#open orthodoxy

[kaurwreck]

i thought we all agreed we were joking when we said we didn't know why every gal in constantinople lives in istanbul, not constantinople.

#sorry fyodor orthodoxy post notes opened a can of worms for me that i'm too sleep deprived to close

[llycaons]

with respect to this person’s hc, I think lan jingyi being 100% lan makes him such a better and more interesting character, and actually makes him worth paying attention to as a character for what his behavior reveals about the current lan sect

#imo stereotyping people's personalities by sect is not a valuable or particularly meaningful approach #and obviously not supported by the vast variety in personalities and outlook within a single sect #wen ning vs. wen chao #nhs vs. nmj #jfm vs jc #and lxc vs. lwj #just look at lan yi! she's lwj's ancestor - nobody more lan. and she defied all orthodoxy. and that was the ppint #walking that back and tying personality to sect is just not very interesting #what if lan jingyi was a naturally loudmouthed and sarcastic person and he was able to thrive in the lan sect #because of the changes that lwj was instrumental in. and the lan sect #is a more open-minded and supportive and accepting place because of it #I'd much rather have that narrative #or what if the lans are still incredibly strict and ljy has preferential treatment because he's part of the lan family #or what if the lans are still incredibly strict and he doesn't get preferential treatment and he's punished all the time but he STILL #mouths off because he's irrepressible and his elders can make him do lines but they won't change who he is as a person #JL has a personality AND things going on. lsz has things going on but no personality #ljy has a personality but nothing going on #like the og trio in many ways in fact... #ficblogging

[vavandeveresfan]

Holy shit, the New York Times is FINALLY interviewing and listening to detransistioners.

The tide is turning.

Opinion by Pamela Paul

As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.

Feb. 2, 2024

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.

Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.

“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.

Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.

“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”

A New and Growing Group of Patients

Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”

Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.

They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.

In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.

“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.

Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.

Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.

Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.

Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”

One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.

Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”

But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.

Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.

Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.

In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.

But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.

“I realized something had gone totally off the rails,” Kimberly, who subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the L.G.B.T. Courage Coalition to advocate better gender care, told me.

Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.

As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”

“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”

When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”

In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.

“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”

Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.

Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.

Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.

‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’

At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”

“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”

She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.

Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues.

“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”

While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”

In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.

As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a number of advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutch studies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike some of the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the study said that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.

In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain — long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognized that early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explaining why it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”

But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.

Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”

Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”

The larger threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”

Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.

“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.

Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

*~*~*~*~*~*

For those who want tor ead more by those fighting the cancellation forquestioning, read:

Graham Lineham, who's been fighting since the beginning and paid the price, but is not seeing things turn around.

The Glinner Update, Grahan Linehan's Substack.

Kellie-Jay Keen @ThePosieParker, who's been physically attacked for organizing events for women demanding women-only spaces.

REDUXX, Feminst news & opinion.

Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs, A nonprofit of gay people and others within the community against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children under the guise of "LGBTQIA+"

#detransitioners #detransition #gender critical #New York Times #gays #lesbians #trans #trans insanity #long post #article #detrans #transgender #post trans #desisted

[copperbadge]

A horror trope that I very much enjoy is the "haunted book" -- a book that affects the reader in some way, like the Necronomicon driving people mad, or Dr. Mabuse's book that hypnotizes its reader into doing his bidding. It recently had a nice moment in the Magnus Archives, with the Leitner subplot, and there's even a hint of it in Frankenstein, when Victor reads the work of a scientist that his professors dismiss as nonsense and becomes obsessively deranged studying the subject matter.

So it's not that I think it's time for a revival and lord knows the word "reboot" has begun to stink of soulless profit (I think we're one, maybe two flops from a reboot of the MCU). I'm not the most current on horror media in any case so maybe it's been done, but if not I do think we oughta start considering the idea of a haunted phone app.

Apps are already designed for this, anyway. In our current era, a lot of retail "apps" are just reskinned browsers that load an optimized version of the company's website, and the goal of most apps and websites is to keep you in the app/website. (Which is why the google mail and tumblr apps both have internal web browsers.) A lot of phone games are designed to keep you in the game and continually redirect you towards microtransactions, and even apps that aren't games often gamify use; "gamification" has come to be a polite euphemism for "creating addictive circumstances".

Alongside this, a lot of recent cults and cultlike organizations have determined that straight religion is not the best way in anymore, and are coming in sidelong through MLMs (Nexium), wellness and dietary orthodoxies (Bikram Yoga, a number of insta/tiktok orthorexia gurus), or political movements (Qanon). So you get a cult, set up like a business, with an app you use for your business -- or even a cult with a "wellness" app that monitors your sleep, eating, location (wait, that's just FitBit) -- and slowly it gamifies you right into attempting to raise a Great Old One using the power of your downstream or a nice big helping of olive oil coffee.

Although I hate those thinkpieces/art pieces that are all about "you're so busy on your phone you can't appreciate the world around you, remember when we read real paper books" so I would require that the protagonist defeat the evil also using a phone app, or at the very least blind the evil using the flashlight function. Locking the book away in a library app and then putting the phone on airplane mode is a nice resolution, followed perhaps by it lighting up even though it's offline with a message "someone is attempting to locate this phone" as the post-credits stinger for the sequel.

This thought brought to you by Duolingo, which recently fed me, in succession, the task of translating from Italian the phrases

Who do you see in the mirror?

We open the curtains and see the light.

The pillows and blankets are red.

#horror #writing #story ideas #haunted books

[spriteofmushrooms]

As Nie Huaisang poured their tea, Jiang Cheng rubbed his thumb against the carved wooden box in his lap and tried not to fret over what the other man was thinking. He knew what he looked like: the white streak at his temple announced it all. Jiang Cheng's cultivation was failing, and with the discussion conference tomorrow, it would be impossible to hide. Not even the reputation of Sandu Shengshou could shield him from being known now.

"Jiang-xiong, if you brought me a present, you have to give it to me," Nie Huaisang said behind his fan. His eyes seemed amused, at least, maybe.

"I know that," Jiang Cheng said, flustered and annoyed for being so. He placed it on the table between them.

Nie Huaisang tapped his hand with the closed fan where he hadn't yet pulled it away, and Jiang Cheng snatched it back to his lap. "It's a beautiful box, Jiang-xiong, but you can't keep it, either!"

"We're supposed to drink tea first," Jiang Cheng groused as Nie Huaisang's dainty fingers opened the lid.

"No, I distinctly recall the Gusu edict that states gifts are more important than anything," Nie Huaisang said. "If it's on their wall, you know it's orthodoxy itself. Oh, what are these?"

In his hands, the brilliant pressed ink cakes were even more beautiful. He was holding the azure bird, and his skin glowed against it. "One of the painters in Lotus Cove has... eccentric ideas. She's been experimenting with pigment and ash combinations. These are her more stable creations, but even then, they're not as permanent as standard ink. But, well." Jiang Cheng pulled a small book out of his sleeve and handed it over. "Here."

Nie Huaisang pulled his bottom lip into his mouth, darted a glance at Jiang Cheng's face, and then set the ink cake back into the box. "I don't have enough hands," he whined, but he took the book graciously. Page by page, his expression grew sharper; a slight flush brightened his cheeks. "A generous gift, Jiang-xiong."

Jiang Cheng swallowed. "She said the pink is especially fleeting, so you shouldn't hang anything with it in direct sunlight," he said gruffly. "Some of them have inclusions that make them act unpredictably in water. It's... You'll have to work with them a lot. To know how they'll perform."

"This kingfisher shimmers with true to life colors," Nie Huaisang murmured. After a moment of silence, he said, "I haven't painted in a long time."

"I know," Jiang Cheng said miserably. At the other's look, he added, "The fans from the last few years weren't your style."

Instantly, Nie Huaisang's fan was between them again. Jiang Cheng looked away, neck hot.

After a tense silence, Nie Huaisang said, "Jiang-xiong, would you tell me if something was wrong?"

"You know something is."

"Can something be done?" Nie Huaisang paused. "Gusu healers, perhaps?"

Jiang Cheng scoffed. "What Lan would help me? Hanguang-jun has never hidden his disdain for me, and Zewu-jun seems determined to live on darkness and silence forever. The Lans who would graciously ignore the feelings of one can't forgive me for being associated with Jin Guangyao and Guanyin Temple, for not noticing a-Ling's xiao-shushu was a treacherous minx who had beguiled the First Jade and would hurt his precious feelings later. As if I've ever picked up on anything like that before."

"How is Jin-zongzhu?" It was hard to read Nie Huaisang's tone, but that wasn't new.

Jiang Cheng fiddled with Zidian, tugging the chain. "He has his friends, his duties, and his shibo."

"Not his jiujiu?"

"You know how Wei Wuxian is," Jiang Cheng said.

Another pause. "I suppose I do." Nie Huaisang picked up and repositioned ink cakes for a moment before asking, "Does he know?"

"Unless the Jin spies defected, yes."

Nie Huaisang rapped his knuckles with the fan, and Jiang Cheng looked up at him. "He should have heard it from you."

"You don't get to tell me how to die," Jiang Cheng snapped.

Nie Huaisang looked bored. "Oh? Then why are you here?"

"This is why tea is supposed to be drunk first," Jiang Cheng said peevishly. "The entire pot is cold now."

Nie Huaisang draped himself over the couch and fanned himself. "You're a thorough person, Jiang-xiong. You must have an heir to announce tomorrow; likely, one of your usual retinue to these things. Not your head disciple, for as dear as that boy is, he doesn't have the head for politics, and politics and reputation have kept YunmengJiang safe. Chen Helin?" At Jiang Cheng's sharp look, he added, "I pay attention to you, too, Jiang-xiong."

"If you know everything, why ask?"

"No one can know everything," Nie Huaisang said gently. "I very often know nothing and must hope for the best. QingheNie hasn't fallen yet, which suggests even caged birds in pavilions aren't always prey." He looked at the box. "You want me to paint again. Why now?"

"After," Jiang Cheng started. He wasn't used to seeing Nie Huaisang's entire face. He wasn't used to seeing Nie Huaisang in soft, unembroidered robes. He wasn't used to seeing Nie Huaisang's hair down from its braids. "After," he repeated, "I didn't ask about your leg."

Nie Huaisang waited, but then murmured, "It healed."

Jiang Cheng swallowed. "I was selfish. I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want to think about Chifeng-zun's body or what seeing it in pieces would do to you, because I can't—things are better when you don't think about them. But you stopped painting when he died, Nie-xiong, and all I did back then was scold you for not knowing how to triage your sect in its grief. In your grief." Here, the traitor that used to be his body swelled, and the foreign wave of mourning filled him once again. "You should paint," Jiang Cheng said through tears.

"Oh." Nie Huaisang opened his mouth, and then he closed it, simply looking at Jiang Cheng. "Come here," he said, patting the couch.

Obediently, Jiang Cheng moved to sit next to him.

"Good, good. Put your face here, please."

Jiang Cheng hesitated, but was it wrong to seek comfort when invited? He hadn't asked for it. Nie Huaisang probably didn't know how much he needed it, so it wasn't like he pressured him into it. He fell forward and pressed his face into Nie Huaisang's neck. Engulfed by the complex herbal and spice blend preferred in Qinghe incense and Nie Huaisang's sweet, peppery chrysanthemum, he simply breathed.

"You helped me a lot back then, Jiang-xiong." Nie Huaisang was a little cooler than him, since their cultivation levels were so different, but it was refreshing on his heated cheeks. "Maybe you were stringent, but someone fussing at me to take care of my duties was comforting." His hand moved to the back of Jiang Cheng's head. "I'm sorry I didn't go to Lotus Pier and make a complete nuisance of myself when you needed one."

"I didn't expect you to."

"Why?"

"They said I killed your friend."

Nie Huaisang's hand tightened in his hair. "Weren't you my friend?"

Jiang Cheng didn't want to say that he didn't know, so he said nothing.

#mdzs #sangcheng #pallas.rtf #my writing #i wrote this over a year ago but i still think it's cute

[philosophicalconservatism]

A federal circuit court judge invited as a speaking guest to Stanford Law School last month was endlessly interrupted, shouted down, and harassed by Left-wing protesters as he attempted to address the students at the school. Stanford has since apologized for both the students and the misconduct of its own faculty during the incident, stating that this was inconsistent with its policies on free speech.

At the University Of Buffalo, Left-wing protesters attempted to shutdown another speaking event; this time by a Conservative political commentator who disagrees with contemporary gender ideology.

This has been the pattern of universities across the United States for years and years now. Increasingly we have an entire generation of young people who have no regard for the ideals of intellectual curiosity, intellectual diversity or rational deliberation. They believe that the purpose of education is personal affirmation rather than universal exploration. They think and speak in the language of dogma and heresy; endeavoring to both silence and destroy anything that does not conform to their established political orthodoxy. And no matter how new or recently fashionable an item of that orthodoxy is, it may not be questioned. How can the quality of American higher education be maintained if such trends persist? It cannot be. Once unconditional ideological conformity replaces open and sincere inquiry, education is dead.

[shut-up-rabert]

Rant timeeee

Sometimes I feel like “open minded hindus” need to form a society of our own so to make sure that neither extreme left nor extreme right hijacks the religious movement and give people a wrong Idea of Hinduism.

The way local “Hindu” orgs push for more orthodoxy really scares me. Today I heard a debate on how only salwar kameez and traditional dresses should be allowed in the temple. What is a religious person like me who doesn’t wear trad clothing supposed to do? Not pray anymore?! Not go to temples despite being a god loving Hindu?

What about Vidur’s wife who ran to see Lord Shree Krishna and forgot to put clothes on out of excitement and had to be reminded by him, who was moved by her devotion? What about Mata Bhadrakali who dons skulls, limbs and blood of demons as garments? Are they not respectable women for you?

What the fuck do you mean when you speak of muslim women the way you do? You repay those who harm Hindu Women by doing the same to innocent muslim women? What the fuck do you think women are? What happened to Hari hi Narayani? What happened to us being your equals according to the sacred texts?

What do you mean when you say Lgbtq should be punished? You seem to think you know hinduism more than doctor bhagwat, the RSS chief who unconditionally accepts the validity of Queer existence? More than lord mercury (Budhha, not Budhhā) who loved his partner even tho he turned out to be a different gender than believed? More than lord Shree Krishna who let Shikhandi have his preffered gender? More than Shree Rama who was moved to tears by his Eunech devotees? More than the Narayan who created us all fully knowing what we were going to be?

What should the Queer people who revert to Hindu because of its acceptance do? Revert again? Would your convert hungry self want that?

Do these people not realise how much they are harming Sanatan by this? Not realise that our openness and tolerance to different practices is what makes us, us?

This is not how you preserve Sanatan. The clothes and traditions are a considerable part, but our wisdom and awareness are the major ones.

Protect it from any threat and enemies who want it gone, but don’t go about making enemies from your own people who practice in a different way or aren’t what you want them to be.

If you want to create awareness about Hinduism, learn to be calm and wise and the kind of person a Hindu is supposed to be. Read the sacred texts if you will. Valour plays a big part, but Knowledge and acceptance plays aswell.

*closes powerpoint*

And this is why learned Hindus (and Sanatanis in general) need to speak up more. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. Your money will be refunded shortly. :)

#hinduism #hindublr #tw: rant #all I wanna say is #HINDUISM IS TOO GOOD TO BE CONSTRICTED LIKE THIS PLEASE—

[vigilantkatholixx]

VI. Embracing Masculinity

Robert Moore – King, Warrior, Magician, Lover David Deida – The Way of the Superior Man Walter Newell – The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country Frederic Delavier – Strength Training Anatomy Mark Rippetoe – Starting Strength Tony Robbins – Awaken The Giant Within Marcus Aurelius – The Meditations Sun Tzu – The Art of War Robert Greene – The 48 Laws of Power Yamamoto Tsunetomo – Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

VII. Traditional Christianity

G.K. Chesterton – Orthodoxy Venerable Fulton Sheen – The Moral Universe Hilaire Belloc – Survivals and New Arrivals Michael Walsh – Roman Catholicism: The Basics Archbishop James Gibbons – The Faith of Our Fathers Henri Daniel Rops – This is the Mass Fr. Frederick William Faber – The Precious Blood or the Price of Our Salvation Fr. Frederick William Faber – The Creator and The Creature Robert Hugh Benson – Christ in the Church Cardinal Manning – The Holy Ghost, The Sanctifier Colin Lindsay – The Evidence for the Papacy Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre – An Open Letter to Confused Catholics Fr. James F. Wathen – The Great Sacrilege Fr. Luigi Villa – Vatican II About Face! Fr. Joseph Deharbe – A Complete Catechism of the Catholic Religion ——– Alexander Schmemann – For the Life of the World Kallistos Ware – The Orthodox Way Lorenzo Scupoli – Unseen Warfare John Marler – Youth of the Apocalypse and The Last True Rebellion Seraphim Rose – Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future

VIII. History Revisited.

Admiral Raphael Semmes – Memoirs of Service Afloat Anne Jean Marie René Savary – Memoirs of the Duke of Rovigo Claude François de Méneval – Memoirs to Serve for the History of Napoleon I K. P Pobyedonostseff – Reflections of a Russian Statesman Edmund Burke – Reflections on the Revolution in France Regine Pernoud – Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths Lothrop Stoddard – The French Revolution on San Domingo Sidney George Fisher – True History of the American Revolution Lawrence H. Keeley – War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage Alexis de Tocqueville – The Old Regime and the Revolution Peter Oliver – Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion

#books 3

[francesderwent]

*clears throat* Chesterton says in Orthodoxy, “The note of the fairy utterance always is, ‘You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word “cow”’; or ‘You may live happily with the King’s daughter, if you do not show her an onion.’ The vision hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden....Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do.”

and Lockwood & Co is very much set up as this kind of fairytale!! Lucy is presented with a vision of dizzy and colossal things - she can live in this cozy home, she can fight monsters alongside people who care for her, she can be free and powerful and unafraid, she can be understood and appreciated and saved. but she cannot open the door on the landing - she cannot even ask about it. everything she is gifted depends on that one prohibition. she’s Pandora, she’s Psyche, she’s Bluebeard’s wife. the closed door grates on her, because of its mystery but also (especially) just because of its forbiddenness. she can’t just leave it alone.

but the really interesting bit is!! she does. Lucy steps into a fairytale that we’re all familiar with. she’s welcomed into the home of a lover who could be a god or could be a monster. she’s told it can be her home, and they can belong to one another, so long as she doesn’t cross this one line - so long as she doesn’t open the door. and she toes the line - she brings it up, and asks about it - but she doesn’t go over. Lucy obeys the fairy prohibition, and so she gets to stay in fairyland. and grace abounding ever-more: her mythical lover didn’t intend to leave her in the dark forever. he’d wanted to bring her into the fullness of his truth for a long time. she’s able to step over the threshold, because he invites her.

#is lockwood a very chestertonian character or am I a very chestertonian thinker? idk #meta whine and rant #I dunno guys I just think Adam and Eve ate the apple because they were told it would make them like gods! #but God created man with his divinization in mind already!! #the door will be opened to you if you wait!! if you don't grasp at it but stand with open hands!!!!!!!!!! #and I love that the story of these kids!!! is not a story of a Fall!!!!!

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“Freedom of Speech”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Reith Lecture, 2022

Full transcript, with a link to watch at the end of the post.

“It’s a bit disturbing to have people be forced to clap for me. And I’m sorry. Thank you all for being here. I’m really happy to be here and I’m happy that you’re here.

It is a privilege for me to be here today to join in the distinguished tradition of the BBC Reith Lectures. When I was growing up in the 1980s on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, I was a very curious child keen to hear every story, especially those that were no business of mine. And so, as a result, I sharpened very early on in life the skill of eavesdropping, a pastime at which I am still quite adept.

I noticed that each time my parents’ friends visited, they would sit in the living room talking loudly, except for when they criticised the military government. Then, they spoke in whispers. That whispering, apart from testing my eavesdropping capabilities, was striking. Why speak in such hushed tones when in the privacy of our living room, drinking brandy, no less? Well, because they were so attuned to a punitive authoritarian government that they instinctively lowered their voices, saying words they dared not say in public.

We would not expect this whispering in a democracy. Freedom of expression is after all, the bedrock of open societies. But there are many people in Western democracies today who will not speak loudly about issues they care about because they are afraid of what I will call, “social censure,” vicious retaliation, not from the government, but from other citizens.

An American student once accosted me at a book reading. “Why,” she asked angrily, “Had I said something in an interview?” I told her that what I had said was the truth, and she agreed that it was and then asked, “But why should we see it, even if it’s true?” At first, I was astonished at the absurdity of the question, then I realised what she meant. It didn’t matter what I actually believed. I should not have said it because it did not align with my political tribe. I had desecrated the prevailing orthodoxy. It was like being accused of blasphemy in a religion that is not yours. That young woman’s question, “Why should we say it, even if it’s true?” illustrates what the writer Ayad Akhtar has called a moral stridency, “a fierce, perhaps even punitive adherence to the collectively-sanctioned attitudes and behaviours of this era.”

To that, I would add, that this moral stridency is in fact, always punitive. We now live in broad settled ideological tribes. We no longer need to have real discussions because our positions are already assumed, based on our tribal affiliation. Our tribes demand from us a devotion to orthodoxy and they abide not reason, but faith. Many young people are growing up in this cauldron afraid to ask questions for fear of asking the wrong questions. And so, they practise an exquisite kind of self-censorship. Even if they believe something to be true or important, they do not say so because they should not say so.

One cannot help but wonder in this epidemic of self-censorship, what are we losing and what have we lost? We are all familiar with stories of people who have said or written something and then, faced a terrible online backlash. There is a difference between valid criticism, which should be part of free expression, and this kind of backlash, ugly personal insults, putting addresses of homes and children’s schools online, trying to make people lose their jobs.

To anyone who thinks, “Well, some people who have said terrible things, deserve it,” no. Nobody deserves it. It is unconscionable barbarism. It is a virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken but to create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking. There is something honest about an authoritarianism that recognises itself to be what it is. Such a system is easier to challenge because the battle lines are clear. But this new social censure demands consensus while being wilfully blind to its own tyranny. I think it portends the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity.

No human endeavour requires freedom as much as creativity does. To create, one needs a kind of formless roving of the mind, to go nowhere and anywhere and everywhere. It is from that swell that art emerges. The German writer, Gunter Grass, once reflected on his writing process with these words: “The barriers fell, language surged forward, memory, imagination, the pleasure of invention.” As a writer, I recognised this intimately. As a reader, I have often felt the magic of literature, that sudden internal shiver while reading a novel, that glorious shock of mutuality, a sense of wonder that a stranger’s words could make me feel less alone in the world.

Literature shows us who we are, takes us into history, tells us not just what happened but how it felt and teaches us, as an American Professor once put it, about things that are “not googleable.” Books shape our understanding of the world. We speak of “Dickensian London.” We look to great African writers like Aidoo and Ngugi to understand the continent and we read Balzac for the subtleties of post-Napoleonic France.

Literature deeply matters and I believe literature is in peril because of social censure. If nothing changes, the next generation will read us and wonder, how did they manage to stop being human? How were they so lacking in contradiction and complexity? How did they banish all their shadows?

On a calm morning in New York this August, Salman Rushdie was attacked while just about to speak, ironically, on the freedom of speech. Imagine the brutal, barbaric intimacy of a stranger standing inches from you and forcefully plunging a knife into your face and your neck multiple times, because you wrote a book. I decided to re- read Rushdie’s books, not only as an act of defiant support but as a ritualized reminder that physical violence in response to literature can never, ever be justified.

Rushdie was attacked because in 1989, after his novel, The Satanic Verses was published, the Iranian regime declared it offensive and condemned not just Rushdie but all his publishers, to death. Horrors, of course, then followed: His Italian translator was stabbed, his Norwegian publisher was shot, and his Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered in Tokyo. Here is a question I’ve been thinking about: would Rushdie’s novel be published today? Probably not. Would it even be written? Possibly not.

There are writers like Rushdie who want to write novels about sensitive subjects, but are held back by the specter of social censure. Publishers are wary of committing secular blasphemy. Literature is increasingly viewed through ideological rather than artistic lenses. Nothing demonstrates this better than the recent phenomenon of “sensitivity readers” in the world of publishing, people whose job it is to cleanse unpublished manuscripts of potentially offensive words.

This, in my mind, negates the very idea of literature. We cannot tell stories that are only light when life itself is light and darkness. Literature is about how we are great and flawed. It is about what H. G. Wells has called ‘the jolly coarseness of life.’ To that I would add that just coarseness alone will do, it need not be jolly.

While I insist that violence is never an acceptable response to speech, I do not deny the power of words to wound. Words can break the human spirit. Some of the deepest pain I have experienced in my life have come from words that somebody said or wrote, and some of the most beautiful gifts I have received have also been words. It is precisely because of this power of words that freedom of speech matters.

‘Freedom of speech.’ Even the expression itself has sadly taken on a partisan tribal tint. It is often framed, and I will put it crudely, as “say whatever you want” versus, “consider the feelings of others.” This, though, is too stark a dichotomy.

I cannot keep count of all the books that have offended me, infuriated me, disgusted me, but I would never argue that they not be published. When I read something scientifically false, such as that drinking urine cures cancer, or something gratuitously hurtful to human dignity, such as that gay people should be imprisoned for being gay, I desperately long to banish such ideas from the world. Yet I resist advocating censorship. I take this position as much for reasons of principle as for practicality.

I believe deeply in the principle of free expression, and I believe this particularly because I am a writer and a reader, and because literature is my great love and because I have been formed and inspired and consoled by books. Had any of those books been censored, I would perhaps today be lost.

My practical reason, we could also call it my selfish reason, is that I fear the weapon I advocate to be used against someone else might one day be used against me. What today is considered benign could very well become offensive tomorrow, because the suppression of speech is not so much about the speech itself, as it is the person who censors. American high school boards are today engaged in a frenzy of book banning, and the process seems arbitrary. Books that have been used in school curriculums for years with no complaints have suddenly been banned in some states, and I understand that one of my novels is in this august group.

I confess that there are some books I would fantasize about banning. Books that deny the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide, for example, because I detest the denial of history. But what if someone else’s fantasy was to ban a book about the Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinians by Zionists in 1948? Or a book about the Igbo coalminers massacred in Nigeria by the British colonial government in 1949? Above principle and pragmatism, however, is the reality that censorship very often does not achieve its objective. My first instinct, on learning that a book has been banned, is to seek it out and read it.

And so, I would say, do not ban them, answer them. In this age of mounting disinformation all over the world, when it is easy to dress up a lie so nicely that it starts to take on the glow of truth, the solution is not to hide the lie but to expose it, and scrub from it, its false glow. When we censor the purveyors of bad ideas, we risk making them martyrs, and the battle with a martyr can never be won.

I read newspapers from both sides of the political spectrum. I am, by the way, still puzzled that newspapers, ostensible bastions of objectivity, are politically differentiated. And I often say when I am feeling a little sanctimonious, that I am interested in the ideas of people who disagree with me because I believe that it is good to hear different sides of an issue. But the truth is that I am interested in their ideas because I want to understand them properly and therefore be better able to demolish them.

I believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech, and I recognize how simplistic, even flippant, that can sound. This is not to suggest that one should be allowed to say absolutely anything at any time, which to me is a juvenile position, for being fantastical and detached from reality. Free speech absolutism would be appropriate only for a theoretical world inhabited by animated ideas rather than humans.

Some speech restrictions are necessary in a civilized world. After the Second World War, when countries gathered to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, most agreed that “incitement to violence,” should be punished, but the Soviet Bloc wanted to add “incitement to hatred,” citing the Nazis as an example, which on the surface was reasonable. But their opponents suspected, rightly, that “incitement to hatred,” would end up being interpreted so widely as to include any criticism of the government.

This raises the question: who decides just how narrow and how clear restrictions should be? The nineteenth century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, wrote that all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility, and with all due respect to the Pope, nobody is infallible. So, who decides what should be silenced?

Mahatma Gandhi, after he was arrested for sedition, wrote: “Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence.”

Most people would agree. But what about speech that does not directly incite violence but has nevertheless led to deaths by suicide, as has happened with people is so harangued on social media, so insulted and abused, that they take their own lives? I, by the way, use the word ‘violence,’ assuming that its meaning is self-evident. But is it really? For what is to be said of the idea prevalent today that speech does not merely incite violence – the kind of physical act as suffered by Salman Rushdie – but that speech itself IS violence?

The expression, ‘the answer to bad speech is more speech,’ in its beguiling simplicity, also fails to consider a central motif, which is power. Who has access? Who is in a position to answer bad speech with more speech? In arguing for the freedom of speech, one must consider all the limitations placed by unequal power relations, such as a mainstream press owned by fewer and fewer wealthy people, which naturally excludes multiple voices.

Even the definition of speech can be limiting, such as when the US Supreme Court decided, in the case of Citizens United, that money is speech. All those not wealthy cannot then ‘answer back,’ as it were. Most of all, the Social Media companies, with their mystical algorithms and their lack of transparency, exert enormous control on who can speak and who cannot, by suspending and censoring their users, something that has been called ‘moderation without representation.’

Yes, these companies are private but considering the outsize influence they have in modern society, they really should be treated more like a public utility. There are those who think that, because of these sorts of power limitations, we should robustly censor speech in order to create tolerance. A well-intentioned idea, no doubt. But as the Danish lawyer, Jacob Mchangama, has argued: “To impose silence and call it tolerance does not make it so. Real tolerance requires understanding. Understanding comes from listening. Listening presupposes speech.”

For all the nobility in the idea of censorship for the sake of tolerance, it is also a kind of capitulation, an acceptance that the wounded cannot fight back. When an anti-black poster was once displayed on the campus of Arizona State University, the university chose not to expel the perpetrators. Instead, a forum was organized, the poster discussed, and an overwhelming majority of students expressed their disapproval. One of the black students who organized this said, “When you get a chance to swing at racism, and you do, you feel more confident about doing it the next time.”

A troubling assumption underlying the idea of censorship for the sake of tolerance is that good people don’t need free speech, as they cannot possibly want to say anything hurtful to anyone. Free speech is therefore for the bad people who want it as a cover to say bad things. The culture of social censure today has, at its center, a kind of puritanism that expects us to be free of all flaws, like angels, and angels do not need free speech.

Of course, we all need free speech. Free speech is indeed a tool of the powerful, but it is also crucially the language of the powerless. The courageous protests by Iranian women, the ENDSARS protest in Nigeria, where young people rallied against police brutality, the Arab Spring: all wielded speech. Dissent is impossible without the freedom of speech.

The biggest threat to speech today is not legal or political, but social. This is not a new idea, even if its present manifestation is modern. That famed chronicler of American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, believed that the greatest dangers to liberty were not legal or political, but social. And when John Stuart Mill warned against the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling,” it reads as though he foresaw the threat that orthodoxy poses today. The solution to this threat can only be collective action. Social censure creates not just a climate of fear but also a reluctance to acknowledge this fear. It is only human to fear a mob, but I would fear less if I knew my neighbor would not stay silent were I to be pilloried. We fear the mob but the mob is us.

I want to make a case today for moral courage, for each of us to stand for freedom of speech, to refuse to participate in unjustified censorship, and to make much wider, the boundaries of what can be said. We must start again to assume good faith. In public discourse today, the assumption of good faith is dead and speech is by default interpreted in the most uncharitable way. Yes, some people are not of good faith which, I suppose, is what that modern word “troll” means, but we cannot, because some people do not act in good faith, then decide that the principle of good faith itself is dead. It is instructive to be reminded of American President James Madison’s words: “some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of everything.”

We must start again to make our case, respectfully and factually. We must agree that neither sanctimonious condescension on the left nor mean-spirited hectoring on the right qualify as political arguments. We must insist not only on truth but also nuance. An argument for any social justice movement, for example, is stronger and more confident when it is nuanced because it does not feel the need to simplify in order to convince.

We must hear every side and not only the loudest side. While social media has re-shaped the traditional power dynamic by giving some access to the powerless, it has also made it easy to mistake the loudest voices for the truest. We must protect the values of disagreement, and agree that there is value in disagreement. And we must support the principle of free expression when it does not appeal to our own agenda, difficult as that may be, and I find it particularly so.

We must wean ourselves of the addiction to comfort. When I first left Nigeria to attend university in the US, I quickly realized that in public conversations about America’s difficult problems – like income inequality and race – the goal was not truth, the goal was to keep everyone comfortable. And so, people pretended not to see what they saw, things were left unsaid, questions unasked, and ignorance festered. This unwillingness to accept the discomfort that honesty can bring is in its own way a suppression of speech. Some Americans argue, for example, that students today should not be taught about the racist Jim Crow laws of the 1950s, because it will make them uncomfortable. And so, they prefer the disservice to young people of making them ignorant of their own history.

We must stop assuming that everyone knows, or should know, everything. I was once struck by how quickly an American journalist was fired from her job for saying something racist. Little was made public about exactly what it was she had said, and this not only gave a certain unearned power to her words, but also darkly suggested that perhaps they contained an element of truth. The public was also cheated of its right to hear, and perhaps, potentially learn. What was said? Why was saying it wrong? What should have been said instead?

We must demand that people behave on social media only as they would in real life, and we must also demand reasonable social media reforms such as the removal of anonymity, or linking advertising only to accounts with real names, which would provide an incentive to promote voices of actual people and not amoral bots.

What if each of us, but particularly those with voices, gatekeepers, opinion shapers, political and cultural leaders, editors, social media influencers, across the political spectrum, were to agree on these ideas as broad rules to follow? A coalition of the reasonable would automatically moderate extreme speech. Is it naïve? Perhaps. But a considered embrace of naivety can be the beginning of change. The internet was after all designed to create a utopia of human connection. A naïve idea if ever there was one, but it still brought about the most significant change in how human beings communicate.

Sometimes it takes a crisis for a naïve idea to become realistic. President Roosevelt’s New Deal itself was based on ideas that went against the prevailing consensus of the time and were generally considered naïve and impossible. But when crisis came in the form of the Great Depression, it suddenly became possible.

Social censure is our crisis today. George Orwell wrote that, “If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it.” To that I would add: We can protect our future. We just need moral courage.

Thank you.”

#too good not to share in its entirely #*entirety #I’ll be posting individual quotes tomorrow I think

[eightyonekilograms]

wildgifthorses what, exactly, is the self-interested harm from climate change that developed world zillennials are "staring down the barrel" of?

I didn't get into it because that was sort of "scope creep" for the original post, but I actually agree with you. I really wish people would just read the IPCC reports— they're quite readable, and they're pretty frank about what will and won't happen. But since we live in a fallen world where nobody will do that, you need to take your intended audience's worldview and emotional truths into account, even if those are based on faulty data. That's Rhetoric 101.

And look, the reality is, the well of "you do not have a correct view of how bad the effects of climate change will be" has been thoroughly, utterly poisoned by the denialists. If you're writing to try and get people to have a more realistic assessment, that poisoning isn't your fault, but it is your problem. If you really want to persuade here, you need to cross every t and dot every i and obsessively quintuple-check every turn of phrase, to make sure you leave no opening whatsoever for your readership to write you off as an Exxon shill. And since Friedman's Substack post was what prompted that last post, let's see him as an example of how not to do it:

As regular readers know, I believe that the current scientific orthodoxy on climate change overestimates expected cost, that we do not actually know whether climate change will make us on net better or worse off. 

If "getting young progressives to have a realistic view on the effects of climate change, instead of an apocalyptic one" is a marathon, having this as your opening sentence is the equivalent of tripping on your untied shoelaces and breaking your face right at the starting gun.

[is-this-really--life]

I sincerely hope one day you can escape from the RadFem cult and learn that you don't have to live your life in fear. It can be hard to recognise propaganda at first but there are resources out there to help you. However, it can't start until you're ready, so until then us good members of society have to run damage control on your awful politics.

Hey. So here's an essay on cult-like thinking from this wonderful reidentified woman and lesbian writer I just discovered:

I don't agree with everything this author says, but I agree with most of it, and I think this perspective is important.

On radical feminism: I found a community to surround myself with that prioritizes women, celebrates our gender nonconformity and critical thinking, and raises awareness about the depths of misogyny and male violence.

I'm not in a cult anymore. I no longer avoid information from sides I disagree with. I regularly engage with ideas that differ from my own. I'm open to changing my mind about things, but I know why I believe what I believe. This was not the case when I was in radical queer spaces.

They regularly misrepresented the beliefs of an entire branch of feminism and the group that closely aligns with it, telling everyone to "block and stay safe" and "you're bigoted if you start to think biological sex (with a diversity of expressions) matters more than gender identity" or even that "Trans women are trans women, and don't share many of the experiences that biological women do as female bodied people."

If you reposted from one of the blacklisted accounts, usually something feminist and nothing to do with trans people, you were a suspect, and you would be dog piled on unless you deleted it. They all began to interpret basic feminist consciousness as a red flag until everyone who didn't listen to radfems stopped posting about feminism altogether. It's a little better now than it was a few years back. But it's still not great.

This attitude is not only found online anymore. There is a group of people who are no longer my friends because I started asking questions and disagreeing with them about the nature of "gender" as a sociological concept, as a social role assigned to the sexes, rather than a highly individual internal feeling and identity that everyone supposedly has. These were the type of people who refused to engage with opinions that differ from their own. These were the people ruled by a fear of stepping out of line. They would cut people off for the smallest perceived missteps. I don't befriend people locked into that cult-like mentality anymore. No matter what end of the political spectrum it comes from.

P.S. I've been talking openly with my normal, very offline cousin about every "radfem" belief I have, including the feminist ones criticizing male violence, and the ones criticizing the very online behavior of the group of people shouting that "sex isn't real" or "isn't overwhelmingly dimorphic" or that "trans people are being genocided in the U.S." or whatever, and she 100% agrees with everything I say. Can you say the same? Or do very offline people get weirded out and concerned when you talk queer orthodoxy bullshit? Just asking.

#radfem #ask #gender critical #heterodoxy

[orthodoxadventure]

The Unity and Infallibility of the Church

'The Church is one. Its unity follows of necessity from the unity of God'. So wrote Khomiakov in the opening words of his famous essay. If we take seriously the bond between God and His Church, then we must inevitably think of the Church as one, even as God is one; there is only one Christ, and so there can be only one Body of Christ. Nor is this unity merely ideal and invisible; Orthodox theology refuses to separate the 'invisible' and 'visible Church', and therefore it refuses to say that the Church is invisibly one but visibly divided. No: the Church is one, in the sense that here on earth there is a single, visible community which alone can claim to be the one true Church. The 'undivided Church' is not merely something that existed in the past, and which we hope will exist again in the future: it is something that exists here and now. Unity is one of the essential characteristics of the Church, and since the Church on earth, despite the sinfulness of its members, retains its essential characteristics, it remains and always will remain visibly one. There can be schisms from the Church, but no schisms within the Church. And while it is undeniably true that, on a purely human level, the Church's life is grievously impoverished as a result of schisms, yet such schisms cannot affect the essential nature of the Church.

In its teaching upon the visible unity of the Church, Orthodoxy stands far closer to Roman Catholicism than to the Protestant world. But if we ask how this visible unity is maintained, Rome and the east give somewhat different answers. For Rome the unifying principle in the Church is the Pope whose jurisdiction extends over the whole body, whereas Orthodox do not believe any bishop to be endowed with universal jurisdiction. What then holds the Church together? Orthodox answer, the act of communion in the sacraments. The Orthodox theology of the Church is above all else a theology of communion. Each local Church is constituted, as Ignatius saw, by the congregation of the faithful, gathered round their bishop and celebrating the Eucharist; the Church universal is constituted by the communion of the heads of the local Churches, the bishops, with one another. Unity is not maintained from without by the authority of a Supreme Pontiff, but created from within by the celebration of the Eucharist. The Church is not monarchical in structure, centred round a single hierarch; it is collegial, formed by the communion of many hierarchs with one another, and of each hierarch with the members of his flock. The act of communion therefore forms the criterion for membership of the Church. An individual ceases to be a member of the Church is he severs communion with his bishop; a bishop ceases to be a member of the Church if he severs communion with his fellow bishops.

-- Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church

#Kallistos Ware #Christianity #Orthodox Christianity #Church #God #Unity

[bri-the-nautilus]

Hi there! I saw your reply to that ask about Malenia being a milf, really enjoyed reading it all (it was all just right!). Especially a passage on Gowry. Do you have more detailed headcanons/theories on him? Can you share them?

It's just that he plays an important role in my own postcanon story, being sort of a rematching villain. So I'm always open on any info on him and the Rot in general, even others' headcanons. Do you think there could be other humans worshipping the Rot? (not just kindreds/pests).

I meself stick to the theory of him being a Carian sorcerer who's studied the Rot and went too far (then even farther to turn back).

Thank you!

(editing this in at the end. This got LONG. I dug up so much stuff as I was compiling my thoughts, and this post took quite a turn. Thanks for getting me thinking, and I apologize for how ungodly long this post is. This was fun!)

Gowry is an interesting one. He doesn't talk much about himself, and his adopted daughters don't really like to talk about him either for obvious reasons. And as far as sane residents of Caelid to converse with go, it's really just him and the girls, a few merchants, Maliketh, and Jerren. Not exactly a wealth of lore.

Let's start with his armor set. Gowry wears the Sage Set, which can be found in Liurnia's Stillwater Cave. It's worth noting that this cave is home to several Rot-themed enemies, including mushroom priests and a Cleanrot Knight. From the description of the Sage Armor:

Thick burgundy robe. Attire of the wise sages who were deemed heretical. Evidence that the wearer was driven from town.

This is interesting. It's also worth noting that Gowry isn't the only character who wears this armor. Necromancer Garris, the boss of the Sage's Cave, also wears pieces of the set. Their faces are also quite similar. There could be a connection here, but we're getting sidetracked.

So the Sages were driven from a town. The question is, which town? The answer is of course Sellia, Town of Sorcery. Gowry lives just outside the city walls. For confirmation, we need only look at his inventory. Gowry sells Night Shard and Nightmaiden's Mist, whose descriptions both say that they were invented in Sellia. The third spell he sells is Glintstone Stars, which is a Raya Lucaria sorcery, but its description also says that it's a spell of the Olivinus Conspectus, "which attracts sorcerers from Sellia."

So Gowry lived in Sellia as a sage, where he learned the town's signature brand of magic. Then he was kicked out for heresy, per the Sage Armor's description. The next question we have to ask is, what heresy did he commit? Let's take a step back and examine Liurnian orthodoxy. Astrological worship is the basis for all of Liurnia's science and religion. The Academy worships the stars, while the House of Caria and Lazuli Conspectus worship the moon as well. The description of the Lazuli Robe calls this star-moon worship heresy. I don't think what Gowry did was heresy in the Liurnian sense of the word, however. Sellia is a town descended from the Nox and heavily associated with the Olivinus Conspectus. The Nox were star worshippers, and the Olivinus are an orthodox Conspectus with a focus on meteors. If Gowry grew up here, the odds of him converting to moon worship are slim.

Rot worship is a possibility. The only real evidence of pre-Shattering Rot worship is House Marais, who clandestinely worshipped the Outer God of Rot in their castle. The Haligtree venerated Malenia, but didn't worship the Rot because Malenia herself suffered at its hands and would like nothing more than to be rid of it. Rot worship doesn't go mainstream until after Aeonia when an entire civilization of shrimp cultists crawls out of the nuclear swamp and decides Malenia is their goddess. So while Gowry worshipping the Scarlet Rot in prewar Sellia would be kind of heretical, it would also be a really weird thing for anyone to be into given the time and place. Also, notice that the Rot is only ever worshipped by people actively suffering from it. "The sons of House Marais are all sickly born" (probably because they decided to build on top of a poison swamp), and the mushroom priests and shrimpbros speak for themselves. It would be very odd indeed for a healthy Sellian man in a lush, unblighted Caelid to suddenly say "hey screw the stars, we worship super skin necrosis now." You know what I think he did?

Necromancy.

Oh yeah, you thought we were done with Gary.

So let's talk about our friend Necromancer Garris for a second. While it's not in his name like it is for Gowry, Garris is almost definitely a Sellian sage. He looks like Gowry, he wears the requisite robes, and the cave where he lives is called the "Sage's Cave." Unless the Black Knife lurking nearby has some scholarly qualifications we don't know about, the Sage in question has to be Garris. Now what exactly is his deal? What can we learn about heresy from this guy?

Garris is a necromancer. He summons bone snails in battle and uses the Prince of Death staff to cast a spell similar to Rancorcall, whose description claims that it's an ancient death hex presumed lost to the annals of history until Garris rediscovered it. Most interesting, however, is his weapon. Garris wields the unique flail Family Heads.

Three bludgeoning copper heads attached to a handle by chains. Signature weapon of Necromancer Garris, the heretical sage. The heads were made to resemble those of his wife and two children.

Oh. Oh. Oh.

Here we have confirmation that Garris is not only a Sage, but a heretical one. Much like good old Gowry. A wife and children, you say? Let's take a look at the weapon's unique Ash of War: Familial Rancor. This ash behaves similarly to Rancorcall, the spell that Garris rediscovered and uses. And its description?

Gently rattle the copper heads to summon vengeful spirits that chase down foes. The anguish of a spouse and children invites accursed wrath.

Alrighty. It's the classic story of a magician and his dead family. This is just Fullmetal Alchemist now. We don't really have the evidence to say one way or another what happened here. Did Garris lose his family and resort to necromancy to try to get them back? Or is the "wrath" and "anguish" of his family a result of him using them as human sacrifices or guinea pigs in his experiments with the dark arts? But enough of that.

The trouble we were having with Gowry is that we couldn't pin down what he was doing that would have gotten him banished from Sellia. Sellia, per the Night Shard description, is a town of assassins that habitually kill other sorcerers. You'd have to do something nuts to get kicked out of a place like that, and we just didn't have anything that points towards a sensical explanation for Gowry's heresy. This is where Garris saves us. We know he was also a Sage who got kicked out of Sellia for being a heretic, but unlike Gowry, we know EXACTLY what Garris was doing. And now let's look back at Sellian theological law and try to apply it to necromancy.

Of course necromancy is heretical! The Lands Between broadly speaking venerates the dead. Dead people are buried at the roots of the Erdtree to return to its grace. The burial watchdogs are statues built to watch over these dead, and while the Erdtree is a Golden Order concept, the fact that some watchdogs use glintstone attacks implies that the Liurnians also build them. Liurnia does have its own Erdtree burial catacombs, despite not worshipping the Erdtree or any other Golden Order figures as deities. We know from Fia and Lionel that people in the Lands Between see the Deathbed Companions as disgusting heretics. What do Deathbed Companions do? Raise the dead. Necromancy seems like an amazing way to get yourself kicked out of just about any dignified society in the Lands Between.

And when we look at Gowry through the lens of necromancy... things start to add up.

If you try to kill Gowry, he turns into a Kindred of Rot on death and his disembodied voice casually mentions that he can keep coming back. Upon reloading the shack, Gowry's there again. You can repeat this ad infinitum until reaching the end of his and Millicent's questline. He doesn't stay dead.

Hmm.

We can't really say for sure what Garris was doing with his necromancy outside of the fact that he was researching ancient hexes. Gowry, on the other hand...

Here's my theory. Gowry, either together with Garris or on his own, starts researching methods of achieving life after death. When what he's doing comes to light, he gets banished from Sellia, but his work is far enough along that he can finish it alone without the resources of a town of sorcery. But as an outcast, there's not much he can really do with that.

Enter Malenia.

Malenia's bloom is said to have been awe-inspiring and divine. We can find ghosts who witnessed Aeonia ranting about the divine splendor.

Sublime, I tell you. The very first flower of Aeonia bloomed on this very spot. Malenia, may you blossom into a goddess.

For Gowry, who is by now thoroughly disillusioned with the Sellian orthodoxy that kicked him to the curb for being a necromancer, the Rot may well have been a religious experience. Especially when the necrotic death bomb starts creating life.

Life from death. The goal of every necromancer.

And oh boy does Caelid have it.

Gowry has found a Goddess who he thinks can create life from death. He has an entire cult worth of shrimp people who also worship her, and who he can manipulate as he pleases with his superior intellect. And best of all, he has Malenia's daughters, who he can raise into Goddesses of Rot themselves.

Gowry is of course just a man. An old man whose condo is six feet away from Ground Zero for the Aeonian Bloom. His body is dying as he experiences all this wonder and finds the infant buds amidst the fallout of the Bloom. But for a Necromancer, who has cracked the code, this is no trouble. Even as his body gives out, Gowry's spirit possesses a lowly Kindred of Rot, projecting an illusion of his human form. As a Kindred, he can survive indefinitely in rotting Caelid. As an illusory human, he can deal with outsiders and raise Malenia's daughters. If his Kindred is slain... no matter. There's more where that came from.

#elden ring #malenia blade of miquella #elden ring lore #elden ring theory #sage gowry #necromancer garris #sellia #caelid #scarlet rot #asks #answered #answered asks

[shut-up-rabert]

Some Hindus really like to boast about how they are not like xyz religion, how they are open minded and then go on revolt over the littlest things such as a discussion about gay marriage or a guy performing kathak in the same breath, lmao.

Honestly, while you may be super proud that the invaders never managed to swallow you in their religions, the way you all freak out over stuff related to modesty, sexuality, expression and tradition and push other hindus away because of it since they are “against your religion” (they actually aren’t); all of it just goes on to show how good of a job those invaders did on atleast changing your mindset on faith to theirs. All that is left to do is convert, because you are just an Abrahamic cloaked as a Sanatani.

For people glaoting about being different from Abrahmic religions, you sure are trying hard to match your religion to theirs with all these alien rules.

No need to mention I have nothing against Islam or Christianity, I’m not against your practices either but the fact that those rules and orthodoxy don’t belong in Hinduism is a given.

#hinduism #queue the beat #desiblr #hindublr #hinduphobia #for those wondering nope I’m not back #I’ll be back in like a few days but not yet

[traumacatholic]

I think going forward (at least for the time being), I will use this blog for:

Prayer requests: If anyone would like some prayers, I am more than happy to pray for you and to share your prayer request here so others can also pray for you.

Sharing mental health and disability resources

Answering questions about RCIA: Despite being in a position where I'm exploring Orthodoxy, I was still a convert to Catholicism. I went through RCIA and was Baptised and Confirmed. I'd be more than happy to answer any questions about how someone might enrol in RCIA or how to make the most of it.

Sharing prayers regarding healing / comfort / for trauma survivors: A lot of people find great comfort in these kinds of prayers, and I feel like these aren't particularly going to come into any kind of conflict.

General advice or help finding resources: If you need help finding particular books on a mental health or disability topic, or if you would like some advice on managing Church attendance while sick etc. I'm happy to answer to the best of my abilities.

This blog has a wonderful following, of people who have engaged with these topics before. Some much more knowledgeable than me (particularly to do with resources outside of the UK). If I can use the access to that platform for the benefit of anyone, I would still love to do so.

I won't be using this blog to engage in theological arguments about Orthodoxy and Catholicism. And I think also it would be unwise for me to answer questions on here about 'What's the Catholic view on X or Y' which I would sometimes get. The best advice I could give if you want to know the Catholic view on a subject is to read the Catechism of the Catholic Church and speak with a local Catholic Priest who can answer any questions you have following that or recommend you some other resources to engage with.

I am using my new main blog @orthodoxadventure (https://orthodoxadventure.tumblr.com/) to share excerpts of Orthodox books and such I'm reading. And that's primarily where I'm going to be most active regarding things to do with my faith. Feel free also to send prayer requests, ask advice, any questions etc you might have over to my new blog. And that's also where I'll be more open to answering questions about where I am in the faith now.