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thisweekingundamwing · 5 years

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TWIGW RoundUp (August 11th - 17th)

Greetings Everyone! Here’s your roundup of contributions for this week. Check out their stuff and show them some love!😊💖

~Mod TB

Fanfiction:

@amberlyinviolet, Knife in Hand (Ch. 31) / Ch. 32 / Ch. 33

Rating: Explicit

Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage

Category: M/M

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationship: Trowa Barton/Duo Maxwell

Characters: Trowa Barton, Duo Maxwell, Heero Yuy, Zechs Merquise, Chang Wufei, Relena Peacecraft, Quatre Raberba Winner, Dorothy Catalonia, Howard (Gundam Wing), Original Characters

Additional Tags: Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Consent Issues, Organized Crime, Assassination, child trafficking, Past Abuse, Federal Agents, Abuse of Power, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Gender Issues

Summary: When Duo learns there's a hit out on him, he turns to the only person in Chicago he believes capable of helping him. But will the cost of the Broker's help be too high?

@anaranesindanarie, The Life of Nanashi: Who am I? (Ch. 1)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationship: Trowa Barton/Duo Maxwell

Characters: Trowa Barton, Original Trowa Barton, Doktor S (Gundam Wing), Duo Maxwell, Quatre Raberba Winner, Heero Yuy, Chang Wufei, Catherine Bloom, Howard (Gundam Wing)

Additional Tags: Angst, Searching, Trying to find oneself, Names, Belonging

Summary: All Nanashi has ever wanted is to belong. Believing a name is what he is missing, he tightly grasps the first one he is given.

Earth Bound (Ch. 2)

Rating: Mature

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationships: Duo Maxwell/Quatre Raberba Winner, Trowa Barton/Duo Maxwell/Quatre Raberba Winner, Chang Wufei/Heero Yuy

Characters: Duo Maxwell, Quatre Raberba Winner, Trowa Barton, Chang Wufei, Heero Yuy, Catherine Bloom

Additional Tags: Supernatural - Freeform, Alternate Universe, Fantasy, Smut, Angst, not sorry

Summary: Trapped in a human body, Duo Maxwell must uncover a way to unblock his powers before he finds everything ripped from him again. Who will pay the price? What will Duo decide? For @fadedsepiascribbles

@bailong05, All the King’s Horses (Ch. 7)

Rating: Mature

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: F/M

Fandoms: Xiaolin Showdown (Cartoon), Gundam Wing

Relationships: Jack Spicer/Chase Young, Chang Wufei/Original Female Character(s)

Characters: Jack Spicer, Chase Young (Xiaolin Showdown), Chang Wufei

Additional Tags: fem!Jack, mentions of physical abuse, Mentions of Emotional Abuse, Mentions of Sexual Harassment, Panic Attacks, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Romance, Mentions of War, Trauma, Psychological Trauma, Childhood Trauma, Healing, Crossover

Summary: Chase and Wufei's relationship seems to be better now, but what about Chase and Jack's?

@bobo-is-tha-bomb, The Bodyguard Ch. 13 / Ch. 14 / Ch. 15 / Ch. 16 / Ch. 17

Rating: Mature

No Archive Warnings Apply

Relationships: Heero Yuy/Reader (You)

Characters: Heero Yuy, Relena Peacecraft

Additional Tags: Romance, Drama, Violence, Mild Sexual Content

Summary: When death threats start to get serious, Preventer sends an Agent to protect you. But this man might be more dangerous to you than any death threat. HeeroxReader.

Forgive and Forget (Ch. 2)

Rating: Explicit

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: F/M

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationship: Duo Maxwell/Reader

Characters: Duo Maxwell, Heero Yuy, Chang Wufei, Sally Po

Additional Tags: Romance, Drama, Angst, Violence, Lemon, Reader-Insert

Summary: You’d infiltrate Preventer and expose that fact that it employed and protected terrorists. But that mission proves to be quite a challenge, all information regarding personnel carefully guarded. And the challenge becomes even greater when you meet Special Agent Duo Maxwell. He is pretty much the man of your dreams, all devilish charm, good looks, and bravado. And he kisses like the Devil. You are swept under and recklessly pursue and affair with him. But there is still your double agenda, and that is bound to make everything come crashing down around you. Especially when you find out that Duo is not exactly the man he said he was… DuoxReader

The Dream is Still Alive (Ch. 2)

Rating: Mature

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: F/M

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationships: Wufei Chang/Reader, Relena Peacecraft/Heero Yuy

Characters: Wufei Chang, Reader, Heero Yuy, Relena Peacecraft, Duo Maxwell, Lady Une

Additional Tags: Romance, Drama, Angst, Lemon, Lime, Reader-Insert, Violence

Summary: Three years ago, your feelings for him had cost you your job at Preventer. On top of that you gained his contempt. When an old enemy you helped putting behind bars escapes prison, your paths cross again. Forced under his protection, your old feelings for him resurface but you are determined not to get hurt again. But the spark is back, and there are no rules and regulations to hold you back this time. And maybe, just maybe, he might be willing to give in as well. WufeixReader

What’s going on Fanfiction wise (6)

Doii, Precogmare (Ch. 8) / Ch. 9

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category: M/M

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationships: Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy, Trowa Barton/Quatre Raberba Winner, Chang Wufei/Sally Po

Characters: Duo Maxwell, Heero Yuy, Quatre Raberba Winner, Trowa Barton, Chang Wufei, Sally Po, Relena Peacecraft

Additional Tags: Get Together, Mission Gone Wrong

Summary: A mission gone wrong shows Duo the future that awaits them. Could he stop it on time? Can he protect Relena and the other pilots while keeping his secrets hidden? *Wrote it ages ago, never published it. A lot of cursing and references to violence, death, blood and suicide. It's a Heero and Duo get together, background 03x04 and 05xS*

@duointherain, Beneath: Cornflakes (Ch. 3)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: F/M, M/M, Multi, Other

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationship: Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy

Characters: Duo Maxwell, Heero Yuy, Mareen Darlian, Relena Peacecraft, Chang Wufei, Trowa Barton, Quatre Raberba Winner

Summary: Relena’s mom takes them shopping.

Beneath: Western Civ 101

Rating: General Audiences

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationship: Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy

Characters: Heero Yuy, Duo Maxwell

Summary: This is just fluff. We had an evacuation at my job, so Duo gets one at his. Just Heero being a good and loving husband.

Beneath: Cornflakes: The New Kid (Ch. 1)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Category: M/M

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationship: Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy

Characters: Duo Maxwell, Relena Peacecraft, Maureen Darlian, Heero Yuy

Additional Tags: School, Mental Health Issues

Summary: Duo goes back to school, to real school, not like hiding, but really back to school... The school by the lake, the one he and Relena nearly blew up with the elephant toothpaste.

@helmistress, The Legend of Shinigami (mini announcement - mun stuff)

@janaverse, Stickies From Heero (Part 12)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category: M/M

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationships: Heero Yuy & Duo Maxwell, Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy, 1+2+1, 1x2x1 - Relationship

Characters: Heero Yuy, Duo Maxwell

Additional Tags: Get Together, Friendship, Eventual Sap, Eventual Implied Sexual Content, Mentions of Trowa ⋆ Quatre ⋆ Wufei ⋆ Relena ⋆ Sally - for now

Summary: heero and duo are in their mid-20's and are sharing a house. they are both working as preventers, but are not on the same work schedule. duo initiated this unique form of communication and heero has fully embraced it. [ these are images of the actual notes that heero leaves for duo on their refrigerator. ]

@ladyunebarton, The fundamentals of caring (Ch. 11)

Rating: Mature

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Relationship: Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy

Characters: Heero Yuy, Duo Maxwell, Chang Wufei, Trowa Barton, Quatre Raberba Winner, OC - Character, Relena Peacecraft

Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, parenting, Adoption, Kid Fic, Adopted Children, Childhood Memories, Romance, Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, First Time

Summary: After a fire on an Orphanage left three kids without a home. Heero and Duo decide to take them into their own for the mean time. But this decision will make them reconsider where they are and what they want from life.

luvsanime02, Moments

Rating: General Audiences

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: Gen

Fandom: Gundam Wing

Character: Hilde Schbeiker

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern SettingIntrospectionMild Languagebad weekCocktail Friday

Summary: Hilde isn’t sure if this party is the best decision that she’s ever made.

Skarla, Send in the Clowns (Ch. 7)

Rating: General Audiences

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: Gen

Fandoms: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Gundam Wing

Characters: Clint Barton, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson (Marvel), Jane Foster (Marvel), Darcy Lewis, Duo Maxwell, Trowa Barton

Additional Tags: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Parallel Universes, birthday present fic, Post CATWS

Summary: Clint Barton had a secret, one that he had been carrying for so long that it didn’t even really seem like a secret anymore. It was just another thing in the long list of things that he didn’t talk about, along with his time in Korea or that mission in Budapest. The trouble was, now that Shield was in tatters with every third agent loyal to Hydra and being hunted like the rats that they were, his helpful support system had evaporated along with his second favourite bow and his salary. For Scarly13.

@terrablaze514, Fic inspo / Cat adoption video ( @seitou @softnocturne @gundayo )

Shampoo & Conditioner - Snippet Saturday

Rating: T (for pending violence, group discord)

Pairings: 3x4 (implied), 4x5 (if you squint)

Summary: All Hail the Pineapple Express! A blessing and a curse… [preview of Ch. 3]

@thehiddenbaroness, Resurrecting the Viper (Ch. 31)

Rating: Mature

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category: Gen

Fandoms: 機動戦士ガンダム鉄血のオルフェンズ | Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, Gundam Wing

Characters: Orga Itsuka, Eugene Sevenstark, Mikazuki Augus, Merribit Stapleton, Norba Shino, Akihiro Altland, McGillis Fareed, Original Female Character(s), Heero Yuy, Duo Maxwell, Naze Turbine

Additional Tags: Action/Adventure, Crossover of a kind, Science Fiction, Cryogenics, Revenge, Drama, Political Intrigue, Canon Compliant

Summary: Following a routine visit to Vingolf, Orga, Mikazuki and Merribit are surprised by the sudden appearance of a practically naked, injured woman. Although Artima seems to have full recollection of who she is, she does not seem to understand the outside world. Against Orga's better judgment, the Isaribi is soon entangled in Artima's quest to find and destroy her old mobile suit - and discover both she and it are relics from over three hundred years ago that could hold the key to Tekkadan's future.

Fanart:

@babygray-dam, Duo Maxwell

@bluesquishylemon, Title: No Name

Source: Gundam Wing; character Trowa Barton

Media: Colored versions marker on 8.5x11 computer paper, line drawing pen on 14x17 Bristol 6-27-17; computer corrections 8-11-19

Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing or any character associated; I also do not earn any financial compensation for this fanart.

Request: Please credit this artist for this work when reposting - thanks!

@duointherain, Duo Maxwell

@elfbingo, Gundam Wing pilots representing Iron-Blooded Orphans (forwarded by @disturbed02girl )

@fenorange, Gundam SEED/Wing Crossover

@gundayo, Trowa & Quatre - Inside Jokes

@gundayum, Heero and Quatre (Muppets spoof) | Relena and Heero (Muppets spoof #2) | Duo & Wufei (Muppets spoof #3) | Trowaupagus |Duo and his daughter (AU)

kacfrog711, Duo at gunpoint - FIFTEEN 2011 (forwarded by @disturbed02girl )

@kenrik, Heero x Relena

***Please don’t remove artist credit, nor repost without permission.

Photosets/Screenshots/GIFs:

@animethingsandstuff, Heero Yuy

@capyper-land, Relena Darlian (Frozen Teardrop)

@gundamfight, Gundam Cross War

@its-more-than-just-a-fantasy, Duo Maxwell

Quotes:

MoodBoards/Aesthetics:

@janaverse, 1x2x1 sticker

@rx-79bluedestiny, Build kit boxes

Videos/AMVs:

@eostreofthedawn, MSA:GW - Sowing Discord (by Operation Meatier via YouTube)

@softnocturne, Just Communication 2015 Live (archived by ANime++) | White Reflection by Two-Mix (Official Music Video)

Wen, Just Communication (cover) - forwarded by @softnocturne

Headcanons:

@sweetgoufbrah, Trowa running looks like…

@terrablaze514, A Crazy Sleepover (Freedom Fighters AU)

Memes:

@incorrectgundamwingquotes, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, Episode 2

Gunpla:

@christianmswanson, Tallgeese ii | Wing Zero

@gundayum, Mini Deathscythe (so adorable!) #1 (#2 here) | Wing Zero (2) (3)

Calendar Events:

@gundam-wing-bingo, Gundam Wingo is a GO! Sign up for your card here (and ensure your blog’s submissions box is open).

@gundamzine, Rhythm Generation: Shooting Stars

Mod Rounds / FAQ / The Measure of a Year (Bonus details, forwarded by @lemontrash )/ Schedule

@zineapps @zine-scene @zinefeed @zinewatch @zinesubmissions @fandomzines @zinefans

@gwcocktailfriday, Cocktail Friday (due August 23rd, between 3pm - 5pm in your timezone)

@thisweekingundamevents, Mini Bang: Unorthodox Undercover Work!

^ Mini Bang Rules / FAQ / Dates to remember ^

1st Check-in: August 17th (due August 24th). This check-in is for Writers.

All participants are encouraged to contact @helmistress in case of dropouts, Beta Reader changes, etc.

@seasons-of-gundamwing thanks all who participated in “Summer of Zechs 2019” this year! Links to fanworks are being posted.

#twigw #this week in gundam wing #weekly roundup #gundam wing #mobile suit gundam wing #gundam wing fanart #gundam wing fanfiction #gunpla

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blackleopardgirl · 3 years

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☕️

1-20-21 Wednesday I went to my offficial first earth hazards lecture, it wasn't horrible and out of 10 I think that I did about a 7. I was engaged, the baby wasn't horrible being around him. the smell of coffee reminded me of being home alone during the day a few years ago (2018) and then I finished up some western civ notes, im finishing those now. finished some stuff for swan lake, and then now I'm home. home everyday by 4:30 and it’s actually great for me to be away all day since we are in a pandemic, because now I can come home and actually WANT to be at home and be in my bedroom. if I'm in here all day I won’t even want to be here and you can forget about sitting at my desk and studying. but today was a great day, I bought more stuff. Maybe I'll talk about that in another post. who knows, happy Wednesday.

0 notes

thecounterplan · 5 years

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A Reply to Rod Dreher on Graduate School in Literature

by Brice Ezell

I’ll be the first to tell anyone: quite frequently, graduate school in the humanities sucks. With scant few exceptions, you’re typically overworked and underpaid for the better part of five to eight years, after which you’re thrust into a bloody fortune’s wheel of a job market, if you even want to remain in academia at that point. Choosing to go to and, more importantly, remain in graduate school is a difficult decision, one not to be taken lightly. It is not simply pressing pause on life if you don’t know what you want to do career-wise, nor is it just an extension of an undergraduate degree. And in the case of English, my chosen field, pursuing a graduate degree like a PhD is not simply a pleasurable exercise in “loving literature.”

Rod Dreher, a columnist for The American Conservative, emphasized in a recent post that one should especially avoid graduate school if they love literature. He excerpts a big chunk of a Quillette interview with Tony Tost, who earned his PhD from Duke University in 2011 and went on to build a successful career as a poet and a screenwriter. Although Tost describes himself as left-leaning, the conservative Dreher – most recently famous for advocating for a semi-reclusive form of communal Christian life called “The Benedict Option” to survive a “post-Christian nation” – finds in Tost’s account of academia a clear warning about the study and appreciation of literature.

First, a qualification: I’m pursuing my PhD in English at a major R1 university in the United States. While I of course have limited experience in academia’s upper echelons so far, I do know the state of the discipline well enough to comment on Tost’s observations. In many cases, Tost provides salient criticisms about the functioning of the academy. For instance, in describing his working-class, non-prestigious undergraduate education, Tost recalls,

This is an extreme example, but at my first department function at Duke after being accepted as a doctoral student, a prominent professor asked me where I went to undergrad. I told him Green River Community College and College of the Ozarks. He looked me up and down, then turned away and simply didn’t speak to me again my entire six years in the program. That wasn’t typical. But it did feel a bit symptomatic.

Tost’s language here veers toward being contradictory: at first, this professor is an “extreme example,” not “typical,” but in the end he is somehow “symptomatic.” I would relax Tost’s many qualifications of this brief encounter: it is 100 percent true that the academy, especially in its prestigious Ivy league hubs, frequently looks down on scholars from working-class backgrounds, or at the very least views those working class backgrounds as a thing to “overcome” with an advanced degree. Numerous studies (here’s one) show that top-tier academic institutions cull from a sliver of similarly elite institutions when hiring tenure-track professors. Tost definitely picked up on something in that interaction.

There is also truth in Tost’s claim that, “[a]t its worst […] academia struck me as a bunch of privileged people ensuring their cultural status.” Particularly at elite universities like the one which granted Tost his PhD, there is an undeniable element of class replication. When Tost writes,

Many, however, seemed to be experts at positioning themselves within the newest intellectual trends. Many seemed like they’d been cultivating their academic careers since middle school and now were armed with impeccable credentials and tons of entitlement and very little imagination, creativity, or curiosity. None struck me as any more gifted than the brighter working class students at my prior schools. They just had better funding and better connections.

he does accurately describe certain members of the academy. Quite often, graduate students are encouraged to perfectly craft an “intervention” into a field – meaning a viewpoint or argument which breaks, ideally radically, from previous scholarly conversations on a given subject. Dissertations and scholarly articles should of course contribute new things to existing discourses, but there can arise out of this fixation on “intervening” a prizing of novelty for novelty’s sake. Trend-chasing, which is to some extent inevitable in a winnowing job market, can produce short-sighted scholarship. (Speaking of the job market, Tost also accurately identifies the difficult prospects for PhD graduates, noting that two of his colleagues from his PhD cohort don’t yet have full-time academic employment.)

Tost clearly took a great deal from his time at Duke, even though he sees plenty of places where the academy has a long way to improve. By and large – and this is true for even those who manage to find some permanent academic employment – this is the experience of most people who earn the PhD. The still-existing language of the “ivory tower” of academia doesn’t at all capture how most professionals in the discipline see the institution(s) in which they work. Every year at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, the core gathering for scholars and teachers of English and languages in North America, there are numerous panels about the problems with the academy, and what should be done to rectify them.

However, in detailing his problems with academia, Tost ends up providing grist for the mill that Dreher and numerous other conservative thinkers have been running for quite some time now. Based on the Quillette interview, I imagine that Tost and Dreher would disagree on most things when it comes to culture and politics – Tost, for instance, is critical of the politics of his undergraduate institution, the highly conservative College of the Ozarks, which I’m sure Dreher would find fine if not exemplary for a modern university. But when it comes to the Canon, Tost and Dreher seem to be in agreement.

For Tost, pursuing undergraduate and then graduate degrees in literature derived from a feeling he had at age 18, when he “discovered that books and films and art understood me better than my family did and I wanted to maintain that spiritual intoxication for the rest of my life.” At the College of the Ozarks he read, among others, “William Butler Yeats, Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Emily Dickinson, Faulkner, Hemingway” – in other words, a who’s who of great literary figures in the modern canon. Following his undergraduate degree Tost then went on to get his MFA in poetry at the University of Arkansas. He was first impressed by what he felt were the excellent Southern writers in the program, but after awhile those writers – and Dreher puts emphasis on this summary – “started getting replaced by writers who were more slick, more credentialed, more politically astute, less problematic but also infinitely less interesting than the generation that preceded them.”

This shift, for Tost, was replicated at Duke. Dreher also boldfaces this extended quotation from the interview:

So I think my issues are less with Duke or that particular English department and more with this emerging academic generation, which to me seems to double-down on the older generation’s worst trait (ideological certainty) while skimping out on its greatest strengths (genuine erudition and intellectual curiosity). As an academic, I generally felt like as soon as the older professors retired, I was going to be surrounded by people who all read the same ten theorists and who uniformly had pretty banal tastes in literature and who were all frothing to cancel and leap-frog each other into eternity and/or tenure.

Tost recounts one specifically example of this trend – though the professor in question is not named – in this way:

I remember the head of the English department giving a talk about his new ambitious post-colonial literary theory, which was elegantly presented and name-checked all of the right theorists and fused cutting edge notions of the subaltern and post-human aesthetics, etc. And then at the end he asked us if we knew any books that would fit his theory. Apparently, he hadn’t found any yet. As someone for whom books and art have been a lifeline, I was astounded. The art itself simply didn’t matter.

From this narrative Dreher comes to a few conclusions. Breaking them down, they are as follows:

1. “Ideology — left wing or right wing — is the death of art, of beauty, of wisdom, and of the curiosity that leads to these things.”

2. “Tost’s story” is about “interesting old writers being abandoned for lesser PC ones.” Dreher provides his own example of this happening when he writes,

I was reminded of a conversation I had at Cambridge University this past summer. I met someone there who told me that the entire university is about to undertake an initiative to consider how it can “decolonize the curriculum.” What does this mean in practice? If the decolonizers are successful, they will throw out, say, Descartes, Rousseau, and Kant and replace them with African philosophers of equal stature. Who don’t exist, because Africa has not had a 2,000-year-old formal philosophic tradition, but whatever.

[…] a great and old university like Cambridge [appears to be] cast[ing] aside the giants of Western Civ for the sake of political correctness […]

There is a twofold problem here. Tost’s account of his time in graduate school consists of massive generalities between “old” and “young” generations of scholars. This vagueness allows Dreher – who, again, is not a political compatriot of Tost’s – to insert his own political reading of the academy into this narrative, thereby furthering the longstanding “colleges are being too PC” narrative. On my reading of the interview, I can’t say that Tost would grant Dreher his interpretation wholesale, but there does appear to be overlap enough that they might share some common talking points.

However much Tost gets right about the academy, his generalizations allow people like Dreher to get things very, very wrong in turn. Tost himself, however, has his own slip-ups. Clearly, Tost is a primary text guy, which is perfectly fine – there is lots of scholarship still in that vein. But in characterizing his department head’s theory talk as a failing of scholarship, he misunderstands what the modern academy is set up to do when it comes to literary study. Not everyone needs to always be in the primary texts in the way that Tost clearly wants literary scholars to be. Some folks specialize in theory, and that is fine. (I’m not sure what made Tost choose Duke as his home for graduate school, but given that he’s clearly not enamored by theory, I find that school an odd move for him, given that it’s widely known as a great place to study theory.) I have been to numerous theory talks in which literary texts are referenced but not deeply read in the context of the talk; done right, those lectures can be as enlightening as a close reading of The Countess Cathleen. There are numerous avenues for traditionally-minded scholars like Tost to pursue their research and writing – I just spent a week at a conference devoted to a canonical modernist poet, consisting largely of lectures which hew more closely to close reading than to the theory that Tost finds too distant from the art it studies. While PhD students should have a solid baseline understanding of theory, being a graduate student does not mean signing up to only cite and read theory.

Still, Tost’s mistake pales in comparison to what Dreher attempts to do in his American Conservative piece. The use of “ideology” as a cudgel is a classic conservative move here, one that is woefully inadequate in responding to those who wish to challenge, expand, or, yes, decolonize the canon. (A recent graduate of my PhD program in English wrote an excellent article in The Los Angeles Times on “decolonizing the syllabus” that’s worth a read.) Ideology refers to those beliefs which structure everyday life; per the now-classic joke, ideology is the “water we’re swimming in,” the views which you hold without thinking critically about them. I can think of no better way to describe a view in which a canon of largely male, largely white western authors – who represent but one segment of a large global population – are the “real” literature than “ideological.”

If you took what Dreher and other conservatives say about the canon at face value, you’d think that literature professors, through a painstaking and rigorous process, compared the works of “great books” authors like Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Hemingway to works by non-white, non-American or European authors and through sound reasoning and academic research determined which books are canon-worthy and which aren’t. The canon wasn’t formed by anything close to a process like that one. The Western canon which we have received has been formed by traditions of scholars, public intellectuals, and other figures deeming people important in particular times, in particular cultural contexts. Sometimes, a writer or thinker makes a splash in an artistic movement or philosophical trend at a given time which enables them to take off and become a permanent part of their cultural milieu. Put simply, how authors become “canonical” or “important” is not through a tried-and-tested scholarly process, but rather through a series of ad hoc, culturally contingent factors which are then filtered through scholarly back-formations like canons, which are themselves driven by culturally specific assumptions. Strip the centuries-long academic and popular baggage from Shakespeare, and it’s not immediately obvious why he over the dozens of other Early Modern playwrights should be the one that every single schoolkid across the English-speaking world is expected to read. I love Shakespeare; contrary to Tost’s description of the academy, I have taken numerous courses in Shakespeare as a graduate student, and by the end of my coursework I’d read over half of the Bard’s plays quite closely. But part of being a scholar is questioning one’s own methods and practices, and those of the broader academic community, meaning that I shouldn’t just be reading individual Shakespeare plays. I should also be asking why Shakespeare is who he is in English scholarship, and how he came to be here. The ideological thing to do would be to simply say, “Shakespeare’s canonical, I’ve obviously got to read him.”

The canon has been interrogated for many decades now, as it should be. When Dreher condescendingly and presumptuously dismisses non-canonical writers as “lesser PC” authors, he ignores that scholarship which runs against the canonical grain has helped expose important scholarly works that fall outside of the standard Western canon, which in many cases offer valuable insights that predate similar insights in Western thought. To list just one example: in the standard history of philosophy, it is now widely taught that philosophers from the Middle East – the Muslim thinker Averroes in particular – are largely responsible for the transmission of Aristotle’s thought into the West. Similarly, the Muslim mathematician and scientist Avicenna helped lay out important groundwork in medicine, logic, and physics in the Middle Ages. In India the Cārvāka darsana of Indian philosophy (which goes as far back as the sixth century BC) advanced and foreshadowed what would later be perceived as radical empiricist and materialist views in the West when David Hume argued for them in the eighteenth century. I could go on.

Dreher doesn’t just falsely assume that the canon’s value is unquestioningly obvious; he also misrepresents what it means to challenge the canon, and to re-frame how it is taught to include historically marginalized voices. “Decolonizing the syllabus” does not mean it is morally wrong to teach James Joyce in an English class, or Descartes in a philosophy course. Obviously, reading those two authors is particularly important and unavoidable if you’re in certain fields – Irish studies and modernism for the former, philosophy of mind and epistemology for the latter. But any professor who claims to value free thought and unique scholarship should welcome work which upsets dogmatic claims about canonicity or “great books.” The idea that the greatness of any “great book” is obvious and requires no justification, and that no other voices could be brought in to be conversant with that text, is as ideological – and I’d argue even more ideological – than the straw-man “PC” beliefs that Dreher rejects. No one is calling to throw out whole traditions of thought wholesale; there is not a single philosophy department in the West which has “thrown out” major thinkers like “Descartes, Rousseau, and Kant.” To suggest otherwise is absurd.

So Dreher is right in one very small sense in his headline: loving literature does not mean you should pursue an MA and/or a PhD in literature. Those degrees are for people who intend to professionalize their relationship to literature in particular ways. Many of those ways involve not focusing primarily on close reading of texts, but on philosophical and theoretical discourses which operate at a meta-textual level – which is, to be sure, an unusual way of thinking about literature for most people, especially non-academics. But you can pursue an English PhD while still loving literature. I’d say my appreciation for the written word has enhanced substantially since beginning my PhD, where I’ve been exposed not to a single, ideologically rigid view of literature, but in fact a wide range of reading practices, some of which look a lot like what Tost prefers in his scholarship. The academy’s flaws are myriad, but “PC culture” and knee-jerk “cancelling” of canonical authors is not one of them. If people like Dreher want to talk about people capitalizing on trends, he should maybe focus instead on the alarming trend of universities overpaying administrators and consultants to the detriment of the faculty.

#Rod Dreher #The American Conservative #graduate school #literature #English literature #Tony Tost

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mindful-air · 5 years

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5.7.19: Finals Schedule

Thur: 5/9 Last Politics Class Lecture

Tue: 5/14 Part 1 Politics Final (Multiple Choice)

(chpt5&6)

Wed: 5/15 Last Western Civ Class Lecture

Thur: 5/16 Part 2 Politics Final (6 Paragraph Essay) (one concept from three different class note subjects: market failure, comparing decision environments, economic model of political behavior and government failure + include examples that show these three concepts in the real world)

Mon: 5/20 Western Civ Final (multiple choice, work sheet of 5 quotes ‘who said what’, & essay (put the people into 2 groups & find out who doesn’t belong)

Mon: 5/20 Psych Final (multiple choice chpt 2,3,7)

^ ask to make sure the chpts are correct bc I have other chpts written down

Tue: 5/21 Mathematics Final

(This is just for me obviously so I know what’s going on lol god help me finals week is upon me...)

#finals #journal entry #schedule #studyblr

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x-15 · 7 years

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I was going through my Western civ notes and found a doodle of the Vostok 1 module that just says "see ya later space Yuri" holy FUCK

#??????????#pic later I'm in class

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er-cryptid · 10 months

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Achilles and Homeric Values

-- Homer’s work emphasized the protection of one’s pride and one’s family and property

-- Achilles was the fiercest warrior on the Greek side

-- he stopped fighting because his pride was wounded, as a king refused to give him his war prize

-- Homer wrote Odysseus as pure, Hector as good, but Achilles was the most human

-- Achilles’ lover Patroclus sees the Greeks are demoralized

-- Patroclus puts on Achilles’ armor and leads the Greeks

-- Patroclus dies at Hector’s hand

-- this enraged Achilles -- his lover killed -- Trojans thought they could kill him -- his honor and family assaulted

-- Achilles fights again

-- he calls out Hector

-- Hector dies

-- Achilles desecrates his body

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greenhouse-studies · 11 months

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Day 30 • 100 Days of Productivity

all my notes today were digital and i couldn’t get a good picture of my screen, so here’s a picture of my laptop and the book i’m reading! can you tell i’m originally from ann arbor? i moved away when i was 10 but i got a bunch of stickers when i was visiting last and now my computer is decked out.

as for the work i did today, i finished chapter 6 for western civ and then wrote my essay for english. i don’t have to turn in the essay yet, we have peer review on monday, but it needed to be mostly done. i also had PT in the morning which leads me to my next thing…

it was super hard to do this today. i have POTS and i’ve been very dizzy and lightheaded today. i almost fainted at PT today and i couldn’t stand for most of the day without immediately sitting down. the only way i got my work done was with my mom’s help in walking me to our home office. but i still got it done!

i want any other chronically ill students to know that 1) it’s still possible to get work done but also 2) if you cannot do your work one day bc of your chronic illness, please don’t feel like a failure. listening to your body and resting is just as productive as doing work because you’re preparing yourself and setting yourself up to being able to work later, and that is so so valuable! i admit i pushed myself a lot today, but that’s because i know i have all of tomorrow off where i don’t have to do anything other than rest, but if i needed to take today off and do stuff tomorrow, it still would have been a good choice

🎶 june - florence and the machine 🎶

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ericfruits · 6 years

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December 2006: Tanta joined CR!

CR Note: Gone hiking! I will return on Thursday, Oct 4th. There will be a few posts on Tanta today. In December 2006, my friend Doris "Tanta" Dungey started writing for Calculated Risk. When some people say that here are few women bloggers in finance and economics, I remind them that Tanta was the best of all of us! From December 2006, until she passed away from ovarian cancer on Nov 30, 2008, Tanta was my co-blogger. Tanta worked as a mortgage banker for 20 years, and we started chatting in early 2005 about the housing bubble and the changes in lending practices. In 2006, Tanta was diagnosed with late stage cancer, and she took an extended medical leave while undergoing treatment. While on medical leave she wrote for this blog, and her writings received widespread attention and acclaim. Here are excerpts from her first two posts: From December 2006: Let Slip the Dogs of Hell

I still haven’t gotten over the fact that there’s a “capital management” group out there having named itself “Cerberus”. Those of you who were not asleep in Miss Buttkicker’s Intro to Western Civ will recognize Cerberus; the rest of you may have picked up the mythological fix from its reprise as “Fluffy” in the first Harry Potter novel. Wherever you get your culture, Cerberus is the three-headed dog who guards the gates of Hell. It takes three heads to do that, of course, because it’s never clear, in theology or finance, whether the idea is to keep the righteous from falling into the pit or the demons from escaping out of it (the third head is busy meeting with the regulators). Cerberus is relevant not just because it supplies me with today’s metaphor, but because it was the Biggest Dog of three (including Citigroup and Aozora, a Japanese bank) who in April bought a 51% stake in GMAC’s mega-mortgage operation, GM having, of course, once been renowned as one of the Big Three Automakers until it became one of the Big Three Financing Outfits With A Sideline In Cars. I tried to find a link for you to Aozora Bank’s announcement of the purchase, but the only press release I could find for that day involved the loss of customer data. They must have been so busy letting GMAC into the underworld that the dog head keeping the deposit tickets from getting out got distracted. ... Now, I’m just a Little Mortgage Weenie, not a Big Finance Dog, but bear with me while I ask some stupid questions. Like: how do the Big Dogs maintain “diverse and flexible production channels” (i.e., little mortgage banker Puppies to sell you correspondent business and little broker Puppies to sell you wholesale business) when “market share currently held by top-tier players” expands to two-thirds (meaning less diverse off-load strategies for the Little Puppies in the “production channels,” putting them at further pipeline/counterparty risk unless they become Bigger Puppies, which makes them competitors instead of “channels,”), while at the same time watching some of the Little Puppies (in whom the Big Dogs have a major equity stake) crawl under the porch to die? I know Citi doesn’t seem to have noticed that the “increased regulatory scrutiny” is not just of “products” but of “wholesale operational/management controls,” but I did.

And from December 2006: On Hybrids, Teasers, and Other Mortgage Guidance Problems

First of all, a “hybrid ARM” is called a “hybrid” because it is, basically, a cross between a fixed rate and adjustable rate mortgage. Before the early 90s, an “ARM” basically meant a one-year ARM. The initial interest rate was set for one year, and the rate adjusted every year. The only real variations on this theme involved shortening the adjustment frequency: you could get an ARM that adjusted every six months instead of one year. Around the early 90s, the “hybrid ARM” was introduced. It had an initial period in which the rate was “fixed” that didn’t match the subsequent adjustment frequency: this is the classic 3/1, 5/1, 7/1, and even 10/1 ARM. The whole idea of the hybrid ARM was to provide a kind of medium-range risk/reward tradeoff for borrowers and lenders.

CR Note: If you want to understand the mortgage industry, read Tanta's posts (here is The Compleat UberNerd and a Compendium of Tanta's Posts). Also see In Memoriam: Doris "Tanta" Dungey for photos, links to obituaries in the NY Times, Washington Post and much more. https://ift.tt/2R4iXBh

#IFTTT #Feedly

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just-cause-im-bored · 7 years

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¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#I am so...... easy..... omfg #so in western civ today the guy who sits next to me got there late #and missed like half the notes #so after class I asked if he wanted the notes and he was so surprised!!!! and so he took pics of my notes and asked for my name 😍#this sounds so lame when I write it out but like. it was a Big Deal to me #his name is Miles btw #so now I can add one (1) mini-crush / sudden infatuation to my list of things I'll never do anything with #honestly I'll be so surprised if we talk more #but. it just made me happy I did that. >//< it sound so lame omg

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womenintranslation · 7 years

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WiT's Flash-freeze Survey #11: Scott Esposito

1. Who and/or what are you reading, watching, or listening to in order to preserve your ability to persevere right now? I'm trying to keep in touch with the long narratives of Western Civ to maintain a sense of perspective. So that will probably mean a fair amount of philosophy, some classics. Marilynne Robinson also keeps me going always. 2. What was your favorite text—article, manifesto, book, etc.—written and/or translated by a woman in 2016? Just one, really? You're making this hard. 2016 was the year I treated myself to the collected work of Szymborska. That's pretty hard to beat. 3. What book(s) written and/or translated by a woman due out in 2017 are you particularly looking forward to? (Translators, editors, publishers, publicists: share previews!) Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin is an amazing debut novel. A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault edited by Joanna C. Valente is going to be challenging, moving, and so necessary. I have high expectations of Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaoji. And then there's Prose Architectures by Renee Gladman. 4. What do you think are the most important actions for translators to be taking right now? Be visible to your representatives and your fellow Americans. Call the House and the Senate. Write them letters. Share how you feel on social media. Write to your local newspaper. Organize events with marginalized writers, and go help out at the local food bank. Protest in the streets. Practice self-care. Be good to one another. Schedule one or two long-term projects and keep touch with them a little every day. Celebrate the fact that you get to work with beautiful languages and are friends and colleagues with people who appreciate that.

#WiTsurvey

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republicstandard · 6 years

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The Crying Child Argument: The Left’s Immigration Hysteria

With the media outrage about separation of families still running hot, the hysterical manipulation and hypocrisy could fairly be described as Peak Crying Child, with even the Washington Post calling out Time magazine for that absurd cover.

To listen to the media and their obedient audiences, the only thing that should be done is to admit these poor souls—all desperate, needy people—to the land of free milk and honey. This, and only this, is supremely and consummately moral.

If you have been following this column for any length of time, you know that whenever the Cathedral and the Left start talking about compassion and empathy, the bite of the Empathy Worm is not far behind.

While the forces of the Left and the Cathedral Right—establishmentarian Republicans, “proposition nation” civ-nats, etc.—will almost invariably reduce their arguments to emotion and personal feeling, and to vicious attacks on anyone who sides with Orange-Hitler’s incarceration of brown children in dog cages, they will sometimes attempt to appeal to history.

Here we encounter two standard arguments: If you’re not Native American, your ancestors were immigrants and European settlers stole the land from the Native Americans.

Both of these claims are of course factually true, but as we’ll see, there is a rhetorical tension between them. For now, let us boil them down to the famous words from the poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, which adorn the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

You can read The Atlantic’s take on the whole thing and what it means here (never let it be said that we at Republic Standard do not empower dissenting voices).

Where is the compassion and the empathy for the citizens of the Western nations whose national resources, borders, and identities the open-borders activists are so happy to hand-wave away?

So, what we have is in essence two leftist arguments: Crying Child, and Statue of Liberty. We have three distinct arguments if you count Europeans stole the land from the Native Americans as a separate argument—we’ll call this one First Thanksgiving for now.

Let’s start with Crying Child. The first problem with Crying Child is that it is based on emotion rather than logic. In fact, it erodes critical thinking. Let me be clear: if you believe Crying Child, you are making yourself dumber.

There are indications that the migrant flow to the United States is discretionary, consisting of economic migrants who would rather live in the United States as opposed to desperate, needy people (who we simply have to help because Crying Child).

Writing for National Review, Rich Lowry explains that the underlying issue is a previous policy of failing to enforce the border with regard to adults traveling with children:

“The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.

“It’s the last that is operative here. The past practice had been to give a free pass to an adult who is part of a family unit. The new Trump policy is to prosecute all adults. The idea is to send a signal that we are serious about our laws and to create a deterrent against re-entry. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry a felony.)”

There’s a great deal more to it, and the whole article is worth a thorough read, but our focus here is the weaponization of emotion. The short version is that if an adult claims asylum, the government will probably detain the adult longer than they are legally allowed to detain the child, although this is fixable.

Failing to enforce the border has also resulted in an influx of unaccompanied minors, notably back in 2014. Writing for NPR in July 2014, John Burnett explained that human smugglers had helped to smuggle in “the 57,000 unaccompanied immigrant children who’ve been apprehended in South Texas since October [2013].”

Illegal aliens have been using other people’s children to enter the border, and here it should be noted that the border crossing business is dangerous and fraught with abuse for the illegal aliens who attempt the journey.

If your only concerns are humanitarian, there is still a perfectly good case for enforcing the border so that fewer people attempt to make the journey with children who may or may not be theirs—or worse, send their children north with human smugglers to be intercepted by the Obama administration and handed over to human traffickers.

By the way, on the subject of being humanitarian, is it only the U.S. federal government and various state governments which must be humanitarian? For all that the Cathedral media and their creatures are happy to practically defend the good name of MS-13’s violent animals (tongue planted only partially in cheek), would it be too much to question the good judgment or parenting skills of the parents who either show up at the border with kids in tow or who send them on their way with smugglers?

Fifty-seven thousand unaccompanied kids intercepted in South Texas from October 2013 to July 2014. Asylum requests up 1,700 percent from 2008 to 2016. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announcing that 80 percent of asylum seekers at the southwest border are not eligible to enter the country. Is there no point at which one can begin to question the backstories, honesty, and basic decision-making skills of the people flooding the southern border of the United States?

A more fundamental point, of course, is what about the citizens of the United States? This same line of inquiry applies to European nations afflicted with mass migration encouraged by the cosmopolitan, trans-national elites in Brussels and in Berlin.

Where is the compassion and the empathy for the citizens of the Western nations whose national resources, borders, and identities the open-borders activists are so happy to hand-wave away?

The advocates of mass migration brandish the rhetorical Crying Child from the Third World, but are only too happy to hand-wave away any question of the costs of illegal immigration, in terms of crime and government spending.

Granted, illegal immigration is also linked to mildly cheaper produce, but this is taking us far indeed from Crying Child.

If we care about the citizens of a country—in the reactionary view, if a power-strategy of fairness prioritizing the citizens of a country prevails—then should immigration not be in the national interest?

A practical problem with Crying Child is that once the principle is established, the only real question is “How many millions?” In other words, if the principle is established that any denizen of a Third World country can show up at the border, claim asylum with a rehearsed script about a credible fear of persecution, then how many millions should we take?

If immigration to the United States is to be driven by Crying Child, by anyone from the Third World with a hard lunch story, how many millions must we accommodate? Let’s try to find a few numbers.

Mexico is the country most prominently associated in the American mind with illegal immigration, although many migrants are from Central American nations—Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras. Now, Mexico ranks as the world’s 68th richest country, out of 189 assessed, according to Global Finance’s 2016 rankings.

For a bit of context, number 1 is Qatar, and the U.S. is number 13. If we follow Crying Child “logic,” shouldn’t we seriously consider most people from the 121 countries poorer than Mexico? Who cares about that stupid gumball video from 1996, anyway?

youtube

One hundred twenty-one countries poorer than Mexico is a lot of people, so let’s start adding them all up. We’ll start with number 69, Lebanon:

69). Lebanon: 6,229,794 70). Iran: 82,021,564 71). Azerbaijan: 9,961,396 72). Belarus: 9,549,747 That’s four places, and we’re already looking at over a hundred million. These are fantasy numbers where immigration is concerned.

But c’mon, we’re all really interested in the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Immigration from these countries, much of it illegal, has increasingly become the focus of media and public policy attention.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, as of 2015 there were about 3.4 million Central American immigrants in the U.S., making them 8 percent of the 43.3 million total immigrants. Of that 3.4 million, 85 percent were from the Northern Triangle countries, and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection intercepted “nearly 46,900 unaccompanied children and more than 70,400 family units” from those same countries in fiscal year 2016 alone.

So, going back to our handy Global Finance list, we hop around until we find El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and we order them not alphabetically but by their ranking (which coincidentally puts them in the same order): 113). El Salvador: 6,172,011 119). Guatemala: 15,460,732 135). Honduras: 9,038,741 Total: 30,671,484

That’s admittedly less than California, which has over 39 million, but more than Texas, which has over 28 million.

So long as we’re tossing around air-castle numbers, according to the World Bank 10.7 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, on less than $1.90/day, as of 2013. By the numbers, that’s 767 billion people. This is actually an improvement: in 1990 the number was 1.85 billion.

Living in abject poverty in the Third World—in any part of the world—is surely ample grounds for a hard lunch story. Once we have affirmed the principle of Crying Child as the deciding factor in whether someone is admitted to the United States or other Western country featuring a lavish welfare state, the only question left is how many of those 767 million people we are going to take.

But what about America’s history of immigration? Aren’t we a nation of immigrants? If Crying Child won’t work, perhaps Statue of Liberty will provide a different emotional attack vector for tearing down borders.

A little history: early immigration from the British Isles and to some degree the European continent to the American colonies and then the fledgling United States occurred during the age of sailing ships, when the Atlantic crossing was relatively costly. As a result, for the period from ca. 1600-1800, many people paid for passage through indentured servitude.

In the 19th century, however, steam power began to replace sails, and between this and networks of migrant finance, the costs of migration from Europe to America plummeted. The resulting Age of Mass Migration from Europe lasted from the mid-19th century until a literacy test was imposed in 1917, followed by quotas in 1921. America was not the only destination of the 55 million migrants who left Europe during this period, but the country did absorb nearly 30 million of them.

This history is rich and complex, not least because of the shift from Northern and Western Europe, which accounted for more than 90 percent of migrants in 1850, to Southern and Eastern Europe, which accounted for 45 percent of migrants in 1920, compared with only 41 percent from Northern and Western Europe. These diverse migrants had diverse skills: some were comparable to native-born Americans, while others were disproportionately poorer.

Overall, there were broad-spectrum similarities between the levels of development of many of the European countries the migrants hailed from, and the United States. Indeed, the immigrants played a very important role in the development of the burgeoning industrial economy in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. From 1880 to 1920 alone, the American manufacturing sector underwent a four-fold expansion of employment.

All of this expansion had positive effects: by 1913, American industrial output accounted for one-third of global production, more than the United Kingdom, France, and Germany put together. Living standards and purchasing power increased.

There was also a frontier until 1890, when the Census Bureau officially announced that it had ended, meaning that in addition to jobs there was cheap land—the more since rural-to-urban migration is another feature of this period.

The contemporary U.S. faces a far less rosy situation, as rents that rise faster than wages push an increasing number of Americans into homelessness. In 2017, Zillow found that 79 percent of American renters who had moved within the last 12 months had experienced an increase in rent, with 57 percent citing this as a factor.

Some 30 percent of households nationwide report either financial struggles, or that they are merely getting by. And 51 percent of Americans do not have sufficient savings to last them three months.

With so many Americans struggling financially, how can one justify immigration? There are already an estimated 43.3 million immigrants, with an estimated 10 million of them illegal aliens.

How can the open borders advocates be so callous, so utterly lacking in compassion toward their fellow citizens who are already struggling, that they would want to invite millions more people into the country to compete for the limited pool of lower-skilled jobs and drive up the costs of housing? (And how does that medicine taste, open borders advocates?).

This very point, that mass migration and open borders would impoverish the United States, was recognized by none other than Bernie Sanders during his campaign in 2015. There’s a fun irony here, given this column’s previous dismissal of the “Kingfish of Burlington’s” many economically illiterate ideas.

Economically and demographically, America has long since ceased to be the country that it once was, a developing country in a position to reap massive dividends from European migration beginning in the mid-19th century and lasting down to the early 20th century. In that period, immigrants were rocket fuel to the economy. In our own time, they are more likely to be a drain on the welfare state, as Steven Camarota explains:

“A further area of contention in the immigration debate is its economic and fiscal impact. Many immigrant families prosper in the United States, but a large fraction do not, adding significantly to social problems. Nearly one-third of all U.S. children living in poverty today have an immigrant father, and immigrants and their children account for almost one in three U.S. residents without health insurance. Despite some restrictions on new immigrants' ability to use means-tested assistance programs, some 51 percent of immigrant-headed households use the welfare system, compared to 30 percent of native households. Of immigrant households with children, two-thirds access food assistance programs. Cutting immigrants off from these programs would be unwise and politically impossible, but it is fair to question a system that welcomes immigrants who are so poor that they cannot feed their own children.

“To be clear, most immigrants come to the United States to work. But because the U.S. legal immigration system prioritizes family relationships over job skills — and because the government has generally tolerated illegal immigration — a large share of immigrants are unskilled. In fact, half of the adult immigrants in the United States have no education beyond high school. Such workers generally earn low wages, which means that they rely on the welfare state even though they are working.”

To the extent that we are carrying these people on our backs, whether in part or in whole, the debate can stop there: this is a fundamental difference with the immigrants who came through Ellis Island and built a prosperous industrial economy even as the frontier was settled.

In fact, the Statue of Liberty argument is another iteration of Crying Child: another argument based on emotion and (selective) empathy rather than reason.

From the reactionary perspective, these “arguments” are both too silly and childish to be taken seriously.

Historic immigration from Europe built America. Modern immigration from the Third World, some of it illegal, imposes many costs on America. Once this is understood, sentimental appeals to the notion of a “nation of immigrants” carry no water.

Of course, leftists are fond of invoking America’s history, when it can be used to guilt-trip white people. This brings us finally to the First Thanksgiving argument.

I’m fond of pointing out that leftists’ focus on the European colonization of the Americas is spectacularly selective, as anyone who has read of Alexander’s conquest of Achaemenid Persia or Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul can attest. Migration, invasion, and conquest have been major themes in human history for a very long time, not only in Europe but across Eurasia, Africa, and everywhere else.

Steven Pinker has gone to great lengths to document humanity’s history of violence, and how it has declined in recent centuries thanks to the advance of modern civilization and many civilizing processes. To hand-wring over the Europeans’ seizure of the Americas while failing to acknowledge humanity’s universal history of violence is a tremendous exercise in special pleading.

There’s also a tremendously funny tension between the argument that the Europeans stole the land from the Native Americans, and therefore the United States is not legitimate, and the argument that if you’re not Native American, your ancestors were immigrants too—and therefore you should let in the next set.

These two arguments are supposed to reinforce each other—stolen land plus immigrant ancestors equals open borders and demographic replacement—but by invoking the fate of the various Native American cultures variously swamped by European conquistadors, settlers, miners, rubber-tappers, etc., the leftist actually provides an excellent argument for halting immigration.

From the reactionary perspective, these “arguments” are both too silly and childish to be taken seriously. Throughout history, tribes, city-states, nations, and kingdoms have acquired territory through the law of adverse possession, which is simply a fancy way of saying “They took it fair and square.”

When a polity is confronted by immigration, it may find the immigration to be a net benefit or a net cost. In the case of the former, it may well encourage immigration. In the case of the latter, it may seek to control it. If it fails to do so, the amount of immigration is likely to exceed the amount desired by the government.

Note that none of this is contingent upon ultimately fatuous questions about who can be said to be the true, original, or genuine owners of land X, Y, Z, or the other one. Now of course, once a polity acquires a land, it has a vested interest in establishing a stable set of arrangements governing who has access to, and ownership of, which parts of that land. This arrangement may change over time for any number of reasons having to do with the dynamics of the polity; it may also be torn down through migration and invasion, such as the migration of the mostly-Germanic tribes north of the Danube and East of the Rhine into the Roman Empire in the late 4th-5th centuries.

Emotion is no substitute for reason. Once Crying Child is invoked, as we have seen, the only real question is How many millions—and who pays?

It is perhaps the ultimate irony that those invoking empathy and compassion as a basis for allowing unauthorized mass migration from the Third World are happy to hand-wave away national borders, identities, and resources, imposing costs on their fellow citizens in order to feel better about themselves.

This very willingness to put emotion before reason, to burden others with weighty practical considerations in order to thoughtlessly unburden one’s own keenly-honed feelings of moral distress, is precisely why the Crying Child argument is so contemptible.

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