#its not like the rich character are the only ones Jewish coded. all of them are Jewish coded. beacuse a lot of the cast and the creators

[zonatcannibalism]

"the rich people and the lawyer have Jewish names!!!!!!!" My man have you considered every hatchetfield character is actually Jewish. Hope that helps :)))

#I am so not kidding with this one #ruth. Richie ...other people #its not like the rich character are the only ones Jewish coded. all of them are Jewish coded. beacuse a lot of the cast and the creators #are Jewish themselves #hatchetfield #starkid

[columboscreens]

I hope it isnt rude or presumptuous of me to barge in and vent, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on Columbos family. I just finished "no time to die" and I can't get over how bad that episode was. Maybe its me and my headcanons getting in the way but No Way is he from a family of cops. And not a single one of them sounds like they're Italian or new yorkers the blasphemy! To me that mans from an Jewish immigrant family, and proud of it.

combined with:

yeah the whole "family of cops" thing in no time to die came off as cheesy, contrived 90s copaganda, so i just kind of ignore it. it's hardly canon, so feel free to do the same! i picture columbo with a big, loud, italian family myself, in which he's just about the only cop.

I will say though, i actually totally agree that he comes off as more jewish than not. columbo is, in canon, a good little italian boy married to a catholic woman, so the natural assumption is that he, too, is catholic. but peter falk was a very organic, naturalistic actor--as a student of sanford meisner, his primary acting imperative was to live and behave truthfully to the self under imaginary circumstances. so for someone who was barely religious himself in the way "cultural jews" tend to be...

what i'd pay to hear the words "had the fuckin bar mitzvah'" come out of that man's mouth

...to me, falk's "truthful self" is just so jewish to his core that, because he puts so much of himself into the character, it bleeds clean through to columbo, and we get all these jewish mannerisms out of the supposed catholic! (jews, of course, have a rich and historic presence in italy, so there's no preclusion on that front.)

once you notice the little things, you can't stop. his phrasings, his gestures, the ways he interacts with others, his boiled eggs, his gastrointestinal sensitivity, even his sense of humor.

chag pesach sameach

there are, of course, more substantial pieces of evidence than ordering chinese food for his extended family or needing an antacid every time he eats too quickly. i'm not jewish myself, but i grew up in a very jewish neighborhood, had more jewish than gentile friends growing up, and my partner of seven years is jewish. to me, what really codes columbo as a jewish man is how well he embodies many aspects of specifically jewish ethos.

being honorable, sensitive, and humble, he's the ideal mensch. one tenet strongly prioritized in judaism is tzedek, or one's ethical obligation to righteousness, equity, and compassion. he is both moved by suffering and tenaciously committed to justice.

jews hold the deepest respect for both religious and civil law, and you will note that columbo is neither an outsider nor a vigilante--he is a sanctioned agent of the legal system respecting and following the process of the law in his pursuit of murderers. he functions within it, sometimes in spite of it, but not outside of it. when he gets creative, he toes, but never quite crosses the line.

he thinks for himself and thus has a strong moral compass; he treats everyone with kindness and empathizes readily with individual struggle. he is patient, courageous, and clever--all particularly valued qualities in judaism.

(rakish semitic looks aside)

paramount is columbo's intellectual curiosity, love of learning, and propensity to question, which is, too, seen as fundamental to a faith built entirely on asking questions. whether he's gently yet methodically poking holes in a suspect's alibi or wondering how much a random stranger paid for his shoes, he never has a shortage of them. he's a little guy bursting with chutzpah, perfectly at home both asking a prime suspect if he can have a closer look at his hand, and God Himself to spare sodom and gomorrah if he can only find a few good people...

if you really needed any further evidence that he's God's Chosen...

#columbo #ask #longpost #excerpt is from rolling stone #the most crucial game #a stitch in crime #the evidence pile for jewish columbo is big enough to require a sherpa to summit #he's just a little mensch!

[ceruleanwhore]

A (Mostly) Complete Critique of Tangled

I used to love Tangled but, as I’ve said before, it’s been ruined for me in recent times, starting with when I watched the series. However, where at first I felt like the movie was fine but the show messed up a lot of what was there, I’ve recently begun to see the truth, that the movie was never good to begin with. Being me, I want to talk about it and hopefully find others who feel similarly.

First and foremost, I have to talk about Disney choosing to make Rapunzel a princess with royal parents. One of the main aspects of the original fairy tale is that she comes from a poor family and when that family commits a relatively minor crime of stealing some vegetables, they are punished far too harshly by the witch who literally kidnaps their daughter in retribution. The story is that of a poor family having their daughter stolen but, because they’re poor, they literally don’t have the means to get anyone to go after this witch and get their daughter back. It’s a heavy metaphor for class disparity where those in power can do whatever and have no one challenge them because they’re so powerful while the powerless innocents they trample can do nothing to fight back. Making Rapunzel a princess ruins all of that and Jew-coding Gothel flips that power dynamic back around so now it’s a Jewish woman stealing a baby in the night and these rich, white royals are just powerless to save their poor infant daughter in the face of her evil Jewish magic or whatever.

Speaking of “evil Jewish magic or whatever,” next up is all the bullshit with the flower. Aside from the extremely lazy worldbuilding aspect of it that’s later retconned to be made even worse, this is just another way that they’re missing the whole point of the original story and tbh kind of ruining it. The entire point of the original is that the parents steal something of little value and are punished by having something as valuable as their own baby taken from them as punishment. If you make the stolen object something that not only is extremely valuable but is literally the only thing of its kind that is literally priceless, that radically changes things. Objectively, that flower is worth more than any other life in that world, including that of literally any royal, so that whole transaction just got flipped. Also, everyone acts like it was so terrible of Gothel to hide that away and keep it for herself but no one cares that Rapunzel’s parents literally made tea with it and destroyed the fucking thing to prevent a very natural death and force a very unnatural birth.

Another setting-type thing before I get into the actual story itself is what I mentioned earlier of Gothel being so very heavily Jew-coded by Disney. For one thing, Walt Disney was a freaking yahtzee and hated Jewish people, so keep that in mind. For another, it’s yet another thing that further wrecks the story. Yes, witchcraft as a concept does have a lot of roots in antisemitism, but I do believe there are ways you can have a witch as a villain and not have it feel like a really bad Jewish stereotype. Hell, look at the Barbie Rapunzel and how much different that version of Gothel feels from the Disney version. But because of how symbolism works in movies, there ends up being this effect with the Disney version where it then feels like everything Gothel does in the movie that’s bad is actually a greater stereotype and criticism of all Jewish people.

So, getting into the story, I want to start with Rapunzel herself. She’s freshly 18 but has the vibe and acts like she’s 8. I understand having Gothel try to limit how much she can intellectually explore the outside world, but that sheltering wouldn’t affect her personality. It’s this thing where people associate naivete with childishness and so, when they make a character who’s sheltered or naive, that character then has to also act like a child. For all the events of the story, Rapunzel would be better if she were older and also acted her age, even though she’d still have limited knowledge of the world. A great example of the issue with her character is how her immediate response to an intruder breaking in is to hit him with a frying pan, tie him to a chair with her hair, stuff him in a closet, and then actually think she can use a literal hostage to convince her helicopter mom that she’s a capable adult.

The next issue is Flynn. He’s fine in and of himself, but this movie with the canon version of Rapunzel we got is not the movie to go plugging in this 27 year old man who was created by a panel of women to be hot. There’s something really weird and icky about having the most sheltered, naive, very childlike character who looks and acts like a child end up with the love interest who’s been made to look the most mature and appeal to grown ass women. My biggest issues with him all have to do with his relationship with Rapunzel. He’s the adult here so he should’ve insisted upon taking a good chunk of time to let her adjust to existing in society and also processing everything that just went down in less than a week and meeting her parents and everything before trying to date her. It was irresponsible at best and harmful at worst for him to allow her to throw herself into a relationship with him when she is the way she is and he’s very literally the first person she’s ever met aside from her kidnapper.

As for the plot, the biggest thing I have a problem with is the hair, which I know sounds weird when we’re literally talking about Rapunzel but hear me out. The sundrop was destroyed and consumed in order to keep not just the queen but also Rapunzel alive, which should’ve used up the magic and produced a normal, non-magical child. However, since Rapunzel has magic hair in this, there’s a few other issues, like that she hears Gothel talking about how valuable her hair is and how people will want to steal it, but she doesn’t just give herself a trim as soon as she leaves to ensure her safety? Also, I get that the hair needs to be super long, but it’s too long for her to be able to like… exist with it. It would only weigh about 20 lbs but, when wet, it would definitely be super heavy and the length would be literally impossible to do anything with. She tries to walk across a room, it’s getting caught on five different pieces of furniture. At least let her braid it.

Another issue I have is with the haircut at the end. There’s nothing wrong with short hairstyles, but this particular one seems to accentuate the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ aspects of Rapunzel’s character and, especially when combined with the rest of her design, I feel like it makes her look even younger. Instead of having this moment be the really charged metaphor I think it was supposed to be about the end of her sheltered childhood and entry into adulthood, it feels lackluster because, visually, it’s the opposite. Rapunzel with the long hair looks like she could be 18 but, with the short hair, she looks no older than 14:

And then compare that to this edit that @juliette-daria made of Rapunzel with longer hair:

Do you see it? How, yeah, she still has big eyes and youthful features but, with a different hairstyle, she doesn’t look literally 14? I just really want to know why they chose to do what they did and make a very young-looking character look even younger before pairing her with a grown ass man who damn well looks like a grown ass man. I always thought I just didn’t particularly like Rapunzel’s haircut aesthetically but now I’m realizing it’s because I can’t stand to see her doing couple stuff with Flynn when she looks so young like that and he looks, well, 27. 

Aside from the hair stuff, the antisemitism, and questionable stuff with age, I don’t have a ton of issues with the story itself. The biggest story thing I have an issue with is Gothel showing up in the middle of their journey like that instead of having her kind of tailing them until the main conflict at the end. Her popping up at the campsite and being a bitch just seemed so unnecessary and I feel like the story would’ve been better without it. Also, I feel like that big, climactic conflict should’ve gone differently and happened in Corona because we’ve already seen that it’s a multiple-day journey from the tower to the city or vice versa, so the idea that Flynn is just running to that tower the way one might run to the store doesn’t really work. Having everything come to a T in Corona also could have provided tons more drama and been way more interesting. That way, you could have Flynn bust out of prison and then go with all the Snuggly Duckling guys to save Rapunzel together and there could be an even bigger conflict.

#anti tangled #tangled critical #tangled salt #tangled criticism #antisemitism #anti disney #disney critical #disney criticism

[qu-film-history-to-1968]

From Supportive to Critical: How Political Hollywood films changed drastically overtime.

Today, Hollywood is often seen as a very liberal industry where people aren’t afraid to speak out against America when it does something wrong. But in previous years it was more of the opposite. During World War II, Hollywood was under a strict mandate from the government to produce films that would aid the US war effort. This led to a vast wave of propaganda films being made to get the Americans to hate their foreign adversary, with two notable examples being The Great Dictator and Shadow of a Doubt. 

Shadow of a Doubt is a much more subtle example of propaganda. The film stars a young woman named Charlie who lives in a small town in California. Her life is then changed when her Uncle Charlie comes to visit her and her family. At first young Charlie is incredibly excited to see her uncle, but that all changes when she slowly finds out that her uncle is most likely a serial killer called "Merry Widow Murderer". While this film never mentions anything about a war or foreign adversary, the propagandistic message of this film is that America is being subverted by an outside force. This is represented by the character of Uncle Charlie, not only is he not native to the town young Charlie lives in, but he also says many things that show what a suspicious character would look like to the US government. At various points, he talks about how he distrusts US institutions like the banks, and he repeatedly comments on how he hates rich widows, he even calls them "fat, wheezing animals". It tells the American audience that the people who could be subversives are the ones that distrust the institutions of America and degrade others. Which brings to mind images of the Nazi’s as they were also critical of institutions like banks and of course degrade the Jewish population by treating them as less than human. The main theme of this film is summarized in an article by Steffen Hantke, where he writes “the film tells a powerful cautionary tale to wartime America about the enemy hiding in its midst” (Hantke). So, while Shadow of a Doubt doesn’t seem like a propaganda film at first, its message of America secretly being subverted by a foreign adversary make it fit right in with the films of the time.

The Great Dictator is a more obvious example of a propaganda film, but what makes it stand out from other films of its kind is that it's a comedy rather than a drama or thriller. It features an obvious parody of Adolf Hitler who makes comments like “Free speech is abhorrent”. As well as the Nazi soldiers being portrayed as stupid bullies. The propaganda in this film goes in the complete opposite direction of Shadow of a Doubt. Rather than trying to warn the audience of their foreign threat, it is saying that the ideas of the Nazi’s are completely ridiculous, and you would be a fool to believe in them. It comes as a stark contrast to previous Hollywood films as most of them didn’t overtly reference or criticize the internal politics of the time. But this was most likely due to the special codes that the government implemented on Hollywood to control what kind of content they were allowed to depict. A quote from The Journal of American History sheds light on why the US government saw this as important, by saying “The enemy was fascism. The enemy was not the Axis leadership nor all of the Axis-led peoples but fascist supporters anywhere, at home as well as abroad. "Any form of racial discrimination or religious intolerance, special privileges of any citizen are manifestations of Fascism, and should be exposed as such," (The Journal of American History). The US government saw fascism as such an existential threat to society that they wanted to make sure it was completely hated and ostracized by the American public. Even if that meant making questionable decisions that arguably violated the first amendment.

Nowadays the government doesn’t have that many strict codes on what films can and can’t depict and propaganda films are largely in the past. In fact, modern Hollywood has gone in the exact opposite direction, it very rarely releases films that comment on a certain international issue and is more likely to criticize America than its foreign adversaries. A more recent example would be the film Team America: World Police which is a parody film that was meant to criticize the US government’s decision to invade Iraq after the 911 terrorist attacks instead of making fun of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. If this kind of film was made in the days of the WWII production codes, it would probably be deemed as anti-American propaganda and most likely not even released. A quote from The Journal of Social Relations shows the massive difference in political films made the past vs ones made from today, they say, “The movies reaffirmed political and social values of a free market economy in order to conserve social status quo: "A movie made for the purpose of changing attitudes about, say, American foreign policy or socialized medical care or monogamy would be a propaganda film" (Humboldt). In short, Hollywood's biggest change was that the propaganda films of the past were meant to make you more in favor of the US government’s actions. But the propaganda films of today are meant to make you more skeptical and critical of the US government’s actions.

Sources:

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 1990, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1990), pp. 43-65

Steffen Hantke (2016) Hitchcock at War: Shadow of a Doubt, Wartime Propaganda, and the Director as Star, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 44:3, 159-168, DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2016.1161586 

The Journal of American History, Jun. 1977, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Jun. 1977), pp. 87-105

#submission

[octaviasdread]

any girls! dark academia movie recs? i really struggle to find anything not about a group of boys (as much as I love them)

SO MANY!!! This is probably a far more detailed answer than you were expecting but this is a popular question and I want to keep a list for myself and others.

Feel free to add to it/give opinions. I've tried to give a tw for anything I can remember

Girls! Dark Academia Movies/TV Shows

Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

1950s Women’s college

Art professor! Julia Roberts

She’s legit the female Mr Keating of the art & college world

Feminism vs. Tradition

Maggie Gyllenhall x Ginnifer Goodwin; their characters were more than friends. Fight me.

Does not end how you expect

Strike!/All I Wanna Do/The Hairy Bird (1998)

MY FAVOURITE!!!

Free on YouTube under one of its various names

Comedy

1960s all girls boarding school

Young Kirsten Dunst

Group of girls plot to sabotage a merger with a boys school less prestigious than their own

Secret attic clubhouse meetings of the D.A.R aka Daughters of the American Ravioli (eaten cold, ew)

girls get political & advocate for their rights using ANY elaborate and chaotic scheme

TW: eating disorder, vomiting & creepy male teacher but the girls plot against him too

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

based on a short book I read for uni by Muriel Spark

1930s girls school in Edinburgh

Scottish teacher! Maggie Smith, controversial with a focus on romantic ideals

Spoiler alert, the liberal teacher is actually a fascist

Her group of fave students has cult- vibes and it’s fascinating

Picnic at Hanging Rock

1970s movie or 2018 mini series

Never watched either but I plan to

Wild Child (2008)

00s romcom every UK teen girl loves

Emma Roberts as the spoiled rich American teenager sent to a strict English boarding school

Plots to get herself expelled but oh no she’s making friends with the girls who help her

And the headmistress has a hot son, and he’s nice??? Double oh no

ICONIC SCENES

Everything! Goes! Wrong!

omg she burns the school down

Feel good, comfort, nostalgia

St Trinians (2007)

English girls boarding school

The kids are all criminals, no joke

So are the teachers

CHAOTIC

gay awakening for british girls

Art heist pulled off by school girls

Government tries to shut them down but oh no, the education minister & the headmistress are ex-lovers

Colin Firth x Rupert Everett in drag

Superior cast: Jodie Whittaker, Gemma Arterton, Juno Temple, Stephen Fry, Colin Firth, etc...

embodies the phrase 'problematic fave'

St Trinians 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold (2009)

Mystery, pirate ancestors, hidden treasure

omg Shakespeare was a woman

girls disguised as boys to infiltrate and rob the posh boys school

Villain! David Tennant in that ICONIC boat scene

Teen girls vs. ancient misogynist brotherhood

like the first film but MORE chaotic and BETTER!???

The Falling (2014)

1960s all girls school

best friends! but its unrequited love

Agoraphobic + distant mother aka mommy issues

Sudden death and the school suppresses/ignores the students grief, sparking mass hysteria & a fainting epidemic in the girls

Cast: Maisie Williams (GoT) & Florence Pugh (Little Women) & Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders)

TW: teen pregnancy, death, vomiting, underage s*x, sibling inc*st, past s*xual assault

READ THE PLOT SUMMARY FIRST

The Book Thief (2013)

Based on an amazing book by Markus Zusak

set in 1940s Nazi Germany

Daughter of a communist whose family were taken by the Nazis/died is fostered by an older couple who teach her to read & she paints a dictionary on the basement walls

Coming of age story about a compulsive book thief. No joke, this kid steals books from banned book burnings and breaks into the mayor's library through the window

Family hides the Jewish son of an old friend in their basement and he helps her to start writing about her experiences in the war

TW: death, bombings, WW2 anti-semitism

Mary Shelley (2017)

Overall good & roughly biographical

Pretty costumes and aesthetic

Modern feminist take on Mary Shelly in her own time period

So many INACCURACIES for the drama so don’t take it as truth

Percy Shelley slander and not all of it is justified

Cast: Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, and Maisie Williams

The Secret Garden (1993)

Based on a fave childhood book

1901 colonial India & Yorkshire, England

Orphaned, spoilt & neglected girl sent to live with her reclusive Uncle in the English countryside

Gothic elements, mysteries, secret doors/passages/locked gardens

local boy with a flock of animals, magic, kids chanting around a fire and all around immaculate vibes

Happy ending!!!

Hidden Figures (2016)

African-American women as mathematicians for NASA

1960s space project

Women balancing a career and family obligations

Deals with racial & gender discrimination

Loosely based on the lives of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan who worked for NASA as engineers & mathematicians

Anne of Green Gables (1985) & sequel (1987)

Adaptation L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Anne of Green Gables’ books

Canada (late 1890s/early 1900s)

Highly imaginative & bookworm orphan is adopted by a reclusive elderly brother and sister duo

Small town & school years comedic drama

Unrequited Enemies -> Friends -> lovers

Inspiring new woman teacher

Girls re-enact Tennyson’s poem and nearly drown for the aesthetic™

Dramatic poetry reading with INTENSE 👀eye contact👀

Writer! Anne & English teacher! Anne dealing with unruly girls school antics

Collette (2018)

biographical drama on french writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette

Victorian & Edwardian era France

More talented than her husband so she ghostwrites for him

Fight for creative ownership of her wildly successful novels

Affairs with a woman called Georgie and also with Missy, born female but masculine presenting

Cast: Keira Knightly, Dominic West, Eleanor Tomlinson (Poldark)

Enola Holmes (2020)

Netflix book adaptation

Younger sister of Sherlock Holmes

Victorian era! feminism/suffragettes

Mother-daughter focus

Mystery, adventure, secret codes, teens running away & escaping from (and eventually fighting) assassins

Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Henry Cavill, Sam Claflin, Fiona Shaw, Millie Bobby Brown

Ginger & Rosa (2012)

1960s England

best friends since literal birth navigating troubled teen years

poet & anti-nuclear activist! Ginger

off the rails but also catholic! Rosa

Shout out to Mark & Mark the gay godfathers we all want

family troubles 

TW: older man has an affair with a 17 yr old

Testament of Youth (2014)

based on WW1 memoir by Vera Brittain

young woman (writer & poetry lover) escapes traditional family & goes to study at Oxford University

abandons to become a war nurse

romance, tragedy and war trauma

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Kit Harrington (GoT), Taron Edgerton (Rocketman), Colin Morgan (Merlin)

Little Women (2019)

Writer! Jo & Artist! Amy

Mother/daughter focus and sister dynamics

the March sisters’ theatre club is *chefs kiss*

champagne problems edits of Jo x Laurie are a mood

Ambivalent ending perfectly captures Louisa May Alcott’s dilemma with the book the movie is based on

set in 1860s America

ALL STAR CAST and a Greta Gerwig masterpeice

Lady Bird (2017)

coming of age in early 2002/2003 Sacramento, California

all girls catholic school

writer! Christine aka Lady Bird wants to get outta town and start her life again at college 'in a city with culture'

Mother/daughter dynamics - so realistic!

I live for that Jesus car stunt & the nun's reaction

school theatre program

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Timothee Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein

Another Greta Gerwig gem

Beguiled (2017)

Virginia, civil war era

Girls school with only five students and two teachers left

Find an injured Union army soldier & bring him inside

Women & teenagers want his attention (v. problematic) before uniting against him

(tbh you'll either love it, hate it, or watch once & forget it)

Sofia Coppola film so its very feminine gaze

TW: violence, death, underage

Legally Blonde (2001)

No questions will be taken

Elle Woods was the blue print

TV series:

House of Anubis (2011-2013)

I know it’s a kids/young teen show but I still unironically love it

ANCIENT EGYPT!!!!

Modern day with Victorian era links to treasure hunters & Egyptian research expeditions (stealing from tombs)

Chosen one plot lines, curses, kidnapping, mysteries, secret tunnels under the school, elixir of life

Teens have investigate & protect themselves cus oh no the TEACHERS are involved in some shady stuff

new American kid at British boarding school is the actual premise not just a fanfic au

Nostalgic, light-hearted, funny, and kinda cheesy but I will accept no criticism

The Alienist (2018 -now)

Mid 1890s, New York

Woman’s private detective agency (Season 2)

Serial killer mystery

Woman secretary turns detective and teams up with a criminal psychiatrist and a newspaper editor to solve crime

TW: violence, child pr*stit*tion

Cast: Dakota Fanning, Luke Evans, Daniel Bruhl

The Queen’s Gambit (2020)

Woman chess prodigy

1950s & 1960s

TW: drug & alcohol abuse

Gentleman Jack (2019 - now)

Based on the diaries of Anne Lister

Victorian Yorkshire, England

Upper-class lesbians

Confident, suit wearing! Anne Lister x shy! Ann Walker

Business woman! Anne running the family mines

Cast: Suranne Jones (Doctor Foster) & Sophie Rundle (Peaky Blinders)

TW: violence

Gilmore Girls (2000-2007)

bubbly/ambitious single mom + intelligent daughter

bookworm! Rory Gilmore gets into a prestigious private school and then an Ivy League college

Small town drama is comedic gold

Fast dialogue packed with pop culture and literary references

Comforting & nostalgic

TEAM JESS

Anne with an E (2017-2019)

Loose adaptation of L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Anne of Green Gables’ books

they completely change the plot lines but it’s still very good content!

Orphan girl with trauma and a love of books/poetry is adopted by an elderly brother & sister duo, bringing light and fresh ideas to a rural community

Feminism, girls writing club, lgbtq safe spaces, girls eduction, black/indigenous representation

Miss Stacy as THAT inspiring teacher

Aunt Josephine’s lavish gay parties have my heart

TW: creepy male teacher tries to marry a student, racial discrimination, indigenous assimilation school

Victoria (2016-2019)

Adaption of Queen Victoria’s life

Victoria navigating her political, royal, and personal life

Albert’s involvement with The Great Exhibition, 1851 (on cultural + industrial innovations)

Alfred Paget x Edward Drummond is exquisite

Gorgeous costumes and aesthetics

TW: bury your gays trope

Derry Girls (2018-now)

1990s Northern Ireland during the troubles

Comedy, episodes 20-25 mins long

English boy sent to an all girls Catholic school with his cousin

✨Dead Poets Society parody episode ✨with a free-spirited female teacher

Sister Michael, the sarcastic nun who hates her job & reads the exorcist for giggles

Wee anxious lesbian! Clare Devlin (plus her friends wearing rainbow pins)

Badass with bad ideas! Michelle Mallon

Main Character! Erin Quinn

Lovable weirdo who would fight a polar bear! Orla McCool

Wee English fella & honorary Derry girl! James Maguire

Dickinson (2019-now)

Loose adaption of the poet Emily Dickinson’s life

Set in 19th century Massachusetts, US

Historical drama with modern dialogue & music that works SEAMLESSLY

gives a great understanding of Emily Dickinson’s poems

💕Vintage gays! Emily x Sue💕

Theatre club, writing, poetry, dressing as men to sneak into lectures, love letters, teen drama, feminism, and an underground abolitionist journal as a brief side plot in season 2

Wiz Khalifa plays death in a horse drawn carriage

TW: opium use

A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017-2019)

Based on great childhood books

Bookworm! brother, Inventor! sister, and baby sister with sharp teeth

Mystery, secret organisations, orphaned siblings figuring things out & fending for themselves against the villain after their fortune

Adults either cartoon evil, comedically incompetent, or SPIES

Boarding school, library owner, scientific researcher, and theatre episodes

Ambiguous time period which is really fun to try and pin point

Killing Eve (2018-now)

Classic detective who has homoerotic tension with the assassin she is tracking down

British Detective! Eve Polastri figures out the notorious assassin MI5 are investigating is a woman, is fired & then put on a secret MI6 case with a small team

Assassin! Villanelle, a psychopath with a tragic past and a mastery of both accents & fashion

Woman MI6 boss! Carolyn Martens, head of Russian section

Travel Europe following Villanelle’s killings and escaping the assassins sent by Villanelle’s organisation

‘You’re supposed to be my enemy and moral opposite but omg you’re the only one smart enough to get me and why am I obsessed with you????'

🚨 GO IN FOR A KISS AND THEN STAB YOUR ENEMY 🚨

Cable Girls/Las chicas del cable (2017-2020)

Spanish drama set in 1920s Madrid

Four young women at a telecommunications company form a group of friends and help navigate the difficult situations they are all in

Secret identities, dangerous pasts, murder, crime, lgbtq couple & throuple, trans man character, feminism/suffragists

girls commit crimes for humanitarian reasons and cover! it! up!

UNDERRATED SHOW!!!!

Gorgeous costumes and set

Haven’t finished it yet and I’m catching up

TW: abuse, violence, death

Outlander (2014 - now)

haven’t watched yet but plan to

Woman time travels to Scotland, 1743

Rebel highlanders, pirates, British colonies, American revolutionary war

Time jumps between 18th & 20th century

#CO posts #answered asks #asks #dark academia girls #dark academia recommendations #dark academia recs #dark academia women #dark academia movies #dark academia tv

[ckret2]

GVK spoilers below, about conspiracy theories

I’m gonna get around to posting all my GVK reactions but this one got long so I’m putting it in its own post.

The Monsterverse series, in both KOTM and GVK, has some pretty interesting things to say about conspiracy theories and ecofascism; but, unfortunately, it doesn’t REALIZE that it’s saying any of them, so it keeps dropping the ball and missing opportunities to explore them.

Starting with KOTM, “there’s too many humans so we’ve just gotta let some die and that’ll fix pollution 🤷” is like false ecofascist claim #1 but at no point in the movie was it challenged as unfactual, it was just presented as a sad truth that people have to do morally ambiguous things about. Except that it’s just literally mathematically not true!

Emma could be such a GREAT, believable character—especially in this world with, like, frigging QAnon nonsense getting such widespread traction—showing a compelling, realistic tragedy of how this normal, intelligent, well-educated white mom who otherwise is likely left-leaning (pro-environmentalism, pro-nature conservation, got a doctorate and generally more academia correlates with more liberal ideals) got sucked into a far right ecofascist doomsday militia that combines hokey pseudo-environmentalist propaganda with “in balance with nature” semi-religious mysticism, because she was exploited at a time when she was emotionally vulnerable (when her kid had just died) and was lacking healthy emotional support (when her husband turned to alcohol and then ran off).

... Except the movie never says that her “overpopulation” beliefs are WRONG. It says that they’re RIGHT, and she was just forced to choose between two losing scenarios—deliberately kill most of humanity to hopefully save a few, or watch humanity kill itself.

Nobody bothers to mention that the size of the population isn’t the problem, it’s the disproportionate pollution coming out of first world countries. Nobody bothers to mention that when Emma talks about “overpopulation” and shows a screenshot of an overcrowded neighborhood, it ain’t affluent downtown skyscraper condos in Europe or America that she’s highlighting, but large masses of poor people whose neighborhoods look “dirty” to the white woman’s eyes, despite the fact that they’re contributing the least to humanity’s carbon footprint.

Emma’s beliefs are empirically wrong, and if KOTM had ever demonstrated that, it would’ve been brilliant. Instead, it tries to say “she was right, she just went too far,” and in doing so loses an opportunity to make Emma a deeply believable, timely, realistic, well-meaning but wrong villain.

And now we’ve got GVK, which has swerved away from the ecofascism but doubled down on the conspiracy theories. Here, Emma’s daughter, who was raised for five years with what amounts to a survivalist doomsday cult’s beliefs, when faced with the grief of her mother’s death and the struggle of trying to reconnect to her estranged father, turns—again—to conspiracies to make sense of the world around her. Because that’s what Madison’s been raised with, and even though she got disillusioned with the particular “we know something special that the normal people can’t handle” beliefs that she was raised with, that kind of thinking is still what she knows. She’s still doing what her mother raised her to do! She’s still pulling the “hypercompetent highly-trained lone wolf ‘survivor’ saves the world” shtick that Jonah’s gang taught her to do—but it’s never brought up that it was screwed up to raise a child like that and it’s screwed up for her to still be interacting with the world like that.

At least THIS conspiracy theorist isn’t literally advocating for global genocide. Bernie’s focus largely seems to be on “this corporation is trying to screw people over and screw up the environment—” (because in Monsterverse, as in Toho monster movies as a whole, kaiju/titans and the environment are symbolically conflated, so if a corporation is messing with Godzilla then they’re messing with nature as well) “—so I’m gonna find out what they’re up to and be a whistleblower.” Which is great! Solid start! We’ve got a guy taking aim at big business and who says “when the weather Godzilla acts erratic, it’s not random chance, it’s because a big business is doing something it shouldn’t,” so it looks like we’ve got a leftist conspiracy theorist, that’s different, could be interesting to explore.

Except then he starts talking about governments serving a “global elite” and facilities built by “lizard people” and then we’ve swung right back around to the far right by casually dropping in a couple of antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Add that in with the whole “hollow earth” thing and damn, we’re namedropping a lot of antisemitic conspiracy theories, aren’t we? Granted, most conspiracy theories ARE antisemitic—but like, they could have dug around for some that aren’t. Have him talk some more about Roswell. Have him bring up things that we’ve actually got documentation happened and theorize that MKUltra research was used in Apex’s development of their pilot’s psychic mind link to Mechagodzilla. Have him bring up tailor-made-for-the-Monsterverse conspiracy theories that don’t exist here, “Monster Zero is actually the secret weapon of a nearby ‘Planet X’ that’s gonna invade,” whatever. Instead, nah, we went with the antisemitic ones.

Now, do I think the writers behind KOTM and GVK intended antisemitism? Do I think they’re closet alt-right trying to dogwhistle the fascists in the audience? No, I think they think they’re making fun of—or playing around with—what they see as harmless, unbelievable, way-out-there conspiracy theories. I think they know just enough about “hollow earth” and “global elites” and “lizard people” to make references to them, but not in a way that promotes the common antisemitic understanding of those theories as true. (Monsterverse’s hollow earth, a weird underground jungle where King Kong lives, sure doesn’t resemble the usual conspiracy theory.) To me, the way they were used suggests the writers didn’t deeply understand (or at least, didn’t deeply think about) what the theories really mean—nor what they imply about the beliefs of the characters who espouse them. Which is the crux of my issue with how the movies deal with conspiracy theories and ecofascists and so forth (beyond the fact that, hey, I just don’t like seeing likable characters casually referencing antisemitic beliefs): the writers didn’t think about the implications.

Because these things do imply a lot! For example, if, say, Josh, total newb to conspiracy theories, had asked about lizard people, I would have grimaced to hear it but I would have believed that he’s a teen boy that picked up the term at school and doesn’t know anything about what’s behind it. But on the other hand, I can’t believe a guy so deep in the conspiracy theory world that he bathes in bleach doesn’t know exactly what those conspiracies mean—or, even if he does somehow staunchly refuse to believe that “lizard people” is a code for “Jewish people,” that whatever circle of conspiracy theorists he runs with doesn’t use it as a code. Bernie didn’t pick up those beliefs in a void. I really doubt that’s what the writers wanted to imply about the goofy likable underdog with a podcast.

And sure, the “global elite” and “lizard people” references are presented like a “haha look how far out his beliefs are” joke—the same as the fluoride reference, which is basically Hollywood code for “bogus nonsense only complete lunatics believe” thanks to Dr. Strangelove—but at the same time, they’re never really disproven. Nothing he believes is challenged. Nor are any of Madison’s beliefs that she’s picked up from him. Everything they both believe is either a “wow that’s wild” throwaway joke, or else they’re presented as totally right, e.g. about Apex being up to dubious crap that’s irritating Godzilla.

Just like Emma, who was presented as in the wrong not because she was incorrect but because she WAS correct but took the wrong actions. And just like Rick in KOTM, who kept bring up the hollow earth theory like a running joke but then the joke was that he was right.

And that’s at the root of the issues with both movies’ portrayals of conspiracy theories. Aside from the jokes that are never explored (and therefore, never disproven), the movies say that, every time it matters, the conspiracy theorists on the fringe are correct, the heroes that need to be believed. Even though all (excluding Rick) are characters who have suffered deep loss, who have been hurt, who you can imagine as passionate but grieving people who turned to dangerously wrong extremism in their search for meaning... the movies don’t portray them as people who have been led astray by their pain, but enlightened by their pain. Which is what they themselves think they are, sure, but that doesn’t line up with reality.

The movies never forces them to grapple with how far they’ve gone astray from reality—and I think they should. I’d like to see them processing the revelation that their beliefs are wrong. Whether it’s as big as somebody trying to convince Emma that killing half the population doesn’t fix the pollution caused by corporations rich enough to weather a global hurricane, or as small as Bernie looking at Apex’s financial records and realizing the company’s money is going to the CEO’s vacation home rather than a reptile government and deciding to rethink those beliefs after they’ve checked out Hong Kong.

“Conspiracy theorist is right about everything” is already a common enough trope that Monsterverse isn’t breaking any new ground with it. And in a franchise like Godzilla, whose movies are rife with messages both allegorical and literal about environmentalism, corporate exploitation, the futility of military action, international politics, war crimes... letting the conspiracy theorists be wrong and showing that they’re wrong and what that wrongness can lead to would mesh far better with the themes of Godzilla.

Think about Jonah and Emma unleashing Ghidorah (who emerged from a destroyed ice cap and immediately caused devastating hurricanes—a perfect metaphor for climate change), and what that could say about how ecofascists who purportedly joined the movement because they support environmentalism are actually far more in bed with the destructive industries really at the root of environmental damage... if the movie acknowledged them as ecofascists.

Think about how Jonah collected Ghidorah’s head at the end of KOTM and by the time of GVK it was in Apex’s hands, and how this exchange demonstrates that “I want to unleash titans to destroy humanity to save the environment” Jonah the ecoterrorist and “I want to beat the titans to protect humanity” Simmons the billionaire CEO actually have far more similar ideals beneath the surface of their opposed goals—ideals that have less to do with the environment or with humanity and more to do with securing personal power and control... if the movie had explained how this exchange took place.

Think about how Madison’s mother died trying to mitigate just a little of the damage she did under the thrall of a doomsday cult’s skewed beliefs, how even though Madison broke free she found herself embroiled in similarly skewed beliefs just three years later, and how powerful it would have been if she recognized that she herself had walked right back into the kind of fringe beliefs her mother had led her into as a child, and if she had then resolved to learn how this kept happening to her and break this pattern... if the movie had ever let her realize that she was making the same mistakes, or even acknowledged them as mistakes.

There’s so much potential there, so many things you can see happening right beneath the surface... but the movies never touch on them. And so it looks like, in Monsterverse, all fringe beliefs are either right or harmless. And we never get the “disillusioned conspiracy theorist” story that could be so brilliant and that, right now, would be so relevant.

#gvk #godzilla vs kong #gvk spoilers #godzilla vs kong spoilers #godzilla #kotm #meta

[writingwithcolor]

Fairy Tale Retellings with POC

@anjareedd asked:

Hello, Writing with Color! First of all, thank you for all you do. Second, do you have any advice for a white person retelling fairy tales, both European fairy tale and non-European fairy tales? Is it okay to retell non-European fairy tales? I would feel bad if all fairy tales I retold were European as those are over represented, but given how much white people have erased and whitewashed other culture's fairy tales I understand if that were off-limits for a white person. Thank you!

Fairy tale retellings are my favorite thing. I love reading, rewriting and creating new fairy tale-style stories with People of Color!

As you write, keep in mind:

European does not mean white. 

The possibility of PoC in European or Western historical settings tends to throw off so many. There are plenty of European People of Color, then and today. You can have an Indian British little red riding hood and it isn’t “unrealistic.” And we wanna read about them!

Still, research the history of your settings and time period. Use multiple credible sources, as even the most well-known ones may exclude the history of People of Color or skim over it. The stories might be shoved into a corner, but we live and have lived everywhere. The specific groups (and numbers of) in a certain region may vary, though. 

How and when did they or their family get there, and why?

Has it been centuries, decades, longer than one can remember?

Who are the indigenous people of the region? (Because hey, places like America and Australia would love to have you believe its earliest people were white...)

Is there a connection with the Moors, trade, political marriage; was it simply immigration?

No need to elaborate all too much. A sentence or more woven into the story in passing may do the trick to establish context, depending on your story and circumstance. 

Or if you want to ignore all of that, because this is fantasy-London or whatever, by all means do. POC really don’t need a explanation to exist, but I simply like to briefly establish context for those who may struggle to “get it”, personally. This is a side effect of POC being seen as the Other and white as the default.

Although, if PoC existing in a fairy tale is the reader’s biggest stumbling block in a world of magic, speculation, or fantasy, that’s none of your concern.

Can you picture any of the people below, or someone with these backgrounds, the protagonist of their own fairytale? I hope so!

Above: Painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1760s - 1800s), British Heiress with her cousin. Check out her history as well as the movie, Belle (2013).

Source: English Heritage: Women in History - Dido Belle

 Above: Abraham Janssens - The Agrippine Sibyl - Netherlands (c. 1575)

“Since ancient times Sybils were considered seers sent by god, priestesses foretelling the coming of great events. This model serves to depict the Sybil of Agrippina, one of the 12 that foretold the coming of Christ. Notice the flagellum and crown of thrones which are symbolic objects reminding the viewer of Christs suffering.”  X

Above: “Major Musa Bhai, 3 November 1890. Musa Bhai travelled to England in 1888 as part of the Booth family, who founded the Salvation Army.” X

Above: Eleanor Xiniwe and Johanna Jonkers, respectively and other members of the African Choir, who all had portraits taken at the London Stereoscopic Company in 1891. 

“The African Choir were a group of young South African singers that toured Britain between 1891 and 1893. They were formed to raise funds for a Christian school in their home country and performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, a royal residence on the Isle of Wight.” X

The examples above just scratch the surface. Luckily, more and more historians and researchers are publishing lesser known (and at times purposefully masked) PoC history.

More Sources 

PoC in History (WWC Search Link)

POC in Europe (WWC Search Link)

The Black Victorians: astonishing portraits unseen for 120 years

Hidden histories: the first Black people photographed in Britain – in pictures

Let’s talk about oppression and slavery 

There is a hyper-focus on chattel slavery as if the times when and where it occurred is the only narrative that exists. And even when it is part of a Person of Color’s history, that is seldom all there is to say of the person or their lives. For example, Dido Elizabeth Belle.

People of Color were not all slaves, actively enslaved, or oppressed for racial reasons at all times in history! Dig deep into the research of your time period and region. Across the long, wide history of the world, People of Color are and were a norm and also NOT simply exceptions. Explore all the possibilities to discover the little known and seldom told history. Use this as inspiration for your writing.

PoC (especially Black people) were not always in chains, especially in a world of your making. 

Don’t get me wrong. These stories do have a place and not even painful histories should be erased. I personally read these stories as well, if and when written by someone who is from the background. Some might even combine fairy tale, fantasy, and oppression in history. However...

There are plenty of stories on oppressed PoC. How many fairy tales?

Many European tales have versions outside of Europe. 

Just because a tale was popularized under a western setting doesn’t mean that it originates there. Overtime, many were rewritten and altered to fit European settings, values and themes.

Read original tales. 

You might be inspired to include a story in its original setting. Even if you kept it in a western setting, why not consider a protagonist from the ethnicity of the story’s origin?

For example: the Cinderella most are familiar with was popularized by the French in 1697. However, Cinderella has Chinese and Greek versions that date back from the 9th Century CE and 6th Century BCE, respectively. 

Choosing a Setting: European or Non-European?

I do not see anything wrong with either (I write tales set in western and non-western settings, all with Heroines of Color). There is great potential in both.

Non-Western Settings (pros and cons)

Normalizes non-Western settings. Not just the “exotic” realm of the Other.

Potential for rich, cultural elements and representation

Requires more research and thoughtfulness (the case for any setting one is unfamiliar with, though)

European or Western Setting (pros and cons)

Normalizes PoC as heroes, not the Other, or only fit to be side characters.

Representation for People of Color who live in Western countries/regions 

Loss of some cultural elements (that character can still bring in that culture, though! Living in the West often means balancing 2+ cultures)

Outdated Color and Ethnic Symbolism 

Many fairy tales paint blackness (and darkness, and the Other) as bad, ominous and ugly, and white as good and pure. 

Language that worships whiteness as the symbol of beauty. For example: “Fair” being synonymous with beauty. Characters like Snow White being the “fairest” of them all.

Wicked witches with large hooked noses, often meant to be coded as ethnically Jewish people. 

Don’t follow an old tale back into that same pit of dark and Other phobia. There’s many ways to change up and subvert the trope, even while still using it, if you wish. Heroines and heroes can have dark skin and large noses and still stand for good, innocence and beauty.

Read: Black and White Symbolism: Discussion and Alternatives 

Non-European Fairy tales - Tips to keep in Mind: 

Some stories and creatures belong to a belief system and is not just myth to alter. Before writing or changing details, read and seek the opinions of the group. You might change the whole meaning of something by tweaking details you didn’t realize were sacred and relevant.

Combine Tales Wisely: 

Picking stories and beings from different cultural groups and placing them in one setting can come across as them belonging to the same group or place (Ex: A Japanese fairy tale with Chinese elements). This misrepresents and erases true origins. If you mix creatures or elements from tales, show how they all play together and try to include their origin, so it isn’t as if the elements were combined at random or without careful selection.

Balance is key: 

When including creatures of myths, take care to balance your Human of Color vs. creatures ratio, as well as the nature of them both (good, evil, gray moral). EX: Creatures from Native American groups but no human Native characters from that same group (or all evil, gray, or too underdeveloped to know) is poor representation.

Moral Alignment: 

Changing a good or neutral cultural creature into something evil may be considered disrespectful and misappropriation. 

Have Fun! 

No, seriously. Fairy tales, even those with the most somber of meanings, are meant to be intriguing little adventures. Don’t forget that as you write or get hung up on getting the “right message” out and so on. That’s what editing is for.

--Colette  

#writing advice #representation #history #people of color #writing #fairy tales #fantasy creatures #supernatural beings #guides #long post #slavery #slavery mention tw #culture #images #asks

[kindred-is-obsessed]

Reasons you should be watching Craig of the Creek

Not enough people are watching this wonderful show, so I thought I’d do my best to introduce people to it. It’s made by former Steven Universe crew Ben Levin and Matt Burnett, so if you’re missing Steven Universe while it’s on hiatus this is a great way to keep away the hiatus blues, or if you just enjoy in cartoons. It’s great for a whole list of reasons, which broadly fall into the two categories of great representation and great storytelling:

Canonical queer representation

-       The witches premiere in the episode The Curse. If you aren’t sure if you want to watch this whole show definitely watch this one at least! It’s my absolute favourite not least of all because it’s about teen goth girls in love. It has a sequel The Last Kid in The Creek which is also wonderful, and the witches cameo throughout the series. I don’t want to spoil too much but The Curse is essentially about the two not wanting to be separated and struggling to admit their feelings for each other. (Spoilers: they do and walk off alone, blushing, staring at each other lovingly, while the kids aww at them)

-       Bernard and his girlfriend watch a cooking show hosted by a gay couple.

-       Other cameos, hints and coded queer kids such as JP’s sister (who has fancy dinner reservations with Kat, a woman with a shaved head who compliments Kelsey’s fake sword). There’s also Raj and Shaun (two very close friends), as well as several very boyish tomboys, including Handlebarb and Turner.

-       All public bathrooms I’ve spotted in the show have gender neutral signs on them which is nice.

POC representation

-       Craig, the main character, is black and has a loving family explored in depth, including an activist grandmother working for the council, a wise and fun grandfather, a supportive fun dad who loves his amazing wife, an adorable assertive little sister, and an angsty overachieving older brother who just wants to be a good grownup who loves his family and girlfriend.  

-       There are MANY characters of colour. There are black and brown characters, Raj is Indian, Stacks is Hispanic (and it’s implied she is an immigrant), there are several Asian characters, Kelsey is Hungarian and Jewish, a persistent background character wears a hijab (I’m pretty sure she was named at some point but I can’t find her name anywhere. She definitely has lines at one point). I’m sure there are others I have missed. No one is a stereotype as far as I am aware.

Subtle neurodivergent representation

-       JP is possibly on the autism spectrum. I’d love neurodivergent people’s opinions on this, but while the representation isn’t canonical or obvious I think it’s good that while JP is represented as having different thought processes from his friends, he isn’t made fun of for it, at least not by them. It’s noteworthy I think that he’s the eldest of the core trio, probably because he finds it easier to relate to younger people who still share his imagination and care less about his unique way of thinking. His neurodivergence is explored most explicitly in the episode Jextra Perrestrial, so if you’re interested in this kind of representation definitely check that episode out.

Non-nuclear family representation

-       While the main character is a member of the typical nuclear family you see on TV (except black, and actually interesting) most of the other families we see are not.

-       JP is raised by his mother and older sister. His father is never mentioned and their house is definitely in worse condition than the others we see. His family works hard to take care of each other. His sister is a nurse and both her and her mother are away a lot of the time, but they both love JP very much. JP’s sister also happens to be really openly body positive. I love them a lot.

-       Kelsey’s father is an only parent. There’s still a lot of mystery surrounding how Kelsey’s mother passed away. It’s a very subtle but important part of Kelsey’s character and comes through in really bittersweet adorable ways (not limited to Kelsey using her “half-orphan”ness to guilt trip a man into giving her money)

-       Other kinds of families are scattered throughout the show, including families that move around a lot, a home-school kid with a strict mother, and more.

Unique approach to fantasy and sci-fi

-       You know how most kids show will take a kid’s fantasy and bring it to reality? Well Craig of the Creek keeps the fantastical and nostalgic element of that line of thinking but never confirms or denies whether the kids fantasies are real or in their heads. And not in a Scooby Doo way where the fantastical elements are explained away, but are hinted as a possibility right at the very end. Instead, two perspectives (the fantastical perspective and the realistic perspective) are woven into every episode.

-       This means there are two ways to interpret every episode. You can view the witches as real witches, or as goth teenagers. You can view Helen as a kid from another dimension, or a home-school kid who is never at the creek at the same time as the other kids. You can view Deltron as a cyborg from the future, or as an imaginative kid from a big city.

-       This is super unique and fun to watch. They come up with so many new ideas and its always fun to figure out what’s actually happening, while still getting to relive childhood fantastical nostalgia.

-       Almost all of these episodes use this to talk about an issue, but these issues can get quite complex and are definitely not shoved down your throat.

Overarching mystery plot about a colonialist kingdom / cult

-       Love the slow burn storytelling of Steven Universe’s Diamond Authority? Love putting together the mysteries of Gravity Falls? Then you’ll love this plot about colonialism, classism, bullying, peer pressure and more and its mysterious build up including cryptic graffiti art and flower symbolism.

-       Even before this arc properly begins, Craig of The Creek primarily centers around the microcosm of the Creek. Many of the episodes have a lot of commentary on society, politics and how different factions of people form and interact.

-       The show is over 50 episodes in and this arc is only just starting to kick off so now is the time to catch up and watch.

-       Fun complex villain(s)

Complex relatable characters

-       Want commentary and nostalgia about horse girls, children’s tea parties, weird kids, angsty teens, young weebs, dweebs and more!? Every childhood obsession is represented in this show.

-       Adults! All the parents and older teens in this show are just as rich and complex as the kids. They are all so interesting and fun.  

-       Want characters with arcs, aims, fun relationships and complexity!? Look no further! Redemption arcs! Revelations! Found family! It’s all here!

Great art and soundtrack

-       Cute background and character designs that make you nostalgic as hell and are also beautiful and well thought out.

-       Sometimes the art design is changed up for a particular episode to portray a certain fantastical / sci fi element. It’s very fun and engaging. 

-       An opening song that’s fun to sing along to, bittersweet ending song that makes me want to cry, a couple of musical episodes including a super fun rap musical episode, and a great OST

Queer headcanons

-       There are tons of ways to interpret the show but here’s some of my head canons just to get an idea.

-       (Note that despite my headcanons I use the pronouns for the kids that they use in the show cause I’m not certain about any of it and they’re kids who haven’t come out yet and also for clarity and consistency’s sake – I’m not saying trans people are not their genders. Don’t worry I’m nonbinary)

-       I headcanon that all the main trio grow up to realise they are queer. They strike me as that weird group of friends that doesn’t fit in with the other kids and aren’t quite sure how they all came to be friends, only to later realise they all showed early signs of breaking gender roles and that’s why they stuck together.

-       Craig definitely grows up to realise he’s gay, bisexual or queer. His admiration for characters like Deltron and Green Poncho are definitely crushes that he mistakes for a strong sudden and eager desire for friendship.

-       Kelsey probably grows up to realise she is nonbinary, a trans boy or a WLW. I mostly headcanon this because I relate to her a lot and I’m nonbinary and queer so I said so. She reminds me a lot of myself as a kid. She throws herself into books, mostly fantasy for escapism. She fantasises and writes a lot for the same reasons. She dresses like a tomboy (She always wears her hair up in the same bun which strongly reminds me of my own childhood hair dysphoria) and she hangs out solely with male friends.

-       JP gives me strong trans lesbian vibes, or to a lesser extent nonbinary vibes. (I know his sister is WLW coded but take it from me there can be more than one queer in a family). He is interested in girls, specifically Maney the horse girl (he even joined the horse girls for one episode). He wears a long V-neck shirt that is essentially a dress ALL the time. He’s aware that he’s different and while self conscious sometimes, mostly just wants to express himself the way he wants to. He also chooses to go by initials JP over his very gendered name Johnathan Paul (In a recent episode he names a ship after himself, calling it “The SS Johnathon Paulina”).

-       (Sidenote if you do start watching this show and I see any nasty shipping of these characters in non puppy-love fashion so help me god)

 Other reasons

-       The show is at times very intertextual and references Princess Mononoke, Super Smash Brothers, Sailor Moon, Lord of the Rings, and a billion other things. It also has some fun cameos, including background images of the Tres Horny Boys from The Adventure Zone, a TARDIS from Doctor Who, and a Cookie Cat from Steven Universe.

-       Honestly, this post hasn’t done the best job explaining why I love this show so much. You honestly just have to watch an episode to understand fully what I’m talking about, so give it a go! Watch The Curse at least, it only goes for 10 minutes.

#craig of the creek #gravity falls #steven universe #ok ko #cartoons #reccommended #recommendations #recommendation #hiatus #cartoon network #star vs the forces of evil #svtfoe #su #cotc #representation #show #watch #adventure time #bravest warriors #analysis #headcanon #shera #spop #we bare bears #clarence #avatar #atla #tlok #disney #the amazing world of gumball

[kamalahkhan]

AoT isn't anti-semitic. How can it be anti-semitic if it doesn't even feature jewish characters? AoT has their own in world lore/religion where some ppl worship the walls and some the titans. Racism however plays a big role in the manga, but it gets NEVER condoned. What apparently flies over anons head is that Eren is a byproduct of a thousand year of hate and his character fell into villainy.

I see what you want to convey but something does not have to contain explicitly stated jewish people for it to be anti-semitic. 

The caricatures, stereotypes can be taken and made into insensitive stuff that can only be understood when people decide to give a thought to it (like anything that has goblins in it, the step mother from the original snow white movie when she turns into a witch, rapunzel’s ‘mother’ in Tangled and so on).

Speaking in favour of insensitivity, violence and oppression towards Jewish coded characters is anti-semitism. 

That is what I have to say about the anti-semitism in fictional works part, now coming to AoT.

As I have stated that I have not read the manga or watched the anime. All I know is that the richest class in the inner-most wall is the actual culprit in the story. They were the reason for the Titans who are actually innocent and eat humans in hopes of turning back into human themselves. The rich people are the ones who brought ill fate upon others beyond their own wall, and upon realization people come together as a whole against them. There is a huge involvement of the military.

Also some philosophies are taken from an real Nazi person whose name I forgot but I’ll look it up and add it in the edited version. 

I take your word that this contains heavy sensitive elements so one should be very critical and careful. That being said, please don’t hate anyone for watching/reading AoT. Its not possible for everybody to be deeply involved in everything and have the proper knowledge. (this last part is not for anon, its for people who are hardcore anti AoT)

#asks #aot #snk #anti-semitism mention #Anonymous

[thecorteztwins]

🔥 villains. 🔥 the hellfire club 🔥the difference between naive and unintelligent characters

Welp, this all got STUPIDLY LONG and I’m really sorry. Under a cut because HUUUUUGE.

🔥 villains.There’s just been a robbery! All the jewels in the museum’s vault have been stolen! The culprits are….Sabretooth and Magneto!Yeah, that doesn’t sound right, does it? Thievery isn’t really something either of them do, they’re not bank robber or cat burglar types at all. And Magneto’s not a fan of Sabes to my memory, it’s unlikely he’d work with him unless it was essential to his ACTUAL goals…which this isn’t. But hey, they’re both bad guys, so they must do ALL the bad things! No matter what it is, it’s in-character if it’s evil or unlawful, right?This is the logic that I see running both often in fandom, and also sometimes with canon writers. There’s a mentality that if someone is villainous or bad in ONE way, then they must be villainous or bad in ALL ways. I think there’s always been this misunderstanding, as people do tend to think in black and white a lot, but I think it’s also increased with the rise of purity culture in Tumblr, where people/characters/works are All Good or All Bad, and if the bad guys aren’t depicted as 1000% heinously evil then it’s APOLOGISM. An example in RP would be that more than once I’d had people expect Fabian to be a racist. I can see why, given that he expresses sexism, classism, a bit of ableism, and disgust with physical mutations. But not only does he never express racism, he never expresses racism DESPITE AMPLE OPPORTUNITY. Think about it—his main antagonists are Magneto (Jewish) and Quicksilver (Jewish and Romani), he once personally fights Bishop (Black and Indigenous Australian) one on one, he’s on one team with Shinobi (half white, half Japanese), and his allies/underlings in the second-gen Acolytes included people who are African American, Moroccan (and Muslim-coded), and Inuit. And he never, ever, EVER even THOUGHT anything related to race (or religions that are usually implicitly tied to race) about ANY of them. Given how blatant his other prejudices are, I think he would very much let the reader KNOW if he were racist, anti-Semitic, etc. An example in canon…look, I’m sorry to bring up this dead horse again, but it is the best example that I presently have—Sebastian Shaw making the “women’s work” comment. As with Fabian, I get why it makes sense on the surface. He’s a powerful man, the proverbial rich old white guy, and he’s part of an organization where women walk around in lingerie as a general rule. It seems like it makes sense, it does, I grant that. But then if you actually look at his history…for 40 years of canon, he’s been allies and enemies with many powerful women, and never made a remark about their gender, never relegated lesser or menial tasks to them, never treated any of them differently as partners or foes, he actually never even flirts with any of them, be they opponents or partners in crime  (except that ONE issue when Emma is in Storm’s body and he kisses her…yeah that was a weird issue, why does a telepath need a gun to switch bodies?) Which is pretty unusual for a male Claremont villain. And he actually reacts with “I…see.” the one time a comrade makes a genuinely sexist remark. He doesn’t agree with him, he’s more like “wow ok I can’t believe he said that but I guess I’ll let it go since I want to recruit him” So, it’s actually VERY odd for him to suddenly say something like that, once you know the character. Especially since, like Fabian, he had TONS of opportunity in the past and he’s also not a character that most writers want to seem sympathetic or likeable. So it’s unlikely the writers were just trying to make him look good by playing down some secret sexist tendencies all this time or something. It’s more likely he just doesn’t have them BUT IS STILL A HORRIBLE PERSON! He just doesn’t need to be horrible in every way! Most people, even the MOST terrible, aren’t horrible in EVERY WAY POSSIBLE.That’s also why I try to avoid having Fabian being too homophobic (beyond “I can convert lesbians”) or transphobic, despite the fact that I *could* justify it (since those things are very intertwined with sexism)—because he’s awful enough. Giving him additional bigotries just seems stupidly redundant and cheap. Especially since I think people actually hate a bigoted character more than they hate a murderer; like I feel like if Duggan ever graduates to Shaw making a racist or homophobic remark, I might have to close his blog, but it’s fine to have blogs for fictional serial killers. By the same token, a villain having good traits doesn’t somehow eliminate their bad ones, especially if the good and bad traits are unrelated to each other. A mass murderer supervillain is not “actually a good guy deep down” because he loves his family; it’s actually VERY common for even genocidal dictators to care for their own. Hell, not to go all Godwin, but Hitler was an animal-lover and had a beloved dog. You can certainly point to good traits to show that a villain isn’t ALL bad (which as I just said, I support) but not being “all bad” isn’t the same as “actually a good person and just misunderstood!” Like, Shaw being an egalitarian in a lot of regards or was good to Madelyne Pryor or loved his father, doesn’t change he’s a heartless, morally bankrupt monster who abused his son and sold out an entire oppressed species (his own, no less) for his own financial gain. Mystique is an incredibly complex character, far more so than Shaw, but her love for Destiny and Rogue and many of her other good points don’t change that she hunted down other mutants for the government, abused her human son for not being a mutant, has committed rape by deception numerous times (though I think that’s due to the writers not realizing that’s a thing), constantly tries to manipulate her daughter’s life and choices, and I’m pretty sure I recall an issue where she framed a guy for domestic abuse just for funsies?Basically, villains are people. They have individual different traits and beliefs and motives, and those things will drive them towards individual different types of villainy. One villain probably won’t do the same kind of villainy that another does. Likewise, someone being a shitty person in one way, or many ways, doesn’t mean they will be in ALL ways. Pointing this out isn’t the same thing as denying their flaws or defending them, but some people do do this and that’s wrong too. Nuance needs to be allowed for. Pointing out Shaw isn’t awful in every way doesn’t mean I think he’s a misunderstood woobie whose crimes should all be forgiven. Pointing out Mystique has done awful shit doesn’t mean I think she’s pure evil and all her complex points should be ignored. It just means I don’t think characters should be strawmanned by fans OR writers as paragons or demons, especially when it contradicts what canon has actually established (with the caveat that canon is dumb sometimes too, and also some characters canonically ARE one extreme or the other, but I’m talking about ones who AREN’T)🔥 the hellfire clubI’ll give two on this! One is “unpopular” just in the sense it’s not something I’ve ever heard anyone express, but I’ve never heard an opinion in opposition to it either. The other is “unpopular” in that it does directly contradict a popularly held opinion.The first is that I think it’s stupid that Grant Morrisson made The Hellfire Club into a strip club, and it’s stupid that writers since depicted it this way. The Hellfire Club is shown in the 80s and 90s as being, first and foremost, an elite social club for the wealthiest and most powerful people in society. It’s basically a big posh country club, and most of its members are just regular people. Super duper rich people, but still normal people, lots of old money and new money and big business owners and politicians and probably royalty/nobility. Most of what they’re doing is big fancy, stuffy galas and balls, that kind of thing. But under the surface, it’s hinted that there is indeed a much more sexual underside to it. The female staff wear very fetishy maid costumes, the female Inner Circles literally have dominatrix lingerie as their getups, and while we actually never see what goes on beyond the closed doors in the 80s, nor was anything directly stated, the hints are definitely there that it’s as libertine in the private rooms as they are prim and proper in the ballrooms. We don’t know WHAT exactly is happening, only that it’s dark and decadent and surely sexual in some kind of “abnormal” (read: kink shaming) way.And then it turns out it’s just a strip club where the dancers wear corsets? Really? REALLY? I’m sorry, you expect me to belief that these oh-so-forbidden and secretive sexual delights that are available only to the richest and most powerful people in the world are…a TITTY BAR WITH NO ACTUAL TITTIES EVEN OUT???? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! It’s so fucking juvenile! It feels like something a 13 year old made up while trying to come up with the mos edgy, shocking, “sexy” thing he could. It just…doesn’t work. It doesn’t work firstly because it completely took away the whole “upper class veneer” that is as much an essential part of the HFC as the sex. In fact, I think more so. Writers, artists, and fans all like to focus on ZOMG THE SEXY COSTUMES but thematically speaking, I think the fact it’s an elite organization exclusive to the super-wealthy is much more important; that should be what they’re really about as villains, but writers end up focusing way too much on the shock value of the kink, and that’s how you wind up with stuff like this. The second reason it doesn’t work is that…it isn’t even shocking. When what they were doing was kept hidden, the reader could imagine no limit of decadence and depravity. When it’s revealed, and revealed as something that’s frankly super and common and TAME (seriously, strip clubs aren’t edgy these days) that you can get anywhere else, you’re left wondering why exactly anyone gives a shit about being in the HFC if this is all it really is? We should NEVER get to see what the HFC patrons truly do in private, and we should definitely never get shown that it’s just watching a woman pole dance with Victorian underwear on. That doesn’t make the HFC look sexual, it makes them look like PRUDES!Honestly, I do actually love the sexy sinful decadent aspect, but it’s overtaken the “extremely rich and powerful people trying to rule the world from behind the scenes through political and economic manipulation” aspect (which is far more interesting and villainous) that I kind of wish sometimes they had been created without the kink or colonial cosplay aspects, and instead had just worn some 80s powersuits.Now, here’s the “unpopular as in contradicts the popular” opinion. I see the Hellfire Club described a lot, in canon and fandom, as an organization of powerful MEN, as a bunch of MEN who just want to control others, as a BOY’S club…but aside from Sebastian Shaw, all the most prominent and effective members of the Club have been women? I mean, think about it. The names most synonymous with “Hellfire Club” in fandom are Emma Frost, Selene, Jean Grey as Dark Phoenix, and Sebastian Shaw. Shaw’s the ONLY dude that really gets any focus from writers OR fans; the women are almost always utilized more by writers and remembered more by fans. Heck, in the London Branch of the Hellfire Club, NONE of the male members of the Inner Circle even got NAMES, while ALL the women did. Now, of course, individual women in an organization being successful in said organization and beloved by fans/writers, doesn’t mean the organization itself can’t also be sexist. And like most people, the disparity between the costumes of both the Inner Circle and the mere staff does lead me to believe that it was probably founded and run only by men originally, and I bet women probably weren’t even allowed in for a long time (especially given that it was established in the 1700s) But that’s my HEADCANON. That’s what I EXTRAPOLATE. But what’s actually on the page IN THE PRESENT is women that are on equal footing with men, or superior to them. They’re not just simply ALLOWED in the Inner Circle, they’ve been dominating it from the first appearance with Emma ruling it alongside Shaw over Leland and Pierce, and then Selene coming in to challenge Shaw and Emma (with Shaw being terrified of her) in a way that none of the other members (all male—Leland, Pierce, Von Roehm) could. Gender is never brought up by anyone, even the most despicable male HFC members like Donald Pierce. So while I believe it was founded by sexist men, the Inner Circle seems pretty egalitarian now.But of course, there’s the costumes. I absolutely think it’s a sexist setup that the men get to wear (super ugly) period cosplay while the women are in fetish lingerie. It seems to be the standard uniform, and the fact that they haven’t CHANGED it shows that there’s definitely still some sexism.Except…it doesn’t seem to be a rule in-universe that the women HAVE to wear them? We actually see female members of the HFC, such as Selene, wearing clothing other than that while hanging out there; there’s actually a scene wear Selene is wearing pants and a sleeveless turtleneck with gloves. Maddy also wears a lot of black leather when she’s a member, but it doesn’t look like the Hellfire Club ladies getup, it looks like all the other stuff she was wearing in the 90s. And when Selene, Emma, etc., AREN’T in the Hellfire Club…they often still dress exactly like that, or in a similiar manner. I think it’s pretty clear that no one is MAKING them wear the uniforms, they just LIKE them, they’re probably “encouraged but optional” or something like that. And Emma even has that WHOLE DAMN SPEECH about how this is her armor, how it empowers her, etc. That said, while I don’t think any other CHARACTERS are making these women dress like that, I do think the writers/artists are. If a real woman made the speech that Emma did, I’d be like “ok sure, you go girl, do what feels empowering for you”. But Emma ISN’T a real woman. Every word in her mouth in that panel is being put there by Chris Claremont, a horny man with a dominatrix fetish who is trying to justify it by selling it as feminist. That is what it is. But just because that’s the case on a meta level…on an in-universe level, no one makes these women dress like this, and that’s very evident, and while the way they’re treated by writers/artists is definitely affected by them being women, the way other characters, including the Hellfire Club men, treats them, isn’t. At least not til shitty recent stuff. (I’ve seen some people think SHAW made the women dress like that….yeah, sure, like he could make SELENE do anything? He’s completely afraid of her but somehow can make her wear something she doesn’t want? Emma and Selene dress like that no matter where they are and whether they’re presently HFC members or not, but somehow he’s making them do that? HOW DOES ANYONE GIVE THIS GUY THAT MUCH CREDIT?)Basically, I think people are TRYING to be feminist, but it often ends up feeling like SEXISM to me? Because it’s totally ignoring and erasing the power and agency that these women exert in this organization, and often even claiming that it’s actually the men who have all the control, when aside from Shaw it’s usually the ladies running the show. It just seems disrespectful to me. It’s like, as much as people are claiming to hate a lack of agency for female characters, they seem more comfortable with that idea than a situation where women actually HAD it. Maybe it’s because they’re villains, maybe it’s because the costumes really are distracting and unequal no matter how the writers try to justify it (again, I wish they’d just gone with business suits), but there seems to be an overall fandom determination to insist on women like Emma Frost and Selene as victims or simply accomplices to a greater (male) villain, rather than embracing them as the Top Tier Bad Bitches they were/are, and, again, that seems more sexist to me than not. But I worry people will think I’m sexist if I say that. But you know me, you know I LOVE agency for female characters, and how I rail against it when see them ACTUALLY lacking it in comics, so you know it’s not that. I think it’s just a part of the rise in purity culture that even “progressive” people would rather see a woman forced or coerced to be a victim than choose of her own volition to be a villain and be GOOD at it :/🔥the difference between naive and unintelligent charactersWell, firstly, obviously there IS a difference. Naivete is just a lack of experience or learned knowledge, neither of which has anything to do with intelligence. A naive character may make mistakes in a new situation based on their lack of knowledge about it, and that may LOOK stupid to those who have this knowledge, but it’s not the same thing. I think we can agree that, say, Tony Stark isn’t stupid, but if he had to navigate in the wilderness, he might do things that experienced hikers and campers and outdoors people know are SUPER BAD IDEAS. Because this isn’t something he knows about or has experience with.So, I think considering characters who are new to this world (as is common in comics—lots of people from other dimensions, planets, and times) as stupid because they don’t know a lot of things we take as a given, is erroneous. I think it’s pretty common for fandom to look at, say, Longshot or Thor, and deem them as basically being idiots because they’re not familiar with their new environments…when in fact, we’d all be acting the same if we wound up in Asgard or Mojoworld. Not that there’s not other reasons they can’t be idiots, but not knowing what a toaster is isn’t one of them.The big difference is that naivete is a temporary state, and I think both writers and fans forget that. The character’s naivete will gradually decrease as they learn more and more. So if you’re writing an Avengers fic where Thor has been on Earth for five years so far, he probably knows what a toaster is, can order normally at a restaurant, isn’t confused by normal sights like cars or traffic lights or computers, etc., but could still be confused if he went to a Midgardian country with very different cultural norms than the ones he’s learned in the United States. Likewise, I can keep Malcolm perpetually baffled by new worlds in RP since time is kinda wobbly here and can be static or move forward or back as we like, but if I were writing him in a linear story, he would have to learn along the way about the technology and norms of other worlds as he experiences them; if he didn’t learn, THEN he would be unintelligent, not just naive. If he touches a hot stove once because he didn’t know what it was, and it burns him, that’s naive. If he touches it twice to test if it does the same thing again, that’s curious and maybe even smart, despite looking stupid to others. If he keeps doing it every day by accident, then THAT’S an idiot. Also, even a naive character may still be able to deduce that certain things are bad ideas, dangerous, etc. For instance, let’s say my character is a normal everyday girl sucked into a fantasy realm. She doesn’t understand the language, and the people around her don’t look like anything humanoid, but when all of them go quiet and still when a larger, more decorated one enters, and they all give it a lot of space, she can probably deduce that this is someone of great importance, and she probably should do what the others are doing and not risk pissing it off. She may know nothing about these beings or their customs, but she still can use her powers of observation and common sense. It may end up being a TOTALLY wrong move—for instance, maybe newcomers are meant to come introduce themselves to the leader by touching them–but it was a good, sensible guess. Whereas if she’d just walked up to the being and given it a good swift kick, that’d be unintelligent to an almost unbelievable point, and no amount of “she’s just naive!” could excuse it.Oh yeah, and optimism doesn’t automatically equate to naivete either. To be honest, I think that extreme cynicism is just as naive in its own way as thinking everything is sunshine and daisies, and I’d like to see this explored more in fiction rather than the perpetual “happy positive people are dumb and naive and just don’t know better, whereas the grumpy cynics are always smarter and more experienced” that media is so fond of.TL;DR Not only is naivete not unintelligence, it also should be a temporary state. It’s definitely cute to watch a naive character stumble around their new experiences, but in gaining those experiences, they’re going to become less naive, and make few mistakes. Naive characters should also still be capable of acting in ways that are sensible, even if they end up being wrong for the new situation. And being positive doesn’t automatically equate naivete either, nor does negativity equate to the reverse (and can be naive in itself)

#unpopular opinion #salt #meta #badmusesdoitwell

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Two ideas puzzled me deeply as a child growing up in Brooklyn during the 1930’s in what today would be called an integrated neighborhood. One of them was that all Jews were rich; the other was that all Negroes were persecuted. These ideas had appeared in print; therefore they must be true. My own experience and the evidence of my senses told me they were not true, but that only confirmed what a day-dreaming boy in the provinces—for the lower-class neighborhoods of New York belong as surely to the provinces as any rural town in North Dakota—discovers very early: his experience is unreal and the evidence of his senses is not to be trusted. Yet even a boy with a head full of fantasies incongruously synthesized out of Hollywood movies and English novels cannot altogether deny the reality of his own experience—especially when there is so much deprivation in that experience. Nor can he altogether gainsay the evidence of his own senses—especially such evidence of the senses as comes from being repeatedly beaten up, robbed, and in general hated, terrorized, and humiliated.

And so for a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover, to me. During the early years of the war, when my older sister joined a left-wing youth organization, I remember my astonishment at hearing her passionately denounce my father for thinking that Jews were worse off than Negroes. To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed very clear that Negroes were better off than Jews—indeed, than all whites. A city boy’s world is contained within three or four square blocks, and in my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes. What could it mean, then, to say that they were badly off and that we were more fortunate? Yet my sister’s opinions, like print, were sacred, and when she told me about exploitation and economic forces I believed her. I believed her, but I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.

It had not always been so—that much I can recall from early childhood. When did it start, this fear and this hatred? There was a kindergarten in the local public school, and given the character of the neighborhood, at least half of the children in my class must have been Negroes. Yet I have no memory of being aware of color differences at that age, and I know from observing my own children that they attribute no significance to such differences even when they begin noticing them. I think there was a day—first grade? second grade?—when my best friend Carl hit me on the way home from school and announced that he wouldn’t play with me any more because I had killed Jesus. When I ran home to my mother crying for an explanation, she told me not to pay any attention to such foolishness, and then in Yiddish she cursed the goyim and the Schwartzes, the Schwartzes and the goyim. Carl, it turned out, was a schwartze, and so was added a third to the categories into which people were mysteriously divided.

Sometimes I wonder whether this is a true memory at all. It is blazingly vivid, but perhaps it never happened: can anyone really remember back to the age of six? There is no uncertainty in my mind, however, about the years that followed. Carl and I hardly ever spoke, though we met in school every day up through the eighth or ninth grade. There would be embarrassed moments of catching his eye or of his catching mine—for whatever it was that had attracted us to one another as very small children remained alive in spite of the fantastic barrier of hostility that had grown up between us, suddenly and out of nowhere. Nevertheless, friendship would have been impossible, and even if it had been possible, it would have been unthinkable. About that, there was nothing anyone could do by the time we were eight years old.

Item: The orphanage across the street is torn down, a city housing project begins to rise in its place, and on the marvelous vacant lot next to the old orphanage they are building a playground. Much excitement and anticipation as Opening Day draws near. Mayor LaGuardia himself comes to dedicate this great gesture of public benevolence. He speaks of neighborliness and borrowing cups of sugar, and of the playground he says that children of all races, colors, and creeds will learn to live together in harmony. A week later, some of us are swatting flies on the playground’s inadequate little ball field. A gang of Negro kids, pretty much our own age, enter from the other side and order us out of the park. We refuse, proudly and indignantly, with superb masculine fervor. There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first nauseating experience of cowardice. And my first appalled realization that there are people in the world who do not seem to be afraid of anything, who act as though they have nothing to lose. Thereafter the playground becomes a battleground, sometimes quiet, sometimes the scene of athletic competition between Them and Us. But rocks are thrown as often as baseballs. Gradually we abandon the place and use the streets instead. The streets are safer, though we do not admit this to ourselves. We are not, after all, sissies—that most dreaded epithet of an American boyhood.

Item: I am standing alone in front of the building in which I live. It is late afternoon and getting dark. That day in school the teacher had asked a surly Negro boy named Quentin a question he was unable to answer. As usual I had waved my arm eagerly (“Be a good boy, get good marks, be smart, go to college, become a doctor”) and, the right answer bursting from my lips, I was held up lovingly by the teacher as an example to the class. I had seen Quentin’s face—a very dark, very cruel, very Oriental-looking face—harden, and there had been enough threat in his eyes to make me run all the way home for fear that he might catch me outside.

Now, standing idly in front of my own house, I see him approaching from the project accompanied by his little brother who is carrying a baseball bat and wearing a grin of malicious anticipation. As in a nightmare, I am trapped. The surroundings are secure and familiar, but terror is suddenly present and there is no one around to help. I am locked to the spot. I will not cry out or run away like a sissy, and I stand there, my heart wild, my throat clogged. He walks up, hurls the familiar epithet (“Hey, mo’f—r”), and to my surprise only pushes me. It is a violent push, but not a punch. A push is not as serious as a punch. Maybe I can still back out without entirely losing my dignity. Maybe I can still say, “Hey, c’mon Quentin, whaddya wanna do that for. I dint do nothin’ to you,” and walk away, not too rapidly. Instead, before I can stop myself, I push him back—a token gesture—and I say, “Cut that out, I don’t wanna fight, I ain’t got nothin’ to fight about.” As I turn to walk back into the building, the corner of my eye catches the motion of the bat his little brother has handed him. I try to duck, but the bat crashes colored lights into my head.

The next thing I know, my mother and sister are standing over me, both of them hysterical. My sister—she who was later to join the “progressive” youth organization—is shouting for the police and screaming imprecations at those dirty little black bastards. They take me upstairs, the doctor comes, the police come. I tell them that the boy who did it was a stranger, that he had been trying to get money from me. They do not believe me, but I am too scared to give them Quentin’s name. When I return to school a few days later, Quentin avoids my eyes. He knows that I have not squealed, and he is ashamed. I try to feel proud, but in my heart I know that it was fear of what his friends might do to me that had kept me silent, and not the code of the street.

Item: There is an athletic meet in which the whole of our junior high school is participating. I am in one of the seventh-grade rapid-advance classes, and “segregation” has now set in with a vengeance. In the last three or four years of the elementary school from which we have just graduated, each grade had been divided into three classes, according to “intelligence.” (In the earlier grades the divisions had either been arbitrary or else unrecognized by us as having anything to do with brains.) These divisions by IQ, or however it was arranged, had resulted in a preponderance of Jews in the “1” classes and a corresponding preponderance of Negroes in the “3’s,” with the Italians split unevenly along the spectrum. At least a few Negroes had always made the “l’s,” just as there had always been a few Jewish kids among the “3’s” and more among the “2’s” (where Italians dominated). But the junior high’s rapid-advance class of which I am now a member is overwhelmingly Jewish and entirely white—except for a shy lonely Negro girl with light skin and reddish hair.

The athletic meet takes place in a city-owned stadium far from the school. It is an important event to which a whole day is given over. The winners are to get those precious little medallions stamped with the New York City emblem that can be screwed into a belt and that prove the wearer to be a distinguished personage. I am a fast runner, and so I am assigned the position of anchor man on my class’s team in the relay race. There are three other seventh-grade teams in the race, two of them all Negro, as ours is all white. One of the all-Negro teams is very tall—their anchor man waiting silently next to me on the line looks years older than I am, and I do not recognize him. He is the first to get the baton and crosses the finishing line in a walk. Our team comes in second, but a few minutes later we are declared the winners, for it has been discovered that the anchor man on the first-place team is not a member of the class. We are awarded the medallions, and the following day our home-room teacher makes a speech about how proud she is of us for being superior athletes as well as superior students. We want to believe that we deserve the praise, but we know that we could not have won even if the other class had not cheated.

That afternoon, walking home, I am waylaid and surrounded by five Negroes, among whom is the anchor man of the disqualified team. “Gimme my medal, mo’f—r,” he grunts. I do not have it with me and I tell him so. “Anyway, it ain’t yours,” I say foolishly. He calls me a liar on both counts and pushes me up against the wall on which we sometimes play handball. “Gimme my mo’f—n’ medal,” he says again. I repeat that I have left it home. “Le’s search the li’l mo’f—r,” one of them suggests, “he prolly got it hid in his mo’f—n’ pants.” My panic is now unmanageable. (How many times had I been surrounded like this and asked in soft tones, “Len’ me a nickle, boy.” How many times had I been called a liar for pleading poverty and pushed around, or searched, or beaten up, unless there happened to be someone in the marauding gang like Carl who liked me across that enormous divide of hatred and who would therefore say, “Aaah, c’mon, le’s git someone else, this boy ain’t got no money on ‘im.”) I scream at them through tears of rage and self-contempt, “Keep your f—n’ filthy lousy black hands off a me! I swear I’ll get the cops.” This is all they need to hear, and the five of them set upon me. They bang me around, mostly in the stomach and on the arms and shoulders, and when several adults loitering near the candy store down the block notice what is going on and begin to shout, they run off and away.

I do not tell my parents about the incident. My team-mates, who have also been waylaid, each by a gang led by his opposite number from the disqualified team, have had their medallions taken from them, and they never squeal either. For days, I walk home in terror, expecting to be caught again, but nothing happens. The medallion is put away into a drawer, never to be worn by anyone.

Obviously experiences like these have always been a common feature of childhood life in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, and Negroes do not necessarily figure in them. Wherever, and in whatever combination, they have lived together in the cities, kids of different groups have been at war, beating up and being beaten up: micks against kikes against wops against spicks against polacks. And even relatively homogeneous areas have not been spared the warring of the young: one block against another, one gang (called in my day, in a pathetic effort at gentility, an “S.A.C.,” or social-athletic club) against another. But the Negro-white conflict had—and no doubt still has—a special intensity and was conducted with a ferocity unmatched by intramural white battling.

In my own neighborhood, a good deal of animosity existed between the Italian kids (most of whose parents were immigrants from Sicily) and the Jewish kids (who came largely from East European immigrant families). Yet everyone had friends, sometimes close friends, in the other “camp,” and we often visited one another’s strange-smelling houses, if not for meals, then for glasses of milk, and occasionally for some special event like a wedding or a wake. If it happened that we divided into warring factions and did battle, it would invariably be half-hearted and soon patched up. Our parents, to be sure, had nothing to do with one another and were mutually suspicious and hostile. But we, the kids, who all spoke Yiddish or Italian at home, were Americans, or New Yorkers, or Brooklyn boys: we shared a culture, the culture of the street, and at least for a while this culture proved to be more powerful than the opposing cultures of the home.

Why, why should it have been so different as between the Negroes and us? How was it borne in upon us so early, white and black alike, that we were enemies beyond any possibility of reconciliation? Why did we hate one another so?

I suppose if I tried, I could answer those questions more or less adequately from the perspective of what I have since learned. I could draw upon James Baldwin—what better witness is there?—to describe the sense of entrapment that poisons the soul of the Negro with hatred for the white man whom he knows to be his jailer. On the other side, if I wanted to understand how the white man comes to hate the Negro, I could call upon the psychologists who have spoken of the guilt that white Americans feel toward Negroes and that turns into hatred for lack of acknowledging itself as guilt. These are plausible answers and certainly there is truth in them. Yet when I think back upon my own experience of the Negro and his of me, I find myself troubled and puzzled, much as I was as a child when I heard that all Jews were rich and all Negroes persecuted. How could the Negroes in my neighborhood have regarded the whites across the street and around the corner as jailers? On the whole, the whites were not so poor as the Negroes, but they were quite poor enough, and the years were years of Depression. As for white hatred of the Negro, how could guilt have had anything to do with it? What share had these Italian and Jewish immigrants in the enslavement of the Negro? What share had they—downtrodden people themselves breaking their own necks to eke out a living—in the exploitation of the Negro?

No, I cannot believe that we hated each other back there in Brooklyn because they thought of us as jailers and we felt guilty toward them. But does it matter, given the fact that we all went through an unrepresentative confrontation? I think it matters profoundly, for if we managed the job of hating each other so well without benefit of the aids to hatred that are supposedly at the root of this madness everywhere else, it must mean that the madness is not yet properly understood. I am far from pretending that I understand it, but I would insist that no view of the problem will begin to approach the truth unless it can account for a case like the one I have been trying to describe. Are the elements of any such view available to us?

At least two, I would say, are. One of them is a point we frequently come upon in the work of James Baldwin, and the other is a related point always stressed by psychologists who have studied the mechanisms of prejudice. Baldwin tells us that one of the reasons Negroes hate the white man is that the white man refuses to look at him: the Negro knows that in white eyes all Negroes are alike; they are faceless and therefore not altogether human. The psychologists, in their turn, tell us that the white man hates the Negro because he tends to project those wild impulses that he fears in himself onto an alien group which he then punishes with his contempt. What Baldwin does not tell us, however, is that the principle of facelessness is a two-way street and can operate in both directions with no difficulty at all. Thus, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I was as faceless to the Negroes as they were to me, and if they hated me because I never looked at them, I must also have hated them for never looking at me. To the Negroes, my white skin was enough to define me as the enemy, and in a war it is only the uniform that counts and not the person.

So with the mechanism of projection that the psychologists talk about: it too works in both directions at once. There is no question that the psychologists are right about what the Negro represents symbolically to the white man. For me as a child the life lived on the other side of the playground and down the block on Ralph Avenue seemed the very embodiment of the values of the street—free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic. I put the word “erotic” last, though it is usually stressed above all others, because in fact it came last, in consciousness as in importance. What mainly counted for me about Negro kids of my own age was that they were “bad boys.” There were plenty of bad boys among the whites—this was, after all, a neighborhood with a long tradition of crime as a career open to aspiring talents—but the Negroes were really bad, bad in a way that beckoned to one, and made one feel inadequate. We all went home every day for a lunch of spinach-and-potatoes; they roamed around during lunch hour, munching on candy bars. In winter we had to wear itchy woolen hats and mittens and cumbersome galoshes; they were bare-headed and loose as they pleased. We rarely played hookey, or got into serious trouble in school, for all our street-corner bravado; they were defiant, forever staying out (to do what delicious things?), forever making disturbances in class and in the halls, forever being sent to the principal and returning uncowed. But most important of all, they were tough; beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything. To hell with the teacher, the truant officer, the cop; to hell with the whole of the adult world that held us in its grip and that we never had the courage to rebel against except sporadically and in petty ways.

This is what I saw and envied and feared in the Negro: this is what finally made him faceless to me, though some of it, of course, was actually there. (The psychologists also tell us that the alien group which becomes the object of a projection will tend to respond by trying to live up to what is expected of them.) But what, on his side, did the Negro see in me that made me faceless to him? Did he envy me my lunches of spinach-and-potatoes and my itchy woolen caps and my prudent behavior in the face of authority, as I envied him his noon-time candy bars and his bare head in winter and his magnificent rebelliousness? Did those lunches and caps spell for him the prospect of power and riches in the future? Did they mean that there were possibilities open to me that were denied to him? Very likely they did. But if so, one also supposes that he feared the impulses within himself toward submission to authority no less powerfully than I feared the impulses in myself toward defiance. If I represented the jailer to him, it was not because I was oppressing him or keeping him down: it was because I symbolized for him the dangerous and probably pointless temptation toward greater repression, just as he symbolized for me the equally perilous tug toward greater freedom. I personally was to be rewarded for this repression with a new and better life in the future, but how many of my friends paid an even higher price and were given only gall in return.

We have it on the authority of James Baldwin that all Negroes hate whites. I am trying to suggest that on their side all whites—all American whites, that is—are sick in their feelings about Negroes. There are Negroes, no doubt, who would say that Baldwin is wrong, but I suspect them of being less honest than he is, just as I suspect whites of self-deception who tell me they have no special feeling toward Negroes. Special feelings about color are a contagion to which white Americans seem susceptible even when there is nothing in their background to account for the susceptibility. Thus everywhere we look today in the North, we find the curious phenomenon of white middle-class liberals with no previous personal experience of Negroes—people to whom Negroes have always been faceless in virtue rather than faceless in vice—discovering that their abstract commitment to the cause of Negro rights will not stand the test of a direct confrontation. We find such people fleeing in droves to the suburbs as the Negro population in the inner city grows; and when they stay in the city we find them sending their children to private school rather than to the “integrated” public school in the neighborhood. We find them resisting the demand that gerrymandered school districts be re-zoned for the purpose of overcoming de facto segregation; we find them judiciously considering whether the Negroes (for their own good, of course) are not perhaps pushing too hard; we find them clucking their tongues over Negro militancy; we find them speculating on the question of whether there may not, after all, be something in the theory that the races are biologically different; we find them saying that it will take a very long time for Negroes to achieve full equality, no matter what anyone does; we find them deploring the rise of black nationalism and expressing the solemn hope that the leaders of the Negro community will discover ways of containing the impatience and incipient violence within the Negro ghettos.1

But that is by no means the whole story; there is also the phenomenon of what Kenneth Rexroth once called “crow-jimism.” There are the broken-down white boys like Vivaldo Moore in Baldwin’s Another Country who go to Harlem in search of sex or simply to brush up against something that looks like primitive vitality, and who are so often punished by the Negroes they meet for crimes that they would have been the last ever to commit and of which they themselves have been as sorry victims as any of the Negroes who take it out on them. There are the writers and intellectuals and artists who romanticize Negroes and pander to them, assuming a guilt that is not properly theirs. And there are all the white liberals who permit Negroes to blackmail them into adopting a double standard of moral judgment, and who lend themselves—again assuming the responsibility for crimes they never committed—to cunning and contemptuous exploitation by Negroes they employ or try to befriend.

And what about me? What kind of feelings do I have about Negroes today? What happened to me, from Brooklyn, who grew up fearing and envying and hating Negroes? Now that Brooklyn is behind me, do I fear them and envy them and hate them still? The answer is yes, but not in the same proportions and certainly not in the same way. I now live on the upper west side of Manhattan, where there are many Negroes and many Puerto Ricans, and there are nights when I experience the old apprehensiveness again, and there are streets that I avoid when I am walking in the dark, as there were streets that I avoided when I was a child. I find that I am not afraid of Puerto Ricans, but I cannot restrain my nervousness whenever I pass a group of Negroes standing in front of a bar or sauntering down the street. I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them. And knowing this I feel ashamed and guilty, like the good liberal I have grown up to be. Yet the twinges of fear and the resentment they bring and the self-contempt they arouse are not to be gainsaid.

But envy? Why envy? And hatred? Why hatred? Here again the intensities have lessened and everything has been complicated and qualified by the guilts and the resulting over-compensations that are the heritage of the enlightened middle-class world of which I am now a member. Yet just as in childhood I envied Negroes for what seemed to me their superior masculinity, so I envy them today for what seems to me their superior physical grace and beauty. I have come to value physical grace very highly, and I am now capable of aching with all my being when I watch a Negro couple on the dance floor, or a Negro playing baseball or basketball. They are on the kind of terms with their own bodies that I should like to be on with mine, and for that precious quality they seem blessed to me.

The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself. It no longer has, as for me it once did, any cause or justification (except, perhaps, that I am constantly being denied my right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a child to feel). How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism; I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple; and I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone.

This, then, is where I am; it is not exactly where I think all other white liberals are, but it cannot be so very far away either. And it is because I am convinced that we white Americans are—for whatever reason, it no longer matters—so twisted and sick in our feelings about Negroes that I despair of the present push toward integration. If the pace of progress were not a factor here, there would perhaps be no cause for despair: time and the law and even the international political situation are on the side of the Negroes, and ultimately, therefore, victory—of a sort, anyway—must come. But from everything we have learned from observers who ought to know, pace has become as important to the Negroes as substance. They want equality and they want it now, and the white world is yielding to their demand only as much and as fast as it is absolutely being compelled to do. The Negroes know this in the most concrete terms imaginable, and it is thus becoming increasingly difficult to buy them off with rhetoric and promises and pious assurances of support. And so within the Negro community we find more and more people declaring—as Harold R. Isaacs recently put it in these pages2—that they want out: people who say that integration will never come, or that it will take a hundred or a thousand years to come, or that it will come at too high a price in suffering and struggle for the pallid and sodden life of the American middle class that at the very best it may bring.

The most numerous, influential, and dangerous movement that has grown out of Negro despair with the goal of integration is, of course, the Black Muslims. This movement, whatever else we may say about it, must be credited with one enduring achievement: it inspired James Baldwin to write an essay3 which deserves to be placed among the classics of our language. Everything Baldwin has ever been trying to tell us is distilled here into a statement of overwhelming persuasiveness and prophetic magnificence. Baldwin’s message is and always has been simple. It is this: “Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.” And Baldwin’s demand is correspondingly simple: color must be forgotten, lest we all be smited with a vengeance “that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance based on the law that we recognize when we say, ‘Whatever goes up must come down.’” The Black Muslims Baldwin portrays as a sign and a warning to the intransigent white world. They come to proclaim how deep is the Negro’s disaffection with the white world and all its works, and Baldwin implies that no American Negro can fail to respond somewhere in his being to their message: that the white man is the devil, that Allah has doomed him to destruction, and that the black man is about to inherit the earth. Baldwin of course knows that this nightmare inversion of the racism from which the black man has suffered can neither win nor even point to the neighborhood in which victory might be located. For in his view the neighborhood of victory lies in exactly the opposite direction: the transcendence of color through love.

Yet the tragic fact is that love is not the answer to hate—not in the world of politics, at any rate. Color is indeed a political rather than a human or a personal reality and if politics (which is to say power) has made it into a human and a personal reality, then only politics (which is to say power) can unmake it once again. But the way of politics is slow and bitter, and as impatience on the one side is matched by a setting of the jaw on the other, we move closer and closer to an explosion and blood may yet run in the streets.

Will this madness in which we are all caught never find a resting-place? Is there never to be an end to it? In thinking about the Jews I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant. Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction. And when I think about the Negroes in America and about the image of integration as a state in which the Negroes would take their rightful place as another of the protected minorities in a pluralistic society, I wonder whether they really believe in their hearts that such a state can actually be attained, and if so why they should wish to survive as a distinct group. I think I know why the Jews once wished to survive (though I am less certain as to why we still do): they not only believed that God had given them no choice, but they were tied to a memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption. What does the American Negro have that might correspond to this? His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness.

I share this hope, but I cannot see how it will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation. The Black Muslims, like their racist counterparts in the white world, accuse the “so-called Negro leaders” of secretly pursuing miscegenation as a goal. The racists are wrong, but I wish they were right, for I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned. I am not claiming that this alternative can be pursued programmatically or that it is immediately feasible as a solution; obviously there are even greater barriers to its achievement than to the achievement of integration. What I am saying, however, is that in my opinion the Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way.

I have told the story of my own twisted feelings about Negroes here, and of how they conflict with the moral convictions I have since developed, in order to assert that such feelings must be acknowledged as honestly as possible so that they can be controlled and ultimately disregarded in favor of the convictions. It is wrong for a man to suffer because of the color of his skin. Beside that clichéd proposition of liberal thought, what argument can stand and be respected? If the arguments are the arguments of feeling, they must be made to yield; and one’s own soul is not the worst place to begin working a huge social transformation. Not so long ago, it used to be asked of white liberals, “Would you like your sister to marry one?” When I was a boy and my sister was still unmarried, I would certainly have said no to that question. But now I am a man, my sister is already married, and I have daughters. If I were to be asked today whether I would like a daughter of mine “to marry one,” I would have to answer: “No, I wouldn’t like it at all. I would rail and rave and rant and tear my hair. And then I hope I would have the courage to curse myself for raving and ranting, and to give her my blessing. How dare I withhold it at the behest of the child I once was and against the man I now have a duty to be?”

#racism #Norman Podhoretz #neoconservatism #tw: racism

[an-ephemeral-blog]

Linkspam #7

Top Links

Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy by Nan Estad at Boston Review:

Business schools fetishize entrepreneurial innovation, but their most prominent heroes succeeded because they manipulated corporate law, not because of personal brilliance.

Capitalism, like the United States itself, has a mythology, and for five decades one of its central characters has been the nineteenth-century maverick cigarette entrepreneur, James B. Duke. Duke’s risk-taking investment in the newfangled machine-made cigarette, so the story goes, displaced the pricey, hand-rolled variety offered by his stodgy competitors. This, in turn, won Duke control of the national, and soon global, cigarette market. Repeated ad nauseam in business and history journals, high school and university curricula, popular magazines, and websites, the story has taught that disruptive innovation drives capitalist progress.

The problem? The Duke story is false: mid-century business historians fabricated it to accord with the theory of creative destruction, developed by libertarian economist Joseph Schumpeter. For generations, we have learned from this myth to fetishize entrepreneurial innovation as the engine of capitalism, while missing Duke’s instrumental role in rampant corporate empowerment.

Air Pods Are a Tragedy by Caroline Haskins at Vice:

Even if you only own AirPods for a few years, the earth owns them forever. When you die, your bones will decompose in less than a century, but the plastic shell of AirPods won’t decompose for at least a millennium. Thousands of years in the future, if human life or sentient beings exist on earth, maybe archaeologists will find AirPods in the forgotten corners of homes. They’ll probably wonder why they were ever made, and why so many people bought them. But we can also ask ourselves those same questions right now.

The Cis White Gay Man at a Crossroads by Tim Murphy at Into:

To ally oneself with power and privilege after historically having one’s own inherent gender and racial privilege compromised because of one’s sexuality is extremely seductive. It’s also uncomfortable, to say the least, to know that your new bros are perpetuating cruelties that you know in your gut to be real because, especially if you are an older gay man, you remember such cruelties to the point that your voice rises and breaks when you allude to them.

It can be so uncomfortable that, in the next breath, you deny their authenticity. People who feel vulnerable and unsafe, you say, enjoy playing the victim. Your new status in the world depends on not connecting your own former, or fleeting, suffering to theirs.

Privileged by Kyle Korver at the Player’s Tribune:

When the police break your teammate’s leg, you’d think it would wake you up a little.

When they arrest him on a New York street, throw him in jail for the night, and leave him with a season-ending injury, you’d think it would sink in. You’d think you’d know there was more to the story.

You’d think.

But nope.

Women suffer needless pain because almost everything is designed for men by Sigal Samuel, interviewing Caroline Criado Perez, for Vox:

Sigal Samuel: Can you give an example of a drug that’s been found to be less effective for women?

Caroline Criado Perez:  The most shocking one was a heart medication that was meant to prevent heart attacks but at a certain point in a woman’s menstrual cycle is actually more likely to trigger a heart attack. That has to do with the problem of not testing the drug on women at different stages of their menstrual cycle, because you [the researcher] say, “Oh, that’s too complicated and too expensive.” You’re basically saying, “I would rather let women die than have to do a complicated test.”

It Wasn’t Just the Trolls: Early Internet Culture, “Fun,” and the Fires of Exclusionary Laughter by Whitney Philips in Social Media + Society:

Very quickly, I realized that many of the young reporters who initially helped amplify the white nationalist “alt right” by pointing and laughing at them, had all come up in and around internet culture-type circles. They may not have been trolls themselves, but their familiarity with trolling subculture, and experience with precisely the kind of discordant swirl featured in the aforementioned early-2000s image dump, perfectly prepped them for pro-Trump shitposting. They knew what this was. This was just trolls being trolls. This was just 4chan being 4chan. This was just the internet. Those Swastikas didn’t mean anything. They recognized the clothes the wolf was wearing, I argued, and so they didn’t recognize the wolf.

This was how the wolf operated: by exploiting the fact that so many (white) people have been trained not to take the things that happen on the internet very seriously. They operated by laundering hate into the mainstream through “ironically” racist memes, then using all that laughter as a radicalization and recruitment tool.

Other Favorites

Science

Going Critical by Kevin Simler at Melting Asphalt - cool interactive post about criticality in networks

I Got Tenure, But Science is Still Broken by Ryan Abernathey at Medium

From sick role to practices of health and illness by Arthur W Frank in the journal Medical Education

Technology

Google Is Eating Our Mail by Tomaž Šolc at Avian’s Blog - what happens when a private company gets to decide what email is worth receiving

Coding Is For Everyone - As Long As You Speak English by Gretchen McCullough at Wired

YouTube Disabled Comments On Livestreams Of A Congressional Hearing On White Nationalism Because They Were Too Hateful by Ryan Broderick at Buzzfeed News - “Tuesday's hearing was meant to examine the rise of white nationalism and white supremacy and the role social media plays in its spread. Then the comments got hijacked.”

Thinking through ACL-aware data processing by Lea Kissner at the The International Association of Privacy Professionals “Privacy Tech” blog

A Conspiracy To Kill IE6 by Chris Zacharias at their personal blog

History

Liberalism and Jewish Emancipation by Mark Koyama at Liberal Currents - how Jews became full citizens of England

Politics

Is Josh Hawley For Real? by Alexander Zaitchik at the New Republic - A terrifying analysis of the “post-liberal” movement.  “Stated simply, the post-liberals reject universal reason as a basis for laws and government. They mourn the institutions, values, and hierarchies that secular rationalism has laid to waste in the name of progress.”

The families funding the 2016 presidential election by the New York Times

Identity politics strengthens democracy by Stacy Abrams in Foreign Affairs

Misc

How to Draw a Horse by Emma Hunsinger in the New Yorker

My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me. by Wil S Hylton at the New York Times

The Untold Story of the Ermahgerd Girl by Darryn King at Vanity Fair

Stoicism’s Appeal to the Rich and Powerful by Ada Palmer at Ex Urbe

What If A City Decides It Can Live Without A Freeway? by Nathanael Johnson - “Inside the push to tear down an Oakland freeway”

Put down the self-help books. Resilience is not a DIY endeavour by Michael Ungar at the Globe and Mail

What Could Have Been by Sophia Steinert-Evoy at Jewish Currents - “I realized: I was watching two Jewish American millennials sing about the crisis of Jewish identity created by the State of Israel on a nationally syndicated television show. But in its subtlety, the performance doesn’t make a statement so much as it opens a line of questioning—starting with What could have been? and leading, perhaps, to: How do we move forward?”

#linkspam

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Epic Dollhouse Review of Doom: Why I Am Calling It Quits

by Dan H

Monday, 22 June 2009

Dan on Dollhouse, The Sopranos, and Slow Builds~

Previously on Ferretbrain: I started watching Joss Whedon's Dollhouse and was doing an episode-by-episode review.

I kind of stalled on it, because I've come to the realisation that part of what the show is trying to do is to make you, the viewer complicit in the activities of the Dollhouse, trying to draw a comparison between you watching the show and the clients hiring the Dolls. Just as the Dollhouse caters to their needs, so this show caters to your needs. Do you see.

Eight episodes in I decided I was no longer going to be complicit in anything. I can take being bored. I can take being annoyed. I can take having Joss Whedon masturbate in my face. What I can't take is being bored and annoyed and having Joss Whedon masturbate in my face all at the same time.

Just to be clear. I did not stop watching Dollhouse because the dolls are all rape victims. I did not stop watching Dollhouse because I was uncomfortable with a television series where human traffickers are sympathetic viewpoint characters. I did not stop watching Dollhouse because its damning insights into the human condition were outside my comfort zone. I stopped watching Dollhouse because it was preachy, inconsistent, condescending, self-aggrandising, clunkily written, boring, exposition-heavy, mcguffin-driven, shit with the intellectual sophistication of a sixteen year old's GCSE essay about how we should totally abolish money, because that would make everybody equal.

So here are my final thoughts:

A Very Specific Level of Evil

One of the “memes” I'm trying to spread around the internet is

A Very Specific Level of Tired

. For those who don't want to read the link, the salient exchange (from a hypothetical D&D game) is this:

“No, you have just enough energy to climb this hill, but not enough energy to go on or look for someplace else to camp.” “That is a very specific level of tired.”

I like to use the phrase “very specific level of [blah]” to describe any situation in a work of fiction where a character or institution is supposed to be sufficiently [blah] to do what the plot demands, but not quite [blah] enough to do all the things that a [blah] person would do that might wreck the plot. Voldemort is a classic example of this. He's evil enough to kill helpless babies if they get in the way of his plans (or at least, fail to kill helpless babies) he's evil enough that he routinely uses torture and violence to get what he wants, but somehow he is not evil enough to – say – round up all of Harry Potter's friends and start killing them until Potter shows himself.

The Dollhouse (the institution rather than the show) has a similar problem. The Dollhouse is evil, it takes people and scrubs their brains and programs them to do things for rich people.

But it's a very specific level of evil. It takes the time and energy to provide its Dolls with comfortable living conditions, even though doing this pretty clearly makes them harder to control. It seems to vet its assignments extremely thoroughly, so that the Dolls only get sent out to do things which are basically okay. It gives the Dolls names – admittedly names based on military callsigns, but they're clearly designed to function like English Proper Names, not codes. They seem to encourage their handlers to form an emotional bond with their actives and if the handler abuses the relationship, that handler is actually killed.

It's the most naïve representation of human trafficking I can possibly imagine.

Now the counter-argument to this is that the Dollhouse is only superficially nice, and that in fact they are just as evil as you would expect from an institution which (as we discover in episode seven) is run by an evil biotech company that does experiments on babies.

There are two problems with that argument. The first is that the “good” parts of the Dollhouse are most assuredly not superficial. They do in fact take genuine care of their actives, they do in fact try to make them as happy and comfortable as possible. They do in fact use them to help people (sometimes, apparently, for free).

The second problem with this argument is that evil institutions do not look superficially attractive because they do not need to. There were no Callisthenics classes in Auschwitz. Josef Mengele didn't have cutesy conversations with his Jewish prisoners before pouring bleach in their eyes. Guantanamo Bay isn't full of happy, smiling Muslims with slightly vacant grins on their faces. The Dollhouse's veneer of respectability is not for the benefit of the staff (who shouldn't care) or the clients (who shouldn't care, and who never see inside the building anyway) but for the benefit of the audience.

It's another incarnation of what the girls at

Boils and Blinding Torment

used to call “the Misdirection Fairy”. Joss Whedon is chronic for having characters in his shows behave in ways which only make sense if you assume they are consciously performing for an audience. Classic examples of this in Buffy include Jonathan deciding to commit suicide by shooting himself with a sniper rifle in a bell tower (almost as if he was deliberately trying to fool the viewing audience into thinking he was about to embark on a killing spree) and several bits in season seven where Buffy persists in acting confused and frightened, even though everything is going exactly according to her plan. The Dollhouse keeps acting “nice” but there's no earthly reason for it to do so.

To put it another way: Joss Whedon fails at Atrocity 101.

If we are to accept that using Dollhouse technology on people is a genuinely atrocious act, then we have to assume that it works the same way all atrocities work. You start by dehumanizing the victim. Giving the Dolls names, making them comfortable, letting them socialise and caring if they get raped are all totally incompatible with wiping their minds and handing them over to the highest bidder. There's a reason that lab rats aren't given names (or, for that matter, toys). The Dollhouse treats the Dolls like people, and they shouldn't. Not if they're supposed to be genuine human traffickers.

There's a bit in Episode Eight (the last episode I saw, and the last I will ever subject myself to) where de Witt explicitly says that the Dolls should be thought of as pets. This is supposed to be chilling, I think. It's supposed to highlight how dehumanizing the Dollhouse really is. But it doesn't work.

Anybody who has ever worked in a laboratory should know that you absolutely, under no circumstances, treat your test subjects as pets. Pets are, in fact, treated as people. They are cared for and protected, they are given names and they are individualised – humanised, in fact. De Witt consistently singles Echo out for special treatment. One cannot treat a person in this fashion and then commit atrocities against them.

Show, Don't Tell, Dickhead

We spend a lot of time in The Dollhouse having people present the cases either for it (it “gives people what they need” and “helps people”) or against it (it is “slavery” and “human trafficking”). We do not ever see the Dollhouse behave in a manner that fits either of these descriptions, or at least not consistently.

In Episode Eight we finally discover that Sierra was wiped against her will (unlike all the other Dolls, who were volunteers) specifically because she turned a millionaire down for sex. De Witt later explains at the end of the episode (in which the Dollhouse arranges for its three primary Dolls to achieve “closure” or something – I was too bored and pissed off to care by this point) that she “needed to confront the man who took her power away.” Now hang on. You can't talk, sympathetically, about how horribly Sierra was mistreated by this guy when you run the organisation that made it possible. Not because it's hypocritical, but because you shouldn't care. The whole sequence seems to be designed to make you realise how awful the Dollhouse is, because of what it did to Sierra, while at the same time making you think that de Witt is an okay person, because she sympathises. It's not subtle, it's not complex, it's just fucking stupid.

A comparison that I've been wanting to make for a while now is with The Sopranos.

Tony Soprano is very seldom called a criminal. People very seldom tell him that what he does is wrong. He seldom justifies his actions, because he seldom needs to. But he does things that are demonstrably, obviously horrific, and we see them in harsh, unflinching detail, and we see the consequences that his choices have on ordinary people. We don't need trembly emotive speeches where people say “the Mafia is bad!” because we already know. We don't need Tony to say “we help people” because it would be completely stupid.

And we certainly aren't asked to question our own complicity in the work of the Cosa Nostra.

Dollhouse is two shows. There's the show Joss Whedon wanted to make, which exists entirely in the exposition, and is all about Big Serious Issues, and the show that Fox wanted to commission, which is an adventure show about a hot girl who wears a series of different outfits. What we are left with is a show about a girl who has crazy kung fu adventures which keeps stopping every five minutes to explain how it's really about human trafficking and free will and shit.

The Slow Build Fallacy

I once met somebody who said that the thing they hated the most about Buffy the Vampire Slayerwas the fact that they kept watching it, and not liking it, and everybody they talked to kept saying “yeah, well that season wasn't so great, but the next season is really good”. They gave up after season three, possibly because nobody could quite bring themselves to say that about Season Four.

People keep saying the same thing about Dollhouse “sure, the first three quarters of the season sucks, but then you see where it's all been going and it's awesome”.

This is bullshit.

Good TV is good TV from the start. No ifs. No buts. No exceptions. A series should not have to waste my time for upwards of eight hours before it starts displaying whatever dubious merits it is supposed to possess.

To put it another way, if you like a television program, and it shows consistent improvement in ambition, complexity of storytelling, and of course acting, you are going to see that as a show which gets better every season. If, like Buffy, there is also a marked change in style every season, you will also mark every season as the point where it really gets into its stride. I know that I've been guilty of identifying pretty much every season of Buffy as “where it starts to get really good” when talking to more sceptical members of my social circle.

Basically this is an elaborate piece of self-deception we engage in, convincing ourselves that our appreciation for a show is based on a slowly developing understanding of its many subtle advantages, when actually we just think it's a cool idea.

If you don't like Buffy Season 1, you will not like Buffy, period. The reason for this is simple: if you don't like Buffy Season 1 it's probably because something fundamental about the show doesn't work for you. Maybe it's the cutesy dialogue. Maybe it's Sarah Michelle Gellar. Maybe it's the whole idea of a cute blonde chick fighting monsters when she transparently doesn't have enough meat on her to open a stubborn jar of pickles. It doesn't matter how complex the arcs get, or how well they handle

the subject of bereavement

or

the nature of forgiveness

the whole thing is framed in cutesy dialogue and a blonde girl kicking vampires in the face and either you buy that shit or you don't. I personally bought it big time and Buffy the Vampire Slayer remains one of my favourite television shows ever.

I just don't buy Dollhouse. I don't buy the premise, I don't buy the boring, stilted, not-at-all-cutesy and therefore not-at-all witty and therefore not-at-all interesting dialogue. I think the show is heavy handed. I think the show is boring.

Nothing can change in the last four episodes of Season One or the first four episodes of Season Two to change this fact. My issues with Dollhouse are with the root and the core of the show, with the ideas behind it, the way the characters are presented, the way the dialogue is written. No penultimate-episode revelation will change that. Nothing the show can be building towards can change what the show is built on.

Which, from where I'm standing, is Joss Whedon's penis.Themes:

Damage Report

,

TV & Movies

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

,

Whedonverse

~

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Arthur B

at 12:47 on 2009-06-22

Eight episodes in I decided I was no longer going to be complicit in anything. I can take being bored. I can take being annoyed. I can take having Joss Whedon masturbate in my face. What I can't take is being bored and annoyed and having Joss Whedon masturbate in my face all at the same time.

So what you're saying is that you're fine with Joss jerking off in your face, but you draw the line at him asking you to give him a hand? :P

Seriously though, awesome article. I think a lack of, for want of a better word, psychological realism can absolutely kill any hope shows like

Dollhouse

have of being appreciated on the sort of level Whedon clearly wants

Dollhouse

to be appreciated on. This isn't always true, but I think it's often true, especially if the show hinges on the internal psychological states of the characters, and having your show hinge on a mind control process means the mental states of the characters is

the

most important element of the story.

The Prisoner

did this sort of thing

right

. Even though most interrogation processes are vastly grimier than what Number Six went through in the Village, you still had the impression that people were behaving in the way you would expect them to behave in a paranoid schizophrenic Welsh village where Number Six never knows who's working for Number Two and Number Two isn't sure how much Number Six really knows. What's more, what goes on in the Village is an atrocity with a thin veneer of pleasantness which is

actually

a thin veneer. The various Number Twos and their lackeys were perfectly pleasant most of the time, but behind their kind words there was always a snare, and they never hesitated to knock people on the head and drag them in for a lobotomy if they felt the need.

I think part of the reason that the last episode is so controversial is that it abandons psychological realism for tripped-out 60s allegory, and whilst there's nothing wrong with allegory it does tend to involve unrealistic behaviour on the part of characters for the sake of making a point. I do wonder whether

Dollhouse

would work better approached as social allegory as opposed to a psychologically realistic study of rape and/or slavery, but I suspect not since it certainly sounds as though it were written as the latter, not the former.

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Andy G

at 13:57 on 2009-06-22Blackadder comes to mind as a counterexample to what you say about slow builds ... though I guess you could make the case that that is a slightly unusual case since so much was changed after season 1.

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Andy G

at 14:09 on 2009-06-22

And we certainly aren't asked to question our own complicity in the work of the Cosa Nostra.

I agree that the show isn't making some sort of didactic point, but surely it is very much about the uneasy relationship between mainstream American society and the violence that it either hypocritically condemns while supporting, or simply turns a blind eye to? Especially with the outsider liberal figures like Meadow or Dr Melfi.

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Dan H

at 15:46 on 2009-06-22

I agree that the show isn't making some sort of didactic point, but surely it is very much about the uneasy relationship between mainstream American society and the violence that it either hypocritically condemns while supporting, or simply turns a blind eye to?

True, but there's a difference between making a point about society in general, and making a point about you, the viewer.

The Sopranos doesn't ask you to view the act of watching the Sopranos as making you complicit in the work of the Mafia, if you see what I mean.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 17:58 on 2009-06-22

Blackadder comes to mind as a counterexample to what you say about slow builds ... though I guess you could make the case that that is a slightly unusual case since so much was changed after season 1.

I'd say with Blackadder it's really the same all the way through. There are major changes b/w season 1 and the later seasons, but the basic idea is the same. I think the biggest tweak is in exactly how Blackadder fits with the world and the other characters. But a lot of the basic ideas are the same. The final episode isn't so much fantastic because it shows you where the show is going; it just applies the same formula to a part of history where it's most powerful imo.

The Sopranos doesn't ask you to view the act of watching the Sopranos as making you complicit in the work of the Mafia, if you see what I mean.

I agree. I just started finally watching

The Wire,

and interestingly, in the commentary for the pilot the creator talks about how the first chapter shouldn't be as good as the series is going to get--he's going for a slow build. But at the same time the first chapter clearly lays out what the series is about. And there too it's about society, but not in an accusatory way. Characters don't explicitly justify or condemn everything about themselves and others.

Also maybe another thing that also applies to the Sopranos and doesn't seem to apply to Dollhouse is that there's little need for characters to justify themselves because the world in which they live makes what they do understandable. We can see why being born a Soprano might encourage you to be Tony or AJ or Meadow, or how someone like Carmela would wind up this kind of wife. Likewise how the characters in The Wire become criminals or cops.

But is there any explanation why these people created and work at the Dollhouse--any human reasons with which a reader can identify? This is partly where the proble of all those nice guys working at the Dollhouse come from. We can see where a nice guy on the Sopranos or the Wire could get pushed to stay in a life that goes against their nature (and so probably slowly kills them) but when I read your descriptions of these characters I still wind up asking why they don't work somewhere else.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 17:59 on 2009-06-22Sorry about that strange comment--I didn't realize the whole thing was copied in italics!

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Jamie Johnston

at 18:18 on 2009-06-22Haven't finished reading the article yet but I thought I'd mention before I forget: the link to

Boils and Blinding Torment

doesn't work. It looks like it has the same problem I got when I was putting up my last article, namely the process of pasting into the Ferretbrain article editor and saving has somehow added "&8221" to the beginning and end of the URL.

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Jamie Johnston

at 19:04 on 2009-06-22Have now finished reading and very much agree, not specifically in relation to

Dollhouse

because I haven't seen any of it but in relation to your general thinking about how fiction should work and how it goes wrong.

Funnily enough the section on the 'slow-build' made me think of exactly the same bit of commentary on the first episode of

The Wire

that Sister Magpie mentioned. David Simon says several times in that audio commentary (and not without sounding just a little smug and patronizing about it, I'm sorry to say) that the series was very demanding of its audience in following a single complete story at a relatively slow pace across 13 episodes rather than the more usual thing of playing out a long over-all plot over the course of a series of somewhat self-contained one-hour-long stories. But you can get away with that if each episode, whether self-contained or not, is in itself enjoyable (which in the case of

The Wire

it certainly is). You can't use it as an excuse for boring your audience out of its collective skull for twelve weeks on the promise of something exciting happening in week 13.

I'm also put in mind of what Neil Gaiman has often said about

The Kindly Ones

, which is that it was the only sequence in the

Sandman

series that he allowed himself to write not as a series of 24-page monthly episodes but more or less as a single 312-page comic, knowing that the pacing and plotting would not really work very well when it was published in 24-page chunks and would only properly make sense in a trade paperback collection. The point here is that Gaiman knows enough about good writing that he clearly feels rather sheepish about doing this.

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http://skull-bearer.livejournal.com/

at 19:24 on 2009-06-22

osef Mengele didn't have cutesy conversations with his Jewish prisoners before pouring bleach in their eyes.

Sorry to disagree, but that's exactly what he did. But that's a case of reality being more screwed up than fiction, and that guy was an utter nutcase.

Sorry, carry on.

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Rami

at 20:52 on 2009-06-22

process of pasting into the Ferretbrain article editor and saving has somehow added "&8221" to the beginning and end

I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about that -- it's the magic of Microsoft Word.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/ck5gg.gRlPbLG2WYCqrJ5k2.qjxalTVt0AHQ#14479

at 23:37 on 2009-06-22Dan Hemmens is a man after my own heart.

Okay, enough sucking up.

You make a good point, though about not liking Buffy because something doesn't 'click' with you about it, but I'll go one step further and say Whedon's propensity for not really understanding the underlying psychology of a given situation precedes Dollhouse by a country mile.

I was first totally turned off to the Whedon way of thinking during the "Graduation Day" episode of Buffy when I was insulted a total of three times.

The first was when Buffy was given an umbrella and the title of "Class Protector". First of all, are you kidding? If all the kids in high school knew about the growing vampire population, don't you think there would be a massive exodus of people from the town, not to mention a mass ostracizing of Buffy (in the same way people would avoid Fairuza Balk's character in The Craft)?

Most normal teenagers back away from things that are dangerous, even if there's an overall 'good' associated. Why? Because lots of people believe that if you lie with dogs, you get fleas. Hang out with Buffy, you're taking your life in your hands. Better to turn a blind eye to it also, if you know what's good for you.

The second was that the Scooby gang let same said high schoolers in on the plot to take down the mayor. Are you kidding? Are you seriously telling me that the same group of kids isn't going to stay home that day because they might just end up dead?

And third, and the most final and grating of insults, was that upon reflection of the day's events, Oz says, ponderously, "We survived high school."

I get the fact that Buffy was supposed to have been a metaphor, but seriously? The metaphor works best when you're not being beaten over the head with the fact that it's a metaphor.

Golly!

So, I'm not particularly surprised that Whedon has this odd base in non-reality that quite a few people seem to think is clever. (What can I say, I'm a sucker for sci-fi, even if I hate the creator, and yes, I have daggers for Whedon the same way Dan has for JK Rowling - who I also have daggers for.)

So, I made it a point to watch Dollhouse. Hey, if Adam Sandler can have "The Wedding Singer" in him, surely Whedon could have something interesting (and good!) to say at some point, right?

But only three episodes, two of which after the mythical "game-changer" episode. The first was the pilot. Oddly, I didn't see much difference in between the former and the latter, no matter what the fans say (I think the fans have convinced themselves that they're seeing something that isn't really there...I just thought everything I've seen was unilaterally bad in all the same ways).

What constantly annoys me about Whedon's work is often a complete lack of understanding of how people actually work. And this is the point that Dan makes very well above. There's Dollhouse, which tries to give everyone, no matter how 'evil' a supposedly sympathetic edge, and then there's The Sopranos, where the writing goes so far as to make you understand why the characters do what they do, instead of relying on plot contrivances to masticate pathos out of them.

I certainly wouldn't have, for instance, pegged Topher for 'lonely', and if I did, I would think he'd be sneaking dolls more often than just for his birthday (he being a 'genius' and all). Reminds me of that episode of Firefly where Jayne 'betrays' the crew and Mal threatens to throw him off the ship, or into a turbine or something. The rest of the episodes (of either) don't seem to have a thread that bears out these particular plot contrivances; they merely exist to demonstrate what Whedon wants us to see in the characters.

And Adelle, being Miss Lonelyhearts? Why can't she just be ruthless? Or is it not empowering for women to have blind ambition and nothing else? Or is that too cliche for Whedon? (I'll save my rant on why what Whedon writes isn't feminism for some other time because I'm sure I'm just rambling now.)

But yeah, I totally agree that there's just no "there" there with Dollhouse. It's insulting pseudo-intellectual garbage.

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Dafydd at 00:37 on 2009-06-24

"Dollhouse" is indeed boring, but as for Whedon wanking in our faces?

You need a Klein bottle to turn Whedon through 180 degrees.

http://www.kleinbottle.com/

Whedon's head is stuffed so far up his arse, that he will need to be rotated at right angles to reality before it is anatomically possible for him to wank in our faces.

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Robinson L

at 05:15 on 2009-06-26So, being annoyed, bored, and having Joss Whedon's rather malformed and immature "messages" and "insights" shoved down your throat all at the same time is too much for you? Reasonable. Dunno if I'll ever watch another episode. It ain't going to get any better.

If you don't like

Buffy

Season 1, you will not like

Buffy

, period.

Gonna play Hack's Advocate for a second here and point out the "Growing the Beard" phenomenon. I suppose the counterargument is that people who like, e.g.

The Next Generation

even before it gets good, and people who hate it when its bad will still hate it when it gets good.

the intellectual sophistication of a sixteen year old's GCSE essay

I seriously doubt that. My sister was sixteen last year, and I know she could right more sophisticated stuff that

this

back then.

One of the “memes” I'm trying to spread around the internet is A Very Specific Level of Tired.

Oh yeah. Good one. (

Love

that comic.)

Jonathan deciding to commit suicide by shooting himself with a sniper rifle in a bell tower

I saw this episode long before I began critically engaging with my entertainment media, and even then I knew this sequence was bunk.

True, but there's a difference between making a point about society in general, and making a point about

you, the viewer.

Actually, I've always thought one of the things which could've made

Firefly

much better would've been if Whedon had made his feminist message about how ordinary, well-meaning nonsexist (in their own minds) people (by implication

you, the viewer

) are complicit in systemic sexism, rather than scapegoating it all on the Misogynist-of-the-Week.

Josef Mengele didn't have cutesy conversations with his Jewish prisoners before pouring bleach in their eyes. Sorry to disagree, but that's exactly what he did. But that's a case of reality being more screwed up than fiction, and that guy was an utter nutcase.

On a somewhat-less-evil (though perhaps only because of opportunity) scale, Bull Connor apparently had a quite friendly and pleasant conversation with a couple of Freedom Riders on his way to dumping them in

very

hostile territory in the middle of the night. Some people, apparently, really

are

that sick. (Or that desperately in need of a real human relationship and that screwed-up about how to go about it. Don't mind me, rosy-tinted ocular sensors filtered by a rose-tinted brain.)

"We survived high school."

Again, watched the episode before I got my critical thinking in gear. At the time, I just thought it was a good joke. (

That's

what you consider the bigger accomplishment?)

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Jamie Johnston

at 19:59 on 2009-06-26Keeping the ever-riveting technical side-discussion alive:

I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about that -- it's the magic of Microsoft Word.

Surprisingly I got it even with Mac TextEdit. But I'm not complaining - it's no trouble to fix as long as one remembers to check for it, and the only reason I mentioned it was to alert people to the need to check.

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Jamie Johnston

at 20:01 on 2009-06-26Actually, having said that, I started writing in Pages rather than TextEdit, so composing

ab initio

in a plain-text programme might well solve it.

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Rami

at 00:33 on 2009-06-27

Surprisingly I got it even with Mac TextEdit.

Word is the most common offender but pretty much any rich-text program will screw up HTML. Starting out plain-text will fix this for sure :-)

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Arthur B

at 02:09 on 2009-06-27

Word is the most common offender but pretty much any rich-text program will screw up HTML. Starting out plain-text will fix this for sure :-)

Wise words for sure. Should there in fact be a note in the article writer's guide - or, indeed on the main article-editing page - strongly suggesting that people use plain text editors such as notepad to compose their articles for best results?

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 15:55 on 2009-06-29

On a somewhat-less-evil (though perhaps only because of opportunity) scale, Bull Connor apparently had a quite friendly and pleasant conversation with a couple of Freedom Riders on his way to dumping them in very hostile territory in the middle of the night. Some people, apparently, really are that sick.

Definitely. Though I think when people show them in fiction that comes through. Like, there'd be a difference in deciding *why* Mengele has these creepy cute conversations that make him even more evil before he hurts a person. What Dan's talking about seems to be more people being portrayed as genuinely normal and well-meaning and nobody seeing any disconnect between that and human trafficking.

Maybe an even better example would be something like slavery where you had a slave owner who was sentimental with some of his slaves, but that just makes the rancidness of the relationship all the more clear. They're not really being nice the way they would be nice to a real person. It seems like Dollhouse thinks you can genuinely have it both ways where the human trafficking genuinely doesn't inform other interactions.

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Robinson L

at 03:30 on 2009-06-30*slaps forehead* You know, I think I'd meant to say something like that and then forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me, Sister Magpie.

While I was pedantically pointing out a minor argumentative error that somebody else had already pointed out like the arrogant little prick that I am, I agree with the general point that the Dollhouse staff do not behave at all realistically for a human trafficking organization. In all these cases the victims are being dehumanized--that's just about a tautology for someone who's a slave or in a concentration camp or even a second class citizen: they are viewed as less than human. Their masters/overseers may still have affection for them, but not the affection you'd have for a fellow human being--an equal.

Despite continually mind-raping their subjects and stifling their free will to almost nothing, the Dollhouse executives still show a distinct tendency to treat their "actives" as human equals, or near-equals.

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http://tabaquis.livejournal.com/

at 03:58 on 2009-06-30

There's a reason that lab rats aren't given names (or, for that matter, toys).

Loved your review as always, but just to nitpick: http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/pubs/enrich/rodents.htm

Lots of lab rats are in fact given toys, because it stimulates their health and reactions in a positive way so that you get more out of your experiment with them.

Just sayin'! ;)

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http://wemblee.livejournal.com/

at 06:30 on 2009-07-06

Good TV is good TV from the start. No ifs. No buts. No exceptions.

I... what? Star Trek: The Next Generation isn't a good show? Because I thought it was... starting with season 3, because anything before that is a

wasteland of unimaginable suck

. And Deep Space Nine? That was an even better show... except for pretty much the entire first season, which was horrible. And Farscape, which didn't find its way until the end. And Torchwood had a terrible beginning, but found itself in its second season. And Moonlighting's pilot is slow and awful. And pretty much no sitcom, ever, has had a pilot that was as good as the episodes that came later. And and and.

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Robinson L

at 08:06 on 2009-07-10Mm, yes wemblee, although I think what Dan

meant

was that people who enjoy a bad programme will enjoy it even more, but people who don't enjoy a bad programme probably won't like it even when it gets good. I suppose he could be right.

I can enjoy Next Generation and Deep Space Nine even before they got good, and Torchwood, too (although I'll have to see the second season to believe it gets any better), so I'm open to them being good. Maybe people who dislike them do so for reasons more to do with taste than quality.

Although if that is the argument, I agree that particular passage was unfortunate.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 19:31 on 2009-07-10I thought it was also more like saying that if you don't like the basic idea of a show, that basic idea getting better isn't going to do it for you. Iow, there was always some good fundamentals there, it just took a while for them to be used in the best way. Somebody turned off by those fundamentals isn't going to suddenly like the show when they get used better.

Blackadder I think is a good example since there's such a marked change between S1 and S2-4. I much prefer 2-4. The characters significantly shift their dynamics. But there's still stuff in S1 that I like that sound like the Blackadder of 2-4.

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Dan H

at 22:47 on 2009-07-10

I... what? Star Trek: The Next Generation isn't a good show?

Sister Magpie pretty much sums this up. All the things that are good about Star Trek TNG are things that are part of the show from its inception. All the things that are bad about Star Trek TNG are things that are part of the show from its inception.

Everything that's good about DS9 is in it from the beginning. Everything that's good about TNG is in it from the beginning. You might have thought that the first three seasons of TNG sucked, but you obviously weren't turned off by the premise of the show, you didn't think the idea of flying around in space seeking out strange new worlds was stupid, because if you did you wouldn't have liked series four onwards either.

TV series don't get better they just get better executed.

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Niall

at 23:55 on 2009-07-11

Everything that's good about DS9 is in it from the beginning.

I think I would be prepared to make the case that (a) the Dominion, (b) the Defiant, and (c) Worf are substantial parts of what made DS9 good, and they were grafts onto the original concept, not a part of it.

I would also be prepared to make the case that Torchwood is a counter-example here. Children of Earth is good in large part because it discards or transforms most of what was characteristic about the first two seasons.

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Arthur B

at 00:33 on 2009-07-12

I think I would be prepared to make the case that (a) the Dominion, (b) the Defiant, and (c) Worf are substantial parts of what made DS9 good, and they were grafts onto the original concept, not a part of it.

But would the Dominion, the Defiant, and Worf be enough to make you enjoy the show if you couldn't stand the Bajor/Cardassian conflict, Sisko's accidental messiahism, Odo and Quark's frequent run-ins and all the other elements which were important to the show from the start?

Arguably, each of the things you mention is simply something that enhances a pre-existing element of DS9. The Dominion is an added complication to the "interstellar politics" dimension of the show. Worf is an addition to the "ensemble cast with complex interrelationships" element. The Defiant is a plot device for moving subsets of said ensemble cast to off-station locations. They embellish the show, but they don't actually change the premise of it: it's still a show in which an ensemble cast with complex interrelationships have to deal with tricky questions of interstellar politics.

I would also be prepared to make the case that Torchwood is a counter-example here. Children of Earth is good in large part because it discards or transforms most of what was characteristic about the first two seasons.

And I'm sure that there's a number of people out there who actually liked the first two seasons and are completely livid about

Children of Earth

, although they may well be in the minority. Major changes to the very premise of the show are an

enormous

gamble, and the BBC is arguably one of the few broadcasters who are really in a position to attempt such a roll of the dice, and even

then

they may still not have considered it if

Torchwood

wasn't a significant part of their grand plans for the

Dr Who

franchise. I suspect 9 out of 10 broadcasters out there would rather scrap a series and commission a new one with a new premise rather than alter an old series to fit a new premise.

It remains to be seen whether Whedon will, in fact, do anything similar with

Dollhouse

, but it would be stupid of Dan to keep watching merely in the

hope

that Whedon will undertake such a drastic retooling.

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http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/

at 04:08 on 2009-07-12Um - just chiming in as a Niner, to say that shows certainly can develop. But much of what I absolutely loved about DS9 was there from the first season. And that included the Dominion. Yes, they were introduced in the first season! (at least, I'm pretty sure they were - or very early in the second).

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Niall

at 09:01 on 2009-07-12Mary, you're right; I'd remembered "Rules of Acquisition" as being late-S2, not mid. Nor am I saying, actually, that DS9 wasn't good until S3; I have a substantial amount of affection for S1 and S2. But the *perception* exists that DS9 didn't get good until S3, with the appearance of the elements I mentioned. And while Arthur is in a sense correct that the grafts are more organic than I allowed in making my point, I dispute that it's still the same show: it changes complexion radically, from a show about building peace to a show about fighting war. It's as radical as the change in Torchwood, just done more gradually.

Arthur:

And I'm sure that there's a number of people out there who actually liked the first two seasons and are completely livid about Children of Earth

Yes, there are. The arrogant, superior part of me finds them hilarious. But if you're going to make "some people like the early version" your counter-argument, well, that could apply to any TV show. I'm sure plenty of people were pissed off when the Dominion showed up, too (probably pissed off for reasons not a million miles away from those behind my dislike of the recent Trek film, come to think of it: a betrayal of the Trek vision). That said, as it happens I think Children of Earth would have been better as an original production -- the ending is hampered by the need to fit into an ongoing continuity.

but it would be stupid of Dan to keep watching merely in the hope that Whedon will undertake such a drastic retooling.

Indeed, and I wasn't suggesting he should. I was disputing his general argument. Angel is yet another example: later seasons bear very little resemblance to the format they started out with (indeed, you may remember how vocal fans of the initial help-the-helpless-of-the-week concept were when the show moved away from it). But there are plenty of fans who joined the show at S2, or S4, or S5, who don't like seasons earlier than those points because of the ways in which they are different from the version of the show that they like.

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Arthur B

at 15:54 on 2009-07-12

And while Arthur is in a sense correct that the grafts are more organic than I allowed in making my point, I dispute that it's still the same show: it changes complexion radically, from a show about building peace to a show about fighting war.

There I think we just have to disagree - the threat of war was

always

present in DS9, it's just that we were led to expect trouble to break out between Cardassia and Bajor. (If war wasn't

potentially

about to break out at any moment, the whole "building peace" thing would have fallen flat after all.) The fact that the war turned out to be against the Dominion instead was a misdirection, but not one without precedent in the sort of story being told. (In fact, it's a lot like the similar misdirection in

Babylon 5

, where at the beginning we're all expecting shit to kick off between the Centauri and the Narn and the Vorlons to remain steadfastly neutral.

Speaking of B5, in fact, you could equally argue that the early seasons of that are about building peace rather than fighting a war, but the war was still planned from the very beginning.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 21:03 on 2009-07-12

Angel is yet another example: later seasons bear very little resemblance to the format they started out with (indeed, you may remember how vocal fans of the initial help-the-helpless-of-the-week concept were when the show moved away from it). But there are plenty of fans who joined the show at S2, or S4, or S5, who don't like seasons earlier than those points because of the ways in which they are different from the version of the show that they like.

Supernatural in S4 became a war vs. heaven and hell with the main characters in the middle story. There are fans who don't like this direction and wish they'd go back to MOTW. Others have gotten more interested tihs season.

However, I would never say this is a fundamental change of show. It's still imo a disagreement over the most enjoyable way to deal with the same characters and general idea. I liked the original premise of 2 brothers running around fighting demons. I'm more grabbed by what's going on now. But what's going on now is still dependent on the exact same brother relationship that was always at the center of the show, the family drama played out with supernatural beings is still the central idea. If I'd hated that premise the shift to angels and the apocolypse would not change that. The Wincesters are still the same family. If I like them now I can't help but also like them in S1 (and that would be true even if I hadn't cared for them as much back when S1 was first-run). I'm still expected to care about these characters and what's important to these characters is still their family.

The move from MOTW to a mytharc is pretty common since The X-Files, actually. Many mytharcs basically are MOTWs where it's personal played out over many episodes instead of just one.

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Robinson L

at 18:36 on 2009-07-14

TV series don't get better they just get better executed.

All right Dan,

now

I see what you're saying, but I think you're treading on some tricky linguistic ground, here.

Sure, it might be more accurate to say that tv shows don't get better, it's the

quality

of the shows which gets better. Just as it would be more accurate to say that the Earth revolves so that the sun is more/less in view, rather than "the sun is rising/setting." But who the hell talks like that? It's not even that good a comparison, anyway, because just saying "the earth revolves" doesn't mislead 99% percent of readers, whereas saying "good TV is good TV from the start, no exceptions" can be

very

misleading, as we've just seen ...

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Viorica

at 03:43 on 2009-07-27

The Wincesters

*sniggers*

There are people who were pissed off by

Children of Earth

, but not really because of any change in tone. They're raging because a very popular character/pairing was killed off, and this fandom has some truly deranged 'shippers. However, this is a good example of a series that fundamentally changed when the tone shifted. Torchwood's first two seasons are about a secret alien-fighting organisation that's only slightly less campy than

Xena

, where no one really has to make serious decisions beyond "Who would I rather sleep with?", and death can be reversed with a magical robotic arm.

Children of Earth

is about an alien-fighting organisation that's extremely serious and dark, where agonising choices have to be made, and death can't just be undone. Same premise, very different show.

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http://matthew.wilson.myopenid.com/

at 14:40 on 2009-08-02Buffy had a plan in season 7?

#Ferretbrain #Dollhouse #Joss Whedon #Dan H

[poetryofchrist]

Biblical Studies Carnival 156 February 2019

Welcome to the 156th Biblical Studies Carnival February 2019 - The Lego Edition

TNK/OT

Posts this month heralded a new English translation of the Old Testament announced by the Jewish Telegraphic Society some months ago and in Carnival 153.

Deane Galbraith of Remnants of Giants notes Two New Misprinted Bibles.

when the authorities became aware of the error, most copies of the Wicked Bible were destroyed. Only a few copies survived, and these have become valuable collectors’ items.

Several reviewers from the Jewish Review of Books held a symposium on the Alter translation.

Alter’s Hebrew Bible is the only single-author translation by someone who has spent a lifetime studying literary artistry in both Hebrew and English. This is not to say that it is, or could be, beyond criticism.

Robert Alter wrote a short introduction in Ancient Near East Today.

The first might be described as strictly literary, which is to say, an attempt to find workable English equivalents for the cadences, the expressive syntax, the sound play, the thematic shaping of narrative through strategic word choice, and much else in the Hebrew. The other impetus is an effort to render faithfully the semantic force of the Hebrew words.

The apogee of classical form, all of them with shield and helmet (Ezekiel 38:5)

Bob MacDonald (your host) reviewed the reviewers in a series of posts: Has translation of the Bible into English reached its apogee?

Discussion of Alter's translations are not new in the blogosphere. Here is an early mention in the archives of the NY Times from 1996.

Also a post estimating how long it takes to translate the First Testament.

Goldingay reports that translating the First Testament consumed an hour of his time daily for five years. (7 days a week?) That would be 7*50*5 = 1750 hours. ... My estimate of what pace I could keep by the end of the project was 10 verses per hour. That would be 2,320 hours. From June 2015, I scheduled 4 hours a day 5 days a week 45 weeks of the year = 900 hours a year or about 3150 hours to November 2018.

James Davila posts about an article and responses on Alter's Bible.

To call it the best solo English Bible is, given the competition, not saying much. But one is also tempted to call it the best modern English Bible, period—a judgment with which Alter appears to agree.

Goldingay's First Testament is reviewed here.

The section titles in the FT are fantastic and funny, creative and clever. For example, “How David acquired his grandfather” for Ruth 4:11-22; “How to be the bad guy” for 2 Kings 21:1-12; “Let me tell you a story” for Proverbs 7:1-20. ...the FT forces me to think creatively about how to communicate biblical terms in ways people can more easily comprehend.

Sarah O'Connor via Marg Mowczko on Numbers 5:11ff.

In a world dominated by men, where a man’s honor was often valued above a woman’s life, the Bible stands out in its protection of women. Remember that the next time you read Numbers. If you ever do, I mean.

Marg Mowczko on the household codes.

The so-called household codes in Ephesians chapters 5-6 and Colossians chapters 3-4 are often used to support the idea of “gender roles.” These gender roles usually boil down to “the submission of all women to male-only authority.” But these codes were not primarily about gender roles or even gender. They were about power.

Rachel Barenblatt ponders the light of the world on parashah tetzaveh.

אמּת suitable for ages 4+ includes tool set and box

The Hasidic master known as the Sfat Emet reads this verse in a beautiful way. First he notes the verse from Proverbs, "The candle of God is the soul of a human being." When we are in dark places, we light a candle to help us see.

James McGrath ponders what is in the Bible (or not) considering translation or paraphrase.

“If you oppress poor people, you insult the God who made them; but kindness shown to the poor is an act of worship.”

Via James Davila, a usage history of Goy.

... a careful tracing of “the genealogy of the goy, from the Hebrew Bible [where “Israel is one goy among many”] to the rabbis and church fathers of the second and third centuries” of the Common Era ...

And again on Ethnic and Cultural Identities in the Rabbinic Goy Discourse.

...the authors offer a most insightful analysis of Paul’s motivations, arguing that the creation of a new model of equal membership of Jews and others within the ekklesia required a new binary language, which would obliterate any particular ethnic identities, and at the same time maintain the separate identity of the gentile qua gentile in the messianic age.

And moving on to Ki Tissa, a question raised about the legitimacy of sacrifice on Mt Carmel.

Clearly, in Elijah’s perception, Yahwistic altars such as the one that he repaired on Mount Carmel were not only legitimate, but their destruction represented an affront to YHWH, indeed a tangible expression of the people’s abandonment of their covenant with YHWH. The contrast between such a perception and the Deuteronomic law reflected in the Book of Kings itself that proscribes sacrificial worship outside of the Jerusalem temple could hardly be greater!

Rachel Adelman writes on atoning for the golden calf with the Kapporet.

Atop the kappōret, the ark’s cover, sat the golden cherubim, which framed the empty space (tokh) where God would speak with Moses. Drawing on the connection between the word kappōret and the root כ.פ.ר (“atone”), and noting how the golden calf episode interrupts the Tabernacle account, the rabbis suggest that the ark cover served as a means of atoning for the Israelites’ collective sin.

Henry Neufeld considers Hezekiah's horrible prayer.

... in 2 Kings 21 we see Manasseh, generally considered the worst king of Judah, took the throne at 12 years of age on the death of his father. His birth would have occurred in those 15 years added to Hezekiah’s life.

and follows up with a counter interpretation from Brevard Childs.

Ackroyd (“An Interpretation of the Babylonian Exile,” Studies, 157ff.) has mounted a persuasive case against interpreting it as a smug response that the judgment will not personally affect him. Rather, it is an acceptance of the divine will in which Isaiah’s form of the response (39:8) emphasizes the certainty of divine blessing at least in his lifetime.

Andrew Perriman rethinks the identity of the servant.

Philip proclaims the crucified and resurrected Jesus as Israel’s Lord and Christ, no doubt drawing out the theological significance of the extraordinary turn of events through the analogy with—but not identification with—Isaiah’s portrayal of Israel as a suffering servant.

And he has a follow-up here.

as things stand, we have to reckon, both historically and canonically, with its current location. It’s an integral part of the story of the exile and the return from exile.

Deane Galbraith argues against the class prejudice of scholars about Tobit.

The class characteristics of the Tobit family are frequently missed by commentators, despite many indications of their wealth and status.

New and Old together

NT Julia Blum relates issues about Sabbath observance in Matthew.

The gospels are the only first century source that we have, where healing is permitted and performed on Shabbat. Jesus advocates – perhaps even establishes – the same approach that later, slightly modified, will become normative in Rabbinic Judaism.

Also on the parables.

For instance, we find a parable similar to Jesus’ Parable of the Lost Coin in a Jewish commentary on the Song of Songs—Song of Songs Rabbah. Remarkably, here the parable itself is likened to the Lost Coin. “The matter is like a king who lost a coin or a precious pearl in his house. He will find it by the light of a penny-worth wick. Likewise, do not let the parable appear of little worth to you: through the parable, a man can stand on the words of Torah.

Via Brian Small on FB, Report of a symposium on Hays Echos. Response by Rafael Rodriquez, and reply from Richard Hays (more to come in March).

[T]his is a book that offers an account of the narrative representation of Israel, Jesus, and the church in the canonical Gospels, with particular attention to the ways in which the four Evangelists reread Israel’s Scripture—as well as the ways in which Israel’s Scripture prefigures and illuminates the central character in the Gospel stories.

Second response by Eric Barreto and reply from Hays.

...the significance of the New Testament is not to be found on a single literary or historical layer; instead, the Gospels and Paul alike are palimpsests of interpretive activity.

Who will go up for us?

... the chief point of coherence that lies at the center of my [Hays] argument: namely, the christological coherence of the Gospel narratives, all four of which in their distinctive ways proclaim the identity of Jesus as the definitive embodiment of Israel’s God. This was a deeply scandalous claim within the world of ancient Judaism, and it is a point on which the four Gospels converge and agree.

The third tangential response is also available, the fourth still to come in April. A technical note on pre-existence from Larry Hurtado.

final things are first things ... it was a short (but remarkable) step from belief in Jesus’ eschatological significance to belief in his pre-existence, and likely required very little time to make that step.

He also examines the Christological idea that Jesus was considered angelic noting much detail on the last 120 years of thinking on this subject.

The simple fact is that earliest Jesus-followers had a rich body of angel-speculations available to them and were convinced of the reality of angels, but they never referred to Jesus as an angel (to judge from the NT texts).

Ian Paul asks about sexual boundaries and gospel freedom.

Instead of questioning the meaning of scriptural passages, the bishop appeals to ‘other sources of authority such as reason, scientific evidence and in serious dialogue with other disciplines’. This is not crude rationalistic liberalism, however, as an important step in his argument is that he sets out a biblical justification as to why scripture itself mandates us to go beyond it.

Ian also writes on the miraculous catch of fish (lectionary for February 5th).

We will see the metaphorical boat of the early church filled almost to sinking throughout Acts, as on several occasions thousands come to faith in Jesus at a time, and the structural nets of leadership need expanding and reconsidering, not least when the ‘gentile mission’ takes off under Paul’s ministry.

Bosco Peters has an opinion on these fishy tales too.

In last Sunday’s Gospel reading (Luke 5:1-11), fish were perfectly happy, swimming their happy fishy life, and then they are caught in half-cleaned nets, dragged to the shore and left, dead and dying, on abandoned boats in the late afternoon heat. And Jesus seems to say: “follow me – what we did to those fish, that’s what we are going to do to people”!

Airtonyo points to a chapter of Class Struggle in the New Testament available online.

It is not uncommon to find unchecked entrepreneurial assumptions influencing the interpretation of the New Testament world, not only in the popular press but even within the discourse of biblical studies. ... the retrojection of entrepreneurialism demonstrates just how totalizing neoliberal capitalism has become as an implicit hermeneutical frame—a way of seeing and structuring the entire world—in every field and period of human knowledge.

Phillip Long continues his posts on the New Testament, with daily sequential posts on The Acts of the Apostles, e.g. Gamaliel:

Gamaliel urges careful deliberation before acting. ... Why does Gamaliel give this advice to the Council? Is this, as Dunn says, simply “shrewd politics”? Or is there more to this story?

What were they praying for when Peter appeared?

... if they were praying for his release, then their response to Peter’s escape from prison is unusual.

and Herod Agrippa (I)

Agrippa is therefore demonstrating his piousness by pursuing the leaders of the Christian community.

Via FB, James McGrath points out a Zondervan online course with an introduction to Who wrote the Book of Acts.

Together with the Gospel of Luke and the Letter to the Hebrews, the book of Acts contains some of the most cultured Greek writing in the New Testament. On the other hand, roughness of Greek style turns up where Luke appears to be following Semitic sources or imitating the Septuagint.

Wayne Coppins ponders Angelika Reichert pondering the I in Romans 7.

Consequently, it appears sensible to modify how the question is posed, i.e. instead of the question of the meaning of the positive statements about the “I”, to place the question of their function in the flow of vv. 14-23 in the foreground.

James Tabor has a two part post on the 6 greatest ideas in the writings of Paul.

Helmet, repaired in the very place of its failure in its classical form

/from part 1/... putting “justification by faith” at the center of Paul’s thought throws everything off balance. ... the New Testament gospels are essentially Pauline documents, with underlying elements of the earlier Jesus tradition. .../from part 2/  he, as a Suffering Servant, along with Christ, would also pour out his blood as an offering, and thus “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s suffering”

Ken Schenck has posted a 10 part series on Leadership beginning with Corinth.

At some point around AD49, a Christian couple arrived at the city of Corinth named Priscilla and Aquila. I put the wife's name first because the New Testament typically puts her name first when it is referring to their ministry together. This fact suggests that she generally took the lead in ministry between the two.

Christopher Scott explores soteriology.

For an entire semester we talked about elements of salvation, biblical views on what it means to be saved, historical interpretations of salvation, as well as people that have tried to make salvation something other than what the Bible describes it as.

Airtonyo quotes Moltmann on fundamentalism

O documento divino da revelação não pode estar sujeito à interpretação humana mas, ao contrário, a interpretação humana deve estar sujeita ao documento divino da revelação.

Claude Mariottini posts his fifth study on the explore God Chicago 2019 series. "Is Jesus really God?"

... the writers of the New Testament, as they tried to identify the one who died on the cross and the one who overcame the grave, concluded that the one whom they called “the Christ,” was fully human and fully God.

Larry Hurtado notes the usage of the phrase son of God in early Christian writings.

So, it’s clear that the NT authors vary in their use of the expression “son of God”, with no clear pattern readily apparent to me. The authors of GJohn and 1 John easily out-distance other NT texts in usage of the phrase, and in the confessional significance attached to it.

James McGrath posts on the doctrine of personal infallibility citing Lars Cade.

Many Christians think something like this: “The Bible is True. I believe the Bible. Therefore, everything I believe is true.” This also applies to the morality of actions they may take or motives they may have (see: defending the separation of families by quoting Romans 13). With such a mentality, it simply does not occur to people that they may be wrong.

Peter Gurry examines the textual problems with Hebrews 11:11.

Thus, in one single verse, we must judge between ‘longer’ and ‘shorter’ texts, and not make a fetish of either. There is no royal road or short cut in these matters.

Other notes Via ETC via Paleojudaica among a clutch of debunkings, Is codex sinaiticus a fake? Short answer, No.

Obviously, the two sets of images were not taken to the level of precision that Daniels’ theory needs. If they were, we would see no difference in colour at all, because those two versions of yellow that you see in this image are the exact same colour in real life.

Also via James Davila, Dating Biblical Texts to the Persian Period.

By grappling with these questions, the essays in this volume evince a greater degree of precision vis-a-vis dating and historical context.

James McGrath interviews Pete Enns about his book How the Bible actually works. Larry Hurtado points out two new books from Jörg Frey,

One of the most productive NT scholars today is Professor Jörg Frey (University of Zurich), and so it is very good news to have a couple of his major works now available in English.

and on the marginalia review of books, has a review of Paula Fredriksen’s When Christians were Jews.

I have attempted to reimagine the stages by which the earliest Jesus-community would have first come together again, after the crucifixion. To understand how and why, despite the difficulties, these first followers of Jesus would have resettled in Jerusalem. To reconstruct the steps by which they became in some sense the center of a movement that was already fracturing bitterly within two decades of its founder’s death. To see how the seriatim waves of expectation, disappointment, and fresh interpretation would have sustained this astonishing assembly in the long decades framed by Pilate’s troops in 30 and Titus’s in 70.

Phillip Long reviews Douglas Mangum and Josh Westbury, eds. Linguistics & Biblical Exegesis

The second volume of the Lexham Methods series surveys the often difficult field of linguistics. Since the essays in this volume are all aimed at students who are doing exegesis of the whole Bible, examples are given for both the Old and New Testaments.

Amy Erikson reviews the five scrolls. Table of Contents and list of authors is here.

... there are contributions from six scholars working in South Africa, several from the United States, two from scholars based in China, and two based in Australia. ... The volume also contains essays by scholars from Israel, Argentina, and the Netherlands. The result is an eclectic collection of fresh readings that explores not only how a reader’s context might influence one’s reading of the text but also how the Bible might enrich a reader’s understanding of his or her context.

James Pate reviews George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles.

"Imagine Sheldon Cooper in the pulpit, only with the desire to be a poet."

James Davila points to a review by Yitz Landes of The Origins of Midrash.

for much of antiquity, including during the early rabbinic period, the Semitic root d.r.sh referred to teaching—textual or otherwise. Mandel thus overturns the consensus understanding that early uses of the root d.r.sh refer to textual interpretation, and that only later was the root expanded to encompass teaching more generally.

James Hanson reviews According to the Scriptures.

If all you know is the New Testament, you do not know the New Testament” - so the late New Testament scholar Martin Hengel is reputed to have said... Allen has done a great service by compiling a truly comprehensive bibliography on the question of the Jewish Scriptures in the New Testament, both in general and specifically in relation to Jesus’s death.

April DeConick speaks about silenced voices in religion. Kings of Israel - Todd Bolen links to a board game.

If the players are able to build enough altars before the game ends, they win. If the game ends by either the team running out of sin cubes or idols, or by Assyria destroying Israel, the prophets lose.

A conversation from Michael Langlois: Campus Protestant m’a demandé comment l’archéologie éclaire la Bible. A note on the Hebrew language from Autumn Light.

So next time you hear Murphy’s Law— If anything can go wrong—it will. remember Goldberg’s Corollary: If anything can go wrong—God forbid—it won’t.

Also from Jonathan Orr-Stav, an answer to a question about ס and פ as parashot markers.

The division into parashot is usually to indicate a contextual change, so there isn’t a consistency in the size or number of verses involved. In the case of the Ten Commandments, for example, each commandment is a parashah in its own right—presumably to underline its importance.

Jim Davila and Drew Longacre both note a new book: The Masora on Scripture and its Methods.

The ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible contain thousands of Masora comments of two types: Masora Magna and Masora Prava. How does this complex defense mechanism, which contains counting of words and combinations from the Bible, work?

Again via Jim Davila, a new trilingual inscription found near the tomb of Darius the Great.

the most famous trilingual inscription from Iran is the Behistun inscription, which (rather like the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian) was key to the decipherment of Akkadian.

Via Ekaterini G. Tsalampouni an article on the pomegranate from ASOR.

The pomegranate is attested in ancient Elam during the 4th millennium BCE, and then spread to the rest of the Near East, with the original shrub (Punica protopunica L.) reaching Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine by the end of the 3rd millennium. Sumerians appear to have been involved in domestication of the pomegranate (Punica granatum L.), and the fruit quickly became an important symbol.

Call for papers for Medicine in the Bible, Warsaw 2019.

Contributors should aim at offering a comparative perspective by keeping an eye on the embeddedness of medical discourses in their surrounding cultures( ancient Babylonian, Near Eastern, Graeco-Roman, Persian, Byzantine/Syriac or early Islamicate traditions). Such a perspective will allow for assessing Jewish and Talmudic medical knowledge within a broader history of ancient knowledge cultures and helps to determine their distinct epistemologies or particular Jewishness.

Conference announcement on the New Song

the meaning of the Bible's poetry as Jewish and Christian scripture in the 21st century - the difficulties (ambiguity, genre blending/bending, figurative language), the dynamics (poetry as experience relayed and as experience relived, theological explorations of form and content, prosody and parallelism), and the effects and demands on hearers and reading communities.

Liturgy redefines liturgy. Take your pick of three definitions,

[Liturgy] was in ancient Greece a public service established by the city-state whereby its richest members (whether citizens or resident aliens), more or less voluntarily, financed the State with their personal wealth.

Kurk Gayle announces a posthumous book by Suzanne McCarthy Valiant or Virtuous? Gender Bias in Bible Translation. Ian Paul remembers Michael Green. Vimoth Ramachandra reflects on grief. Jim Gordon speaks of loss. Future carnivals Please contact Phillip Long @plong42 to volunteer for a carnival. Note that June is currently open.

March 2019 (Due April 1) - Spencer Robinson, @spoiledmilks

April 2019 (Due May 1) - Christopher Scott

May 2019 (Due June 1) - Claude Mariottini, @DrMariottini

June 2019 (Due July 1) -

July 2019 (Due August 1) - Lindsay Kennedy, @digitalseminary

August 2019 (Due September 1) - Amateur Exegete, @amateurexegete

The dreaded bin of everlasting stor-age.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2tIvfF9 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

WHEN I TAUGHT ancient and medieval Western civilization, at the end of the class I used to tell my undergraduate students that, for all the genius we had surveyed, if someone were to approach them with a time machine and ask what year they would like to live in, they should say, “This one, please.”

The slightest engagement with history teaches us that life is better for (almost) everyone today than it was for even the most privileged in the past. Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West joins a growing library of modernity boosterism by Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, and others, which seeks to convince us of our own good fortune.

Unlike Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), however, Goldberg’s is a jeremiad, a genre with a very old history, as the name indicates. As good as things are, he suggests, they are also tenuous. Goldberg thinks we are in danger of losing many of the benefits we have painstakingly accrued, that we have gone seriously off the ideological rails. The Western world has been captured by a tribal romanticism and is neither grateful for its blessings nor concerned with how to sustain them.

Goldberg covers a lot of ground, and the weight of his argument sometimes sags under the ancillary. He wants to explain “the miracle” — the astonishing increase in living standards and freedom in the past few centuries. He offers quick summaries of the birth of capitalism, the English and American revolutions, the foundations of liberty, and everything from the explosion of government regulation to current speech codes on campus, trends in film and music, and the economic woes of Venezuela. One can nitpick about the potted histories (for example, I believe he doesn’t acknowledge the enormous contribution of Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish thought to the founding of America or of capitalism), and there is some assassination by anecdote. Granted, his wry retelling of campus blaming, shaming, and victim claiming would shock all but the most ideologically besotted. But is the atmosphere better outside of the college campus? Are communities left or right more tolerant than students? Having attended my share of conferences, rallies, conventions, religious services, and public events, I am not at all convinced that campuses are unique in this regard. And if the attitudes there are more extreme, is that a surprise? Tolerance is painless to the indifferent and wrenching to the passionate. Youth specializes in passion.

That said, the details add up to a powerful indictment. Goldberg’s larger argument runs roughly as follows: human nature is not an overflow of goodness, but a mix of selfishness, altruism, distrust of the other, and the capacity to be civilized. Therefore, how we train ourselves and our children, how we learn to discipline our emotions, how we esteem the individual even when different from us, is critical to the democratic experiment. And we are trivializing and emoting our way to chaos. All the talk of feelings and identity, the exaltation of emotion over reason, corrodes the healthy body politic with a toxic species of group-solidarity. What’s the alternative? A return to core, conservative values.

¤

“Modern American conservatism,” Goldberg writes,

is a bundle of ideological commitments: limited government, natural rights, the importance of traditional values, patriotism, gratitude, etc. But underneath all of that are two bedrock assumptions upon which all of these commitments stand: the belief that ideas matter and that character matters.

At first glance, the assertion that ideas and character matter is denied by no one. But a mild assent is not enough. “[T]he cure for what ails us is dogma. The only solution to our woes is for the West to re-embrace the core ideas that made the Miracle possible, not just as a set of policies, but as a tribal attachment, a dogmatic commitment.” Assent is anodyne; we need devotion.

Goldberg attributes our ailment to a combination of causes: exhilarated with our identities and experiences, we slight the rationalism and individualism upon which America — and the West — was founded. Reasoned discourse falls before “as a (fill in the blank), I feel”; the subgroup you belong to has come to matter more than what you think. This way, argues Goldberg, lies balkanized chaos. We must return to our traditional roots.

John Locke in particular receives a long encomium. Goldberg explains why he, and not Rousseau, is America’s guiding spirit: “Locke believed in the sovereignty of the individual and that we are ‘captains of ourselves.’ Rousseau argues that the group was more important than the individual and the ‘general will’ was superior to the solitary conscience.”

It is dangerous to enlist intellectual history in service of modern agendas. The story of mind is capacious, and condemnations should be specific. One could as easily point to the transcendentalists as America’s guiding spirits, and surely Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson (and Lincoln, for that matter) could justly be described as romantics, or at least romantic adjacent. And while Goldberg continually extols the individual over the group, and identifies the group with romantic ideology, it is hardly clear that romanticism cannot be as individualistic a doctrine as reason. Reason is general; feelings are individual. The romantic hero was a solitary one. “Self-reliance” was Emerson’s essay, not Locke’s. That romanticism has lent itself to totalitarian ideologies is inarguable. But to prove that a militant tribalism is essentially a problem of romantic ideology would require a much longer book than this already long one.

Furthermore, Goldberg seems to be aware of the baleful social effects of the headphone-wearing, Netflix-binging, food-delivery-ordering loner whose needs are increasingly fulfilled by a series of screens. In a techno-geeking world, individualism easily slides into solipsism. Is that any more desirable than romantic tribalism?

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Goldberg certainly has a bone to pick with new technology. He complains of the ability of mass entertainment, music, movies, and TV to seduce us into immorality. Sure, Breaking Bad may have us falling in love with an increasingly savage Walter White, but Goldberg’s is a very old complaint, and hardly unique to new media. Recall that Plato wanted to ban poets from the Republic, and William Blake acutely commented that Milton, having made Satan by far the most vivid character in Paradise Lost, “was of the devil’s party without knowing it.” Diversions of the young have always seemed pernicious to the old. One can almost hear Goldberg shaking his head and muttering, pipe in hand, “Kids today…”

Indeed, there is much to dispute in this crowded book, but Goldberg is an expert shot and modern America is a target-rich environment. Polarization is greater than at any time in recent memory (and most of the book was written before the election of Donald Trump). Public depredations that would once seem unthinkable are routinely overlooked. As family and voluntary associations crumble, political divisions take on the coloration of religious commitments, passionate and exclusionary. Government does increasingly reach into every corner of our lives. The history of the West is far too often seen only through the prism of its crimes (which are, of course, heinous), rather than its unprecedented achievements. And we are undoubtedly victims of the skill with which we entertain ourselves. On all these issues, Goldberg’s analysis is acute, informative, and important.

His prescription, however, seems inadequate to the complexity of the problem. Is it really enough for us to become more appreciative and disciplined? Can we really turn on a dime? The same technological warp drive that has given us iPhones and streaming services has cut extreme global poverty in half. The same tsunami of data that has revolutionized medicine has, with a twist and a tweet, given us 24-hour news with its howling stridencies. We spit and get our genetic history, press a button and access all human knowledge, navigate the globe on a six-inch screen. In other words, we are in the midst of a tidal wave of change. A call for discipline and appreciation in the midst of such a maelstrom reminds one of St. Augustine’s encounter with the child who was trying to empty the sea with a spoon.

Perhaps no one can rise to the challenge of offering a prescription, but there is great value in diagnosis.

Suicide of the West has pointed to genuine problems: Jeremiah’s doom has been pronounced. Now we await the prophet who can explain how technology can aid our solidarity more than it destroys it.

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David Wolpe is rabbi of Sinai Temple in Westwood. His most recent book is David: The Divided Heart (Yale University Press).

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