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needs-to-stop-looking-at-valves · 3 years

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Transformers Siege (WFC) character review!(1/2)

Instead of separating from decepticons and autobots (mainly because of the Predacons and maximals), I’m going to put them in order of which bots I really feel like talking about the most! So, here we go!

*watch for swearing, spoilers, and possible thirst.

/Also, alt modes will NOT be available for this series. They kinda don’t transform too much, and when they do, they hardly let me get a shot, sooo/

Optimus Prime!!;

This Optimus did a full 180 for not only my opinion, but for his own characterization. This Optimus started out as impulsive, reckless, ignorant of other’s opinions, and quite frankly, was just frustrating to deal with. He was the one who essentially sent the Cybertron into a total fuck storm, and as such, doomed MANY lives, including the one of his love, Elita one. Honestly, Optimus is kinda. Dumb, honestly? He literally sent the live source of Cybertron into the vastness of space, just to keep Megatron from winning the war. Literally, EVERYONE hated him at the start, from Bumblebee to Ratchet. Then, get this- he learned from his mistakes. From Skylynx, to the Optimus Primal, to the soul of Elita, to Optimus and Ratchet and even Megatron- he had so many influences telling him what he did wrong. Towards the end of the series, he became the classic, noble, somewhat self conscious mech we all grew to know and love. Honestly? 9/10. He isn’t perfect. Far from it, but damn Optimus KNOWS this, and that’s so great- I can go all day, you guys (also that one moment where he asked Megatron to forgive him at gunpoint, such a good fucking scene).

Elita one!!;

I love her. SO much. She’s a QUEEN. She has been ignored, she has been held hostage, she’s been punched and kicked and shot at-my girl has been through hell. And she carries it WELL. Not only is she FINE, but she is bold, smart, and she is STUBBORN in her beliefs. She is also a natural born leader, and I honestly and really appreciate her. Her death was honestly one of the sadder moments, but her soul’s reunion with Optimus was one of the sweetest things I’ve ever seen. I wish we saw more of her, honestly and desperately (plus she has so many character interactions, there’s SO many ways you can go about her character, it’s incredible). 10/10 my girl is a fighter and she was so ride or die for Optimus (even though I lowkey ship her with those three little cons, ya’ll know the ones) 💕.

Megatron!!(Siege);

Every Megatron has something different about them. For example, this series has two Megatron’s (three because Galvatron), but we’re talking about the Megatron that we start the series with. The sort of ‘G1’ Megatron. This Megatron has a few...issues. Lips aside, this Megatron has a few things I’d change about him. He’s insane, he’s incredibly selfish, and honestly? His character interactions leave something to be desired, in my opinion. However, he does have a blend of good traits. You guys remember Prime Wars Megatron? How this man refused to go down without being ‘fuck you’ to his opponent? This Megatron had those moments, telling Galvatron right the fuck off when he tried to present him with a decision to join him. I love a Megatron that refuses to back down. I also appreciated the regret he clearly has for stuff he did (we all remember what happened to that one power plant), and I appreciate that In a Megatron. Couple that with the pompous villain aesthetic (he had his own pictures hung up on a wall for fucks sakes). However, he isn’t my favorite Megatron (that’s a tie between Prime/Prime Wars Megatron). 7/10. Fun in some cases, but not someone I think I’ll deem my favorite Megatron.

Megatron!!(beast wars);

This Megatron was kinda doomed from the start. From the issue with his VA (not everyone can be David Kaye, but still), to the odd way he simped over the other Megatron, kinda made me dislike seeing him on the screen. Don’t me wrong, he wasn’t AWFUL, and like everyone else on the show he LOOKED good and his VA did...okay. Listen, he had a REALLY good simp voice. But beast wars Megatron actually saw the old Megatron as an old fool. Now he suddenly worships him? It kinda makes this Megatron look pathetic, and I’m not really into it. 4/10. I’m sorry, but I appreciated him more when he wasn’t on screen.

Ironhide!!;

He did like. Nothing in this series. He only really spoke to tell Optimus what he did. He’s just so cute and I liked hearing him speak. Not the same Ironhide voice, but still I love him terribly 10/10 he is but a baby waby.

Sideswipe!!;

He did like, two things in total in this series, and BOTH made me feel something. He also misses his brother Sunny and it honestly hurt me. Someone hold and support him, 8/10 this precious bundle of red-

Skyfire!!;

This Skyfire actually starts off as not only a decepticon, but a HIGH ranking decepticon, pretty much Megatron’s second hand. He was pretty decepticon motivated, up until Megatron decided the whole genocide of an entire race was too much for her. Honestly his role was a LOT like MTMTE Impactor in this series. A close believer changed to the opposite side, because Megatron’s dumbass got carried away. This Skyfire died, but up until that, he was determined to help the cause. He was literally willing to have a bomb implanted into him just to prove he was with the autobots. He was bold, stubborn, and everyone he interacted with was GREAT. 8/10. Tbh, probably my second favorite Skyfire (hard to compete with Cyberverse).

Impactor!!;

Pretty much the first time I’ve seen him in a show (at least noticeably) and I appreciated his little debut here. Impactor betrayed the decepticon, and in the best way possible. Not because he thought the cause was wrong, but because he got a super hot medic boyfriend, who JUST so happens to be an autobot. Seriously, ratchet fixed his booboos and Impactor just went ‘Listen I’d die for you’. Did anyone but Ratchet trust him? Nope. Did Mirage like him? Nope. Did we give a shit because he was very literally, ride or die for Ratchet? Also nope. Like this dude deadass was willing to go through the ‘we don’t trust decepticons’ bullshit, JUST because Ratchet swept him off his feet. 10/10, Impactor didn’t deserve to die, he deserved to be the hostile gay to suit the hostile lesbian that was Blackarachnia. 💜

Ratchet!!;

This Ratchet was like. The ONLY Ratchet I’ve ever seen, who just fucking hated Optimus. Seriously, this dude just wanted to be alone with his husband. Wanted NO part of Optimus, no part of Bumblebee, NO ONE. He’s sarcastic, bitter, and he WILL give you shit over Impactor or any of his patients. He’s a sour/sweet old man and even though I wish I saw him more, I love him and adore him with my big ol’ heart. 9/10, everyone can eat my ass I’m not over Impactor still.

Wheeljack!!;

Chaotic bastard. Smartass, dumbass, gay ass, and the first character to say ‘ass’, I love him. He doesn’t play much in terms of actual plot stuff (he’s like, a support character tbh) but the few times he was on screen, I loved him. It was like someone gave Danny Devito a PHD. 8/10, just needed to be able to give more one liners like he deserved.

#reviews #wheeljack #ratchet #impactor #skyfire #sideswipe #ironhide #megatron #elita one #optimus

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theteej · 3 years

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on white performative anxiety on election night

Ok, here we go. I had decided that I would not watch the election results unfold last night because quite frankly--it was clear that it would be a close race, and just like with sports games it takes a particular type of narcissistic imagining to think that constant watching will change the impact of an event simply because you watch it. Also, this isn't a sports game--it's people's lives. So I ordered a pizza and worked through three unread X-Men collections (decent, by the way--especially the new take on Marauders).

By 8pm I was getting frequent texts, and despite putting my phone in another room, i heard the buzzing enough to get me off the couch. I logged onto social media to see a flood of white Democrats having a complete meltdown as if the election had been called. And that same existential dread/despair cataclysmically reverberating across social media in New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia. I was so confused. What the actual fuck were people upset about? He hadn't conceded. Most states hadn't been called. The responses felt so much like being in high school or college where I'd studied for exams and felt reasonably prepared but then got overwhelmed in the psychic energy of performed anxiety/fear/studying that everyone did around finals. Hell, in pre-covid times I had to limit my time on campus as a professor in the last week because the palpable miasma of fear/anxiety/performative freaking out was too much for me, even though I WAS JUST GRADING THE FINALS. Honestly, I was baffled. Why were people like this? They knew that Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania were not going to count their early voting polls first, and the in person would screw Republican. WHY WERE THEY FREAKING OUT?

And then it slowly dawned on me. They really had believed their own lies. They thought there was going to be a magical, massive blue wave of repudiation of President Trump, after the xenophobia, the racism, the wanton cruelty, the vicious fascism. They needed to believe that this moment would redeem them, this electoral moment would fix them. And they were mourning, almost disproportionately, this sense of utter collapse. They were treating the reality of the closeness of the election as somehow equivalent to the idea of a Trump re-election victory. What the actual hell.

I started to see a lot of "I can't believe it's even this close" statuses. I put down my pizza in annoyance and kept reading. There were so many variations on the time-honoured "this is not who we are" canard so many people tell themselves about America. People were mourning, in real time, the lie they'd told themselves. There was a fundamental believe that Trumpism, the vile populism and toxic mix of racism and other oppressive elements, was an "aberration" that could be corrected. There was a willing disbelief that this was not part of the very core of this country, that 'America' as a concept is a bad place--one made entirely possible through enslavement and genocide and one that was absolutely fixable through a simple electoral action. And it's wild, because that's never been the case. Not now, not ever. I remember in 2008, being overwhelmed by white people wanting to celebrate Obama with me, but I was also keenly aware of racism and the fact that my own state had just voted to take away same-sex marriage. Dr. Jim Barrett, a professor in my graduate program at Illinois, stopped me, a new, black graduate student who he didn't know, and said, "isn't the election great?" and i said, "I'm from California, and I'm more worried also about how easily people can dismiss queer rights." He paused for a second, and then said, "but we did it this time with Obama!" Here was a full-grown man with a PhD in American history casually telling a black graduate student (WHOSE NAME HE DID NOT EVEN KNOW) how great it was to be able to absolve oneself of responsibility via an electoral process, and to imagine an America without self-criticism, just redemption.

And that's what was at the heart of this baffling pre-capitulation, one that exceeded even the easy stereotype of the always-losing Democrats. BIDEN HADN'T EVEN LOST. He had (and as of now still) leads in electoral votes! But everyone was moaning, gnashing teeth, and grieving. But what they were really grieving was their own innocence. Their naïve assumption that they could be the heroes in a story, in a history of violence that was expressly built for them, even if they wanted to deny it. Trumpism sells a fantasy of white revanchism, of recovery, and even those whites who imagine otherwise can't exorcise it via a ballot because the entire system of it is at its core, still violent and racist. Y'all seriously wanted a parade, a movement repudiating this. What America do you live in? Did we not go through the same black summer? Of course we didn't. You saw this summer as a moment of profound alliance building and a recapturing of a mythical value of inclusion. We saw it with surprise--oh white people either just realized that black lives are cheap, or they were sufficiently bothered/bored enough to perform about it.

So much of this is a navel-gazing performance of anxiety. 2016 was traumatizing for people who didn't want to think Trumpism was America, but it IS. And it's done in your name.

This morning, I saw even more of this. A friend and colleague wrote a lengthy status about her anxiety about it all and hope that 'good' would prevail, and bemoaned the lack of a real wave of change. A friend, family member, or colleague of theirs immediately commented with pro-Trump sloganeering. And she did nothing. She kept commenting. This broke me for a second. How could she not see what a joke all of this was? What she was? Here she was bemoaning a lack of some sort of prelapsarian goodness, trying to make some sort of "we'll get through this message," and she couldn't even see what she was doing. There was no acknowledgment, no censuring, no pushback, no RESPONSE to the Trump sloganeering, because she could not fathom the idea that this was connected to HER. The disappointment she felt, that so many people expressed on social media? It was performative, it was a mourning one's inability to distance oneself from genocidal, suicidal logics of all of this populist turpitude. She couldn't even denounce the very Trumpism on her own fucking wall, in response to her comment. Of course there was no blue wave, of course there was no rebuking. Why should there be? There are no consequences. Just white folk hoping civility will save them, with the same baffling surety as King Canute commanding the waves to cease lapping at the feet of his throne. The whole event felt like a farce--people attempting to distance themselves from a violence done in their name by refusing to even pushback against he very violence that endangers millions of people, incarcerates children, kills with impunity.

I feel, once again, like I'm the one person who felt confident for an exam during finals week. Everyone's freaking the fuck out, performing, demonstrating a goodness, trying to foolishly imagine the country as good. I think back to March, when black voters in South Carolina made very clear what was going to happen. White people were not coming to save them. Electoral legerdemain was not going to happen, there was no last minute deus ex machina. There was the brutal calculus that many people don't see the fascism as bad, and remain so insulated that they don't care if the brute returns, so much as the lesser peoples are put in their place. Those black voters saw that their best chance was the utter uninspiring, safe, and milquetoast flavour of whiteness, Joe Biden. And they were right. We can push that one, perhaps. Make changes. But this was always going to be a bitter slog, and at most, a close thing. America is a bad place. We cannot redeem it through performance, through simply voting. We don't exorcise our structural violence with selfies and dashes of ink on sealed papers.

Now that we know this, we can actually push back against the attempted voter fraud that IS happening right now, and then hope that this mediocre blue man wins. And then maybe y'all can join us in doing the hard, daily work that also involves critically acknowledging our own complicity, investment, and inclusion in a violent, illegitimate space. We have to live in these contradictions, to push and transform it, and remember that there are no cheat codes here. Just grinding work, and no cookies or congratulation.

Be fucking better, y'all.

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the-lightning-strikes-again · 4 years

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Hey Lightning, I was wondering if I could get your thoughts on something. One take that seems to keep returning every once in a while is the "Allura fell for Lotor only after he revealed his Altean heritage," but I know u and others have disproven this many times, which does reassure me. While I love Allura, I definitely think one of her weaknesses was her devotion to Altea and singing Alfor's praises, which sometimes became too much. At the same time, it bothers me when I see some ppl (1/?)

Continuing anon message: “ say that she thought Alteans were superior to all other races, and that when the colony plot twist happened, she became repulsed by Lotor's Galra side, which is why she rejected him. For them, that's why she forced violent memories onto an uncorrupted Zarkon, but somehow "saw the good/redeemed" Honerva, the Altean. I can kind of understand where they're coming from, but for me, it just didn't make sense that Allura suddenly had a change of heart considering for most of s8, she was angry and dead set on going after Honerva. Even with that, I think to a lot of her fans, s8 made Allura so ooc that she became unrecognizable, which hurt to watch. I guess for me it's hard seeing antis and people who don't like her claim that that's just how she is and has always been. Haha sorry for rambling, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, since your arguments ease my mind on a lot of things when it comes to Allura :)”

Hi, anon. Wow, thanks for your extended note! I don’t know anywhere in canon that Allura champions Alteans as a superior race. The definition of racial supremacy is a belief that inherent genetic differences between races determine cultural or individual achievement, with social/governmental policies championing intolerance of other races. To get Allura to fit into such a label:

1. A viewer has to ignore or undermine all the evidence available about who the main-universe Alteans really were before main-universe Zarkon’s massacre of them.

2. A viewer has to ignore or undermine how Allura actually responds to a variety of different races in the show, including her own.

So let’s start with issue one. To support an “Allura was a racial supremacist” opinion, a lot of antis (and even non-militant, average viewers) are favorable to the opinion that Alteans as a group, including Alfor, were actually evil and violent colonizer elitists before Galrans killed them off. In other words, they question Altean victimhood, and this allows the militant antis to poison and undermine scenes of a woman mourning her home and her beloved family. And it just gets to be a really unsettling conversation, to listen to someone actually try to justify genocide. They’ll also have suspicions that all of our foundational backstory in the s3 finale was just “cleansed” propaganda from Coran. So if antis can undermine Allura’s entire race and family as corrupt, then they can intentionally undermine any of her canonical statements about or efforts toward peace. Which is hilarious, because this racist tactic applied to Allura is actually what a lot of antis accuse Allura of doing with Lotor.

For the record, I don’t think the show production team actually intended the subliminal messaging/cognitive dissonance that I’m about to discuss. The people who designed and developed this show are fans of robot kitties and aren’t PhDs in social issues. But I think there is a very serious issue about the portrayal of genocide victims that feeds into some very real problems in our world, especially regarding the concept of racial supremacy and conspiracy theories about genocide victims.

VLD tried to play with both genocide politics for edge™ points while ALSO playing with shatterglass theory (shatterglass meaning an AU where the heroes are villains and villains are heroes). Combining these two concepts into the same universe creates some incredibly disturbing subliminal messaging about Alteans that very closely mimics ongoing neo-Nazi propaganda against Jews. Nazis and other anti-Semitists justify their hatred of Jews by equating them as terrible villains out for world domination via some underhanded shadow control of the mass populace. It’s an incredibly malicious form of propaganda, because it works so terribly well. And what do you know, VLD plays right into this kind of propaganda. In the season 3 episode, Hole in the Sky, we’re faced with team Voltron confronting an Altean Empire that was actually evil and out for multiverse domination. And oh by the way, they’re using malicious shadow tech to control a mass populace.

It’s like someone on the production team read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and then just copied/pasted that incredibly damaging and widely accepted conspiracy theory right onto Alteans for s3 funsies because edge content.

This is incredibly punishing, for the narrative to wave the carrot stick in front of genocide survivors that maybe some others survived—and then to suggest that Alteans were the evil ones all along. A shatterglass twist worked very well in Captain Marvel (2019) for a lot of reasons, for example, but it just doesn’t work well in the VLD universe given that the show explicitly portrays the genocide victims as evil and validates this concept. And this episode unfortunately feeds ongoing cognitive dissonance in antis that if AU Alteans could be so evil…how certain are you that they aren’t in the main universe too? On the reverse side, the main-universe goes out of its way to portray that not all Galrans are evil, and even that Galrans were the primary resistance (BOM). But in this singular episode, we see a united Altean empire. And the only Altean who moves to stand against it once the shine wears off…is Allura. There is no AU Altean actually shown in the Guns of Gamara. So Allura stands alone as an Altean against her own people.

For this reason, this episode doesn’t function very well as a shatterglass AU either, because the moral “flip” isn’t a mirror balance to main universe. The Alteans of the AU world appear as fully united in their evil plans. And then, no doubt, anti-alluras point out other quirky things about main-universe Alteans throughout the show—the violent language-learning system that scares Pidge, and the ancient Altean terraforming technology that Haggar activates, and the fact that Oriande is a hidden place that keeps out the less magical with a violent guardian. These details, when removed from main-universe world building, create a cognitive dissonance about whether main-universe Allura and Alteans were actually genuine in how they depicted respectful “peace and diplomacy.” So anti alluras who believe Allura was a racial supremacist really rely on this s3 episode and these details to uphold their conspiracy theory.

So let’s focus on Allura in this episode, because it says a lot about who she ultimately is as a person, and people have forgotten how she actually responded in this episode. Allura is unquestionably hopeful at the thought that her and Coran might not be the last Alteans alive. Pretty understandable. If I were the last human, I’d be darn excited to find out there’s more of me left, lol. So her experience as a genocide victim initially blinds her to the evilness of these Alteans. You can even see the ache on her face, of how badly she wants to believe their narrative of peace.

So Allura is initially star-struck that she and Coran are not the last Alteans, yes, and that somehow they’ve achieved a “peace.” She is also not afraid to admit that they would be valuable allies in the war:

And she’s not wrong there, considering that they have what appears to be extensive military resources and a robot force of their own. But she makes a critical mistake in assuming that “these are my people” means that they share main-universe cultural sentiments. The instant Allura hears Slav (so not someone of her own race) call these Alteans out as actually evil colonizers turning people into slaves, she begins to question the narrative she’s received.

In this instance, she actually affords the Alteans the same courtesy she afforded Lotor—the opportunity to deny the accusations.

But in the AU Altean’s case, they try to turn blame back on other parties. Allura listens to Keith when he grows increasingly fearful of what the Alteans might do to the others, and she tries to plead for actual peace:

And actually, this is a pretty interesting moment for Allura. She tries to salvage an alliance…until she realizes that their differences are irreconcilable, and that their definition of peace is inherently different from her own. This probably sets the stage for why Allura was so triggered by Lotor talking about peace while also killing people—because she’s seen people misappropriate that term before. And also probably informs why she trusts the information of both Keith and Krolia (both of whom have Galran blood, btw).

Ultimately, Allura turns against her own people. Violently:

When they get angry about her wanting actual peace, Allura draws a weapon against them and rejects them from her people. This mimics how she spends several seasons fighting an Altean Haggar/Honerva for her crimes, and how she turns against Lotor too.

So case in point here, Allura loves her people, obviously—but she also is holding them to moral standards regarding their behavior, which is something that a genuine racist doesn’t do. As a matter of fact, Lotor is the only person of Altean blood that Allura genuinely bonds with ever again in the series. She’s distant with Romelle, she’s distant with the s8 Alteans… In s8, Allura even says this about Luca, which refers back to her own mistakes she made with initially being star-struck by the s3 AU Alteans who came in “peace”:

Allura herself had been manipulated in s3, wanting so desperately to not be the last Altean alive that it initially blinded her to how Commander Hira was manipulating her. The plight of the s8 Alteans who are deceived by Honerva is inherently frustrating to her, because she can see herself in them.

Absolutely none of this correlates with Allura seeing or perpetuating Alteans as a superior race. At every turn, her own people continue to disappoint her, and she increasingly and progressively separates herself from them in hopelessness, because they’re so brainwashed that they can’t see they’re just cannon fodder for someone else’s military agendas. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for a superior race, lol.

So let’s think about anti accusations here. Allura is a racial supremacist…but she’s arguing against her people who believe unquestionably in Honerva, another full Altean like herself? Nothing about that accusation makes sense with her actions.

The fact is, consistently from season 3 and onward, Allura is faced with her own people morally disappointing her.

The good news for the s8 Alteans like Tavo is that Allura is able to remove the dark entity Honerva is using to control him. Which allows other Alteans to “wake up” from being manipulated and try to make amends.

Regardless, Allura makes a very clear line that simply being Altean doesn’t make someone “right.” She sees herself fully at odds with her own people who are drawn in by Honerva’s lies. And she experienced well back in s2 (revealing Haggar as Honerva) and s3 (evil AU Alteans) that any given race, including her own, can house people who do bad things.

The fact is, she’s consistently and willingly drawn weapons against even her own people when they didn’t meet her moral expectations. So her response to Lotor isn’t particularly out of line there. She’s repulsed by a moral flaw.

And actually, Lotor himself wouldn’t have known this, but he very oddly echoed the AU Alteans by getting angry that Allura was angry over the means through which he was trying to get peace:

So Lotor actually reverts to the same logic of the AU Alteans—peace at any cost, just look at the results—

And keep in mind that the AU Alteans also manipulated Allura’s excitement about them, to get her to make the transreality comet usable so they could go into other realities. So Allura has felt betrayed and used before, by her own people.

So when she says this:

Yes, it’s a reference back to how Zarkon manipulated his friends in order to get access to the quintessence field, at the explicit cost of potentially killing his own people. But it’s not without understanding that yes, Alteans can be just as manipulative and betraying as Zarkon. Because she’s experienced it, again and again.

As a matter of fact, six out of the eight seasons of Voltron: Legendary Defender feature villainous Alteans/Alteans on the wrong side of the war, and we continuously see Allura punished again and again for wishing that Alteans still lived.

No wonder she wanted to die.

This is something that I find uncomfortable about the narrative of the show. Previous iterations of Voltron did in fact have a “blood on everyone’s hands” perspective, such as within the ages 16+ Dynamic Comics. However, Arusians/Alteans in those old Voltron narratives were not victims of genocide. VLD turns Alteans into victims of the worst racial crime possible and then also consistently portrays them as inherently antagonistic to genuine peace efforts in some way, instead of focusing on the evil of the oppressors.

And this is such a double whammy for Lotor’s characters as well, given that he was abused by his parents and threatened with slavery via his Galran culture, and that he was half-Altean too trying to connect to his lost culture.

As a matter of fact, the larger show’s narrative interest in “victims as antagonists” makes it such that when we see victims try to enact actual justice, it feels almost jarring. Let’s look at that s8 Zarkon moment you brought up as an example, where Allura destroys his innocent perspective by showing him his evil deeds.

The s8 Zarkon is a weird topic because 1) This Zarkon actually doesn’t exist outside of Honerva’s mind, so how he has any kind of actual free-will is beyond me, unless someone wants to argue that Honerva actually cursed his true soul just as she cursed the other paladins. It’s hilarious too, because Honerva-mind-Zarkon also calls Honerva a psychopath, so I guess now Honerva is psychoanalyzing herself using her dead husband as the vehicle, while also discreetly helping the paladins to stop herself—

ANYWAY, using this Zarkon as a “proof” of Allura’s “racism” is also cherry picking in the weirdest of ways. Is she angry about his horrific and incalculable crimes, including even how he betrayed the OG paladins and ruined his own planet? Absolutely. Does she want him to be aware of his crimes instead of having to pretend like nothing’s wrong? Yes.

But notice here, this Zarkon actually shows remorse. He is actually crying over those memories and recognizing that he had done something wrong. And Allura can work with that. In fact, out of everyone standing around and doing nothing, it’s Allura who gives him a second chance and offers an alliance with Zarkon in order to stop a crazy Altean:

Keep in mind too, Honerva didn’t have memory loss at the end of s8. She knew exactly what she’d done and had given up and had to actually be convinced to do anything halfway constructive. That’s a very different circumstance than mind-Zarkon had, who jumped at the chance to do something to fix what all had happened, and gets even morally righteous about it, calling his own wife a psychopath, lol.

So generally, antis who believe Allura was a racial supremacist haven’t watched the show holistically. We see her hold the same standards to her own people as she expects out of others. This show would look incredibly different if Allura were a true racial supremacist.

Ah, you ask. Okay, so we’ve refuted the big pieces of “evidence” used to incriminate Allura. But what about all of those weird details about ancient Altean history? The violent language-learning program that scared Pidge? The violent terraforming tech that almost kills Voltron? The concept that Alfor tried to play “police” over the Galra and actually blew up their planet? The Alteans’ ongoing discussions of “peace and diplomacy” and spreading it throughout the universe while they happen to sit on a massive load of ancient power?

The s3 finale and other facts throughout the series very heavily smash the claim that our canon, in-universe Alteans were evil colonizers like the AU Alteans. The biggest piece of evidence to the contrary is that the Altea we know was one (1) planet. You counted right. One planet. Not an empire, but a singular planet. The s3 finale corroborates this, showing Altea as being largely isolationist from a military perspective while Daibazaal and Nalquod warred "for generations," right in front of their salad.

So some viewers would have you believe that Alteans were these big bad, intergalactic police state colonizers. But for all of its great power and knowledge, the singular planet of Altea didn't even canonically interfere in the wars of its own galaxy for actual millennia? And looking at the screenshots upon the stabilization of the alliance, Alfor is revealed to not have had experience with a neighboring culture. His face while exploring Gyrgan’s homeworld is an indication that it’s all rather new for him too. So again, we have evidence showing that Alteans were not colonizing or even functioning as a police state.

Note here that in the s3 flashbacks, the show confirms that it actually wasn’t just Alfor who suggested an alliance. All five leaders had common interests in protecting their galaxy from even worse threats, so all five came together at the same time. This is actually the first piece of evidence we have of Altea entering into some kind of intergalactic military agreement to stave off said worse threats.

And all of this is on top of a history where in s6, the Galran Archivist confirms that the Galran Empire had existed before Zarkon for 3,000 years, with times of “expansion.” It’s very easy to see that Blaytz’s people were actively fighting off Galran occupation of their homeworld within this past.

And that’s actually what I think makes Alfor and the OG paladins some pretty interesting characters. Here, we had colonizing Galran empire setting down its sword and accepting the value and space of its neighbors. Here, we had master alchemist Alfor giving up military power within their group by acknowledging Zarkon as the superior strategist. Here, we had Blaytz who had previously been battling Galran occupation…fully accepting the Galra?

So the OG Paladin backstory represents a pretty incredible alliance that removed a lot of intergalactic toxicity and helped heal broken bonds. But it required all five leaders to agree to that. Alfor did not throw his weight or power around within this. There were several checks and balances here.

But this backstory also helps to explain some of the quirky details about Alteans. Their planet existed within an active war zone, and it’s very likely that they’d had to fight off Galran occupation just as Blaytz’s people did. So the violent robot trainers and fear-based language learning systems start to make sense. Alteans weren’t just simpering people playing harps all day and eating grapes. They were actively prepared to defend their planet and their culture.

So when Allura says in season 1 that Alteans were “spreading diplomacy” across the universe, the only pieces of evidence we have of that is the OG paladins themselves, in which Alfor was a big part in creating that alliance—and then possibly the Alteans with the Balmerans, given their deep collective rituals with that planet while the Galra literally just came in and ripped the planet nearly to death. Allura tries to mimic what it means to accept and interact with a culture without changing it well in season 1, when she stumbles through trying to respect Arusian culture and its demands on its people. Also, there is a big fact that antis like to overlook:

The fact is, despite the untold numbers of civilizations we interact with across 76 episodes, no outside race remembers Alteans as evil colonizers. If they were really so big and bad, we would have heard it, like, “Man, yeah the Galrans are bad. Just as bad as those Alteans, back in the day.” Or something. But nope, nothing.

So I heavily question the history of Altea as an ancient colonizing race. If they were, then Altea wouldn't have just been a single planet with limited resources to fight wars in even its own galaxy. All of this supports the idea of Altean children being raised to fight--because they were preparing to defend themselves when/if diplomacy fails.... But the fact that the Balmerans see Alteans fondly and that literally every other race we run into is explicitly suspicious of Galrans and not at all of Alteans says something.

I think the only piece of evidence there might be for a genuinely colonizing ancient Altea is the use of terraforming technology, as mentioned in s4. Haggar discovers it and activates it to try and kill Voltron--and she nearly succeeds, because said tech destroys the entire crust of the planet to reform it. But you have to step back for a second and wonder--if ancient Alteans were so powerful, why was Alfor struggling so hard to even hold his own planet together in the midst of all these other cultures warring and larger threats? If they had this technology--and they did know about it because Allura recognized it right away as ancient technology--why the heck wouldn't they use it? Or were they using it, and it was to reform uninhabited planets to help sustain displaced peoples? Why is it, if Alteans were so terribly bad, we have no record across ANY of the many alien races being cautious of them? Even Galran Lieutenant Lahn snapped at Allura only because he was jealous of the general security she had back on, you guessed it, explicitly Altea. There's a lot of potential explanations for a positive use of terraforming technology, and the evidence against colonization and Altea committing omnicide against other races is incredibly more aligned with the other details in the canon.

And even Alfor’s creation of Voltron and the blowing up of Daibazaal—that’s something that antis like to position as evidence of his police-state ways to underhandedly control other cultures.

So let’s tackle those too while we’re at it.

Honestly, I know people like to hate on Alfor, and I do think his character picks up some misogynism just from the writers....But I don't think he was as much of a controller as people think he was. He was already in an alliance with four other leaders to try and stop bad things from happening in their galaxy. That meant they were expending incredible amounts of time and resources to accomplish that end—resources that were not renewable and may have been straining various planets. We know that he started building Voltron with Zarkon and everyone else's blessing because he called them "clean ships," but it's only after the rift creatures attack that suddenly Alfor's perception of Voltron moves from "clean energy" to "omg we need a more powerful weapon against this unknown enemy.”

So these are his intentions BEFORE he discovers rift creatures are a threat to the universe. While Zarkon states that these new ships are to be endlessly powerful for the Galra Empire, Alfor shames him by offering what his desire is for them:

After the rift creatures nearly destroy Daibazaal, intentions change.

So here, we see the game change in a BIG way. Voltron is not just about offering a more renewable way of sustaining peace-keeping efforts. Alfor is now adjusting and finishing these ships with the explicit knowledge that if they are not powerful enough, then Daibazaal and the Galran people will die. Alfor’s got a LOT of pressure on him now to deliver a mighty and powerful weapon to stop this new threat. So even his creation of Voltron as a superweapon involved using it to protect people from imminent death—not to police them.

And about Alfor blowing up Daibazaal—once again, it’s Alfor trying to clean up Honerva and Zarkon’s mess. Honerva had convinced Zarkon that the rift needed to be wider, and so Zarkon deceived the paladins into widening it.

So keep in mind here, at this point in time—the rift was destabilizing and eating an entire planet. The entire universe was now at stake. Alfor had to choose between a bad fix and an even worse option of allowing everyone to die, but he very clearly evacuated people before destroying Daibazaal, as part of his promise to keep Galrans safe. So that no one would have to die.

And as a matter of fact—about that terraforming technology. How sure are you that Alfor didn’t intend to use it to build Galrans a new home? It’s entirely within the realm of acceptable conjecture that he allowed for the existence of that technology because it could restore what had been lost.

And here’s where the story gets really screwy and feeds into some anti hate. Because when Zarkon wakes up as a zombie, he desires more quintessence as zombies do.

So he’s pissed that Alfor just cut off his gateway, and he manipulates his people:

And it’s here where we get the idea that Alfor was an evil controller. The idea came from Zarkon, who—we can look around pretty easily and see that he was not a man of honor, ultimately. Even if you chose to not believe the s3 finale flashbacks as being objective, there’s something wrong with Zarkon. (It’s clear that the show thought using Coran was a smart way to shell off massive amounts of info, because clearly if this were truly in Coran’s perspective, we would NOT have had intimate looks into Zarkon and Honerva’s bedroom as Zarkon is tending to her, like omg.) Numerous sources, histories, and cultures outside of Coran confirm that Zarkon hit a point of no return on the evil scale, and that he projected his own blame for Daibazaal’s destabilization onto Alfor in order to raise up his new regime in the name of Quintessence™.

So at the end of the day, even Alfor was a victim. But yet somehow, various antis choose to believe Zarkon’s victim-punishing narrative because said antis can’t or else refuse to connect one scene to another since it undermines their justifications for why they can hate on Allura. And that’s not so much an issue with the story itself as it is just poor critical analysis or malicious weaponization of content against other fans.

Now, at this point, we’ve talked about Allura and we’ve talked about Altean history. I have numerous other posts about Allura’s interactions with other races and Galrans and overcoming trauma to give the entire universe a second chance. So if there is anything in this show that suggests Alteans were in any way a superior race, then it’s probably within the show’s own worldbuilding. The show contradicts its own definitions of what quintessence even is by suggesting Alteans have “bluer/purer quintessence” in order to justify why Lotor would even be trying to sacrifice them for anything. The show-championed concept that Alteans have a bluer, purer life force above all other people, and that only Altean energy could interface with the fabric of space-time. Now, this is a problem in the later seasons’ world building itself. And you know who wrote that in? The production team. So once again, we do have racial issues in this show, in ways that shows like Star Wars desperately try avoid by showing racial diversity in who has Midi-chlorians.

That said, I’m not a perfectly woke storyteller either. I think every story and show is going to have something problematic™, but with VLD it’s very clear that its disrespectful handling of genocide politics and shatterglass conspiracy theories, on top of its weird master race angle created the perfect storm. These mishandled and quirky details have created a cognitive dissonance with the provided narrative, resulting in some people in the anti fandoms to champion what aligns very closely to actual neo-Nazi propaganda against Jews, who according to them are not victims but instead the true perpetrators of all bad things. For the sake of the antis, I’m pretty sure they’re not intentionally looking at VLD this way and are probably just looking for any easily graspable reason to hate on Allura for interfering with their ship or something.

But this kind of subliminal propaganda that undermines victims, and the effect it has had on fandom morality politics, is deeply concerning to me. I really wish that we’d had an opportunity to respectfully and critically discuss this with the production team of the show, because a Y7-FV show about “strength in unity” should NOT result in us needing to have a conversation about people walking away with neo-Nazi-ish propaganda sentiments against genocide survivors. Like. Clearly, VLD is fictional, but it’s feeding into a real-life beast that it does NOT need to feed. And it’s keeping alive ongoing conspiracy narratives against some of our most vulnerable populations on the planet.

So, we need better stories. We need a production team that, if they’re going to get paid to do something involving portrayals of genocide and politics, that they need to do their research on those topics. Nobody is going to be perfect with a creation, but VLD validated some very damaging things—and it ALL is something that could have been fixable. I think it would have been incredibly validating to hear the production talk about and accept that these were issues that cropped up unintentionally, and to hear them confirm that these issues are not the sorts of things that VLD was supposed to champion.

The greatest tragedy of all of this is the potential that this show had to really champion some great and validating messages, and the potential that we as a fandom had to come together and do something that fandom was meant to do—which was celebrate the things we love. Because that’s why we’re all here. That’s why this crazy tumblr of mine even exists. It was supposed to celebrate things.

For that reason, I’m going to end this here. I’ve written several responses now as to my thoughts on the inappropriate narrative lens of the show, its contradictory and damaging worldbuilding about the purest race, and how it champions demonizing or punishing genocide survivors again and again. Within all of that, I’ve talked at length about Allura’s character and behavior over 8 seasons and how she built even empathetic connections with militant Galrans like Commander Lahn. In fact even her own homesickness is how she emotionally connects with Lahn, because she understands that desire to call something one’s own. To have a home. A family.

I now really would like to get back to writing stories that I find meaningful to me using these characters and these worlds—and trying to find the hope in all of this darkness, haha. And maybe with any luck, I can hope to do VLD some justice, knowing that I am still on a learning journey as well.

But I appreciate your note, and I hope this very extensive response helps to settle your questions and concerns once and for all regarding VLD Allura. If you should have any remaining questions, please feel free to reach out via a private message to discuss. Thank you!

#Volron #VLD #Allura #VLD Critical #Alfor #Zarkon #Honerva #Lotor #I hope this helps explain my perspective #I think this might have to be my last refutation to the Allura as racist/racist supremacist conspiracy theory #at a certain point #people either watch the show holistically or they don't #you can't convince an anti #so this meta will probably not help an anti #but if you're sitting on the fence and felt drawn in by anti propaganda #then I hope that maybe this post provides an alternate perspective #and one that tries to be more holistically fair to all 8 seasons of the show #and to the intentions and general oversights that can occur during production #Ultimately it doesn't matter if someone likes or dislikes Allura as a fictional character #we need better entertainment that can handle these hard topics and handle them well #And we also need a fandom who's willing to look at all of the information and not weaponize it to specifically demonize and silence others #Maybe a family TV show shouldn't be appropriating conspiracy theories from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion #real-world fans are incredibly vulnerable to such conspiracy theories #and it creates a lot of real-world strife as a result

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humansofhds · 5 years

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Julia Hintlian, MTS ′18 and Harvard PhD Candidate

"I’ve spent time in the Republic of Armenia, and in 'Western Armenia' (now Eastern Turkey). A lot of our churches have been desecrated and destroyed, and those of us who are fortunate to survive have a responsibility not only to know what we’ve lost, but to know that what we have inherited is valuable."

Julia graduated in 2018 with an MTS from HDS. She is now a rising doctoral student in religion at Harvard. This past summer, she taught at the seminary of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Formations of My Identity

My doctoral degree is in the history of Christianity, and I am working on the influences of Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism on Syriac and Armenian Christianity in Late Antiquity. My master’s degree is in Silk Road Religions, an individualized area of focus that included the same subjects I am studying now—as well as some other, lesser studied traditions like the religion of the Yazidis of Northern Iraq, and Ismailism, a sect of Shia Islam. During my undergraduate degree in religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, I focused on Hinduism and Islam. So, I arrived at the history of Christianity by studying many other traditions through the lens of “world religions.”

My mom got an MTS when I was in high school, and she would come home from her classes and talk to my 14-and-15-year-old self about what she was learning. She encouraged me to ask questions that I was not taught to ask in school, like: Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? What have writers over millennia had to say in answer to these questions?

I am ethnically Armenian, baptized in the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Armenian Church is ancient, and we are an ancient people with a rich religious history, strongly identified by our Oriental Orthodoxy. The traditional date of our conversion is 301 AD, which we claim makes us the oldest Christian nation in the world. This legacy has also been a big factor in my identity and my decision to study religion. Prior to being Christian, the Armenians were Zoroastrian, and our Zoroastrianism was somewhat unique from Persian Zoroastrianism. So, I think I have a lot to be proud of in terms of Armenia’s long-term historical, religious legacy, which has “evolved” to reach me over the course of many generations.

I feel that I have a responsibility to all the people who came before me to take my scholarship seriously. Especially on the Armenian side, because two thirds of our population was wiped out one hundred years ago in the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Those of us who remain must carry this identity into the future. I’ve spent time in the Republic of Armenia, and in “Western Armenia” (now Eastern Turkey). A lot of our churches have been desecrated and destroyed, and those of us who are fortunate to survive have a responsibility not only to know what we’ve lost, but to know that what we have inherited is valuable.

Teaching at the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin

I have lived in Armenia on two separate occasions, and on a third occasion I traveled to Western Armenia. My family is Western Armenian. The Western Armenians lived under the Byzantine and later Ottoman Empires, and the Eastern Armenians lived under the Persian and later Russian Empires. The dialects are a bit different; they are mutually intelligible, but Western Armenian is more influenced by Arabic and Turkish, and Eastern Armenian is more influenced by Persian and Russian. Culturally, Eastern and Western Armenians are a bit different, too. It is a very complex history!

Last summer, I was teaching at the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, the center of the Armenian Church, which is located in Vagharshapat, half an hour outside of Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia. I taught in the Gevorgian Seminary, which is where they train the next generation of clergy. I was mostly teaching deacons, and my courses were “English for Theological Reading” and “Introductory Syriac Language.” We read Irenaeus of Lyon’s second-century Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching in my English class, and we talked about the theology. I picked this text because it was basically lost to history for many centuries, and then it reappeared in Armenian translation (from the original Greek) in 1904.

In Communion

As Armenians, I think it is very important to know that we are in communion with the Syriac Orthodox Church. The Oriental Orthodox Churches, which are unfortunately very understudied in Western academia, are the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches, and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India. We have been in communion for many centuries, and these communities are often located in places that are not (or historically have not been) safe, and yet we have kept our faith and traditions alive. I think it is important to have inter-community relations, and that is one reason I study Syriac. I still have much to learn from my advisor, Professor Charles Stang, but I thought that it was important for these deacons to have at least a taste of Syriac, so they might one day find common ground with Syriac priests. Common language encourages the exchange of ideas!

It was very meaningful for me a few years ago when our HDS Syriac lecturer took us to a service at the local Syriac church. When they discovered I was Armenian, they said, “Why didn’t you take communion with us? We would have been so happy to have you!” And they were speaking to me in Armenian and really making an effort to welcome me and to let me know they were happy to have me in their church.

Each Oriental Orthodox Church has its own leaders and hierarchy, but the leaders of those churches are in contact with each other. The Armenian Church has a Catholicos for its spiritual leader (actually there are two Catholicoi, but that’s a complicated story!) and then two Patriarchs, in Jerusalem and Istanbul.

Shedding Light

Orthodox Christianity in general is understudied in America, but even when we do refer to Orthodox Christianity, we are usually talking about Eastern Orthodoxy, which has its own rich heritage and tradition and history. I think it would be good for more light to be shed on Oriental Orthodoxy.

In the History of Christianity track here, there are people who have had very limited exposure to Oriental Orthodox history and theology. Many scholars of Christianity know that the “Miaphysite” Oriental Orthodox Churches broke away from the fourth ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451, but they know little of our history after that. Christianity is such a massive tradition, with so many iterations all over the world, but the Oriental Orthodox Churches are very ancient, most of them have been around since the very early Christian period, and they have survived many trials and tribulations. Right now, the Coptic Church is facing significant persecution in Egypt, and my students in Armenia expressed concern over this situation. Armenians know what it is like to feel unsafe and to work to preserve our faith at all costs.

There are a few reasons these traditions are understudied in the West. The theological breaks are very old, and the churches are very small (especially compared to Catholic and Protestant denominations). Linguistically, they are difficult to access; there are few people who know Classical Armenian and can teach it—same with Classical Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic. These are obscure languages, and culturally foreign, which makes them more obscure and less accessible than languages like Greek or Latin.

It’s interesting to study Christianity right now, because some people seem to be saying it is a Eurocentric tradition of oppression and colonialism. When I hear that, I wonder how much people know about Christianity outside the West, and I feel compelled to say that this is a very diverse tradition, with a unifying theology and ideology that is manifest in many different cultural settings. But I do find in Protestantism and Catholicism a narrative that I believe in, and I look positively on these traditions because though there are linguistic and cultural differences, I think we are aspiring to the same truth.

The Catholic Church and the Armenian Church are two examples of churches that have been finding common ground recently, and I see beauty in that. In 2015, for the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, Pope Francis named one of the great Armenian theologians and spiritual fathers, Grigor Narekatsi/Gregory of Narek (10th/11th c.), as a Doctor of the Church, and erected a statue of him in the Vatican. The Armenian Catholicoi and Armenian political leaders were present for this special moment.

A Priceless Heritage

I spend a lot of time with my head in books from the fifth century, reading things that happened a long time ago. But it is also very important to me to care for the modern iterations of the traditions that I study. Their continuing survival and existence inspires me. To this end, I’ve done a little bit of work for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom in Washington D.C. as well.

Tur Abdin is a region in Turkey with a lot of Syriac monasteries. Unfortunately, the Turkish government has been trying to seize some of these properties, including the fourth-century Mar Gabriel monastery. Unless you can appreciate what happened at Mar Gabriel hundreds of years ago, the theology, spirituality, and history created there, you might say, “Why does it matter if the Turkish government takes it away?” But if you know its religious significance, you know why it is worth preserving.

I often contemplate what my ancestors would think of me, especially two of my great-grandmothers, Antaram and Sultan, who managed to escape Armenia with their children after their husbands were killed in the genocide. I hope they are proud of me, I hope they know that they passed a heritage to me that is priceless and beautiful, and I hope they know that I am doing everything I can to defend it.

Interview and photos by Anais Garvanian

#armenia #Religion #Religious Studies #Harvard #Harvard Divinity School #syria #turkey #catholic #roman catholic #Christianity #Coptic Christians

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canaryrecords · 6 years

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An unfinished obit for Leo Sarkisian (January 4, 1921 – June 8, 2018): Leo Sarkisian arrived home from World War II as a man in his mid-20s with nine battle stars including a bronze star “for meritorious service” and initiative, energy, and perseverance. He had volunteered straight out of art school in September, 1942 and for a year a half had been a topographical cartographer for the U.S., stationed in Algeria as part of Engineer Intelligence Services. Because he had been tasked with studying overhead photographs of German bases in Salerno, he was sent in with the Commandos in Italy because he knew the lay of the land. He walked in with the assault. A third of the U.S. force died. He had seen that – friends his age. The war over, Sarkisian lived first with his uncle, a dry cleaner, in New York City on 8th Avenue near 24th Street. His uncle got him a job as an illustrator – magazines and books – during the day. Lots of Armenians were engravers and illustrators. At night, he went out and listened to music and drank and blew his wages in jazz clubs in the Village listening to Artie Shaw, Lionel Hampton, and Vido Musso, Benny Goodman’s Italian tenor saxophonist. Leo had always been a clarinetist himself and played jazz. Then there were the “oriental” clubs up and down 8th Ave, where music in Turkish, Greek, and Armenian thrived among the immigrants - The Egyptian Gardens, The Brittania. The music there was close to the music from childhood in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the older Armenian men played oud, violin, zurna, and dumbek and sang Ottoman folk songs in Turkish, listening to Marko Melkon and “Sugar Mary” Vartanian, and Louis Matalon, Sephardic Jew at whose side Leo often sat, watching him play the 72-string dulcimer, the kanun. That was when Leo wasn’t throwing money at the dancers or ordering another drink. And it was like the fleeting, fun nights in Rabat and Casablanca when Leo had heard Arabs playing the same instruments with bellydancers. There was one night when he had been chased off by the French police because the music “stirred up the locals.” There was another when he had a moment of stardom because he, an American G.I., had gotten up and played oud and rocked the house. A bellydancer had wrapped her arms around him because played a song he knew from back in Lawrence. The nightclubs in New York were for the weekends. Weeknights were all in the New York Public Library. Four nights a week, Leo read anything about music from Asia and Africa. There he saw patterns of expansion of instruments and ideas. The kanun and its scales travel from here to there. One instrument travels to another place. A local instrument replaces it, but the idea of how it’s played remains. There is a connection from the Ottoman Empire to the Arab world. Then, Africa to India and China… There is a deep musical connection among all of these people, including a boy from Lawrence, Massachusetts who feel compelled under the city’s lights to understand how his own feeling of music connects so many other people. “I don’t know why,” he told me in 2014, when he was 94 years old. “I’m reading, reading all this stuff. There was something in me that I had that feeling that whoever wrote those books didn’t really have that feeling… Even if someone does get a degree in music and stuff like that, there’s something between – under – inside of you. They can’t get that.” Leo’s father arrived through the port of Boston from Diyarbekir in present-day Turkey in 1901 with the great wave of Armenian immigration following the Hammidean massacres of 1891-96. A quarter of a million Armenians died in that wave of killings, twenty years before more than a million more Armenians were killed by Ottoman forces. That moment coincided with one of the largest waves of emigration to the United States that the country ever saw with Christians and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe flowing in to just the port of New York, never mind Boston, San Francisco, or anywhere else, at a rate of 1,000 souls a day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. Most of them came from Eastern and Southern Europe, meaning that most of them were not from the Northern European counties who were the culturally dominant ethnic stock of the U.S. That wave came only about forty years after the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. gave equal protection to all naturalized (male) citizens to the U.S., including the right to vote. The existing Protestant majority of the U.S. took such a dim view of idea that the Catholic and Jewish immigrants might vote that Congress had hearings in which mid-Western eugenicist authorities argued effectively that the breeding stock of the U.S. would be diluted if a serious change in immigration policy were not implemented. With the 1896 Chinese Exclusion Act as precedent, in 1924, three years after Leo Sarkisian was born and nine years after the genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the Reed-Johnson act set quotas for immigrants by country of origin, based on a complicated set of mathematics aimed at keeping the U.S. ethnically stable and exactly as White as it ever was. 51,227 Germans were allowed to emigrate each year. 54,009 from Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 5,982 from Poland. Only 120 Armenians a year were allowed. Zero from Africa or Asia. Living in a room over beer joint in the Village in 1952, Leo showed a friend of his some notes he’d made on Central Asian music at the library. He’d made some smart connections between the descriptions of one imperialist traveler and other, and when Leo’s friend showed them to Irving B. Fogel of Tempo Records, a friend of Walt Disney’s whom everyone called “Colonel,” Fogel knocked on Leo’s door and asked him to move to Hollywood to work for Tempo. “You’re who I’ve been looking for,” Fogel said. Leo said OK and took with him an Armenian girl who had gone to his same high school in Lawrence but whom he’d met when they were both in the military. Tempo was largely a specialty label offering among the first muzak-type sound programs. After a year of luxury in Hollywood and working with great sound engineers, he worked on the hit record “Sweet Georgia Brown” by Brother Bones and the soundtracks of African Queen, and six Tarzan movies. Fogel decided to send Leo and Mary to record music in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Burma for the label. So, in 1950, still in their late 20s, Leo and Mary went first to Karachi then in Lahore before pushing through the Khyber Pass in a jeep loaded with recording equipment, Budwiser and vodka to Kabul. They were treated as dignitaries, and Tempo released the 10” LP Drums Over Afghanistan from their efforts. That trip was Leo’s phD in listening to people – dignitaries and folks alike – hanging out with them, drinking, talking, digging music, and making friends. There were diplomatic problems with Russians, but nothing he couldn’t handle. On the way back across the subcontinent, he met and recorded Alludin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, Bismillah Khan. There was a world of master musicians he had access to now for only the reason that he was American and had learned how to travel and to be good guest and cared deeply about music. Leo was learning to be a great ambassador for the U.S. At the same time, he was learning that wherever you go, you meet Armenians. Leo and Mary were greeted on New Year’s Day 1955 at the airport at Dacca, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by a delegation of Armenians who took him to the Armenian church and the cemetery, where they saw graves of Armenians dating to the 15th century. “The big guy looks out for me,” he told laughingly. “Because God is Armenian!” In 1959, Tempo relocated Leo and Mary, then in their late 30s to Ghana and then, about a year later to Guinea with an eye to creating African recordings for the American market. A knock came at their door in 1963 in their home in Conakry, Guinea. Incredibly it was Edward R. Murrow, who had been appointed head of the United States Information Agency by President John F. Kennedy. Leo and Mary invited Murrow in to listen to some of Leo’s recordings, and Murrow offered Leo a job as the Voice of America’s broadcaster for Africa. They were allowed two years to travel the continent to learn before Leo first broadcast Music Time in Africa in 1965 from Liberia where they lived until 1969, when they moved close to Washington D.C. For more than forty years, Leo broadcast African music to Africa and made many trips. He claimed to have visited every country on the continent, and he drew hundreds of faces. The Leo Sarkisian Library at the Voice of America now houses not only his LPs and CDs but also 10,000 reel-to-reel tapes that he made on his travels, including early performances by musicians who later gained recognition, Fela Kuti among them. It is for Music Time in Africa that he will always be remembered, among the pioneers of Western recordists of African music including the Opika brothers, Hugh Tracey, and Willard Rhodes. There were fan clubs through the continent in the 70s and 80s. Bags of letters came thanking him for celebrating what was good about being African. His enthusiasm for the music was obvious. He never referred to anyone’s “band,” always an “orchestra.” In D.C., he continued to play kanun with Armenian bands, playing on a couple of LPs as a talented sideman. His Silver Spring, Maryland home was covered in his paintings of the faces of African women. When Mary’s vision failed, he said, “she took care of me for fifty years. Now, I have to take care of her for fifty years.” He donated his personal collection of instruments to the University of Michigan. The defunding of the VOA under the Obama administration such that he could not travel there as he liked troubled him deeply. He had served the United States under thirteen presidents, every one since Truman, and it pained him when at the age of 91, the oldest federal employee, he stepped down from Music Time in Africa, handing the reins to Heather Maxwell.

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the-little-crime-writer · 6 years

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Stephen Griffiths - The Crossbow Cannibal

A psychology graduate and PhD student in Applied Criminal Justice Studies, Stephen Griffiths is destined to be remembered as ‘The Crossbow Cannibal’. The gruesome moniker didn’t come from a popular press, but from the man himself. On 28th May 2010, wearing a black shirt and jeans, he stood in a packed magistrates’ court and boldly gave the name in place of his own.

The declaration was met with gasps from a crowd that had no idea what it was he had done with the three women he was accused of murdering. When asked by the court clerk for his address, the Crossbow Cannibal replied, ‘Here, I guess.’ These short lines were part of a three-minute performance that ended with the 40-year-old confirming his date of birth. Stephen Shaun Griffiths was born in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire on 24th December 1969 - like all children, he couldn’t wait for Christmas Day, went the family joke. The eldest of three children, Shaun, as he was known, was a slender child. The Crossbow Cannibal’s first moniker was ‘The Stickman’

Unlike his siblings, Griffiths was an introspective and quiet. ‘You could never get a read on him,’ remarked one uncle. ‘He was very much a loner.’

Griffiths didn’t seem to care much for football or any other interests of most boys his age. This is not to say he didn’t attract attention. One former neighbour recalls that as a child the future murderer had a habit of killing and dismembering birds: ‘It looked like as of he was enjoying what he was doing He wasn’t dissecting them bit by bit, he was ripping them apart.

In Trouble

When Griffiths was still very young, his parents split up. He moved with his mother, sister and brother to the nearby city of Wakefield. There he attended the exclusive and expensive Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, the alma mater of serial killer John George Haigh, ‘The Acid Bath Murderer’.

He was a diligent student, but outside of school Griffiths was often in trouble with the law. In his early teens he was caught stealing from a garage. At the age of 17, he slashed a supermarket manager with a knife when he was stopped for shoplifting. Griffiths received a three-year sentence for that attack, some of which was spent in a high-security mental hospital. One doctor diagnosed Griffiths as a ‘sadistic, schizoid psychopath’. Another doctor recorded that the youth had a ‘preoccupation with murder - particularly multiple murder’. Griffiths told his probation officer that he believed he would one day become a serial killer. Within three years, Griffiths was back in prison, this time for holding a knife to the throat of a young girl. He could give no reason for his actions.

Not long after his release, the future Crossbow Cannibal got into trouble again, this time for possessing two airguns and carrying a knife in public. Despite his years of incarceration, further run-ins with the law and wildly unpredictable, anti-social behaviour, Griffiths managed to earn a degree in psychology from Leeds University. He was accepted at the University of Bradford, where he began six years of work on academic thesis, ‘Homicide in an Industrial City’, comparing modern murder techniques in Bradford to those used during the second half of the 19th century. Griffiths incorporated some of his research in ‘The skeleton and the Jaguar’, a website he established that focused largely on serial killers.

He spent a good amount of time online, frequenting social networking sites. Griffiths would identify himself as ‘Ven Pariah... the misanthrope who brought hate to heaven’, under which guise he would post his disturbing thoughts. ‘Humanity’, he once wrote, ‘is not merely a biological condition. It is also a state of mind. On that basis, I am a pseudo-human at best. A demon at worst.’

His relationships with women tended to be abusive and short-lived, yet he fathered at least one child. Griffiths was arrested numerous times for domestic violence, and once appeared in court for leaving threatening messages on the voicemail of a former girlfriend.

Sinister habits

From his teens on, Griffiths was one of those people in the media describes as being ‘known to police’. In 2008, attention increased after local librarians reported that he’d been borrowing books on human dismemberment. This warning sign coincided with problems at the building in which he rented a small bachelor flat. Male neighbours were being threatened, while the females increasingly became the focus for unwanted attention. Two women reported that a once friendly and polite Griffiths had become extremely hostile after his sexual advances were rejected.

The building management became so concerned that it installed closed-circuit cameras and a panic button for its caretaker. An unnamed senior manager with the company that owned the building was convinced that it was only a matter of time before Griffiths committed murder... which, of course, he did.

It’s likely that the true number of women murdered by Stephen Griffiths will never be known. Ultimately, he would admit to just three, the first being 43-year-old Susan Rushworth.

A sex trade worker who struggled with heroin addiction, she was last seen alive near her home during the dying minutes of 22nd June 2009. In the months that followed police made numerous appeals to the public, hoping for some hint as to the missing woman’s whereabouts. What the authorities didn’t know, but perhaps suspected, was that Susan Rushworth was long dead. It’s almost certain that she was killed by Griffiths on the evening of her disappearance.

On 26th April 2010, another prostitute, 31-year-old Shelley Armitage, disappeared while working the streets of Bradford city centre. No one noticed at first; two days passed before she was reported missing. Less than a month later, on 21st May, a Friday, Suzanne Blamires also vanished from the streets of Bradford. The mystery behind the disappearance of this 36-year-old sex trade worker would only last the weekend.

We know that Blamires accompanied Griffiths to his flat, most likely willingly. We also know that she tried to leave. The same security cameras that had been installed in Griffiths apartment building by concerned management captured her sudden and swift end. Grainy footage shows Blamires feeling Griffiths’ flat with the PhD student in pursuit He knocks her unconscious, and leaves her lying in the corridor. Moments later, Griffiths returns with a crossbow, aims and shoots a bolt through Blamire’s head. Before dragging the woman back to his apartment, he raises his crossbow to the camera in triumph. Moments later, Griffiths returns with a drink, apparently toasting the death. Still later, the murderer can be seen carrying a series of bin bags out of the building.

The first person to view these images was the building caretaker. He called the police - but not before selling the story to a tabloid newspaper. Griffiths was arrested within hours. Asked to confirm his identity, he replied, ‘I’m Osma Bin Laden’, later adding cryptically, ‘I’ve killed a lot more than Suzanne Blamires - I’ve killed loads. Peter Sutcliffe [The Yorkshire Ripper] came a cropper in Sheffield. So did I, but at least I got out of the city.’

Authorities searched his home and the immediate area for any sign of Blamires and the other missing women. The small flat was lined with shelves holding hundreds of horror films and books on serial killers, terrorism and genocide. It wasn’t strictly true that Griffiths lived alone; he kept two lizards, which he fed baby rats that he bred for just that purpose.

The first body to be discovered not by police but by a member of public in the River Aire. Cut into at least 81 separate pieces, the corpse was not complete. Police divers would recover a black suitcase containing the instruments Griffiths had used to carry out the dissection. As would become clear in the coming days, Griffiths had consumed several pounds of flesh from his victims. The remains would be identified as belonging to Blamires. Identification came without the aid of DNA testing - her head, with the crossbow bolt, was found in a rucksack. A some point Griffiths had embedded a knife in her skull.

The Bathtub ‘slaughterhouse’

During police investigations, the man who had rambled continuously on the internet proved oddly reticent. When asked why he felt the need to kill, Griffiths was initially flummoxed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. But then he added: ‘Sometimes you kill someone to kill yourself, or kill a part of yourself. I don’t know, I don’t know - it’s like deep issues inside of me.’

The investigating officer pressed on; ‘So, why did you feel the need to kill any of the girls?’

‘I don’t know,’ Griffiths eventually responded. ‘I’m misanthropic. I don’t have very much time for the human race.’ Griffiths gradually opened up about the murders, providing police with macabre details. He described his flat’s bathtub as a ‘slaughterhouse’, saying that it was there that his victims were dismembered. He used power tools on the first two bodies, boiling the parts he ate in a pot. Blamires was cut up by hand, and her flesh was eaten raw. ‘That’s the part of the magic,’ he said, explaining his predilection for human meat.

While Griffith did not share many details of the actual killings, police had video evidence. There was of course, the death of Suzanne Blamires, which had been captured by a security camera, but the horrific images paled next to those of Shelley Armitage. Griffiths had filmed his second victim’s death using his mobile phone, which he subsequently left on a train. The device was bought and sold twice before police managed to track it down. The footage it held was described by one veteran detective as the most disturbing he’d ever viewed.

Armitage is shown naked and bound with the words ‘My sex Slave’ spray-painted in black on her back. Griffiths can be heard saying: ‘I am Ven Pariah, I am the bloodbath Artist. Here’s a model who is assisting me.’

Only Susan Rushworth was spared the indignity of having her death caught on camera. Investigators believe she was killed with a hammer.

On 21st December 2010, three days before his 41st birthday, Griffiths pleaded guilty to the murders of Susan Rushworth, Shelley Armitage and Suzanne Blamires. He was handed down a life sentence. (Bizarrely, he had insisted on being represented by the Bradford law firm Lumb & Macgill, who acted for serial killer Peter Sutcliffe in the early 1980s.)

Since being taken into custody, Griffiths has reportedly attempted suicide. He also went on a hunger strike, reportedly losing 40 lb (18kg). Behind bars, Griffiths is less the Crossbow Cannibal, and more the Stickman.

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braindamageforbeginners · 6 years

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The apocalypse is here

Pictured above: Either the I5 North or the current political races. I’m no longer sure. So, this will take a bit of time to get to, but I promise it’ll be good. I guarantee that, I’ll be quoting directly from candidate statements/descriptions (we’ll get back to the abyss soon enough, and the time a DIY project almost killed/crippled Dad)(the man attempted an electrical project, I’d like to point I quietly though this was a bad idea). Anyway, I’m certain that decent, kind, honest, noble, and educated and mostly-human Congresscritters must exist - people do vote for them, after all. However, having met one Congressman and, being lied to the staff of another (pro-tip; no matter how pro-military or manly and awesome you like to think you are, it’s not a reassuring thing to your constituents if there’s an explosion on a large photo in your office. So I have rather low regard for them, as a group (I know, that’s baseless stereotyping).

So you can imagine my surprise at coming to rest in Daryl Issa’s old district, a man so loathed even by his own party that they quietly told him to go away. I’ve seen a lot of strange political events, but, believe me when I say I’ve never seen anything like this; a completely vacant Congressional seat that could be inhabited by a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, or even some type of salamander (the salamander would’ve been an improvement over Jerry Lewis). Anyway, since there are also assorted state assembly judicial races at stake, they’re all included in this pamphlet (and potentially included in this oversized piece). As usual, I will be selecting choice quotes, and, remember, candidates may include an age and/or occupation.

Kistin Gaspar: “[...] A mother, small business owner, and the mayor of encinitas, she has the get-it-done approach we need in Congress.” Fantastic, just as I start to enjoy the peace and quiet of life without Larry the Cable Guy in the public light, there’s this call-back. Or so I thought, until I found out that the “Get It Done” app is used in our area to report “non-emergency problems to the city.” Now, I hate potholes as much as any American (possibly more, since I used to live in a country where drivers used them to help corner while going 80 mph on unpaved roads). Still, “Fixing potholes” seems a little below the pay-grade of a pre-conviction congresswoman.

Diane Harkey: Healthcare: Diane will worke for policies that increase choice, costs, and allow patietns and doctors to decide what care is best. No, no, she isn’t. Diane’s endorsed/puppeted by the American Independent Party, so she has about as much chance of winning as a large rock. But, more importantly, I’m pretty sure the AIP is only concerned with healthcare as a business that sends them money. The big take-away here is less what I say, and more the fact that third party-associated candidates with little-to-no chance of winning feel compelled to tell everyone their healthcare system will be fine, even if it won’t.

David Medway: “I want to protect working families from increasing taxes, healthcare bills, and gun violence (while protecting our right to bear arms). I want to prevent national catastrophes like pandemics (which I wrote a book about) and environmental disasters (such as protecting our coastline from nuclear waste and oil spills that would devastate our shores). I support women’s rights and the melting pot of cultures tha tmake up California. I support lower taxes, less government and the best healthcare and education in the world for all Americans at reasonable prices. Please define “reasonable,” sir, I suspect our answers will differ. Also, you’ll notice he’s making the classic math mistake - better, improved services at a mere fraction of the tax cost! Which is a bullshit political statement/proposal. You might be able to get a great vaccuum cleaner for a fraction of the name-brand because slavery is still totally legal in some parts of the world (meaning the company saves a lot on payroll), and wholesalers/transportation will give bulk purchase discounts. Unless your local police and firefighters are staffed by robots (always a possibility), imagine City Hall telling them that they now have to do the same job, only much better, and with a pay cut. Oh, and we’re firing one-in-three of their employees. Society tried hat in Silicon Valley (with choppy results), I don’t think you want to try it with ambulances.

Crag Nordal: “I am an Evangelical Christian who will defend and protect Israel, protect innocent human life from conception to birth, and to natural death, defend and protect marriage between a man and a woman, restore Christian and Jewish morals and ethics to our public schools, and protect religious freedoms. I vow to enforce and enhance border security, build that wall, protect and defend our 2nd Amendment as an NRA life member, and wok to shrink government daily and drain that swamp. I believe I have a conviction from God, to enter this race. I ask that you consider my moral character and conviction above any other experience or attributes. Nothing is more important in selecting our leaders in in the Congress of the United States of America. Our country is engaged in a spiritual battle between the guiding force of moral law and those that are working to remove God from every aspect of our society. We need Christian moral leaders to stand up and fight for the God given rights that our Founding Fathers based our Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. In the creation of this great country God and His laws were relied on to form the greatest founding documents of any country ever formed by men, and thereby the greatest country ever conceived. The United States was formed to be God’s hammer in this world to contain and destroy evil.” Holy shit (almost literally), is there a lot to discuss - I included all of it because every time I thought I’d gotten to the funny/pertinent point, it went on, like a Harry Potter book . First of all, even though you get looney-tune candidates like this and parts of the GOP that always like to nod to the idea of instituting a theocracy, let’s get that out of the way; this is basic civics, First Amendment expressly forbids the idea of instituting a state religion. Speaking of which, even if that were legally possible, whose religion? When he simultaneously restores Jewish and Christian ethics to the schools, will bacon be allowed in those schools? You get a different answer depending on if you go to church on Saturday or Sunday (which is also something different Christian sects have different ideas on). For the purposes of brevity, I’ll have to just say, everyone’s welcome to their own religion, but the institution of a theocracy - while appealing in theory - would be horrific, brutal, and possibly genocidal (I’ll admit I like the idea of communism, in theory, but I’ve seen enough of the results in the real world to know it’s not a good idea). Also, I appreciate his desire to look after Israel, which is always a positive attribute when you’re voting for someone to look after your own country’s interests (I know there’s a tenuous Biblical connection, but, come on, guys, Isarel’s gotta start fending for itself)(the flip side of hat sentiment would be, “We can talk about Israel when every American has a job, home, and healthcare”). And there’s “I believe I have a conviction from God.” We all have convictions, maybe some of them come from God, but most are personal. Unless he means “I believe I have a mission from God.” Which is more grammatically correct, and, compared to the rest, no crazier or dumber. BTW, I feel like I have to put out a disclaimer about religion and say that I don’t really care if you’re religious, or, as long as it’s not hurting anyone to what extent your religion informs policy proposals (and I wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to determine exactly where one ends and the other begins; our minds just aren’t built that way) - there’s a massive difference between that and standing up in the middle of church (let alone Congress) and shouting, “GOD COMMANDS ME TO CAST OUT THE UNWORTHY.” I do like his demand that we judge him exclusively on his faith and not on what he says, does, or anything else that might involve objective reality. Oh, and that bit about “God’s hammer in this world” really upset me when I first read it, and I couldn’t figure why, until I remembered this quote, “ "I am the Flail of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you. “ which is attributed to Genghis Khan (even if you think the temporary stability and increased trade in Asia as a result of the Mongol Empire is awesome, remember that 40-60 million people died due to his campaigns and policies)(the Mongols tended to obliterate cropland, so whoever they didn’t kill usually starved).

Robert Pendleton MD, PhD - Surgeon/Biochemist/Small Businessman/Visual Artist: “ My name is Robert Pendelton Md PhD and I feel a calling to awaken the apathetic and unite disenfranchised moderates. I am an eye-surgeon, biochemist, small businessman, and visual artist, and the K9USA Party is my vision for a better world. K9 is a political party and philosophy of decision-making based upon the attributes of dogs that make “man’s best-friend” so special: Unconditional Love, Simple Needs, and Readiness to Defend. Adapted to national politics, international politics, and our personal lives, these attributes become the nine K9 principles: Socially Progressive, Fiscally Conservative, and militarily prepared (national, Altruistic, Sovereign, and United (international), and Loving, Lean and Strong (personal).2020 Application of K9 Principles yields the “six results” of Tolerance, Security, Health, Happiness, Peace and Freedom. My “2020 Vision” is for the K9USA Party to elect a majority of representatives (50% women) to the United States Congress and Presidency by the year 2020... Donkeys and elephants have failed. It’s time for dogs to lead.” I have only just heard of this man and I love him.

#quie

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seeksredempticn · 7 years

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Hey this is genuinely just curiosity, I'm not looking to fight, but what do you have against Tony Stark? Is it just mcu Tony?

Hey! Thanks for being so polite! I only hate MCU Tony, because I dont really know any other version of him - except for some amazing roleplayers. Well, I think the whole Peter thing is a shitshow. Tony takes a 16-year-old boy who just discovered his powers to another country to fight Captain America, without ever giving him any explanation to what was happening (also breaking the Accords he was so fussy over), and what they were fighting over. I didn’t watch SM:H, but I’ve seen a lot of people saying Tony seemed neglectful towards Peter, installed a fucking kill mode in his damn suit, and had a lovely line about how he couldn’t have Peter’s death on his consciousness - which feels like the problem wasn’t Peter dying, but Peter dying and it being Tony’s fault. Tony rarely seems to care about things until they directly affect him. You can’t tell me he didnt know what his weapons were being used for before he witnessed it and felt bad about it. Same thing with CA:CW. I doubt he would have been pro-Accords if that lady hadn’t shoved her son’s death into his face. Going back a little, I hate how condescending and mocking he always is, how every time he’s sharing a scene with a woman, he’s leering. Bonus points for the rape joke in AoU. In AoU, well, he makes Ultron. “Oh, but Wanda-” yeah, she did that with everyone, and nobody reacted like that. Tony deliberately doesn’t tell anyone, exactly because he knows they’ll stop him. In CACW, or, as I call it, Iron Man 4, it’s a shitshow from start to finish. It’s naive to trust the UN to actually put people over the interests of state, and the G5 countries rule it anyway - aka Germany, France, UK, USA, Russia. The UN fails every time it’s needed, usually because money, and poorer/developing countries pay the price inevitably. Our governments suck. And I bet Tony “I have 3 PhDs” knows this. Also, the whole amendments suggestion? Can’t be done, because no Avenger was part of creating the Accords. Furthermore, signing the Accords won’t stop destruction, won’t stop innocent people from getting killed. Tony just wants to have the excuse of just be “following orders” so he won’t feel bad. (Oh, he also calls Wanda a WMD. Good one, buddy.)I won’t even get started in how registering people for being different is the first step to genocide, and there’s enough hatred against mutants and enhanced people in the MCU. Then there’s the airport scene. Tony - and the whole team - flat-out refuse to listen to Steve, only delaying them from stopping the real villain of the movie. He also shoots Sam close-range in the chest for… nothing, I guess, because all Sam did was dodge a blast that would have definitely killed him, if the fall was high enough to paralyze this super-protected Rhodey (who’s only paralyzed for further Tony’s manpain.)When Tony visits the Raft, he talks to Clint like it’s Clint’s fault that he’s there. Sure, he broke the Accords, to stop Zemo. What did he want, for everyone to stay still and wait for their passports so they could go to Siberia? Oh, he leaves everyone there to rot, too, when he could have broken everyone out with a snap of his fingers. Then there’s Siberia (aka, Tony breaking the Accords the moment he needed to). He sees the video of his parents being murdered, and doesn’t immediately attack Bucky. Instead, he talks to Steve first. Attacking Bucky isn’t his gut reaction, so this is further evidence to what the directors say about the scene: that Tony is trying to kill Bucky partially to get back at Steve. To quote the directors: “You like this thing so much? I’m gonna take it away from you.”He also doesn’t care that it wasnt Bucky’s fault. After Steve tells him Bucky wasn’t in control and that killing him won’t change what happened, Tony just says “I don’t care. He killed my mom.”“Oh, but Evie, everyone would have reacted the same!” In that same movie, we see that no, not everyone. The woman from the beginning of the movie looks the man responsible for the death of her son in the eye and doesn’t even raise her voice. T'Challa hasn’t had any time to grieve from seeing his father die in front of him like 3 days ago, and when he learns who’s the real murderer, he stops Zemo from killing himself. Meanwhile, Tony blows Bucky’s arm off and shoots him in the back when he was pretty much already down for the count, and later, when Tony’s got Steve cornered, Bucky taps Tony’s foot to distract him and Tony kicks him in the face with his metal-clad foot. That’s not a fight, that’s just good ole’ cowardice and, as the directors confirmed it, “he wants to see Bucky suffer. That’s why he asks him if he remembers killing his parents.”Basically, Tony doesn’t think shit through. He reacts with his feelings without caring how is it gonna harm others, or if it’s fair, or anything. He’s a self-centered dick who has the most annoying fanbase I’ve ever seen. Also, I’m just really tired of everything in the MCU revolving about his feelings. And theres enough Rich White Billionaire Manpain in the real world. I want to see a hero.

#antitonystark

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samueldays · 6 years

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One hell of a ride

It’s okay to be white, says 4chan.

HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT YOU RACIST, says a hydra that should be a 4chan and should be considered a 4chan. I call this counter-4chan a “hydra” because it has many distributed ‘heads’ that scream and bite, but seemingly nothing that can be said to be in charge, nobody central. Oh, and because it’s a monster. Much like 4chan.

4chan’s posters are not the story. The reaction is the story. I will attempt to approximately dissect a few sub-verbs for an attempt at precision:

The reaction exists because the 4chanlike hydra has had a long time to get into positions of standing; papers and universities and other places with a good solid grasp on the Microphone.

The reaction happens because nobody is in charge of the hydra.

The reaction is noteworthy because the hydra is deranged.

The reaction becomes a story because the internet has allowed 4chan Prime and its friends to also get a degree of Microphone access, and computers in general allow for easy collection and distribution of a dozen of the most preposterous reactions from the hydra.

Point 1 could have been negated by altered behavior in hiring and reporting so that people like George Ciccariello-Maher (of “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” infamy) don’t accumulate as much social capital in the first place, either by keeping them out in the first place or by reporting on them more as 'Maher, a twitter troll, says...' and less as ‘Maher, of Drexel University, author of Such-and-Such, PhD AP JKL M.N.O. High Poobah, says...’. Point 2 could have been negated either by stop-that-shit orders from above (if there had been any above), or by internal communication and coordination. Point 3 could have been negated by not responding in a deranged fashion. More ‘This is a divisive message, selective focus and cherry-picking, it’s not easy being green, Black Lives Matter, this is just 4chan attention whoring, move along now’ and less ‘Nazist! Racist! No it’s not okay to be white!’ Point 4 could have been negated by the first group from the previous point having some way to rein in the second group, or media control and censorship so that 4chan and friends couldn’t get out their message about the second group’s bile.

Justine Sacco gets fired for an insensitive joke. George Ciccariello-Maher doesn’t get fired for calling for genocide. Maher then has the audacity to complain that he’s been ill-treated because his employer politely distanced themselves from him, “of course Maher has free speech but we found this comment reprehensible”.

I name Maher because one can here see Maher’s standing/backing/prestige/legitimacy/status/whatever you want to call it, where a Grand High Poobah suggests that Drexel should apologize for distancing themselves from a call for genocide. But this isn’t a post about him, it’s a post about the interaction-pattern between 4chan and its hydraesque mirror. Maher is just a standout example. “It’s okay to be white” is the most recent example.

(“But I was only joking.” Tell it to Justine Sacco. Tell it to Pax Dickinson. Tell it to all the people fired for insensitive jokes that didn’t involve calls for genocide.)

4chan baited the hydra with “It’s okay to be white”, and boy did the hydra bite. The hydra was confident it could get away with taking the bait, and 4chan was similarly confident that the hydra would bite. Or so it seems to me, because both parties to this shitfest have quite the history. 4chan has for a long time been a toxic noise hole of no value and no standing except to the kind of people who are themselves largely without standing, and the hydra has for a long time been in positions of great standing and saying with an ever thinner figleaf, ever louder: “We hate white supremacism. We hate toxic whiteness. Actually, whiteness itself is a cancer...”

(There may be a generational process of 'not getting the joke' at work here. One generation’s hyperbole and slogans become the next generation’s truths accepted at face value, so their hyperbole has to be turned up further.)

I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know how this is going to end. I’m mostly writing this to sort out my thoughts on how things have gone already, and put “It’s okay to be white” into a larger context. This latest fracas didn’t come out of nowhere, and it seems likely to get recurringly worse over time.

Perhaps one could phrase it as a negotiation/argument. 4chan says “We want hydra privileges of having well-paid, respectable jobs and near-immunity to punishment when we call for genocides of the outgroup; or for you to suffer and lose these things.” Hydra says “You white people had those for centuries, turnabout is fair play. Consider your suffering to be the reparations you owe for your atrocities.” 4chan says “This is America, we don’t have hereditary privileges or taint of blood here.” Hydra says “But you did, and you still do.” 4chan says “Fine, if we’re going to play it that way, with collective hereditary ethnic guilt and all, I demand reparations for the various colored atrocities.” Hydra says “But those didn’t happen in America. We’re discussing America here, and America was distinctly directional in having white-on-black atrocities and not the reverse.” 4chan says “If you insist on limiting the discussion to America, I insist on limiting the discussion to those now living, among whom there are no slaves or slaveowners.” Hydra complains of present-day institutional discrimination, 4chan hammers on present-day murder rates by race.

4chan isn’t actually this eloquent, but I think you get the drift. History is big enough that carefully-chosen slices of it can be made to support the viewpoint of your choice, and there’s not going to be agreement on how to slice it any time soon.

Interesting times.

(Lurking in the background: A dire warning. Also from miti, further reading for those who have come from the future to read this at a time when the event is not fresh in memory and you have only a vague idea WTF is going on.)

#all #idpol #racepol

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22kjde · 7 years

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Just Tattoo of Us

Request: Hi! If you’re still doing requests could you do one where the reader is Mr J’s tattoo artist, the only one he hasn’t killed. Maybe have a jealous Harley in it.

Warning(s): Swearing, slight (sexual) violence i.e. choking, sexual references, light dirty talk, Jealous!Harley

Word count: 2.1k

The bell dinged, signifying yet another customer entering the already crowded tattoo studio. Mind you, it was a Saturday at 1:19pm in the middle of a busy city - Gotham; to be exact.

City of Crime.

Has a ring to it.

Even though the dangerous city had quite the crude reputation to be... crooked, let's say, she loved living in it. It was just something about living life on the edge - never really knowing whether the next day would be her last - that excited her and she couldn't get enough of the rush that came with it.

Though of course, the perks also came with a few disadvantages, that many would say would be a little too colossal of a problem and would turn them away from moving to the crime-ridden town.

You know, just a tad of a turn-off.

She had run into - well, saw at the corner of a street and then swivelled in the other direction as fast as she could - many a criminal during her occasional strolls through the underworld.

Don't take a midnight stroll on the wrong side of town, I'm telling you. It's not a good idea.

There was one special occasion, however.

Meeting the one, the only, the infamous, Joker: Clown Prince of Crime - the 'Jester of Genocide', if you will - under the pale moonlight oddly drew her being towards him in some sort of way. Which way that was, she didn't know herself yet. Maybe curiosity, maybe incredulity, maybe attraction, but she was certainly intrigued by the acid-washed man.

Now, the woman wasn't an idiot, nor ignorant, at that. She had acknowledged the presence of his partner in crime - his Harley Quinn - nevertheless, she persisted in trying to get into his circle of trust, to be his friend, in an obscure form.

You would think being his tattoo artist wouldn't get her very far, huh?

She was the only tattoo artist within a 3-mile radius of his unknown location in which he and Harley lived.

I wasn't kidding when I said the tattoo studio was crowded. How much do you wanna bet getting a micro-sized rose on your ankle is? Joker made sure she was earning as much as your standard lawyer or doctor in the city by taking the liberty to act on some pretty drastic measures.

Basically, he executes every other tattoo artist in the general area, to put it simply.

How sweet.

But as one can imagine, his significant other would be slightly suspicious, and that was to be expected when your man paid special and notable attention to another woman. Yes, jealousy wasn't exactly an aspired trait in a normal relationship. But anyone who knew about them and their past knew that Harley Quinn and her Joker were anything but ordinary.

Jumping into a VAT full of bubbling acid to prove your love for a psychopath who manipulated you?

No thank you.

Although, with saying that, the adrenaline-addicted tattoo artist from a family background was seemingly willing to do anything and everything but.

"I was thinking about a new lip tattoo, whaddya think?" A deep yet velvety voice broke her from her trance and snapped her back to reality where she noticed she had just been staring out of the recently cleaned, sparkling window, wielding a tattoo pen that was still whirring from inscribing her art onto her last customer - she had forgotten to turn the machine off before spacing out.

Quickly switching it off, she swallowed before looking up at the blindingly green-haired man standing in front of the mirror and pulling at his bottom lip, inspecting.

"Well if you want it to say "P U S S Y", count me out." She retorted with a quick wit, something she never really understood if it was a gift or a curse. Her sharp tongue usually got her into some hefty trouble more than a few times. But hey, she was comical.

Her comment earned a chuckle from him which in turn made her smile to herself. Making him laugh was always a daily mission for her. To see him smile because of what she did or said was always an achievement.

"That's why I like you, doll. You always have some sarcastic remark. It's refreshing. Hearing the words "yes, Daddy" and "play with me, Daddy" from Harls every day gets repetitive over time." He sauntered over after checking himself once over in the mirror - vain bastard - and sat on the extended tattoo couch, now level with her, as she had been sitting in her spinny chair, whilst she discarded her old rubber gloves and put on a new pair, the sound of the material smacking against her skin as she pulled on them.

"Oh, I'm sure it must be very tiring to have kinky sex on the daily, J." She rolled her eyes as she used his nickname that only certain people were allowed to call him. He normally only allowed others to refer to him as "Joker" or "Mister J". She snickered at the glare he gave her before continuing, not adhering the warning. "I'm serious! Ya gotta use the handcuffs, the ropes, the ice, the foreplay, the whips... I would imagine fucking your tailor-made girlfriend who obeys your every command would be absolutely tedious."

His hands were around her throat and squeezing within seconds after she had finished her sentence, making her stand up with him and letting him push her back into the wall with a thump, a constricted grunt of slight pain resounding from her closed throat. Her doe eyes looked up and met his narrowed ones with only a few inches between them.

"I don't think you want to know just how interesting I can really be with my toys, doll-face, so I suggest you shut up about my sex life unless you want me to prove to you that you're wrong." His threat was laced with a presence of sexual tension. The sensation of his fingers around her neck and his breath fanning her face with seducing threats that came with his body mere centimetres away from hers almost made her knees buckle from underneath her and she had to stop herself from releasing an audible moan of desperation and anticipation from thinking about what he could do to her right then and there.

The two of them must've stayed in that position - staring each other down with nothing but their laboured breaths filling the room - for a solid five or so minutes until the door to the room slammed wide open and a bustling bleached-blonde skipped in, the sound of her heels tapping against the floorboards jolting the woman held against the wall back to life and she tried pulling away but to no avail. Keeping his grip tight, but not tight enough to cut off the airways, he continued to gaze intently into her eyes. His glazed over with a fire burning deep inside of him that he didn't conjure with his girlfriend any longer.

"Puddin'?..." The mixed tone of anger, disappointment, and rejection was detectable from Harley as the nickname for her lover spewed from her red lips. Walking into a secluded room to see the man she loved with a woman she had already been jealous of, in a position she thought was only reserved for her in the bedroom, brung out the worst in her as she felt the rage bubbling up inside at an increasing rate. Ready to pounce at the bitch trying to steal her boyfriend, she was stopped by the voice she had fallen in love with.

"Harley, sweetums, I want you to go home and be ready for me for when I get back, okay? Daddy's going to get a new tattoo and I was just in the middle of telling our artist here exactly what I want. Detail... by... detail." The reply had a sickly sweet underlay to it which, to any typical person, could've been easily picked up on and scoffed at - something she almost did - but to Harley, blinded by her emotions towards the criminal, it was just another demand for sex which she gladly complied to every time. She looked past everything she had just witnessed only minutes ago after hearing the pet name she had been called, convincing herself that the man dangerously close to a woman that wasn't her, still loved her in his own way.

"Alright, Daddy, but don't be long. I'll be waiting..." An exaggerated grin, accompanied by a giggle, was sent in his direction before she turned on her heel and walked through the doorway, shutting the door with a click after her.

Shoving his body off of her, the trained tattoo artist dramatically gagged and stuck her forefinger inside her mouth. She was amazed yet disgusted at the same time at how submissive a woman could be towards a man. Never in her life did she witness such obedience without question to someone who was clearly not right in the noggin'.

"You've messed her up, J. Like real bad. She worships the ground you walk on. She's just your fucking sex toy and she doesn't even realise it, thinking you "love" her and shit." A rant had been building up inside of her until finally, it started to be projected. "I kinda feel sorry for the girl. She was a psychologist, a good one at that, with a PhD, and you've somehow manipulated her and worked your way into her mind so that now she'd do anything for you. She'd die for you."

"And that's how I like it. People in this city respect me, all because-..."

"That's not respect! That's psychological torture and I'll be damned if I end up like another one of your 'dolls' you can have fun with one minute and couldn't give a fuck about the next." She didn't notice but she had begun to yell with pent up anger flowing out of her, she didn't even register entirely what she was saying.

She had wanted to be by his side for as long as she could remember after meeting him, as his companion, his partner, his lover. She had thought she could replace Harley and become his new Queen of Crime. However, after seeing what previous Dr Harleen Quinzel had now become under his hands, she began to have second thoughts.

"You think I would treat you just like some random woman I picked up from the club? Oh, no, no, no. You... are one of a kind. You're unique... You're mine." As he spoke these enticing words in a sultry manner, he came closer. Each step forward he made, resulted in one step backward for her until the back of her knees hit the chair and she fell back into it, now laying down. She watched as he placed his hands either side of her on the armrests and wedged his knees beside her, crawling up her body until he was hovering above.

Her breath became uneven as she tried to stop herself from giving in and looking down at his crimson lips that looked o so kissable. "I want you. And the things I want, I get, no matter how. I know you've been wanting me since the first time you saw me. I know you touch yourself at night at the thought of me doing dirty things to you. When you're alone in bed and your mind keeps drifting off to think about what I could do with your body. And I know how badly you want to feel full. You want me inside you. Isn't that right?"

The way he spoke her thoughts aloud without caring who heard him made her cheeks turn a shade of red so deep she didn't even think it possible and her core slick with want and need. The rough nature of his gravelly voice mixed with the undertones of lust and greed for her, visibly shook her as goosebumps appeared on her skin. Hearing all of these sinful words whispered from the mouth she had tried to resist earlier made her reach up to pull his head down as she just couldn't take the teasing any longer, connecting their lips together in a heated, passionate kiss.

A growl was released from the depths of his throat as he shifted his body weight onto his elbows either side of her head and pressed his lower half into her, allowing her to feel what she did to him without touching him once. Hands moving to grip his shirt around his torso, she opened her mouth to grant him access to explore with his tongue before moaning gently.

Amongst all the fiery desire and passion the both of them were sharing, she had managed to remember a specific moment that had happened during his visit to the studio earlier before which made her pull away from his hungry lips to add her sarcastic rebuttal, as she always did,

"Play with me, Daddy."

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fallinginlovewithafashionmogul · 6 years

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“Oh I see, well if you really want to know what... I like to gorge more in Asian cousin and I can be a pasta whore and pizza lover too, in fact I like junk food in general but, lately I don’t have the time nor the money to indulge.” He replied with a simple shrug of his shoulder, “I also don’t believe in wasting food but, that’s not the reason why I’m eating it. Like I said before it’s been a very long time since someone cooked for me. And that was before I developed OCD and PTSD.” Eren set his fork down on top of the empty plate. The three major things were Haphephobia, Agraphobia, and Autodysomophobia but, he didn’t think he needed to say that to Levi on their seconded meeting. In fact they weren’t even friends... but, he wanted Levi and for some reason he was overriding his phobia from day one when Levi ram into him. “My parents aren’t exactly in the country and haven’t been since I started middle school. I moved out when I was seventeen but, before that I graduated high school at the age of eight I enter my university at around the same time and obtain my master degree when I was 10. And you know I’m close to obtaining my PhD and I’m just in my twenties. I think the reason why I pushed myself was mostly out of spite.” Eren smiled a little, “Well any way It’s just been a long time.... So thank you for the food.”

Eren looked down when he said it. He kept his tone neutral he didn’t blame his mother from marrying the step-loser who never accepted him. He was suppose to be some high ranking Archdeacon and no offence to his mother she could have done a lot better than to marry that selfish mother fucker from the People of Faith who were rumored to dislike everything that weren’t human. Eren bet if they could commit genocide of a race they would have already. Which made him question her multiple time why she did the things she did. But, than again his mom was smart... Especially since she was an ex Arrow so maybe she was investigating something. But, who knows. She stop being his mother since she got married to that prick. Shaking his head off the unpleasant memory he glanced back to Levi and noticed how strange he was being.

“You have a little dessert lingering at the corner of your mouth…”

Eren glanced at him in time for Levi to hold both the napkin and another plate of the dessert. Eren wonder briefly how many of these desserts did he made? Instead he focused on how distant he was being. Taking the napkin and plate he set it in front of him he narrowed his gaze ever so slightly. To be truthful Levi was now rubbing his fur the wrong way. It felt like he licked his palm and intentionally started from the base where his tail attached and rub hard going up to his neck ruffling his damn fur out of order.

“Is something the matter? You’re sitting over there like I’m about to jump you and have my way with you or something...” Eren used the back of his hand to wipe at both side of his mouth getting some of the creme.

“Are you still worry about what happen? I told you I didn’t mean to slap your hand away... You’re not dirty or at least I don’t see you as someone who is filthy. I mean sure I’ll get startled and do something thoughtlessly since I haven’t put any real effort to touch therapy but, I don’t want you to think I don’t want you to touch me. Cause I feel like I do want you to touch me despite the way I am right now.”

Eren kept his gaze on him and when he thought Levi would break eye contact with him he reached out with both hand and semi-cup his cheeks to keep those hues on him without really touching him bare skinned-ed. “I don’t care if I duck or dodge you or hell run from you I want you to touch me. If you feel like you need to ambush me fine you have skin privileges.”

Eren dropped his hands to his lap his dessert forgotten his stomach was crunching almost nauseated. All this talk about being touched had given him chills and a slight erratic beat of his heart. “I know we just meet and I’m not the type of person who freely gives skin privileges but, I’m making an exception with you and only you.”

On another hand he crossed his arm over his chest thinking about his own family the one he considers pack. Like his brother Marco and Marcus and than there’s Jean too whom he sees as his brother. Armin is his partner his brother the one who’s akin to his soul. He has others and he wanted to fix himself so the next time they visit him on his island. He wanted to hug them in surprise like Ria and Sasha fierce, Connie and so many more. In a way the Imani’s Bodt, Kirchstein, Arlert and the Jaeger’s were family. And his family friends were his friend too so he wants to be welcoming towards them. But, as he was now he was incapable of touching them. “I’m working on touching family but, it’s hard right now... Maybe if I have a starting point I could do it....” He mumble but, he never had the drive to do so until this beautiful man ran into him. Now that he thought about it when this man told him to strip he sort of felt like he meant it as a compliment than insult or being a perverted shit.

He was flattered if it meant Levi was attracted to him maybe just maybe he felt a connection like pull like he was having. Levi scent made his feline purr made his cat arch it’s back and knead it’s claw in his head. When he had detected the first sent of Levi’s arousal his cat pounced on it. It took him considerable control to reign it back because he himself wasn’t ready. It stressed him and the fear was tangible to the point his cat felt it and retreated. It sniffed at him worriedly and making distress noises. He wanted to sooth his cat because it was aggressive and sexual and sensual and he never been shied about intimacy. But, what happened to him crippled not only him but, the cat he loves and cherished. If nothing change preferably sooner her might become aggressively violent... He wanted his first time of having sex with someone special. And he guess he still does so when he looked up to Levi he wonder how that was going to work..

Eren sigh softly what is he going to do should he just have sex and leave the emotional part out? Eren shook his head no internally yeah that wasn’t going to happen. So, if they did bounded than what? Does he stay here or should he leave anyway. Or maybe he’ll come with him since he talked about islands and connected with him anyway if only for a little bit.

“Anyway don’t force yourself I know you have OCD too so don’t push yourself if you’re uncomfortable. I’ll keep my hands to myself unless you want me to touch you. But, just so you know I don’t know how that’ll work with me though.”

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thisdaynews · 6 years

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Obasanjo ambushes Soyinka on Olumo Rock

New Post has been published on https://www.thisdaynews.net/2018/07/10/obasanjo-ambushes-soyinka-on-olumo-rock/

Obasanjo ambushes Soyinka on Olumo Rock

Humanity oscillates between extreme opposites; darkness paints the beauty of light; fear skirts the periphery of bravery; ugliness envies beauty; falsehood stalks truth, death ambushes life; good wrestles evil; all in an everlasting tussle. And science cements this eternal truth into reality, combining negative and positive poles to produce light.

The ubiquitous beauty of social media is also its blight. Social media, a nonphysical marketplace of ideas where information is served online among human communes, is a bittersweet leveller. It’s the color-blind arena where the walls of difference separating the rich and the poor; the young and the old; the literate and the illiterate; the weak and the powerful, are pulled down to kindle seamless social interaction.

I trod the online space some few days ago and a roar jangled my eardrums. The rumble shattered the time-worn witty saying, “Egba meji o j’ara won niyan,” meaning: two Egba indigenes don’t quarrel. But last week, the white-mane lion of letters, Oluwole Soyinka, attacked the Ebora Owu (Gnome of Owu), Olusegun Obasanjo. The Nobel laureate advised Obasanjo to desist from struggling to restore Nigeria to the path of sanity, urging the Ota farmer to head for a monastery for purgation, instead.

Though both prominent octogenarians are from the same Egba community of Abeokuta, where they grew up, age hasn’t thawed their icy relationship. Soyinka’s mother, Eniola, was the daughter of Rev. Canon J. J. Ransome-Kuti, and sister in-law to Mrs Olufunmilayo Kuti, the mother of the late Afrobeat great, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Although conjoined to his art, Soyinka’s political activism propelled him in 1965 to seize the Western Nigerian Broadcasting Service studio, Ibadan, and force a broadcast of the demand for a cancellation of the rigged western Nigerian regional election about to be announced. Predictably, the election turned out to be the bloodiest in the country’s history. Both the laureate and the three-time Nigerian ruler, Obasanjo, an Army General, have always been locked in a battle of wits as far back as 1967 when Soyinka described the Nigerian Civil War as a pogrom. At great personal risk, Soyinka secretly visited Enugu in 1967 when the clouds of war were about bursting into flaming rains. Soyinka dialogued with the charismatic Igbo leader, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, on the need to nip the impending war in the bud. Obasanjo, who fought on the side of Nigeria against the Igbo in the 30-month bloodbath, however, believes that the Biafran agitation for self-rule was treasonable.

Baba Iyabo tops the list of men most favored by Nigeria’s political dynamics. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan ranks second on the list. Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo is also prominent on the list. With military discipline and self-motivation, Obasanjo, whose parents were nobodies, rose from nothingness to excel in the Army and lead Nigeria for 11 years as military head of state and civilian president. By providence, Obasanjo it was, to whom Biafra surrendered on January 12, 1970, ending the Civil War. Religious, Obasanjo is a Baptist, who recently bagged a PhD in Theology. Spiritual, Soyinka sees Ogun, the Yoruba god of Iron, as a pathway to a better understanding of humanity, underlining Ogun’s creative force as an ironsmith, and his destructive force when seeking justice.

If the Ebora Owu and the Eni Ogun meet on top of Olumo Rock, here’s what’s likely to transpire:

Ebora: (Pele, Wole) Hi, Wole! I knew a day like this would come when we shall meet face to face, alone.

Ogun: Aremu, tani egbe e? Clearly, your parasitic happenstance in political leadership has vitiated your sense of respect. You call me Wole? Is 1934 the same as 1937?

Ebora: Ha, sorry o. (Igbawo lo ma ge wigi e yi?) When are you cutting this your wig?

Ogun: When you desist from corruption, deceit, vainglory and distractive powwowing!

Ebora: Ha! Powwowing ke? Wole has come again o, Mr Dictionary!

Ogun: It’s meet I give you a verbal hiding to exorcise the demons torturing your putrid being. You’re the very grief of this country.

Ebora: You nko?

Ogun: Me? Did I oversee the treacherous impeachments of Senate Presidents Evan Enwerem, Chuba Okadigbo and Ken Nnamani? I neither sought third term nor enthrone brigandage as state policy which saw the dehumanization of sitting Governor Ngige and the annihilation of Odi. Go and look at my records when I oversaw the FRSC. What light did you provide Nigerians with after guzzling billions of dollars? Did I corral people in government and the private sector to build a personal library for me? Your party was a nest of killers, Bola Ige was killed, and his killers weren’t arrested…

Ebora: Dake jo! Stop all that nonsense! Look at his biabia! I should’ve sent you to jail when I was president! You’re talking big grammar like Zebrudaya, abi? Who’s the great grandfather of cultism in Nigeria? Do you know how many people cultism has killed in this country? In fact, you should be tried for genocide, you killer!

Ogun: (E ma wo were yi!) Look at this madman! Your claim to knowledge through your recently purchased Oshodi PhD is hereby exposed. In your depth of debilitating ignorance, you didn’t know that confraternities are part of university culture? In the dawn of our youth, six other visionary youths and I, at the University College, Ibadan, formed the Pyrates Confraternity in 1952 to fight societal ills. Did you ever hear about cult killing during my years in the university? Why should I be held responsible for the violence in tertiary institutions arising from your misgovernment? When you polluted the education system, and violence became the order of the day, I stopped Pyrates from operating in tertiary institutions. When splinter groups emerge years after and began unleashing terror, should I be held responsible? The National Association of Seadogs is a responsible organization.

Ebora: Shut up there, killer! You didn’t form a football club; it’s a cult that you could form. And you’re here making a noise like a misfiring generator. Even if you had inaugurated a beauty pageant, it would’ve been better. You can’t blame campus violence on me, Oluwole the cultist!

Ogun: I sure can, Aremu the zombie! Weren’t you the one at the helm when Nigerian university students were killed in UNILAG and ABU in 1978 during the Ali-Must-Go riots? Wasn’t that the beginning of campus violence in Nigeria? Ashewo, beauty pageant ko, beauty detergent ni.

Ebora: (Laughing, he bites at his bitter kola, clears his throat) (Wole, o gbadun) Wole, you’re sick. Did you hear me complain when you made all your accusations against me? I gave you just a small teargas, you went berserk. I‘m going to shave your wig today! (Laughs)

Ogun: So, you know?

Ebora: Know what?

Ogun: That if your leprosy hands touch my hair, you’ll be made whole.

Ebora: There he goes again, arrogant Capon Seadog! Black white man!

Ogun: Aloku soja! Useless ex-soldier, if my words can’t penetrate your waxed ears, read my lips: the greatest hallmark of existence is giving your all to humanity and your spiritual essence.

Ebora: Ignorance kills the cat. You can give your all in teaching and among your seadogs, not in Nigerian politics. I was military head of state and civilian president. I know better. The society gets the leaders it deserves. I heard you tore your Green Card. How more stupid can you be, Wole? You’re too impulsive.

Ogun: Impulsiveness is a virtue needed to needle government into action where wastefulness, inaction, corruption and injustice roam.

Ebora: Zebrudaya, tell your friend, Buhari, that he’s going back to Daura in 2019.

Ogun: Were you not in the country when I told him he’s treating herdsmen killings with kid gloves and that he should stop venerating Abacha?

Ebora: Na you sabi, Professor Ahoy!

Ogun: Jazz away, you little-minded lubber or I skin you!

#Olusegun Obasanjo #Soyinka

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sumergosuigeneris · 6 years

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April 17, 2018

In today’s saga of bitchiness:

1. White people I’m trying to keep contact with are getting on my nerves. Looking for a damn way to excuse the starbucks philly thing. Like, you are TRYING to find a way for it to be not the managers fault!!!

2. So, I was supposed to pull an all-nighter, but it didn’t happen. Getting crap done without my car is hard. I was so tired! So the exam today was awkward, b/c everything was on the tip of my tongue (so to speak) but nothing was quite right. Grateful for partial credit. As long as I got a 50 or above, a B+ is still doable in the course. Arguably more exciting, I was able to get enough done to know I *can* do A work. I just have to DO the work. Also, a good reminder that mathematicians are ‘lazy.’

3. But I’m afraid the dick is gonna count it against me b/c I’m ‘trending down’ even if a B+ is good enough.We’ll see.

4. I did have a revelation last night. I think I want to finish the master’s and determine from that point the trajectory of phd. Or not. Not sure that decision ‘makes a difference’ but it feels good. At least I can stop back and forth and agonizing for a minute.

5. Had an interesting conversation at the grocery store last night. Accidentally got into a convo with a lady who’s a black special ed teacher in the public school system. Learned some shit. Man. Got.to.give.it.up. to the teachers. To the ones who stay regardless of the crazy. And if you don’t work in a public school system, the crazy is crazier than you can imagine.

6. Weird work vibes today. Knocked an the door of a meeting to make sure boss joined another remote meeting, and the other person was like ‘is that all you wanted? Are you sure?’ like in a creepy way. And when I said why I knocked, said ‘they’d never miss that meeting’ all sarcastic. Weird vibe. Not that it’s any of my business, but I kinda wonder if they ‘got a thing going on.’ I mean, I’ve wondered off and on for a while. But then I get mad at myself. Because why can’t people who fall into the same sexuality category just be friends?!?! They can! So I need to shut the fuck up. Still, it’s weird from time to time.

7. Still trying to figure out if I’m supposed to be boycotting starbucks or not.

8. I noticed a while ago that someone maybe is kind of cutting me off. Not sure why. Nothing had really changed in our relationship (there wasn’t much of one). Not sure if they decided to cut off b/c of that, or b/c it bothers them that I got out of the quagmire I was in. Interesting when someone doesn’t want to stick by you when you’re down, but also doesn’t want you when you’re up, or doesn’t want you to be up. Also, not entirely sure how much I care, or why. I mean, it’s obvious I care, or I wouldn’t be writing about it. But sometimes, sometimes I’m very observant like all of life, including myself is an experiment. So I’m not always sure the 5W’s of my feelings.

9. Still haven’t heard from my ‘bff’. Probed myself a bit to see if I’d be okay if she cut me off for being mad at her. So far, I’m okay. I see no reason to contact her atm. But I also wonder if I’m not worried b/c she’s in the middle of a semester. We’ll see how freaked I am if I don’t hear after the 27th or 29th. lol my ability to be crushed or not, the unpredictability of when I’ll fall apart is a painful joke.

10. The other day I finished that episode of supergirl. I decided that I kind of didn’t like it. Because here’s the thing. If you lined the atmosphere with lead, couldn’t you send Mon-el into outer space and develop a filter mask for him to come back?Did he really *have* to leave earth? Forever? I’m glad M’gann is back, and she and J’onn are officially, finally together. Hope she sticks around. Hope Cat sticks around. Frustrating that I know Maggie and Alex aren’t gonna make it. Feeling bad for Lena about the whole ‘mommy issue’ thing. But again, why did the lead destroy the Daxamites’ bodies? Also, isn’t that kind of genocide? Really hope Cat sticks around. Pros and cons on the James storyline.

11. I’ve neglected my linkedin forever. But I see that this girl is trying to connect with me. Why am I emotionally like ‘hell no?’ Because she’s in the multicultural sorority I tried to join. I would have joined but I ended up graduating instead. Everybody said we’d kit, but they didn’t. So if you can’t be my friend without being forced to b/c of a sorority, why should I stay in contact with you? Esp since I have no idea about you in a professional situation.

12. I actually made a comment yesterday about the fact that I, the lowly peon, was the last official rep for that guy. I was ignored. Okay then.

I feel like there was more bitchiness on my list, but I can’t remember so....

#me

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daaninrwanda · 7 years

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Part I 05-06-‘17 / 17-06-‘17

Well well well, there we are again. After six months in both Indonesia and Cameroon, it is now time for three months in Rwanda! This time I’ve decided to write my blog in English so that some of my non-Dutch speaking friends can read them too :). So let’s start from the beginning by explaining how I ended up with this new adventure.

After Cameroon, which in some parts was an amazing experience, but in other parts pretty hard and difficult for me, I decided to do my second research internship in the Netherlands. So I found this amazing labgroup doing research on evolutionary cognitive psychology. For this internship I’ve been training orangutans to perform a task on a touchscreen from which we can measure what emotions draw their attention. Okay, whatever not the point of this blog. My supervisor, Evy, then asked me if I wanted to join her to a research project in Rwanda. She is working with primates too, but has never seen/studied them in the wild so that’s why she wanted to do this. After having some time to think I decided that I had to try such a project one more time. This time I was sure I wasn’t going to be alone as I would join Evy, and we would be sure to actually see chimpanzees (something that didn’t really happen in Cameroon; okay 20 minutes in 6 months, pretty disappointing..). Also, this time I would only be gone for three months, so that wouldn’t be too long.

The fun already began with applying for our visa. We needed a visa for three months and applied for a 90-day tourist visa. We handed in all the information that they required and were told that if we didn’t receive a phone call/e-mail we could collect our visa three days later. So three days later we went to the Rwandan embassy again where we heard that our visa application got rejected. Why? Unsatisfactory information. What does that mean? We don’t know. Basically they wanted to know where we were going to stay those three months, okay that sounds like a legit reason. A few days later we went back with the supplementary information. I can’t even remember how many times we went back, but long story short: our visa got rejected a second time. Meanwhile time was ticking and eventually we received a 30-day visa on a Friday, while our flight was planned on the Monday after that Friday. So even before we left we had so much stress because there was a big chance we had to reschedule our flight.

Now, I’m almost two weeks in Rwanda and so far it is an amazing experience. We arrived in Kigali which is the capital of Rwanda and compared with Yaoundé, Cameroon, everything is super clean, organised, people don’t drive like crazy and they are really friendly. The next day we met with a group of 8 American students and their professor who is one of the managers of the project. Together we visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial which remembers the +800.000 people that died during the 100-day long genocide in 1994. It was really impressive to see how this country suffered from this genocide, but also how it recovered from it. That same day we head to the Gishwati forest where Evy and I will stay the next three months. It was pretty convenient that we could travel together with the Americans and got introduced in the field station (which is an actual building in a village called Kinihira). They stayed only 10 days in Gishwati as part of a course they were taking. The first few days Evy and I could join their program which was really nice because we did things we otherwise didn’t do. Among those things we saw a traditional welcome dance, helped local schoolchildren writing English letters, had a campfire, went to a local cooperative that makes traditional baskets, played ‘duck duck goose’ (zakdoekje leggen) with the children in the village, visited traditional healers and had tons of laughs with the American students. It was sad to see them go, but now I’m feeling more confident in the upcoming months.

Evy and I had been into the forest a couple of days already to find the chimpanzees. In short, we want to measure how much stress these chimpanzees experience from the presence of humans, using behavioural observations. These chimps are not fully habituated to humans (meaning that they do not yet fully tolerate their presence) which makes it interesting to record stress behaviours. Later we would like to compare their stress levels with chimps that are habituated to humans and chimps in zoos. The forest is highly fragmented as a result of deforestation activities during and after the genocide. In this area there were a lot of refugees and probably most people that currently live in this area are not originally from here. The forest is about 9 ha. big and there are approximately 25-30 chimpanzees. The Gishwati forest is surrounded by eucalyptus forests and tea field. The wood of the eucalyptus trees is used for making charcoal which is then used as fuel for cooking. The forest is extremely hilly so we either ascend of descend, so by the time I get back my legs are super trained. Finding the chimps isn’t always easy and we have to rely on either hearing them, finding fresh traces (feces, feeding remains or new signs) or we have to ‘nest’ them before they go to sleep. ‘Nesting’ the chimps means that you find them before they make a nest and stay with them until they make their night nest and go to sleep. That way, you can go back early in the morning (read: wake up at 4:00 am) to the place where they sleep. For now, we still kind of have to fine tune our research methods as we are also trying to record their vocalisations which is sometimes difficult to combine with our behavioural observations.

Yesterday we went to Gisenyi, which is a village nearby and is located at Lake Kivu. Gisenyi is pretty big and you can basically find everything here. Also the phone service is much better here than at the field station. Next week a PhD student from Yale will come and stay 1,5 months to do some surveys in the villages around the Gishwati forest, three students from Rwanda will join us and another Spanish student (Berta) will come and help us. I’ve already met Berta when she was in the Netherlands and she is super friendly, so it is nice to have to extra people here.

So far, I really like Rwanda. Everyone is so friendly (especially compared to Cameroon) and you can still laugh with people that don’t speak the same language (most people speak Kinyarwanda). For me it is also nice that I’m here together with Evy and more people will join next week and the fact that I can observe chimpanzees is amazing! However, if I’m honest with myself, I’m not sure if I’d be able to do this kind of work after I’m graduated for longer periods. I realise that I miss too many things back home. So I’m happy I’ll be able to do this work for the next three months which is a good period, and I’m sure I will enjoy it!

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