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ammy-gordon · 11 days

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Loved your old blog! But i have a question why's there's too many immigrants in Europe rn, isn't having too many immigrants not safe for your country, it makes the country and its culture unstable. Like common you can see it clearly too right ?

True, there has been instances where it has appeared that show immigration in a bad light but it's not the fault of the immigrant people but the policy itself. Most European countries involve policies where immigration is allowed to a percentage, a small percentage each year to absorm them minority in their own culture. Disregarding the fact that these people have their own culture and values, richer and more grounded. So ofcourse there has been resistance

But the 'resistance' is only to a an impulse, made by these countries. First let me explain why immigration is necessary for Europe then i would explain how europe is doing it wrong.

Without immigration, the EU and UK could find their economies crippled by worker shortages within the next thirty years. A shift in attitudes to immigrants, as politically and socially difficult as it might be, will be necessary to head off economic disaster.

Demographic decline, the effect of populations getting older and having fewer kids, will see the economies of Europe and the UK down around 44 million workers by 2050, according to a report from the Center for Global Development (CGDev) based in Washington, D.C.

We've known about the issue of demographic decline for a long time, and many developed countries are now waking up to the fact that a crisis is looming (lesser-developed countries tend to have younger populations and higher fertility rates so aren't yet facing the same problem).

Fortunately, the report argues, the solution to Europe's demographic woes is right next door. With Africa's population expected to double to 1.3 billion by 2050, it would make sense for Europe to allow more people in to fill job shortages, while relieving the worsening jobs crisis for young people in Africa.

That's easier said than done, of course. Europe and Africa have a complicated relationship when it comes to migration, and recent years have seen various deals between individual African countries and regions and European governments to restrict immigration from South to North. The Khartoum Process, for example, saw EU and UK money sent to governments in the Horn of Africa to effectively outsource European border control, which many observers say led to widespread human rights abuses

At the same time, European attitudes to migrants present a mixed picture, with some countries more resistant to newcomers than others. African migration in particular is a thorny issue, with many Europeans expressing concerns that Africans are less able to adapt to European customs and national identities, though recent research suggests this attitude is improving in some countries.

There is, however, another more subtle concern. The case for labor migration in the face of demographic decline may be overwhelming enough even to beat out racial prejudice or anti-immigration sentiment, but such a utilitarian approach risks viewing potential African migrants as resources Europe can use, rather than individual people with their own dreams and ambitions

A step in the right direction would be for European policymakers to stop using immigrants as political scapegoats or leverage, and instead to start acknowledging that Europeans may need Africans just as much as they've always assumed Africans need them, by 2040, Africa will have 1.7 billion people of working age, more than China and India, and by 2030, it will be home to 65 percent of the global population of people under 30. So where's the problem the problem is this ego of these white people, thinking that they are the purest and their culture and future can't have people that don't look like them.

Europe needs to lose this silly pride of this 'purity' and accept facts, these bigots are afraid they gonna lose their privilege when exposed to this

They have benefiting for centuries just by merit but this same privilege has become their downfall

Almost all of good media (music, film, sports) are mostly afro people.

This is what those racists are afraid of

Which is basic evolution, prettier, stronger, smarter, less genetic defects etc.

So how should Europe avoid Africa colonising them forcefully in future?

By adopting African culture now.

There's stigma involved, prejudices by lack of information, which when looked into are just hypocrites and their lies. Europeans need to see as assimilation as the way into right direction, marrying into an African family is hypergamy. And adopting and celebrating culture of the soon to be majority is a good way to avoid these problems happening right now, so the solution is :

#beauty standards #africanization #hypergamy #black is better #open borders #refugees welcome

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mariacallous · 2 months

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Europe’s never-ending struggle to provide tidbits of assistance to Ukraine while still pandering to the agricultural lobbies that dictate so much policy in Brussels took another tortured turn this week. The European Commission hammered out its latest, tentative compromise plan to offer Kyiv another year of tariff-free access to the European single market for some agricultural products—but it’s not a done deal, and it could end up as a nasty tripwire for Ukraine’s hopes to join the European Union.

At issue is a monthslong tussle over the renewal of tariff-free access for a handful of Ukrainian farm goods, such as eggs, poultry, honey, and maize (corn). Ukraine, which is not a member of the EU and is in the middle of a war with Russia, desperately wants the trade relief, which it figures is worth well over 1 billion euros a year in much-needed export earnings.

Europe as a whole is unlikely to be concerned about such rounding-error figures, but certain groups in Europe—namely farmers in eastern “front-line” countries—care very much indeed. Farmers in Poland have added angry chants against Ukrainian food imports to the standard-issue complaints about the European Green Deal and free trade that animate farmer protests across the continent; they’ve even blocked the borders east and west in protest against what they say is a flood of outside food that is undermining their livelihood.

In a nutshell, Europe’s bid to offer Ukraine the tiniest of economic lifelines is threatening to weaken support for the country’s eventual membership in the EU by angering groups with outsized political influence that feel threatened by what looks to them like the stealth arrival of a new trade rival. That is most evident in Poland, Ukraine’s neighbor, which when the war began was hugely supportive of aiding Kyiv in any way possible but which in recent months has become a lot more sour on defense assistance, Ukrainian refugees, Ukrainian wheat, and, of course, Ukrainian EU membership.

According to recent opinion polls, support among Poles for further aid to Ukraine is dropping sharply, and that is especially true among more right-wing voters (as is true across much of Europe). One big reason for this decline in support is the fight that Polish farmers have waged against what they see as a flood of cheap, foreign food.

“What I can say is that the support for Ukraine has taken a real hit in Poland. Look at enlargement, support for refugees, even weapons,” said Isabell Hoffmann, a survey expert at Eupinions, an independent platform for European public opinion. “Support was extraordinarily strong before, and it is still strong today. But it weakened notably and quickly.”

Poland has been fighting over Ukrainian food imports for a year, but the protests intensified at the beginning of this year with further border blockages and anti-Ukraine animus which have found widespread popular support.

“This issue has become very toxic in domestic politics. There are more and more critical voices in Poland,” said Piotr Buras, the head of the Warsaw office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). “This is the paradox: The European Commission is talking about more gradual integration with Ukraine and the single market, but we are talking about the gradual closing of the single market for Ukraine.”

All this began, like so many of Ukraine’s current woes, with the full-scale Russian invasion in early 2022, which threatened Ukraine’s breadbasket agricultural regions and, importantly, its main export route through the Black Sea. The EU offered emergency tariff relief for a host of Ukrainian agricultural goods so they could travel overland and into the EU and trade without prejudice.

For Ukraine, desperate to earn foreign currency and boost the few exports that were left after the Russian invasion, it was a tidy little lifeline.

“From an economic point of view, agriculture remains one of the key export sectors of Ukraine,” said Marek Dabrowski, an expert on European trade and enlargement issues at Bruegel, a think tank. “Before the war, it was metallurgy and industry, but then part of that was destroyed, and part is occupied, so exports now are essentially down to agricultural goods. The reason for these ‘emergency measures’ has not gone away.”

Indeed, those emergency measures have continued every year since—until now. The European Commission planned to simply roll the tariff relief over this year, giving Ukraine one more year of free access, worth about 1.7 billion euros for Kyiv’s empty coffers. But many of the countries bordering Ukraine, including Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, pushed back at what they viewed as a flood of cheap Ukrainian grain that was undermining their own farmers. Some countries, such as Poland, unilaterally blocked Ukrainian farm goods from staying in the country.

Together, and most recently backed by France, those countries pushed for a tougher version of tariff relief for Ukraine that would have limited the amount of agricultural goods it could sell to Europe. The European Commission and European Parliament have been at work hammering out ever-tougher versions of tariff relief ever since.

The latest proposal would still offer Ukraine relief for another year but with tougher quota baselines, which would cost Kyiv about 350 million euros annually. Ukraine’s farm lobby on Thursday decried the slide toward EU “protectionism” in the latest wrangling. But even that compromise measure still has to pass the European Parliament, where it could face yet further efforts to weaken Ukraine’s access.

While an extension, even a watered-down one, would still be welcome in Ukraine, the problem is the perception that such preferential trade policies create in front-line countries such as Poland. Ukrainian grain is not the cause for the plight of Polish farmers any more than it is the reason for angst in the countryside in the other 26 EU member states; that has a lot more to do with falling prices for global agricultural staples such as wheat, as well as slightly tougher (and costlier) EU regulations on agricultural production.

But many who are getting kicked while they are down don’t look carefully at precisely who is doing the kicking, and continual European assistance for Ukraine rubs many in the east the wrong way.

The temporary trade measures amounted to a full opening, Buras of ECFR said. “Basically, Ukraine jumped from a piecemeal opening to European access to the final stage of this process,” he said. “Nobody expected these measures to remain in place for three years or more. Technically, we have a full opening of the single market to Ukrainian products.”

The risk is that the tiny measures Europe is taking to shore up Ukraine today with trade relief could end up as a poisoned chalice in years to come. Once the war is over, Ukraine is widely expected to get on with its decade-long quest to become a member of the EU—a step that ultimately needs the go-ahead from all current member states.

“The Ukrainians should also, seen from Warsaw, be a little more careful when they push for more liberalization,” Buras said. “At the end of the day, Ukrainians are dependent on Polish support” to join the EU, he added.

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lykegenia · 3 months

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Happy Valentine’s Day, lovely person 🌹

I love your writing so much (your Nate! And Leah!) and am so happy you’ve started sharing more about Rhi and Mason as well. And whenever you share your thoughts, they are always so well-though out and interesting to read!

Here’s a romance-themed OC question for any OC(s) of your choosing (no pressure to answer on Valentine’s day itself, or at all):

What combination of random objects would your OC use to describe their LI? What do they represent? Bonus question: What would their LI use to describe them?

Dearest Nonny, you have no idea what a delight it was to wake up to this message this morning. Thank you so much for such kind words, it's one of the best feelings to know my characters are loved 🌹

For the OC question...

Objects Leah would use to describe Nate:

A fountain pen, but like, a really fancy one made of tortoiseshell and ebony and gold wire - not only do charming words seem to flow easily from him, but there's a certain elegance in his hands and a lightness of touch that matches the finesse required to use a fountain pen properly (she could never master it). It's also slightly old-fashioned, but there's potential for change as well with special inks or new designs like those glass nibs, which he would probably appreciate even if he was a bit dubious at first.

A cashmere blanket - soft and comforting and cozy (and expensive, because Nate would never compromise on quality). Something that she doesn't necessarily need or was missing before it came into her life, but woe betide you if you try to take it away from her. She's snuggled and comfortable now.

A star chart - not just for his naval background, or his penchant for deep thinking, but because people have always used the stars for guidance. She never really had a direction before UB came into her life, but now she does, and the feeling of looking up into the vastness of the night sky is very reminiscent of the rare mornings where she can wake up before Nate and watch him still sleeping.

Nate for Leah:

A (European) magpie feather - elegant but understated and unassuming, from an intelligent but often overlooked/maligned bird, until you look at it from the right angle and the plain black shimmers into brilliant irridescence. He once listened to her talk for an hour about how structural colours evolved in birds, and wishes she could appreciate that complex beauty in herself.

A lit candle - staring down the darkness of eternity often seemed unbearable at times. There were previous sparks, but nothing to provide the steady light that Leah provides him. The sweet smell of beeswax meant it was used to create church candles in the medieval period, and being close to her certainly feels holy, the flame bright and warm but with a bite if you're not careful. But at the same time, it's precious, because eventually the flame will burn down and go out, and the memory of it will be all that's left.

An arrow - it flies straight and true and pierces its quarry without mercy, and that's what Leah is like in the pursuit of justice. There are also so many stories where arrows are a symbol of devotion, from St Sebastian to Cupid, and he likes the imagery of himself as an Arthurian white stag finally brought down by a strike to the heart.

Bonus Mason and Rhi:

"What the fuck kind of question is that? Rhi's not an object, and if I wanted to describe her, I'd just say she's hot." "Charming." "Don't hear you contradicting me." "Well I know what kind of object you are." "Oh?" "You're one of those metal ring puzzles you get in Christmas crackers that are fun for the first few minutes before everyone gets sick of it." "I like to think it'd take more than a few minutes to get bored of playing with me, Sweetheart." "And you even come with a terrible joke - do not respond to that." "Wouldn't dream of it."

#rhi doesn't mean it #much #she's just surprised mason didn't compare her to a cigarette or something #but fun fact #cigarettes are something he can live without now #he's going to go away and think about this for a week and come up with a really prodfound answer out of context #meanwhile leah and nate are out here falling deep into the romance of it all #i apologise to anyone who hasn't experienced christmas crackers #i got carried away #the wayhaven chronicles #nate sewell #twc mason

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presidentstalkeyes · 1 year

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More Psychonaut Headcanons:

So I've been thinking. It's implied a lot in both (main) games that the Psychonauts as an organization has a divided reputation, with some viewing it as past its prime and no longer needed - Lilli being the biggest example. The Psychonauts' financial woes in the second game only reinforce the theme - clearly they're not getting as much funding as they used to, from... whoever their backers are.

I'm assuming they receive funding from governments who 'opt in' to make use of their services. They're headquartered in the US because that's where Green Needle Gulch and the Quarry is, and they have a lot of American agents, but that doesn't make them an American organization. Indeed, at least two of the original Psychic Seven are non-American, possibly more (Lucy is Grulovian, Cassie is Chinese, Helmut and possibly Otto are ambiguously European going from their names, and Compton is presumably British going from his accent). Not to mention they got their big break (if you can call it that) from being called on by the international community to battle a problem in Grulovia.

It's clear they didn't start out with the intention of becoming some kind of international psychic safeguarding force - it's stated by Otto that the 'true mission' of the Psychonauts is scientific research, and Ford at the end of 2 says he wants the organization to return to its scientifically-minded roots. However, judging from the implied poor state of psychic acceptance before their arrival, I find it hard to believe there wasn't at least the implication they'd use that research to further the cause of ensuring safety for psychics everywhere.

It was only after the Maligula disaster that it was made clear there needed to be a deterrent against psychic threats, since as the nature of psychics became better understood, that drastically increased the chance they'd grow to that level of power in the first place. Since the Psychonauts were at the cutting edge of that research, it was decided they'd have the responsibility of looking into these threats and curtailing them. Fighting psychic threats was considered a part of their research - by tackling them, and exploring their minds, they'd gather valuable data.

The Psychonauts' 'downfall' in the eyes of many came about as a result of four things, each of them intertwined.

The first was politics. Since it's implied the games take place during the Cold War, neither of the major power blocs at the time were really keen on a powerful, independent agency that transcends borders and answers to neither side (a majority of their agents are from 'Western' countries but Mikhail - and possibly Sasha, depending on which Germany he's from - shows they'll consider prospects from the Eastern Bloc, too).

Furthermore, both the United States and the Soviet Union undoubtedly would have wanted to use psychic powers for their own gain, with no regard for the long-term impact on psychic safety. A majority of Soviet-aligned states would have banned the Psychonauts altogether, viewing them as a Western meddler, while the cold war-era US would have paid lip service to supporting them but start its own in-house 'psychic soldier' programs on the side, siphoning money and resources away from the Psychonauts (which is bad because their HQ is based within US borders). Deprived of much-needed funding, that leads us to problem two...

Intra-agency friction and mission creep. As it turns out, there's a lot of moving parts behind ensuring psychic safety. Sometimes it involves fighting a psychic bad guy, other times it involves rehabilitating that same bad guy so they don't cause any more trouble. Sometimes it involves teaching children - or indeed, adults - how to properly control their powers so they're not a danger to themselves and others. Sometimes it involves studying not only psychics but non-psychics who've had contact with psychic phenomena. All of this requires money and administration, leading to all sorts of divisions and bureaucracy. It also requires facilities, which means more money, more staff to run those facilities, etc. At a certain point it becomes difficult to keep track of everything, leading to some parts of the agency operating largely independently - bad news if they end up turning into money-sinks (and have little to nothing to do with psychics at all, like food chains and media franchises). As a result, issues with individual agents were often sidelined, which lead to...

Problem three, scandals and a loss in public trust. Considering both Coach Oleander and Gristol Malik were able to conduct their evil plans right under the Psychonauts' noses, possibly for years, despite a majority of agents having some kind of telepathy... well, it doesn't paint a flattering picture of their ability to keep their own staff under control. And that's just when their ire is aimed at itself - imagine if a Psychonaut agent went rogue and started targeting ordinary civilians. Even most 'harmless' psychic powers like Clairvoyance are easily abusable - which is a prime reason why psychics struggle to find acceptance, as many will assume they're up to no good. I personally think many repressive governments throughout history would have (forcibly) used psychics to their own ends, painting an image of psychics being a tool of the oppressor. The Psychonauts promised to change all of that, and so seeing that promise broken, even slightly, would come off as a major betrayal.

The fourth problem, weirdly enough, was that despite all of this, the Psychonauts actually succeeded in improving the state of psychic acceptance... in the more wealthy 'Western' countries where it drew a lot of its personnel from, and where it got most of its funding. Ironically, this success lead to the organization being seen as 'redundant' as these countries started passing legislation to protect psychics and promote psychic safety programs of their own, while private entities also started offering psychic services (at a hefty price, yes, but still). This lead to the funding drying up even further, and by the time the games roll around the organization has been forced to downsize significantly to cut costs.

The chief counter-argument among the Psychonauts leadership to the idea that they're 'no longer needed' is that it's simply not true. There are still huge swathes of the world where psychics are routinely exploited and turned into weapons against normal people, hurting everyone involved - even in so-called 'accepting' countries there's problems, and it's important to have an independent entity run by psychics, for psychics, beholden to no government or corporation that might seek to use them as tools in unrelated conflicts.

Those like Ford and Otto who want the Psychonauts to go back to its roots would argue that, more than anything, knowledge is power - they could accomplish just as much as they could in their heyday, if not more so, and with less fuss, simply by cooperating with governments in an advisory role and organizing large-scale research efforts; focusing on proactive prevention, not reaction.

In fanfics set in the future, I imagine the Psychonauts have undergone something of a reorganization, becoming overall more decentralized and clandestine, with cells based all over the world funding themselves both openly and via fronts (and having their own leadership to reduce the amount of micromanagement needed) and are accountable to each other (capable of smacking each other down if they fall out of line). The Motherlobe (which remains the public 'face' of the agency) having more concrete divisions with clearly-defined duties and an upper limit on personnel to ensure quality of mind, and R&D splitting off into an entirely separate organization, Mentallis Labs, focused only on R&D. It provides the Psychonauts with their technology and scientific know-how but doesn't get directly involved with their other activities.

#Psychonauts #headcanons #Stalkeyes rambles #longpost #fictional politics and history babble

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thecarnivorousmuffinmeta · 2 years

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ohohoho. how is louis like a more sane edward??? tht sounds hilarious and something worth of discussion!!! thank you very much for all of your posts

Anon's referring to this post.

Specifically, anon means Louis Pointe du Lac from Interview with a Vampire.

Well, this will be an intresting ride.

The Romantic Nature

Both Edward and Louis are romantics.

When Edward falls for Bella, he has all sorts of notions about how this a grand love, the greatest love in his life, how he'll nobly commit suicide when she inevitably dies, how he wants to court her as a mortal would, etc.

In every breath he utters, Edward is all about the imagery, the grand meaning of things, with himself as a central character in this saga. Edward doesn't necessarily strive to be extraordinary, but it is how he inherently views the world.

Louis is extremely similar.

Louis treats his interactions with Lestat, even in retrospect, in a very romance filled manner where they're clearly the part of lovers though he doesn't outright state it. While he talks about the trashyness of Lestat he does so in an eloquent manner that discusses Lestat's intrigue as a vampire, his looks, his importance etc.

Louis tells his tale with himself the tragic protagonist just the same as Edward does. And treats his life as a series of tragic events that befall him, few of any of which are his fault, when in reality they appear to be an odd series of events in which he is more often than not somewhat responsible.

Louis also needs there to be an inherent meaning in vampirism. He looks for vampires in all the wrong places. He asks Lestat about vampires in Europe and Lestat tells him they're trash (turns out, Lestat was right, but Louis never realizes that). Louis goes to Romania to see the vampires there and is shocked! Shocked! When it turns out there's not a damn thing there and concludes in woe that vampires have no origin. This is genuinely distressing to him.

He's drawn to Paris far more than New Orleans and America because it's this old city with a rich history and what he views as the true owners of the French language. He wants to be European, to be a gentleman of European society, and in this screams Edward Cullen.

The Hatred of the Vampire Aesthetic

Edward and Louis both loathe what they have become but mostly for... what it makes them feel about themselves.

Edward is terrified he's a demon, believes he looks like a gargoyle, etc.

Louis is much the same, though not as extreme in that he finds vampires beautiful, but he views them as living ghouls and constantly bemoans his cursed and wretched existence.

More though, both try to follow the animal diet and find they can't do it on their own. In Edward's case, he does have Carlisle to help him and go back to, so he gets back on the horse. In Louis' case he ends up eating a baby and, well, you never come back from that.

After that, Louis comments that he was a very silly man doing silly things in this phase to Claudia when asked. It's not so much the loss of life itself that bothers Louis, it's the idea of the loss of life and the idea that it doesn't bother him.

Much like Edward.

They Get Fucking Weird About Love

Edward has his thing with Bella, I've talked about it at length.

Louis has Lestat, which is... complicated, he has Armand who is... the worst and a teenager and utterly insufferable, and he has... Claudia... Who is five. And who he starts narratively treating more and more like a grown woman (who is also five forever) but who tries to dress and act more maturely (but she's totally five) and it's uh unclear if he has sex with her or not...

But he makes it sound very romantic in his interview. His relationship with Claudia is a tragic, doomed, romance at which Lestat is entirely at fault which is why they fed him to alligators. Louis portrays himself as a mostly sympathetic narrator who found himself in this torrid and taboo love affair

So... They're the Same

No, Louis is a saner Edward in that Interview with a Vampire, a recollection from Louis's point of view told to a journalist, reads much less insane than Midnight Sun which is Edward's internal musings.

Louis has a firmer grasp on reality, even on those around him, than Edward.

But they do have some of the same tendencies.

#twilight #twilight meta #twilight headcanon #twilight renaissance #interview with a vampire #interview with a vampire meta #interview with a vampire headcanon #edward cullen #anti edward cullen #louis pointe du lac #anti louis pointe du lac #meta #headcanon #opinion

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perereiii · 1 year

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Ok I need to get this out somewhere because the way Wednesday (show) displays pilgrims really irks me. needless to say, spoilers for the show under cut!

Ok. Let's start right off the bat in the psychic vision Wednesday had of Joseph Crackstone in “Friend or Woe” when he was trying to kill all the outcasts.

For reference, Joseph Crackstone is canonically a pilgrim that helped found Jericho in 1625. He’s seen repeatedly being a sadistic asshole that is willing to kill anyone who doesn’t fit in, no matter the cost. Below is a transcript of part of the scene.

[villagers] Burn her! Burn her! Burn her!

[villager 1] Devil Spawn!

[villager 2] Beast!

[villager 3] Witch!

[villagers] Repent! Begone! Witch!

[Joseph Crackstone] Stand aside! Goody Addams! You have been judged before God and found guilty. You are a witch, a sorceress, Lucifer’s mistress herself. For your sins, you will burn this night, and suffer the flames of eternal hellfire.

[Goody Addams] I am innocent. It is you, Joseph Crackstone, that should be tried. We were here before you, living in harmony with nature and the native folk. But you have stolen the land. You have slaughtered the innocent. You have robbed us of our peaceful spirit. You are the true monster. All of you!

[Addams slices a blade at Crackstone’s cheek]

[villager 4] Punish her!

[Joseph Crackstone] The Devil ne’er sent such a demon.

[Addams cries out as Crackstone slaps her face]

[Joseph Crackstone] And I will send you back!

[Goody Addams] No!

[Joseph Crackstone] You are abominations in the Devil’s grip! I will not stop till I have expunged this New World of every outcast. Godless creatures!

[Crackstone and the villagers walk away from the meeting house]

[Joseph Crackstone] Set it ablaze!

...

[Goody Addams] He won’t stop until he’s killed us all! ...He’s here.

[Joseph Crackstone] There will be no escape for you.

After that, Wednesday wakes up.

There’s a couple things wrong with this scene. Burning’s were rare, if ever, in pilgrim and even puritan societies. The idea of ‘burn the witches!’ likely ties to Joan of Arc, a French martyr that was burned at the stake. Even during the Salem Witch Trials, the 19 deaths were all hangings and one crush...ing. (tl;dr, the accused denied being a witch and was sentenced to being crushed between two stones) Goody Addams, creator of the Book of Shadows, would have been the only confirmed witch that Crackstone targeted. I do applaud to the realism of Crackstone killing Addams specifically because she claimed innocence however, as that is exactly what happened to many of the accused witches in Salem, as tragic as it is.

Crackstone’s course of action is also very strange, as the cost to build (or rebuild, in this instance) was high. I can’t attest to the accuracy, but this site claims that it was about £80.00 during the 17th century (not accounting for modern inflation), for the meeting house it cites. This is a costly repair for a relatively weak and trivial public stunt.

While the supernatural outcasts in the show are drastically different from outcasts in real life, outcasts typically weren’t... Burned, or hung, or anything of the sort. Anne Hutchinson, for instance, was considered an outcast for her more individualistic beliefs regarding faith and reaching salvation. John Winthrop opposed her ideas, and when he became Governor, she was eventually banished. This can also apply to the Natives—while a decent number of those who survived disease ended up dying at the hands of European colonists, others were simply pushed west, banished from their homelands.

The fact that Crackstone targeted outcasts instead of witches is odd as well—witchcraft was a much more justifiable reason to kill during the 17th century over simple ‘outcastery’. For instance, there was another witch trial in Wethersfield, Connecticut that predates Salem, with one accusation and death in 1648, two in 1651, and one accusation and banishment in 1669. You could do all of that with charges of witchcraft, however that would be a lot more difficult if you charged ‘being an outcast’. The other people in the meeting house aren’t confirmed or denied to be supernatural outcasts, simply “abominations in the Devil’s grip”, so it’s hard to know if they really were supernatural or not. Plot wise, having Addams as a supernatural outcast might let the viewer infer that the others are also supernatural outcasts, however, false accusations were widespread (again, look at Salem!) and they could have just as easily been the result of fallout of the discovery of a real supernatural outcast.

Another albeit nitpicky detail is the stereotypical black/white clothing choice of pilgrims. While pilgrims—and puritans, for that matter—sometimes wore the well known black/white combo, they also had other articles of clothing in many bright colours (puritans were more reserved and stuck with symbolic, muted colours). The pilgrims typically only targeted detailed clothing (ribbons, seductive styles, etc. were discouraged likely to display modesty).

All right. Now for “A Murder of Woes”, of which holds two prominent scenes of Joseph Crackstone. The first takes place in his crypt after he’s revived:

[Laurel Gates] I am of your blood. I have summoned you to rid the world of outcasts once and for all.

[Joseph Crackstone] My vengeance will be swift and true.

[Wednesday Addams] As will mine.

[Crackstone’s staff pulses]

[Joseph Crackstone] Goody Addams. You haunt me still. You will suffer the same fate you bequeathed me.

[Crackstone stabs Addams in the gut]

[Joseph Crackstone] Now burn in the eternal fires of hell!

[Crackstone twists the knife suddenly]

[Joseph Crackstone] Where you belong.

[Crackstone and Gates leave as Addams stumbles to the floor]

[Laurel Gates] Sweet dreams, Wednesday!

And then, the scene depicted in the prophecy:

[Wednesday Addams] Howdy, pilgrim.

[Joseph Crackstone] How canst thy heart still beat? What demon sorcery is this?

[Xavier Thorpe] Stay away from her!

[Xavier shoots an arrow at Crackstone. He flips the arrow around and shoots Addams]

[Xavier Thorpe] No! Oh my God!

[Wednesday Addams] I’m fine. Go. Get them out of here! Now!

[Xavier Thorpe] Ok! Come on, guys. Let’s go! Go! Go!

[Addams grabs a nearby sword and attacks Crackstone. Addams is pinned to the ground]

[Joseph Crackstone] I will send you back to hell.

[Crackstone is stabbed through the heart, and killed for good]

There’s... Not a whole lot to note about this, actually.

I do find his hypocrisy in condemning witchcraft while using magic-like properties while zombified rather comedic though. He quite literally became the very thing he swore to destroy.

#take one guess as to what one of my special interests is. i dare you #as always if i did fuck up the history please tell me!!! ill do a little research of my own and make sure to change it #with its respective citations #wednesday addams #wednesday #joseph crackstone #i do actually like this show quite a bit #the way different characters confront and react to public images and personal issues #is very interesting. im just a history nerd #raven rambles #new tag #raven has too much fucking time on his hands

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bubblesandgutz · 1 year

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Every Record I Own - Day 765: Lankum The Livelong Day

I developed an appreciation for Irish folk music in college.

I was by no means an expert in the field... I was mainly fixated on The Clancy Brothers. But those simple, rousing protest songs and folk narratives resonated with me on the same level as classic Bob Dylan and Billy Bragg. The irony is that while The Clancy Brothers' defiant nature paired well with the punk and hardcore stuff I was listening to at the time, the American Irish punk bands like Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys didn't appeal to me at all. As far as I was concerned, the only decent crossover between punk and Irish trad music was The Pogues.

Fast forward twenty years and along comes Lankum. This Dublin quartet uses traditional Irish instruments and culls the majority of their material from songs that have been handed down over the generations. But their musical approach feels more in line with bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Swans. There are long droning passages, textural explorations, an emphasis on repetition, and an embrace of dissonance. Though these are songs that you could likely hear in the pubs of Temple Bar, Lankum's twist makes it sound like something you'd be more likely to hear at a modern art gallery or a European punk squat.

Take album opener "The Wild Rover." It's a fairly common Irish folk song, typically sung in a major key with an air of revelry. In Lankum's hands, the song stretches into a patient, tension-baiting, harmonically rich, and ultimately emotionally crushing 10-minute epic that negates more modern interpretations in favor of the earlier tragic and cautionary tale of the aimless drunk.

But my favorite track on The Livelong Day is an original composition that closes out the album. "Hunting the Wren" was written by Lankum member Ian Lynch in reference to the Wrens of the Curragh, a "community of unmarried mothers, free-thinkers, alcoholics, prostitutes, vagrants, ex-convicts and harvest workers... all of them women who had, in one way or another, put themselves beyond the pale of respectable society." The song also seems to reference to Ireland's Wren Day and the Isle of Man's Hunt the Wren tradition, both of which can be traced back to an old folklore story where an enchantress whose beauty lures men to harm is transformed into a wren and hunted as punishment for her actions.

Between ominous droning minor key choruses and orchestral major key choruses, Lankum vocalist Radie Peat sings of the maligned wren and the mob violence she endures:

The birds of the earth The beasts of the field By spite and by fury Are people revealed

Attacked in the village Spat on in town They come from all over To hunt the wren on the wide open ground

The wren is a small bird Though blamed for much woe Her form is derided Wherever she goes

The best folk songs, like the best punk songs, allow us to view the world from an alternate perspective, to feel empathy for someone who has otherwise been cast as a villain or a misfit. Even the Clancy Brothers, with their songs of rebellion against the British, feel dapper and approachable in their white cable-knit sweaters when compared to the ragged and scrappy members of Lankum. These are the true Irish rebels... the vagrants who busked for spare change and somehow took old familiar songs and revitalized them back to their original downtrodden intent.

#lankum #everyrecordiown

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biblenewsprophecy · 2 months

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Christian Growth: Consider the Monarch

God has a purpose for everything He does. This sermon is based on a shorter message given by the late deacon Richard Close. Richard pointed out certain patterns of numbers and also tied some of them in with the physical creation. What about clean and unclean meats? What are the four stages of development of a monarch butterfly? Are humans called worms in scripture? What about the appearance of a chrysalis seemingly doing nothing? Is there any relationship that can be drawn from the metamorphosis of a pupa/chrysalis and a begotten child of God being changed? Like the stages of a butterfly's life, are we to be renewed and changed? What will we be like after we are changed in the resurrection? Will Christians bear the image of Jesus? Are there lessons on Christian growth we can glean from Monarch butterflies? Dr. Thiel addresses these issues in this message he updated, from the late Richard Close, with additional scriptures, comments, and edits.

A written article of related interest is available titled 'The Monarch Butterfly and Christian Growth'

youtube

Sermon Youtube video link: Christian Growth: Consider the Monarch

Some items of possibly related interest may include:

The Monarch Butterfly and Christian Growth Are there lessons Christians can learn from the life stages of a monarch butterfly? This is an updated transcript of a message given by the late deacon Richard Close. Dr. Thiel added scriptures, comments, and made various edits. Here is a link to a related sermon: Christian Growth: Consider the Monarch.

Who Gave the World the Bible? The Canon: Why do we have the books we now do in the Bible? Is the Bible complete? Are there lost gospels? What about the Apocrypha? Is the Septuagint better than the Masoretic text? What about the Textus Receptus vs. Nestle Alland? Was the New Testament written in Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew? Which translations are based upon the best ancient text? Did the true Church of God have the canon from the beginning? Here are links to related sermons: Let’s Talk About the Bible, The Books of the Old Testament, The Septuagint and its Apocrypha, Masoretic Text of the Old Testament, and Lost Books of the Bible, and Let’s Talk About the New Testament, The New Testament Canon From the Beginning, English Versions of the Bible and How Did We Get Them?, What was the Original Language of the New Testament?, Original Order of the Books of the Bible, and Who Gave the World the Bible? Who Had the Chain of Custody?

Lost Tribes and Prophecies: What will happen to Australia, the British Isles, Canada, Europe, New Zealand and the United States of America? Where did those people come from? Can you totally rely on DNA? Do you really know what will happen to Europe and the English-speaking peoples? What about the peoples of Africa, Asia, South America, and the islands? This free online book provides scriptural, scientific, historical references, and commentary to address those matters. Here are links to related sermons: Lost tribes, the Bible, and DNA; Lost tribes, prophecies, and identifications; 11 Tribes, 144,000, and Multitudes; Israel, Jeremiah, Tea Tephi, and British Royalty; Gentile European Beast; Royal Succession, Samaria, and Prophecies; Asia, Islands, Latin America, Africa, and Armageddon; When Will the End of the Age Come?; Rise of the Prophesied King of the North; Christian Persecution from the Beast; WWIII and the Coming New World Order; and Woes, WWIV, and the Good News of the Kingdom of God.

The Ten Commandments: The Decalogue, Christianity, and the Beast This is a free pdf book explaining the what the Ten Commandments are, where they came from, how early professors of Christ viewed them, and how various ones, including the Beast of Revelation, will oppose them. A related sermon is titled: The Ten Commandments and the Beast of Revelation.

About Baptism Should you be baptized? Could baptism be necessary for salvation? Who should baptize and how should it be done? Here is a link to a related sermon: Let’s Talk About Baptism and Baptism, Infants, Fire, & the Second Death.

Christians: Ambassadors for the Kingdom of God, Biblical instructions on living as a Christian This is a scripture-filled booklet for those wishing to live as a real Christian.Two related sermons are also available: Living as a Christian and Christians are Ambassadors for the Kingdom of God. Here is a video in Spanish: ¿Qué es un verdadero cristiano?

Proof Jesus is the Messiah This free book has over 200 Hebrew prophecies were fulfilled by Jesus. Plus, His arrival was consistent with specific prophecies and even Jewish interpretations of prophecy. Here are links to seven related sermons: Proof Jesus is the Messiah, Prophecies of Jesus’ birth, timing, and death, Jesus’ prophesied divinity, 200+ OT prophecies Jesus filled; Plus prophecies He made, Why Don’t Jews Accept Jesus?, Daniel 9, Jews, and Jesus, and Facts and Atheists’ Delusions About Jesus. Plus the links to two sermonettes: Luke’s census: Any historical evidence? and Muslims believe Jesus is the Messiah, but … Is God’s Existence Logical? Is it really logical to believe in God? Yes! Would you like Christian answers to give atheists? This is a free online booklet that deal with improper theories and musings called science related to the origin of the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and evolution. Here is a link to a related sermon: Evolution is NOT the Origin of Life. Two animated videos of related interest are also available: Big Bang: Nothing or Creator? and A Lifegiver or Spontaneous Evolution?

Christians: Ambassadors for the Kingdom of God, Biblical instructions on living as a Christian This is a scripture-filled booklet for those wishing to live as a real Christian. A related sermon is also available: Christians are Ambassadors for the Kingdom of God.

Beliefs of the Original Catholic Church: Could a remnant group have continuing apostolic succession? Did the original “catholic church” have doctrines held by the Continuing Church of God? Did Church of God leaders uses the term “catholic church” to ever describe the church they were part of? Here are links to related sermons: Original Catholic Church of God?, Original Catholic Doctrine: Creed, Liturgy, Baptism, Passover, What Type of Catholic was Polycarp of Smyrna?, Tradition, Holy Days, Salvation, Dress, & Celibacy, Early Heresies and Heretics, Doctrines: 3 Days, Abortion, Ecumenism, Meats, Tithes, Crosses, Destiny, and more, Saturday or Sunday?, The Godhead, Apostolic Laying on of Hands Succession, Church in the Wilderness Apostolic Succession List, Holy Mother Church and Heresies, and Lying Wonders and Original Beliefs. Here is a link to that book in the Spanish language: Creencias de la iglesia Católica original.

Hope of Salvation: How the Continuing Church of God Differs from Protestantism The CCOG is NOT Protestant. This free online book explains how the real Church of God differs from mainstream/traditional Protestants. Several sermons related to the free book are also available: Protestant, Baptist, and CCOG History; The First Protestant, God’s Command, Grace, & Character; The New Testament, Martin Luther, and the Canon; Eucharist, Passover, and Easter; Views of Jews, Lost Tribes, Warfare, & Baptism; Scripture vs. Tradition, Sabbath vs. Sunday; Church Services, Sunday, Heaven, and God’s Plan; Seventh Day Baptists/Adventists/Messianics: Protestant or COG?; Millennial Kingdom of God and God’s Plan of Salvation; Crosses, Trees, Tithes, and Unclean Meats; The Godhead and the Trinity; Fleeing or Rapture?; and Ecumenism, Rome, and CCOG Differences.

The MYSTERY of GOD’s PLAN: Why Did God Create Anything? Why Did God Make You? This free online book helps answers some of the biggest questions that human have, including the biblical meaning of life. Here is a link to three related sermons: Mysteries of God’s Plan, Mysteries of Truth, Sin, Rest, Suffering, and God’s Plan, Mystery of Race, and The Mystery of YOU. Here is a link to a video in Spanish: El Misterio del Plan de Dios.

Universal OFFER of Salvation, Apokatastasis: Can God save the lost in an age to come? Hundreds of scriptures reveal God’s plan of salvation Will all get a fair chance at salvation? This free book is packed with scriptures showing that God does intend to offer salvation to all who ever lived–the elect in this age, and the rest in the age to come. Here is a link to a related sermon series: Universal Offer of Salvation 1: Apocatastasis, Universal Offer of Salvation 2: Jesus Desires All to be Saved, Mysteries of the Great White Throne Judgment (Universal Offer of Salvation part 3), Is God Fair, Will God Pardon the Ignorant?, Can God Save Your Relatives?, Babies, Limbo, Purgatory and God’s Plan, and ‘By the Mouth of All His Holy Prophets’.

The Gospel of the Kingdom of God This free online pdf booklet has answers many questions people have about the Gospel of the Kingdom of God and explains why it is the solution to the issues the world is facing. It is available in hundreds of languages at ccog.org. Here are links to four kingdom-related sermons: The Fantastic Gospel of the Kingdom of God!, The World’s False Gospel, The Gospel of the Kingdom: From the New and Old Testaments, and The Kingdom of God is the Solution.

Where is the True Christian Church Today? This free online pdf booklet answers that question and includes 18 proofs, clues, and signs to identify the true vs. false Christian church. Plus 7 proofs, clues, and signs to help identify Laodicean churches. A related sermon is also available: Where is the True Christian Church? Here is a link to the booklet in the Spanish language: ¿Dónde está la verdadera Iglesia cristiana de hoy? Here is a link in the German language: WO IST DIE WAHRE CHRISTLICHE KIRCHE HEUTE? Here is a link in the French language: Où est la vraie Église Chrétienne aujourd’hui?

Continuing History of the Church of God This pdf booklet is a historical overview of the true Church of God and some of its main opponents from Acts 2 to the 21st century. Related sermon links include Continuing History of the Church of God: c. 31 to c. 300 A.D. and Continuing History of the Church of God: 4th-16th Centuries and Continuing History of the Church of God: 17th-20th Centuries. The booklet is available in Spanish: Continuación de la Historia de la Iglesia de Dios, German: Kontinuierliche Geschichte der Kirche Gottes, and Ekegusii Omogano Bw’ekanisa Ya Nyasae Egendererete.

CCOG.ORG Continuing Church of God The group striving to be most faithful amongst all real Christian groups to the word of God. There are links to literature is about 100 different languages there.

Congregations of the Continuing Church of God This is a listing of congregations and groups of the Continuing Church of God around the world.

Continuing Church of God Facebook page This has news and prophetic information.

LATEST SERMONS

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xtruss · 3 months

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Nazis attempted to cover up their crimes in the Holocaust—and denial of the genocide persists to this day. Scholars say memorials—like this one in the former train station of Pithiviers, France, from which Jews were sent to death camps—are essential to fighting anti-Semitism. Photograph By Christophe Pitit Tesson, Pool/AFP Via Getty Images

How The Holocaust Happened In Plain Sight

Six Million Jews were Murdered Between 1933 and 1945. How Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party Turned Anti-Semitism into Genocide.

— By Erin Blakemore | Published: January 27, 2023

Six million Jews murdered. Millions more stripped of their livelihoods, their communities, their families, even their names. The horrors of the Holocaust are often expressed in numbers that convey the magnitude of Nazi Germany’s attempt to annihilate Europe’s Jews.

The Nazis and their collaborators killed millions of people whom they perceived as inferior—including Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, people with disabilities, Slavic and Roma people, and Communists. However, historians use the term “Holocaust”—also called the Shoah, or “disaster” in Hebrew—to apply strictly to European Jews murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

No single statistic can capture the true terror of the systematic killing of a group of human beings—and given its enormity and brutality, the Holocaust is difficult to understand. How did a democratically elected politician incite an entire nation to genocide? Why did people allow it to happen in plain sight? And why do some still deny it ever happened?

A shop selling household goods and clocks on Pinkas Street in the Jewish Quarter of Prague, then part of Czechoslovakia. In many parts of Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism was rampant before the Holocaust and Jews were forced to live separately from the rest of the population. Photograph Via History & Art Images, Getty Images

After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Polish Jews were forced into ghettos like this one in Warsaw. This image taken by an unknown German photographer was later exhibited at the war crime trials that sought to hold the Nazis and their collaborators accountable after the war. Photograph Via Bettmann, Getty Images

European Jews Before The Holocaust

By 1933, about nine million Jews lived across the continent and in every European nation. Some countries guaranteed Jews equality under the law, which enabled them to become part of the dominant culture. Others, especially in Eastern Europe, kept Jewish life strictly separate.

Jewish life was flourishing, yet Europe’s Jews also faced a long legacy of discrimination and scapegoating. Pogroms—violent riots in which Christians terrorized Jews—were common throughout Eastern Europe. Christians blamed Jews for the death of Jesus, fomented myths of a shadowy cabal that controlled world finances and politics, and claimed Jews brought disease and crime to their communities.

The Rise of Adolf Hitler

It would take one man, Adolf Hitler, to turn centuries of casual anti-Semitism into genocide. Hitler rose to power as leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, also known as the Nazi Party, in the 1920s.

Hitler harnessed a tide of discontent and unrest in Germany, which was slowly rebuilding after losing the First World War. The nation had collapsed politically and economically, and owed heavy sanctions under the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazi party blamed Jews for Germany’s troubles and promised to restore the nation to its former glory.

Hitler was democratically elected to the German parliament in 1933, where he was soon appointed as chancellor, the nation’s second-highest position. Less than a year later, Germany’s president died, and Hitler seized absolute control of the country.

Born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, in 1889, Adolf Hitler was a skilled speaker and rose to power in Germany democratically. In the wake of its WWI loss, he blamed the country's economic woes on Jewish people and promised to restore Germany to glory. Photograph By Roger Viollet, Getty Images

The Early Nazi Regime

Immediately after coming to power, the Nazis promulgated a variety of laws aimed at excluding Jews from German life—defining Judaism in racial rather than religious terms. Beginning with an act barring Jews from civil service, they culminated in laws forbidding Jews from German citizenship and intermarriage with non-Jews.

These were not just domestic affairs: Hitler wanted to expand his regime and, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland. It marked the beginning of the Second World War—and the expansion of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies.

German officials swiftly forced hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews into crowded ghettoes, and with the help of locals and the German military, specially trained forces called the Einsatzgruppen began systematically shooting Jews and other people the regime deemed undesirable. In just nine months, these mobile murder units shot more than half a million people in a “Holocaust by bullets” that would continue throughout the war.

But Hitler and his Nazi officials were not content with discriminatory laws or mass shootings. By 1942, they agreed to pursue a “final solution” to the existence of European Jews: They would send the continent’s remaining Jews east to death camps where they would be forced into labor and ultimately killed.

Hitler dismisses U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's appeal for peace in a speech before the Reichstag, Nazi Germany's parliament, on April 28, 1939. Months later, Germany invaded Poland. Photograph Via Universal History Archive, Universal Images Groyp/Getty Images

Genocide in Plain Sight

By characterizing their actions as the “evacuation” of Jews from territories that rightfully belonged to non-Jewish Germans, the Nazi operation took place in plain sight. Though thousands of non-Jews rescued, hid, or otherwise helped those targeted by the Holocaust, many others stood by indifferently or collaborated with the Nazis.

With the help of local officials and sympathetic civilians, the Nazis rounded up Jews, stripped them of their personal possessions, and imprisoned them in more than 44,000 concentration camps and other incarceration sites across Europe. Non-Jews were encouraged to betray their Jewish neighbors and move into the homes and businesses they left behind.

Prisoners at Buchenwald Concentration Camp, near Weimar, Germany, in April 1945, the year it was liberated. In the eight years Buchenwald was in operation, it housed between 239,000 and 250,000 prisoners, who were subjected to medical experiments and grueling forced labor. Photograph By Eric Schwab, AFP/Getty Images

Dachau, which opened near Munich in 1933, was the first concentration camp. Five others—Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—were designated as killing centers, where most Jews were immediately murdered upon arrival.

The killings took place in assembly-line fashion: Mass transports of Jews were unloaded from train cars and “selected” into groups based on sex, age, and perceived fitness. Those selected for murder were taken to holding areas where they were told to set aside their possessions and undress for “disinfection” or showers.

In reality, they were herded into specially designed killing chambers into which officials pumped lethal carbon monoxide gas or a hydrogen cyanide pesticide called Zyklon B that poisoned its victims within minutes.

The earliest Holocaust victims were buried in mass graves. Later, in a bid to keep the killings a secret, corpses were burned in large crematoria. Some Jews were forced to participate in the killings, and then were themselves executed to maintain secrecy. The victims’ clothing, tooth fillings, possessions, and even hair was stolen by the Nazis.

As Allied troops advanced near the end of the war, Germany sent prisoners on death marches from the western front to Dachau, near Munich. When the camp was liberated in April 1945, pictured here, U.S. troops encountered piles of dead bodies and survivors on the brink of death. Photograph By Roger Viollet, Getty Images

Life in the Camps

Those not chosen for death were ritually humiliated and forced to live in squalid conditions. Many were tattooed with identification numbers and shorn of their hair. Starvation, overcrowding, overwork, and a lack of sanitation led to rampant disease and mass death in these facilities. Torture tactics and brutal medical experiments made the camps a horror beyond description.

“It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so,” wrote Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in his 1947 memoir. “Nothing belongs to us any more…if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name.”

But despite almost inconceivable hardships, some managed to resist. “Our aim was to defy Hitler, to do everything we [could] to live,” recalled Majdanek and Auschwitz survivor Helen K. in a 1985 oral history. “He [wanted] us to die, and we didn’t want to oblige him.”

Jews resisted the Holocaust in a variety of ways, from going into hiding to sabotaging camp operations or participating in armed uprisings in ghettoes and concentration camps. Other forms of resistance were quieter, like stealing food, conducting forbidden religious services, or simply attempting to maintain a sense of dignity.

In 2005, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, opened in Berlin, Germany. Below ground, an information center shares stories of the Holocaust's victims—which scholars say is essential to preventing history from repeating itself. Photograph By Gerd Ludwig, National Geographic Image Collection

The Aftermath of the Holocaust

As World War II drew to a close in 1944 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to cover up their crimes, burning documents, dismantling death camp sites, and forcing their remaining prisoners on brutal death marches to escape the advancing Allies.

They didn’t succeed: As they liberated swaths of Europe, Allied troops entered camps piled high with corpses and filled, in some cases, with starving, sick victims. The evidence collected in these camps would become the basis of the Nuremberg Trials, the first-ever international war crimes tribunal.l

In the war’s aftermath, the toll of the Holocaust slowly became clear. Just one out of every three European Jews survived, and though estimates vary, historians believe at least six million Jews were murdered. Among them were an estimated 1.3 million massacred by the Einsatzgruppen; approximately a million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.

Many survivors had nowhere to go. Poland had Europe’s largest Jewish population before the war, but lost 93 percent of that population in just five years. Entire villages and communities were wiped out and families scattered across Europe. Labeled “displaced persons,” survivors attempted to rebuild their lives. Many left Europe for good, emigrating to Israel, the United States, or elsewhere.

Top: Photographs of a man held captive at Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps established during the Holocaust. These images can be found inside the Menorah Jewish Center in Dnipro, Ukraine, which explores the past, present, and future of Jewish life. Photograph By Abbas, Magnum

Bottom: Six million European Jews were killed—and hundreds of thousands displaced—during the Holocaust. When the international community learned the extent of Nazi brutality during World War II, it became clear existing laws of war were inadequate for addressing these crimes. Photograph Via Bar Am Collection, Magnum Photos (Left) And Photograph Via Bar Am Collection, Magnum Photos (Right)

Holocaust Denial

Despite the enormity of evidence, some people sowed misinformation about the Holocaust, while others denied it happened at all. Holocaust denial persists to this day, even though it is considered a form of antisemitism and is banned in a variety of countries.

How to counter the hate? “Educating about the history of the genocide of the Jewish people and other Nazi crimes offers a robust defence against denial and distortion,” concluded the authors a of a 2021 United Nations report on Holocaust denial.

Though the number of Holocaust survivors has dwindled, their testimonies offer crucial evidence of the Holocaust’s horrors.

“The voices of the victims—their lack of understanding, their despair, their powerful eloquence or their helpless clumsiness—these can shake our well-protected representation of events,” said Saul Friedländer, a historian who survived the Holocaust and whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz, in a 2007 interview with Dissent Magazine. “They can stop us in our tracks. They can restore our initial sense of disbelief, before knowledge rushes in to smother it.”

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wyrmfedgrave · 4 months

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Pics:

1 & 2. The original poem that we're discussing, in the Brown U archives.

3 thru 5. Lovecraftian towns, enough said!

6. The real horror here is the racist hatred that drove most of HPL's tales.

1913: Output.

Intro: What lingers, from reading Lovecraft's tales, is a feeling of rapt captivity & blind fear.

But, what 'hurts' is the fact that it was Howard's own racism that empowers most his works.

While it's true that readers can't really separate an author's life experiences influencing their works, 1 can enjoy their fiction without liking the writer him or herself.

Though HPL was a bit rabid in his hateful thoughts, I still enjoy his take on cosmic horrors.

I'd gladly be chased thru time & space, 'projecting' myself back to Arkham in the early 1900s.

Or, slip thru the dimensions out to the Great Australian Desert. And then, plunge down into the depths of the Pacific Ocean!!

I'll even play the part of a lonely & scared academic who learns too much to survive any longer.

But, I won't act like some blind bigot. I'm not a racist & have friends of all kinds & sexes.

Hey! Watch where you put that sinful tentacle...

Plot: We start out with "New-England losing (its) original inhabitants¹ & agricultural atmosphere²."

"Being now the seat of... industries (run) by southern Europeans & West Asiatic immigrants of low grade³..."

"(Their) squalid, nosy village (now) asleep. Dusk & quiet hide a monstrous mill⁴... (now belonging to) alien serfs."

"Tainted air for (a) moment clears the ruin wrought by evil years⁵ & (my) tortured mind is lightened of its pain."

Suddenly "ancestral spirits reign anew & old New-England... lives again."

But, this only lasts for a moment.

The poem now focuses on describing "an empty green⁶, ancient structures rotting (away & a) temple spire (that) ascends no higher (due to) the Popish cross⁷."

Then, the poem asks "where dwells that race... whose rule is benign⁸?"

Suddenly, we get a twist!!

"From the woes which blend in modern times, new blessings emerge⁹!"

Yet, the poem ends with a final sad prediction, "contemplation mourns New England's end¹⁰ (for) draped in sack-cloth¹¹, 'She' (=s New England) chants her country's dirge¹²."

Notes:

1. At 1st, it sounds as if Howard's writing about the aboriginal American 'Indians' but, we know better!

If he were, he would be sadly correct. There's few of the aboriginal nations left - but, they're not extinct.

Not even in New England...

2. Wrong again.

Today, New England farms provide 50% of the dairy & 40% of the veggies consumed in the region.

Even though farms only make up 7% of the modern land use!!

Cheer on our modern practices.

3. Howard again ranks minorities as being of low quality as a whole.

Due, no doubt, to the then current pseudo-scientific 'thinking.'

But, Lovecraft liked to obsess on most things & didn't like 'change' at all.

The only type of changes that he allowed himself, were on scientific advances.

As even we are finding out, science is always changing. Usually by advances that are 'unexpected'.

Look at the amazing findings of the James Webb telescope, to see what I mean.

But, HPL couldn't seem to master his racial fears - whose origins still remain largely unknown...

4. This seems to refer to Howard's preference to water powered grind- stones & his 'hate' of coal powered mills.

I'd have to agree with him on this point.

5. Hmm... Methinks we can see the slow growth of Lovecraft's Mythos vocabulary in moments like this.

6. Dude, come on. Your poem takes place at night...

If someone (of any color) was there, it wouldn't be for romantic reasons.

7. Howard (the atheist) taking a pot- shot at Christianity while upholding a Protestant past.

8. In some fantasy realm? No 'rule' - especially a royal one - is ever 100% perfect.

Not even democratic 'rule'...

Every known form of government has had some kind of problem(s) during its existence.

9. Hmm... "The woes which blend?"

("Whatchu talking about, Willis?!")

I don't think this is sarcasm aimed at "race mixing."

Perhaps, it's a poetic way to say that America has a lot of problems.

Well, I'd match our problems with yours anytime, bro.

Though HPL would probably like the Big Orange Rump! Lovecraft was always attracted to 'royalty.'

10. Quite wrong again.

As stated before, New England is still in white hands & in no danger of being overrun by minorities - we just don't have the money to live there...

11. Sack-cloth were 'clothes' woven out of goat or camel hair! It was the proper garment to be worn during times of mourning.

In English, it also describes "coarsely woven fabrics made from flax, hemp or cotton."

12. Still wrong!!

We've certainly come close to extinction - several times! But, the U.S. is still here...

Right now, we're still fighting off the greedy power lust of an ex-prez who wants to become 'king.'

The kind of person that Lovecraft would like - at 1st sight!

But, HPL could change his mind!

As he did with Hitler, once Howard understood what kind of a danger Adolph posed - to HPL's beloved England!

Criticism: Not really much written on "Village." So, I'll add some quick notes after the 1 comment that I could find...

The National Amateur said, "Lovecraft chants a dirge (death song) over the New England of American history... discovering that the New England of their dreams is not the New England of today."

Notes:

1. You could think of this poem as part three of Howard's "Racist Trio" for 1913!

The more racist poems being the already examined "Providence in 2000 AD" & "New-England Fallen."

2. But, if this is true, this poem is a toned down version of the other two poems' hateful bigotry! Because, for HPL, this poem is a minor exercise in Racism Lite...

Still, all such works hurt somebody.

#hpl bio #history #racist lit #poetry #adult lovecraft

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opedguy · 1 year

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Huckabee Sanders Gives GOP Response

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Feb. 8, 2023.--President Joe Biden, 80, delivered a clever State-of-the-Union speech Feb. 7, working the joint session of Congress like skilled impresario at a three-ring circus. For anyone listening, Biden exceeded all expectations reading short lines on his teleprompter often mangling words or grammar but nothing really mattered. Biden showed, beyond any of former President Donald Trump’s descriptions of Biden’s impaired, that he knows how to throw red meat to an audience. Biden benefited from a brilliantly written speech, allowing the president to play folksy Uncle Joe to a largely receptive audience. Whatever outbursts took place by Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Biden’s State-of-the-Union was a campaign speech, in effect, announcing that he’s running for reelection in 2024. Nothing in Biden’s speech delivered any factual accuracy, only a self-congratulatory personal sales job.

If you listened to Biden, the U.S. economy and foreign policy have never been better, touting U.S. alliances overseas to battle the evil 70-year-old Russian President Vladimir Putin. Biden didn’t admit how the U.S. proxy war, using Ukrainian troops, has fueled the worst inflation in 40 years, all because Ukraine defends European democracy against an existential threat from Putin. Much of Biden’s speech was a hodgepodge of platitudes, far from even the most partisan reality. Biden said that backing Ukraine helped save European democracy, the same malarkey said by Ukraine’s 44-year-old President Volodymyr Zelensky to a joint session of Congress Dec. 21, 2022 that Ukraine was not a charity case but an investment in preserving democracy. Biden said the same rubbish knowing that Ukraine’s war-torn, bankrupt government only fights for its own survival, certainly not Europe’s.

Delivering the GOP rebuttal, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders went over the deep end talking about Biden pandering to “the woke mob.” Whether that’s true or not, ordinary voters, those tuning into the State-of-the-Union, don’t know what she’s talking about. “Whether Joe Biden believes this madness or is simply too weak to resist it, his administration has been completely hijacked by the radical left,” a fashionable term in conservative circles. Most voters want to know what the GOP plans to do to fix the ailing U.S. economy. What, if anything, the GOP plans to do about the proxy war in Ukraine against the Russian Federation. How the White House plans to stop a war with China over Taiwan or some other useless dispute. “Everyday, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags and worship their false idols,” Huckabee Sanders told a largely bewildered audience. Uncle Joe spoke to the working class voters, looking for government to bail them out of their financial woes due to runaway inflation and economic problems. Huckabee Sanders grossly missed an effective rejoinder to Biden’s utter nonsense, delivering his announcement that he’s running for reelection in 2024. “Americans want common sense for their leaders, but in Washington, the Biden administration is doubling down on crazy,” Huckabee said. Huckabee tried to say Biden squandered the prosperity and peace of the Trump administration but, somehow, got lost in translation. When 58-year-old House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) kept telling Greene to pipe down, what kind of message did that send about “crazy?” Huckabee-Sanders had the perfect chance to call Biden out on his nonsense about the economy and foreign policy, when the U.S. is in the worst place in decades.

Huckabee-Sanders talked about Biden’s failure on the border, violent crime, while Democrats ask to de-fund the police, all because African American lobbying groups have a stranglehold on the Democrat Party. “Despite Democrats’ trillions in reckless spending and mountains of debt, we now have the worst border crisis in American history,” Huckabee-Sanders told her audience. Instead of offering propose GOP fixes, Huckabee-Sanders on complained about what’s not going right. Most voters like Biden’s profligate government spending because they benefit from more outlays of cash. Instead of going after Biden’s disastrous foreign policy, Huckabee-Sanders highlighted how Democrats and Republicans are on the same page when it comes to Ukraine. Only former President Donald Trump, 76, has had the guts to question Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine, telling the public the war must stop.

Biden played Uncle Joe, working the crowd like circus impresario, selling the American public a bill of goods. Trump was dead wrong about Biden’s cognitive deficits, proving he can work a crowd like the best of him. Watching Joe laugh when he accused the GOP of trying to gut Social Security and Medicare, shows that Joe knows how to gaslight the crowd. Joe managed to get applause from both sides of the aisle, even from McCarthy, who, like other Republicans, have fallen into the Ukraine trap. Biden has no plan in Ukraine other than a perpetual blank check, pouring billions in tax dollars down a rat hole. Huckabee-Sanders talks about the “woke mob,” but she doesn’t call Joe out on his reckless foreign policy that has the U.S. dangerously close to WW III, possibly nuclear War. Where’s the GOP when it comes to Biden’s abysmal relations with Russia and China?

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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goodfish-bowl · 3 years

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Ectober Day 7: Swamp

Summary: Undergrowth origin story.

Warnings: mentions of violence, death, and European conquest

Words: 1457

AO3 link

It’s kinda weird, but I’ve never seen anything with Undergrowth as the main focus, usually when they’re’s involved it’s background, or controlling Sam, so I’ve decided to do something about that and give them a bit more character. (Undergrowth gets he/him pronouns in the beginning, and they/them near the end, and you’ll see why)

Undergrowth remembered their beginnings well, better than most.

The swamp he was born in was heavy in supernatural energies. He was sentient far before he was a ghost, as the humans referred to them nowadays. The small, feeble flesh-beings would slink through his home, full of fear and awe. It was a deadly place, worthy of the respect they afforded it back then, like they no longer do today. They would bring offerings to him, and rest them at the base of his trunk, offering words and care, pruning his dead branches, removing the muck, giving him the nutrients he needed. In return he protected them as best he could, offering his very own fruit in return, to keep them loyal and strong.

Over the centuries, he grew stronger, powerful in their worship. He was a benevolent god to them, a protector of the forest, despite not yet being able to move or tell them as such. (He had been able to communicate with one priest with violet eyes, and there had been attempts to replicate his prowess since then.) He influenced the forest, making the trees grow stronger around their settlement to protect them from the summer storms, enriching the soil for their crops, and making the forest flourish with foods and life. He gave them everything they ever had needed to flourish, creating a paradise for them in return.

Then they started burying their dead underneath his roots.

Undergrowth could sense their fear, it crippled them, they were dying by the dozens, a sickness brought by people from over the horizon, who wore stange clothing,spoke in stange tongues, and carried themselves like they were gods instead of small, weak, flesh-beings. His people told him their woes, prayed to him for protection against the disease, asking them to protect the living from the dead. He accepted these offerings just as he had in the past. He also felt their silent fury at the newcomers from the deceased. Their rage at how these newcomers brought strange and lustrous items from much farther away than Undergrowth could reach. His people were paying for them with their lives. Undergrowth decided he should protect them from these men from the horizon altogether. He gave them all the medicines he could for their dying, and made the plants flourish along the coast where the foreigners resided. Plants that bore sharp thorns, sweet fruit laced with poison, plants that called forth stench and plague. Ones that brought forth the true carriers of disease that lurked within the swamp where he had driven them off to long ago. Exactly the kind of plants he had protected his people from for centuries.

It didn’t take long for him to drive off the invaders. Within the next moon cycle, they left on their massive canoe, the wind carrying them away far from the shore. However his people were still dying, unable to drive the diseaseaway. They came to him, asking various things of him he could not do. He could not cure them, only give them the supplies. He could not bring back a dead lover or child. He could not (and wouldn’t even if he could) bring back the invaders to pay for their crimes. Then there were the questions, asking him why. Why was he angered at them? Why did he drive the men from the horizon away? Why hadn’t he protected them from the disease? What had they done to deserve this?

He wasn’t angered, he’d done all he could, the invaders were the reason they were dying. They brought only false hopes and disease. His people were of no fault, he bore them no ill will. He only wished for them to persevere like the very forest they resided in. To him, they were all his children, he watched over and protected them all, making sure they were well-tended and flourished. The invaders were the only ones who deserved his fury.

Eventually, the disease passed, and very few remained. A handful compared to the tribe they had been before. Then, the foreigners returned, unwelcomed onto a coast brimming with deadly life. They were different this time, clothing unlike the last, made of dense fibers that the thorns couldn’t puncture, tools made of metal that severed and sliced down his defenses, and knowledgeable about the very plants he had attempted to trick them with before. Then they began to threaten the lives of his children. They made demands of resources to take back to their home, demanding food, wood, and precious things. He flooded the swamp to drive them away, but they took with them much more. They stole parts of his precious forest, and took several of the tribe with them, mostly young girls. He could feel their fear and their pleas as they were carted away by the evil that had arrived.

He never saw the young women again, but these men came to steal from him again. They brought their weapons of war with them this time. Undergrowth once more brought down his and the forest’s collective rage on them, in another attempt to drive them away. The poison and the storm, floods and pestilence, did nothing to deter their destruction this time around. They stole more from him, and his rage continued to flourish while his paradise died. His children, the small, weak, flesh-beings that were his, had dwindled to merely a dozen. Two families remained, and he would not let these evil men take what was left from him.

Undergrowth pulled energy from the forest and the rage and fear of his children into himself and called forth everything he could. He made the trees move with his will. He made monsters from nature itself, and then decimated their camp site. He slaughtered them as ruthlessly as they had murdered his own. Then they set his puppets aflame, destroying what was unknowingly his last defense.

Although his rage festered and boiled much higher than before, he no longer had the energy to do much more than continue to cultivate the poisonous, thorny plants he had taken to sowing around the settlement and himself as protection. He wasn’t able to defend himself other than this when they came for him.

He watched as the pale creatures, pale like the disease they were, brought torches to burn him with. Blades of gleaming metals to cut him down. And a cowering priest clutching a strange box wrapped in animal leather, a metal cross cutting into his pathetic flesh as he muttered strange words that only irritated Undergrowth further. Just as they were about to slay him, one of his remaining, oh so, so, so precious children came to his aid.

He remembered this one, she was to be his next caretaker, with pitch black hair and powerful, violet eyes. She bore the same eyes as the priest he had once communed with in the distant past. He was much more powerful than he had been back then and she was to be a powerful keeper had she ever reached full bloom. She threw herself upon his roots, and screamed with all her might, rage burning brighter than his own, and the energy that flowed through the forest pumping through her veins. He too, flowed all the energy he could muster into her small, mortal body, until she became the god he was to his children.

However, there was very little left to protect. His children had been culled like weeds, and his forests sliced down. The rivers ran slow and muddy, and the paradise he had once tended was a distant memory, poison and disease taking its place. His little flower made sure it would remain that way until the sun failed to rise. Cursing the men from the horizon and salting the very ground she was once destined to tend with every breath left in her feeble lungs.

It was truly a shame they burned her right beside him.

When Undergrowth awoke again, they were no longer bound by roots. They were in a place where there was no sun, just an endless stream of energy and twisting green sky’s. They remembered very little. The rage, the sins of men, screaming at the foul invaders with every breath from their lungs until they were choked and burned to ashes, tied to the god that had once protected them all. They remembered trying with all their might to drive off the men with poisons and floods and diseases and the wrath of the forest itself until they no longer had anything left to protect themself and their precious children with.

Undergrowth screamed in rage and grief, for that’s all they could feel, and sought to take back everything that was stolen from them in retribution.

#danny phantom #goodfish writes #undergrowth #he deserves some attention #the other one ep. baddies get love why not the sentient plant monster?#unnamed original character #ectober 2021 #swamp #tw: violence #tw:death #tw:European conquest #I implied a few things #but if you don’t understand feel free to ask me #ectoberhaunt 2021

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deerth · 3 years

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my first mistake in witchcraft

yes i’m going to be petty over religion for a second here.

i have been slowly inching out of the broom closet as i now consciously move on from the atheist mindset to the pagan one. i was looking for more resources to research my path, and i ended up on a witchy server... woe unto me as i try to fit in once more, for it seems that not even witches are unified.

forget about all that shit about garden, cosmos and whatever witches. the religion actually broadly branches into two practices - Wicca and regular witchcraft. so you are primarily the one or the other, no matter what flavour of ritual you practice.

the primary difference between Wiccans and general witchcraft is your belief of whether religion can be used for harm or not. in short, Wiccans state “an it harm none, do as ye will” (as long as you don’t hurt anyone [including yourself], go bonkers), therefore you will not find Wiccans casting curses or hexes. we know the responsibility of our faith and we know that if you radiate bad vibes, it will come right back around to bite you in the ass later. that said, most Wiccans don’t mind witches who do curse or hex. some cultures use practices like voodoo, and even old eastern European practices were not free of rituals that were made to directly interfere with someone’s will (love spells that were supposed to make someone love you). therefore, a disclaimer: I’m not anti-hex. I would not use a hex because I feel that hate will not solve hate, and as long as you’re an adult, I trust you know what you’re doing with your power. maybe you are of an oppressed culture and have good reason to exact revenge on someone who severely hurt you, especially if you have a long-standing tradition of hexes. even Nina Simone sang “I Put a Spell on You” (albeit this is also a love spell). I know curses and hexes and even spells affecting with another’s free will are an inherent part of witchcraft and I won’t deny it. I follow my doctrine, you follow yours, that is fine by me.

what is NOT fine with me, however, is propagating hex culture among minors. why? because minors are not ready to take on that responsibility!!!! just like they are not truly ready to make healthy decisions about sex, alcohol or other substances, they cannot take true responsibility over causing harm, be it spiritual or otherwise. “what’s a little hex do?” you might ask, if you’re a minor. not to sound like a boomer, but when I was 16, I was edgy as fuck. I hated everyone while claiming to love everyone. I was in NO correct mental state to make decisions about the aforementioned things. even without casting any hexes, I made many mistakes. big ones. I hurt a lot of people. yes, I regret it all deeply. I wish I had thought things over rather than stay stubborn. in fact, most people under 20 are not ready to enter discourse, drama or a vicious cycle of hatred purely because it will always turn into “all bite but no bark”. I purposefully say it that way because although youngsters are admirably spirited and ready to take on the world... they often bite off more than they can chew. I see girlies straight out of high school trying to solve huge problems like racism, and although, again, admiring these young people, they have researched their stuff. to an extent, they know what they’re talking about... but I do believe hate will not solve hate.

one of the moderators of said server retaliated with it not being a universal truth, and claimed my take to be “unverified personal gnosis” (what is a verified gnosis, anyway? how do you measure it? especially in a practice like witchcraft where every bloody individual practises it differently and there are no priests or churches?). if the moderator happens to read this and wishes to elaborate, i’d be welcome for a bit of constructive discussion over what is and isn’t personal gnosis. I acknowledge that “hate cannot be fought with hate” is not a universal truth... that is perhaps where I went to the extreme. but believe me, I did not say it to be holier-than-thou. I was actually shocked to be called out by not one, but two moderators on my behaviour, instantly. I did not read in the rules that one would be forbidden to state their opinion or softly disagree, but perhaps it is so and I did not pay enough attention.

there comes another food for thought: is it possible to socialise without being opinionated in any way? would shutting down opinions truly prevent conflict? because I’m feeling very bitter and left out now. I know everyone on that server is not Wiccan. but to get slapped in the face right after I attempted to be friendly (laconic and feeble as that was), among who I considered to be my own people... I feel conflicted. now mind, I’m not going to leave witchcraft behind. it is my religion, and thanks to this experience, I learned that Wicca is the right thing for me. I don’t want to advocate for violence and a vicious cycle of hatred. my grandfather was Romani, therefore I believe I know a thing or two about mislabeling and hate enacted upon minorities and outcast people. does that mean I want to kill and hex every white in sight? the answer is no. if anything, me being both Wiccan and Romani, it would just add fuel to the fire. especially because Romani are stereotyped as evil witches in the first place, so it would be a double suicide. by propagating violence, I would give these people more reason to hate pagans and Romani people. both cultures are already feared and hated upon as it is. I am not going to give people more opportunity to hate me.

coming back to the minor I disagreed with in the server. I was shocked that the first thing that came to a teenager’s mind was a revenge hex. it screams of naiveté and irresponsible behaviour towards your faith. and not JUST your faith. as I am a student of psychology, I am well aware how mind patterns work, and here’s the funny thing: psychology has proven that witchcraft’s law of returns is somewhat true, not on a magickal level, but on a mental one. if you ponder over violence and revenge excessively, you are reinforcing those neural pathways in your brain. there is a reason why they say “hate breeds hate”. it is the same reason why depression is so hard to deal with. anything you obsessively ruminate over reinforces it again and again until escape seems impossible. I’m not only speaking as a witch, I’m speaking as a human being. is it correct to propagate petty violence among minors when we as adults can do better and guide young people to better paths?

I’m not saying young people shouldn’t use hexes. but I am questioning their ability to take on the responsibility of potentially hurting someone, or even just thinking of hurting someone. you plant a seed of hate and it may just grow. you knock on the devil’s door enough times and he will answer (disclaimer: I’m not Christian either, I just like the saying). soon there shall be nothing left but hate. if the person in question had not been a minor, I would have left it at that. but religion is sacred. a witch’s magick is essentially making something important to you sacred. it’s not a plaything. it’s not to be used light-handedly. it’s not a trend. and hexes should be the last resort if all else fails OR the person you hate has a damn good reason for being hated.

is it wrong to vote for love and peace? yeah, I sound like a hippie, but I think they’re right. love was not born from continuing to fight each other - love was born from unity, from coexisting. how does one fight racism? psychology says see more poc, interact with them, understand their struggles. how to fight religious fear? spend time with people of different views. how to get over homophobia? spend time with the gays and try to understand their views, and like, actually understand them. spending time with someone just to berate them is still bigotry. the interaction I mean here is coexisting with minorities in a shared space and them slowly, but surely becoming more accepted and normalised because we finally see them. even a bigot can’t stay a bigot if they are brought out of isolation. if they’re forced to see people different than them.

unfortunately, not even your own faith can comfort you sometimes, mostly because the community is still divided. there are rules on what should and shouldn’t be done, and woe upon thee if you dare to even peep one of your thoughts. I merely said thank you and sorry and left, as I always do when I feel misunderstood. it was a valuable yet harsh lesson, and I regret hoping for acceptance or even offering me a moment to be understood without being shut down without a second thought. I regret hoping for a little discussion where it is seen as a violation of rules.

again, as long as you are ready to bear the responsibility of harming another, do whatever you want. as a Wicca, I prefer staying benevolent and kind, even to those who traumatised me. you might argue that this essay in itself is not benevolent... after all, Wiccans don’t slander people behind their backs, you might say. but it is not my intent to slander. it is just me expressing sheer confusion over what I expected to be a community to hear out all voices, because why have a community at all if you allow for no discussion? do we shut off discussions entirely in fear of fights? but alas, it is human nature to be opposed, but it’s also human nature to still hold hands despite the differences - one just needs to acknowledge it.

blessed be.

#own post #witchblr #witchy #wicca #laconic and gross oversimplifications to this post will not be accepted.#i am naive in my own way for believing people want to be kind #but i do believe that there can be love and peace on the planet earth. as a survivor of hate #i know it.

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passionate-reply · 3 years

Video

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This week on Great Albums: a Great Album that your average rock critic would actually agree with me about! Find out how Kate Bush got her groove back with her fifth LP, Hounds of Love, and whether she ever came down from that hill. Full transcript below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Ever since I first conceived the idea of Great Albums, I’ve always intended it to reflect nothing other than my own personal “canon”--not necessarily a list of albums that were influential, successful, or acclaimed by anybody’s standards but my own. But in this installment, I’m making a somewhat uncharacteristic move, and diving into an album that really doesn’t need me to advocate for it: Hounds of Love, by Kate Bush, often considered Bush’s greatest masterpiece--if not one of the greatest albums of all time.

Released in 1985, Hounds of Love was Bush’s fifth studio LP. Her career had started off surprisingly strong in 1977, with the release of her debut single “Wuthering Heights,” written when Bush was only 19 years old. With a high-concept theme, based around the titular novel by Emily Brontë, it would set the template for much of Bush’s subsequent career: irreverently eccentric, high-concept art-pop with the intensely personal passion of a singular singer-songwriter. But just how much patience for that sort of thing does the general public have, beyond letting the occasional “Wuthering Heights” through as a sort of novelty hit? Bush’s subsequent work in the early 1980s met with inconsistent reception, with her fourth LP, 1982’s The Dreaming, marking a particularly low point. The first album that Bush produced all by herself, The Dreaming took even more radical creative liberties, pushing her sound into increasingly experimental territory.

Music: “Get Out Of My House”

Following the fairly cold reception of The Dreaming, Bush took several years to produce her next album, but it would prove to be the one that redeemed her career, and arguably turned her into a bigger star than ever before. Hounds of Love managed to stay true to the core principles of the Bush aesthetic: moody and introspective, full of rich and complex narratives, as well as musical risk-taking. But it honed and refined that sound into something that was also remarkably pop.

Music: “Running Up That Hill”

“Running Up That Hill” was one of the biggest hits of Bush’s career, and arguably dethroned even “Wuthering Heights” as her signature song. I think the secret to its success is its ability to balance Bush’s experimental impulses with an intuitive, deep-felt emotional quality that makes her best work resonant in an accessible way. On paper, “Running Up That Hill” is as high-concept as anything else in Bush’s catalogue--a song about making a deal with God to swap sexes with your lover, and feel what life is like in another body? But at the same time, the song has an ability to “work” even if you don’t know all of that. Who hasn’t longed for a way to bargain with supernatural forces, for a chance at the impossible? There’s a certain applicability to its themes, which I think is a chief reason why it’s inspired so many covers and reimaginings over the years. But even when one listens to the original, the stately washes of digital synthesiser and the powerful conviction that propels Bush’s vocals make it easy to sympathize with. It feels grounded and physical, rooted in the most carnal aspect of the human body. Positioned as the opening track of the album, “Running Up That Hill” feels like an obvious lead single--in the best way possible. But it’s worth noting that not everything on the album is quite so radio-friendly.

Music: “Cloudbusting”

Perhaps one of Bush’s most compelling narratives, “Cloudbusting” is also, ostensibly, fairly high-concept, portraying a heavily fictionalized episode from the life of Wilhelm Reich. A controversial figure both in life and legacy, Reich is best remembered for his work in psychology, heavily influenced by the spectre of Sigmund Freud. But “Cloudbusting” focuses on his later-life fascination with the physical sciences, and his belief that a mystical energy called “orgone” was responsible for both human emotional woes as well as disturbances in the Earth’s atmosphere. Reich attempted to develop a machine that could manipulate this energy, and hence achieve the longtime dream of technological weather control, but there’s no evidence his “cloudbuster” really worked, or that there’s any such thing as “orgone.” But Bush’s “Cloudbusting,” and its accompanying music video, portray Reich as a tragic hero, silenced by government authorities who sought to destroy what they couldn’t understand, conflating his work with cloudbusters with his censure by the FDA for his questionable medical devices.

The song was inspired chiefly by the memoirs of Wilhelm Reich’s son, Peter, with Bush explicitly portraying Peter’s naive childhood perspective on his father, and that does allow for some substantial nuance here...but at some point we have to ask ourselves what responsibility an artist has to the truth. “Cloudbusting” is the musical equivalent of a film that’s “based on a true story,” and I see no reason why music can’t be just as capable of spreading misinformation as the Oscar-bait biopics of Hollywood. Just how accurate, or how beautiful, does a work of art need to be, for us to allow a bit of playing loose with the facts for the sake of a great story?

Setting aside these quandaries presented by its subject matter, “Cloudbusting” undoubtedly delivers musically. Across its sprawling runtime, it develops and earns a sense of grandeur, building from its infectious percussion and cresting with Bush’s fragile, but assertive prayer: “I just know that something good is going to happen.” If you listen closely to the percussion tracks on the album, you’ll notice that there’s no cymbal or high-hat utilized anywhere, which helps give the album its particular hazy, meandering ambiance.

That effect is perhaps even more pronounced on the second side of the album. Hounds of Love is divided quite sharply into two sides. The first side, also sub-titled Hounds of Love, opens with “Running Up That Hill,” and finishes with “Cloudbusting,” which serves as something of a bridge between the two, combining a singable hook and a pop-like verse-chorus structure with a taste for more visionary narrative. While the first side is home to all four of the album’s singles, the second side, sub-titled The Ninth Wave, strays much further away from the standard expectations of pop.

Music: “Under Ice”

Going by the tracklisting, there are seven tracks that make up *The Ninth Wave,* though their smooth transitions and willful defiance of verse/chorus structure create a seamless oratorio or song cycle feel, not unlike many of the great “album sides” of the prog tradition. The Ninth Wave also departs from the feel of the first side in its instrumentation. While the Hounds of Love side has its fair share of exotic instruments, such as a balalaika on “Running Up That Hill” and a didgeridoo on “Cloudbusting,” The Ninth Wave is more richly baroque, with elements like that jarring violin on “Under Ice.” As it progresses, the breadth of timbres increases, climaxing in the Celtic-inspired “Jig of Life.”

Music: “Jig of Life”

The explosion of folkish, backward-looking sounds of “Jig of Life” and “Hello World,” with their fiddles, whistles, and full choir, represent its protagonist’s return to the realm of the living, after the trauma represented by earlier tracks like “Under Ice.” The abstract, though affecting, narrative presented by The Ninth Wave seems to be a tale of death and rebirth, with a narrator who drowns themselves, only to be reborn--whether literally revived from a failed suicide attempt, or metaphysically reincarnated after a passage through the realm of the dead.

Much more has been written about the themes of *The Ninth Wave* than I’m getting into here, but suffice it to say that many people consider it the relative highlight of the album. But I think it’s worth questioning that a little bit, and taking the time to look at Hounds of Love a bit more holistically. Just because the first side is a bit less overtly experimental doesn’t mean it doesn’t have just as much to offer, artistically, or that it isn’t a part of what makes this album truly great. At the end of the day, I think we can probably agree that far fewer people would have ever heard The Ninth Wave if it weren’t for those more accessible singles on side one, moving copies of the record and adding to Bush’s widespread acclaim. Without “Running Up That Hill,” Hounds of Love might have gone down in history as a fairly niche cult classic like The Dreaming, instead of the era-defining album that it got to become.

On the cover of Hounds of Love, we see an image of Bush reclining and embracing two dogs--who were, in fact, her own pets. The image’s saturation in purplish pink and Bush’s perhaps sultry expression combine to create an impression of traditional femininity, which resonates with the album’s themes of gender and sensuality. Framed in by large white borders, we might read the composition of the cover as evocative of a personal locket or memento, a sort of furtive glimpse into Bush’s more private or intimate essence, fitting for the introspective and emotional focus of much of the music. This “framing” is perhaps also evocative of the idea of the domestic sphere of life--and hence, again, of femininity.

While the title track of the album portrays the “hounds of love” as figures of menace, who are said to “chase” after its narrator, the submissive and comfortable-looking canines portrayed in the cover art seem like a foil to that idea. In the history of European art, dogs are often used as symbols of fidelity, particularly in the context of romance. Titian’s Venus of Urbino, painted in the 1530s, is often considered the progenitor of the Western “nude” as an archetype. Alongside the titular goddess, paragon of eroticism and the feminine, the painter has also included a lapdog, peacefully dozing beside her. It’s tempting to see the composition of the cover of Hounds of Love as doing something similar, invoking confident sensuality alongside a symbol of faithfulness to portray the essence of idealized love.

After the release of Hounds of Love, Bush would once again take several years to produce her next LP, 1989’s The Sensual World. More closely related to The Ninth Wave than the A-side of Hounds of Love, it was nonetheless another commercial and mainstream success for the artist.

Music: “The Sensual World”

From the mid-90s to the mid-00s, Bush took an extended hiatus from music, focusing instead on her family and her personal life. Despite uncertainty surrounding the future of her career, she would eventually return to the public spotlight in the 21st Century, and remains active, if somewhat intermittently, to the present day. At this point, it’s safe to say that Bush has a fairly enviable position, having lived long enough to become a cultural institution, and able to bask in the cult following her unmistakable and distinctive work has earned her. For as much as I’ve praised the more commercial side of Hounds of Love in this piece, I still believe in the power of the truly unfettered creative soul, and I’m still happy for Bush that she’s achieved that kind of freedom.

My favourite track from either side of Hounds of Love would have to be “The Big Sky.” In the context of the album, it stands out for its rousing, triumphant crescendo of energy--a marked difference from the languid, introspective sensibility that dominates most of the material. And it manages that without bringing the cymbals back, either! Thematically, its emphasis on weather and the sky prefigures that of “Cloudbusting,” perhaps providing a more hopeful and naive vision of what weather can do, which resists being “clouded” by political drama. That’s all I have for today--as always, thank you all for listening!

Music: “The Big Sky”

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