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thessalian · 6 months

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Thess vs Ticket Issues

Anyone who thinks that nerds are childish and somehow lacking in adulthood because of their hobbies and interests really needs to watch us arrange a convention sometime. I'm not even talking about the money required to go to a convention. I'm talking logistics. Travel time, organisation of activities for every given day, sorting the souvenir budget. And that's just if everything goes right.

See, my mother booked a physical ticket when she bought me my weekend priority entry to MCM Comic Con this year, and it arrived on Friday. My stepfather brought it Sunday when he finished programming the new heaters (well, one of the new heaters; today's the other one, fixing a hole he made in a wall, and sorting out the boiler ... theoretically, anyway). The first thing I thought was, "Ooh, pretty". The second thing I thought was, "...wait, why does this only say Sunday Priority instead of Weekend Priority?" I mean, the envelope was opened, and Mum and David had already had a look, but they don't understand how any of this works, and anyway probably stopped looking particularly closely when they saw MCM on the flier inside and knew it was technically mine. So they obviously didn't catch it. I, however, did, and it's my ticket, so I was going to have to sort something out.

At first I thought, "Well, maybe it's only the physical ticket that says the wrong thing and the QR code is fine" ... but I was deluding myself because the card is honestly more like a gift card you can get for various shops than anything else, and that probably means that there's just a batch of tickets with QR codes on them for specific days pre-printed and sent out as appropriate, and I just got the wrong one. However, I did want to confirm, so I downloaded the app for the convention (entire conventions have apps now, which I'm sure is helpful but still will not stop being weird) and begin the process of activating my ticket, just to see what happens. I eventually get the text boxes for confirming individual day tickets and weekend tickets. Try my confirmation code in the Weekend Priority Ticket box ... before I even hit submit, it's telling me that the code is invalid. Put the confirmation code for Sunday in? No such message. So they sent me the wrong ticket. Well, fuck.

First thing I did was check to see if that had happened to anyone else. If it has, it isn't a huge deal on the places people complain about such (like, for instance, Reddit), at least not even under the best search terms my black belt in Google-fu could generate. Now, there was the option to email the con runners, but ... well ... much as I hate and despise it, sometimes you just have to talk to a human being for some peace of mind. So I called the line for queries.

Surprisingly, I got an actual person on the line right away. A person in a really shitty wireless headset who I could only partly understand, but an actual person. So I explained the issue, gave him the QR code on the physical ticket and the confirmation ID on the confirmation email my mother forwarded to me, and now all I have to do is go to the query desk with my confirmation ID on my phone and it'll all get sorted. And I had to go to the query desk anyway for an accessibility lanyard, so that's okay. I mean, I'm going to bring my physical ticket just in case they want to see it, but that's only because decades as a secretary has taught me to cover your ass and have all even potentially relevant documents to hand when you're dealing with an issue. Better overprepared than having to fumble for things.

So that's my spark of adrenaline for the day - I actually had to ring customer service and sort out a problem. Because seriously, Marion's coming for the whole weekend and my autographs are booked for Saturday, so going only on Sunday is not an option, even if my mother hadn't spent just over £100 for the ticket, the delivery of physical ticket that they screwed up anyway, and a souvenir pin badge that I also have to pick up at the query desk. Or at least a query desk.

Anyway, look, I adulted my ass off to sort out the mess the people sending tickets made of my con information. Nobody gets to tell me that going to a comic convention makes me less than adult.

#mcm expo #Thess is a motherfucking adult

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meili-sheep · 2 years

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My thoughts on Jean are more sympathetic, I think, mostly because even though she is a tired trope of 'overworked soldier woman' (like a lot of Genshin's other female cast) I feel like she did it first and she did it best. Which is not me trying to persuade anyone else into liking her! I just think that Keqing, Ganyu, Kokomi, Ayaka are all basically the same trope, except Jean gets true introspection on her role (the Dandelion Knight vs Lionfang Knight thing, which made me appreciate the role Jean plays as Acting Grandmaster a lot more).

Unfortunately, it does seem that Genshin has a better track record in making interesting male characters than female. Even speaking as someone who enjoyed going on (what were essentially) dates with Ei and Ayaka, the dilution of Ei's negative attributes to make her more palatable really frustrated me. Most of the female characters are just chipper, good people, with the exceptions frequently lacking in story content (Rosaria and Sara don't have hangouts, Shenhe doesn't have a story quest).

Even the ones that do get decently featured (for example Beidou and Yae), I find that I'm not personally that interested in them? Idk, I just find Yae very creepy in all her voicelines about the Inazuma peeps, and felt that Beidou's backstory was very poorly implemented into her hangout event, even though I enjoyed her personality whenever she showed up as not the focus.

I'm hopeful that the next time we see the likes of Shenhe, my personal favourite character, she won't fall into the boring trap after such a great first (and only 😓) appearance.

See, I definitely understand how Jean can look sympathetic, and she's by no means the worst character in the game. I do think Keqing is much worst character-wise. (As that whole last event was "Oh don't overwork yourself, Keqing" But stolen fireworks were defiantly something she needed to handle, and it really felt like we were babying her)

Ganyu I think is a little more sympathtic as she struggles with not belonging. I can relate a lot.

Kokomi has a similar issue to Jean in that people are expecting too much of her. But Kokomi does take time for herself. And Know when to pull back and recharge herself. And I've been called a Kokomi Kinnie. And ya, our autism is a little on the similar side for my comfort. Lmao

Ayaka I'm not gonna try and make a point for because she like Jean I find it very boring but unlike Jean, I can use her relationship with Ayato to build my own version and not give a single shit about canon.

Ei had the worst sort of redemption arch in the history of mankind. And I am still upset that she really just kind of got to be a selfish pos and get away with it.

Yae I can't stand it at all. She makes me feel very, very gross. She and Ei being the focus of Inazuma, are partly why the story suffered so much.

I personally like Beidou a lot but haven't played her hang out, so I'll check that out before I say anything.

Now Shenhe. I love Shenhe a lot, and while I don't think they carried out here idea very well, they did give her an interesting concept. And As I put her with my favorites in my Bully the Fatui Brigade. And I spent money to get her and her weapon ahahahh. I can say I like her a lot.

#general genshin thoughts #just a little ramble #A lot of my care of a character has a variety of factors #but it could be ultimately boiled down to #if i can related and build on them

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cruciatusforeplay · 3 years

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This is part two of a hella big post. Check out part one here. These are all a lot more recent, so I'm gonna try to be less spoilery, but there are gonna be some.

A not-so-brief history of Hawkeye in Comics Part Two (spoilers below the cut)

A note on events, dying and doubling down on Hawkeyes

Comics love doing big events, and I'm not covering them in here. Partly because they are huge and complex and to just focus on Hawkeye would be an injustice to the stories, but also because the amount of stuff I would need to spoil would be way beyond just a little Hawkeye. Clint was involved in Secret Wars (1984), which was one of the first crossover events of its kind. Another notable era is 2004-2009, where there is an incredible amount of superhero politics driving big narratives. If you're new to comics, you might not know that characters dying is common and rarely permanent. This is relevant because while I said that I wouldn't talk about events, I think it would be pretty uncool to not mention that Hawkeye dies and is brought back to life (Avengers Disassembled, House of M, New Avengers #26). It's around here that Clint picks up the Ronin mantle.

This is also when Dark Reign/Dark Avengers is going on. For anyone who'd like some Clint whump from this era, there's a top notch naked torture scene in New Avengers Annual (2009). Clint is involved in several other big events and crossovers over later years, but that's definitely a seperate list.

In the time where Clint is dead, Captain America is hanging out with a group of newly formed Young Avengers, including archery badass Kate Bishop. Cap suggests to her that she take up the Hawkeye mantle and gives her Clint's old bow. After Clint returns, he becomes initially her mentor, before they form a very close friendship. Clint is initially doing Ronin things, but even when he lays down ninja robes, they decide to be very Hawkeye about the whole thing and both keep calling themselves Hawkeye, despite the obvious confusion this causes.

Hawkeye's ears: Hawkeye vs. Deadpool #0-4 (2014)

This is a fun little miniseries that you could treat as a Halloween special if you so desired. It's set in the time after Fraction's run and there are a few callbacks, but nothing major if you've not read that. Clint is a little short-tempered and hypermasculine in this run for my personal taste, but it's got lots of grumpy Clint Vs sassy Wade while they vaguely attempt to team up. The thing this run does really well is Clint's deafness, despite the lack of visible hearing aids. There are comments around lip-reading, wearing aids when wearing other headgear, there's some sign language, and this is the run where Deadpool pulls his mask up so Clint can lipread and see his face while he signs (facial expressions are really key in sign language). It's lovely. Otherwise the run gives you a Kate cameo, some Deadpool and Hawkeye disaster/shenanigans, and perhaps most importantly, the return of the skycycle.

Key background: All New Hawkeye #1-6 (2015)

This run is often overlooked, but the art in the flashbacks is beautiful. We get some key information around Clint and Barney's abusive home situation - with their dad who drank and beat them, and how they ended up in care after their parents died, and subsequently their early days in the circus. There is a definite shift in how Barney is characterized as a bad influence compared to the 2003 run. It parallels with the rest of the arc which focuses on Clint and Kate Bishop working together to get some kids out of a very bad situation. The rest of Lemires run is a little weird and has no major repurcussions for anyone except Barney (which I won't elaborate on because it's relevant to the Fraction run).

Back to your roots: Tales of Suspense #100-104 (2017)

Seeing Clint cycle back and return to Tales of Suspense is really lovely. This comic is one of my all time favourites. It's incredibly tight story-telling with a great plot and really fun dynamic. The premise is Clint and Bucky teaming up to figure out the body trail being left after Black Widow's death. Clint is obnoxious and a delightful mess, Bucky is sporting a permanent scowl and is hilariously level-headed. It's a lot of fun and it's a lovely build on the tension and teamwork between these two idiots (who I, as an avid Winterhawk shipper, am completely gone for, but even without that, this is a great comic.) It also has some killer covers, and the facial expressions are absolutely hilarious.

Hawkeyes together: Hawkeye #13-16 (2017) and West Coast Avengers #1-10 (2018)

The Hawkeye run is Kate Bishops run and it has a larger continuing storyline that runs from the beginning of her Hawkeye and way into WCA, but I've listed the issues that you'll want for Kate and Clint shenanigans, and you should be able to catch up without the rest if you don't want it. These comics are ridiculously fun, especially West Coast Avengers, which has Kate leading the team this time. There's loads of jokes, and it strikes a nice balance between Hawkeyes being disasters and being hyper competent. Truthfully, this is Kate's show, and Clint takes a backseat, but their dynamic is killer here so I think is deserves a mention. There are also plenty of Clint related wardrobe malfunctions and Lucky the Pizza Dog is around.

Our most recent boy: Hawkeye freefall #1-6 (2020)

I haven't read this one yet, but it's been extremely well received by the fandom. As a result, good news: no spoilers! It's a short run, which may have had something to do with it being published during 2020, and specifically around a time when Marvel were experiencing some major distribution issues (which would have led to digital release only and as a result lower sales), but that's all guesswork because I haven't actually researched it. This run has someone dressing as Ronin and letting Clint take the blame for their nefarious deeds (oh no!). Clint makes some classic Clint (read: dumpster fire) decisions, and the art looks fun and vibrant. Can't really give you more without reading it myself 😅 If you need more Clint still, he's also rumoured to be knocking around in the 2020 Black Widow run, but I've not had the money to get my mitts on that yet either.

Notable AUs:

Marvel is a big fan of throwing a well known cast into an alternative universes, so there are a few other places to look for him.

The Ultimates universe was largely speaking a bit of a shitshow, but they did give us a very dark and gritty Clint, so if that's your jam, ultimate hawkeye is the place to be. Old Man Hawkeye appears alongside Old Man Logan, and they are both, you guessed it, old. It's not the only time we get Clint as a wrinkly dude (the second half Lemire's run also has some timey-wimey stuff happening), but this is a version of Clint who is going blind (granted we've seen that before too, but this is a darker vibe than Blindspot). Wanna know who the greatest marksman is without his sight - old man Hawkeye for you! Finally there's the Zombie 'verse: zombie Clint is a little confused, but he's got the spirit. Clint got zombiefied and then left in some rubble as only a head for 40 years before getting picked up, so he's a little worse for wear. If you need that in your life then Marvel Zombies is your universe. For a full rundown of all the universes including animated and MCU, click here.

Notable aliases:

Clint's been a few other people than Hawkeye in the 616 universe (the main Marvel Comics universe). He used one of Hank Pyms growth serums and became a giant strongman in Avengers #63 (1969) and stuck around in his Goliath form for more than a few issues. After Cap had died, Clint returned from the dead and tried on Captain America for all of one issue in Fallen Son #3 (2007). He decided (with a little help from Kate) that it wasn't right to wear the uniform, which in turn led to some interesting tension between him and Bucky Barnes when Buck did become the new Captain America. Finally, there's his most well-known alternate persona: Ronin. Clint becomes Ronin after returning from the dead, wanting a break from his Hawkeye persona and an opportunity to become Ronin arises in New Avengers #27 (2007). Clint is not the only person to have used these aliases. Additionally, Hawkeye has been used not only by Clint and Kate Bishop, but also by Bullseye during the Dark Reign.

The things we haven't talked about

Like I said at the very beginning, there is a lot of Clint Barton knocking around in comics and even with all this there's a lot of content I haven't focused on. For instance, I've not talked a lot about his relationships, beyond his marriage to mockingbird (and really I only scratched the surface with that), and honestly once you start getting into interpersonal relationships we're starting to move on from what can be done in a Tumblr thread.

There are also some topic specific threads floating around, which you might like to look at too.

@vaguelyrotten has done a run down of some great dumpster fire Clint Barton comics (some of which I haven't listed) and you can see that here.

@bobbimorses did a great summary of Clint's historical deafness for instance which you can find here.

There's also this little bit all about Clint and Bucky in canon (thanks to @nightwideopen ) and how Winterhawk became a thing (thanks to @1000-directions )

This is slight sidenote, but @clintscoffeepot did a really great comprehensive of Fraction Clint's apartment which is just a really useful writing resource and you can get that here.

There is also this website which I stumbled across fairly far into writing this post which does actually look like it might be comprehensive.

If I've missed anything major, or listed something incorrectly or you just have some Clint related opinions that I need to know about, do hit me up.

#clint barton #Hawkeye #hawkeye comics #hawkguy and other costumes #deaf hawkeye #comic #comic books #marvel comics #let's talk about comics

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cadomoisspokenfor · 3 years

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Legion Rewatch Notes,

Chapter 4:

Frizzytop

I theorized in episode 2 that David could see through the 4th wall, or at least into a different universe. At the start of this episode Oliver outright breaks the 4th wall. Perhaps powerful reality benders just have that capability. If David knows, and Oliver knows, then Farouk definitely knows.

“A great philosopher once wrote, ‘In times of peace, the war like man attacks himself.’ This is the route of all our problems.”

“We are the route of all our problems. Our confusion, our anger, our fear of things we don’t understand.”

If we carry those 2 quotes throughout the rest of the show, then no doubt the tragedies that happen later on are caused by a collective misunderstanding of each other. And a collective lashing out at that misunderstanding of each other.

“Violence, in other words, is ignorance.”

The most central theme of the show is empathy vs fear. I s’pose whenever there’s a conflict in the show we’re supposed to be asking whether the characters should answer with empathy or fear. Certain characters lives have revolved heavily around fear. And that informs their decision making quite a bit. This will all come up again at multiple points throughout the show.

Syd... probably can’t break the 4th wall. So maybe it’s most logical to interpret this as her inner monologue. Very Jessica Jones esque.

The same voice lines from when Syd was searching for David in episode 1 are played. I guess there go to whenever Davids lost (whether in the world or in his mind) is to transmit Syds voice calling his name in hopes he’ll hear it and come back.

Kerry can pick locks.

The concept of “bad mutants” is well established amongst the veteran summerland crew. Ptonomy’s caution about David is probably because he feels he has a selfish vibe, and that’s a well known red flag of “bad mutants.”

It should also be noted he’s partly afraid of him because he has so much trouble understanding him. His powers, which when used affectively are essentially the ability to understand where someone’s coming from, keep getting overrided by Davids.

It’s now to the point where Ptonomy is doubting his own ability to tell what’s real and what’s not real. He was pretty confident he’d always know somehow in episode 2. Now, not so much.

Ptonomy very early on is open to the idea that David both has powers and psychological issues. “He’s unstable. You try hearing voices for 10-15 years, self medicate with hard drugs and then get dumped in a looney bin.”

Ptonomy also determines that because of his instability combined with the fact he has powers, David is a bomb waiting to go off.

I suppose if we’re trying to figure out their logic with the whole “the combination of being mentally ill and having powers makes him dangerous”, and considering that their right now going over an incident where David robbed his therapist for drug money and then bashed the doctors head in when he came back, the direct concern is that David makes bad decisions and/or selfish decisions (at least), and if he were to make a bad decision regarding his powers a lot of innocent people could get very badly hurt. Or killed. Along with the worry that the voices in his head don’t exactly give him the most angelic of advice at times, and because of his powers he’s very capable of fulfilling their wills, so to speak.

Based on Olivers speech at the beginning of the episode though, it might be safe to say the overall message is instead of acting on fear they should act on empathy and help David overcome his problems instead of vilifying him for his mental illness.

Syd suggest Davids hiding his real memories behind a fake ones and Ptonomy says she going through a lot of effort just to convince herself Davids a good guy. I never really got what he meant, but I guess what he meant is that Syd’s trying to find a justifiable reason for why David would attack Dr Poole like he did when the obvious answer is just “He’s got violent tendencies.” I always just thought she was genuinely hypothesizing, ya know, trying to solve the case. Maybe she was and Ptonomy’s just mean.

“I was looking for the man I loved. Or did I just love the idea of him? The face he showed me?” Doubt springs up early. Why can none of the characters reconcile that a person can have both good and evil in them at the same time? That’s... all people, in fact.

When Kissinger ask if Amy knew David had powers Amy says, “I think so.” Amy potentially acted on fear as well, in regards to her and Davids childhood that is.

Kerry mostly only thinks of herself in relation to Cary.

Cary misses Kerry when she’s gone. Even besides the roles they fill for each other, they generally enjoy each others company. They’re quite literally as close as 2 people can be. Each one living for the sake of the other.

Davids once again surrounded by a crowd of people all yelling in his face. After they disappear though he recovers pretty fast. I guess he’s used to it.

Clockworks Podcast pointed out that the music Davids wincing at is sax heavy Jazz, which is (abstractly) the sound The Devil With Yellow Eyes makes whenever he appears. If my theory about David seeing through the 4th wall is correct, then maybe he’s actually hearing that sound whenever TDWYE is around. Alternatively, Farouk blast that in his head everytime to mess with him.

“Sorry... I forgot about your um... I had a similar- proclivity? Malady? I forget the word- what’s the word? I’ve been here a long time.”

If the previous paragraphs are right, Oliver’s probably implying he was also affected by a mental parasite at some point. It might’ve even been what stranded him in the astral plane.

From Davids perspective he skipped over the entire second half of Chapter 3.

Oliver is essentially explaining the plot of the show to David and the audience before it’s even been unfurled.

“You have an unquiet mind, so you war with yourself, like a dog trying to chew off its own tail.”

David’s still in a very pessimistic guilt ridden place at this point in the story. That’s probably the internal war Oliver’s talking about.

... why can’t Oliver leave the astral plane again? If he did have his own mental parasite, it seems long gone by now. If he just can’t find his way back, then how does he do it in Chapter 7?

Syd calls non-mutants “normals.”

“We were the ghost in a haunted house.” ~Syd, Chapter 4

“You think ghost like living in a haunted house?” ~Syd, Chapter 12

Why does Syd keep hallucinating The Angriest Boy? Or is that just visual metaphor?

Ptonomy’s a very, “Get the job done and look classy while doing it” sorta guy.

“To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.” ~Sun Tzu, Ptonomy

Is the above quote perhaps relevant to the shows message during other conflicts throughout the series? Could it be subtly implying all the characters should always look for non-violent ways to defeat their enemies? I.e. not just a classy line from Ptonomy, but a statement of themes within the show.

The food David, Philly, and Dr Poole are having in Philly’s memories is cherry pie.

In Philly’s memory David says, “I don’t keep a lot of stuff.” And Philly comments that there’s no evidence David had a past. At least among the things David owns at that point. I know Farouk edited a lot of Davids memories, but why did David himself get rid of so much physical stuff? Syd said the reason he broke into Dr Pooles that day was to destroy their taped conversations. What’s compelling him to erase himself from existence? Is it as simple as “Farouk”? It seems like on a deeper level David doesn’t want anyone to know too much about him. Everyone’s only allowed to know what he tells them. His way of feeling in control I guess.

Philly did the classic “I can fix him” when she started dating David.

Philly implies David going off his medication and keeping bad company is what caused the downfall of their relationship. And subsequently his life, probably.

Despite everything, Philly still feels sympathetic towards David.

“Whoever altered Davids memory-“ Ptonomy very early on humors the idea that Davids being acted on by a 3rd party.

The longer Kerry is away from Cary, the more antsy she is for a fight. She’s not supposed to have to sit through all this “boring stuff.”

Ptonomy left after he got the info on Pooles location from Philly. He probably wanted to get the rest of the information from the source. Ironically, they probably woulda gotten closer to the real answer if he’d just looked a bit longer.

Sys proudly says “Yes” when “Dr Poole” ask if she’s in love with David.

It never really comes up again, but Kerry and Cary are physically linked. Maybe even psychologically. When one of them gets hurt, or even exerts their body a lot, the other can feel it, even if their own body doesn’t take on the actual damage. This is still true even if they’re miles apart.

Syds definitely portrayed as the hero at the end of this scene.

“All those years of practice-“ A part of David always knew he had powers. I wonder, did he practice a little in secret? Or is he saying he was at Summerland for years? That doesn’t really add up. But then... what does he mean by years?

Lenny encourages David to get angry so that his powers will strengthen enough for them to overpower the astral plane. Sort of... cheating his way out. David will later achieve more feats of strength through honing his emotions. Like many heroes, his level of power is intrinsically linked to his emotional state.

Very directly here, Davids violence is caused by ignorance. He doesn’t know Syd switched bodies with Walter and is trying to escape.

#legion fx

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agameoftragedy · 3 years

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Reading about the British royal family and their courtiers/workers, shouldn’t Cersei have had a more difficult time? Say a traditional Jon Arryn at odd with her, stannis and renly were reported to dislike her putting in lackeys, but shouldn’t have others made it more awkward at the beginning? Or the end, but the beginning must’ve been difficult? Something a bit like the Tyrell vs Lannister in storm of swords? Even Eleonor of Aquitaine-ish at the very least with how she was treated

Ok, so Eleanor of Aquitaine and that period of British history is not my strongest, I was more modern history and renaissance Florence in my degree.

However... we have an unusual situation at that point in Westerosi history. Fresh off a successful rebellion, a whole new royal dynasty. Robert is broadly liked, but it's not clear how solid a faction he has, rather than people clambering for power or heldover from the last regime. He has two brothers, one still fairly young and the other very young, no other Baratheon figures mentioned. Jon Arryn presumably loved him like a father (and Ned but he's not there) - but Jon was the one who brought the Lannisters in for their money and power. He seems to have had a lot of influence over Robert until he died, but his own wife had enough influence over him to get Littlefinger in positions.

Queens can potentially have a lot of influence separately from the King's top advisors - in the bedroom, potentially in respect to their children: 'happy wife, happy life', as they say. So if Cersei asks that her younger cousins squire for him: sure, why not? There's nothing obviously bad about that in general, no skin off his ass really.

Because what was Cersei trying to achieve politically while Robert was alive? The crown wound up in debt to the Lannisters, but it seems like that might be (partly) down to Robert's profligacy, not her workings. The main thing she's trying to do is secretly usurp the throne for her bastard children - and once those against her have noticed, they started taking investigative action to bring her down (and may well have succeeded if Jon Arryn hadn't been poisoned).

We get brief mentions of Cersei's earlier times, like she had started out trusting Varys but learned better. It seems like a fair amount of the council may not have had strong loyalties between the couple at all to begin with, and no reason to really distrust Robert's beautiful young bride (Pycelle's basically in love with her dad so he might side with her more than Robert from the start, but with the appearance of a wise unbiased maester).

The issue with the current Tyrell vs Lannister stuff is that there's all these leftover family members from the last generation still jockeying for power, particularly Cersei. It doesn't seem unusual that the bride's house and vassals might gain a few positions, balanced with other regions and families, but Cersei's paranoia and hunger for power means she's not even yielding what might ordinarily be expected under the circumstances, and the King is too young to mediate the dispute.

#asks #cersei lannister #anon

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elizabethan-memes · 4 years

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Can you elaborate on Erusamus and the reformation please, or at least point me toward sources? Politics make more sense than philosophy to me, so I see the reformation through the lense of Henry VIII, or the Duke of Prussia who dissolved the teutonic order, or France siding with the protestants during the 30 Years War because Protestants > Hapsburgs

So sorry to take so long!

If you needed this answer for academic reasons, given that summer term is pretty much done I’m probably too late to help, but I hate to leave an ask unanswered.

HELLA LONG ESSAY BENEATH THE CUT SORRY I WROTE SELF-INDULGENTLY WITHOUT EDITING SO THERE IS WAY MORE EXPLANATION THAN YOU PROBABLY NEED

Certainly religion has been politicised, you need look no further than all the medieval kings having squabbles with the pope. Medieval kings were not as devastated by the prospect of excommunication as you’d expect they’d be in a super-devout world, it was kinda more of a nuisance (like, idk, the pope blocking you on tumblr) than the “I’m damned forever! NOOOOOOO!” thing you’d expect. I’m not saying excommunication wasn’t a big deal, but certainly for Elizabeth I she was less bothered than the pope excommunicating her than the fact that he absolved her Catholic subjects of allegiance to her and promised paradise to her assassin (essentially declaring open season on her).

I think, however, in our secular world we forget that religion was important for its own sake. Historians since Gibbon have kind of looked down on religion as its own force, seeing it as more a catalyst for economic change (Weber) or a tool of the powerful. If all history is the history of class struggle, then religion becomes a weapon in class warfare rather than its own force with its own momentum. For example, historians have puzzled over conversion narratives, and why Protestantism became popular among artisans in particular. Protestantism can’t compete with Catholicism in terms of aesthetics or community rituals, it’s a much more interior kind of spirituality, and it involves complex theological ideas like predestination that can sound rather drastic, so why did certain people find it appealing?

(although OTOH transubstantiation is a more complex theological concept than the Protestant idea of “the bread and wine is just bread and wine, it’s a commemoration of the Last Supper not a re-enactment, it aint that deep fam”).

I’ve just finished an old but interesting article by Terrence M. Reynolds in Concordia Theological Quarterly vol. 41 no. 4 pp.18-35 “Was Erasmus responsible for Luther?” Erasmus in his lifetime was accused of being a closet Protestant, or “laying the egg that Luther hatched”. Erasmus replied to this by saying he might have laid the egg, but Luther hatched a different bird entirely. Erasmus did look rather proto Protestant because he was very interested in reforming the Church. He wanted more people to read the Bible, he had a rather idyllic dream of “ploughmen singing psalms as they ploughed their fields”. He criticised indulgences, the commercialisation of relics and pilgrimages and the fact that the Papacy was a political faction getting involved in wars. He was worried that the rituals of Catholicism meant that people were more mechanical in their religion than spiritual: they were memorising the words, doing the actions, paying the Church, blindly believing anything a poorly educated priest regurgitated to them. They were confessing their sins, doing their penances like chores and then going right back to their sins. They were connecting with the visuals, but not understanding and spiritually connecting with the spirit of Jesus’ message and his ideals of peace and love and charity and connecting with God. Erasmus translated the NT but being a Renaissance humanist, he went ad fontes (‘to the source’) and used Greek manuscripts, printing the Greek side by side with the Latin so that readers could compare and see the translation choices he made. His NT had a lot of self-admitted errors in it, but it was very popular with Prots as well as Caths. Caths like Thomas More were cool with him doing it, but it was also admired by Prots like Thomases and Cromwell and Cranmer and Tyndale himself. When coming across Greek words like presbyteros, Erasmus actually chose to leave it as a Greek word with its own meaning than use a Latin word that didn’t *quite* fit the meaning of the original.

However, he did disagree with Protestants on fundamental issues, especially the question of free will. For Luther, the essence was sole fide: salvation through faith alone. He took this from Paul’s letter to the Romans, where it says that through faith alone are we justified. Ie, humans are so fallen (because of the whole Eve, apple, original sin debacle) and so flawed and tainted by sin, and God is so perfect, that we ourselves will never be good enough. All the good works in the world will never reach God’s level of perfection and therefore we all deserve Hell, but we won’t go to hell because God and Jesus will save us from the Hell we so rightly deserve, by grace and by having faith in Jesus’ sacrifice, who will alone redeem us. The opposite end of the free will/sola fide spectrum is something called Pelagianism, named after the guy who believed it, Pelagius, who lived centuries and centuries before the Ref, it’s the belief that humans can earn their salvation by themselves, by good works. Both Caths and Prots considered Pelagius a heretic. Caths like Erasmus believed in a half-way house: God reaches out his hand to save you through Jesus’ example and sacrifice, giving you grace, and you receive his grace, which makes you want to be a good person and do good works (good works being things like confession of sins, penances, the eucharist, charity, fasting, pilgrimages) and then doing the good works means you get more grace and you are finally saved, or at least you will go to purgatory after death AND THEN be saved and go to heaven, rather than going straight to Hell, which is what happens if you reject Jesus and do no good works and never repent your sins. If you don’t receive his grace and do good works, you won’t make the grade for ultimate salvation.

(This is why it’s important to look at the Ref as a theological as well as a political movement because if you only look at the political debates, Erasmus looks more Protestant than he actually was.)

There are several debates happening in the Reformation: the role of the priest (which is easily politicised) free will vs predestination, transubstantiation or no transubstantiation (is or isn’t the bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of Jesus by God acting through the priest serving communion) and the role of scripture. A key doctrine of Protestantism is sola scriptura. Basically: if it’s in the Bible, it’s the rules. If it’s not in the Bible, it’s not in the rules. No pope in the bible? No pope! No rosaries in the bible? No using rosaries! (prayer beads)

However, both Caths and Prots considered scripture v.v. important. Still, given that the Bible contains internal contradictions (being a collection of different books written in different languages at different times by different people) there was a hierarchy of authority when it came to scripture. As a general rule of thumb, both put the New T above the Old T in terms of authority. (This is partly why Jews and Muslims have customs like circumcision and no-eating-pig-derived-meats that Christians don’t have, even though the order of ‘birth’ as it were goes Judaism-Christianity-Islam. All 3 Abrahammic faiths use the OT, but only Christians use the NT.)

1. The words of Jesus. Jesus said you gotta do it, you gotta do it. Jesus said monogamy, you gotta do monogamy. Jesus said no divorce, you gotta do no divorcing (annulment =/= divorce). Jesus said no moneylending with interest (usury), you gotta do no moneylending with interest (which is partly why European Jews did a lot of the banking. Unfortunately, disputes over money+religious hatred is a volatile combination, resulting in accusations of conspiracy and sedition, leading to hate-fuelled violence and oppression.) The trouble with the words of Jesus is that you can debate or retranslate what Jesus meant, especially easily as Jesus often spoke in parables and with metaphors. When Jesus said “this is my body…this is my blood” at the Last Supper, is that or is that not support for transubstantiation? When Jesus called Peter the rock on which he would build the church, was that or was that not support for the apostolic succession that means Popes are the successor to St Peter, with Peter being first Pope? When the gospel writers said Jesus ‘did more things and said more things than are contained in this book’, does that or does that not invalidate the idea of sola scriptura?

2. The other New Testament writers, especially St. Paul and the Relevation of St John the Divine. (Divine meaning like seer, divination, not a god or divinity). These are particularly relevant when it comes to discussing the role of priests and priesthood, only-male ordination, and whether women can preach and teach religion.

3. The Old Testament, especially Genesis.

4. The apocryphal or deuterocanonical works. These books are considered holy, but there’s question marks about their validity, so they’re not as authoritative as the testaments. I include this because the deuterocanonical book 2 Maccabees was used as scriptural justification for the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, but 2 Maccabees is the closest scipture really gets to mentioning any kind of purgatory. Protestants did not consider 2 Maccabees to be strong enough evidence to validate purgatory.

5. The Church Fathers, eg. Origen, Augustine of Hippo. Arguably their authority often comes above apocryphal scripture. It’s from the Church Fathers that the concept of the Trinity (one god in 3 equal persons, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit) is developed because it’s not actually spelled out explicitly in the NT. Early modern Catholics and Protestants both adhered to the Trinity and considered Arianism’s interpretation of the NT (no trinity, God the Father is superior to Jesus as God the Son) to be heresy. Church Fathers were important to both Catholics and Protestants: Catholics because Catholics did not see scripture as the sole source of religious truth, so additions made by holy people are okay so long as they don’t *contradict* scripture, and so long as they are stamped with the church council seal of approval, Protestants because they believed that the recent medieval theologians and the papacy had corrupted and altered the original purity of Christianity. If they could show that Church Fathers from late antiquity like Augustine agreed with them, that therefore proved their point about Christianity being corrupted from its holy early days.

Eamon Duffy’s book Stripping of the Altars is useful because it questions the assumptions that the Reformation and Break with Rome was inevitable, or that the Roman Catholic Church was a corrupt relic of the past that had to be swept aside for Progress, or that most people even wanted the Ref in England to happen. Good history essays need to discuss different historians’ opinions and Duffy can be relied upon to have a different opinion than Protestant historians. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s works are good at explaining theological concepts, he is a big authority on church history and he’s won a whole bunch of prizes. He was actually ordained a deacon in the Church of England in the 1980s but stopped being a minister because he was angry with the institution for not tolerating the fact he had a boyfriend. The ODNB is a good source to access through your university if you want to read a quick biography on a particular theologian or philosopher, but it only covers British individuals. Except Erasmus, who has a page on ODNB despite being not British because he’s just that awesome and because his influence on English scholarship and culture was colossal. Peter Marshall also v good, esp on conversion. Euan Cameron wrote a mahoosive book called the European Reformation.“More versus Tyndale: a study of controversial technique” by Rainer Pineas is good for the key differences in translation of essential concepts between catholic and protestant thinkers. The Sixteenth Century Journal is a good source of essays as well.

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bdgthinks · 4 years

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The Two Sides of “The Two Sides of Singapore, As Seen By A Food Delivery Rider”, As Seen By A Food Delivery Rider

https://medium.com/@bdgthinksShort pre-amble: Just as how the original Rice article is just the opinion of one writer, what I’m writing below is likewise, just the opinion of mine alone. Also, my opinions are based on my experience working with Deliveroo while Yusuf worked for Grab Food so there may be some differences between the pay structure, zone distances and other company-specific policies.

I was clicking past Instagram stories yesterday afternoon, about to take a nap, when I saw a friend share this recently posted Rice Media article. Part photo journal, part commentary on the gig economy, Singapore’s class divide, and how income inequality is growing more apparent as we adapt to the ever-evolving Covid-19 situation? Sign me the hell up.

All images courtesy of Ricemedia.co, Yusuf Abdol Hamid, or myself

20 minutes, a few raised eyebrows, and many heated texts later – I reluctantly abandoned my plans to nap because I read some many things in this article (which I highly recommend you read first before reading on!) that I disagree with profoundly.

Before I start, I want to offer my appreciation to Yusuf (the narrator), Boon Ping (the editor/author), and Rice Media for publishing this piece that will help many understand the oft-overlooked issue of social/income inequality in an engaging and accessible manner. My misgivings towards some of Yusuf’s opinions notwithstanding, the general sentiment towards this article is extremely positive and has done what I believe every great article should do, provoke thought and inspire critical thinking towards the status quo!

A smattering of positive feedback to the original article

What I appreciated most about the article is encapsulated by joce_zhang’s comment, that it’s an important reminder to be kinder to people – regardless.

However, I couldn’t help but find it slightly troubling that Yusuf and Boon Ping (the editor) seemed to have oversimplified these issues and reduced the stakeholders to caricatures: the rich as the Monopoly Man; and the tireless ‘seen by many as a dead-end job’ delivery couriers as a Dickensian orphan, counting pennies and agonizing over whether they ‘deserve’ a Zinger.

I worry that one unintended consequence of this article is that some ways social inequality is highlighted may lead to reinforcement of the divide rather than dissolution.

During my Summer holidays in 2018, I became attracted to the idea of working part-time as a food courier cyclist as in my mind I saw it as being paid to just cycle and listen to podcasts. Since then, I’ve been an on-off Deliveroo cyclist during the shorter holidays or whenever I needed a little bit of extra pocket money.

In past the two years, I’ve earned exactly $4081.63 from making deliveries (inclusive of bonuses) and dividing it by a conservative $15/h rate, I’ve worked for around 272 hours or about 700 deliveries. split about 60/40 between private properties and HDB flats.

And I guess it’s also partly because of my different experience working in food couriering the past two years that made me feel so much discontent while reading Yusuf’s article. In these 400-odd deliveries to private residences (or heck, in any of my deliveries), I don’t recall having once been treated unnecessarily rudely, aggressively or dismissively by any of the stakeholders I interact with in the job – restaurant servers and managers, condo security management and customers alike.

What I have experienced actually are customers that have tipped me for my efforts - especially ones who live in fairly inaccessible areas, and (during this circuit breaker period) offered me a snack or a cold drink to drop off their deliveries; security guards who ask me how my day was and if I’ve had my lunch or dinner; and restaurant staff who invite me to have a seat in the restaurant while I wait for my order.

Some treats from kind customers

Even when I had made a mess of the customer’s order from their order roiling around during a bumpy 15-minute bike ride (entirely my fault of course!), I’ve never heard anything more than an entirely deserved ‘tsk’ at the disappointment of having half of their pho soup ending up in the plastic bag instead of the bowl – and even then these tsk’s are far and few between!

And it is (again, solely from my own personal experience) where I felt that Yusuf could have been cherry-picking the worst examples from his own experience to make a point. While service industry personnel are no doubt severely underappreciated and that should be improved as a whole, I feel that such blatant incidents are the exception rather than the rule.

My point is: the world isn’t binary. Heck, even up to a year ago I was still echoing Yusuf’s entire argument and ranting rather colorfully about the injustice and discrimination of it all. Who are YOU to tell me which lift I can and cannot use?

In the pursuit of delivering a commentary on some really important social issues, I feel that it fell short by over-emphasizing the ludicrousness of the elite and failing to consider the many other factors that contributes to this problem.

For one, I thought that the annoyance projected to security guards seeing themselves as ‘a barrier between the riff-raff and their diamond-encrusted residents’ was a bit uncalled for – painting a picture of the fearsome guard – in employ of the up-in-the-air bourgeois hiding in their ivory tower, assailing an innocent courier who had the audacity to think that he had the right to take the same elevator as the residents?

But then… when we consider that most lift lobbies are a good distance from the security guard posts where the guards are stationed, it doesn’t seem so unreasonable for a guard to have to raise his voice to get his point across, right?

Being fortunate enough to live in a condo myself, I’ve sometimes felt unease in the duality that security guards experience every single day: faithful bastions in keeping residents safe, spending their days patrolling the lush, landscaped gardens and expansive feature infinity pools, but never once stepping foot into the houses they loyally guard.

And at the end of the day, clocking out to return home to an environment I assume is much less luxurious.

So why then, do Yusuf and Boon Ping deign to foster an us vs them divide, arbitrarily placing one occupation on one side of the line and another on the opposite?

How about the incredulousness towards the guy who orders a stupid $11 Dal.komm latte every day, or the Grange Road resident who only orders a single scoop of Haagen-Dazs ice cream?

Like I said, caricatures that highlight and reinforce the rich-poor divide.

Cherry-picking prevents the reader from seeing the single cups of coffee that I’ve delivered from Common Man Coffee Roasters to Tenteram Peak, the eight egg tarts from Whampoa Hawker Center to Toa Payoh. Or my dad, who lives a one-minute walk from the hawker center but still chooses to order through Grabfood because he paid for a subscription service that offers 50 free deliveries for just $10?

All these customers lived in HDB units.

As a courier, there’s nothing I appreciate more than collecting an order to find out I’m being paid $5 to cycle one block away, or reaching the restaurant to find out that a customer only ordered an easy-to-transport wrap instead of say, twelve packets of chicken rice – I’m getting paid the same amount anyway.

So yes, they’re paying our salary, so thank you.

Juxtaposition is also good and all for making a point, but is it truly accurate and representative?

The word exclusive is used a lot by Yusuf - but are those who live in a smelly HDB with the pee smell in the corridor exclusively nice, and the expat who lives in the Ardmore Park condo with the super high ceiling exclusively mean? Is it wrong to live (or aspire to live) in an exclusive private property? These are questions to be stimulated, not answers to be given.

There’s so much to pick apart, but my goal isn’t to say: I’m Right, You’re Wrong, it’s just that say that There Are Two Sides to Everything.

A brief aside on ‘fulfillment’

While I love my part-time job – paying me upwards of $20 an hour to keep fit and listen to podcasts, I’m entirely cognizant that while I’m privileged that it’s a side-hustle, a side-gig, a part-time job to me; it’s also a livelihood to tens of thousands of hardworking people out there.

Where I could turn off the app and head home when I decided I’ve earned enough in the week to eat at a new restaurant I’ve been eyeing or if it was too hot in the afternoon, most other people working my job can’t – if not, the lights may not turn on the next day.

In a comment to an earlier draft of this piece, a friend shared that it’s a privilege to be able to separate your social identities. I think it’s also a privilege to have the choice of perspective. We exercise when we’re healthy, as a hobby, or a passion. Deliverymen don’t see it that way. There is no ‘good to do’, there is only ‘must do’.

At the end of the day when the world starts to recover from Covid-19, you’re going to start getting photo and videography gigs and transition back to the white-collar world.

As for the security guard and domestic helper at Ardmore Park, the server at the Grange Road Haagen-Dazs, and the tens of thousands of for-hire drivers and delivery couriers? There’s no ‘back to normal’ – this is their normal.

In a discussion post on Yusuf’s article, a redditor referenced Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

In the blue-collar normal, where every day is a struggle to meet the needs of financial safety and security, maybe fulfilment isn’t really an aspiration for most. In an article calling for empathy, I feel the quality slightly lacking in my reading.

A few months back I began my education into inequality in Singapore with Teo You Yenn’s seminal This Is What Inequality Looks Like. In it, the title of one of her essays especially stood out to me: Dignity Is Like Clean Air. She describes, like Yusuf does, that many blue-collar workers in the service industry always feel invisible, that people don’t respect them, that it makes them feel small. I’d like to add on to** Dignity Is Like Clean Air** with the caveat: Segregation Is Not Necessarily Dirty.

Going back to the ‘fucked up service lifts at the back for the smelly people, the non-residents and stuff’, how about we just call a spade a spade?

In restaurants, servers and chefs who have their meals there usually sit at tables near the kitchen (or even in the kitchen itself).

In airplanes, consumers have the choice to pay a much higher premium for more leg room and a more gourmet selection of food. In fancy hotels, bellboys and concierge staff have to wear stiff suits – there’s usually a dress code for guests to enter certain areas.

So, is it really that unfair, for someone who’s had the means to pay for the privilege of living in luxury, to not really want to share a lift with someone who might smell unpleasant from having spent hours cycling under the hot sun?

The service lift provides the same functionality – no one’s saying that couriers are ‘lesser people’, we’re not being asked to walk up the stairs while the ‘masters’ take the magic moving box. It wasn’t created to separate the ‘undesirables’ from the ‘desirables’ like a pre-Rosa Parks bus, and it’ll be unhealthy to think of it as such – even worse to let it fester.

To package my views into a neatly categorized box – When I’m Brandon the Deliveryman, it’s perfectly fine for a guard to request for me to take the service lift, but when I’m Brandon the Guest attending a dinner party at the same condo, no one is stopping me from taking the resident lift right?

Different day, Different fit, Same me

I still think that it’s incredibly fucked up that some employers make their helpers take a separate lift though.

But in delivering the core message – is it more helpful to frame your reflection as ‘why do some people treat their subordinates with such contempt and how can we as society hope to change it’, or to just resent the fact that ‘rich people like that la’ – and laugh and pretend we’re friends.

I guess what I’m most frustrated with about the article is that it had the potential to be so much more. It occasionally flirts with the possibility of going deeper into one issue or the other but ultimately ends up being a reflection of one privileged dude’s brief foray into an industry that many of us often take for granted.

And because there are so many issues at play, people often fall into the trap of distilling extremely complicated issues into dangerous sweeping statements, which eventually does very little for the problem in question.

Another frustration I often have towards the discourse towards social issues is that they often fail to carry a call-to-action. Okay, I’ve checked my privilege, I’ve understood that my successes in life is partly a byproduct of the wealthy family I was fortunate to being born into – now what?

A good rule of thumb that I’ve been trying to implement into my life recently is to think about the net positive or net negative an action has onto society. And hence:

To the fortunate: While it is important to understand your privilege and not take things for granted, you also don’t have to be ashamed of it. Every dollar you spend goes into the economy and is earned by someone else. So, what can you do to influence a net positive?

Be kind to everyone, be kind to everyone, be kind to everyone.

If you can, have the moral courage to call out undesirable behavior – especially if it’s someone close to you. But if you can’t – it’s okay too. Start with yourself. The world could do with less ‘you should do more’ and more ‘thank you for what you did’.

This is not exclusive to tipping service staff or offering couriers a cold drink (although it is always really welcome!). Offer a kind word to anyone you interact with. Ask the office or school janitor if they’ve had their meal yet, wish your security guard a good morning/good evening when you pass them by, clear your tray when you’re at a fast food restaurant and smile and thank the servers if you pass them by.

I promise you - these little acts of kindness will go a much longer way received than it takes you to give them.

To our everyday heroes: Your intrinsic self worth is by no means defined by how an asshole treats you. You are so, so, so much more important.

You are somebody, you are somebody, you are somebody.

In this essay, my intention is to extend the net positive that Yusuf and Rice has already generated while minimizing the net negatives it may unintentionally create by framing the issue as ‘us vs them’.

I hope that it will be seen as an addendum to Yusuf’s original piece instead of a correction. To build up on the important issues that **each and every one of us **should acknowledge and then go one step further to see how we can resolve them. I hope that reading this has provoked more questions than it gives answers. I hope that we don’t see the world as black-and-white but how things can move to a more palatable shade of grey.

Of course, my thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions here could be (and probably are) wildly ignorant and myopic, and I still have so much more to learn. So please confront me, dispute me and tell me where I’m wrong and what I don’t know.

If I have to leave you with just one takeaway, I hope everyone remembers to be kinder to people – regardless.

(You can also find me at https://medium.com/@bdgthinks!)

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thessalian · 1 year

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Thess vs Major Disappointment

I ... just can’t today. I literally just cannot.

All my bus routes were basically no-go zones because of roadworks. So I took the Tube. Which was expensive, but never mind, we live in hope that I won’t have to do this for much longer, right?

(Spoiler: that’s not exactly a given.)

So the typing queue was awful and I was still being left with the long crappy bits (oh, no, sorry; Temp took one. Left me the other dozen or so). We didn’t even really make a dent, partly because Milady’s away but mostly because one of the trusts that send us referral cases sent a grand total of five emails full of reports they wanted us to send to them, and guess who got the duty? Yeeeeeep. So between long, complicated typing, the pain spasms that had me in tears at my desk again, and that level of report-tracking, it wasn’t exactly a banner day for getting shit done.

Of course, about a half-hour of that got blown because IT guy’s boss, keen to make things right, at least tried to contact me about the whole issue with my laptop, after his IT guy has been messing me about for months. After some discussion, we figured it was because of a miscommunication issue - basically we were pretty sure I’d been given the wrong network address. So I said I’d give it a shot when I got home (because apparently the ethernet jacks are keyed to very specific computers so I couldn’t have tested any of this from work anyway).

Thing is ... that relied on my getting home. Because I could not face the walk to the Tube station, I decided to get the Overground. Unfortunately, the Overground train just ahead of us had an ‘incident’, and we got stuck at a middle-of-nowhere station for about twenty minutes. Probably more; I lost track. Anyway, we got moving again, but only got as far as Shepherd’s Bush before they decided that apparently they were going to take the train we were on out of service, and get us to wait for the next one. Now, keep in mind that Shepherd’s Bush a pretty large public transport hub - Overground, Central Line (second only to the Northern Line for how horrific the crush can get), and about a dozen buses. The Overground platform at Shepherd’s Bush is always crowded. When we got off, it was an absolute crush. I knew full well that I wasn’t even going to be able to get on a train, never mind get a seat. So I had to take the long way around just to get back to a spot I could actually commute from. So it was Central Line to Oxford bloody Circus, swap to the Bakerloo Line, and then there to Elephant and Castle where I could catch the 363. Thankfully I was at just about the tail end of rush hour by the time I finally got onto the Tube, so that’s something. Of course, I got out at Elephant and Castle just in time to see my bus drive away. Had to wait ten minutes for the next one ... only to find that I’d miscalculated the funds available on my Oyster Card and got told “Not enough money” when I tapped in on the bus. The one decent thing that happened in this whole mess was that the bus driver just waved me on when I stepped aside to dig for my debit card. I’m just really aggravated because I was sure there was an upper limit on how much you paid for London travel and I only topped the damn thing up today so there should have been enough to cover it. So I’m going to have to top the damn thing up again for tomorrow.

Another spoiler there. Because, see, when I finally staggered back home, first thing I did was test out whether we were right about my having been given the wrong network address. Turned out ... yeah, we were right! Someone gave the wrong network address and now I have the right one, and I logged onto my remote desktop with no problem! Finally! I was thrilled and relieved!

...Then I tested the transcription software which was what we were waiting to get sorted out in the first place.

Guess what?

IT DIDN’T. FUCKING. WORK.

Everything else works except for the one thing I really, literally need to do my damn job. So tomorrow I have put more money on my Oyster Card (I’ve spent well over my monthly travel budget because of the roadworks mess, and it’s pissing me off) and face the prospect of the hell-commute again, all to go back to IT guy’s boss and try to find a polite way of asking what the fuck he’s been doing, because this? The setting up of my transcription software? WAS WHAT ALL OF THIS WAS FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE! That was exactly what the original ticket was about. And yet somehow it took all this just to find out how much he did not do his damn job.

I’m supposed to be walking a player through less a level-up and more a major class change today (it was supposed to be last week but I was having a significant pain flare. Not that today’s any better but I was hoping to be working from home by now or at least have the prospect of upcoming work from home to ease the pain). I should be putting together dinner and sorting myself out for that. Game’s Sunday and I can’t put this off much longer. But honestly, all I want to do is curl up and cry. I have been through too much with all of this and I’m finally just at the point where I think it’s sorted and I find out that the absolute base level thing I was asking for? Just didn’t get done.

I would like to get through just one day where I don’t end up in tears. That would be really great.

#Thess has a day job

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faintingheroine · 4 years

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http://www.mislokate.com/best-turkish-literature/

There is a dearth of content on Turkish novel in English of a non-academic kind and those that exist are frequently misinformed as the above post.

Like most of its kind, this post starts with how Atatürk is The Worst (TM). The post mentions how “Turkish has been the official state language of Turkey, for a relatively short time. Ataturk’s language reforms of the 1920s mandated that Turkish be written in Latin, not Arabic, script and that the large numbers of Persian and Arabic loanwords be scrubbed as much as possible from the language. One of the main consequences of this is that modern Turkish literature is a relatively young beast. Other consequences are equally important. While the generally accepted interpretation of Ataturk’s language reforms is that were an attempt to instigate a rapprochement with Europe, the reforms had the messy secondary effect of rendering a large number of people with no experience of the Latin alphabet illiterate.”

It is important that Ottoman Turkish (which was still very much Turkish, just with a lot of Arabic and Persian loanwords) was only spoken by the educated elite. Regular Turkish people spoke the regular Turkish that we speak today. Even the educated elite didn’t speak high-brow Ottoman Turkish in their daily lives. One of my favourite novels, “Aşk-ı Memnu” published in 1900, is famous for the heavy Ottoman Turkish it’s written in with a lot of Arabic and Persian loanwords. Its descriptions of landscapes are quite hard to understand, even when it’s translated to Modern Turkish. The dialogue of the characters, however, is in plain Turkish that is understandable to everyone in Turkey. Because people back then spoke Turkish mostly as we do, they just didn’t write in it and the elite didn’t speak it in formal contexts. Ataturk’s reforms just made the language of the regular Turkish people the written language and the official language of Turkey. It’s comparable to how during Renaissance educated Europeans stopped regarding Latin as the language in which literary works are written in and started using national languages like English and French. But it is not even that drastic a change because Ottoman Turkish was still Turkish, just with a lot of loanwords. And language reform didn’t really start with Atatürk either. Turkish writers started to write in regular everyday Turkish as early as in 1910s, and literary works in 1910s and 1920s are not heavy in Arabic and Persian loanwords. This is basic democratization of literary language that makes literary works accessible to everyone, regardless of class or education. It is not a bad thing.

Again, people talk a lot about the change to Latin script from the Arabic one and whether it was necessary. Now, I don’t know if it was necessary. But I can say that it is not as important as people frequently make it out to be. Prior to alphabet reform, only around 5 to 10 percent of Turkish people could read and write. So it’s not like the whole country turned illiterate overnight, they were already so. And people who were already literate quickly learned Latin alphabet. Most of the important literary works written in Arabic script were translated to Latin script in a couple of decades. Most Turkish high school students read a couple of Turkish novels written in Arabic script during the Ottoman times. As to the non-literary archives that weren’t translated to Latin script, well people who are supposed to read that stuff are historians, and they learn to read Ottoman Turkish in Arabic script at university. I’m not saying nothing of value was lost with the alphabet change, but it is not this great tragedy people make it out to be.

Yes “modern Turkish literature is relatively young beast”, but not because of Ataturk’s reforms. But because Turkish people weren’t influenced by the modern literature of the West until 19th century. Breaking point here is not Ataturk’s reforms in 1920s and 1930s but Tanzimat reforms that started in 1839. There are a lot of Turkish novels written between 1850s and 1920s and most Turkish people are familiar with them. But these works do not really get translated to English.

“Turkish literature’s relative youth and the Turkish language’s relatively limited geographical spread restrict Turkish literature in ways that highlight striking commonalities between works. It is possible that this is only a consequence of a certain type of book being favoured for English-language translation; however, I suspect this not to be the case. Resistance is the most prevalent theme I encountered.”

This paragraph is emblematic of the typical debate on whether the novel of the “Third World” is inherently more political and allegorical than that of the West that was started by Fredric Jameson. Now, I can say that the Turkish novel in general is more heavily political than, say, the English novel. Political issues do indeed have more of an effect on Turkish people’s culture and general life than in Western Europe. I won’t deny that. And most of the “important” Turkish novels have a historical/political aspect. This is partly because most of the Turkish novels “canonized” by high school curriculums are chosen so that high school students can become familiar with a certain part of Turkish history alongside reading good literature. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t great Turkish novels that are apolitical. My favorite Turkish novel, “Aşk-ı Memnu” is one of them, it is a novel that is fiercely (yes fiercely) apolitical. And I’ve recently read a novel about a Turkish spinster who is determined to destroy her older brother’s life that was published in 1937. There is commentary on gender in it and some stuff about “old money vs new money”, but there is nothing in it that can’t be found in a European novel written in 1930s. Neither of these novels are translated to English. “A certain type of book” is favored for English-language translation. Works from non-Western cultures are favored for English translation when they’re as exotic and as emblematic of their country of origin as possible. Novels that just depict Turkish people living their regular lives that are not that different from how people anywhere live their lives are not interesting for an English speaking readership. When people pick up a book from Turkey, they want it to feel Turkish. So the works with a historical/political emphasis are the ones that get translated. And not just any political novel of course, but works that reinforce how that country is seen by the audience of English-speaking countries. (Continental European publications tend to be less restrictive in whom they translate than English/American ones).

She then lists nine Turkish works that she has already read as recommendations. I won’t be harsh here because she has read works that are available in her language and it is a pretty varied list.

I’m sure that this person wrote this list with the best of intentions and I’m very impressed with how many Turkish works she actually managed to read. And this is just a regular blog post, not an academic work. But it reveals how Turkish Literature is often thought of in the West in plain language so it was an interesting case study for me to examine.

#turkish literature #turkish novel

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thelastarchangelaskblog · 5 years

Text

Impersonal vs. Personal Stabbing

This RP takes place after we picked up Clint (read: rescued him from goblins almost stark naked), and features some bantering between Tony and Clint.

Tony & Zira’s Chat Charcoal as Breakfast

Tony & Rhodey’s Chat Tony & Luna

Tony & Rhodey Compile a List

The Trouble with Two Tonys

Rhodey & Bob(Tony)

Rhodey & Zira (and Tony)

DJ & Zira

DJ & Tony

Rhodey & DJ

(Read more.)

They've gotten the brush off the wagon by now. It's quite frankly a miracle no one actually found it because in retrospect their work at hiding it wasn't very good.

Tony looks over at Clint, their newest acquisition.

Tony: So...what got you into working the bodyguard business?

Clint: Not a lot of other options as far as job goes. People are pretty eager for sellswords and the like these days. Which reminds me, you didn't see armor or a bow or a pair of swords anywhere, did you? I didn't see what they did with my stuff.

Tony: Yeah, I was about to say that you didn't seem much like a sword person. You look more like a bow and arrow guy. And, uh, no. We were kind of busy getting you out so you didn't bleed to death inside the cave.

Clint: Yeah, that's fair

Clint (quietly): Damn it.

Tony: We could...go back and get it? How stealthy are you? I mean, other option is to steal Rhodey's shortbow, since I'm sure he has one somewhere.

Clint: I'm not sure I'm that desperate. But if you could loan me something, I'd appreciate it. I don't exactly have the money to buy anything new

Tony: Fair; I wasn't sure if I wanted to brave the cave with just the two of us. And DJ. Though I'm not sure if I would've let DJ go anywhere... (He looks pained.)

Clint: Which one's DJ?

Tony: The halfling. Don't call him short unless you want him to get mad at you.

Clint: Noted. I know a lady like that. Though for her it's less “mad” and more “paycheck docked for the next six weeks.”

Tony: Ooh, that sounds rough. But I'm guessing no paycheck at all now?

Clint: She's subtle but damn does she know how to hit where it hurts. Ha, hopefully I'm still getting paid for this. (There's the briefest pause before he continues.) Just gotta track Ryss down first and hope he's still alive.

Tony: I think we're all in the same boat there, since he hired our entire group as well. She sounds like my kind of gal. Any chance she's your contact in Briarbane?

Clint: Nah, my contact's a dude. Wizard by the name of Iarno. I heard last time I saw him that he was going to be heading down this way.

Tony: Huh. Never heard of him.

Clint: Haven't had the chance to check up on him, though. It's hard to send letters on the road, and he's not big on sharing magic items.

Tony: Let's hope he's there. If he's not, we'll need to come up with a backup plan.

Clint: No kidding. With the state of this place, he might've been picked off by the goblins, too.

Tony: (grins) Like you were?

Clint: Ha, ha. It's seriously a shame, though, that bandits are everywhere these days. I used to love to travel. Don't really have the time or money for it anymore. Unless it comes with the job, anyway.

Tony: You can't travel on your lonesome?

Clint: You saw what happened when I brought just one friend. It doesn't get better with just me and Lucky to fend for ourselves.

Tony: True enough. Though DJ and I did just fine for about a year until Rhodey met up with us.

Clint: Must have somebody upstairs looking out for your health.

Tony: ...ha, maybe.

Tony looks considering.

Tony: ...or maybe not. Not sure about that.

Clint: You an atheist?

Tony: Sometimes I wish I were. Would make things easier for sure.

Clint: Guess I shouldn't have asked. Sounds like it's complicated.

Tony: Buddy, you have no idea. Anyway, if anyone up there is looking out for me, they better be looking out for you, too. Doesn't seem fair otherwise

Clint: To be honest, I'm not exactly a religious man myself. You know, it's fun when the holidays roll around and everything - used to be how I ate half the time when I was a kid. But thanks for the sentiment.

Tony: Oh man, those holidays. The holidays are wild.

Clint: I know. You ever been up to Vasselheim for Esteri, or the Godsbrawl? The stories I've heard.

Tony: They definitely get pretty wild from what I've heard.

Clint: (laughing a little) They say the lords and ladies of the Quadroads make and break their fortunes, betting on fighters at the Brawl every year.

Tony: I bet they do. Those kinds of folks always like a good bet. Honestly, I've only seen a few holidays in person. My family wasn't necessarily the best with that stuff.

Clint: ...you have no idea what the Quadroads is, do you?

Tony: ...I totally do.

Clint gives you a patented Skeptical™ look.

Tony (entirely unconvincingly): It's...four roads. A crossroads. You make deals with demons.

Clint busts out laughing.

Clint: It's the Erathis district in Vasselheim. I dunno about demons, unless you count all the jarls, but I guess it's at the crossroads. Never been myself. Too cold up there.

Tony: No, I've never been up there. We've been hanging around the south mostly. Didn't you hear? Bury a box at the center of the crossroads and a demon might show up. And you can deal with them.

Clint: Hear what? And let me say, it pained me to bite back a joke. Ah. Yeah, I tend to end up fighting the kind of people who do stuff like that. I'm eighty percent sure that might carry the death penalty in Vasselheim. Home of the country's biggest religious icons and all.

Tony: You can't hear that well, can you?

Clint: What gave it away, the -? (He snaps next to his ear again.)

Tony: Yeah, that was partly it. And I know my magical items. There was also you wanting to bite back a joke. Not a lot of things to joke about except if you can't hear well.

Clint: Give the man a prize. Yeah, I lost my hearing in an accident a while back. Lucky for me that- (he checks himself) -that ISL is pretty easy to pick up. A friend of mine got me into the habit of making jokes about it.

Tony: If you can't joke about it you'll probably just end up crying about it.

Clint: I'll drink to that.

Tony: Or both sometimes.

Clint:...once we get to Briarbane.

Tony: I'll buy you one. Since apparently you don't have any money. And I don't want you stooping to making deals with crossroad demons. (He grins.)

Clint: Oh, I like you already. What's your deal, then? How's a guy like you end up in Helikon, taking deals from frankly kinda sketchy dwarves?

Tony: Honestly I have absolutely no idea. Other than apparently everyone else wanted a job?

Clint laughs.

Tony: I can't leave DJ alone; that'd be sad. And Rhodey's my best bud; can't leave him behind either.

Clint: So you're the yes-man? You don't strike me as the type.

Tony: I am the opposite of a yes-man. But I can't let my friends be getting in trouble without me.

Clint:...Alright, point taken. I've been there.

Tony: So here I am, taking deals from sketchy dwarves and talking with half-elven bodyguards who can't guard.

Clint: Hey, I take offense to that. I did fine all the way from Myrdinian; it's not my fault the area got ten times more dangerous since the last time I was here.

Tony: Yeah, honestly, those goblins would have been an issue for two people by themselves. But you make poking fun at you easy. (He smirks.)

Clint pointedly rolls his eyes.

Clint:...I hope Ryss is doing alright, though. Guy's more of a miner than a fighter. You'd think the skillsets would overlap, but apparently not that much.

Tony: Hence the bodyguards?

Clint: Ha, if he'd gone for bodyguards, plural, I would've had my usual partner with me and this definitely wouldn't have happened.

Tony: ...are you saying he's a cheapskate?

Clint: But he was only interested in the one. His mine's not operating yet. I think he's more interested in putting his money in it than in his personal safety. Plus my partner doesn't....look the part. I do. Some people make assumptions.

Tony: ...I'm now picturing something very small and fluffy or very tiny and around DJ's size.

Clint: Ha! No. She likes to look unassuming, but she's on the tall side, all things considered.

Tony looks back to where Zira is helping some of the others.

Tony: As tall as her?

Clint: Definitely not. Whatever your friend is, I think her species runs on the tall side as a whole.

Tony: Ehhh, depends, really. So...tall as Rhodey?

Clint: Average for a human, but 'all things considered' includes halflings and gnomes.:...Can I ask what she is? You talk like you know. (He nods at Zira.) Don't want to offend on accident.

Tony: I have my guesses, but she hasn't actually said anything so I'm keeping quiet on that. So...is DJ going to be put out?

Clint: That's a valuable trait in a friend. I make a point to never guess how people will react to her. I'm always wrong.

Tony: That...is probably something I should pick up. But I'm putting my money on a gnome who's really tall and is going to make DJ pout

Clint: If I knew where to find her, I'd do my best to introduce you just to see how your guess holds up.

Tony: Then let me just say I'm looking forward to it. Especially since I have the sneaking feeling that while you don't know where she is, she knows where you are.

Clint: That wouldn't surprise me. (He looks over his shoulder, and then looks a little embarrassed when it's just forest.)

Tony: Don't worry; if someone sneaks up on you I'll let you know.

Clint: You must be familiar with how bodyguards work.

Tony: They guard bodies. Generally easy to figure out.

Clint: No, I mean, that was a pretty good guess.

Tony: ...she's your bodyguard? A bodyguard has a bodyguard?

Clint: No, like I said, she's my partner in the business. (He looks at Tony with interest). Must just be good instincts.

Tony: Ah, well... I figured...you sound like you're close. She also sounds like she's pretty crafty. And if you were hired and she wasn't... Let me just say that if it was my friend, I'd be keeping tabs on them.

Clint: I figure she found work with someone else. I guess she coulda wrangled her way into coming down this way, too, if she managed to figure out where I was going.

Tony: Entirely possible, and yet she might show up in Briarbane and give you the fright of your life from a trash can.

Clint: If she did I'm gonna give her a piece of my mind, because I coulda used a hand back with the goblins. No offense to you, but you took a while to catch up.

Tony: Oh yeah; we had a goblin on a baby leash. Took a bit with that.

Clint: Huh?

Tony: And then there's, y'know, the halfling and bird thing. They can't walk as fast. Yeah, goblin on a baby leash. She led us to the cave.

Tony mimes what he's talking about.

Clint:...huh. I guess those goblins really didn't like their boss.

Tony: Yeah, which was partly the reason why we ganked him. The other reason was because we had to get you out of there.

Clint: I was, y'know, there for that whole conversation. I can't believe you managed to get out without that a-hole scamming the life out of you

Tony: Rhodey's very good at what he does. Which is scaring the shit out of people he doesn't like. It also helps to have someone as tall as Zira backing you up

Clint: I'd say it was more than a little your alligator-toothed mystery friend, yeah.

Tony: She's a sweetheart. But definitely looks terrifying to those who don't expect it.

Clint: Suuure.

Tony (smiles): You can trust me. Would I lie about Zira? :)

Clint:...Well, I don't know you that well yet.

Tony: Definitely fair. But Zira's cool. She just uses what she has to great effect. And no one expects someone who's almost seven feet tall to intimidate you into giving up your hostage.

Clint: I dunno, I'd put money on intimidation coming from the one who's seven-foot-fuck-off in a second.

Tony: ...definitely fair But she looks a bit like a...twig, doesn't she? Not that intimidating unless she smiles at you.

Clint looks up at Zira

Clint: ...you make a fair point.

Tony: Also she likes chocolate.

Clint: Who doesn't?

Tony (snaps fingers): That's what I'd like to know!

Somewhere several guards in several towns wince at the sound of snapping fingers.

Distantly...they know.

Clint: So you guys are chocolate-loving, incredibly efficient sellswords...anything else I should know?

Tony: Well, the chocolate-loving doesn't apply to everyone. DJ's not very partial to them as far as I can tell. My bribes certainly haven't worked on him. I suppose I should tell you so that you're forewarned about Bob. He goes by a different name every day.

Clint: Which one's Bob

Tony: The bird. He'll be the one to speak into your mind, so no hearing required.

Clint: That's....weird. How's that work?

Tony: I have no idea and I'd love to find out but Bob doesn't seem to have any idea how his stuff works either. ...psionic wavelengths? He's psychic? He sure does like his mind spells.

Clint:...

Tony: Yeah, just fair warning. He doesn't seem to mind doing it on us. You might be okay provided you don't piss him off much or annoy him. I think he's going by Tim today, but I just call him Bob. So that's Bob - or Tim, I guess. (shrugs) Luna is...I don't know her that well. She's interesting, though. Definitely blends into trees better than anyone I've ever seen. She actually became a tree.

Clint: Are you fucking with me, or did she actually shapeshift? 'Cuz that would be neat.

Tony: I have no idea but she's a druid, I think. ...Actually, I don't think there was any shape-shifting involved, but I was a little busy trying not to get stabbed by arrows.

Clint: Do arrows count as being stabbed? Being stabbed is a much more personal experience.

Tony: They were sharp and piercy and jabby and one got me through the armor. I call it being stabbed from an impersonal distance

Clint: It's about the personal touch, though.

Tony: Besides, I could totally stab you with an arrow right now and it'd be stabbing

Clint: Hold on. Were you being shot at, or was someone using an arrow as a makeshift dagger?: Those are two different things.

Tony: Shot at. The brambles made it a bit difficult to get up close and personal. I was stabbed from a distance. It counts

Clint: Nope. Not stabbing. That's just regular old being shot at.

Tony: It totally counts because they had a personal vengeance against us! They were sharp and pointy. That nets you a stab!

Clint: Just because something pointy hits you, doesn't make it a stab. Do you call falling into a thorn bush a stabbing?

Tony: No, because that would be my own fault and the thorn bush is innocent.

Clint: Who brought fault into this? If I stab someone because he was being a dick, that's not less of a stabbing than if I stabbed him for funsies.

Tony: But it's personal, isn't it?

Clint: Not if it's the second one. Less so, at least

Tony: If you stabbed him for funsies I'd assume you still had a reason for it.

Clint: My point is fault has nothing to do with this.

Tony: Otherwise it's just friendly poking.

Clint: Friendly poking--

Clint: Have you ever been stabbed, in your life

Tony: Oh yeah. Loads of times. Just now, in fact, by those goblins.

Clint: When you say that, do you mean actually stabbed or shot

Tony: Stabbed, of course. Sharp and pointy things were involved and they stabbed me.

Clint narrows his eyes at Tony.

Tony just grins back.

Tony: I mean, it's not a stabbing unless it's personal, right? That's what you were saying, wasn't it? Otherwise it's just poking.

Clint: Stabbing is personal because it's done up close. You've got it backwards

Tony: I don't think I do. I mean, it's personal regardless of distance. And if you get shot at then it normally involves something really small and round that makes you hurt a lot. Arrows are not small and round unless I've been looking in the wrong field.

Clint: What the hell do you think getting shot at is?

Tony: You know... (He mimes with two hands cocking something and then jerking his hands up.) Shot at?

Clint: Ohhh. You're Marquetian. I get it now.

Tony: ...no.

Clint: You know guns aren't really a thing this side of the ocean, right? Some lordship in Tal'dorei has a monopoly on it, and they've got connections in Vasselheim.

Tony: That would explain why I haven't seen any guns around here. You're also the first person to know what I was talking about. Congratulations. Candy? (He offers something sour.)

Clint: Nah, I'm thirsty enough already. Whereabouts in Marquet, out of curiosity? Ank'harel, or outside the desert?

Tony: It was desert-like, so... (shrugs) Though there were trees, too? And some mountains. Also an ocean. Just a lot of things in general.

Clint: Alright, I get it. You don't have to say.

Tony: You from Marquet, too? Seeing as how you actually know about guns?

Clint: Nah, you just hear stuff in this business. I was up north roundabouts fifteen years ago, you know - not in the city, but you hear stuff. I think one of the people who fought in the Siege was connected to that Tal'dorei lordship and had a gun from there? Sorry, the Siege of Vasselheim. It was a big deal. You probably don't know.

Tony: No, I do. (glances at Rhodey) It was a big thing.

Clint: Yeah. Makes me glad I never made up my mind to go to Vasselheim.

Tony: Why do you think I've never been up there? There's too much going on. That, and it's really far up north.

Clint: I hear they've still got some things lingering around from the Siege. Monsters and the like.

Tony: Yeah, that's what I've heard, too. Those kinds of rumors make their way down here all the time. You said something about a lordship? It's been a while since I was down there.

Clint: Oh, yeah. Some place on northern Tal'dorei, I think over on the side closer to Wildemount. You've been to Tal'dorei?

Tony: Not Tal’dorei, but the south coast? So close enough. You get more news there about what’s going on.

Clint: Like near Kol'arn, or southern Tal'dorei?

Tony: South Tal'dorei, but like I said, that was a long time ago.

Clint: Fair enough. I only ask 'cuz I'm a fan of travel stories. Never been outside the country myself, so...

Tony: I've got quite a few of those but most of those just involve me seeing the inside of a caravan...

Clint: Sorta like right now, huh?

Tony: It's nicer, actually. Less people for one. It also stinks less.

Clint: Wait, let me guess - donkey carts? Crowded passenger ships?

Tony: Yep and yep. You want to hop large bodies of water and you don't have the funds, that's what you're stuck with.

Clint: At least you made it.

Tony: Tell me about it. Sure, the traveling bit's nice, but it's always nicer with friends.

Clint: Tell me about it.

He kinda leans back among the various supplies in the wagon and shifts to make himself comfortable, and says, "I'm gonna take a nap. Wake me up when we hit Briarbane."

Tony: You do you. I'll, er, keep DJ out of the area.

Clint: 'Preciate it.

He appears to fall asleep pretty fast.

#d&d campaign #the-grey-hunt

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desbianherstory · 5 years

Text

What I want to highlight here is how the politics of funding has completely changed the dynamics of the queer movement. When we started off, the whole discourse was around HIV and AIDS. We consistently tried to bring in an alternative voice to this paradigm. What about the violence against lesbian and bisexual women? Why should the F to M be invisibilised, just because they are not as susceptible to HIV as gay men, transwomen and MSMs (men having sex with men)? At the end of the day, gender becomes important here… and how it hierarchises the non normative sexualities too! I have seen some M to Fs talking so much about exploitation suddenly taking on a masculinist tone and swearing at network meetings where projects are allotted!

....I don’t believe that there is a uniform, one whole LGBT movement. Where is the B? They do not even exist in the discourse! They are often shunned as opportunistic, getting the best of both the worlds. But imagine the pain they go through when their male lovers do not trust them because they like women while their female lovers feel insecure because they also like men or may get married; such a lot of distrust from both sides when they might truly love both. Where are their issues, their voices? I attribute that partly to the fact that no bisexual leader emerged who could show a new way. And then there is L vs. G and T is of course a different ball game altogether! That’s where all the money is. What we are witnessing is an ‘NGO-isation’ of a movement. Look at the proliferation of identity labels. Earlier, they were all referred to as hijras, now we hear about kotis, transwomen. It has become a herculean task for people like us to establish that T also includes female to male

...For instance, till 2007, we had this bitter pain that these people talk so much about the LGBT movement but women were invisible in their struggle against Section 377. Later, we thought, we should become part of the system and bring in our narratives. Section 377 talks of penetrative sex and therefore technically, lesbians do not come under its purview but let’s not simplify women’s lives. It is no hypothetical situation that a lesbian could be forcibly married and left alone at the in-laws while the husband is working in Gujarat or Maharashtra. The husband comes once a year and gifts her with a child, and sometimes with AIDS, too, from all the unprotected sex he has had. This girl may have a girlfriend who is her only solace. What is penetrative sex here? It is compulsory heteronormativity and being forced to be who you are not. If I start narrating instances of violence, you wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. Parents blackmailing girls into marriage or else risk being reported to the police… if a boy gets arrested, the parents can secure his release and slap him for ‘unnatural behaviour’ but for a girl, marriage is the worst punishment you can give. A girl may have visited a psychiatrist, against all odds, but even the psychiatrist tells her, “It’s a passing phase. Get married and you will be fine.” I know an educated woman who was raped by her doctor and threatened into silence. ‘Corrective rape’ is a common phenomenon. This girl was repeatedly raped and finally her only recourse was to get married and settle abroad. She had a box full of lesbian magazines which she read in the lurch. Finally, she has summoned the courage to walk out of her marriage and be herself. So many lesbians commit suicide. We do not even get to know about all of them. Girls are paraded naked to prove to the world that they are women. The educated woman might be married to someone working with a multinational while the girl from the lower class to a migrant labourer. But see how their concerns merge. It doesn’t matter whether we are subject to Section 377 or not; there are multiple ways and layers of oppression that need addressing.

Since 11/12/13, more and more F to Ms are calling on our helpline. Their situation is no less unique. Firstly, many of them do not want to join organizations because they feel insecure about losing their lovers in women’s spaces. Also, because they identify themselves as men, they may not connect with women’s organizations. Then, there are those who come to us saying that they are men but not like their male friends who objectify women. Neither can they connect with their misogynist male friends nor can they speak about themselves freely with them. These voices need to be heard. You are right in saying that the resources available for F to Ms are much less compared to resources for M to Fs. But for that we are also at fault. It took us time to understand their issues.

—Interview with Malobika, co-founder of Kolkata-based Sappho for Equality, an organization for lesbian, bisexual women’s and trans men’s rights.

#sappho for equality #Malobika #indian lesbians #indian bisexual women #indian lgbt #indian trans men #indian trans women #section 377

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not-close-to-straight · 6 years

Text

Woke Up Like This (SWS #52)

SUNDAYS WITH SPIDEYPOOL MASTERLIST HERE

*******************

The upside of hanging out with heroes vs killers was that Wade got to meet all sorts of interesting people, and most of them were even on the side of justice and freedom and puppies an all that, so that was fun. A nice step up from the usual uh-- standard? of people that Wade usually ran in to. The good guys tended to shower, tended to smile a little more-- it was a good gig for the most part.

The downside of hanging out with heroes vs killers is that instead of just popping one in scary bad guys, they had to try and take them down non-lethally, which had ended up with all of them getting blasted with some sugar pink fairy dust from a not-scary-looking-at-all-but-super-moody-witch type person who had muttered something suspiciously curse like before dusting them all and Wade had crawled away from it all with a pounding headache and spitting up what was probably blood but since he was hallucinating it definitely looked like sparkles and that-- ugh god he needed to sleep this one off and avoid any heroes for a few weeks.

Any heroes except Spidey, of course, because not even magical witchy fairy dust would keep Wade away from his favorite web slinger. Nuh-uh. Almost a year now they’d been running patrol together, and just about nine months since they’d started this little flirty teasing dance-around-each-other thing, and only about four since they’d taken off their masks in front of each other and Wade had melted over how beautiful Spidey was and then melted all over again when the kid hadn’t even blinked over all his scars had just smiled that contagious smile and kept right on talking like everything was fine.

No, Wade wouldn’t be staying away from Peter ever, at all, not if he could help it. It wasn’t like Peter didn’t know Wade was half in love with him, and Wade was pretty sure Pete was half in love with him but they’d never done anything about it-- partly because of Wade’s insecurity issues, partly because you know... when did super hero types have time to date??

Oh man, they should totally date, shouldn’t they? They were perfect together, fuck all this waiting stuff.

Wade just needed to stop seeing sounds and hearing colors before calling Spidey, that was all. Then they were gonna date, oh hell yeah they were.

He slept it off for about fourteen hours, passed out halfway on his bed and half off, probably drooling, definitely snoring and most likely terribly unattractive-- but hey no one was there to see him--and when he woke up, he stumbled to the bathroom, and splashed some water on his face before looking in the mirror--

--And screaming bloody murder because whomst the fuck was that hunk of yum staring back at him??

“I’m pretty.” Wade stared into the glass, at his clear skin and bright hazel eyes and thick hair and not so much as a pimple anywhere to be seen. “Holy schnitzel on a stick I’m pretty.”

He took a shower just to make sure he was awake, pinched himself entirely too hard to make sure it wasn’t a dream, and kept staring in the mirror.

He was pretty. Like Ryan Reynolds level of hunky and wasn’t that just fairly amazing.

Apparently there were benefits to inhaling witchy powder.

Feeling confident for the first time in-- forever-- and not willing to waste even one second of pretty-time, Wade dove for his phone and fired off a text to Spidey:

From Wade: Pete. Let me take you out on a date. We’ve been flirting and teasing and all that shit and its time for me to put my money where my mouth is. I want to take you out and feed you expensive food, then I want to take you to bed and wreck you about as sweetly as I can, and then want to make you pancakes in the morning, how does that sound?

From Pete: Little early to be drinking, don’t you think?

From Wade: Oh no, I’m totally sober, Pete. And I mean every word. What do you say?

From Pete: I like blueberries in my pancakes.

From Wade: I’ll pick you up at eight.

**********************

The suit cost some ridiculous amount of money, but Wade didn’t care because he looked incredible in it-- the fabric tailored to his body, the shirt underneath stretching over his arms and shoulders. He got to use gel (gel!) in his hair (his hair!!) and his pants were probably a size too tight but whatever, this was one night that he wanted to be stared at.

Flowers from a vendor, probably too many flowers but hey, Peter was worth it, and Wade was standing outside the apartment building at five till eight, waiting for Peter impatiently, smirking when a woman walked by and blatantly checked him out.

Oh he was messing with witches more often, HOLLA.

Peter came downstairs right at eight, glancing in Wade’s direction and then away, obviously scanning the street for what he thought Wade would look like.

“Pete.” Wade spoke up when the kid reached for his phone, presumably to text him. “Pete, I’m right here.”

“Hm?” Peter glanced at him again, then came off to the steps to take a closer look. “Oh my god. Wade?”

“Hey.” Wade grinned, handing him the flowers. “Surprise.”

“What-- what?” Peter put the flowers down and rubbed his fingers on Wade’s face. “Are you wearing make up? What is this?”

“Um witchy girl?” Wade caught Peter’s hand and pressed a kiss to his palm. “When she sprayed us with this crap it must have muted my whole-- my whole issue. I woke up like this.”

“You woke up like this.” Peter repeated, and finally finally, his eyes dropped to take in the fit of the suit over Wade’s body, the skin showing at the vee of his shirt, flicking up to look at his hair, and finally finally he smiled. “Um, wow.”

“You approve?” Wade said hopefully, and Peter nodded slowly. “So, the date still on?”

“Oh hell yeah.” Those dark eyes sparked with something that made Wade’s breath catch. “Let’s go.”

**********************

Dinner was easy and fun, laughing and talking over their food, lingering over their drinks.

The waitress kept bending over in an obvious attempt to catch Wade’s attention and he certainly noticed it because you know-- she wasn’t cringing away from him, which was the only reaction he’d gotten from women men anyone for years-- but he only had eyes for Peter, who was talkative and funny and hot as hell, all smiles and not-subtle checking Wade out and every glass of wine that went down had their feet bumping a little more under the table, and Wade leaning further over the table because Peter’s voice was dropping soft and flirty, and several times Wade could have closed the distance between them and kissed those ridiculously pretty lips, but he held off until after they had left the restaurant.

It was Peter then, who shoved him up against a wall and pinned him there with just a bit of his Spidey strength, weaving a hand through Wade’s hair and yanking him down for a bruising kiss, gasping, “I’ve waited so long to do this.” before kissing him again and again and again. “Jesus, Wade I thought you’d never ask me out.”

“You could have asked me out.” Wade pointed out as they stumbled up the stairs to his apartment. “I’m a shy boy, Pete, I was nervous.”

“There’s nothing shy about you.” Peter denied, ripping Wade’s shirt right off him and dragging his nails down his abdomen. “Oh god, Wade you are so hot.”

“You’re one to talk, baby boy.” Wade fell back on the bed and dragged Peter with him. “Never seen nothing half as good as this ass, you feel me?”

“Oh I feel you.” Peter rocked into him purposefully, and Wade groaned. “You still planning on wrecking me sweetly or you gonna let me wreck you first?”

“Eek I’m in love!” Wade laughed as Peter crushed another kiss to his mouth. “This is the best night of my life.”

*****************

Morning came entirely too soon, especially since round three had happened at sometime around three am and not even Wade’s more than impressive stamina had been up for another and they had curled up in each other’s arms and slept cuddled together until the sun came up, and once Wade shut the blinds and climbed back into bed, they slept until lunch time.

He woke up to soft lips over his skin, a nibble at his neck, a tongue over his nipple, light fingers down his stomach and more determined touches in his below the belt region and Wade was smiling and shifting and murmuring for more before he even opened his eyes.

He didn’t even know anything was wrong until Peter moved to straddle him, rubbing against him languidly and running his hands carefully over Wade’s bare scalp, breathing, “You up for round four, merc?” and Wade was ready to say “hell yes” but then he realized that Peter’s hands were on his head and not his hair, and that familiar ache that was the ever present sting of his mutation was back, hovering beneath his skin, and his skin was--

“Damn it.”

He didn’t have to open his eyes to know he was back to normal, back to scarred, and bald and--

“I love this part of you.” Peter’s teeth scraped over Wade’s hipbone, his nose rubbing into the deep vee of his hip. “It’s so sexy, its like a trail leading down to better things and--”

“Pete.” Wade tugged at him. “Stop.”

“But it’s my turn to top!” Peter laughed and pinched his thigh. “Don’t tell me you’re chickening out! What happened to that healing factor?”

“Stop.” Wade said again, and sat up to push Peter off him. “Let me go put some clothes on.”

“Wade.” Wade dodged the hand that reached for him and headed for the bathroom for his robe. “Wait, baby, what’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” he tied the sash securely around his waist and started searching through his drawers for an extra mask. “I woke up like this, Pete, woke up ugly again. “Apparently the witchy powder only lasted twenty four hours so--”

“What do you mean you woke up ugly?” Peter jumped of the bed and tried to put his arms around Wade’s waist. “You look the same as you always do.”

“Yeah.” Wade kept his eyes averted, arms folded across his chest. “Exactly.”

“Exactly.” Peter echoed. “So I don’t see what--” he stopped, understanding clearing his eyes. “Wade, did you only ask me out because you looked... because you looked different? Is that what last night was about?”

“Sort of.” Wade mumbled. “Thought since I was pretty again you’d say yes.”

“Because you were--” Peter shook his head. “I didn’t say yes because you were pretty. I said yes because I’ve been waiting months for you to ask me out on a date. I said yes because I’ve been waiting to get you naked for months. It had nothing to do with any of--” a vague motion at Wade’s body. “--any of that.”

“Well yeah, but--but I woke up great yesterday. And I woke up like this today. First time you’ve had to wake up to me and--”

“And I obviously liked what I saw, because I was more than halfway to giving you a blowjob before you pushed me off.” Peter interrupted. “I thought you knew I didn’t care about any of this sort of thing, Wade, we’ve been maskless around each other enough, I figured you knew how I felt.”

“You don’t mind?” Wade chewed at his lip anxiously. “Because I can try and find the witch again or figure out how to do this sort of thing permanently if that’s what you want.”

“I want you to give me my turn to top.” Peter teased, pushing Wade’s robe off his shoulders and to the floor. “And then I want blueberries in my pancakes. And at some point we should take a shower because--”

He stopped talking when Wade kissed him, soft and slow and a little hesitant and a lot sweet, gathering him close and holding him tight.

“Everything alright?” Peter whispered once Wade let him breathe again. “Hm?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.” Wade pressed their foreheads together and sighed shakily. “It’s alright that I woke up like this?”

“As long as you wake up like this all the other times I spend the night.” Peter promised. “Besides, you look like Ryan Reynolds the other way and he creeps me out. I prefer you looking like you, merc. No more witches and weird potions to change your looks.”

“I’ll try my hardest, but honestly the Avengers hang out with weird people, so no promises.”

*************************

SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE STORY!

*************************

#ncts fics #sundays with spideypool #spideypool

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thesffcorner · 5 years

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S.T.A.G.S.

S.T.A.G.S. is a YA thriller written by M A Bennet. It follows Greer, a girl who is a new student at St. Aidan the Great School, or STAGS, a private, Catholic school in Northumberland England. She gets invited to a weekend of “huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’” by the Medievals, the group of 6 most popular students in the school, who practically rule the student body, along with two other students. However, as soon as Greer gets to Longcross, the estate where she’s to spend the weekend, she realizes something is amiss, and she might be in more danger than she ever thought possible. S.T.A.G.S. is a book that is so full of film and pop culture references, that I feel it’s only fitting I myself start with one; this book is basically the Riot Club, except our lead is a girl. If you’ve read the play or watched the film adaptation then you know exactly what kind of story you’re in for, and if you liked either, than you will definitely like this. Let’s start with the setting; I don’t read a lot of books by English authors, and it was honestly refreshing to read this one, because England as a country is both much closer to what I’m used to, being from Europe, while also being entirely different. I didn’t care too much about the meticulous descriptions of the estate and the school, however, what I liked was that this books avoids my pet peeve of having these descriptions being meaningless. This is told in first person, and the way Greer tells the story, is like a diary entry that she’s writing after all the events have already happened. As such, she’s able to give little hints and comments on everything she sees and experiences, like what things remind her off, or why she thought they were relevant to mention. She also makes a lot of remarks on things I don’t often read in these types of books, the main one being money and status. I really, really liked this aspect of the book. Bennet talks a lot about accents, dialects and pronunciation, and how that determines not just what part of the country you come from, but also your social and economic status. Greer is from Manchester, and as such she has a pretty thick accent, that immediately marks her as an outsider in the posh world of high class British society. There are parts of the novel where Bennet writes out phonetically what words sound like, and how their pronunciation is very different depending on who’s speaking. When the Medievals talk, they add r’s in words that don’t have them, and they clip their words so that they never say the full thing. When Nel, another character who is as rich, but she is new money talks, the way she pronounces the word ‘love’ nets her the receiving end of bullying because of her not truly being posh. This discussion of class becomes even more complicated when we take into account religion, race and new vs old money. Nel, who is richer than probably even the Medievals is still shunned and bullied, because she got the money recently, and as such has no class or social standing. The Medievals all come from incredibly rich, well connected old families; their leader Henry has had the land since the 11th century, because of an ancestor who fought in the crusades. Likewise, another character, Shafeen, whose father is a literal Indian Prince, and his family has been royalty, rich and high class for much longer than any of the Medievals’ families is rejected and bullied because of his skin color, and the fact that he’s Indian. This dissection of class, race, economic status and language was so fascinating to me because I never see it explored like this in YA; it’s also a nice refresher for American readers that racism and classism though by no means gone in Europe, operate differently than they do in the US. Another thing about the setting that I really enjoyed was the discussion about what class and rich actually means. Like I said, Nel is rich, but all her clothes are brand new, and everything she does and wears seems to be a little bit off. Though she imitates the mannerisms and even the speaking style of the Medievals almost perfectly, the fact that everything on her is brand new is what gives her away as a poser. There are scenes where Greer walks around the manner and notes how despite everything being incredibly opulent it’s also falling apart; the clothes are old and have been worn, the walls have gold decals that are peeling, the house itself is old. I was reminded constantly of a comment a friend of my family made about how people in England live in houses that barely have modern plumbing just because they are old and ‘traditional’, and refuse or in many cases can’t integrate modern technology to make life easier and more pleasant. Speaking of technology, that’s another topic that’s greatly discussed in this book. I found this was explored less well, and I thought it was a bit on the nose, mostly because it intersects heavily with the reason everyone is going to Lockwood in the first place, so I can’t discuss it without spoilers. I did like that technology wasn’t vilanized and even ended up helping at the end. You might be wondering why I gave this book only 3 stars if nothing I said so far was negative. That mostly comes down to the plot and the ending. I feel like the plot was fairly predictable. Partly because the story is told in flashback and partly because it’s very easy to guess where things are going, I never really felt true tension in the scenes that were meant to be tense. I was worried about the characters sure, but I knew more or less exactly how things would pan out, and I guessed fairly easily who would be the one to die. Even the very final twist I saw coming from a mile away, and since the book has an open ending, I’m not really sure how to feel about it. If there’s ever a sequel maybe it would make more sense, but as is, it feels like the book came to a natural conclusion, and then had a last minute Bloomhouse style twist thrown at the very end that deflates a lot of what made it good up until that point. There were also some issues with the characters. Let’s start with the Medievals. There are 6 of them: 3 girls and 3 boys. I had a lot of trouble telling any of them apart, mostly because they are meant to resemble and act like each other, but also because outside of Henry, Greer has very little interaction with any of them. Bennett tries to distinguish the 3 blonde Medieval girls from one another: Charlotte is the preppiest one, who is the most fake enthusiastic and ‘speaks in italics’. Esme is the fake polite one, who pretends to be friendly, and Lara is the Russian one with the lazy, condescending accent. However, since the interaction between Greer and them is so minimal, I ended up only really distinguishing Lara, because she’s Henry’s girlfriend and Russian. However, the girls have nothing on Henry’s buddies, Cockson and Piers. I couldn't tell u anything about them or who’s who. All I know is that Cockson is also named Henry, but they both like drinking, they are both supremely loud and rude, and they are both indistinguishably awful. This is intentional, but like with the girls, it didn’t really make them compelling characters. Henry fares better in that he’s the only one that has any personality. Unfortunately, he suffers from this thing called informed traits, and this other thing, which doesn’t have a name, but I like to call it Ludonarrative Dissonance, but for books. We are told multiple times, by both Greer and other characters like Nel, that Henry is supremely charming. He knows the right thing to say, he knows how to touch people, how to smile, and in general how to woo everyone into following his orders. The problem was, that I never found him charming or funny, and I never thought any of the points he made were reasonable or smart. Maybe I’m just old and have been trained by the internet to never trust anyone who talks about the ‘natural order of things’ or about how ‘hunting helps cull the undesirable, lesser species’, but no one who says that is a nice or charming person. His whole diatribe about technology was likewise, like listening to an old man yell at a could. There are many valid points against how technology rules people’s lives these days, but having less time for hunting, is really not one of them. There was no real scene where I understood why Greer liked him, other than him being hot and calling her beautiful. I can’t really decide if this is a flaw with Henry as a character (since Greer is pretty dumb and naive), but the fact that I didn’t buy any of the characters traits he was meant to have doesn’t say good things. Even General Zaroff, who is character Henry is so clearly based on, was so much more charming and gallant, and had interesting things to say, even if you knew he was mad the whole time. That’s what I expected; what I got was a bad Lost villain. The lead characters fared much better. First we have Chanel or Nel. I actually liked her fine; she’s rich and incredibly insecure in her place in the world, since she grew up middle class and is forced to quickly adapt and assimilate in a world that is notoriously isolated, hostile and judgmental. She has lots of flaws; she’s superficial, she’s cowardly and she’s easily seduced, but I liked that she overcame a lot of them, and I enjoyed her friendship with Greer. Shafeen was my absolute favorite character. I don’t often read about Indian characters, and I’m not entirely sure how accurate his characterization was in this, but what we get I liked a lot. He was smart, he was opinionated and unlike Henry, he was actually charming. When he compliments Nel or Greer I believed it, and I could imagine him saying it and it sounding enticing. He wasn’t perfect either; he says some nasty things to Greer, and he also holds some ‘problematic’ views on hunting and this world of high class, which is understandable seeing as he’s royalty. Greer was interesting. I can’t say I liked her, but she wasn’t a bad character. She has this tendency to compare everything to films, which I also do, and as such I know first hand how grating it can be. I appreciated that her repertoire was pretty broad, spanning classics, French films, blockbusters and romantic comedies, and the ending bit that involved Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows was surprisingly fitting, and actually made sense with the plot of the book. However, Greer was also probably the most dumb and naive character I’ve read from in a while. I don’t mean that as in she’s badly written, I think she’s supposed to be kind of dumb. There were so many points where she lets herself be manipulated by Henry purely because it’s the easier option, and it was grating to read about. I’m not saying I want the character to be a genius, but again, maybe I’m just too old to believe the things she does even for a second. The other issue I had with Greer was that she seemed to not really have her priorities straight. This is hard to discuss without spoilers, but let’s just say, considering what she finds out about Henry, and what nearly happens to her while at the mansion, the guilt that she carries feel ill-placed. Nel even calls her out on her behavior, which makes me think it was intentional, but we never truly have a moment to acknowledge that what the Medievals are doing wasn’t just misguided and accidentally, but sociopathic, not to mention racist and classist. Overall I liked this book quite a lot. I think it was well written, explored some really interesting topics, and had a fast paced, engaging plot. I am confident that I would like anything else Bennet writes, and that with perhaps a slightly different plot, her work could be some of my favorite. As is, I do recommend this thriller, only if you manage your expectation, and have more patience for tomfoolery than me

goodreads

#s.t.a.g.s.#s.t.a.g.s. review #moni talks #book review

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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IN THESE TIMES

The Supreme Court is set to issue a ruling on Janus vs. AFSCME, which could have far-reaching consequences for the future of public-sector unions in the United States. The case has sparked a wide-ranging debate within the labor movement about how to deal with the “free-rider problem” of union members who benefit from collective bargaining agreements but opt-out of paying dues. We asked three labor experts to discuss what’s at stake in the case and how they each think unions should respond.

Kate Bronfenbrenner is director of labor education research at Cornell University, Chris Brooks is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes and Shaun Richman is a former organizing director at the American Federation of Teachers.

Chris Brooks:

The way I see it, right-to-work presents two interlocking problems for unions. The first is that unions are legally required to represent all workers in a bargaining unit that the union has been certified to represent, and in open shops the Duty of Fair Representation (DFR) requires unions to expend resources on non-members who are covered by that contract. This is commonly known as the free rider problem and it gets a lot of attention, for good reason.

The second problem is that open shops also undermine solidarity by pitting workers who pay their fair share to support the union against those who do not. This is the divide-and-conquer problem.

So the free rider problem is institutional: the union has to expend all these resources fighting on behalf of workers who are not members and do not pay dues. And the divide-and-conquer problem is interpersonal: when workers do not all support the union this results in union and non-union members developing adversarial attitudes toward each other which undermines the ability for collective action.

If you believe that the source of a union’s strength is its ability to unite workers in common fights to better their conditions on the job and in the community, then the divide-and-conquer problem is a real impediment to union power. Yet, the free rider problem gets far more attention from union leaders and activists than the divide-and-conquer problem. This is especially true in the discussion around whether unions should ditch exclusive representation and pursue a members-only form of unionism.

In my opinion, most arguments in support of kicking out free riders actually reinforces the employers' logic—turning union membership into a personal choice and unions themselves into competing vehicles for individualized services rather than vehicles for broad class struggle. So by focusing on the free rider problem to the exclusion of the divide-and-conquer problem, unions run the danger of turning inward and representing a smaller and smaller number of workers rather than seeking to constantly expand their base in larger fights on behalf of all workers in an industry.

Shaun Richman:

I had an article published in The Washington Post and I admit it was too cute by half partly because I was trying to amplify what I think was actually the strongest argument that AFSCME is making in the case itself, which is that the agency fee has historically been traded for the no strike clause and if you strike that there is the potential for quite a bit of chaos. So I wanted to put a little bit of fear to whoever might potentially have the ear of Chief Justice Roberts, as crazy as that may sound. But I also wanted to plant the seed of thinking for a few union rebels out there. If the Janus decision comes down as many of us fear then the proper response is to create chaos.

If the entire public sector goes right to work, unions will never look the same. So, then, the project of the left should be “what do we want them to look like?” and “what will drive the bosses craziest?” I've written about this before and Chris has responded at In These Times. There are three things that I am suggesting will happen—two of which, and I think Chris agrees, are sort of inevitable and not particularly desirable. The third part is not inevitable and depends a lot on what we do as activists.

If we lose the agency fee, some unions will seek to go members-only in order to avoid the free rider problem, and that's a lousy motivation. I'm not encouraging that, but I think it's also inevitable. Once you have unions representing these workers over here but not those workers over there, it's also inevitable that you wind up with competitor unions vying for the unrepresented. And the first competitor unions are going to be conservative. These already exist. They're all over the South and they compete against the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) in many districts and they offer bare bones benefits and they promote themselves on “we're not going to support candidates who are in favor of abortions and we'll represent you if you have tenure issues.” That's also bad but also inevitable.

The third step, which is not inevitable but we need to consider in this moment, is at what point do new opposition groups break away from the existing formal union? When do we just break the exclusive model and compete for members and workplace leadership? Can we get to a point where on the shop floor level you've got organizations vying for workers' dues money and loyalty based on who can take on the boss in a better fight or who can win a better deal on the basis of we're going to be less confrontational (which, I think, there are a lot of workers whom that appeals to as much as I don't like that idea)? But the chaos of the employer not being able to make one deal with one union that settles everything for three or five years—that's just the sort of chaos that the boss class deserves for having pursued this whole Friedrichs and now Janus strategy.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #in these times #workers rights #workers union #organized labor #labor movement

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