#is blatantly about how capitalism destroys lives and communities

[gamesyoushouldbeplaying]

Next person to call night in the woods a cozy game gets thrown off a cliff

#the game is literally about a cult that murders young adults they think arent productive enough #is blatantly about how capitalism destroys lives and communities #and is also about depression and how being in ur early 20s kinda sucks #just because it takes place in the fall and doesnt have combat doesnt make it a cozy game!!!! #im losing my mind #night in the woods #nitw

[inblackwoods]

While I'm posting about my pathologic transcription, I'll make shorter posts about my takeaways. About the literal health of the environment around town, we get a couple people on day one to give context. The most obvious is Aspity, but to get an idea as to why things are as she says, you have to talk to a drunkard, called a Carouser, and a Tot.

The Tot mentions a "Rotten Field," and when asked what that is, he says:

"It’s where they bury the bulls’ bones. The place is covered with fur instead of grass, and it’s all bones bones bones underground. Bones and horns. Yeah."

Why are so many bones and horns and hides being thrown into a field instead of being used in some way? Either for jewelry, clothes, or for tradesmen's tools, these things have a variety of uses.

The Carouser, when asked about the Abattoir, says:

"Hundreds of bulls are being slaughtered there- what else is there to know? It is our humble town that provides the whole Northeastern region with beef! Or even the whole country mayhap."

It's because of the massive scale of the Bull Project that so much excess material is being produced and then thrown into the fields and rivers as waste products. Nothing is in higher demand than meat, nothing is needed as regularly, and perhaps the people in the Capital and in other towns are less interested in buying blood or bone. It's not profitable, the Olgimskys don't view it as anything but by products of more lucrative things.

Aspity says:

"All that water comes from the Steppe and it isn’t exactly clean. Yesterday I inspected all the springs in the area; there seems to be no more clean water around. That salty taste is everywhere, it’s reddish in colour, and there are disgusting clots in it."

And when Bachelor asks for more information, she says:

"The towsnfolk store water in home-made reservoirs. This modest supply should be enough to help us last a little while, but afterwards we’ll have to drink that bloody mixture."

Bachelor reacts to this with disgust, and can even insist she is lying, perhaps because he had been benefitting from this disgusting reality in his life in the Capital.

Aspity's whole point in starting this conversation is to make blatantly clear some of the side effects of the Steppe's occupation, which is that the waste material of the Abattoir is dumped into the river and land. This problem would be lessened in severity if the community was manufacturing meat not for the sake of providing for the entire country, but just for the local population and what's necessary to export in exchange for other essential imports. Obviously, this would be less lucrative for the Olgimskys (who don't care as long as they don't suffer any loss) but it would mean that the people who live here would better be able to care for themselves and the land with no need to think of supporting an entire country off the backs of one small community. The occupation of the Steppe, the running of the Bull Project, will not only destroy the Kin and lower classes, but will also eventually kill the town, the higher classes and even the Olgimskys as well. When the water runs out, it will run out for the lower classes first, but it will eventually run out for everyone.

More on Fat Vlad trying to talk about this all as if it were an inescapable, natural reality (and the Bachelor's fighting against this notion) later. Sort of how some people think that the way the world works, capitalism and such, are natural laws instead of constructed ideas (horrible fallacy).

#Pathologic #Pathologic HD Classic #мор утопия #This game is good about addressing a lot of the horrible realities of the town and how it's being run #I just don't see it talked about that often #Post cannon even in a Termite ending a lot of work needs to be done to do right by the Kin and to even make this town survive long term #So many things are killing it and despite what Fat Vlad says #It doesn't have to be this way

[stillwinterair]

I'm sorry and I hate to be a downer but I cannot stop thinking about this. Do you see how long it's taken people to wear masks? As recently as this week there are STILL videos going viral of people -- recording their own stupidity and thinking they're justified in it -- going places without a mask on and harassing retail workers and ultimately getting arrested. Two Canadian grocery shoppers and "REI Karen" all in the last week or two, and probably countless more. Corporations and politicians the world over have been pushing since the pandemic began to reopen, to put countless employees at serious risk in order to turn a quick profit, long term be damned. And this tricks people into thinking that things are okay, and that they're justified in returning to the status quo.

But this pandemic is so concrete. The preventative measures are proven, the consequences are blatant. People have died in droves, and more people than my brain is comfortable with admitting into reality have seen loved ones die of covid and shrugged and said "they were old anyway" or "it was probably a pre-existing condition that did it" or "it's just the flu; the flu does that sometimes." Loved ones. Parents, partners, siblings. All the while, corporations and politicians pushing to reopen reinforces the narrative that it can't be that bad, because the people in charge are ready to return to normal, and if stuff is open again, then it's over, right?

And that's a concrete threat.

Climate change will not be so concrete. It is not the difference of one year's death toll to another; it is not the difference between healthy one month and dead the next. Climate change is a difference in decades. In centuries. It is gradual. Some may say exponential. It is only going to get worse. Parts of the world are already becoming uninhabitable. The first waves of climate migration is happening -- right now, it is happening. Some subtly, as Californians filter out as they realize yearly megafires are the norm now. Some blatantly, as Central America is at this moment experiencing record floods that are destroying entire communities. Once-in-a-century weather events became yearly, and now happen half a dozen times per year.

But we're being boiled in the pot, so people can easily say "oh, this one specific element isn't as bad as last year, so it's fine." Capitalism has a vested interest in ignoring the problem. The priority is profits, now, and then more profits tomorrow. Anything beyond that is a problem for the day after.

We will not know the tipping point for our climate when it comes. It is not a concrete thing. There is no wall on the horizon that says "harmful energy emissions must end here." Or, rather, there was a wall that said that, it popped up when science originally proved the existence of climate change, but we already barreled through it. Hell, it was Big Oil who really managed to prove it in the first place, and used it as a weapon in order to melt sea ice in order to operate more profitably, then spent decades and untold amounts of money to downplay and bury their own findings.

This is not a future problem; it is a now problem, and it is being callously ignored at the detriment of every human life. The move toward change, a big, species-wide shift toward environmentalism and zero emissions and so on needed to happen 30 years ago. It needed to happen 20 years ago. It needed to happen 10 years ago. It needs to happen now, and it is not.

Capitalism has actively profited off of a global pandemic, and although we have had the technology and wherewithal to deal with it effectively since the very beginning, capitalists actively fought back at every step of the way, prioritizing profit at the cost of human lives.

This is a microcosm of what's coming. Capitalism actively profits off of the total decline and eventual of Earth's biosphere, and although we have had the technology and wherewithal to stop it -- or at the very least slow it down -- since it was originally identified almost half a century ago, capitalists have been fighting back at every step of the way, prioritizing profit at the cost of the human race.

Insects and marine life are beginning to experience veritable apocalypses. The effects are tangible, but are easy to ignore -- memories of a more stable environment are so far back, they can be safely ignored. And it's only profitable to ignore them.

Remember how many bugs would squish against the windshield of your parents' car, driving down the highway? Remember needing to use wiper fluid to get them off in the middle of a drive? And... when's the last time you saw a bug hit your windshield?

This has been weighing on me so heavily lately. It's making sleep difficult. I can't work up an appetite. I find it so hard to focus. Climate change and capitalism are so intrinsically entwined and we're not going to solve the former without completely dismantling the latter.

Look. All I'm saying is, we'll all be vaccinated this summer. I don't know how to organize anything, but I think it's time for me to do some sort of direct action. And it is long past time for large scale, global climate protests. Something needs to be done. I am so constantly terrified for the future of everything, and I used to be comforted by this sense of... overall cosmic indifference, I guess, that the universe would go on without us. But this fear and this anger that I've had has really begun to shape into something motivating for me. And I really, desperately do not want to just sit back and do nothing anymore. I have too much faith and hope and love inside of me for that.

#at the end of the day. I don't think there's a lot we can do to prevent the worst of it. #but there IS still a lot we can do to... I don't know. shape things to prepare for the fallout #we need a global political system with safety and survival and environmentalism baked in their core #no more of this zero emissions by 2030 shit. zero emissions now. today. complete cold turkey #we need to hope for the best and prepare for the worst and have systems in place so that #when adverse effects arise. they can be dealt with as efficiently as possible #and protect as many people and animals and as much of the environment as we are capable of

[fishoutofcamelot]

Zombie symbolism in media? Body snatchers? That sounds extremely interesting 👀👀👀

OOOOOOOOOOH ARE YOU READY FOR ME TO RANT? CUZ I’M GONNA RANT BABY. YALL WANNA SEE HOW HARD I CAN HYPERFIXATE???

I’ll leave my ramblings under the cut.

The Bodysnatchers thing is a bit quicker to explain so I’ll start with that. Basically, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released in 1956, about a small town where the people are slowly but surely replaced and replicated by emotionless hivemind pod aliens. It was a pretty obvious metaphor for the red scare and America’s fear of the ‘growing threat of communism’ invading their society. A communist could look like anyone and be anyone, after all.

Naturally, the bodysnatcher concept got rebooted a few times - Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978), Body Snatchers (1993), and The Invasion (2007), just off the top of my head. You’re all probably very familiar with the core concept: people are slowly being replaced by foreign duplicates. 

But while the monster has remained roughly the same, the theme has not. In earlier renditions, Bodysnatchers symbolized communism. But in later renditions, the narratives shifted to symbolize freedom of expression and individualism - that is, people’s ability to express and think for themselves being taken away. That’s because freedom of thought/individuality is a much more pressing threat on our minds in the current climate. Most people aren’t scared of communists anymore, but we are scared of having our free will taken away from us. 

The best indicator of the era in which a story is created is its villain. Stories written circa 9/11 have villains that are foreign, because foreign terrorism was a big fear in the early 2000s. In the past, villains were black people, because white people were racist (and still are, but more blatantly so in the past). 

Alright, now for the fun part.

ZOMBIES

Although the concept has existed in Haitian voodooism for ages, the first instance of zombies in western fiction was a book called The Magic Island written by William Seabrook in 1929. Basically ol Seabrook took a trip to Haiti and saw all the slaves acting tired and ‘brutish’ and, having learned about the voodoo ‘zombi’, believed the slaves were zombies, and thus put them in his book.

The first zombie story in film was actually an adaptation of Seabrook’s accounts, called White Zombie (1932). It was about a couple who takes a trip to Haiti, only for the woman to be turned into a zombie and enchanted into being a Haitian’s romantic slave. SUPER racist, if you couldn’t tell, but not only does it reflect the state of entertainment of the era - Dracula and Frankenstein had both been released around the same time - but it also reflects American cultural fears. That is, the fear of white people losing their authoritative control over the world. White fright.

Naturally, the box office success of White Zombie inspired a whole bunch of other remakes and spinoffs in the newly minted zombie genre, most of them taking a similar Haitian voodoo approach. Within a decade, zombies had grown from an obscure bit of Haitian lore to a fully integrated part of American pop culture. Movies, songs, books, cocktails, etc. 

But this was also a time for WWII to roll around and, much like the Bodysnatchers, zombie symbolism evolved to fit the times. Now zombies experienced a shift from white fright and ethnic spirituality to something a bit more secular. Now they were a product of foreign science created to perpetuate warmongering schemes. In King of Zombies (1941), a spy uses zombies to try and force a US Admiral to share his secrets. And Steve Sekely’s Revenge of the Zombies (1943) became the first instance of Nazi zombies. 

Then came the atom bomb, and once more zombie symbolism shifted to fears of radiation and communism. The most on-the-nose example of this is Creature With the Atom Brain (1955).

Then came the Vietnam War, and people started fearing an uncontrollable, unconscionable military. In Night of the Living Dead (1968), zombies were caused by radiation from a space probe, combining both nuclear and space-race motifs, as well as a harsh government that would cause you just as much problems as the zombies. One could argue that the zombies in the Living Dead series represent military soldiers, or more likely the military-industrial complex as a whole, which is presented as mindless in its pursuit of violence.

The Living Dead series also introduced a new mainstay to the genre: guns. Military stuff. Fighting. Battle. And that became a major milestone in the evolution of zombie representation in media. This was only exacerbated by the political climate of the time. In the latter half of the 20th century, there were a lot of wars. Vietnam, Korea, Arab Spring, Bay of Pigs, America’s various invasions and attacks on Middle Eastern nations, etc. Naturally the public were concerned by all this fighting, and the nature of zombie fiction very much evolved to match this.

But the late 1900s weren’t just a place of war. They were also a place of increasing economic disparity and inequal wealth distribution. In the 70s and 80s, the wage gap widened astronomically, while consumerism remained steadily on the rise. And so, zombies symbolized something else: late-stage capitalism. Specifically, capitalist consumption - mindless consumption. For example, in Dawn of the Dead (1978), zombies attack a mall, and with it the hedonistic lifestyles of the people taking refuge there. This iteration props up zombies as the consumers, and it is their mindless consumption that causes the fall of the very system they were overindulging in.

Then there was the AIDS scare, and the zombie threat evolved to match something that we can all vibe with here in the time of COVID: contagion. Now the zombie condition was something you could get infected with and turn into. In a video game called Resident Evil (1996), the main antagonist was a pharmaceutical company called the Umbrella Corporation that’s been experimenting with viruses and bio-warfare. In 28 Days Later (2002), viral apes escape a research lab and infect an unsuspecting public.

Nowadays, zombies are a means of expressing our contemporary fears of apocalypse. It’s no secret that the world has been on the brink for a while now, and everyone is waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. Post-apocalypse zombie movies act as simultaneous male power fantasy, expression of contemporary cynicism, an expression of war sentiments, and a product of the zombie’s storied symbolic history. People are no longer able to trust the government, and in many ways people have a hard time trusting each other, and this manifests as an every-man-for-himself survivalist narrative. 

So why have zombies endured for so long, despite changing so much? Why are we so fascinated by them? Well, many say that it’s because zombies are a way for us to express our fears of apocalypse. Communism, radiation, contagion - these are all threats to the country’s wellbeing. Some might even say that zombies represent a threat to conversative America/white nationalism, what with the inclusion of voodooism, foreign entities, and late-stage capitalism being viewed as enemies.

Personally, I might partly agree with the conservative America thing, but I don’t think zombies exist to project our fears onto. That’s just how villains and monsters work in general. In fiction, the conflict’s stakes don’t hit home unless the villain is intimidating. The hero has to fight something scary for us to be invested in their struggles. But the definition of what makes something scary is different for every different generation and social group. Maybe that scary thing is foreign invaders, or illness, or losing a loved one, or a government takeover. As such, the stories of that era mold to fit the fears of that era. It’s why we see so many government conspiracy thrillers right now; it’s because we’re all afraid of the government and what it can do to us.

So if projecting societal fears onto the story’s villain is a commonplace practice, then what makes zombies so special? Why have they lasted so long and so prevalently? I would argue it’s because the concept of a zombie, at its core, plays at a long-standing American ideal: freedom.

Why did people migrate to the New World? Religious freedom. Why did we start the Revolutionary War and become our own country? Freedom from England’s authority. Why was the Civil War a thing? The south wanted freedom from the north - and in a remarkable display of irony, they wanted to use that freedom to oppress black people. Why are we so obsessed with capitalism? Economic freedom.

Look back at each symbolic iteration of the zombie. What’s the common thread? In the 20s/30s, it was about white fright. The fear that black people could rise up against them and take away their perceived ‘freedom’ (which was really just tyrannical authority, but whatever). During WWII, it was about foreign threats coming in and taking over our country. During Vietnam, it became about our military spinning out of control and hecking things up for the rest of us. In the 80s/90s, it was about capitalism turning us into mindless consumers. Then it was about plagues and hiveminds and the collapse of society as a whole, destroying everything we thought we knew and throwing our whole lives into disarray. In just about every symbolic iteration, freedom and power have been major elements under threat.

And even deeper than that, what is a zombie? It’s someone who, for whatever reason, is a mindlessly violent creature that cannot think beyond base animal impulses and a desire to consume flesh. You can no longer think for yourself. Everything that made you who you are is gone.

Becoming a zombie is the ultimate violation of someone’s personal freedom. And that terrifies Americans.

Although an interesting - and concerning - phenomenon is this new wave of wish fulfillment zombie-ism. You know, the gun-toting action movie hero who has the personality of soggy toast and a jaw so chiseled it could decapitate the undead. That violent survivalist notion of living off the grid and being a total badass all the while. It speaks to men who, for whatever reason, feel their masculinity and dominance is under threat. So they project their desires to compensate for their lack of masculine control onto zombie fiction, granting them personal freedom from obligations and expectations (and feminism) to live out their solo macho fantasies by engaging in low- to no-consequence combat. And in doing so, completely disregarding the fact that those same zombies were once people who cruelly had their freedom of self ripped away from them. Gaining their own freedom through the persecution of others (zombies). And if that doesn’t sum up the white conservative experience, I don’t know what does.

So yeah. That’s zombies, y’all.

Thanks for the ask!

#dude #film stuff is one of my main hyperfixations #but to be fair i have a lot of hyperfixations #why do you think this blog exists #ask #fish post

[smcculloughashgov]

Executive Action Assessment of Climate Science and Climate Change 🌎

Visit the White House website to answer the following questions; choose the Issues tab from the upper-left menu and select the category which represents your civic action issue.  Website:   https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/

Briefly summarize (four-to-five sentences) President Trump’s stance on your issue.

Trump in office has repealed or announced the intention to repeal over 50 act the related environmental regulations saying “We are going to get rid of the regulations that are just destroying us. You can’t breathe—you cannot breathe.” He has called for increased drilling on national parklands. It appears that trump views the environment and climate as an infinite resource and therefore has his policy match that belief because they don't seem to match even the most conservative estimates of projected climate change.

Do you agree or disagree with his position?  Explain.

In theory, I agree to an extent with his position but after reading some of his remarks it's difficult to substantiate what he says with his actions. His appointed head of the EPA is a former coal lobbyist. He even tweeted in January saying “What the hell is going on with Global Warming? Please come back fast, we need you!” when talking about the midwest’s cold front that researched record-breaking low temperatures. These temperatures were actually the result of global warming and climate change if trump believed science was real at all.

Next, go to https://www.usa.gov/branches-of-government#item-214500 Please visit the Cabinet website which manages your issue to answer the following questions.

Which Executive Cabinet manages your issue?

The Department of the Interior

What is the Cabinet’s mission statement (usually on the homepage)? Explain if it relates to your issue.

“The Department of the Interior (DOI) conserves and manages the Nation’s natural resources and cultural heritage for the benefit and enjoyment of the American people, provides scientific and other information about natural resources and natural hazards to address societal challenges and create opportunities for the American people, and honors the Nation’s trust responsibilities or special commitments to American Indians, Alaska Natives, and affiliated island communities to help them prosper.” 

The Department of the interior relates to my topic because it is the only executive department that on any level related to the environment and  climate change. It deals with natural resources and hazards that can affect the future climate.

Who is the secretary of the department (usually under the about tab) What is their background? Are they professionally qualified to lead this department or are they merely a political appointment? Explain how this impacts the department and your issue.

David L. Bernhard is the secretary of the Department of the Interior. He is an avid hunter and had been on the Game and Inland Fisheries for the Commonwealth of Virginia and an oil lobbyist. He does have some background with the department and with politics because he was a lobbyist. This could leader of the department’s mission statement it be compromised.

Explore the Cabinet’s Programs and Services.  Which would be suitable for responding to your issue? Briefly identify and explain them.

The Department of the Interior has a bureau called the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. It deals with the environment and protecting and coming up with solutions after environmental disasters like oil spills. Protecting the environment is an important step in preventing climate change because our nation's natural lands and forests serve as carbon capture sites and are vital to the health of our planet.

Based on your review of the President’s website and Cabinet programs, assess the executive action taken on your issue.  Explain your level of satisfaction and provide examples.  Is this department one which President Trump wants to cut funding?  If so, do agree that this is a viable approach to resolving your issue?  How would decrease funding to this department affect your civic action issue?

I am extremely dissatisfied with the current actions being taken in regards to my issue of climate change and climate science. It is evident that President Trump is blatantly ignoring science in favor of his own delusions. He took the United States out of The Paris Climate Accord and has also repealed or expressed the desire to repeal laws that are helping to protect our environment not and in turn the overall health of our planet's climate. Trump is definitely cutting funding to environmental initiatives and ignoring the broad range of impacts climate change will have on the country and the world, to both the people and coastal cities, agriculture, extreme weather events and his favorite the economy. Decreased funding would suspend/prevent actions by the federal government that would affect the whole country instead of each individual state. It means we will continue to poison the earth with nothing in our way until it's too late and Trump is dead.

 SACAPS—https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/climate/epa-science-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

what is the subject of the article? 

The Trump administration wants to limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use when determining public health regulations.

Who is the author? 

The author Lisa Friedman is reported on the climate desk and she focuses on climate and environmental policy in our nation’s capital.

What is the context? 

The article was written in lieu of A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal that makes it more difficult to use scientific facts and a scientific basis for laws involving the environment.

Who is the intended audience? 

The intended audience is everyone, the New York Time is A little left-leaning but the article isn't an opinion piece and states facts,

What is the bias and perspective of the author? 

The author is evidently pro-environmental protection and climate change prevention.

What is the significance of the article? 

This article demonstrates the Trump administration's policy towards the climate. Repeal, repeal, repeal. He has done much to reverse environmental protection laws since entering the office in 2017.

Do you agree with it? Why or why not?

I agree with it as much as you can agree with a  pretty much-unbiased article. Based on science I understand the severe consequences this kind of action by our Commander and Chief can have on the lives of the citizens he serves. Ignoring qualified professional's advice is dumb and is a disservice to the people he serves, to all of us.

[dxmedstudent]

Heya hope you’re doing well! For the end of year asks, 1 and 24?

I’m doing OK! I keep forgetting to post this, or adding onto it. But I don’t want it to be lost whenever my browser next crashes. So, let’s post this!@meanwhileonwednesday also asked me to answer them all, so I’m gonna combine both.

1) what did you learn about yourself this year?

I learned a lot about myself. I underwent some careers counselling, which has been an itneresting ride, and given me lots of tools to reflect on what I want out of work. It’s hard, because I realised that I (and probably all of us) tolerate so many working conditions that I don’t inherently like or flourish under. I like to take my time on one problem at a time; in medicine you’re being constantly interrupted by like 10 different people who then remind you multiple times about the thing you were doing til someone else interrupted you, and constantly re-jigging your to-do list to accommodate changes in urgency. I realised I like to make people feel better even more than I like to ‘fix’ things. I realised that the reality of what work in a busy hospital is like completely colours my perception of specialties; I can’t unsee the kinds of shifts I’ve had to work. It gave me a lot of food for thought, and I hope it helps me pick something I’m happy with. And having started dating again towards the end of the year, I’ve had to think a lot about who I really am, and what I really want or need. It’s not easy shining an honest light on yourself; what you realise isn’t always flattering (I don’t often spend enough time doing non-work related things, and I’m too much of an introvert for most people, probably). But this allows you to be honest about what would make you happy; for example, I’d hever chase some guy who loves to go clubbing on a regular basis, because we’d be spending every evening apart.

2) best moment of the year?

I don’t know. There were lots of litle modest ‘best moments’, but I’m not sure I can thing of any one big thing.

3) worst moment of the year?

Burnout Time wasn’t a moment, but it wasn’t a good time in general. I’m going to vote it number 1. Though it has some stiff competition. I’ll stick to just one, because nobody wants to read a long list of sad things.

4) what was the biggest change you experienced this year?

I realised that I wouldn’t let training and medicine destroy me. Not that I planned to before, but there’s a lot of fear and anxiety at every stage of the game in medicine. You spend med school anxious in case they kick you out. You spend foundation training anxious in case you kill someone or they kick you out. Then you finish that part of your training, and start the next and its... more of the same? And when you struggle and feel bad, so often your first thought isn’t “I feel horrible, this is bad for me and I need help” but “as long as I am functional at work, then it’s OK as long as they don’t kick me out”. But that doesn’t help you get better, it only piles more pressure on you when you need help. It turns out that I discovered they don’t kick you out of training as easily as my darkest thoughts imagined.  But it made me realise I could never let this job destroy me; there is so much to live for and enjoy outside of medicine. There are so many other ways to be happy.

5) best song of the year?

Aah I’ve listened to so many songs over the course of a year, how could you pick one. I’d blatantly favour the ones I obsessed over most recently. Hmm. I listened to Vitali’s Chaconne on a loop when revising, so let’s go with that. 

6) best album of the year?

I rarely listen to entire albums, because I tend to discover songs randomly and individually. But I loved that my friend and I discovered we both loved Indila’s music really randomly.

7) what’s one thing that happened this year that you want to change?

Towards the end of the year, I had to take a break from making and posting comics. Between burnout and work things, I just didn’t have the time, energy or inspiration to give it what it needed. I hope to get back into it this year; I really miss making my comic.

8) best book/book series of the year?

I’m gonna vote Good Omens. I know people joke about something curing their depression. But yeah, it sort of did with me. It made me see the light at a difficult time, and despite all the stress and sadness and numbness I was going through, it made me laugh and feel joy and appreciate what words could do again. It rekindled a light that had burned very low, and I’m forever grateful for that; it holds a special place in my heart now.

9) best television series?

Hard for me to pick one. I’m watching The Dragon Prince right now, and it’s great! Reminds me of ATLA in the best ways. Honourable mention to Cells at Work for combining three of my interests (medicine, anime and cute things) into one.

10) how was your love life this year?

I actually bothered to try to have one! Only toward the end of the year, though, so we’re on baby steps right now. I’ve talked to and met a few interesting people, even ones that I couldn’t pursue anything further with. I’ve also read like a million really bad profiles, had  way too many half-assed messages and conversations.

I hate the initial bit, where you should try to be yourself and need to be open and vulnerable to really getting to know people, but equally people can just drop out of talking with you or dating you just like that. It’s something much easier to do when you meet online and don’t know each other than when you meet at uni, and I certainly seem to see it a lot more now in online dating than meeting people IRL. Where you get dumped or dump someone but you at least have s a sense of completion. I don’t like how easily the mind wanders over to ‘damn it, he’s ghosted me’ If someone doesn’t reply for a few days, but then again, the fact that lots of people do just ghost doesn’t help that.Still, I remind myself that there’s no use worrying about it; if someone will dump you or isn’t right for you, then there’s nothing you can do to change it.

There are some nice people out there, and I’m interested to see where it goes. Hopefully without too much anxiety, preoccupation or heartbreak on the way; that was one part of dating that I absolutely did not miss in my single carefree years.

11) what made you cry the most this year?

I find it hard to quantify what made me cry the most; I had a lot of tough times. 

Actually, no, on second thought, I think I know what made me cry the most; PMS. Hands-down the winner. What a menace; it’s a real pain. Would not recommend PMS as an experience to those of you unfamiliar with it.

12) biggest regret of the year?

I try not to look back and regret things. I don’t want to say I regret burning out, because frankly that isn’t a choice I made, so I don’t feel bad about it. It’s unfortunate that it’s made my life a bit more complicated, but it’s manageable. So I try not to dwell on that or regret it.

I feel sad that I put my comic on hiatus, because I managed to balance it through so many tough times, so pausing kind of felt like admitting defeat, or losing a part of myself. But it needed to be done.

13) best movie of the year?

It’s late and I actually can’t even remember which movies I saw this year. I think I saw Mary and the Witch’s Flower in this past year, so I’m going to go with that. Because I’m really excited to see where Studio Ponoc takes things, and if they will carry on a Ghibli-ish legacy or do something new.

14) favourite place you travelled this year?

I went to Poland, twice. It was great! I’m slowly trying to get around all the European capitals, and it’s really nice to learn more about the places you go. I never feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see, which I guess is motivation to come back another time...

15) did you make any new friends?

Always. Yep, the benefit of moving to new jobs on a regular basis means that you get to meet new people, a lot. I’ve seen one of my FY1s develop into a great SHO and become a good friend. I’m so proud of them.

And hey, always making new friends here! I love our community, and whilst I can’t remember exactly when I befriended most of you (or got befriended), I am truly glad that I have.

16) did you learn anything about your sexuality this year?

Yep, I don’t think you ever stop learning. I’m looking forward to always finding out more. I don’t feel the need to share it, though :P Some things are better left private.

17) what are some hobbies that you developed?

Most of my hobbies are the same as they always were. However, I feel that I have played a lot of new board games, I continued to D&D without being an utter disaster, and now feel uh, sort of actually competent at this sort of thing.  And I have collected some awesome dice.

18)what surprised you the most this year?

We’re still doing this Brexit thing. I don’t know; I’m not sure politics can surprise me much anymore. It’s still free to disappoint, though. Actually, a few patients survived who I didn’t expect. And some people died suddenly that we didn’t expect to pass at that point. So medicine is always surprising.

19) do you look different from the beginning of the year?

I have more grey hair. Like a LOT. My hair evidently plans to go silver way before I would have expected to. At this rate, I won’t make it to 40 with any brown hair left! My hair is almost waist length so it hasn’t changed all that much apart from the fact that it really wants me to cosplay white haired anime characters.

20) how did this year treat you in general?

People died. People got sick. People in my personal life, not patients, that is. It’s harder to deal with it when it’s not at work; when it’s people you know and care about.  My parents had multiple procedures or surgeries. I sort of burned out at one point and vaguely considered if the path I am on is for me. I did a bit of soul-searching to try to work out what I really want, and what I really need. I’m still not sure I understand, but I’m getting closer.

21) what message would you give yourself at the beginning of the year?

You’ll live. It’s OK, it’ll work out, and you’ll get through it, like you always do.

22) has your fashion style changed this year?

Not really. I have too many clothes (mostly for work, if I’m honest) so I didn’t buy many this year. I definitely need to sell or give away some of the ones that just aren’t ‘me’ any more, though. I sometimes hold on to clothes for a long time, but in the end when it doesn’t feel right dressing like I did say, 10 years ago, then I feel the need to revamp my wardrobe.

23) one of the best meals you��ve had this year?

My mum randomly started making my favourite food more often, and I’m really happy! I keep asking her if there’s some kind of ulterior motive XD

24) who has made the biggest impact in your life this year?

Hmmm it’s really tough to think of any one particular person. Some of the stronger experiences with people were negative, but I refuse to dwell on them or name them; to single them out gives them a power and importance they don’t deserve. So instead I’d just have to say my network of friends and family, for keeping me going’ they have done a lot for me this year. Lots of little and big things that make me feel so loved and cared for. 

25) what’s one thing that you hope will continue next year?

I will keep trying to do my best, and keep trying to look at the bigger picture. I’ll keep working on not letting medicine take over my life. I’ll keep trying to be a better doctor. I’ll keep making time for friends and family. I’ll keep trying my best to meet new people, and not let the times it didn’t work out get me down.

[shaldreth]

I fell in love with Lotor and then realized he's a fucking idiot

AKA: a (bad) dissertation on Lotor's potential as a character and how his motivations basically undermined all of it. 

Spoilers through the end of season 6; written pre-season 7.  

Let's just get my credentials out of the way first: I recently watched Seasons 1-6 of Voltron in the span of about 2 months. I am vaguely aware of some fandom discourse. I know very little about the original Voltron show or its plot except what I've gathered from a single day browsing the wiki. And finally, I love manipulative trash cans. Doesn't matter if they've got gray morality, complete amorality, or if they're just plain evil: I unironically enjoy their existence (the only exception is Ni Jianyi who terrifies me, but, well, I attribute that to good writing). 

So imagine my delight when in his very first episode, Lotor demonstrated that he'd been very competently keeping tabs on the political status of the central Galran Command even while exiled by: rooting out his main opponents, publically humiliating them, and positioning his Generals strategically in the audience to ensure that the crowd's response was positive and enthusiastic, all within probably a quintant or two of getting back. ....And then he blatantly admitted to manipulating public opinion not five minutes later. ....While looking unfairly gorgeous. 

As character introductions go, it set a really fucking high bar, and I think a lot of people were immediately invested in learning what his endgame was. Regardless of whether his ultimate goals were ‘good’ or ‘evil’, people expected them to be competent and..... worthy. Worthy of all the time and effort that was put into this character, and the show in general. And then S6 happened. So buckle up friends because we’re gonna take an in-depth look at his journey from potential political mastermind to... merely obsessed, like his father. 

Immediately after being appointed Emperor Pro Tem, Lotor goes out and retakes a recently liberated planet to bait out Voltron. Which is.... something that we never actually saw his father do. Ever. Zarkon seemed content to let rebel planets stay lost, which is really silly and not at all a sustainable method of ruling an empire (suggesting that Zarkon probably would have lost control of a large portion of the Empire sooner or later anyway even if Voltron hadn't managed to destroy him in Blackout). Anyway, it showed that Lotor is a competent tactician, since he gets exactly the information he needs and does way more damage to Voltron than he probably expected to. He even follows up properly by calling in reinforcements to save his ass fortify the newly retaken planet, which may have given him a nice boost in popularity back home. 

(It also set up a number of obvious parallels between Lotor’s Generals and the Paladins of Voltron. Excellent teamwork and loyalty? Check. Cheerful personality? Check. Big strong type? Check. Brooding, dark-haired second in command? Check. ...Wait, that makes Narti Pidge’s parallel. Or maybe Shiro’s, since she’s sometimes mind controlled....? ANYWAY. )

We start to see a couple cracks in episodes 4 and 6, because it becomes clear that Lotor is actually not spending that much time managing the Empire. He's way more interested in getting the materials to build the Sincline ships. At this point in the series he's still doing a great job of evading detection and throwing misdirection everywhere to keep Haggar from guessing what he's up to, so it starts to look like he's trying to undermine the Empire from within. I mean, think about it: he set himself up publically as a celebrity to strengthen the Empire, and then he disappeared and did none of that. He even exiled Throk, one of his biggest political enemies to Buttfuck, Space - Population: Ice Worms after his public humiliation. Which is a really bad idea if you want to keep a guy out of trouble, but a really good idea if you want to give a guy the time and space he needs to get angry, start another rebellion, and further destabilize the Empire. 

Lotor has lived in exile for years; he himself is the perfect example for how people rebel when sent to some corner of the universe with minimal supervision. He should know better than anyone that exile is a bad way to actually get rid of someone, yet he does it anyway. 

Season 4 pretty much cements the idea that Lotor never actually wanted to rule the current Galra Empire, and was only using its resources for his own gain. He's removed from the position of Emperor Pro Tem with minimal fuss, and probably would have been quite happy to lay low for a while afterwards.... except that his dad then tries to kill him and he does the really dumb thing. I think almost everyone agrees that killing Narti was one of the dumbest things Lotor could have done. He could knock her out? Kill the cat??  Anything other than ruin his own party???

But nah. He stabs Narti and immediately the parallels between his group of Generals and Voltron shatter, because they betray him and try to turn him in to Haggar. Or, rather, he betrayed them.... .....actually maybe the parallels still apply, because I'm pretty sure that if Kuron had actually stabbed any of the Paladins at any point, the rest would have flipped out as well, so really the entire arc may be more of a statement on Galra culture as a whole..... 

ANYWAY, the whole Narti thing might look like the place where everything starts to go south, but it actually doesn't ruin any of Lotor's potential. Killing Narti could either be the callous act of someone who's bad at communication and doesn't actually care about his team (which is his team's interpretation, and a fair one), or it could be taken as a really stupid moment of panic, which I’d argue is a little more interesting, since Lotor never panics. But either way, the outcome was the same: as soon as he had control taken away from him, he turned desperate and all his flaws started to come out. Narti's death was one of the dumbest things Lotor ever did, but I also want to argue that it's the one act that opened up his narrative potential the most, because it could have sparked some interesting discussion about whether all of his actions are due to being arrogant, maladjusted, and self-absorbed... or if any can be attributed to fear.

Unfortunately, while fanfiction capitalized on that potential immediately, the show never really did. I was hoping for a season of self-reflection as Lotor used his intelligence and manipulative skills to sway Voltron to his side and overthrow Zarkon and Haggar in retaliation for his one miscalculation of the series. I wouldn't even have been mad if he had betrayed Voltron again at the end, because it would have been in keeping with his suggested characterization so far, and I like competent opponents with actual realistic goals.

Season 5 looked like it was on track! Lotor was clearly still doing his best to manipulate Voltron as much as he could from a prison cell, furthering his goals despite his enormous setback. It's not really clear how many of his accomplishments during this season are due to careful planning and how many are due to luck; did he know Zarkon would offer the prisoner exchange? Did he know Sendak was going to be at the Kral Zera? Did he know Shiro was Kuron and would secretly hand over the Black Bayard so he actually had a fighting chance against Zarkon? ....Probably no to the last one, since it hinged on Honerva remembering her son, but who knows. 

Regardless, Lotor takes a lot of risks and makes a lot of progress. He actually becomes Emperor. Dude, holy shit, congrats. Take a breather and regroup!! That big of an milestone should have been enough for anyone, but instead he pushed his luck searching for Oriande, becoming completely dependent on Allura for her guidance and her protection, and then he failed the White Lion's trial. Like, completely whiffed it. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. The S6 finale makes it clear that Lotor's morals and goals are almost completely opposite Allura's, and that should have been the perfect place to start developing him further as.... you know, an actual emperor and moral counterpoint?

Instead, we got Season 6, where Lotor turned his fakeness meter up to 11 to seduce Allura. ...Badly. Like... really badly. ... Okay, listen the nanny thing was weird, there’s no denying that. She showed up for one episode out of completely nowhere and was never mentioned again. But Lotor felt more natural during that first episode of S6 than he did the entire rest of the season while romancing Allura, and I think that was probably on purpose. His voice and his face and his smile when he spoke with Allura were all the same ones he used during his first scene in the gladiator ring, when manipulating public opinion. I don’t think we were ever really meant to believe in Lotor’s feelings for Allura when his very character was introduced with the same sort of deception. 

And all of that would still have been fine if he hadn’t had such a stupid final motivation. I suppose Season 6 makes sense when you consider that his ultimate goals actually had nothing to do with the Galra Empire, but it doesn’t feel like a good culmination of his character arc. So, knowing that his ultimate goal was the creation of a new Altean Empire, Let’s briefly review: 

- Lotor spent three seasons manipulating the public to gather support and popularity. The conclusion of this was Kral Zera, where he actually became Emperor. But none of this matters. “Emperor of the Galra” is actually unrelated to “Emperor of the New Alteans”, or whatever. Unless his plan was to marry Allura and spend the next 10,000 years carefully integrating his Alteans into the Galran Empire while giving them every advantage possible, becoming the Galran Emperor didn’t actually have much to do with his Altean goals. His Alteans aren’t Galra citizens. So why spend that much time making himself popular with a race he hated? Narcissism??? 

- Lotor may have also spent three seasons subtly supporting rebellion across the Galran Empire, because he made a couple conspicuously bad decisions when it came to handling his political opponents/rebellion planets. Conspicuously bad enough to be deliberate, given what we know of him as a competent tactician. But supporting rebellion would only have helped him if he had planned to use rebellion to take over, and we just established that being the Galra Emperor doesn’t actually help his main goals. So does that make all the seasons of subtle rebel support.... a side-effect? Carelessness? Supporting the Voltron Coalition didn’t really matter if he intended to replace Voltron with his own shiny robot. 

- Lotor’s generals are all half-galra. Originally, it seemed like he had chosen to align himself with societal outcasts because he could inspire loyalty and comraderie in them, and because after a lifetime of discrimination at the hands of Central Command, they’d probably be willing to support his rebellion. That’s, like, a huge fanfic canon. But instead, his final, power-driven speech suggests that he chose half-galra Generals simply because he couldn’t stand to work with full-blooded Galra. Which makes his close-knit team and all their beautiful parallels with Voltron... accidental??

- Lotor spent let’s say... a season and a half? trying to seduce Allura.  This makes the most sense out of all of his goals, because marrying into the last remaining full-blooded Altean royalty totally fits with the New Altean Empire. What’s stupid here is how he handled it. Instead of coming clean about his Altean colony and, I don’t know, properly hiding his tracks as soon as he realized he could marry royalty?? He left the quintessence farm up and running. We know Lotor can get into and out of the rift way faster than Keith and Krolia, so there was really nothing stopping him from going to hide a couple skeletons in his closet sooner than never. He could probably have won Allura’s loyalty forever if he had presented her with an Altean colony and pretended to need her help restoring Altean culture; instead, he did dumb. 

I’m just... I’m sad, okay? I’m not sad because he was evil; I’m sad because he didn’t want to be his father, and he absolutely turned into his father, and there were almost no signs of that until the very end. He could have been evil and still competent! While there are parts of Lotor that are really well written, it seems like they were all pushed to the side to make way for his obsession - an obsession he wasn’t even that obsessed about previously!!! - in the final couple episodes of Season 6, and he just... does so many stupid things. 

So really, in conclusion, either Lotor got quintessence sickness, Haggar made a Lotor clone while he was visiting her that one time, or we should all be more sympathetic of Zarkon's stupidity in Seasons 1 and 2 because clearly Galra politics are infuriating enough that being Emperor for a couple pheobs was enough to make Lotor lose his McFreaking Mind. Zarkon had been Emperor for 10,000 years; it's understandable that he was a little quirky.

Also, I saw a post a few weeks ago that basically said “the worst thing that can happen to Lotor is that he comes back from the void and gets obsessed with Allura like in the original show”, and I wish I could find it again, so if you know that post, pls link me. And I agree, that would really really suck, I don’t want that. But I’m hopeful that the writers just decided to adapt his character a little, so that instead of being obsessed with the Altean Princess, he was instead obsessed with Altea, and therefore that arc is already over. But I guess we’ll find out soon! Fingers crossed. 

Feel free to comment with alternate interpretations of everything here!

#voltron #voltron the legendary defender #lotor #vld lotor #long post #this is a very bad dissertation #the final message is I'm sad #that's it that's the point of this post #not lotor hate though #more like #I wish you were better #this is my first post in the voltron fandom #and possibly the last #I just #lotor y #six more days my dudes #six more days

[expatimes]

Academic freedom is under attack in Modi’s India | Human Rights News

Last year I had the opportunity to listen to the prominent Indian intellectual and author, Anand Teltumbde, speak at an academic conference in Delhi. At one point in his speech, he got teary-eyed and told the audience that he has lost all hope because India’s transformation into a “Hindu nation” under Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears complete. Having followed his profound anti-caste scholarship and civil rights activism closely over the years, I was heartbroken to witness his despair. I wanted to walk up to him and tell him that things will eventually get better. But since I did not know him personally, I chose not to.

I thought of him and his sorrow about the state of India often in the following months. I was miles away in the United States studying towards a PhD, but I was aware of the increasing repression of dissident academics and student activists in my home country. So when I read about Professor Teltumbde’s arrest in April this year, it felt personal. He was accused of having links with Maoist rebels and conspiring against the government, including “plotting the assassination” of Modi. Countless legal experts agree that the charges are fabricated and politically motivated, but he remains behind bars to this day.

Sadly, Teltumbde is not the only scholar to have fallen victim to the ongoing witch hunt against government critics in Indian academia – many public intellectuals have been accused of endangering “national security” and imprisoned for challenging Modi’s authoritarianism in recent years.

Just last month, a report published by the international NGO Scholars at Risk exposed the steady curtailment of academic freedoms in India under the Modi government. While the findings of the report were undoubtedly disturbing, they did not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the news from India closely.

Since assuming power in 2014, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been systematically destroying the secular, democratic foundations of India and transforming the country into a strictly Hindu nation. BJP’s Hindu supremacist ideology portrays Muslims as the nefarious “other”. Moreover, Hindu supremacy is about the hegemony of upper-caste Hindus. Lower castes, which constitute the majority of the Indian population, are on one hand told to be proud Hindus, and on the other hand, oppressed violently because the caste system deems them inferior. It is in this context that anti-caste, Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) scholars such as Teltumbde, as well as Muslim and other dissident academics, are accused of being “anti-national” and prosecuted with fabricated charges.

Last August, India revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region over which both India and Pakistan claim jurisdiction. Following this move, the world’s so-called “largest democracy” imposed a communication lockdown in the region, closed all educational institutions and erected police barracks in university campuses.

Without access to the internet and university campuses, scholars and students from the region were left struggling to study, teach and communicate with each other and the outside world. To make matters worse, Hindu nationalist groups supporting the government started attacking Kashmiri students in other parts of India for merely “looking Kashmiri”. Scholars working on subjects related to Kashmir, meanwhile, have been summoned by state authorities to explain why they are doing “anti-national” research. Attempts by the Indian government and its supporters to silence dissenting voices in academia have not been contained within the country’s borders, either. Letters accusing Kashmiri scholars based in the US of “supporting terrorism” have been sent to the universities they are associated with, and events they participate in have been disturbed by Modi’s supporters.

Just a few months after the revocation of Kashmir’s special status, Modi’s BJP rammed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which offers an accelerated path to citizenship to migrants who are not Muslim, through India’s parliament.

On university campuses across India, students held unprecedented, peaceful protests against this blatantly discriminatory law. These protests were met with brutal state repression. Police and paramilitary forces entered university campuses and fired tear gas and rubber bullets and beat up students. In some cases, officers stood by and watched as Hindu nationalist groups stormed the same campuses, vandalised property and attacked anti-CAA student protesters.

Indian scholars and students studying abroad, such as myself, watched these events in horror. Many of us published open letters against the CAA and in support of the protesters. Despite a large number of signatories including many prominent scholars, these letters made little difference to the Modi government – it continued its repression of peaceful protesters, which eventually resulted in an anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi that claimed 53 lives.

This year, the COVID-19 pandemic provided another opportunity for the government to clamp down on any criticism of its policies and actions. As protests became difficult and at times “unlawful gatherings” amid the pandemic restrictions, the Modi government decided to utilise its powers to further silence dissenting voices. It started wielding the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act – which gives the state the power to designate an individual as a terrorist before being proven guilty by trial – against dissident scholars and students participating in anti-CAA protests and anti-caste activism.

In July, at the height of the coronavirus crisis, the BJP government also approved the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) outlining its vision for India’s education system. Not only does NEP pave the way for further privatisation of education and the erosion of the federal character of the educational structure, BJP’s rhetoric around NEP reveals how Hindu supremacy is shaping education in India.

BJP officials’ discussion of NEP has been replete with proclamations that education needs to be grounded in “culture” and “traditions” and that India was a “knowledge superpower” in the ancient past, before Muslim invasions and British colonialism.

According to Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal, the NEP is based on the dictum that “nation must”. Under this ideological design, questioning caste oppression, Islamophobia, patriarchy and crony capitalism is “anti-national” and scholars who dare to do so lack “character”.

The NEP prioritises the development of “practical skills” over critical thinking abilities. I, myself, have seen what this means during my undergraduate studies in one of the country’s premier engineering and science institutes, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). It means keeping the curriculum and the university atmosphere strictly apolitical, which ensures graduates obtain remarkable technical skills but remain unable to think critically and question oppressive structures.

With Indian engineers and technical professionals working across the world, this issue has global ramifications. After watching my college peers bash affirmative action for Dalit students for years, I was not surprised to find that there is rampant caste discrimination among Indian-origin engineers in Silicon Valley. Having experienced the meritocratic, technocratic environment of the IIT, I was not surprised that Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who is an IIT alumnus, chose to work with the Chinese government to create a censored, trackable search engine rather than question how doing so will endanger human rights in China.

The ongoing unlawful imprisonment of Professor Teltumbde and numerous other scholars is a clear reflection of the bleak state of academic freedom in India. It will take years, if not decades, to undo the damage that Modi and his Hindu nationalist supporters have inflicted on Indian education. It will require university leaders, lawmakers, civil society, and crucially, the international community, urging the state to end repression of ideas and safeguard academic freedoms.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

#humanrights Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=15809&feed_id=24012 #asia #humanrights #india #opinions

#Asia #HumanRights #India #Opinions

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

Hello! How are you? I was just wondering if you have an book recs? I want to try read more next year :)

YES. YES I DO FRIEND. I HAVE MANY BOOK RECS THANK YOU FOR ASKING.

I was literally just talking to someone the other day about how much I love giving book recommendations because I just love the idea of getting to show people the books that I have enjoyed.

Now, you didn’t specify, and I could ask, or just take a guess at what genre you’re thinking about, but WHERE WOULD THE FUCKING FUN BE IN THAT.

For the Fiction genre:

Maria Lu’s Legend series is really enjoyable. It’s about a sort of pseudo-fantasy Roman society with magic and intrigue and spies and warriors and a pretty great twist on the tired old love-triangle trope.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo is the fantasy Heist novel you never knew you needed. It’s got criminals and bad boys and best friends, old gods and the fall of empires, magic and mystery, betrayal, all sorts of good stuff.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin is my favorite series of all time by my favorite author of all time. It’s a story where there is no good guys, only the heroism and monstrousness of deeply complex human beings who are struggling to survive in a world they themselves have created and destroyed. It’s about the evils of imperialsim, bigotry, and abuse. It’s about the extraordinary way humanity has of surviving a thousand apocalypses throughout our existance. It’s about a mother and her children and her past and her future. It’s about a traumatized girl with the world at her fingertips. It’s about rage and love and beauty and death and failure and survival.

The Diviners by Libba Bray is a Historic Fiction Mystery novel with queer kids, ghosts, murderers, cults, occultism, girls’ friendships, vice and virtue and coming of age in the era of Prohibition. It tells stories of kids getting caught up in more than they can handle and doing what little they can to protect each other, no matter what the world has to say about their worth or their place in it.

Now, if you’re in the mood for Non-fiction, I’m still here for you friend! Bear in mind, that when I recommend non-fiction books and think pieces, it’s not because I agree with everything put forward by them or think they’re right about what they’re talking on, but because I think that the persepctive from which they are discussing a topic is fascinating, or because I think that there is a great starting point for a fascinating debate or conversation within their suggestions.

Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber is a fascinating perspective on the development of economic systems over the years. It talks about how the notion of debt as an economic force is both incredibly new and hilariously old. It demonstrates the different ways that debt appears throughout history, how the advent of paper currency and credit changed the entire economic layout despite the idea of one person owing something to another being a formative part of societal cohesion for millenia.

Sexual Features, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings by Maria Rodriguez is a excellent book that touches on not just the history and cultural development of queerness within the context of Latinx culture, but also the part that disidentification plays in any queer person’s social development, let alone in the development of QPOC.

Travesti: Sex and Gender among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes by Don Kulick is an incredibly challenging opportunity to expose yourself to the critical truth that while queerness as a broader concept has the potential to unite people across infinite cultures and contexts, the reality is that every society has its own queer culture, its own history, it’s own definitions, its own reactions, its own needs. Travesti is the documentation of many lifetimes of stories, tradtitions, and experiences of a group of transgender women in Brazil whose lives are a complicated blend of issues from their gender, to their sexuality, to their profession, to their local communities, to the imperialism of the west over their homelands, to their own personal desires. Reading Travesti gave me the chance to see both the similarities and the differences in the way I grew up understanding my and my family’s queerness as opposed to how these women experience their gender and sexuality. It was a beautiful exploration of the ways in which many of us US queers take our perspective on these issues for granted, and the infinite diversity which we so often forget or intentionally hide from view.

And lastly, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection by Anna Tsing is the first book I read on the subject of the man-made nature of environmental disaster. It talks about how blatantly racist, classist, and imperialist the natural disasters of the modern century really have been, from towns primarily made up of POC being the homes of environmentally disasterous resource production, to the way that climate change so often affects the impoverished and colonized more devastatingly than it affects the imperial west. If I’m recalling correctly, it even goes into some discussion of the way in which capitalism, classism, and colonization have turned the fires that used to burn across my home state as a natural part of the life cycle of the region have now grown out of control as a direct result of the man made abuses that the powerful have made against the land and the less powerful people who live on it.

When I opened this ask, I giggled for so long that Hubby looked over and said “oh no, I wonder if they realize what they’ve just created” and I have to say, this question has tickled me pink and I am thrilled to have the chance to refer ya’ll to some of the most interesting reads I’ve had in the last five years or so. Please let me know if you end up liking any of these, as I always have more books like them to recommend, and also let me know if you have any specific kinds of books you want me to recommend to you as well. There are so many genres I didn’t get the chance to mention here!

[katebushwick]

The 2,753 victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City were business people, lawyers, janitors, bond traders, electricians, secretaries, food service workers, firefighters, police officers, engineers, computer specialists, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, cousins, lovers, friends, spouses, and community members. The remains of 1,113 of them have not been identified. Of those who were found, all but 293 were recovered from among 21,900 bits and pieces scattered throughout the debris of the fallen towers: a tangle of steel beams, rebar, pulverized concrete, asbestos fiber, plus the contents of thousands of offices and retail outlets.1 Buildings that were once 110 stories collapsed into the space of just eleven, seven of which were below street level. Rescue workers initially picked through the rubble by hand, frantically searching, first for survivors and then for victims’ remains. They were choked by dust and smoke and the stench of death. Soon, giant bulldozers and grapplers took over the job of removing debris, and rescue workers dedicated themselves solely to finding remains, including their own brethren. The World Trade Center was attacked just as large-scale DNA identification efforts were becoming possible. The biotechnology boom of the 1990s had produced technologies that could be used to rapidly extract and analyze genetic material from biological specimens. Simultaneously, scientists involved in the investigations of large-scale accidents and mass atrocities were learning how to apply these tools to the damaged and degraded forensic specimens recovered from complex graves. Human rights advocates and activists also realized loved ones not just spiritually and psychologically, but also socially and legally. Without identification of their loved ones, relatives cannot access financial and social services, dispose of personal property, or seek compensation for their loss. They can also become socially marginalized. 2 These advances led New York City’s chief medical examiner, Charles Hirsch, to promise that he and his staff would attempt to identify and return to families every human body part recovered from the site—even those that were heavily damaged by the collapse of the towers and the underground fires that raged at the site for weeks. The job would not be easy—it would require a bewildering mix of technological expertise, statistical acumen, and persistence. More than $80 million has been spent on the effort thus far, and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has committed to continuing in perpetuity the effort to identify remains as new techniques become available. The primary goal, of course, is to link even the tiniest fragment of human remains to a person in an effort to provide proof of death for those families that hunger for such knowledge. 3 But the massive forensic effort was also undertaken to demonstrate that Americans, as individuals and as a society, were dramatically different from the terrorists who so callously disregarded the value of life. It was as much a political and moral statement as it was a scientific and legal one.4 This is not a book for the faint of heart. It tells the story of the recovery, identification, and handling of human remains in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. It also delves into the contested efforts to memorialize the victims of the attacks both at the World Trade Center site and at the Fresh Kills Landfill, where much of the debris from the Trade Center was taken for sifting and disposal, and the controversy over the storage of remains at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum. It exposes the raw grief and persistent anger that motivated a small group of families to continue to contest redevelopment and memorialization efforts at the site more than a decade after the 2001 attacks. In addition, this book seeks to explore the impact and legacy of efforts to recover, identify, and memorialize the dead on the families of victims, the City of New York, the nation, and the world. September 11 was the first time since the Civil War that such a large number of dead bodies had to be dealt with on American soil. 5 Yet the United States had a history with the issue outside its borders: its complicity in dissident disappearances in Latin and South America during the 1970s; Introduction 3 in lending scientific expertise to the identification efforts in those same countries in the 1980s and early 1990s; in leading the international effort to identify the missing after the Balkan wars of the 1990s; through its efforts to recover the remains of American soldiers missing in foreign wars; and in the blatantly political efforts to uncover mass graves in Iraq in order to justify the invasion of the country in 2003. Analyzing the U.S. response to mass death can help Americans better understand similar events around the world, and to empathize with people confronted with such atrocities. Global policy cannot be developed based on the uniquely American response to 9/11, but the United States can no longer turn a blind eye to the psychosocial, political, and scientific needs of societies struggling to cope with mass death. Policy makers can no longer assume that locating bodies and reburying them is enough—the World Trade Center story amply demonstrates that the exhumation and identification of human remains is inherently political and fraught with controversy from beginning to end. Human remains have political, cultural, and emotional power. 6 The death of a loved one in a mass disaster or an act of terror can leave relatives of victims and the missing feeling emotionally and spiritually drained. But it can also give them special status within society and a voice that can be used to make demands on government institutions that would ordinarily not listen to them. 7 Emboldened relatives of the dead and the missing, especially women, often speak out on social and political issues with little regard for negative repercussions. They are fighting for justice and the return of their flesh and blood, and littleelse matters to them. This is true of mothers, wives, and grandmothers of victims of war, disaster, and mass killing around the world. 8 Since 1977, for instance, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo don white scarves and march in the center of Buenos Airesevery week to demand information about, and accountability for, their children who went missing during the 1976–1983 military junta in Argentina. 9 Similarly, in the aftermath of the 1995 genocidein Srebrenica, family groups in Bosnia successfully demanded that international actors identify and return bodies of their missing loved ones rather than just gather demographic profiles for use in war crime prosecutions.10 New York City witnessed thesamesituation after September 11, when wives, sisters, and mothers became advocates for the missing and the dead. Many men also became advocates for the victims of 9/11—especially firefighter fathers searching in the rubble for their firefighter sons. In addition to the actions of relatives left behind, mass death necessitates broader social, political, and cultural responses. Families and communities look to honor the dead and, in some cultures, ensure their smooth transition from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead. 11 The state hopes to reassert its control over society, especially when it played a role in—or failed to prevent—the disaster. It seeks also to demonstrate care and concern for the lives of its citizens and the nation as a whole.12 For everyone involved, and especially forensic scientists, there is a more general desire to ensure that the violation of the dead does not remain permanent. 13 While forensic identification cannot bring the dead back to life, it can restore some sense of normalcy to families and communities whose loved ones have died in traumatic and violent ways. Individual Identification and Collective Commemoration In many places, including the United States, violent mass death can stigmatize the location where it occurs, and the site must be cleansed, destroyed, or transformed into a memorial. 14 Thereis also a practical problem: what to do with the bodies and body parts, particularly when a substantial portion cannot be identified and returned to families? In the case of the September 11, ownership and control of unidentified remains greatly affected debates about the future of the sixteen-acre World Trade Center site. Thus, beyond the forensic dimensions of identifying the missing, this book explores how human remains became central to the memorialization process at the World Trade Center site. The mere possibility of eventual identification means that the bones can never be buried and forgotten. Instead, they must be maintained in an active repository, keeping both the remains and families in a state of extended limbo. We are only beginning to address this dynamic, the salience of which has increased dramatically in the age of DNA identification. After the attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the vast majority of the 1,177 navy and marine personnel who were killed on the battleship USS Arizona were classified as buried at sea and left in place underwater. While the victims could have been recovered— the ship rested close to shore and its parts and materials were salvaged throughout the war—they were assumed to be unidentifiable due to their fragmented and burned condition. 15 In the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings, human remains that went unidentified were referred to as “common Introduction 5 tissue” and collectively buried in a memorial tree grove near the state capital. 16 After the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, on the other hand, each remain was stored separately and treated as an individual entity that might one day be identified as new forensic techniques became available. This policy ruled out collective interment. It also meant that the creation of a “tomb of the unknowns,” such as had become popular after World War I in Europe and the United States, would be unlikely. 17 Historian Thomas Lacquer argues that several factors led to a shift in Western (and particularly Anglo-American) conceptions of what ought to be done for the victims of violent death, especially in combat. Prior to the twentieth century, war victims were generally left in place to be eaten by scavengers or buried in mass graves. 18 By World War I, there was a concerted effort to bury them individually in marked graves and to memorialize them by inscribing their names on grand monuments after the war. One reason for this change was that, by the twentieth century, soldiers were fighting on behalf of democratic nations and were thought to deserve equality of treatment in death as in life.19 But democracy and politics on their own are not sufficient explanations for this change. Lacquer argues that the sheer magnitude of the slaughter in the trenches demanded a new response. The Great War monuments attempt to make sense of the scale of deaths, while making manifest their ultimate incomprehensibility. Perhaps most poignantly, Lacquer notes that many who fought in the battles, as well as commentators who wrote and spoke about the Great War, were worried that the sacrifices of these young men would soon be forgotten and all evidence of their deaths would be subsumed by nature retaking the land. “There is evident here a powerful anxiety of erasure, a distinctly modern sensibility of the absolute pastness of the past, of its inexorable loss, accompanied by the most intense desire to somehow recover it, to keep it present, or at least to master it.”20 The fears were compounded by the condition of remains on the battlefield that resulted from the new machinery of war. Shelling, land mines, artillery bombardments, and machine guns produced not complete bodies with bullet or stab wounds, but mounds of flesh, and disarticulated arms, legs, torsos, scalp, blood, and tattered uniforms. In other words, if the dead were not buried as individuals and their names were not recorded on massive monuments, then Nearly a hundred years later, this fear of erasure seemed to motivate at least some of the families of the World Trade Center victims and their allies. In the aftermath of World War I, nature would reclaim the battlefield and render the events that took place there—and those who died there—invisible. This time, redevelopment would be the culprit, as well as the desire of city residents and city leaders to put the horrible events of 9/11 behind them and get on with business and life. In many ways, this tension between the desire to memorialize and remember, and the desire to move on would animate debates about the site for much of the next decade. Further, new genetic technologies have changed the way we remember the dead. The emergence of DNA identification means that it is far less likely that there will be unknown soldiers in future wars. As a result, monuments to unknown and unnamed war dead will no longer be a way to honor their sacrifices. 21 Similarly, in theera of DNA identification—and in keeping with the nineteenth century belief that dying an anonymous death and being buried in an unmarked grave was a sign of social exclusion and despair—it is no longer enough to produce a single collective memorial to ordinary people killed in mass conflict events. 22 We are compelled to remember them as individuals and push technology to its limits to identify their remains. Yet, just as collective memorials and tombs of the unknown served to tie the nation together in the past, these individual stories—underwritten by DNA identification—now serve as conduits for collective understanding of conflict as they become threads of a collective tapestry. 23 They have social and political power that can be called upon when needed. An important motive for memorializing the dead at the World Trade Center is to justify the military and diplomatic actions taken to protect the United States and its citizens from similar attacks in the future. To downplay the human toll of terrorism is to lessen Americans’ willingness to put up with war and intrusions on their civil liberties. In a nation that exalts individualism, knowing the names, faces, and stories of each of the victims makes it hard for citizens to accept inaction. While humans are generally able to shrug off the deaths of thousands of strangers—we do it every day while reading, watching, or listening to the news—it is difficult to ignore the death of even one person we have come to know as an individual. Introduction 7 The challenge of memorializing the victims of 9/11 as individuals is that narratives stressing communal sacrifice cannot be made too overtly— visitors, viewers, or readers of these memorial efforts must arrive at this conclusion without noticeable coercion. When the link between individual and nation is made too obvious in the context of 9/11, many victims’ families and other stakeholders have protested and actively intervened— especially when the events of 9/11 were used by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq and policies that many believed further eroded Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, and by activists to shine a light on what they saw as the global struggle for freedom and liberal values. Ironically, though, efforts by relatives and stakeholders to depoliticize the victims of 9/11, and the memorialization process as a whole, have served to reinforce the use of these victims for political purposes. For example, when the New York Times published “impressionistic sketches” of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks in its “Portraits of Grief” feature, it sought to portray them all as living the prototypical American dream or on the way to achieving it. 24 The Times editors responsible for these portraits were fully aware of what they were doing. “We recognize,” they wrote in an unusually candid commentary on the “Portraits” project on October 14, 2001, “the archetypes that define the ways these stories are told. The tales of courtship and aspiration, the ways these people relaxed and how they related to their children—these are really our own stories, translated into a slightly different, next-door key.”25 Such representations not only erased the diversity of the victims, but also elided the fact that many of them were not U.S. citizens, including at least a few who were undocumented immigrants. The ways in which the New York Times—and so many other voices in American culture—used the events of September 11 to tell “our own stories” about America, good and evil, and right and wrong, made it impossible to see the lives of the victims through anything other than a political lens. For different reasons, investigators also sought to identify the remains of the suspected perpetrators of the attacks. The presence of remains at the crash site would solidify their connection to the crime. Further, families were adamant that the remains of their loved ones not be comingled with those of their murderers—and demanded that these remains be separated as much as possible. 26 For the U.S. government, there was also the more vexing question of how to deal with the identified remains of the hijackers who used their bodies as weapons and actively rejected the set of international norms and laws that govern conflict among states, including the disposition and treatment of enemy remains. Such decisions simultaneously invoked law, conceptions of punishment, obligations to victims and their families, the projection of the country’s image to other nations and other would-be terrorists, and emotion.27 The handling of the perpetrators’ remains had to be done in a way that neither glorified them nor treated them with the level of respect accorded their victims. Yet there are still no defined policies for dealing with this challenge. After the killing of Osama Bin Laden by Navy Seals, for instance, the U.S. government decided to dispose of his body in the ocean in accordance with Islamic practices when burial on land is not possible.28 American officials noted that they could have handled the body in a less respectful way—for instance, by dumping it from a helicopter without washing the body or wrapping it in a white sheet—but they determined that a proper burial was the right thing to do. While Muslim scholars disputed the propriety of the effort—burial at sea is generally reserved for individuals who die at sea and cannot be brought to land—at least one called the decision “pragmatic.”29 In the context of the September 11 attacks, this responsibility involves long-term, or perhaps permanent, storage, because, while technically permitted to do so, neither the perpetrators’ countries of origin nor their families were willing to claim their remains once they had been identified. For foreign governments (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates—all U.S. allies), claiming the remains would be tantamount to admitting that one of their citizens was responsible for the murder of 2,753 people. And in many ways, the decision to become a violent jihadist is a de facto rejection of belonging to any one country in favor of joining the community of believers who answer only to Allah.30 For families, claiming the remains would be an admission that their kin was indeed a terrorist. As such, the remains of the perpetrators are interred separately from victims’ remains in an undisclosed location under the control of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). Controversy While this book focuses extensively on the controversies that emerged over efforts to recover, identify, and memorialize the victims of the World Trade Introduction 9 Center attacks, I do not wish to suggest that controversy itself is bad—in fact, controversy is perfectly normal in this situation.31 The intersection of personal pain, anger, and grief with commerce, real estate, and politics ought to provoke debate and disagreement in a democratic society. To think otherwise would be, as historian Edward Linenthal writes, a “strange assumption.”32 Controversies give us a window into what people care most about and how things might have worked out differently. They also help us understand how cultural meaning and memory are produced around painful events of the past. 33 By studying controversies as they occur, we can see how disagreements were—or were not—resolved, and how and why certain groups continue to contest the matter at hand after the dispute has been formally resolved. We can also see why these groups are occasionally successful in reopening debate, and why they usually are not.34 Ownership The desire of local and national leaders to rapidly repair the hole in lower Manhattan’s fabric was challenged by the multiple meanings of the site. For rescuers, it was a disaster area to be tamed; for military and national leadership, it was a thesite of an enemy attack; for residents, it was a shocking and traumatic violation of their homes, communities, and everyday lives, not to mention an environmental nightmare; for families, it was a place of mourning, where a loved one breathed his or her last breath, and a cemetery; for the public, it was a place of absence where buildings once stood and lives were once lived, a place of protest, a tourist site, a place of national trauma, a (re)construction site, a neighborhood, a commercial district, and the center of global capitalism; for the architecture community, it was an opportunity to make an architectural and urban planning statement while remembering the victims and revitalizing lower Manhattan. The presence of so many stakeholders with so many agendas meant that the World Trade Center became a new kind of battleground: an economic, legal, and moral one over who could claim ownership of the site.35 At the most basic level, there were significant contractual and financial battles over proprietorship and control of the property. More conceptually, there was strong disagreement about the overall uses to which the site should be put (in which authority was based on expertise, whether professional or lay, and asserted by urban planners, architects, residents, or business owners). Finally, there were ethical debates about what ought to be done to honor and respect the thousands of lives lost on September 11 (in which authority was moral, political, and nationalistic and asserted by all parties, but most forcefully by the families of victims and their advocates). Sacred Space Soon after the dust and smoke settled, the question of whether the World Trade Center site would be preserved as a sacred space or brought back to life as the heart of a vibrant, revitalized neighborhood came to the fore.36 For those who did not see the site as inherently sacred, the best option was to clean up, rebuild, and get on with living. For those who did, the site had to pay homage to the victims of the attacks and could not simply be redeveloped as if nothing had happened there. Ultimately, the design and planning of theredevelopment of thesite was about balancing thetwo—and most of the disputes about the remains revolved around the extent to which the activist families believed the planners did or did not recognize the sacredness of the site. So, in what sense can thesacredness of the World Trade Center be understood? Religious studies scholar David Chidester and historian Edward Linenthal highlight two broad theoretical frameworks that can be used to answer this question. One argument holds that sacredness is physical and emerges from the place itself—either as a result of events that happened there, or from some essential property of the site that projects power or spiritual qualities that elevate it above other locations. This is the view held by many family members who lost loved ones on 9/11. The other argument, which emerges especially from the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim, is situational.37 In this view, sacredness is not inherent but is produced through human action for specific social ends. The sacred is produced through the cultural work of sacralization. Chidester and Linenthal go on to argue that there are three main characteristics of sacred space: it serves as a place for rituals, which they define as formalized, repeatable symbolic performances; it causes visitors to focus on questions of what it means to be a particular kind of person in a meaningful world; and, finally, its power makes it socially valuable and the subject of contestation. Control of sacred space thus becomes an exercise of power. Indeed, a key aspect of the story told in this book is that of families of victims who were fighting to preserve a space for their loved ones’ Introduction 11 memories, free from other interpretations or stories of anyone else’s suffering. At the same time, other stakeholders sought to erase what happened, or at least to provide alternative meanings that enabled life, and commerce, to resume at the site. In the end, a sort of compromise was reached and the World Trade Center site was divided into gradations of sacredness: the OCME repository was completely sacred; the memorial and museum less so but still partly sacred; and the rest of the site was profane, but still requiring some degree of reverence and respect. Museum studies scholar Paul Williams invokes the concept of “secular sacredness” to discuss memorialization, precisely because of the complex, ambivalent nature of these remains and the numerous religious understandings of the “sacred” that exist around the world. In contexts like the World Trade Center site, traditional notions of religious sacredness break down for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that visitors come from numerous religious traditions, and that one religion or another is also implicated in the atrocity being remembered. Even when this is not the case, religion rarely provides an acceptable explanation for why people commit inhuman acts. Further, most memorial museums ultimately put forth a universalist vision that all human lives have value and that secular, rational support for human rights is our best hope for a more peaceful and just future. 38 Williams notes the often-contradictory effects of displaying and/or housing remains within memorial museums. While the presence of human remains signals the importance of the site and enables rituals regarding the dead to take place (such as pilgrimage, prayer, and mourning), the display of these remains may render them profane by preventing traditional (and religiously bound) funerary rites. There is a sense in which the remains lend the site authenticity and connect visitors to the tragedy that happened there, but that the use of remains in this way can further reinforce their profane condition. Ultimately, the 9/11 Memorial Museum decided to thread this needle by storing the remains out of view of the public with the public’s knowledge. The designation of the repository as a “separate space” walled off from the memorial museum denotes both its power and importance to the site overall (in that the remains make it impossible to deny that death occurred there) and the potential the remains have to taint the site in some way if not handled appropriately. This placement became a contentious issue for many victims’ families. They felt that their loved ones, or the loved ones of other families in their position, would become a museum exhibit and therefore be debased, or rendered mere objects. Nationalism Complicating matters even more is the nationalist dimension of 9/11. While the victims of 9/11 may not have died in direct service to the nation, and many of them were citizens of other countries, their deaths took on a broader meaning for all Americans because they were targeted by enemies of the United States. When the city opened a viewing platform at Ground Zero at the end of December 2001 to allow the public to see the progress being made in the Pit and to pay tribute to the victims of the attacks, and to bring tourists back to lower Manhattan, outgoing mayor Rudy Giuliani promised visitors a moving experience: “This gives you all kinds of feelings of sorrow and then tremendous feelings of patriotism. I really urge Americans to come here, and everybody to come here, and say a little prayer and just reflect on the whole history of America and how important democracy is to us.”39 Further linking the site to notions of patriotism and sacrifice, Giuliani noted that that denying the public the right to view Ground Zero would be like “denying people access to other sites of [national] historic significance, like Gettysburg or Normandy.”40 It was in this vein that New York governor George Pataki decided to recite the Gettysburg Address, the speech that Abraham Lincoln delivered in 1863 dedicating a cemetery for Union soldiers killed in the Battle of Gettysburg. In introducing Pataki, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg noted that “139 years ago President Abraham Lincoln looked out at his wounded nation as he stood on a once beautiful field that had become its saddest and largest burial ground. Then it was Gettysburg. Today it is the World Trade Center, where we gather on native soil to share our common grief.” In these two sentences, Bloomberg situated the victims of the World Trade Center attacks within what Linenthal describes as the “comforting narrative of patriotic sacrifice”—the notion that freedom has a price, and the individuals who died on that day sacrificed their lives for all of us. 41 Pataki then recited the speech verbatim: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” Introduction 13 Invoking the definition of sacred space as a place that is inherently meaningful because of what happened there, Pataki continued, “We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. . . . But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Pataki finally read the speech’s conclusion, which demands that the soldiers who perished on behalf of the Union not die in vain and that “this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” The decision to recite the Gettysburg Address was seemingly an effort to rise above politics and to place the dead at the forefront of the commemoration, yet its inclusion in the ceremony suggests that state authorities felt obliged to acknowledgethe dead in some public way without overtly making political capital out of the event. It is interesting that the common grief and national sadness was forcefully articulated not by President Bush or other national leaders, but by local politicians with grand aspirations— Bloomberg, Pataki, and former mayor Rudy Giuliani. In this way, the nation was brought together in a shared sense of grief to form a political community of mourners. 42 This community was not always tolerant, however. Individuals and institutions with actual or suspected ties to Islam or the Middle East became targets of harassment and violence.43 Thus, the dead were not remembered in a politically neutral manner. Linking the World Trade Center attacks to the bloodiest battle that had ever taken place on American soil had serious political ramifications. It placed the World Trade Center attacks among the most important events in the history of the United States. It also signaled that the United States, as a nation, was engaged in a battle between good and evil in which the future of freedom and the democratic way of life were at stake. And, given that the core of the Gettysburg address is an explicit acknowledgment of the sacredness of the Gettysburg site, Pataki was formally stating that Ground Zero was in a very real sense hallowed ground—a place where patriots sacrificed their lives for the nation. Yet this decision was odd in many ways. The Civil War pitted Americans against one another, with the very survival of the nation at stake. The 9/11 perpetrators were an amorphous group of terrorists who belonged to no one particular country—thus the United States was not at war with itself, another nation, or with any one clearly defined entity. What’s more, the victims at Gettysburg were soldiers who went into battle knowing that they stood a good chance of death or injury. Except for the uniformed service personnel who rushed into the twin towers, the victims of the World Trade Center attacks were civilians in every sense of the word. They had gone to work that sunny, warm morning expecting to do their jobs and then return home at the end of the day to family and friends. They had no intention or expectation of dying, and certainly were not representing the nation in any way other than as ordinary citizens. Yet, none of that seemed to matter to those hungry for retribution. The rhetoric and actions of politicians made them into de facto martyrs whose lives, and deaths, needed not just to be remembered and honored, but also avenged. 44 Further, Lincoln went to Gettysburg to consecrate a cemetery for the dead. One year after the World Trade Center attacks it was clear that the site would be neither a cemetery nor principally a memorial to the victims of the attacks. Unlike the battlefield at Gettysburg, the World Trade Center was not a placid piece of farmland. It was an urban center, and not just any urban center. The World Trade Center was at the heart of the nation’s largest and most important city—capital of the arts and finance, a canyon of majestic skyscrapers, the home of the Statue of Liberty and the symbolic font of America’s rich immigrant tradition, and generally the place that defines what it means to be successful in the United States. It was also hometo eight million people who were fiercely proud of being New Yorkers. There were simply too many stakeholders involved for the stated sacredness of the site to last. At Ground Zero, we can see the interests and dignity of the dead (and their families) clashing with broader local, national, and global interests. This tension is evident in the progressive reduction of space that was devoted to commemorating the victims of the attacks. Mayor Giuliani and many family groups initially argued that the entire sixteen-acre site ought to be devoted to remembering the victims, but most of them quickly settled for eight acres. Soon, “sacred ground” became limited to the “footprints” of the towers. According to cultural studies scholar Marita Sturken, “The idea of a building’s footprint evokes a sense that a structure is anchored in the ground. It is also anthropomorphic, as it implies that the building left a trace, like a human footprint, on the ground.”45 This notion that the Introduction 15 space where a building once stood is a suitable place to mourn the dead is also the seen in the Oklahoma City memorial. “The emphasis on the footprints of the two towers demonstrates a desire to situate the towers’ absence within a recognizable tradition of memorial sites. The idea that a destroyed structure leaves a footprint evokes the site-specific concept of ruins in modernity. In the case of Ground Zero, one could surmise that a desire to reimagine the towers as having left a footprint is a desire to imagine that the towers left an imprint on the ground.”46 Other than the presence of Mayor Bloomberg, former mayor Rudi Giuliani (who began the name reading), the governors of New York and New Jersey, and the regional accents of many of the people who read names, allusions to New York City were notably absent. The rest of the more than two-and-a-half-hour anniversary ceremony consisted of dignitaries, survivors of the attacks, and relatives of the victims of the attacks reading the names of the 2,753 people who perished in the attacks on the World Trade Center. In the background, a string ensemble, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma, played wistful, mournful music. The pain in the voices of the readers was palpable and one can see the grief in the faces and bodies of families who were in the Pit. The scene remains nothing less than heartbreaking. Only one other speech was given that day: New Jersey governor James E. McGreevey closed out the ceremony by reading excerpts of the Declaration of Independence. Thus, at least at the one-year anniversary of the attacks, 9/11 was framed in terms of martyrs and a threatened democratic nation, reinforcing the notion that the deaths of the victims (even foreigners and the undocumented) was a patriotic sacrifice and not a random act of murder—and that the entire nation belonged to a single community of mourners united by common grief (for the victims), common principles (democracy and freedom), and common purpose (to avenge the deaths of the victims, to defend our principles, and to defeat the terrorists and terrorism itself). Grief and Mourning The aftermath of 9/11 also made plain the reality that grief is both an individual and a collective phenomenon which, contrary to popular belief, does not operate on a regular schedule. While some people pushed their lives forward in the aftermath of 9/11, others remain focused on the events more than a decade after their occurrence. One of the goals of this book is to understand the actions of the small group of families that have remained active in seeking to influence the memorialization of the victims and the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site more than a decade after the attacks. It is tempting to pathologize the actions of these individuals, first dubbed the “memorial warriors” and later the “grief police” by New York Magazine, to make it seem as if they have not “moved on” from their loss, or that they are seeking to gain control of the rebuilding and memorialization process as a way to compensate for their inability to bring back their loved ones. 47 To do so, however, would be to assume that that their demands are unreasonable and that those in power have truly made a good-faith effort to accommodate their needs and desires. Numbering no more than a few dozen a decade after 9/11, this group was made up primarily of middle-class wives, mothers, and sisters of victims and firefighter fathers of firefighter sons, almost all from the New York metropolitan area. This group self-consciously refused to relinquish their ownership claims or moral authority over the human remains associated with the World Trade Center attack victims and indeed the site itself. They also claimed to speak for a sizable population of 9/11 families that agreed with them but were unable to speak out publically on 9/11 matters for reasons of emotion, family duties, economic hardship, or geographic distance from New York. They also seem to have been ordinary people before 9/11 who had previously shown little desire to be public advocates. Loss, anger, and a feeling that the Bloomberg administration and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) simply didn’t care about them transformed them in fundamental ways. “I was a different person before 9/11,” Sally Regenhard, mother of firefighter Christian Regenhard, told journalist Deborah Sontag. “I tried to speak out, let’s say in Co-op City, where I lived. But now—I’m fueled by adrenaline, outrage and love for my son and that has made me a bigger pain in the ass than I ever was before.”48 How should we try to understand their activities and the intense mainstream media interest they received? Linenthal highlights four narratives that came to predominate after the Oklahoma City bombings: a progressive narrative (in which the city recovered from the event and came back stronger than ever), a redemptive narrative (that God had a plan for those who died and those who lived), a toxic narrative (that the city had suffered a great trauma from which it would never fully recover), and a traumatic narrative (that the city had suffered a great trauma from which it had to recover). 49 These four narrative structures have many parallels in the con- Introduction 17 text of 9/11, with the addition of a fifth narrative structure that focused on the political dimensions of the attacks and the emergence of a long, global war against terrorism. For Linenthal, the Oklahoma City bombing is an “unfinished bombing,” in that it continues to “claim people through suicide, to shatter families through divorce, substance abuse, and the corrosive effects of profound and seemingly endless grief. It is a toxic narrative, and it exists alongside of, and intermingled with, the other story lines.”50 Despite the existence of this toxic narrative, Linenthal notes that “there seemed throughout the city— indeed throughout the culture—an unspoken statute of limitations on mourning. The failure to ‘get on with it’ or ‘be back to your old self’ after a prescribed period indicated, according to the traumatic vision, the presence of an illness and the need for treatment.”51 In other words, grief and mourning were defined by what was considered socially acceptable. This included when, how, and for what time it was appropriate to be despondent, which types of behaviors were normal and which were not, and when one should be done with the mourning phase and transition to the getting on with life phase. Linenthal notes that this perspective is most consistent with the regenerative and redemptive narratives, but only the toxic narrative encapsulates the reality of chronic affliction and an inability to ‘put the past behind you’ that so many of the bereaved felt. The toxic narrative suggests not a return to the old self or putting one’s life back together, but rather a shaping of a new self in the aftermath of such an experience. Linenthal demonstrates that there were strong differences of opinion within the bereaved community about how public grief ought to be. For some families, it was a private matter that was nobody’s business. Others, however, wanted the world to know who their loved ones were and offered a public eulogy by speaking to the press, making the funeral open to the media, or both. Those who opened up to the media gave voice to a kind of communal grief. Other families responded by retreating into the woodwork, while still others took on outspoken, often strongly political, activist roles, advocating for particular forms of memorialization and remembrance or changes in public policies regarding the legal system, victims’ rights, and the death penalty. Whatever the case, it is clear that all of the people who were killed in Oklahoma City and on September 11, 2001 died “culturally significant public deaths,” setting them apart from the thousands of people who die every year from everyday, usually invisible, violence. 52 As such, their deaths were re-experienced on a daily basis by family members confronted with news stories of the bombings, and then during the trials of the perpetrators in the case of Oklahoma City and the nearly daily invocations of 9/11 in the mass media and by politicians during the decade after the event. The publicity associated with these deaths created an extended bereaved community, and hence a community of mourners that both comforted and intruded into the lives of the families of the dead. Thus, the identity of the victims “not only signifies the relationship between a name and asset of physical remains but also encompasses the social ties that bind a person to a place, a time, and, most importantly, to other human beings.”53 The creation of this community of mourners highlights the three different ways that victims of mass atrocity become recognized: first and most obviously, scientifically through the actions of forensic science and DNA identification; second, socially, when family, friends, and communities accept the scientific claim of identity made by the authorities; and finally, collectively, when the person is recognized by the broader national and international community through public commemorations and memorials, and fitted into a historical narrative about the past.54 Thereis, of course, spatial and temporal separation between each of the three moments of recognition, but they are interwoven in ways that will be explored throughout this book. Memorials and the Nation Memorials to tragic events are expected to serve many purposes: to remember the event; to explain its historical importance; to mourn the deceased; to remember their lives and give their deaths broader meaning; to highlight the threat of terrorism and violence; to tell the perpetrators and the world that the goodness of humanity was not defeated by terrorism or violence; to serve the local community through nature, the arts, and public space; and to serve the nation as a source of pride, resilience, and political meaning.55 Memorials fundamentally remember events that were unexpected and create a disjuncture in our understanding of history and ourselves.56 They also suggest that the future should be different in some way. The decision to memorialize a set of past events plays a part in narrating what type of future should exist, both at the site of the memorial and in the society doing the remembering. Introduction 19 When an event is memorialized, there is a certain appeal in focusing primarily on the redemptive narrative identified by Linenthal in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombings—showcasing the better side of human nature, the pride and work ethic of a city or region, the essential goodness of the nation and its people, and the capacity for regeneration and redevelopment in areas affected by terrible events. Perhaps because of the desire for redemption, since World War II, and especially since the 1980s, American memorial culture has been expanded and democratized, both in the sense of which events get memorialized and who has a say in how the memorialization will be done. The time that passes from event to memorial has also been compressed.57 Rather than discussions about memorialization taking place years or even decades after something happened, they often start days after an event.58 There is an intense desire not to forget tragedies and lives lost, and to convey some sort of message—especially a positive one—to future generations about the event.59 The recovery, identification, and memorialization of the victims of the September 11 World Trade Center attacks brought science to bear on questions of identity, politics, and memory. The promise of identifying human remains through genetic technologies has fundamentally altered the way we will memorialize the dead in the future. These changes are not unambiguously good. Will the value of victims be measured by how much technology is applied to identify them? Will the loss of memorials to the unknown dead, and the lack of a clear end to identification efforts, change the way we remember traumatic events—both individually and as communities? How will the culture of memorialization change when there are no longer anonymous remains that belong to the collective, but only remains awaiting ever more powerful technologies to be identified and repatriated to families? These questions cannot be answered yet, but the response to the September 11 World Trade Center attacks can at least provide us with some clues. It is to this story that we turn now.

[ileneca7]

The Velocity of Money… and Revolution

  David Brin is an astrophysicist, technology consultant, and best-selling author who speaks, writes, and advises on many topics including national defense, creativity, and space exploration. He’s also one of the “World’s Best Futurists.” Find David’s books and latest thoughts on various matters at his website and blog. If you missed my interview with David, read it here. ~ Ilene 

  The Velocity of Money… and Revolution

Courtesy of David Brin, Contrary Brin Blog

If you’re perfectly comfy with the economy’s gyrations, then pay no attention as I explain what’s actually going on. Economists have been recognizing signs of serious dislocation for some time. Even right-of-center fellows like newsletter mavens John Mauldin and Lacy Hunt have finally recognized the core indications. I wish I could share their excellent newsletters with you. But – at some risk of misinterpreting or even treating them unfairly – I intend to paraphrase. And criticize.

A recent Mauldin missive correctly cites the most disturbing symptom of trouble in the U.S. economy: a plummet in Money Velocity (MV).

To quote John:  “You may be asking, what exactly is the velocity of money? Essentially, it’s the frequency with which the same dollar changes hands because the holders of the dollar use it to buy something. Higher velocity means more economic activity, which usually means higher growth. So it is somewhat disturbing to see velocity now at its lowest point since 1949, and at levels associated with the Great Depression.”

Somewhat… disturbing? That’s at-best an understatement, since no other economic indicator is as telling. MV is about a bridge repair worker buying furniture, that lets a furniture maker get dentures, so a dentist can pay her cleaning lady, who buys groceries….

There are rare occasions when MV can be too high, as during the 1970s hyper-inflation, when Jimmy Carter told Paul Volcker “Cure this, and to hell with my re-election.”  But those times are rare. Generally, for all our lives, Money Velocity has been declining into dangerous sluggishness, falling hard since the 80s, rising a little in the 90s, then plummeting.

Alas, while fellows like Hunt and Mauldin are at last pointing at this worrisome symptom, they remain in frantic denial over the cause. Absolutely, it is wealth disparity that destroys money velocity. Bridge repair workers and dentists would spend money – if they had any.

We have known – ever since Adam Smith gazed across the last 4000 years – that a feudal oligarchy does not invest in productive capacity. Nor does it spend much on goods or services that have large multiplier effects (that give middle class wage earners a chance to keep money moving). Instead, aristocrats have always tended to put their extra wealth into rentier (or passive rent-seeking) property, or else parasitic-crony-vampiric cheating through abuse of state power.

See my earlier posting: Must the Rich be Lured into Investing?

Situation Normal: Cheating Flows Up

Do not let so-called “tea party” confederate lackeys divert you. The U.S. Revolution was against a King and Parliament and royal cronies who commanded all American commerce to pass through their ports and docks and stores, who demanded that consumer goods like tea be sold through monopolies and even paper be stamped to ensure it came from a royal pal. Try actually reading the Declaration of Independence. “Taxation without representation” was about how an oligarchy controlled Parliament through jiggered districts and cheating, and used that power to funnel wealth upward.

Here’s a fact that shows where we came from… and might be going: over a third of the land in the thirteen colonies was owned – tax-free – by aristocratic families.

The U.S. Founders fought back. After their successful revolt, they redistributed fully a quarter of the wealth and land, and they did it calmly, without the tsunami of blood that soon flowed in France, then Russia, then China. That militantly moderate style of revolution actually worked far better at fostering positive outcomes for all. For the people… and yes, for local aristocratic families, who retained comforts, some advantages. And their heads.

Nor was that the only time Americans had to push back against proto-feudal cheating, which we now know erupts straight out of human nature. The Civil War was certainly a massive ‘wealth redistribution’ by giving millions of people ownership of their own lives and bodies. During the 1890s Gilded Age, we avoided radical revolution in favor of reform – e.g. anti-trust laws.

Our parents in the Greatest Generation – who adored FDR – sought to prevent communism by keeping market enterprise flat, competitive and fair. Far lessradical than the Founders, their reforms created the flattest social structure and the most fantastic burst of economic prosperity, ever.

And dismantling the work of that generation has been the core aim of the confederate aristocracy, since Reagan.

Dire beasties! Debt and the Fed

But let me share with you more of the myopia of decent men. John Mauldin continues: “Debt is another big issue for Lacy Hunt. People compare debt to addictive drugs, and as with some of those drugs, the dose needed to achieve the desired effect tends to rise over time.”

John then shows a chart (he always has the best charts!) revealing the additional economic output (GDP) generated by each additional dollar of business debt in the US. Needless to say, the effectiveness of each dollar of debt, at growing healthy companies, has plummeted.

Um…. Duh? Once upon a time, the purpose of corporate debt was to gather capital to invest in new productive capacity (factories, stores, infrastructure and worker training), with an aim to sell more/better goods and services that would then produce healthy margins that pay off the debt, across a reasonable ROI (Return on Investment) horizon.

This would then actually decrease the net ratio of debt to company value, across a sapient period of a decade or so.  This approach still holds, in a few tech industries, but not wherever companies have been taken over by an MBA-CEO caste devoted to Milton Friedman’s devastating cult of the quarterly stock-price statement.

Today, companies borrow in order to finance stock buybacks, market-cornering mergers and other tricks that our ancestors (again, in the Greatest Generation or “GGs”) wisely outlawed. Tricks that GOP deregulatory “reforms” restored to the armory of cheaters. Tricks that enable the CEO caste to inflate stock prices and meet their golden incentive parachutes, with the added plum of pumping rewards for their Wall Street pals who arrange the debt.

Every parasitic act of “arbitrage” is justified with semantically-empty incantations like “correct price determination” – mumbo-jumbo spells that bear absolutely zero correlation with reality.

No wonder each added dose of debt is ineffective at actually growing long-term company value! What’s so hard to understand? Why are Mauldin and Hunt puzzled?

Oh, yeah. They are honest and sincere men, at last able to perceive symptoms. But alas, they are also far too stubborn to acknowledge the root disease — a conspiratorial cabal of would-be feudal lords. Loyal to a fault… (well, these plutocratic connivers are their friends)… John and other residually-sapient conservatives choose denial over admitting that Adam Smith had it right, all along.

Instead, Mauldin focuses again and again on his chosen Bête Noir … theFederal Reserve, even though the Fed has almost insignificant power over any of the things we’ve discussed here.  It’s Congress – Republican for all but two of the last 23 years – who sent U.S. fiscal health plummeting, from black ink to red that’s deeper than an M Class dwarf star. Congress did this while devastating every protection against monopoly/duopoly or financial conspiracy.

Misunderstanding your own icons and heroes

Consider that Friedrich Hayek – often touted as the “opposite to Keynes” – actually agreed with John Maynard Keynes about many things, like the need for a very wide distribution of economic decision-makers. In an ideal market, this would be all consumers, empowered with all information. (There goes Brin’s broken record, repeating “transparency!” over and over.) Though yes, a 21stCentury Keynsian will call for a government role in (1) counter-cyclical stimulation and (2) inclusion of externalities, like the health of our children’s children and their planet. (Note the spectacular success of the greatest modern Keynsian politician, California’s Jerry Brown.)

Hayek complained that 500,000 dispersed and closely watched civil servants could never substitute for the distributed wisdom of an unleashed marketplace of billions. Hm. Well, that’s arguable. But so?

What does the right offer up, as its alternative? A far, far smaller, incestuous cabal of a few hundred secretly-colluding golf buddies in a circle-jerking CEO caste? That’s gonna allocate according to widely-distributed market wisdom?

Hayek spins in his grave.

This selfsame CEO-caste went on a drunken debt spree that blatantly served the cabal and not their companies, nor the economy or civilization.

Blaming the Federal Reserve for that is like condemning the owners of a liquor store for all the drunk drivers crushing pedestrians. Sure, the low price of booze might have contributed, but it’s not the primal cause. Oh. And yes, it’s been Congress that keeps funneling wealth from the middle class into gaping, oligarchic maws.

Some of these guys almost get it

How I wish I could share John Mauldin’s newsletter with you! It’s smart! I mean it. I always learn a lot, the charts are excellent. Moreover, I get self-pats on my own back, for assiduously reading the smartest commentators that I can find, from every side. Also, John’s a cool dude and way fun. I read every word and its maybe 70% real-smart stuff!

(For contrast, see the super-smart liberal “Evonomics” site; the place where Adam Smith is most-discussed and would be most at-home.)

Moreover, John does honestly acknowledge – forced by the blatantly obvious – that income and wealth disparities are problematic and rising, while money velocity plummets.

Only then he goes to the newest catechism of the rationalizing right… arm-waving that technology is at fault.

Yes, okay, automation has a depressing effect on middle class wages. So? Then it is time for a conversation about the social contract again. Like how to keep the middle class “bourgeois” – by keeping them vested in shared ownership of the means – as well as output – of production. It’s what the Greatest Generation did, while troglodytes accused them of “communism.” The most-entrepreneurial generation in history, they were far from commies.

Some in-yer-face time

Okay, it’s that time again; so let me talk again directly to the confederate/feudal elites aiming to restore inherited hierarchies of old. This is no longer about Mauldin, but the would-be overlords standing right in front of him, in his blind spot.

Dear oligarch-traitors. Let me avow that human nature and history seem to be on your side. Our experiment in flat-fair-open systems always had the odds stacked against it. Hence, you feudalists will probably get your wish. Briefly. The middle class will very likely fall into proletarian poverty while you rake it all in.

Your evident plan is to leverage new technologies to entrench oligarchic rule, right? I depict something like it in EXISTENCE, though done by far smarter zillionaires than you.

Only – was it really part of the plan to wage open war on every single fact-using profession? Now including not just science and journalism and law, but the FBI, intelligence agencies and the military officer corps?  And all the folks who are innovating in genetics and artificial intelligence, too? Really? Are you that confident?

Or else, perhaps you are like so many past lords — so lulled by sycophants that you cannot hear Karl Marx chuckling, as he rises from his mere-nap. (Copies of his works are flying off the shelves, faster than any time since the 1970s.) If so, you may get much more than you bargained for. More revolution than any sane person would want.

Adam Smith wasn’t the only one to seek a way out of this dilemma. Nor were the U.S. Founders. Will Durant – one of the greatest historians – said this, in his book, “The Lessons of History“:

“In progressive societies the concentration (of wealth) may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.”

The recent “great” time for America was built by moderate, if somewhat leveling, legislation. The Greatest Generation chose a Rooseveltean alternative to violent revolution. And it worked — inarguably, spectacularly — till cheating once more gained the upper hand.

Me? I stand with the Founders. With Adam Smith and a flat-fair-open market society filled with opportunity for all and grand, cheat-advantages for none. A relatively-flat society that still has loads of incentives. One wherein true competition among healthy-confident equals can thrive, pouring a positive-sum cornucopia for everyone.

And now, yes, “equals” must include all previously-squelched sources of talent – genders, races and the raised-up/blameless children of the poor.

You confederates, you are the traitors to that flat-fair-open-accountable Better Capitalism. The form that stood up to Marx and quelled him to sleep. The only kind of market system that can withstand the coming wind, when he awakens.

I stand with the Greatest Generation… and greater ones to come.

I stand with the moderate, scientific, flat-fair revolution that accepts facts and complexity and denies simplistic incantations. Moreover, that moderate/calm/eclectic kind of revolutionary numbers in the tens… hundreds of millions. We include nearly all of the most-skilled, and our growing cadre hears the alarum.

We awaken. We rise. And you had better welcome this. Because it will either be our reforms or the tumbrels of Robespierres.

Choose.

[Read also: Must the Rich be Lured into Investing?, “Class War” and the Lessons of History, and our recent interview with David Brin.]

The Velocity of Money… and Revolution was originally published on MarketShadows

[toddbirchard-architect]

Ideas Are Cheap http://ift.tt/2htClH0

An early wake up call in my career was learning the reality of who makes product decisions within companies. Foolishly, I believed that the strategy involved with launching a successful product starts and ends with product managers... needless to say, 20-something year old me learned a few things about how companies operate very quickly.

Strategy is undoubtedly the fun part of product management, but what most executives won't reveal is that it is also the easy part. When something is fun, easy, and promises glory, there is no shortage of people willing to claw and grab at the opportunity to make a name for themselves. Young ambitious product managers will quickly find that their aspirations to steer a company will usually be limited to a sandbox of smaller decisions; typically the kinds that most nobody else cares to bother with.

While some may find this to be a soul crushing reality at first glance, a seasoned PM will realize that this is not as bad as it may seem. Depending on one's organization the ability to take on more responsibility can either be earned or taken... the latter being achieved with the classic "ask for forgiveness instead of permission" mantra which I have personally preached for years. Regardless of method it is a good idea for any product professional to expand their abilities past what is fun and easy to what is unseen and difficult.

Cooks In The Kitchen

On the list of top things that can destroy a product, 'too many cooks in the kitchen' is high on the list.

When building usable products with exceptional UX it is common knowledge that less is more. Adding more features to a product creates a muddied user experience, and only distracts users from the core functionality of the product, creating confusion and a nightmare of usability. Product managers understand this well but the vast majority of stakeholders do not: as product managers we must defend simplicity from the jaws of complexity. Unfortunately for us, complexity is the status quo in environments where members of a team look to toss in their two cents in an attempt to steer a product.

One of my old favorites detailing the dangers of design by committee is the story of the Pontiac Aztek. The Aztek was an attempt by GE to give users an equal voice in defining an end product in a manner which was intended to be design by committee. The result is history:

The result rolled off the assembly line in 2000: the Pontiac Aztek, considered by many to be one of the ugliest cars produced in decades and a flop from Day One.

When you're a product manager at a company shipping tech products, everybody wants your job... including the CEO. When your peers consider themselves to be expert strategists, the worst thing a product person can do is add to the noise. Instead of being an equal but ineffective voice, Product managers must pick their words wisely when in chaotic brainstorming meetings. These are some choice skills to ensure success in a crowded setting:

Utilize inception. Outwardly attacking or shutting down the ideas of others directly never goes over well. Instead, it is best to use the passionate of people as the engine that will drive them to a solution: build on the ideas of others to shape them towards conclusions more likely to work.

Learn when to be quiet. Sometimes the best thing to do in a highly energetic and stressed out setting is to let things pan out one way or another. People have the ability to correct themselves over time even if the starting point was farfetched.

Maximize time away from meetings. A product manager should be able to achieve the most damage by fleshing out ideas away from others. No matter how great your idea sounds, chances are that others won't digest words well in the moment, and the result will seem combative.

Use visuals to communicate. Wireframes and flowcharts are excellent ways to reduce the time between the proposal of an idea and the time it takes somebody to understand it. The longer this time is, the less likely it will be approved.

Befriend analytics. Back up your assumptions and skepticism with data, if not to others than at least to yourself. Also allow development estimates and other metrics to make an argument for you.

Don't speak for your team. Don't promise anything to anybody if you don't have a good understanding of the level of effort intended. Even experienced product managers make this mistake constantly, which is a great way to make your team hate you.

The Idea Bubble

Ideas are currently overvalued. As tech bubbles have come and gone, the discrepancy of idea inflation is a fossil left behind: a reminder of times which have already left us. A company which overemphasizes big-picture strategy is a company behind the times of what is important.

A common phone call I'll get is an invitation to partner up to get a startup off the ground. Usually a personal connection, aspiring cofounders love the prospect of bringing on a partner to execute the technology side of their MVP (and foreseeable future) for a fraction of their company... say, about 2%. What a great idea, they figure, to allow somebody 2 whole percent of the next Facebook. From my perspective, this sounds a lot like executing 100% of the work for pennies on the dollar, all for the privilege of being let in on somebody else's idea... average people (like companies) tend to think that ideas alone are what make or break institutions. Needless to say I've never taken such an offer.

Something I've done in job interviews past is get a feel for some of the longer term strategy thinking that a company is moving towards. Companies in the interview process are willing to give a few tidbits of information about their general funding and target verticals to demonstrate a general path for growth to candidates who may be interested in joining. With this information, it is very easy to predict some very key points about the entirety of a company's business plan:

Which features or new products does this put on the company's roadmap?

What new competitors is this company now slating themselves against?

What are some of the challenges this company must now face as they enter new territory and potentially eat into a competitor's market share?

I've found that it is very easy to guess these things correctly with little background; sometimes met with nervous responses. Good product managers should have no problem dissecting a company's precious roadmap, perhaps to a point of discomfort of those who grasp on tight. What does this ease tell us?

Big picture strategy is more simple than we would otherwise assume.

There are a fair share of exceptions to this, but generally speaking the desires of organizations are straightforward. Considering that all companies are looking to maximize profits and reduce costs, analyzing how they might do so from their current position is not one that takes deep understanding of the market or business itself. All consumers are human beings, which we also happen to be... as a human being, there is no secret sauce a company can withhold from you that you could not otherwise infer, as their product will ultimately be sold to people just like yourself.

To further demonstrate how ideas are overvalued, simply send some time in any brainstorming meeting about a product, and count how many ideas are repurposed versions of preexisting ideas which are currently live in the market. While I've found the notion that "there are no original ideas" a bit dark, there is compelling evidence in favor of this.

Second Place Always Wins

Hypotheticals aside, perhaps we should look to technology's most successful companies. Surely the behemoths which dominate our industry are truly original?

Facebook was of course an evolution of many social networks which came before it in Friendster, MySpace, etc, and was an idea stolen from the Winklevoss twins as was decided by the court system. Facebook succeeded in how it executed this idea, but the concept itself was by no means novel.

Google was one of countless search engines at the time of it's inception, and became economically viable after the collapse of Yahoo! left the space wide open.

Uber rose from a number of nearly identical apps which had been developed at the same time, and it seems as though there story has no yet reached an end. Uber's presence has not hindered the rise of Lyft, Fastn, Gett, and Juno. It is too early to tell, but there's a chance that Uber's own internal politics may pan very negatively.

Snapchat is surely an example of a successful original idea with their Stories feature, right? Except for the part where Instagram blatantly ripped off the same idea, and the public did not seem to care as Snapchat's IPO resulted the most shorted stock in history. To this day articles are published praising the team which downright stole an original idea. Is no idea holy?

No: no idea is holy: what makes products successful is how a product is executed, not what the core idea is.

Execution Is Expensive

If ideas are cheap, the ability to execute is expensive by contrast.

Proponents of capitalism will argue you that a person's worth is reflected in what the market determines their compensation to be. Despite one's own idealogical beliefs, market rates are a good way to indicating which positions are in demand. This is easily achieved by looking at average salaries within a given field.

Unsurprisingly, those who are paid the most within technology companies are those with irreplaceable skills such as developers. Those who know how to carry out ideas will always be compensated at a higher rate than idea people. Despite what startups preach as their core identities, market rates tell a different story: that people who talk are common, and people who do are rare.

What I'm Doing

Apologies if this seems to be a darker perspective to those aspiring to steer, but allow me to offer an alternative narrative: simply because the trajectories of companies are fairly predictable, we should not be discouraged the notion of innovation- if anything, it affords us the ability to pave the way for advancements where others have turned a blind eye. Even if the entire payroll of your startup seems to be a part of the decision making process, I can guarantee you that most will overlook the pieces which make up the whole: a product is made up of features, and features are usually within a product manager's jurisdiction.

Product management remains an empowering profession to those who learn how to navigate political structures and understand people... users and stakeholders alike. I would not trade 8 years of product management for anything in the field, as I believe this field is the greatest way to understand the world to those who are willing.

On a personal note, I am taking a hiatus from traditional product management to pursue the technical side of application architecture for the foreseeable future. As some of the questions of product management are answered in what seems to be a new era, the traditional day-to-day of product management will shift to the side of defining process in product management and software teams alike. Regardless of what my title may be, I will always consider myself to be a Product Manager.

September 24, 2017 at 03:33PM