morning more people had downloaded that sermon on Facebook than anything that’s ever come out of this pulpit in the past, & that’s amazing. What that means is that this is getting beyond where we normally reach. And I always want to include in it the sinfulness of sin, the hopelessness of man without GOD, & the answer of the GOSPEL & the forgiveness & salvation that CHRIST offers. Yeah, there has to be that evangelistic emphasis all the time, & particularly now, because we have people listening who don’t just need to hear how the world should be, they need to hear how they can become right with GOD.

AUSTIN: So you talked about the wheat & the tares, & that’s been a hallmark of your ministry is talking about the danger of a false believer, the lordship of JESUS. In recent months I’ve heard you talking about JESUS is the head of the Church & that our obedience is to HIM over Caesar. It’s reminding me of the things that you said decades ago & have been saying all these years about the lordship of CHRIST. Let’s talk about the relationship between the lordship of CHRIST over the believer, lordship salvation, & the lordship of CHRIST over the CHRIST over the Church. You think those 2 things are really one thing?

JOHN: Yeah, they are one thing, but they haven’t always been understood that way. In fact, Blaikie’s book on Scottish Preachers, written in 1880 or 1890, something like that, he chronicles how that in the Church in Scotland believers acknowledge CHRIST as head over them. But the issue of CHRIST as the head of the Church was not that clear, because when England was Catholic the pope was the head of the Church. And when the particular king was a Protestant, didn’t want the pope to be the head of the Church, the KING of England became the head of the Church. In fact, to this day, if you go to the Scottish Parliament Building on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh & you look up at the very top of the ceiling you’ll see a seat for the king still in the building.

So the world was still trying to figure out not that CHRIST is LORD over the believer, but that CHRIST is actually the head of the Church & not the pope & not the king. And it was in the battles of the 16th, 17th century that the Church crystallized that because it was fought over. And I think that what typically happens in Church history – you know this very well – is that doctrines get crystallized when they’re embattled, when there is a reason that we have to fight this battle And we’re back at that point right now.

I have great regard for the jurisprudent system. I have a great regard for the government & respect for authority. I have nothing but honor for the judge who – several judges who have weighed in on our case; & as of now, I think there have been 5 different judges – 2 individual & 3 on a panel. I have great respect for them & for what they do. But none of them individually nor all of them collectively is the head of the Church. So they can adjudicate things in their realm, they cannot adjudicate things in the kingdom of GOD.

And the LORD is the head of the Church, & that’s why we’re here regardless of what a judge says. They are not the head of the Church. And that is where the Church has taken its stand through its entire history. It’s always taken its stand there. And we have made heroes out of those people. There’s hardly a pastor alive today who wouldn’t go back, & if you asked him if he knew anything about Church history he wouldn’t be able to identify the heroes of the Christian faith. And inevitably they were against the Church of their time, whether it was Calvin who went against the Catholic Church & wrote systematic theology & commentaries & started a seminary; & his seminary became known as a school of death, because the guys that were trained there would go back to France & the Catholic Church would kill them because they preached the GOSPEL. Whether it was John Knox who was hated & rejected, but was faithful to preach; whether it’s the covenanters; whether it was the Great Ejection in England when they threw all the faithful Puritan preachers out of their pulpits on one Sunday.

So throughout Church history we’ve always given honor in the past to those who are not subject to the powers that try to invade the kingdom of GOD. And I’m not doing anything differently, & neither are any of our elders – you included. We’re taking our stand where GOD’s faithful leaders have always taken their stand. It isn’t that we don’t love those people. It isn’t we don’t respect them. It isn’t that we don’t want to see them come to faith in CHRIST; we do. It isn’t that we’re angry with them. It isn’t that we don’t think they provide unnecessary service in the world; they do. But when they step in & tell the Church whether it can meet or not, they have overstepped their bounds, because CHRIST said, “MY kingdom is not of this world.”

So we will do what CHRIST calls us to do. And like the apostles, we’ll obey GOD rather than men, & we’ll take the consequences, whatever they are. They may begin this week, I’m not sure. Possible.

AUSTIN: Yeah. And if you end up going to what we call in New Mexico la pinta, I guess I’ll go with you. I may need bail money, MacArthur.

So I think what you just said is so crystalizing & helpful to think about that I wonder if you’re actually preparing future generations of pastors to make a similar stand. Do you think that this is what’s ahead for us in the future?

JOHN: I think we’ve had enough of the pragmatic stuff. I think the Church has been sold out to pragmatism – weak-willed, unbiblical preachers that are just personalities; narcissistic, self-focused personalities, brokering their charisma & their skills & their communication ability to build what they call a Church, when it isn’t a Church at all. Life is far too serious for those. They’re making daisy chains. What they’re telling people is shy of what people want to hear. It’s time again for the WORD of GOD.

Life is far more serious, at least from my perspective, than it’s ever been; & I’ve been around a long time & seen it in a lot of forms. But I’ve never seen the level of despair. And I think I have to add that this level of despair that’s in our culture – as you know because you work with university students – has been being developed for the last 30 years or more in the university system. They’re the ones, they’re where everybody’s trained to be godless, immoral, self-centered, shameless; & you can’t keep sowing those seeds decade after decade after decade without producing a generation of people who actually believe that.

But that kind of hedonism is empty, void. They can’t establish a meaningful self-identity, so they have to find a tribe where nobody questions them or is allowed to question them because that would be hate speech; or they become nihilistic & nothing means anything. They can’t establish meaningful relationships, certainly not lifelong relationships. So this is not a time for frivolous, superficial pop psychology answers to people’s deep-seated questions. And when you realize as well everybody lives forever, everybody lives forever, the eternal things weigh heavy on my heart.

AUSTIN: When we think about the consequences of JESUS’ lordship in our lives – we’re talking about eternity, we’re talking about the consequences of all that we’re facing right now – what is the worst thing that can happen to us as a Church? I mean, we go up against the county, we go to the Supreme Court potentially. I mean, what’s the worst thing that could happen to us, MacArthur?

JOHN: Well, the worst thing that could happen to us would be to stop being the Church. The worst thing that could happen to us would be not to be here & not to be proclaiming the WORD of GOD, not to be living to the honor of CHRIST, not to be the shining light on the hill. We need to do this. And the world is looking at us. The entire world is looking at us. I can tell you that because I don’t know how to do social media, but all the people who do show me all the streams of things. And you know, there’s everything out there – good, bad & indifferent. But the attention of the world is on us.

And I think we’re beginning to see other pastors be strengthened, other pastors say, “Hey, we need to be the Church. We need to open the Church. We need to not be afraid of this effort to terrify people.” This is a massive effort to reset the entire global culture, including the United States of America, & the only way you can do that – doesn’t take an army to conquer a nation, it just takes fear. And it doesn’t even have to be a real fear, it just has to be an artificial fear that people buy into.

So this whole world & this culture is being manipulated in horrendous ways out of fear. And the one thing that we cannot demonstrate is fear, because we don’t have anything to be afraid of. The worst thing that could happen to us is we all go to heaven, & that’s the best thing that could happen to us. Shy of that we’ve got nothing to fear.

AUSTIN: In the year 2000 a book came out with your name on it called Why Government Can’t Save You: An Alternative to Political Activism. Some people have been asking, “MacArthur, has your view of the Christian’s relationship to government changed since then?”

JOHN: No, I take the same view of government that the prophets in the OT took. I take the same view of – well, you heard my view of government today: “YOU call the government to account when it steps out from under the conviction of the true & living GOD.”

I was serious when I said this morning, when I heard the presidential candidate, democratic presidential candidate say if he gets elected he’s going to fill the White House with Muslims, I think he thought that was advancing this culture. But that is where we are, that there is no difference in the mind of leaders in this country between the true GOD & Satan. There’s no difference. You can have GOD or you can Satan, it really doesn’t matter. That’s how far gone we are.

So this isn’t about politics, this isn’t about activism. Activism is where you destroy. In other WORDs, your goal as an activist is to destroy whatever exists that you don’t like & replace it with something else, & you use manipulation & political means or social means to do that. All I want to do is preach the BIBLE to the culture, to its people, to its leaders. And it’s amazing how much has opened up & how many people are willing to hear this. And I am very encouraged when I get a message from the President thanking me for taking the stand I’m taking & telling me that he’s behind me & he’s got my back. That’s pretty amazing to hear.

AUSTIN: Twenty years ago you wrote these WORDs in that book: “Rather than demanding our rights & creating for ourselves a world where we feel safe & accepted, we need to see the deep spiritual needs of the world & concern ourselves with offering people hope through JESUS CHRIST.” That’s what being a living sacrifice is all about.

JOHN: Right. So that was in the era of the moral majority. And I had an issue with the moral majority because it doesn’t matter if you go to hell moral or immoral, it only matters that you go to hell. Doesn’t matter whether you go to hell as a policeman or a prostitute. Doesn’t matter if you go to hell as an unconverted moral man or the dissolute immoral person on the planet, morality doesn’t do anything. But if you push morality, if you just push morality, morality, morality, we’ve got to be moral, we’ve got to be moral, we want to create a moral country, you begin to develop a hostility toward the immoral people. And it was in that era when I wrote that that – I forget the exact year – that I got a call from the White House when George Bush was president. And some White House people had been listening to a sermon I did on “The Deadly Dangers of Moralism, Deadly Dangers of Moralism,” & I got a call to go back there & to talk with them about the fact that they were so hostile toward the other party’s immorality that they had turned the mission field into the enemy.

And the problem with fighting for morality is all you end up with is Phariseeism. If you want to know what the moral majority looks like go to the NT & look at the Pharisees. That’s the moral majority: lost on their way to hell, whited sepulchers, denounced by JESUS, completely moral & totally lost.

So we’re not for morality; that’s what I was talking about this morning. I wasn’t telling people to be moral, I was saying, “You’d better submit to GOD or you’re going to be judged.”

AUSTIN: It’s a stand for righteousness.

JOHN: It’s a stand for righteousness, justice, truth, honesty, worshiping the true & living GOD. Yeah.

AUSTIN: I loved this morning’s sermon, let’s talk a little bit more about it. You took us on kind of a tour of the Psalms & the prophets & even into the future, talking about how the nations must obey JESUS CHRIST, & that they will answer to GOD, not just individuals, but nations; & that’s undeniably clear in SCRIPTURE. It’s part of the motivation for missions: the national focus of the SCRIPTURES that every knee will bow, every tongue confess; we go out into the world. All of that was kind of coming together in this morning’s sermon. It was a tremendous, just look at our responsibility to be that example of worship & righteousness to an unbelieving world.

JOHN: Right, & we have to be like the prophets & we have to warn the rulers of this nation & every other nation of the dire results of turning away from the true & living GOD. That is a formula for judgment, that without remember, unless one comes to faith in CHRIST.

So that’s taking the SCRIPTURE – I know there have been – somebody told me there’s some people who are criticizing, saying, “Well, MacArthur’s looking at government as a theocracy.” No, no. Whoever made that up isn’t thinking very clearly, which is a life career for people on the Internet.

AUSTIN: It doesn’t pay well.

JOHN: No. Yeah. But I wasn’t talk about – there’s only been one theocracy in the history of the world & that was Israel. And when they sinned against GOD, GOD judged them horribly & horrendously; & they’re still under HIS judgment till they come to CHRIST, & He’ll restore them.

The next theocracy will be the millennial reign of JESUS CHRIST. There’s nothing theocratic about the US or any other nation. We’re not talking about a kingdom on this earth ruled by GOD, we’re talking about rulers acknowledging the true GOD for the sake of the blessing that that brings to their people in a temporal sense. And they will be held accountable for that, as will the nations.

AUSTIN: So a theocracy in the past is real, a theocracy to come when JESUS CHRIST rules on HIS throne. In the meantime, we all live in a very pluralistic society. Our neighbors are Jewish & Muslim. And we live in a world where there’s going to be lots of different views of the world. So help us think about how we should relate to both the world around us in light of what you said this morning, the accountability the whole world has, & how we relate to our government that’s not going to be a Christian government ever.

JOHN: Well, it’s a GOD-ordained government. Marriage is a GOD-ordained institution. Government is a GOD-ordained institution, Romans 13, & it’s ordained for the well-being of man, the protection of those who do good & the punishment of those who do evil, so you can have a functioning culture & a functioning society that can enjoy the benefits of common grace & can allow GOD to be seen & manifest in the order of that society, much more so than in the chaos of a dysfunctional society.

But we have one simple job. The role that the Church plays is to put on display the transforming power of CHRIST. What you heard in those testimonies tonight: transformed lives, just totally transformed lives. The Church is that collection of transformed people, & they’re letting their light so shine before men that they may see their good works & glorify their FATHER who’s in heaven. Or as Paul says, “You’re lights in the world.” The Church then is light, & we talked about that a few weeks ago as salt. It has a subtle influence of righteousness, & it has an open declaration of truth & being light.

But also, the Church is primarily called to proclaim the GOSPEL, & that starts with focusing on the true GOD. So if I were to look at my responsibility to America, what I did this morning would be what I would call pre-evangelism. It’s not actually going through the details of the GOSPEL, but it’s saying there’s only one GOD, & HE has revealed HIMSELF in HIS Word, & you need to come to HIM & worship HIM & honor HIM & obey HIM or you will be judged. You will forfeit blessing in this life, & you’ll forfeit blessing forever in the life to come. So you start pre-evangelism by your definition of GOD.

I remember when I was in Moscow some years ago, & I sat down with a bunch of Russian pastors around a table. And these are, you know, godly guys who’ve gone through a lot of suffering & persecution in Russia. One of them said, “The Muslims worship the same GOD we do, right?” Now that’s a pastor, a faithful pastor. And I said, “No, the GOD of the BIBLE is GOD, & the god of Islam is Satan. Satan, not GOD, Satan.” But that’s sometimes hard for people in the Middle East to get because the term “Allah” is the term “god”; & you see it even in a BIBLE in Arabic.

So we have to begin with sorting out the true & living GOD, which is what I was saying today, & calling nations to acknowledge the true & living GOD. I’m not asking America to go into dietary laws. They were basically set aside in the NT, we don’t need to bring them back. I’m not asking them to adhere to any of the sort of separational behaviors that GOD gave Israel to keep them separated from the Pagans; those were all set aside: “Don’t let anybody hold you to a new moon, a festival, a Sabbath,” you know, any of those externals.

AUSTIN: And you don’t even expect them to act like Christians.

JOHN: No, I don’t. But I expect that if they’re ever going to come to the knowledge of the true GOD, whoever comes to GOD must believe that HE is – right? – Hebrews. So you have to start by believing in the right GOD.

So what I did today is so utterly foundational by saying there’s only one GOD, & if you don’t come to that one GOD, you are under judgment. And if you’re a leader, that judgment is multiplied because you’re leading an entire population of people away from the true & living GOD. But that is the norm. That’s what Romans 1 is saying: “When they knew GOD, they glorified HIM not as GOD.” They basically replaced HIM with created things – you know, animism & gods of their own making – & the wrath of GOD is unleashed on that.

So I don’t – you would see this, of course – there’s a lot of evangelical preaching about, “Come to JESUS & He’ll fix your life.” But there was recently a survey – you probably saw it – of evangelical Christians, & a 3rd of them thought JESUS was a created being. Well, if you think JESUS is a created being, you’re not an evangelical, you’re a heretic. That is a satanic lie. But that’s what a 3rd of evangelicals believe.

So what I’m trying to do at some point is go back to Square ONE; & that was Square ONE today. That’s why you go to the OT, right? The OT has got 2 simple messages & they basically were laid out by GOD in Deuteronomy – you’re familiar with them, very familiar with them – 26 to 29, right? You come to GOD & you obey HIS WORD & – what? – you’re blessed. You disobey & – what? – cursed. That’s what the OT is telling you from beginning to end: you obey GOD, you’re blessed; you disobey GOD, you’re cursed.

That was essentially the summation. I was going to go there this morning, but I ran out of time on that one. But I’m trying to start where you have to start. He that cometh to GOD must believe that HE is, that HE is the GOD He is & not some figment of somebody’s imagination or some false god.

AUSTIN: And the survey you’re referring to is done by a reputable evangelical organization, Ligonier. They call it “The State of Theology.”

JOHN: Yeah. Actually LifeWay did it, & they passed it on to Ligonier. It was kind of a LifeWay, which is Southern Baptist survey.

I honestly don’t like those surveys because I think they’re revealing in that a 3rd of evangelicals think JESUS was not GOD, but HE's a created being by GOD. When you say that’s what evangelicals believe you’ve just created a new kind of evangelicalism. So the effect on me is that’s tragic; those aren’t evangelicals, those are heretics. The effect on everybody else is, “Oh, I could be an evangelical because I don’t believe HE's GOD either.”

So now you have just widened the tent, & they give those questions & give you a percentage of surveys; & what those surveys actually do is recreate a false form of Christianity in people’s minds. You would think that they’d be as discerning as we are & say, “Wow, that’s a tragedy.” But the undiscerning person’s going to say, “Hey, I can be one of those,” & you wind up with a trojan horse.

AUSTIN: Do you think the WORD “evangelical” is even useful anymore? Are we evangelical?

JOHN: Well, euaggelizō means to preach the GOSPEL. It’s a good WORD. But we have to keep changing WORDs.

R. C. Sproul & I used to talk about this a lot. We’d be on a golf course & he’d say, “Johnny Mac,” he’d say, “we’ve got to come up with a new WORD because evangelical’s no good anymore. It’s been coopted by all kinds of people.” So one day he said, “I got it. We’re going to be imputationists.” I said, “That’s not going to work, R. C., they’re going to think we’re cutting off people’s limbs. No, that’s...” “Yeah,” he said, “you’re probably right.” So I think he went to heaven without a WORD, you know. We never got that conversation finished. We’re still trying to find a WORD.

AUSTIN: We’re Christians.

JOHN: True believers, may be 2 words.

AUSTIN: Yeah, & we’re evangelical in that we –

JOHN: Preach the GOSPEL.

AUSTIN: Yeah.

JOHN: Yeah.

AUSTIN: So, again, this morning I think was an epic journey where you brought all people & all nations under accountability & condemnation through the witness of the SCRIPTURE to the one true GOD through HIS SON JESUS CHRIST. There’s no other way; you made that very clear. So in thinking about how individuals & nations need to respond to that, & how individuals need to respond to that, in light of all that’s happening in our culture – I’m going back to that politics idea a little bit – there’s maybe 2 extremes. People could make the idols that you talked about in this morning’s message. They can make politics & idol & think that’s the secret: “If we can just get control.” That was what you were warning about with the moral majority.

JOHN: Yeah, they’re not our enemy. They’re not our enemy, they’re our mission field.

AUSTIN: Right. So political idolatry over on one side, & then some kind of political, maybe, apathy or ambivalence. Is the way the Christian relates to government somewhere in the middle there?

JOHN: Well, I would say we only relate to government on one basis, & I said that this morning. Those that uphold the true GOD & HIS law, we affirm; those that do not, we cannot affirm. It’s that simple. It’s not really economics in & of itself. But I’ll promise you this: somebody who upholds the true GOD & HIS WORD will have the right economic view of personal responsibility, will have the right moral view. There is no such thing as one who gives honor to GOD & upholds HIS law who wants to forward the LGBTQ agenda or any other deviant agenda.

So I think at one point in the message, I can’t remember exactly, I said the only distinctive mark that we’re looking for with anybody who’s running for any position of power is, “What is his view, & what has been a demonstration that he holds that view with integrity of the law of the true & living GOD?” Sometimes a Catholic will do that. Sometimes a Protestant will not do that. So that’s the only issue. We can discuss economics. We can discuss the error of giving away too much & not expecting people to earn it & having some sense of dignity in the accomplishment of that. Those are other issues to be discussed; & the BIBLE discusses those as well. But it’s never politics to me. Politics by definition is the art of compromise. The only way politics works is through compromise.

So historically the idea in America was to get these 2 parties to give & take; & if you could get them to give & take, you could work out a common agenda. We have seen that come to a grinding halt. Those 2 parties don’t work together at all. They’re far worse than any time in my life because the animus & the angst is so deep because it’s no longer a discussion about economics, about labor & ownerships, it’s all moral. It’s all, “Will you accept the LGBTQ agenda? Will you accept transgender? Will you accept homosexual marriage? Will you accept the abortion of babies maybe even after they’re born, the killing of an unwanted baby?”

But that’s not politics, that’s morality. So for us as Christians it’s easier now than maybe it was 25 or 30 years ago to navigate the balance between power & labor, but which doesn’t seem to be the issue today; it’s all moral. And while we condemn the immorality & we support those who are moral & will uphold the law of the true & living GOD, we don’t hate those people, because they’re not the enemy, they’re GOD’s enemy, but they’re our mission field. And we’re told to pray for them, & the assumption is to pray for their salvation.

By the way, I hope what I said reaches the ears of some of the people who need to hear what I said today. But that’s the business the LORD is in. I’m in manufacturing, HE's in distribution. I come up with the sermon & HE does what HE wants with it.

AUSTIN: You were on a Skype call or a Zoom call, whatever it is, this week with a bunch of pastors.

JOHN: Yeah.

AUSTIN: The Master’s Fellowship, & I was listening in on that, & you spoke to them about some of the questions they had in their Churches; & so I wanted you to take a few minutes & talk to our Church tonight. There’s still some folks who aren’t with us yet. They’re either not comfortable or they work in health care & they can’t come into the crowd quite yet, or they’re immunocompromised. Can you be a healthy Church member & be livestreaming in this season? Do you want to say something to those folks?

JOHN: Yeah. It’s no different than any other year. It’s no different than any other flu season, you know, you’ve got to be careful if you have issues; & I understand that. I’ve never made an issue out of it.

I think there’s a lot more going on than a virus for sure. As I have been saying, California rate of COVID is one one00th of one percent. It’s infinite testimony. We have the lowest death rate in the continental United States of any state from this, & it’s a lot lower than the numbers indicate, & the average age of – or the mean age of the people who die with, not from COVID, but die with it is, I think, 80. So we understand that older people –

AUSTIN: And we like octogenarians around here.

JOHN: Thank you. Thank you. But I don’t want to tell people – look, I would tell anybody if you don’t feel, well stay home, if you feel like you have a compromised immune system & you don’t want to expose yourself to something. But that’s just normal common sense life. You don’t have to buy this fear that we’re facing this unheard of death that’s lingering around us. We’ve been, what, 9 weeks at Grace Church. You’re here, you’re not sick; & I don’t know what else we can say. You don’t have anything to fear. But anybody who’s sensible & doesn’t feel well, of course. And if you feel a little bit safer, you know, with a mask or something, that’s your choice to make. You might want to read a little more about that.

AUSTIN: We’re aware of how you feel about the masks.

JOHN: Well, it’s not so much how I feel about the mask, yeah, it’s how I feel –

AUSTIN: Don’t mind them as much, but he questions their efficacy.

JOHN: No, it’s how I feel about the mask you’ve had in your pocket for 3 months.

AUSTIN: This one. This one’s, this one’s 6 months old actually.

JOHN: I don’t think you take that one into surgery.

AUSTIN: I also think my beard will kind of prevent its effectiveness. So let’s talk to people who are outside of our Church & who – I mean, there’s a lot of people in our culture who are genuinely afraid.

JOHN: Oh, yeah, that’s the idea. Yeah, that’s the idea.

AUSTIN: I love Hebrews CH 2, v.15, that the reason JESUS became incarnate.

JOHN: Was remove the fear of death.

AUSTIN: Yeah, to take us out from that slavery that enslaved us all our lives: the fear of death. Talk to our people about talking to their culture about – it’s not that we’re daredevils, that’s not what’s going on. We’ve always lived without a fear of death.

JOHN: Yeah, it reminds me of what Groucho Marx says, “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

What is there to fear in death? Death, far better to depart & be with CHRIST. And I understand that might be the perspective of somebody my age & not somebody, yeah, a lot younger. But we understand even more than that. We understand that the years of our lives are determined by GOD, & that’s all written in HIS book. He wrote down the number when we weren’t even born – right? – when we didn’t even exist. When we were being woven wonderfully in the womb HE numbered our days.

Somebody asked me the other day if I get mad, & I said, “What would I get mad about? What is there to be mad about? What? I’m blessed beyond comprehension. I’m going to heaven. I’m watching the providence & the power of GOD unfold. What’s there to be mad about?”

“Well, do you worry about things?” “What’s there to worry about? What’s there to fear? My years are predetermined & they’re in GOD’s hands, & there’s perfect calm in my heart. I’m not concerned about what the courts might do or what punishment or whether somebody’s going to haul me off to jail or whatever. That would just be the next adventure.”

I had a friend years ago, Ralph Keiper, & he had a little favorite thing he did when he’d fly. He would get the stewardess & he would say, “What would happen if this plane crashed?” Well, you don’t normally say that on a flight to the stewardess. But it was the way he introduced the GOSPEL. She would say, “Well, sir, I don’t want to talk about that.” “Are you afraid of that?” “Well, isn’t everybody?” “No. For you there would be something to fear. For me, that would just be a novel way to get into heaven.” He did that in a kind of an off-handed kind of humorous way.

But, yeah, just to understand that your life is already determined if you’re faithful, unless you go before your time because of sin. So just be faithful, be joyful, be sensible. You know, you don’t want to walk into a contagious ward & be foolish. You don’t want to lie down on the freeway & say, “Okay, GOD, it’s not my time yet, so make sure they go around me.”

But, yeah, I think we should be joyful. And that’s what people pick up when they come here is there’s so much joy on Sunday mornings in this place. People are really amazed at that. There’s not fear, there’s just joy; it’s unbounded joy. And they see all these kids all over the place & families, & there’s just no fear. And that’s for a couple of reasons: one, we know this thing isn’t what they’re telling us it is; & we also know that GOD’s in control of all of our lives. And that’s part of our testimony in this day, & is why I’m telling pastors like on that call, “Open your Church, have Church.” I don’t think the powers that be are going to let up on any of this until people finally say, “We’re not doing it anymore. We’re just not going to do this.”

I think businesses, it’s just crushing what’s happening to people who have spent their whole life building a business, until they say, “I’m sorry, I’m going to open my store, I’m going to open my shop, I’m going back to business.” Until people finally say, “We’ve had it, we’re not buying it anymore,” & there’s an overwhelming movement back, they’re going to keep the control, because control is the ultimate head trip for somebody who wants power.

AUSTIN: Mac, I admire your faith, & I think that this season isn’t different than other seasons because you’re a black-and-white guy: you read the BIBLE, you believe the BIBLE, you respond to the BIBLE. And what I’ve seen in your life is you treat providence the same way. When things happen in our world that seem so, to us, 20/20 or unguessable or erratic, you have this same demeanor you have toward SCRIPTURE: you see this is GOD’s will. And it’s something I think is so helpful for our Church & for me personally, as you lead us & you model that faithful response to both GOD’s WORD & to providence. So, thank you, Pastor, you’re taking good care of us in these days.

JOHN: Thank you. Thank you.

AUSTIN: Mac, you got a final WORD?

JOHN: Well, I would just say just maybe a good wrap-up point is this is an incredible, incredible moment in the history of the Church for you to be here. Don’t you feel that way? I mean, this is amazing to be a part of this & to have the focus on us. I’m glad they’re looking at a place that exalts the WORD of GOD, that believes in GOD, has strong faith, mature believers, kind of fearless, willingness to stand in the will of GOD & take what comes. But do it with love.

You know, I was saying to Jenna Ellis who’s our constitutional attorney, I was saying twice in my life this has happened. Back in 1978 there was a case called the Nally case, & I, along with some of our other pastors were sued for clergy malpractice. This was the 1st lawsuit against clergy for clergy malpractice. There’s medical malpractice, but there was no such thing as clergy malpractice. This was a novel invention. And what had happened was a young man, a UCLA graduate who was coming to our Church & taking some classes in seminary had taken his own life. And his parents sued the Church. They said that he had a predisposition to depression, & my preaching on sin had exacerbated his depression & brought about his suicide. So we were culpable for that suicide.

So we were hit with this lawsuit. And clergy malpractice was a threat to all Churches because – & on the other side, the people that came along with the family that sued us, were the psychiatrists & the psychologists who wanted the Church out of the counseling business so they could have all the money. They don’t like the idea that religious organizations do counseling. And amicus briefs were filed on our side by the rabbis & the priests who wanted to continue to be able to counsel people in their religious communities. And so this case went for 10 years, & it went ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court; & we won at the California State Supreme Court level. And they pushed it to the U.S. Supreme Court, & the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of the California Supreme Court.

That was in 1988 I think when it was finished, & there has not been a whisper of clergy of malpractice since 1988. That was a watershed decision by the Supreme Court of California upheld by the United States Supreme Court that saved endless Churches from being sued for something a pastor said in a counseling situation to someone. You can’t even comprehend how critical a case that was. It was absolutely critical. There’s a book on it written – published by the University of Kansas on the Nally case – Nally versus Grace Community Church if you want to read about it.

But again, the LORD picked us to fight that because we had Sam Erickson who was probably the top constitutional lawyer in the country was one of our elders. He’s since gone to be with the LORD, & he knew that Constitution very well, & we won that on the First Amendment. Here we are all these years later & this has come, & again we’re the Church that’s standing in the gap; & the LORD has brought along Jenna Ellis who’s just an unparalleled constitutional lawyer to be on our team. And I think the LORD picks carefully who fights these battles for the sake of other Churches.

So I’m anxious to see this thing keep moving ahead so that we can protect the future right for Churches to be the Church in a dying culture. If ever this culture needed the true Church it’s now. And the good part of it is, it’s going to filter out the weak & shallow Churches, hopefully, which may be what the LORD has in mind – purging.

AUSTIN: Pastor, will you pray for us?

JOHN: FATHER, we do thank YOU for allowing us to leave the darkness & come to the light by YOUR grace & your sovereign will. Thank YOU for bringing us to this place for such a time as this in history. Thank YOU for this blessed & beloved congregation of people & all those who recently have joined with us. Thank YOU for saving us, sanctifying us, giving us the hope of eternal glory. Thank YOU for using us to proclaim the excellencies of JESUS CHRIST in the world around us. Thank YOU for pouring out blessing on us so that people can see the transforming power of the GOSPEL.

We ask that YOU would keep YOUR hand on Grace Church. May we never do anything that would remove us from the circle of YOUR blessing. And we pray that YOU will move the hearts of all who sit in judgment on us. May they recognize that YOU are the true & living GOD, & YOU expect men to rule righteously & justly. We would pray that YOU would even use this time & this season to bring to salvation some of the leaders that are a part of this very, very challenging opportunity. We would pray for the salvation of all those who come near this Church, & may they hear the truth & repent & believe. Continue to protect us & use us for YOUR glory, we pray in CHRIST’s name. Amen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEOHcBRNJYs https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/70-51

#la pinta #New Mexico

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self-loving-vampire · 4 years

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I was only young when I played Ultima VII but I had already ventured to the depths of dungeons that dripped with dread, partaken in interstellar war and defended my home planet from invaders. Like Roy Batty and all people who grew up with games, I had seen and done so much. Between adventures in space, I’d rezone my commercial districts or build a new bus route, leaving room in the schedules for occasional postal service functions. Yes, I had lived a full life already, but I had never watched a man clad in the finest clothes in Britain eat an egg and then belch in the face of a barmaid, so who can say I had experienced anything worthwhile at all?

Gaming had certainly made me a busy boy, often alternating between saviour and mayor, but sometimes it was hard to shake the feeling that I was a busy boy working away in a collection of somnolent worlds. So often, no matter how much I enjoyed my progress through a game, I couldn’t help but feel I was moving through something static and linear. I didn’t (and still don’t) object to that but as the games I played began to increase in visual complexity, their crude borders only seemed more obvious than before and their inhabitants’ lack of life more acute.

That feeling isn’t a relic, it persists today. Stand in the middle of a junction in Liberty City and it’s possible to feel a connection with the place. Pedestrians, cars, overheard conversations, the dropped coffee and stumble of a jostled passerby. Turn to an empty street though, glance to the side, then back again. Often enough, rows of vehicles will have appeared, like flowers from a magician’s sleeve, a trick that garishly announces, ‘this is illusion’, demanding your attention because the player is not always a protagonist. Often, the player is the audience.

I get it. I understand why. But sometimes I don’t want to be the audience, the centre around which the world revolves and at which events are directed. Sometimes I want to be a participant. That’s something that multiplayer games allow but they are rarely about exploration and existence, concentrating instead on competition and destruction. Online roleplaying games should be the perfect antidote but the structure of the majority reverts to treating each player as a hero in his own story. Quests and plots are usually directed at the player, to be activated at will, rather than being happenings in a wider context.

We’re going back to a time long before that was even a possibility though. Playing games with strangers in other countries? We were lucky if our modems didn’t squawk themselves into a death spiral whenever we connected to the local BBS to talk about games. The idea of actually playing them with someone who wasn’t located in the same building was more exciting than watching Flight of the Navigator for the seventieth time.

Ultima VII was the first game I played that made me feel I was part of a world that didn’t revolve around me and I believe it remains one of the best examples of its type. It’s an RPG that starts with a murder investigation rather than a dungeon crawl and that immediately marked it out. My first goal in Britannia was to talk to people, find out what made them tick and work out just what the heck was going on. While I was doing this, those people would work, eat and sleep. They were trying to get on with their lives and I was the irritating do-gooder poking my nose into their business.

It was only when I headed north to the capital that I really became convinced I was experiencing something completely new though. Travelling through marshes and farms, I was attacked by wild animals and monsters. But it wasn’t a gambit designed to allow me to level up; these were hungry wolves out for the kill rather than piñatas full of experience points and loot. Sometimes, if they were badly injured, they would try to flee, leaving a trail of blood. Their mark on the world.

Arrival in Britain was like entering a metropolis for the first time. Shops, taverns, a museum, the castle, crowds of people in the streets and businesses. There was nothing else like it. Of course, I look back on it now and realise that there were about four streets, one of each type of shop and just enough people to fulfill basic functions. But that doesn’t matter because here are some of the awesome things that I did.

I visited a bakery to buy some fresh bread because I felt me and my companions had been living on stale rations too long, having slept on a bedroll for two nights in a row. It was time to treat the whole party to a bit of the high life. While we were there, I learned how to bake by watching the process carried out by an NPC. Flour from a sack, onto a counter top, water added, rolled into dough, placed in an oven, left to bake, removed, voila! I think that’s all the steps. I’m not going to look it up. The memory is too good as it stands.

When does that happen? When was the last time you played a game and inadvertently learned how to create a useful object in the world simply by watching a character perform the steps to craft it? In fact, there’s that term: ‘crafting’. Ultima VII didn’t claim to have ‘crafting’, it just figured that if you had all the right ingredients, why the heck wouldn’t you be able to bake a loaf of bread?

After learning to bake, I learned to make clothes. More crafting that wasn’t crafting, just interacting with the world. Ultima VII was like the Duke Nukem 3D of RPGs, except it wasn’t about taking a leak, turning out a light and then smashing everything in sight, it was about rearranging the books on a shelf or making a dress for one of your companions and gifting it to her, not in the hope that it would provide enough points to unlock a glass-eyed sexytime cutscene but because it felt like the right thing to do.

I also went to the pub a lot. The Blue Boar, specifically, which is still the finest drinking establishment in all gaming and I am willing to get into a barfight about that. With live music nightly, speedy service and an extensive menu of delicacies, there’s no better way to while away the hours.

In fact, it’s at The Blue Boar that everything came together. Not at the Black Gate or in some grotty underground cave; right there, sitting with my friends on either side and a drunk shopkeeper opposite. As the evening turns to night the place really fills up. There’s the baker, who I learned a new trade from earlier, he’s arrived just in time to grab a plate of meat and potatoes, and trade jokes with his mates. And there, over in the corner on his own, that’s the tailor, downing tankard after tankard. Business must be very good. Or very bad.

I could sit in The Blue Boar for ages, making up stories for all the patrons, knowing that I’d be able to track them down the next day. They weren’t spawned at the doors, forced into existence so that the pub would feel like a pub and them snuffed out of existence as they left, they were the same people who would be walking the streets the next day and selling me goods.

And there was always at least one among them, could have been anyone, who would order an egg. It’d just arrive, plonked down in front of them unceremoniously, a massive plate with a single egg in the middle of it. Even though it didn’t matter that they were eating an egg, in that it wouldn’t have any effect on their social standing or health, it really did matter because it never failed to make me smile.

Which poor bastard is on the eggs tonight, I’d think, watching as sweetmeats from every corner of the world were laid out in front of the gathering. And then, BAM, there it would be. Egg on a plate. No cress. No mayo. The purchaser wolfing it down, hoping no one had noticed, trying to hide their shame.

Then people would stand up, say their goodbyes and leave. Closing time. And time for me to find a bed for the night or, more likely, to trudge back into the wilds looking for some fresh adventure. I’d always be back though, to The Blue Boar, because it felt like a haven. I had friends there, and warmth and food, I was part of something. I was no longer the audience, I was an actor sharing a stage.

Britannia wasn’t very large compared to more recent game worlds or the ludicrousness of Daggerfall but it did have variety and it felt like a place full of life. In a way that made me more eager to protect it but it also made me far more willing to become part of that life. I had to force myself to deliver the promise I held as the Avatar because I’d rather have been one of the ordinary folks. Hunting and drinking, dining and dancing. Ultima is all about the Virtues and one of the greatest virtues of this most excellent entry in the series was its ability to make being a hero so hard. Not because of high-powered enemies and ridiculous grind, but because it offered a world full of distractions instead of arrows pointing to the bad guys.

What other RPG could I write this much about without talking about stats, levelling, equipment and combat? I haven’t even talked about plot except in the vaguest terms. But I have talked about stories, and while they may not involve death knights and ancient artifacts, they’re the ones I remember best.

More than anything, Ultima VII was the game that first made me realise I preferred worlds that moved around me rather than worlds that I simply moved through. The way that worlds come alive for me can be in the history-changing sweep of a grand strategy game or something as simple as the addition of day-night cycles. It can be an attempt to simulate an ecosystem or something as simple as enemies actually dropping the equipment I can see they were carrying seconds before they crumpled to the ground. It all adds to the sense of existing in a world, which adds to my enjoyment of creating narrative in that world. And Ultima VII was one of the places that form of creativity first sparked for me.

#long post #ultima 7 #rpg

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