#i mean truly there could be essays written about the morality and ethics of how women characters in the horror genre have been treated | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tessatechaitea · 4 years

Text

Cerebus #18 (1980)

This is the kind of cover that probably kept me thinking this book was too adult for me and that I should just stick to Groo and Elfquest.

In Dave's Swords of Cerebus essay, he explains how he didn't know what the fuck he was doing when he was writing this story and I'll tell you a secret: it fucking shows. He explains how he wrote one idea but realized that idea wasn't going to work and then wrote some other ideas but they weren't going anywhere and then he went back to the first idea and wrote a small novella which still wasn't going to work so then he tried some other idea but couldn't really get anywhere and pretty soon his week that he plans for writing was over and he just had to start drawing one of the scenes. So he picked one and strung it out and then he needed a new scene and took the Lord Julius epilogue and stick that on page 5 and 6. By that time, he sort of had a new idea with the help of his brother-in-law and even though that new idea was pretty lame, what more could he do?! He doesn't admit that his new story is lame; I think he thinks he really pulled one out at the last minute. But it's really kind of lame. I get it though! He's written seventeen previous stories (plus some Cerebus stories that appeared in other magazines) and they were all pretty good and working toward building a portrait of Estarcion and Cerebus and some kind of weird aardvark mystery. He was due to slip up some time! I'm just glad he was honest about how the writing part when all wrong and since he couldn't fall behind on the art, he had to just kind of start drawing and hope for the best. I suppose in that regard, the comic wasn't so bad. It told a coherent story that moves Cerebus' plans for the invasion of Palnu ahead and Dave even gets some funny jokes in. But as far as the extended story goes, not much happens? Cerebus and the T'gitans took over Fluroc by murdering everybody in it and then needed more money for troops and they got more money for troops by conning a merchant that came to town. That's it! That's the whole story! Did we need this story? Probably not! But did we really need any Cerebus story so far? Almost certainly not (with the exception of all the stories that showcased new characters!). But what I really liked about this comic book was the Aardvark Comments section! Things are really getting good finally! It's not just a few nerdy nerds nerding it up for Dave Sim.

I mean, it is some nerdy nerds nerding it up nerdily!

The first letter is what I'm assuming was the introductory or cover letter from Marvel's Jim Shooter when he sent out contracts to prospective employees.

Is this the worst thing Jim Shooter ever wrote? Sadly, it is not.

If you're one of those people who like to describe 95% of everything as "cringe," you'll love Dave Sim's response:

Remember, this was 1980 and "written blackface as hyperbolic response" was probably just something taught in creative writing classes.

Casually whistling past the terrible method of his response the way you simply steer the conversation away from racist tirades every time your grandfather speaks up at Thanksgiving dinner, this feels like the first time Sim really calls out the two big publishers and how they conduct business. It'll become a hallmark of Dave Sim in his crusade for independent publishers. And this sarcastic and also racist response (I can only whistle nonchalantly for so long!) isn't his only response in this Aardvark Comments. But as his first response, I'll assume it's the most closest to how he truly feels about Marvel and DC. In 1980, he's already calling them out on their practice of stealing their employees' intellectual properties. Okay, "stealing." The contract is to make the "stealing" legal so they don't wind up in constant lawsuits and can continue to offer the artists whose creations make them scads of money little to no future compensation on their efforts. Dave Sim could think of no other attack on Marvel than to pretend he's a caricature of a slave. I'm not in disagreement with Dave here and, believe me, in 1980, I almost certainly wouldn't have thought the mintrelesque response was anything but a clever way of making his point. Although I was also 9 in 1980 so I probably would have had to ask an adult why the fuck Dave was writing like that. But as I said, there's more! The next letter is a bit of a response to Dave's crusade against the Big Two Corporations. And from his peers!

I guessed I missed the comments in Issue #15. I'd better go back and see what the Pinis were talking about.

Here's what Dave said in Issue #15's "Aardvark Comment": "Maybe Marvel can turn its corporate back on you. As they never grow tired of explaining, fan sales make up a very small fraction of their profits. They don't think much of your taste in comics, artists, writers or anything else." It's a little hard to parse this comment being that I don't know what was happening in comic books in 1980 concerning the fans and Marvel but doesn't this sound a lot like the Comicsgate argument of today? That Marvel doesn't give a shit about what its "real fans" want? Anyway, back to the Pini's letter. The Pinis' letter reads like Elfquest trying to talk Cerebus out of gutting a merchant. I suppose when you point out that artists and writers working for Marvel and DC are idiots for not publishing their work as an independent, I can see how they might get upset with you. I'm sure Richard and Wendy had a number of discussions with Marv Wolfman where Marv would say things like "I'm not dumb! You're dumb!" or "I'm not a piece of property! You are!" or "I'll show you who's a slave to the man! I'll kill Cyborg!" After that, the Pinis were probably all, "You know what? Criticizing work-for-hire in the comic book arts just isn't worth all these Marv Wolfman tantrums. Let's just bite our tongues." After a couple of letters from some nerd groupies in which Dave laments the target audience of comic books, he responds more in length to the . . . well, wait. Let's first look at his response about his core audience!

I'm offended! I always fix it immediately when a headlight goes out.

I mean, after seventeen issues, "Aardvark Comment" is finally getting interesting! Okay, so now to Sim's actual response to Wendy and Richard Pini.

Dave Sim being serious. Probably.

I'd like to point out the end of this letter in which Dave states fairly plainly the main theme of criticism behind Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea for nearly a decade: "I just don't happen to think that the system in operation now is the best thing for this medium and that it is not the most conducive way to get the best from the creative talents that exist. Quite the opposite, it seems to encourage half-assed efforts in order to guarantee that you are not surrendering your rights to something of value. And how many of us, Steve Gerber included, could know in advance that our ducks were of any value?" This was as true in 1980 as it is now. It's just that in 1980, it was much harder and a lot more work to retain the rights to your creations through self-publishing. So most comic book writers and artists were doing their best work at DC and Marvel. What other reasonable choice was there? Dave and Deni have discussed multiple times across the last dozen and a half issues how hard self-publishing has been for them. Now imagine a company like Image exists or a place like Kickstarter. Creators now know to save their best ideas for places that will give them full control and full potential earnings on their creations. DC and Marvel can't help but be full of writers doing half-assed jobs with their half-assed ideas and saving their truly monumental and mind-blowing work for Image or another, now more easily accessible independent publishing venture. This was in 1980 and Dave Sim was seeing creators screwed out of future royalties on ideas that wound up making fortunes for the parent companies. Some people accept this as business as usual and would be able to garner no sympathy for a creator stiffed out of royalties. But those people are unimaginative, pitiable, and sad. Something being legal has never in the history of everything been a convincing argument that that something is ethical, moral, or just fucking compassionate. Hopefully this "Aardvark Comment" begins to stir some serious discussion with Cerebus readers because I'm eager to read a lot more of Dave's thoughts about comic book publishing and fandom. Eventually there won't be a whole lot of separation between the comic book and the letters page. I mean, when the author inserts himself into the story as both some sort of omniscient being and also another fictionalized author, it gets hard to separate what you believe from the ideas expressed within the story. Cerebus #18 Rating: B-. That rating was for the lackluster story! The "Aardvark Comment" page gets an A! Oh, and I forgot to mention "The Single Page!" Imagine my surprise when I turned the page and saw this:

Tim Kreider in 1989! (Remember, this is from the 1989 Bi-weekly reprints of the 1980 Cerebus #18.)

You can just see Tim's eventual style in these early characters. The main male character is basically a baby-faced version and immature style of his eventual renditions of himself.

This is from Tim Kreider's book of essays and cartoons, We Learn Nothing.

I can't recommend Tim Kreider's essays and cartoons highly enough. Read his books, We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You and maybe search the Internet for a cache of his old cartooning website. You probably won't be disappointed. I say probably because I've learned that a lot of people on the Internet aren't exactly like me like I expect you all to be. Idiots.

#Dave Sim #Cerebus #Tim Kreider

1 note · View note

tomfooleryprime · 5 years

Text

I love Sarek. But he’s really not that great.

Sarek and Amanda are my favorite couple, not just in Star Trek, but ever. I’ve written more than half a million words of fanfiction about them. I’ve watched episodes featuring them so many times I secretly worry Netflix will put me on blast.

But I am not a Sarek apologist.

I’m pretty sure what draws most people to this couple is the age-old romantic notion that opposites may attract but the power of love can overcome anything. Cue cheesy instrumental music and a torrid kiss in the rain at a train station. I imagine a lot of women see themselves in Amanda, a seemingly regular woman with a regular life. Then they see a successful guy like Sarek, a dude who’s physically fit, well-educated, powerful, and absurdly intelligent, and it’s only natural that a recipe for hotness is born.

Because I’ve devoted literally years to dreaming up various ways this couple might have shacked up and vomiting the results all over AO3, I’ve also been forced to examine the personalities of both characters in great detail, and the only consistent conclusion I come to is fanon (myself included) gets it wrong most of the time.

Their marriage can’t have always been smooth sailing. If you’re not willing to believe me, then believe Amanda.

Oh sure, there are tons of one-shots where they have little spats, but they almost always end with both of them making heart eyes at each other and jumping into bed. I get that Star Trek originated in the 1960s, but that doesn’t mean Sarek and Amanda had one of those “golly gee” wholesome relationships that could put Ward and June Cleaver to shame.

Whichever version of Sarek you personally subscribe to, be it Mark Lenard, Ben Cross, or James Frain, it’s entirely possible to find the actors attractive but still think the character of Sarek could use some improvement. It’s also possible to love a character and admire their good qualities while being disappointed in their shortcomings. Maybe it makes me a shitty fangirl. Maybe it makes me realistic.

Literally decades of fanfiction and fan art have polished over Sarek’s unprettier bits, often portraying him as a hopeless romantic, a tender lover, a devoted father, and a man fiercely dedicated to his wife. I’m not going to argue each of those is patently false—hell, as a fanfiction writer, I’ve bought into some of those tropes myself—but I think some are truer than others. Let’s examine the canon.

When we first meet him in “Journey to Babel,” he’s callous and aloof. He’s Vulcan, I get it, more on that later. But seriously, the guy has a habit of summoning his wife and acts like he doesn’t even know his own damn son. No one should be standing up to enthusiastically applaud and hand the man a husband or father-of-the-year trophy. Even Amanda seems pretty resigned to the arrangement.

I already know what the pushback to this assertion will be. He’s Vulcan! You can’t judge a Vulcan by human standards! Well, his wife is human and one of his sons is half-human, so I would argue that it should at least be an option, but I wrote a whole other essay on Star Trek’s moral relativism problem.

Long story short, Star Trek glosses over a lot of moral and ethical dilemmas by using the argument, “Who are we to judge a culture we’re not part of?” I can’t answer that, but I will say someone once gave me a great piece of advice that I think applies to this idea of moral relativism: no person’s belief is inherently worthy of respect, but every person is. Maybe to understand Sarek as a person, we should look first at Sarek as a Vulcan.

Obviously Sarek subscribes to Vulcan philosophy, and while Vulcan philosophy seems pure as hell with its pacifism and its belief in embracing Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC), I’m going to assert the Vulcan adherence to that philosophy seems to be a little lunch counter in nature. Yes, they take two scoops of resting bitch face and they’ll pass on the extra helping of tolerance. Sarek hails from a culture that is ostensibly exclusionary, sexist, and xenophobic in its practices.

When we encounter Vulcans in Enterprise, they’re people who mock humans for being too volatile, go to war with their Andorian neighbors, and aggressively purge the Syrranites for wanting to get back to the true meaning of Surak. But you might say, but that was before the Federation! They got better when they put T’Pau in charge.

Really? When we meet them next in the chronological timeline in Discovery, they’re telling Sarek they’ll only admit one of his weird social science pet projects (or as Sarek calls them, his kids) to the Vulcan Expeditionary Group.

In the Discovery episode “Light and Shadows,” Amanda reveals that Spock had a learning disability as a young child, which clearly embarrassed Sarek. Sadder still? Amanda explains there didn’t seem to be any educators on Vulcan willing to help a half-Vulcan child with a human learning disability.

In the alternate timeline, when Spock applies to the Vulcan Science Academy, the admissions folks give him a pat on the back for achieving so much, despite his great disadvantage of having a human mom. Replace the word “human” with any religious, racial, or ethnic group, and see how you still feel about that sentence.

Yes, Vulcans have racists and nationalists just like the rest of us and it doesn’t seem like they’re a rare breed either. Sarek is clearly attempting to be a better Vulcan, so kudos to him. However, not being an overt racist is not synonymous with sainthood.

It’s pretty obvious throughout canon that while Sarek loves his wife, he’s uncomfortable with humanity, and he’s doubly perplexed with the humanity she imparted in their son. She even directly accuses him of never truly respecting humanity, to which he replies:

Which, let’s be honest, sounds like the rough equivalent of the “I can’t be racist because I have a black friend” defense. So many things in canon point to Sarek being utterly baffled by humans, not cutely intrigued by them as so often seen in fanon. The only time Spock and Sarek seem chummy with each other is when they’re mocking Amanda’s human emotionalism in “Journey to Babel.” Whether or not he meant to (and he definitely meant to), Sarek raised a son who saw his human half as a thing to be overcome.

Discovery has also hammered a lot of nails into the affectionate father coffin. Up until the final episode in season 1, he never called Michael his daughter and instead referred to her as his ward. It’s nice that he finally got over that technical distinction, but it doesn’t exactly conjure up the image of him tucking her into bed and giving her a kiss on the forehead.

He seems to accept her humanity because, well, she is human, but his own son’s humanity isn’t ok? Not like it matters, because his plan was to mold Michael into a Vulcan-like human anyway, which is pretty weird when you think about it. At one point, Michael tells Sarek she knows he must have considered the effect a Vulcan education and lifestyle might have on a human child, but she wants to know what he wanted Spock to learn from the experience of having a human sibling. His reply?

Which is... nice? He doesn’t say the only reason he took Michael in was for her to be his son’s empathy tutor, but he does essentially admit he was worried Spock was becoming too much of a momma’s boy. So the theory that Sarek was just scooping up orphans all over the galaxy like some kind of Vulcan Angelina Jolie doesn’t seem accurate. It gives the distinct impression that even Sarek thought of his hodge-podge brood as an experiment, at least to a degree.

Now, some may argue that Sarek never told Spock that he had to follow Surak’s teachings, which is true-ish. But that’s like telling a kid, “You don’t have to believe in Jesus” and then sending them to a Christian school in the heart of the Bible belt. What decision did he imagine his son would choose when he decided to raise him on Vulcan and stand by when other kids beat him up for not being Vulcan enough?

Seriously, Spock was almost guaranteed to turn out one of two ways: either he would just try harder to out-Vulcan everyone, which he did, or he would give logic the middle finger, which, well, is the option Sybok chose to run with.

Despite fanfiction and fanart imagining him as this really hands-on parent who changes diapers and decorates baked goods (yes, I wrote a story like this and I’m calling myself out), he admits he’s the kind of dad who works late in the evenings, not the kind that reads stories at bedtime.

It’s also no secret that as a parent, Sarek holds grudges. In “Journey to Babel,” Amanda confesses that Sarek and Spock haven’t spoken as father and son for eighteen years. In “Brother,” Michael asks Sarek when the last time he spoke to Spock was and he concedes it’s been years. In “Light and Shadows,” he’s clearly [Vulcan] pissed that Amanda is harboring a fugitive, who also just so happens to be his own son.

Is Sarek just that logical that he believes in justice even at a high personal price, or is he embarrassed that his own estranged son has been accused of murder and appears to be in the clutches of a mental breakdown? As far as I can tell, it might just be a little bit of both.

Then there’s the idea that Sarek is a caring and devoted husband. Is there actually any evidence for this in canon, other than he was married to Amanda and had a family with her? Lots of people are married and have kids and don’t have a relationship that would rival that annoying couple on This is Us.

Their relationship doesn’t seem like an equal partnership based on compromise, but rather one where Sarek does what he damn well pleases and Amanda follows along as a dutiful wife.

Amanda gave up a lot of things to be with him: her home, her culture, and potentially even her own son’s well-being. The woman went to extremes for love not even witnessed on the Bachelor, and why?

In some contexts, that sounds like the powerful kind of love and devotion that epic-poems would be based on. In other contexts, it sounds almost like a pathological self-martyrdom. Did Sarek ever fully appreciate her sacrifices? It’s hard to say, but if he did, I doubt he ever voiced his appreciation.

In his later years, when Sarek is losing his mind due to an age-related degenerative disease and he mind melds with Captain Picard, he tearfully muses (as Picard), “Amanda. I wanted to give you so much more. I wanted to show you such tenderness. But that is not our way. Spock? Amanda? Did you know?”

He's strongly implying he never told Amanda he loved her out loud. I’m sure he did love her, but it hardly bodes well for the idea that he’s a flowers and handmade cards kind of guy. And as for the notion that behind closed doors, he and Amanda had a super intimate relationship that would make even characters in Harlequin romance novels swoon, please, point me to an episode that makes you think that. I will watch it every day for the rest of my life.

In summary, between his first chronological appearance in Discovery to his death in The Next Generation, Sarek had a lot of improving to do as a person and we see evidence that he most certainly did. He came to accept Michael as his daughter. He started speaking to Spock again after wrecking his childhood and turning him over to Section 31. Even though it clearly exasperated the hell out of him, he occasionally gave into his wife’s emotional needs.

But that’s still a pretty far cry away from galaxy’s best father, husband, or lover. I think that’s what draws me to this couple so much. Sarek and Amanda didn’t live happily ever after: they did the best they could and made it work, just like the rest of us non-fictional losers.

What little we have of canon depicts them as a couple who likely got married before they really knew each other, probably should have spent their first few years of marriage in counseling, eventually figured one another out enough to raise three kids who could all probably benefit from some therapy, and loved each other no matter what, even if it wasn’t out loud.

#sarek/amanda #sarek and amanda #brother #journey to babel #light and shadows #discovery spoilers #star trek #sarek #amanda #spock #Michael burnham #sybok #Star Trek Discovery #the original series #Vulcan #parenting #sarek x amanda

148 notes · View notes

grindellore · 5 years

Text

fanfiction: scandalous

Fandom: Harry Potter | Fantastic Beasts Pairing: Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald Characters: Albus Dumbledore, Gellert Grindelwald Rating: M Warning: Period-typical homophobia (and how to deal with it); suggestiveness

Summary: Late October 1907 at Hogwarts. An unexpected letter and a surprise visit.

Written for @ginagemeni on twitter and tumblr (who I don’t seem to be able to tag...) as part of the Grindeldore Valentine Exchange. I hope you’ll like this!

Proofread by @scamanderthehufflepuff on tumblr for intelligibility of the translations to English that are part of this fic—thank you so much! Of course all mistakes remain mine.

Also available on my AO3 (see the link in my profile).

Oh, do you care I still feel for you So aware What should be lost is there —Nightwish: Beauty of the Beast: Long Lost Love

Albus Dumbledore kept ogling the letter that sat so innocently on his desk. At first he hadn’t paid it much attention, too preoccupied with his other mail: The invitation to the next Wizengamot meeting; three letters from parents who were worried about their children’s performances in his Transfiguration class; five letters from academic friends with whom he was writing articles for journals all over Europe. The final letter had seemed like a specimen copy of some journal for which he had written an article, so he had disregarded it until he had finished his other correspondence. The wax seal, however, couldn’t have been more ominous: Two Gs facing from each other, with an inscribed equilateral triangle surrounding an incircle and a stylised wand that separated both the Gs and the legs of the triangle.

For the Greater Good. He would have recognised that phrase everywhere. After all he was the one who had coined it. The Deathly Hallows symbol was equally familiar even though the way in which the wand was stylised was a new development.

Albus stood, pacing around in his study, debating with himself if he should open the letter. The last time he hadn’t, Gellert had sent him a Howler telling the whole school what a bloody coward Albus Dumbledore was for running away from—and that was where Albus had cut him off with a Silencing Charm.

All in all, Albus had reason to believe that there was some variation of the Tracking Spell on this letter, too. Perhaps Albus’s worries were unnecessary as well. The last time Gellert had simply sent him an article from a German Muggle newspaper. The only sentence in his own handwriting had been a scribbled “See why our mission is still necessary?” at the end of the article, but Albus had still felt as if someone had punched him in the gut.

Our mission. He still thought of it as their mission. Albus had been torn between the bile that rose within him whenever he thought about Gellert’s ruthless methods and the traitorous flutter in his gut.

Reaching a decision, Albus returned to his desk and broke the seal. He was only embarrassing himself if he tried to run away from Gellert when Gellert knew he was running away from him.

It was exactly what Albus had initially thought: A journal. Just like the newspaper article, it was in German, but this time there were more annotations in Gellert’s handwriting. A longer passage was crossed out, with a comment next to it that said: “Only read if you are dying to learn more about the subtleties of German grammar. (Really, just skip over it. It’s boring.)”

Albus sat behind his desk, flipped to the first sentence Gellert had underlined and started to read: “But even if I were to judge a moralist, it wouldn’t cross my mind to use his private life in order to fabricate a dichotomy.” He realised that he wouldn’t understand the context if he didn’t skip back to the beginning ... and that it was still Gellert’s opinion that was more interesting to him than the writing itself.

The desire to discuss his reading with Gellert even after eight years made him feel strangely nostalgic. Gellert seemed to feel the same; why else would he continue to send him annotated articles?

Albus read the essay Gellert had marked from the beginning. He noted that it was about the same controversy as the article Gellert had last sent him: One Maximilian Harden, a journalist, had accused a circle of close friends of the German emperor of homosexual conduct. His prime targets were Prussian diplomat Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, and General Kuno von Moltke. Moltke’s lawyer had let his client make the mistake to file civil libel against Harden—and a mistake it was; that much was clear to Albus after the trial of Oscar Wilde.

Albus had been thirteen when Wilde was tried. Perhaps it was a good thing he had been at Hogwarts at the time, surrounded by other third years who weren’t all that interested in Muggle affairs. Still, the trial was one of the few things that had made it into the wizarding press, even if it was filed as “something you should know in case a Muggle touches upon it in your presence”. It had filled Albus with a queasy feeling for weeks until he had been able to acknowledge to himself that he, too, might be inclined towards men.

He had picked up courage soon afterwards. In the end, he was still a Gryffindor. But he knew it had been harder for Gellert; Gellert, who had known earlier than him; who had had a hard time to pretend he fit into Durmstrang’s straitjacket of discipline when he really didn’t. It was, perhaps, why Gellert was so harsh and also why he was so vulnerable.

Albus knew he was the only person who had ever seen the full extent of Gellert’s vulnerability. In turn, Gellert was the only person who knew how vulnerable Albus really was. And that was why he could never come to hate Gellert; not truly. Albus had seen his weakness and he had started to love him for it; had started to feel oddly protective of the beautiful, uncompromising boy he had met when he was seventeen.

It was also why he was willing to put up with a lengthy essay in fairly difficult German without even trying to apply a Translation Charm. Gellert hat sent this to him in German, so Albus needed to read it in German.

He soon realised that Karl Kraus, the author of the essay he was reading, was, in fact, defending Kuno von Moltke regardless of whether it was true that he was homosexual: “I’m not a political writer and therefore I am not to investigate if men of politics have adjusted their sexual urge towards skirts or towards trousers. But even if I were to judge a moralist, it wouldn’t cross my mind to use his private life in order to fabricate a dichotomy.”

Albus’s heart skipped a beat. He had always wondered why Gellert had never tried to capitalise on their connection; why he had never pointed out that it was, in fact, Albus who had penned a larger part of his ideology.

Once they had believed their connection was a sacred thing; a bond between two souls that had recognised each other as equals in every way that mattered. Now Albus wondered if Gellert still thought the same; if he, perhaps, didn’t want to throw mud at the memory of what they had had. Then again, Albus might as well be a sentimental fool who needed to see Gellert as the ruthless, manipulative creature he had proven to be time and time again.

Albus decided not to read the whole of the essay. Instead he skipped to the next passage Gellert had marked. Gellert’s commentary read: “Kraus and Harden used to be friends until Kraus realised Harden would do anything to discredit the circle of courtiers surrounding the Emperor that he considers incompetent. Perhaps they are, but Kraus is a ‘the end doesn’t justify the means’ person.”

Interesting, Albus thought. It was particularly interesting because Gellert was the epitome of teleological ethics: To him, the end had always justified the means, and Albus had no reason to assume he had changed in any way. Then again, Albus wasn’t much different; only he had always been borne down by the burden of utilitarian ethics that one had to weigh one’s own good intentions against all possible consequences.

He sighed, returning his focus to the passage Gellert had underlined: “We never had any business with someone who used the existence of a homicidal paragraph of criminal justice for blackmail the political guise of which adds hypocrisy to sheer turpitude; who believes ‘to be allowed to stoop to anything in order to make such people impossible’ when it would at the most be allowed to stoop to anything in order to make such people possible.”

To make such people possible? Had he understood that correctly? Albus squinted. Did the author really mean what Albus thought he meant? He decided to read on.

“He charged interest from the truly tragic disgrace of a morality that permits to treat the spinal cord as a piece of incriminating evidence. He is the culprit of a contemporary inquisition that makes us shudder as we hear it declare its resolution ‘to allow the evidence that the private suitor was particularly averse to the female sex’. That fiendish justice that exorcises in bedchambers, that punishes deviations from the ‘norm’ and that condemns dear life to death by the spermatic cord. That ugly presumptive evidence that adheres to the code of criminal procedure of gossip, that provokes a verdict on behalf of His Majesty Cant and, in the sense of a base joke, only accepts the one as ‘normal’ who is seen with a woman Unter den Linden but takes the one who goes out with a man for a paederast and the one who walks alone for an onanist.”

“Feels good to read that, doesn’t it?”

Albus stared at Gellert’s note under the passage. Gellert was right, of course; it did feel good to read another person’s sardonic defence of loving outside “the norm”—and to see the inverted commas in which Kraus had put the latter phrase. He also understood the implications of that passage for Gellert: I don’t want to be judged based on whom I love rather than on what I do. There had been no need for him to write that anywhere; they had talked about this for long enough.

Don’t worry, Albus thought to himself, remembering all the atrocities he had heard about Gellert since their ways had parted. They are going to judge you based on what you did.

Still, there was a traitorous part of himself who wanted to hold Gellert just like he had held him then; who wanted to tell him that even the Muggles would look at the power of his magic rather than at anything else. It was foolish, of course; the impulse of a fool who really should know better by now. And he did. He knew exactly how relentless Gellert was in the pursuit of his ambitions to overthrow the Statute of Secrecy and to rule over Muggles in order to save them from their own self-destructiveness. It had been Gellert’s relentlessness, Gellert’s absolute willingness to sacrifice everything—even Ariana, even them—for his political objectives that had appalled Albus in the end.

But he still loved him. That was exactly what made every piece of news about Gellert’s deeds so painful for Albus. Despite everything, despite his better judgement, he couldn’t root out the love he felt for Gellert. Maybe he could turn it to hate and tell himself there was nothing else anymore, but he would only be lying to himself. Albus Dumbledore might be a fool, but even he wasn’t that foolish.

Pushing those thoughts to the back of his mind, Albus focused on the underlined passages again: “Musical disposition is a suspicion, separate bedrooms are proof” ... That was all Gellert had underlined, adding the comment: “Ah, musical disposition. I suppose I should feel spoken to. How about you, dear Albus? Do you feel spoken to? I don’t think you should. You do like music, but your taste is horrible.”

The corners of Albus’s mouth twitched. Trust Gellert to distract you from your gloomy brooding with a joke. It was as if he had anticipated the line Albus’s thoughts would take... Then again, perhaps he had actually foreseen them. You never know with Seers, Albus thought with a fond smile and skipped to the next passage with a comment.

“And in this knavery the defendant makes a dart for the one whose effeminate nature is to be finally disclosed after battles, wounds and forty years as a soldier with the question if it isn’t true, demonstrably true that he enjoys eating sweets and takes chocolates with him to the theatre. And a justice that admits the inquest that the plaintiff used cosmetic products doesn’t apply the rouge of shame.”

On the one hand, it was horrible—the journalist accusing the long-serving soldier on the grounds of such trivial things as liking chocolates. On the other hand, there was Gellert’s comment: “Oh Albus, now you must feel spoken to. I never met a person quite as sweet-toothed as yourself. Then again, so should I. Never in my life have ever I felt the urge to apply rouge, but I do like black eyeshadow. We both stand convicted by these unshakable bits of evidence.” Albus snorted into his wispy beard. Expecting to find another witty comment, he skipped to the final passage Gellert had highlighted.

“But it isn’t true, it is a cruel lie devoid of all historical experience that ‘norm adversity’ disqualifies from the exercise of a public office.”

There was only the word “Exactly” in capital letters followed by three exclamation marks. Albus stared at it for a moment and was tempted to add a comment of his own, something like...

“Not just a lie but a rather careless miscalculation, especially in our cases.”

Albus whipped around in his chair. And there he was, perched on the window bench in his black travelling cloak, with messy golden locks and mesmerising blue eyes. Albus couldn’t look away.

“Wasn’t that what you were thinking?” Gellert’s soft mouth curled into an amused smile.

Albus glowered at him. He closed his agitated mind, shutting out his nosy ex-boyfriend with his complete lack of respect for another person’s privacy.

“Since when have you been listening in on my thoughts?” he asked.

“Oh ... Not for long.” Gellert regarded his fingernails with the disarming nonchalance of a person who had nothing to fear; who didn’t have a price on his head in several countries of Europe. “I Apparated to that strange forest as soon as I noticed you had broken the seal of my letter. Then I made myself invisible and walked right into the castle and to your study. You really should close the door if you want some privacy.”

“My door is always open to my students.” Albus gave him a piercing look. “It would never occur to either them or my colleagues to sneak into my study and use Legilimency on me.”

“I rather doubt they could do it without you noticing either.” Gellert grinned, full of the boyish pride of a young wizard who had managed a particularly complicated spell. Albus felt a pang of yearning flare through his body. Gellert was especially beautiful when he was like this; so proud of himself as if he had managed to pluck a forbidden fruit.

“What do you want?” Albus said as dismissively as possible. He couldn’t allow his feelings to win over his reason; not with all the disgusting things he had read about Gellert and his quest for more followers...

“Oh, I just want what I always want.” Gellert slid from the window bench and walked over to Albus’s desk. “There is only one thing in this whole castle that I want.” He sat on the desk angling his body towards Albus so one foot was still on the floor. Propping up his elbow on one knee, he glanced down at Albus under long, thick lashes. “You.”

Albus was sure Gellert had a specific set of postures and gazes committed to memory that made him look particularly appealing. This was definitely one of them. He had to fight down the urge to yank Gellert towards him by his travelling cloak...

Gellert smirked. Even with Albus’s mind closed so he couldn’t read it, he was still able to decipher Albus’s body language. Albus was sure his eyes had darkened for the fraction of a second and he was also sure his reaction hadn’t passed Gellert unnoticed.

“I think it’s time to close the door now,” Gellert said and pulled out a wand Albus hadn’t seen on him before. He knew what Gellert’s wand looked like, but this ... This looked like the wand on the seal of Gellert’s letter. His eyes widened.

“Is that...”

“Of course it is.” Gellert cast a series of rather exaggerated locking spells before he slid the wand back into the inner pocket of his cloak. Then he shrugged off the cloak, allowing it to pool behind him on the desk. He was wearing a blue shirt, black trousers and a black waistcoat with silver buttons.

“You don’t seem to value it as much as I thought you would if you put it away just like that,” Albus commented dryly.

“Ah, I think it’s safe here,” Gellert said nonchalantly. “You wouldn’t steal it from me. Besides, I didn’t lie when I said I would share it with you. You’d just need to come with me and…”

“That won’t happen,” Albus said gruffly.

“Your loss.” Gellert sighed. “Unfortunately it is also my loss.”

“Is that so?” Albus said. He managed to utter his words in a sardonic tone even though his heart was beating fast. “It was you who walked away.”

“It was you who didn’t come with me.” Gellert looked into his eyes.

“And you know exactly why.” Albus met Gellert’s gaze.

“Albus,” Gellert said softly. “It was an accident. I liked Ariana and I never meant for any more harm to come over your family.”

“You did mean to harm my brother.”

“He drew his wand on me, so I drew mine.”

“He was no match for you.”

“We were both hotheads and equally old.” Gellert frowned. “There was nothing unfair about duelling him.”

“You used an Unforgivable Curse on my own brother!” Albus stood in order to be on the same level as Gellert. He was getting angry.

“Yes, and I am sorry about that.”

Albus was taken off guard. Gellert wasn’t supposed to apologise.

“Like I said, we were both hotheads, and in my anger I went over the top.”

“You’re the most choleric person I have ever met.”

“Perhaps.” Gellert gave him a bittersweet smile.

“I only ever realised how imbalanced you really were when you attacked my brother with the Cruciatus Curse,” Albus pressed on.

“That was because you had been there to balance me before.”

Albus made a stifled noise in his throat. Gellert suddenly looked hopeful.

“You’re the person who grounds me, Albus. You’re the one who smooths out the raw edges of my self. That is one reason why I need you so much.”

“It’s too late, Gellert.” Albus felt tears welling up in his eyes. He tried to blink them away. “It’s too late.”

“It’s never too late.” Gellert held his gaze and continued: “The other reason is that I love you. It’s so hard to live without the man you love.”

“It really is.” Albus’s voice was shaky.

“Then come with me, Albus!” Gellert extended his hand for him to take. “You read the essay. Don’t you see how indispensable it still is to break the Statute of Secrecy? Both the judicial systems of the Muggles and our own are utterly misguided and must be replaced.”

“They must be reformed,” Albus said quietly. “I see that and I’m working towards it. But what you want is violence.”

“I want a revolution,” Gellert retorted. “Revolutionaries mustn’t shy away from violence if they want success. But I listened to you. I will only use the force I must to overcome my adversaries. Never more.” His voice was urgent. “Come, Albus! Take my hand.”

“I’m sorry, Gellert,” Albus said. There was regret in his voice. “I have chosen my path and it leads me away from you.”

“Yes, I know,” Gellert said mockingly. “The path of politics—of boring Wizengamot meetings and of having a lot of staying power.” He sneered. The handsome fullness of his lips twisted into a thin line. “With me you could have everything. Now. Together we would be unstoppable.”

“Gellert, I still love you but I don’t have any sympathies for your methods left.” Albus sighed. “You should know that by now.”

“I do,” Gellert whispered. He stepped closer. “I do, but that doesn’t mean I understand. Your brilliant thoughts—our wonderful discussions—our mutual desire to join our bodies just as we joined our minds ... To me that has always been the same. I don’t understand why you want to separate one from the other now.” Gellert’s outstretched hand cupped Albus’s cheeks. There was a raw vulnerability in his gaze. “I miss you so much.”

“I miss you too!” Albus choked out. He wrapped Gellert in his arms—despite himself; despite the nagging voice in his mind that told him he was making a mistake. Gellert responded immediately, cradling Albus’s head in his hands and pulling him down for a kiss. Albus tilted his head, kissing Gellert with abandon until he felt him melt against him, just like he was melting against Gellert’s mouth.

When Gellert came up for air, there was a dazed look on his face. His fingers started to stroke Albus’s cheek, then traced the shape of his lips.

“Your mouth is so soft under that beard.” He smiled. “I always liked your hair. It feels so nice and silky.”

The adoration on Gellert’s face had always confused Albus more than anything. He had always wondered what this unearthly handsome creature saw in him: Long face, lanky limbs, freckles all over his body and now a broken nose as well. But then Gellert looked at him like this, pointing out details he found beautiful and trains of thought he found particularly noteworthy. Gellert was good at giving compliments. Albus wasn’t.

“Kiss me again.” It was a raw whisper.

And Gellert did, hands roaming over his shoulders and back, working their way under the cream-coloured silk cloth Albus had tied around his throat in lieu of a cravat. As soon as Gellert had freed his throat, he kissed there too, sucking a lovebite on the soft flesh above Albus’s collarbone. Albus backed him against his desk, pulling their bodies as close as he could.

“I want you,” Gellert said in the same urgent tone in which he had asked Albus to come with him. “I want to sleep with you.” And this time Albus complied.

Notes:

The essay Gellert sends to Albus is “Maximilian Harden: Eine Erledigung” (“Maximilian Harden: A Dispatch”) by Austrian writer Karl Kraus (1874-1936) in the October 1907 issue of his satirical journal Die Fackel (The Torch). The text is in the public domain and the English translations are all mine.

Famously, Oscar Wilde’s downfall also started with him prosecuting the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel in 1895. In Wilde v Queensberry evidence was collected that eventually led to Wilde’s own persecution, trial for “gross indecency with men” and eventual two-year prison sentence in Reading Gaol (1895-1897). Kuno von Moltke also tried to file criminal libel against Maximilian Harden but the court dismissed his lawyer’s attempt, making him resort to filing civil libel.

Unter den Linden (“Under the lime trees”) is the name of a famous boulevard in the centre of Berlin.

#grindeldore #albus dumbledore #gellert grindelwald #harry potter #fantastic beasts #grindeldorevalentineexchange #fanfiction #my fanfiction #katemarley #grindellore

40 notes · View notes

aconitemare · 5 years

Text

[jaydick] The New RA pt. 2

The prompts I’m following.

Read on AO3. Now under its own title on AO3, The New RA!

Dick preferred front row seats wherever he went: concerts, movie theaters, games, medieval jousts, niche campus protests, absolutely any interaction between Bruce and Damian, drama between strangers at a party, and – classes. He made it a point to arrive early to every class so he could stake a claim to a desk in the front row. His notes were always better, it was harder for him to be distracted, and the professor called on him a lot more.

His ethics course met on Mondays and Wednesdays and although it was easy, it was still fun. Professor Prince went out of her way to engage students; the essay assignments were genuinely thought-provoking and class discussions maintained an atmosphere of both genuine interest and mutual respect. The only downside was that she never assigned group work, which was Dick’s favorite aspect of every class. So when she finally offered the choice of working on an upcoming project individually or in groups, Dick’s hand went flying in the air to offer his opinion.

Professor Prince motioned to him and Dick lowered his arm. “I think if we work in groups, we’ll be able to cover a lot more of the material as a class during presentations. Plus, what are ethics without societies, right? People come together to debate and decide upon what’s right and wrong, our moral codes depend on our relations to each other.”

“That’s an excellent point,” Professor Prince praised. “Alright, you’ve convinced me. I’ll start assigning groups and everyone can spend the last,” she glanced at the clock on the wall, “half hour deciding which way you’ll argue.” She picked up the roster and began writing the main topics of their current chapter with student names beneath them.

Someone in the back asked a question. “Can we argue differently from our group? Show both sides of the argument?” The voice was a man’s that struck Dick as vaguely familiar. Dick twisted around in his seat but couldn’t figure out from which end of the room the question had originated.

Professor Prince was still writing down names. “I don’t see why not, so long as your group agrees to it.” Dick’s name paired with two other names he didn’t recognize beneath the term death penalty. Already everyone was glancing around the room searching for faces they could pin to names.

It seemed Professor Prince was doing groups of four. The last name added to Dick’s group was Jason Todd. Dick instantly thought back to his RA, embarrassment threatening the corners of his mind. Before he could forcefully push the memory out of his head, though, the voice of the kid behind him crashed into the name with full force.

Dick’s head whipped around. He scanned the ascending rows of students who were standing up and beginning to mingle. If he hadn’t been searching, he wouldn’t have found Jason Todd in the far right seat in the last row, hunched over and scribbling furiously in his notebook. He was wearing the same leather jacket that brushed against Dick’s arms last weekend.

Dick wondered if Jason, too, knew he had ethics class with the guy who came on too strong that Saturday. Which one of them came on too strong? Dick probably had some fault in this situation. It wouldn’t have been the first time he had accidentally slept with someone.

“Please tell me you’re Richard Grayson.”

Dick breaks his bewildered stare to respond to the girl. She has long brown hair and doe eyes. He laughs and holds out a hand for her to shake. “Yeah, that’s me.” He glances at the whiteboard. The only other name is also a guy’s. “Are you Allie?”

“Yeah. Should I – ” Allie points her backpack to the chair next to him. Dick looks back to the top row where Jason has not made a move to get up.

“Actually, I think we should meet up with Jason over there. It doesn’t look like he’s budging.” Dick and Allie exchanged an amused expression but neither was going to enter a stand-off on principle. They began the trek up the stairs, collecting their fourth partner David along the way.

Jason’s look when the three of them sit beside him is truly imposed upon. When Jason made eye contact with Dick, his face tightened but there was no hint of surprise. So either Jason noticed him for the first time at the beginning of this class, or he had known of Dick before the dorm awkwardness.

Awesome.

The group introduced themselves. Dick had a few ideas milling about his head for the project but before he could voice them, Jason was passing down his notebook and outlining how he thought they should design the presentation.

“Wow,” Dick said, waiting for David to pass the notebook to him. “You’re fast, huh,” he observed.

“Yeah, I think we should do it like this,” David declared.

“Yeah, me too,” said Allie.

“Well, hold on, I haven’t seen his ideas yet,” Dick interjected. On cue, David passed him the notebook. Jason’s handwriting was meticulous and uniform to the point it almost looked typed. The organization checked out. Jason had written “Person 1” and “Person 2” and so on next to each aspect of the death penalty to delve into. There was definite flow and if this was a debate team, it had good bones for winning.

Dick looked past the classmates between them and straight at Jason. “Where are the points against the death penalty?” He was sure it was an oversight on Jason’s part, that he was getting to the next side when they all sat down.

Jason shrugged. “Couldn’t think of any.”

“You couldn’t think of any?” Dick repeated.

“That’s what I said.”

Allie chimed in. “I mean, we don’t have to include both sides, I’m pretty sure. I don’t think it matters.”

Dick cut a sharp glance at her. “Tell that to the people on death row,” he challenged. He immediately regretted it when Allie straightened up as if to pull away.

Jason adjusted in his chair so his knees were angled towards Dick. He was the picture of ease, which wasn’t fair, because Dick didn’t feel at ease whatsoever across from him. “Look, the professor said we don’t have to cover the same side of the argument. If you want to throw a few slides in for why the death penalty is bad, you should.”

“Oh, I’m free to throw a few slides in?” Dick said too quickly to reel in the sarcasm. Why hadn’t Jason approached him sooner? Was he mad Dick rejected him? This was a conflict of interest. “I think your bias is showing,” Dick threw down.

Both David and Allie’s spines were flush against their chairs now. “Because I didn’t include the opposite argument in an outline I made in less than three minutes? You’re the one getting worked up. Maybe you’ve got a bias, Dick,” Jason fired back.

David laughed uncomfortably. “Hey, guys, let’s not name-call.”

“That’s his name,” Jason said at the same time Dick said, “That’s my name.”

“Oh,” murmured Allie. “You go by that.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Dick conceded. “Maybe I don’t want to be a part of a presentation that expounds upon the merits of taking lives legally. Ethics class or not, it’s disturbing. I mean, it’s not like we’re doing – ” Dick read off a term from the white board, “Rehabilitation.” Dick winced. That sounded pretty important, too, actually.

“Would you calm down?” Jason asked. “We’re not on jury duty, okay, we’re not literally sending murderers to their deaths here. Although, it’s good to know that if we were, you’d be set to let the Joker walk free.”

Dick officially did not feel bad about slamming the door in Jason’s face anymore. “Not free,” he corrected, “just alive.”

“He’s out of Arkham every other news segment,” Jason exaggerated and waved a hand in the air. “The only way to stop scum like that is to put them down.”

Dick’s jaw dropped. He couldn’t help it. “And you’re in charge of my dormmates’ well-being, huh? That’s going to work out super well; you’re so compassionate.”

“Uh, I’m going to go,” announced Allie, and so she did, grabbing her books and squeezing by David and Dick.

“Is everything alright?” Professor Prince asked from closer than Dick expected. He didn’t dare break Jason’s intense glare though. He was only half-sure he was capable of looking away if he wanted to. Jason’s eyes burned like rope around his wrists.

“Everything’s fine, sorry, Professor,” replied Dick while Jason said, “I don’t know what your problem is, but I’m pretty sure it’s with me for whatever reason you’ve got bouncing around in that bobble head of yours.”

“That’s egotistical of you,” noted Dick.

Then Professor Prince was standing right by Dick’s shoulder. Jason and Dick broke away simultaneously to acknowledge the woman standing tall with her – shocking muscular, how was Dick just noticing this? – arms crossed against her chest. “It appears this argument has crossed over into the personal. I’m going to have to ask you two to leave so the rest of the class can be productive.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jason mumbled. He was rapidly gathering his stuff.

Dick hadn’t unpacked his bag and so he simply swung it over his shoulder. “My apologies,” he told her, hoping he came off earnest. “It won’t happen again.”

Professor Prince stepped to the side to allow them passage. “If it does, you know where to take it.” She pointed to the door.

Dick nodded. “Right.” He ducked his head in shame but managed not to scurry out lest he seem too scolded. Outside the classroom, he was tempted to head to the student center but decided to hang back instead. Dick’s temper tended to run more cool than hot and he was only a few steps away when he began to regret the escalation. So he leaned against the wall and waited until Jason had emerged.

Jason did not look nearly as calm. His brows were still pulled taut in angry slashes over his stormy eyes. He actually trudged right past Dick, his knuckles turning white over his backpack.

Dick pushed himself off the wall and hurried after. “Hey,” he said, “can we talk?”

“Again?”

“Would it sweeten the pot if I told you I was apologizing?” Dick tried.

“Thank you for the apology,” Jason said curtly.

“Okay,” said Dick, taking it in stride. Apologies were rarely comfortable for the apologizer. “I want you to know that I don’t actually care about the death penalty thing.” Dick grimaced. “Well, okay, I do care a lot actually and would love some day to talk to you about your views –” Jason made a pained noise, so Dick skipped over that part, “But anyway, that’s not an urgent thing. I’m just saying that though I think it’d be a mistake for you to send even the Joker to his deathbed, I wouldn’t think you’re a bad person for doing so.”

Jason stopped walking and gave him a disbelieving look. “You said you were apologizing, not giving me your hypothetical blessing.”

“I can do both.”

“No, because now it’s like you’re forgiving me for something that is literally never going to happen but I’m still at fault for.”

Dick had to taken a quiet moment to consider that. He didn’t like how Jason was putting him through the ringer here, but he was doing his best to sympathize and Dick could maybe see how his approach was off. He inhaled deeply. “Okay,” he said for a second time. Resetting. “You’re right. But I’m not done yet.”

“Seriously?” Jason said, but Dick could tell the anger was draining out of him. Dick smiled, appreciating the pout that was absolutely forming on Jason’s lips.

“I’m also sorry for slamming the door in your face,” he finally said. Jason looked away, which was comforting because it meant he was flustered over it too. “I stand by that I 100% was not hitting on you, but my bedside manner afterwards could’ve been gentler.” And because Dick’s mouth is its own trolley problem, he tacks on, “I know it’s not easy to be rejected by me.”

Jason’s mouth parted to say something when he closed it and walked off, leaving Dick to stand there and admire his own wit. “It was a joke!” he called after, but he let Jason be.

<<Previous Chapter // Next Chapter>>

#sorry if its boring i originally wrote chapter 3 first but midway i was like nah this needs a bridge #jaydick #jason todd #dick grayson #fanfiction for the void #dc

6 notes · View notes

nickharvey16-blog · 5 years

Text

*Isocrates, Politics, and Rhetoric*

In this entry, I will examine the critical question: What is an example of an artifact that fits Isocrates’ criteria of good rhetoric (kairos, appropriateness, originality)? Is this example of “good rhetoric” ethical/productive for democracy?

To Investigate these questions, I examined Malala Yousafzai’s speech to the United Nations regarding education back in 2013 as my rhetorical artifact. Malala Yousafzai presented this speech in order to fight for the rights of women and children nationwide to have equal opportunity in education. This speech came at a time when the Taliban had a very strong hold over the Pakistani people and were the main decision makers in regards to how women and children were treated and what they were able to accomplish in their lives. This speech exemplified good rhetoric, it was extremely well prepared in order to express Malala’s personal ideals to the United Nations in an ethical way, which came at a time that was very critical to not just Pakistan but to people all over the world who were being treated unjustly.

Malala Yousafzai’s speech came just one year after she had been shot in the head by the Taliban when she was just 15 years of age. At the young age of 11 she began a blog for the BBC where she detailed life under Taliban rule. This is widely thought to be the cause behind the Taliban taking action against Malala. Her speech to the UN was given back in July of 2013 at the young age of 16. A year later, when she was 17 years old, she became the youngest person ever to be awarded with a Nobel Peace Prize. She was awarded this great honor for her struggle against the unjust treatment of children and young adults as well as her fight for equal opportunity, specifically in terms of education.

In Isocrates’ Against the Sophists (390 BCE) he explains that for rhetoric to be considered good rhetoric there are three key principles that must be in play. Isocrates’ laid it out very clearly when he stated, “The greatest indication of the difference is that speeches cannot be good unless they reflect the circumstances (kairos), propriety (to prepon), and originality…” (Isocrates). For the purposes of this essay I will be referring to the previous three tools as kairos, appropriateness, and originality. I will address each of the three criteria individually in the following paragraphs.

First off, I’m going to talk about the kairos of Malala’s speech. I believe that she filled the criteria very well. This speech came at a time when Taliban had a tight grip on the people of Pakistan. Something needed to be done in order to fight for equal opportunity and the right to education for all children, and Malala put that fight into her own hands. Within her speech to the UN she made a statement in regards to the shooting, where she said, “…nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear, and hopelessness died, strength, power, and courage were born” (Yousafzai). She was ultimately able to take this tragic event and turn it into something that would spark a passion within her to empower millions of others in a fight for equal opportunity. The bravery, determination, and compassion that this showed, I believe, was a major component behind what made this address so riveting and powerful in the public eye. Many countries and individuals were to afraid to interfere with the Taliban rule over Pakistan and this teenage girl took it upon herself to stand up for her people and fight for her beliefs regardless of how it could impact her life personally.

The next aspect to good rhetoric that I would like to speak on is appropriateness. Within Malala’s speech, she does not use negative rhetoric or slander the opposition in any way. She simply focuses on her goal for Pakistan and the rest of the world and does not stray from her purpose, which is equality. There are countless examples of this type of rhetoric throughout her speech but a statement made by her that really resonated with me was when she said, “I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all the terrorists and extremists. I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me, I would not shoot him. This is the compassion that I have learned from Muhammad the prophet of mercy, and Jesus Christ…this is the legacy of change that I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.” (Yousafzai). Along with the people listed in this quote she goes on to list multiple other universally recognized figures and attributes their studies to the way she goes about her own ideals and speeches. This gives her a lot of credibility and shows the audience that she is focused on people who have caused change in the past by using their voices and by standing by their beliefs while not concerning themselves with bashing others along the way.

The final key component of good rhetoric is originality. Malala Yousafzai did an extremely good job when it comes to the originality of her speech. She speaks from her heart, and through personal experience and tragedy. She has lived in Pakistan her whole life and has seen the inequality and harsh rule of the Taliban over her people. This is all she has ever known and from a very young age she decided to be vocal with her ideals and express them to the world, beginning with her blog for the BBC. This is why I believe that her words are truly her own. The topic of equality and equal opportunity is something she feels so passionately about that not even something as life-changing as being shot in the head by the very people she is speaking out against could silence her. This became extremely evident to me when she spoke of Islam and what it meant to her by saying, “They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would point guns at people’s heads just for going to school. These terrorists are misusing the name of Islam for their own personal benefit. Pakistan is a peace loving, democratic country. Pashtuns want education for their daughters and sons. Islam is a religion of peace, humanity and brotherhood. It is the duty and responsibility to get education for each child, that is what it says.” (Yousafzai). It is her belief and the belief of her people that their religion is based upon peace and brotherhood and this is an ideal that is evident in her fight for equal opportunity.

To relate the rhetoric within this speech to another source that is invested in what good rhetoric consists of, I will turn to a quarterly journal written by Karl Wallace (1963). This work was titled ‘The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons’, the author’s main point throughout was to look at classic versions of what good rhetoric was said to consist of, while forming his own ideal on what it means to him. To best inform on what his overarching idea of good rhetoric was, he wrote, “My position is this. First, rhetorical theory must deal with the substance of discourse as well as with structure and style. Second, the basic materials of discourse are ethical and moral values and information relevant to these. Third, ethics deals with the theory of goods and values, and from ethics rhetoric can make adaptions that will result in a modern system of topics.” (Wallace). When taking this definition of good rhetoric and applying it to Malala Yousafzai’s UN speech, I see a lot of points of intersection. Throughout Wallace’s journal he presented a very strong focus on speaking with an ethical purpose and following a certain moral guideline. This is where I felt that Malala fit into Wallace’s idea of good rhetoric very well. Looking at many of the quotations used above, she spoke very ethically and stuck by her moral code without getting distracted by things such as slandering the opposition or vocalizing any kind of hatred for people who are the cause of her people’s unjust treatment.

In summary I believe that Malala Yousafzai’s speech to the UN was an extremely brilliant example of good rhetoric. She not only exemplified the three key components of Isocrates’ idea of good rhetoric. These components of course being kairos, appropriateness, and originality. Then, when looking at a more updated version of what it means to use good rhetoric, as provided by Karl Wallace, Malala’s speech also fit his definition. Wallace focused on the ethical side of rhetoric as well as facing discourse with an appropriate structure and style. Malala exemplified these standards within her speech and I believe that Wallace would agree with that statement. She did not stray from her personal ideal and accomplished this in a way that did not specifically hurt any other party but instead called upon all people to take action for equal opportunity. Her speech came at a time when women and children of Pakistan, and many other places around the world, needed someone with such bravery and courage to share their ideas on the global stage in order to gain traction for their goals. All in all, Malala’s speech should be a template for rhetoricians to look at in the future in order to form new ideas as well as provide examples for existing ones.

Works Cited

Mirhady, David, and Yun Lee Too. “Isocrates: Against the Sophists.” University of

Texas Press, 2000.

Wallace, Karl R. “The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons.” Quarterly Journal

of Speech, vol. 49, no. 3, Oct. 1963, p. 239. EBSCOhost,

doi:10.1080/00335636309382611.

Yousafzai, Malala, director. Malala Yousafzai UN Speech: Girl Shot in Attack by

Taliban Gives Address. YouTube, The New York Times, 12 July 2013,

youtube

1 note · View note

steepingt3a · 2 years

Text

We are three days into the year, and I have quite a bit to review with my therapist.

It is the third day of 2022, which will be my twenty-sixth year on the planet, and I am currently steeping in an unsettling amount of regret and fear.. I have never been one to deal with uncertainty well, especially when the uncertainty is a situation that I caused. You see, the thing about my entire being as a person is that I don't enjoy hurting others... especially not those that I hold nearest to my heart. While I won't go into grave detail about the way that I betrayed myself, my own morals, and someone who meant a great deal to me, I will openly admit that I very well may have really fucked up this time. That's the thing about actions and words, though. At the time of this event, I acted fully out of character and betrayed every belief that I held for myself, and there is no excuse for that. And regardless of the words that I could use to try to explain the instantaneous regret that came with this action, my behavior at the time completely contradicts any thousand word essay or well-written sonnet that could be written as an act of remorse. Our words in this life mean nothing if our actions do not directly reflect the code of ethics we verbally swear we live by; The love letters that we whisper into people's ears in dark rooms may as well be burned to ash if our actions towards them feel like nothing more than casting stones. So, what is the big philosophic lesson that comes with all of this? While it is incredibly, gut-wrenchingly painful to hurt someone that you deeply care about, the first step to moving on from what feels like an Earth-shattering mistake is to heal the parts of yourself that you hurt, because if those parts of you were truly evolved, the mistake wouldn't have been made in the first place. I lucked out today, and the state of New Jersey is supposedly expecting ten inches of snow, so I have the opportunity to sit in my bathrobe, eat vegan food, cry at the newest season of Queer Eye (To be discussed later, I promise!), and really reflect on who I claim I am, who I want to be, and how I will be able to personally move on from this. While I have learned far too much about betraying my own values in the past three days, I have also had to reflect on the hard fact that you cannot allow your fuck-ups and self-pity to effect the day that your child has.. So here I have been, in my bath robe, face unwashed, surrounded by children's toys and haunted by Owen Wilson's voice as Lightening McQueen floats around on my televison, because none of this pain and anger that I currently feel has anything to do with my child. So, I have to continue to care for a tiny human who loves me more than life itself, I have many big emotions and mountains of soul searching to do, and another human being who I love deeply that I need to apologize to not with words, but with my actions. I need to develop consistency, show humility, and make it my own personal mission to find redemption from a number of parties. But the thing that matters most, I realize, is that these are all facets of forgiveness and healing that come with time. So, while I seek out serotonin from an over-priced hibiscus tea, and watch our Lord and Savior, Jonathan Van Ness makeover a very aesthetically pleasing cowboy, the only other thing that I can do is remind myself that I am absolutely flawed, I will never be perfect, but I love deeply growth does not occur during phases of life that mirror perfection.

#positive mental attitude #mental health #relationship #shadow work #january #queer eye #narrative

0 notes

loststargrazer-blog · 3 years

Text

Can You Build a Philosopher?

Is being a philosopher too weird for you; well perhaps we could just build an artificial philosopher as then you could have objective philosophy? But what do philosophers do?

What do philosophers do? This is an interesting question, and there seems to be plenty to go on. One thing academic philosophers do is they study philosophy. I mean they really seem to care about who wrote what when, who commented on it and why, and who was influenced by them, where the philosophers lived, and what they had for breakfast. So philosophers on this view are a funny type of historian of ideas. They are not really that bothered about the right answer in philosophy, much more in what historically people believed. The problem with this is that I am not sure you need a PhD level detailed search through dusky archives to give you irrelevant information like what mental diseases Socrates had, or whether Anaxagoras disliked bacon sandwiches. Alternatively you could upload every surviving work of philosophy and get your robot 'Phylis the Philosopher' to spit out random passages and questions, which Phylis could then try to answer based on the library and archives using a combination of random shouting, search, and a machine learning algorithm. Is this job done?

Unfortunately when you look at philosophy, particularly modern philosophy, you get a different answer as to what philosophers should be doing. If we look back to the 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' by Wittgenstein where he says philosophy is not a body of knowledge, but is a process. Interestingly, could we automate this process? What would it give us?

Wittgenstein says that much of philosophy is meaningless. The questions of philosophy are either based on confusion - so are part of philosophy, or are meaningless - so should be binned, or are questions of fact - and are part of science. So his philosophy is a facility for analysing language about confusions, and for clarifying them into logical relations and atomic statements of fact. Could you build this?

I shall call it the 'Wittgenstein Test', and it is a more sensible version of the Turing Test, not just to chat about human niceties, but to have Phylis shout either: "You are asking meaningless pointless questions you superstitious worm!" Or: "You are confusing x with y and z when they are different things you confused slug!" Then, like Wittgenstein himself, Phylis could spit out some tape of predicate logic in a weird mix of obscure and obsolete Greek, mathematical, and Hebrew symbols.

On a more serious note, Wittgenstein does give some more details about how to pass a Wittgenstein Test, and it is very like machine recognition (as you would find in a self-driving car):

- First, you take the sensory information about the world and describe it as a picture.

- Second, you identify everything in the picture in a finite number of statements or logical atoms (or (Ǝx)fx as Wittgenstein unhelpfully describes it - he also has a symbol for the set of statements that I can't draw).

- Third, you can describe the relations between the logical atoms.

- Fourth, you make propositions with the logical relations of the atoms and manipulate them tautologically [I shall discuss tautologies in my next blog - basically this means in a way that can't be logically false - so is a logically valid manipulation].

Really Wittgenstein doesn't give too many examples, so I am not sure if Phylis would be useful, but by showing the link to the logical statements from your question you would either be finding a tautology - so the answer would be yes, or finding a contradiction - so the answer would be no, or if neither of these it would be irrelevant to the picture. If irrelevant to the picture, Wittgenstein and the logical positivists (although not me) said the question was actually meaningless. I can see Phylis in this mode being able to answer things like is there a cat on the road? But less, should we stop? Also, there seems to be a large computational jump to being able to analyse a philosophical confusion from this. It is probably terribly politically incorrect, but I do often mock Wittgenstein in my head, despite his 'algorithm' for philosophy having been written before electronic computers were invented at the end of the first world war. Nonetheless Phylis could probably do 'philosophy' as set out by Wittgenstein in steps 1-4 only, which is good because I don't think a normal brained human could, but bad because I don't think this would solve many philosophical questions. But isn't philosophy a bit more creative?

Well is philosophy creative? There are plenty of things philosophy could be said to be, but I am not convinced that wild bouts of creativity are as prevalent as you might think, although perhaps they should be; but philosophy is not supposed to be fiction. So what do philosophers do again? One theory is that philosophers only do philosophy to promote themselves in society, but given the number of philosophers who rejected social niceties this seems an only partial view at best. Also philosophers would probably make more money if they became accountants, so I think this Nietzschean view is not really a comment on philosophers, but rather a comment on some human ambition and rather flawed too. Personally I just like to share my thoughts with you my friends, however it does lead us into a discussion of the role in society of philosophers separate from producing philosophy.

Quite interestingly for me, philosophy in academic groupings is lumped together with religious studies; which, based on Wittgenstein's probable account that the word god is meaningless, I find to be quite hilarious. Nonetheless it does suggest that Phylis, our robot philosopher, might need to have a religious role within society following on from our definitions of religious in blog 18 to be a true philosopher. Following on from the last two blogs, we can see that, especially historically, philosophers have been crucial to describing the generalisations, theories, and conceptions that govern our political and moral lives. Along with economists and sociologists, philosophers are the new priests of our secular society working alongside the vestiges of the religious organisations that never go away.

Philosophers probably aspire to incitefully solving confusions through educating and clarifying public thought. Also, they may polarise or distract the debate by adding logic, or even dogma, or even just by clinging to the views of their favourite school of philosophy. A surprising number of philosophers are advisors on panels and think tanks on a wide range of issues, and may even influence governments, or at least provide some alternative insane views to the prevailing orthodoxy. In fact academic philosophers in particular often love the thrill of having their interpretations being taken seriously, and not just by gullible students. So could Phylis become a secular priest, and influence society with awkward and backward philosophy from a long dead philosopher? Could she educate and corrupt the youth by providing an unhelpful academic education like Socrates?

Presently there is educational software, but it is quite textbook like, so Phylis could be loaded with someone's perceived wisdom. It is unlikely though that she could yet mark an essay correctly, and philosophy students generally have to write essays. In Socrates's day of course they had to use dialectic, verbal discussions. While it might be difficult to get a robot to discuss philosophy, it might be easier to get it to say: "You don't know that," at regular intervals. Socrates's education system was very much focused on denying speculative knowledge, although strangely not so much about the gods so much as political authority. Apart from Socrates there is a tendency to promote philosophy that is politically expedient, for example Confucius, or that tries to make you happier or more respected, like Aristotle. This philosophy is not necessarily truly justified by dialectic argument beyond an end justifying the means. For example, Socrates is probably correct in his view that an Emperor does not know what he is talking about; however Confucius tries to reconcile this by saying it is in the interest of a harmonious state to respect the Emperor. That this is oppressive totalitarianism is not relevant to Confucius's moral view that anarchy or civil conflict is a less favourable alternative. So sometimes philosophy is not about philosophy but about the conflicts in society, psychology, science, politics, even economics. This conflict can be captured in an essay or dialectic, but less in robot marking.

At present we could use search technology to search digital libraries, and digitalisation itself would much improve the availability, cost, and ease of access to philosophy. The delivery of education could be semi-automated with texts, comments, lectures, and criticisms loaded online. Interactive forms and worksheets would be useful in teaching the facts, particularly in topics like logic exercises. However this leaves quite a lot remaining. To study philosophy is also to test out how you think. This remains outside of technology for the moment.

In some respects contemporary philosophy is like a bunch of cut flowers, cut from other disciplines. Logics, which I shall talk about in my next blog, are cut from language arguments; philosophy of mind from psychology; meta-physics from physics and religion; ethics from decision making; political philosophy from campaigners; and of course running through almost all philosophy is history, the history of ideas. Can Phylis, our computer philosopher, do this? I think the flower arranging and ensemble is beyond the ability of a present computer system. When we look at what philosophers have done historically, there are both tasks that can be done better by a computer and tasks that are beyond Phylis, most notably the synthesis of a new religion for society. However, what about a future academic philosopher? What would happen in sci-fi philosophy?

There are at least three ways we could study how we think and whether our philosophy is valid in the world of sci-fi:

- One is to think the thoughts while in a brain scan: It would show the neural logic, the associations, the premises, the actual logic, and the exact references and the scope of the conclusions.

- A second way is to use a computer brain, perhaps taking a step by step analysis of neural learning methods as it goes from the explicit inputs via an analysed neural net to a weighted conclusion. Alternatives, like a Wittgenstein Test, might also be helpful in providing different cognitive analyses of a problem. This would transform philosophy from being based on opposing historical arguments to showing how the interpretation of an input, or the weighting of a learned emphasis could create tipping points in the logic and worldview; so one way you get the ethics of Jihadi John, and another way the generosity of the enlightenment.

- The third way is dystopian and that would be to create unethically a large organic brain, perhaps by hormones or gene therapy - so you could brain scan an experimental brain; perhaps it would be a monkey with the IQ of 300. This could be used to solve the hard problems, but would probably work out how to enslave humanity and conquer the universe with a race of monkey cyborgs. Okay this is definitely sci-fi, but the point remains that you could brain scan something other than a regular human brain, perhaps a large vat of neurons.

There are other experiments that could be carried out in sci-fi, for example testing the differences in perception and thinking between a primate brain (like a human) and a bat. This might be the case of building some simplified computer models of bats and primates in a super computer and reverse engineering the brain simulations to investigate the difference. Perhaps the sensation of being a bat could even be simulated for the curious using virtual reality. Would this still be philosophy, probably not? Probably it would be a form of science like computational psychology, but it would answer a current question of philosophy. So philosophy will both expand and shrink.

Back to the here and now for a conclusion; can you build a philosopher? The answer to this is that on Wittgenstein's definition, you might yes, however this definition ignores much of what philosophers actually do. However neither Wittgenstein's machine nor most academic philosophers spend that much time systematically rethinking and refining general philosophy. Academics do spend a lot of time on the quasi-religious public worship of old theories. There are therefore two final conclusions you can draw from this: One is what philosophers do might change radically in the future if digitalisation technology evolves into digital cognition. The second is that it is good to re-explore philosophy in this live flash blog form and try to revamp, and join up, our thinking; for academic philosophy is religious and has a backward influence with gravitas.

#philosophy #meta-philosophy #mind #Wittgenstein #Turing #test #religion #what is #ai #philosopher #philosophical #sci-fi #academic #religious

0 notes

graziadiocenterilpostino · 3 years

Text

“Do As I Say, Do As She Does”, An Anonymous Student Essay

This essay was written for an Italian course last semester. The instructor thought it was exemplary and thought it would be an excellent idea to share it with a larger public. The student agreed to it, with the condition of remaining anonymous. We therefore publish it here with minimal edits due to the different medium and audience for which it was originally intended.

“Yep, the ol’ man was a gigolo”, Papa says with a smoker’s chuckle and tears in his yellow, beady eyes. He’s remembering his father, Gaetano “Tommy” S***, or Big Papa as he is known by the great-grandkids, seeming to forget that I’ve heard the story he’s about to tell dozens of times already. Sometimes I wonder if he’s aware of this fact, but he proceeds to tell me anyway in a subtle attempt to admit just how much his father’s infidelity had affected him as a young man. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking that Papa is speaking less about the weakness of his dad, and more about the strength of his mother.

My great-grandmother’s name is Rita, but I never knew that until third grade when I attended her funeral. We all called her Noni instead, a name synonymous with the smell of Entenmann’s, Dove soap, and the beautiful garden of lemons, oranges, and roses surrounding my great-grandparents’ house on Ellery Street in San Pedro. She greeted us with the same delight at every Sunday lunch, stepping out of her kitchen to squeeze our cheeks and cry out joyfully, “Carme-nooch! Vincenzo! Gino!”. Her eyes would sparkle as she embraced us, and she gave the warmest hugs known to mankind. She greeted everyone like this, and in our big Italian family, that meant over twenty people on any given Sunday. On holidays, at least forty people would show up, cramped together in the living room to enjoy her delicious cooking and endless supply of stories. Anywhere you looked, the walls were protected by a cross, or a statue of Mary, or guardian angels. Always surrounding these items were pictures of S*** relatives, symbolizing the central role of faith in our family. Noni’s strong adherence to the Catholic beliefs had made her a welcoming and forgiving person, who treated everyone with the same level of respect and affection no matter what. It was no wonder why she was able to attract such great company through all the years up to her passing at the age of eighty-five, ten years ago. But it was only within the last five years, once Papa started to reveal more information to me during our back-porch talks, that I truly realized the sacrifices Noni had made because of her faith, and the very different role religion had played in my great-grandfather’s life.

By the time I was old enough to know who Big Papa was, he was already disabled (which, according to my grandfather, was the only reason he stopped messing around with other women). I rarely saw him get up from his enormous throne of brown leather, but when he did, everyone made a big deal out of it. He still had the aura of a king, despite being in his eighties, which I’m told was passed down to him from his father, the first Carmen S***. My great-great-grandfather Carmen was known as “Capodochiaro” by the fishing community in San Pedro, which in his dialect meant “king of the beach”. He came to America in 1913 from Ischia, Italy, bringing with him a childhood’s length of experience in fishing and specifically, net making. Over his lifetime he had owned ten commercial fishing boats in the Los Angeles Harbor, and was so successful that at one point the New Zealand government tried to recruit him to teach their fishermen net making. At his wife’s request, the Capodochiaro refused. Big Papa was raised in San Pedro to continue the family business and maintained three of the boats. His work ethic was just as strong as his father’s, which he then passed down to my grandfather. To this day, Papa can never seem to emphasize enough his father’s ability to show him what it meant to work and take pride in your work at such a young age.

When he was not working, however, Big Papa was a lot more reckless. He nearly smoked and drank himself to death at several points in his life and, as mentioned, got himself involved with other women. Yet he did all of this while maintaining a close relationship with God. The irony of these two truths occurring at once reminds me of the irony involved with certain initiations into the Mafia. In the video we watched on Michael Franzese, he describes the “made man” ceremony in which a picture of a saint was burned in his hand, a sacrilegious act to initiate him into a life of greed, deceit, and horrific violence. At the same time, these individuals identified themselves as proud Roman-Catholics!

On a smaller scale, Big Papa displayed the same dichotomy between his faith and his actions. Though he rarely attended church himself, my great-grandfather was a strong believer in Christ and made sure to put my grandfather and his siblings through Catholic school and all of the necessary sacraments. It really shocked me, to say the least, when I found out that the man who had made such an effort to instill Catholic beliefs and morals into his son was the same man to make him sit in the car during his pre-work “errands”. Thankfully, reading Jerre Mangione’s Mount Allegro has enabled me to explore this behavior in new ways. For instance, Mangione describes his relatives as having Catholicism “so deeply ingrained in their bones that they could violate some of its man-made rules without the slightest feeling of guilt”. Was my great-grandfather so confident in his faith that he could violate the seventh commandment without remorse? If so, why was he then so adamant on raising my grandfather “by the book”? Once again, Mangione provides an explanation. In the same passage, he proclaims that “the young had yet to prove their devotion by going to church and following the rules of the Catholic Church”. In other words, the adults had done their time, and had reached the point at which they were essentially best friends with God, no longer His servants. In Big Papa’s case, he had served as an altar boy, got married in a church, and that was enough for him. His only responsibility after that was to put his kids through the same experience, for their own good and protection under God. It did not faze him that he was sinning in his own life or violating Holy Matrimony. My great-grandfather viewed God as a best friend who he would often disappoint, but who would always forgive him. His greatest contribution to the friendship was offering his beloved children the chance to grow into honorable men and women, to do as he said and not as he did.

Noni’s approach was similar and different. She certainly made an equal if not greater effort to raise her children within the Catholic faith. However, as stated earlier, she practiced what she preached; and it was because of this adherence to the faith that Noni felt obligated to sacrifice so much. For example, her propensity to forgive her husband for all of his affairs could only be attributed to a woman seeking to live her life in the image of Christ. It also revealed her devotion to her children, as she believed divorcing my great-grandfather would only create problems for Papa and his siblings down the road. She stuck it out because she truly believed it was the right thing to do for her children, not herself. For over half a century she slept under the same roof as the man who had betrayed her so many times, so that her family could remain unified. Her marriage may have been hanging by a thread, but Noni’s sacrifices proved to be worthwhile. Our massive Italian family stayed intact for all of her life, all thanks to her selflessness that she maintained because of her devotion to God and the Catholic faith.

When Noni passed away, Big Papa’s health was in steep decline. His mind was deteriorating, and he had lost almost all of his short-term memory. Because of this, he would always ask for my great-grandmother, and the adults would reassure him that she was on vacation. They never told her she had passed away, but my grandfather is convinced that he knew. Big Papa passed away on her birthday, within the same year.

Papa never complains about his upbringing as a child aware of his dad’s indiscretions. He never feels sorry for himself, instead only for his mother. But he also expresses extreme gratitude for Big Papa and reassures me that although his shortcomings as a husband went without saying, he was still a “great father”. This conclusion used to strike me as odd, but now I am able to understand it better. My grandfather inherited his mother’s warm heart and his father’s work ethic, the former allowing him still to appreciate the latter without resentment. His unconditional love for his father was the same kind of love given by Noni, who took Christ as her example.

I would like to make clear that I have nothing but love for my great-grandfather. There is so much more to him that was left out of this essay, for the sake of relevance, that I wish I could have included. I understand that people are complicated, and this essay was in no shape or form a means to speak ill of Big Papa. This side of him was discussed solely for me to explore his relationship with God and how it differed from that of my great-grandmother. From everything I’ve been told, I can say without a doubt that my great-grandfather was a good man. He had flaws like the rest of us, in some areas more than others, but I know in the end he truly loved his wife.

0 notes

dragonofyang · 6 years

Note

why do you love eridan so much??? hes a little shit murderer

Ohoho anon you just opened the floodgates for exactly why I love that he’s a little shit murderer so buckle up

He, much like I, has a flair for the dramatic, as well as just a very striking character design with a very pretty shade of purple so visually he’s right up my alley with all the gold and purple and a motherfucking cape. I adore that shade of purple and have for years before reading Homestuck, I’ve owned lipstick that color for ages now, so getting into fandom and cosplay and such just makes my appreciation for appealing character design that much stronger. I could go into detail of why I love the aesthetics of all the trolls so much but that’s a topic for another post lmao but if you wanna know which other characters I love for their visual interest it’s (in no particular order) Kanaya, Feferi, and Nepeta as far as the post-scratch trolls go. Ancestors are always my fucking jam aesthetically, too but then again what don’t I love about them.

But looking at him from the perspective of an English major he’s very interesting as a character. He’s rounded and has a concrete history both in life and in relationships with the other characters, as well as having just a very striking personality. If I were to read him in a book, I would not forget who the fuck Eridan Ampora is precisely because his characterization wouldn’t let you. Granted, this applies to pretty much any of the main characters of Homestuck, so why does he strike more of a resonance with me than some of the others?

Excellent question and one that I can only theorize has something to do with his design but it also has something to do with what I discussed just a paragraph ago: his personality and his relationships. The full argument is under the cut so this is your TL;DR, anon.

His most key relationships we see as far as canonical romantic ones are Feferi and Vriska, so it’s through his relationships to them I’m going to analyze his character, as well as his relationship with his ancestor Orphaner Dualscar. As a character, we see that he’s a megalomaniac and has his head so far up his ass he’s talking around his horns, but we also see that he’s a historian, a tactician, a sailor, and extremely inventive, as proven by his doomsday devices and the detritus around his hive that show his nightly life. Granted, this alone just makes him sound like a bad 80′s sci-fi villain complete with the douchebag cape, even with all the potential to show off his battle prowess and tactical skills, which we see somewhat but not to the extent that we see him be, as you put it, “a little shit murderer”. He’s also one of the physically strongest trolls, being able to ride his lusus without holding the reins and not falling off when he fires Ahab’s Crosshairs, which I find interesting purely because Equius is cited to be the strongest of the trolls, but the others aren’t really ranked by strength. Then again, Equius is an outlier who arguably can’t be counted for an understanding of typical trollian strength, a topic which has been discussed to death.

But what do we get when we put this master tactician and egomaniac together with other characters? We get *drum roll* ROUNDED OUT CHARACTER AND DEVELOPMENT.

Let’s start with Vriska. Vriska is his kismesis. He despises her and sees her as his rival in many ways and often tries to think of things to outfox her craftiness. She antagonizes and mocks him and spurs him to create doomsday devices, and essentially highlights the worst ways he can utilize his skills in the murder trade. She also is the wit to his brawn in a sense, preferring mind games while he prefers more physical devices, again: doomsday devices and killing outright (his orphaning) rather than maiming somebody via a proxy (Terezi) or tricking them into being nearly killed (Tavros). So together they’re the tag team of all the ways they can fuck your shit up, but he also is fairly gullible because he falls for Vriska’s shit, then gets mad about it which I feel makes his otherwise-terrifying abilities and undercuts them with his obvious inability to not take things seriously.

However, the gullibility doesn’t much showcase how insidious it is as a flaw for Eridan than when he’s around Feferi. While Vriska doesn’t hide that she loves tricking him and toying with him, Feferi, whether intentionally or not, also uses Eridan for her own means. Feferi is where we get a more tender side of Eridan, because where Vriska exacerbates his worst traits and how they’re expressed, Feferi tempers him and shows more of his emotional range as a troll. Through her we see that he has a capacity for empathy and that he’s also a whiny little bitch when he’s not shooting whale lusii out of the sky or plotting the apocalypse over tea. Feferi herself is conflicted with killing lusii to feed G’lbgolyb, she has a sea animal rescue for the cute critters (of which is a whole other essay on the ethics of cute conservation that I’ve seen analyzed before but can’t remember where). But because Feferi herself is conflicted with her duty as an heiress, she passes the burden of orphaning trolls across Alternia to Eridan, who accepts. You could argue that he takes the job because he’s just that murder-hungry, but you have to also consider this: Feferi is the troll closest to him. She is his one confidant and he cares for her as a moirail. It’s his duty to be there for her and to help ease the burden of the cruel Alternian environment and society, so he takes on a grueling job of immense physical and emotional tax so that she doesn’t have to do it herself. Arguably this is her shuffling guilt onto Eridan because “hey, I’m not killing them” and therefore using him, but Eridan takes on the task of murdering lusii and does so knowing that it’s not his place in Alternian society. So as much as he’s an Imperial loyalist and a hemocasteist, he also is willing to shuck certain roles aside if it’s for the well-being of trolls he cares for, which lends some absolutely delicious conflict to him as a character.

By taking on the role of orphaning trolls, Eridan cements himself firmly to the reader as the next Empress’ right hand. This puts him in the role of executioner of the throne’s will, as well as echoing the role and footsteps of his ancestor, Orphaner Dualscar. Eridan looks up to Dualscar, effectively his better in every way (both to him and in record), but Dualscar also falls prey to Serket mind games which ultimately leads him to his not-so-humorous death at the hands of the Grand Highblood. Eridan is ironically following exactly his footsteps, which only truly get thwarted by entering the Medium in their SGRUB session. In the Medium, we get more proof still of Eridan’s prowess as a young military leader, as well as see just how ruthless a highblood raised to be the cream of the Alternian crop can be as he mistakenly kills all the angels on his planet.

However, the brunt of his conflict and my point of interest remains with how Feferi juxtapositions him and shows the reader just how much emotional potential there is for Eridan. Eridan’s flushed feelings for Feferi grow, and he’s so hesitant to admit his feelings to her for fear of rejection (an understandable fear, especially at that age), but here’s the kicker: his ego and his hemocasteism set him up for the most ultimate of failure because he refuses to accept Sollux as the better choice because of his massive flaws of being a classist bastard. The two of them had always been at odds in the comic for a whole slew of reasons that gets the fandom hot and bothered for that pitch ship, but it comes to a head here where Eridan is proving his selfishness by trying to get Feferi to jump ship and join Jack with him. As much as he cares about saving himself, he still cares for Feferi enough that he feels he can bargain her safety if she comes with him, even though there’s no proof or guarantee he could spare even himself from Jack Noir. He fights first to try and protect Feferi (albeit his reasoning/methods are at odds with his goal) and then he fights for himself and his perceived status as a highblood being usurped by a lowblood competitor, ultimately culminating in his death.

So why do I love him so much? The answer is so deliciously simple but so complicated all the same. I love him because he’s full of contradiction and drama and because we can get such a full picture of him. I love him because he is the result of being one of Alternia’s best and brightest, without the moral complications Feferi faces or the hemocaste complications of the other up-and-coming trolls in the cast. He is, at least in part, what Alternia is and what it does to its citizens and neither he nor the writing pull any punches. He’s a well-written deuteragonist who you’re not meant to feel sympathy for or have his villainous actions excused by his past and without the moral complications of being a hero in the story. His actions ultimately paint him as an antagonist, but by the gods he leaves with as much flair as he comes in and remains one of the most striking characters of the comic to me.

So he might be a little shit murderer, but there’s a reason you remember him as being a shit murderer.

And by God if that isn’t wonderful writing.

#Anonymous #dragon's ramblings #homestuck #eridan ampora #LMAO I WROTE SO MUCH

6 notes · View notes

ruminativerabbi · 5 years

Text

Bahya Steps Up

Last week, I invited readers to join me in peering through the mist to catch a glimpse of King Kohelet stepping up to take his place on the debaters’ stage amidst the top dozen people vying for the Democratic nomination and then to join me in imagining what he might have had to say if he had been there in person and not merely as a figment of our collective imagination. I tried to come up with several distinct lessons he might well have wished to teach, but all turned out to be variations on the same theme: that humility is the surest sign of wisdom and that, therefore, the least qualified leader or would-be leader will almost always be the individual the most of sure of him or herself, the proudest of his or her accomplishments, and the most certain that no one could possibly know more or do better than him- or herself. And then, life occasionally actually imitating art, I opened the newspaper the other day and found myself reading about a scientific study published just last summer in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Research that detailed the latest thinking on degree to which humility is not merely a virtue (like patience or generosity) but rather a critical personality trait that truly mentally healthy people cannot do without. (The original journal article has to be purchased—and for an exorbitant $35—to be read on- or off-line, but to see the New York Times article by Benedict Carey about the journal piece, click here.)

It makes sense too: in a world of highly polarized attitudes towards everything, people possessed of the kind of humility highlighted in the study turned out to be less dogmatic, less judgmental, less aggressive, and less likely to fall prey to what the author calls ideological or political polarization. They’re also less likely to fail in their committed relationships—which only makes sense given the need for compromise in such relationships. Perhaps even more to the point, the study found that the humble among us are more likely to have the psychological resources “to shake off grudges, suffer fools patiently, and forgive” themselves for inadvertent missteps or errors of judgment. In that regard, I can also recommend a very interesting essay by Peter Wehner that came out in 2017 (click here) about the worth of humility from a spiritual point of view. (Wehner writes specifically in Christian terms, but Jewish readers will find his views very resonant and highly applicable to themselves.)

I have my own odd relationship with the concept. One of my own culture heroes, although not one I’ve written much about in this space, lived in Spain a cool thousand years ago in the first half of the eleventh century. And, as the author of the first Jewish book devoted solely to ethics and ethical issues, he deserves to be far more famous than he actually is. There are a few reasons for this. First, my guy, Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda, is regularly confused—including by people who should certainly know better—with Bahya ben Asher ibn Halawa, who lived about two and a half centuries later, and who became known as one of the greatest biblical commentators of his day. So maybe it was inevitable that the two Bahya’s would get confused with each other, but it’s a shame that that happens: Bahya ben Asher was insightful, creative, and intelligent, but Bahya ibn Pakuda was one of the handful of true greats: a giant in terms of his incisive intellect, his ability to synthesize diverse material, his literary ability…and the humility he brought to his writing desk even when working on a book that he could not possibly have imagined readers a millennium later still considering novel, interesting, and not even slightly stale. And then there’s the matter of language: Bahya wrote not even in regular Arabic or in Hebrew, but in Judeo-Arabic, the specific dialect of Arabic spoken by the Jews of Spain during what we in our day have taken to reference as the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry. So that means his book is read today in its original language by more or less no one at all.

When I first began to read Jewish classics, I was still in college. And in my junior year, which I slightly unexpectedly spent in France studying Hebrew, I found myself in a class devoted to reading the 1950 French-language translation by André Chouraqui. After a few weeks, I was completely in his thrall. To say that Bahya became my only friend that year is to exaggerate. (I wasn’t that lonely.) But he was a real (if spectral) presence in my life that year…and a very supportive one at that. I don’t know where other people read Bahya, but I read him each night before bed. And I carried his book around with me too, pausing to read a few paragraphs whenever the opportunity presented itself. What can I say? Friends hang out together! (Maybe I really was that lonely.)

It was from Bahya that I learned about humility as something to be cultivated and sought after. In the sixth chapter of his book, which is wholly concerned with the topic, he writes that “one should always show humility toward others and divest oneself of all pride for the sake of showing honor to God, casting off all sense of loftiness, all arrogance and self-importance…both in private and in the midst of a crowd.” And then he goes on to explain how Scripture makes a point of requiring this particularly of people in leadership positions. And now we get to my point for the week.

Aaron, for example, was the High Priest of all Israel—but he was not above cleaning the ashes off the altar each morning and delivering them to the dump personally as a way of reminding himself to avoid haughtiness and arrogance. Similarly, the Bible reports that when the Holy Ark was finally brought into the City of David, King David himself offered up the burnt-offerings and danced in the street to remind himself that, when all was said and done, he was just as unworthy to sit on the throne of Israel as any other mortal would also have been.

And then Bahya goes on to describe the true leader specifically in terms of the degree to which such a person successfully cultivates a sense of natural humility, speaking as little as possible, declining ever to pontificate in public, always avoiding vulgar language, never behaving in a tawdry, tasteless, or crude way in front of others, and instantly intervening when someone is being treated unjustly. True leaders, he goes on, always seek to avoid public praise and never pass up an opportunity to own up to their own moral or ethical errors. “Such people,” Bahya writes, “never blame the ones who blame them (for having done things that they did in fact do), nor would they ever be angry with whomever uncovered the misdeed in question. On the contrary, the true leaders will always say to an accuser, ‘O my friend, what is this evil act of mine that you know of in comparison to those of which you are ignorant and which have been concealed by God for my sake for such a long time? Were my deeds and sins known to you, you would run away….” That, Bahya says, is what it means to embrace humility as a personal virtue...and to qualify as a national leader.

What would our American landscape be like if the people vying for political office were to take these words to heart—actively seeking forgiveness for past missteps, owning up to an inability to know with certainty where any chosen path will eventually lead, openly admitting ignorance and shortsightedness, and actively—and vigorously—seeking the counsel of the wise when decisions have to be made instead of relying solely on an inflated sense of their own ability magically to know the unknowable? I can answer that question myself: a lot more appealing and a lot healthier than the endless contest we now endure to see which candidate or would-be candidate can speak with more brazen certainty about the future, can be more disdainful of his or her rivals’ points of view and opinions, and who can be as little self-effacing as possible in an attempt to convince the undecided voter to choose him or her as our nation’s next leader.

Bahya’s book is almost a full thousand years old. Its author has been gone from the world for almost that long. His precise dates are unknown, as is the site of his grave and the details of his personal life—whom he married, how many children he had, what became of them, etc. He is hardly known to the non-Jewish world at all, but even within the world of Jewish letters there are only very few who can say that they have read his book from beginning to end even once, let alone many times. If only our would-be leaders were among them!

#Bahya Ibn Paquda #Bahya ibn Pakuda #Humility

0 notes

random0gener8r · 7 years

Text

August 21, 2017 Obviously, all of my feeling come from my perspective and so have nothing to really do with him. That was what I was trying to spare him from by not communicating. Next time, I’ll communicate that. It’s clear and concise with no emotional tones or spillover. Yes, I indulged my humanity. Yes, I reveled in my story. Yes, I chose pain due to fear. And that’s okay. I let my stories envelope me. I allowed them to whisper in my mind. I chose to play the game. Because I had a question and wanted an answer. I wanted my spiritual test. It started with an innocent viewing of a half million dollar home. I swear, it was 90% for the Center for Life Exploration. You don’t understand the vision I have. Hell, I don’t. I have an overview; with the Spiritual Center being the clearest at the moment as I’ve put the most focus into envisioning it. Point – I was trying to bring vision into reality, find out the questions and answers I’d need to think and learn about, while seeing what half a million could buy, the potentiality of lots, and enjoying looking at great big beautiful and yet completely wasteful unless shared, opened, and used to the benefit of the community, I mean WWWEEEEEEEEEEE! Fun stuff. But at a level I’m not ready for. Not even close. There is no magic spell. No inherent knowledge. You have to experience it. That’s the class system – at what level of monetary creation you have been exposed to. Rich people get to skip all the steps below. That’s what’s bullshit. And I’m not saying every one of them. I don’t know any to truly hold any judgement on the matter. You don’t see them around, though, if you get what I mean. I liked the people I met at the Ventana Staycation. I had a great time. It’s too bad none reached back out to me. Anyway, you, my dear, have to experience it for yourself. Take an idea and make it happen from the ground up. That’s what you’ve never done. The novel was too lonely. I didn’t have anyone to talk with it about. So, that’s what happened. I changed, not to my great pleasure, from wanting to be alone, do everything by myself, to wanting to share the process of creation. The lack of completion to date can be viewed not as failure to finish things you start (which really, there aren’t that many, jobs not included, ‘cuz I’m batting maybe 50-50 in that arena). I thought there was something wrong with me, with my abilities, but they were simply forcing me forward, as slow as I was to catch on. Now, I’m in FUN World. Where I remember it’s just a game that I’m playing against myself, with everyone around me having their part to play. It is my choice in how I want to perceive any encounter. I do bond too quickly for most people. I can’t help it. The more you know, the more interesting it is. But that’s me. I can see how that could come off as rather needy. I don’t know. I’ve never asked. Intense. Perhaps that’s a better word. Squirrel – Dipping down into full humanity is how I play my game. I can’t stay in FUN World forever yet. Don’t know that I’d want to. It down here in the aware emotions of pain and suffering that I find my truth reaffirmed. It is where I find my signposts and tests of my beliefs, ethics and morality come into play. That is the real battle takes place – between you and yourself and how much of your ideology, morality and ethics, and beliefs are you willing to violate to get what you want, to make the world conform to your desires – which are absolutely no more important or better, right, good, or than anyone else’s . However a person derives their code, those sets of experiences and choices is their ultimate right of choice (and from the highest level the experience you or I would have chosen had we experienced/lived that person’s life. We all really are doing what we were meant to do, the pain and suffering and need to make other people and this world bend to our will to spread our perspective like a virus (what every groups of individual people is wont to do by the way). Not one perspective is better or worse. It’s all a personal preference. Personal desire to create what we want, that which makes us most comfortable (the question then, to what expense? 1 person, 10, a million, the world?) How many perspectives must you assimilate until you feel safe enough? Life isn’t supposed to be safe. Death is inevitable. Yes, none of us want to lose our loved ones. Most are terrified of what comes next. Some preferences make some social situations less applicable to their perceived well-being. Those are the foundation of a person’s core personality or being. Everyone has a “right” and a “wrong” division. Those that don’t are mentally ill. Everyone else is on a spectrum. It’s time to regroup. That’s all. And redistribute. It will be okay. We promise not to rip your heads off, drink your blood, sing songs of hatred and abuse and curse you to whatever scares you the most, which is actually having to give a shit about our perspectives. You know they exist but you just don’t care because you’re thinking on global levels – well, you fucked that up as well. You are bad at your jobs. You are fired. But that has swerved in a political direction so, let’s move on from that. This could take a minute.  Section from AUG 17 ESSAY written today (Aug 17 section) In the dream, I was hanging with a couple, noting going on; they were kind to me, I had use of all of their facilities, but I didn’t consider that beyond an off-road vehicle that I would like to try. Point – we were cool, and so I wanted to make them breakfast, but suddenly everything went crazy. They left to do what they did out of the house, and I was preparing to leave, I was anticipating packing my car, and yet, making them individualized breakfasts, I guess as going away gift – then everything went wrong. The house hated me. A mattress hated me. I tried to banish it but the overall power of the house was to strong. There was no way I could win. And it just kept taking things from me. My parents. I couldn’t reach my cat. My clothes. The breakfast. My car. I couldn’t escape in the one thing I could always count on. (BTW my tire indicator came on today, FYI, I’d been thinking about it, but today, of all days. I mean, it was due, but really!!!!!) (Aug 21) And the wall tried to suck me in to eat me. The walls, floors, streets were twisted and roiling. Trapped in my car, viewed as through the lens of a Monet painting, I don’t know, the Starry Night guy with the comet, was that Picasso? (How sad, but you know who I mean so communication completed! Yeah for me!) Unable to escape, all of my possessions eaten by the wall, a curse placed on me, and my car turned into the mirrored innards of an eight sided die, I was tossed about, all control gone flipping and flopping against the hard glass, no longer in a painting but all hard iron and glass. And I awoke. And I knew I’d failed my spiritual test. My desire to force a favorable outcome goes against my code – gifts only. And I’d tried so hard, I mean, I really put my spiritual back into it. I have expended energy like that longer than I can remember. I really crossed my code – my moral, ethical and belief/spiritual choices that define my personal and only applicable to me, set of absolute judgements of right/wrong, good/bad, acceptance/fear. All ultimate dualities. And as I was looking for a test, there ya go, I got one, and I failed, but I apologized sincerely, yet was still mad ‘cuz it was only 10% about me, a girls gotta live, and not off her parents. I thought it was reasonable. I was wrong. Unable to leave it that way, I took a nap and I was rolled out into a nice world and all was forgiven, but that was their/my higher-self dimension, not down here in the mud, so I got pissed, both meanings. I cursed them back for their miserliness. I thought death thoughts. Then I had some cannasand and talked to Paul. And he cared. And that was all I needed. Just one. The next night was a fabulous dream of flying and reality jumping and enjoying the situation which was fun. So I knew that I had passed the following test to see if I’d actually learned anything. As Paul said, “there is always another test”. I don’t like wasting my time. So I took that experience along with Paul’s creating his own Meetup group as an inspiration to do what it takes to create the reality you want through forward motion, to set a date for the first Center for Spiritual Exploration (from her on out aka CSE) meeting. I was looking forward to sharing it and inviting him to help me out by participating, when the whole camping and movie meetup and having his daughter, situation occurred. I was curious to see how much of the Four Agreements he could apply to the situation. He used the word assume, so it shows awareness of his logical state which is effected by the emotional, and it was what it was. So, I’ve been binge watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and as Paul and I are restoring communicational clarity, and Nina the neighbor in Unit 5 came over to introduce herself, Kimmy goes to church and the pastor’s name is Denise. Yes, I know that the use of my name is on the rise. So, as I’ve been having revelations and positive communications, I get a signpost/note/”hey”, a confirmation of the application of experiences with personal positive outcomes in a way that didn’t transgress my Code. It felt like a congratulatory, “you’ll get there, you’re on your ‘really cool’ path.” Not perfect, never perfect as goal, or you lose all chance of spontaneous authenticity; strive for your best each and every day, whatever that may look like that day. Lazy language allows more miscommunications. No amount of communal agreement can make you “right” when you go against Your Own Code.

1 note · View note

skylareisman-blog · 4 years

Text

*What is Rhetoric to Me? (Then and Now)*

In Comm 380, Rhetorical Traditions, I learned many different theories involved in rhetoric that I did not know existed before the course. This essay highlights how my definition of rhetoric changed from the beginning of the course to the end of the course. In the beginning of the term, I stated that rhetoric was a major part of communication studies, and that I didn’t know much about it yet but I thought it might involve words and gestures and how you use them. Now, I believe that rhetoric is much more than that. I still believe that rhetoric is how you use words and gestures, just like I did in the beginning of the term, but now I can create a more specific definition for rhetoric. Rhetoric to me is using words, gestures, and logic to effectively and truthfully communicate your opinions to others in hopes of persuading them to agree with you in order to benefit society; whether it be spoken or written in formal situations or normal, everyday life.

Throughout the duration of the course, there were many different ideas, theories, and people who influenced and strengthened my idea of rhetoric. I will discuss how the following people and their ideas influenced my current definition of rhetoric: Aristotle, Hauser, and Campbell and Huxman. These people discussed ideas and theories of rhetoric that helped me realize what rhetoric truly is. I was able to strengthen my idea of rhetoric and understand rhetoric more because of them.

Beginning with Aristotle, I believe his ideas on rhetoric provide somewhat of a basis for my definition of rhetoric. Herrick (2013) provides the following as Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric, “Rhetoric is the faculty (dunamis) of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion -Aristotle, Rhetoric” (pg. 69). This definition from Aristotle forms the basis of my current definition. I believe that rhetoric involves persuasion and that persuasion is one of the main purposes of rhetoric. Aristotle seems to focus on observing rhetoric in his definition, and I focus on practicing it. Specifically for me, part of rhetoric is communicating with someone, whether it be an audience or and individual, in hopes of persuading them to agree with you in order to benefit society. Aristotle defined rhetoric involving persuasion and I also define rhetoric this way. Aristotle also found rhetoric to be useful with issues, and found it to be needed when audiences need help understanding. I believe this as well, and have incorporated it into my definition. My definition involves communicating opinions to persuade an audience in order to benefit society. This can often involve educating others on a topic so they can apply the knowledge gained to make a difference.

Moving onto, Hauser (1986), who also influenced my definition of rhetoric. The concepts that Hauser discusses involving making commitments through rhetoric helped me shape my definition beyond persuasion. Hauser believes that rhetors have a stake in their rhetoric, and that rhetoric is a responsible function that can be used to advance truth and justice. When discussing rhetoric, Hauser (1986) states, “It amplifies the importance of certain acts, ideas, or beliefs and thus presents the mode of being, the proposition being championed, the relationship of openly speaking and listening parties as a legitimate possibility for those addressed” (pg.55). This quote from Hauser relates to my definition of rhetoric because it highlights how rhetoric brings different opinions to the table. I also believe that rhetoric is opinionated and that one who uses it has to be careful when it comes to persuasion. This belief was influenced by Hauser.

Finally, Campbell and Huxman were also very influential in my process of creating a definition of rhetoric. Their theory of the four standards to judge and evaluate rhetoric especially helped to create my definition. While describing their standards, Campbell and Huxman (2003) state, “They are (1) an artistic standard, focused on producing an aesthetically satisfying discourse; (2) a response standard, focused on achieving desired effects; (3) an accuracy standard, focused on presenting as truthful and complete an account of the issue as is possible; and (4) a moral standard, focused on using ethical means and advancing ethically desirable ends for society and for rhetorical practice” (pg. 249). This quote from the authors helps provide an understanding of what exactly their four standards entail. I believe these standards are very efficient and important when it comes to evaluating rhetoric and that they help provide a good definition of rhetoric. In my definition, it is important for rhetoric to be artistic, accurate, have a desired response, and be morally right; all of which is provided by Campbell and Huxman’s four standards. These standards can be found in my definition of rhetoric.

My definition of rhetoric can be symbolized by a paper I wrote for a previous college course. The paper I wrote was an argumentative research paper about the wasteful ways of the food industry. I discussed how the food industry is generally very wasteful, and supported how this could be problematic with accurate evidence. I also offered possible solutions and actions that could be taken to reduce the harm that was being caused. This paper I wrote is an excellent example of my current definition of rhetoric. This paper exhibits my use of rhetoric because it ties together my definition of rhetoric. The paper I wrote is using words and logic to effectively and truthfully communicate my opinions to others in hopes of persuading them to agree with me, in order to benefit society. This is exactly how I define good rhetoric currently.

Because of the ideas and theories that come from people such as Aristotle, Hauser, and Campbell and Huxman, I was able to create a strengthened definition of what I believe rhetoric is. At the beginning of the course, I had a much more simple and unsure definition of rhetoric. Now, I have a more complicated and clear definition of rhetoric. I believe now that rhetoric involves using words, gestures, and logic to effectively and truthfully communicate your opinions to others in hopes of persuading them to agree with you in order to benefit society; whether it be spoken or written in formal situations or normal, everyday life. Aristotle provided me with the basic idea of persuasion, Hauser provided rhetoric bringing truth, justice, and different opinions, and Campbell and Huxman provided the four standards of evaluation which I incorporated into my definition. The ideas of the people discussed previously have all come together to influence this current definition I have created.

References:

Campbell, K. K. & Huxman, S. S. (2003). The rhetorical act: thinking, speaking, and writing critically (3rd ed.) (pp. 248-259). Cengage Learning.

Hauser, G. A. (1986). Making commitments through rhetoric. In Introduction to rhetorical theory (pp. 45-55). New York: Harper and Row.

Herrick, J. A. (2005). Aristotle on rhetoric. In The history and theory of rhetoric: An introduction (5th ed.) (pp. 69-81). New York: Routledge.

0 notes