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kim-ruzek · 3 years

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The unit beyond Hank Voight: or how Intelligence should look if/when Voight is written out

Finally, part two. This was very fun to write and I'm glad I actually did it before season nine airs (I'm cutting it late I know!!!). I've had how I'd want the show to do this in my head for the longest time-- although, I'll say, I technically get to the root of this further into the meta, after the second header. So if you don't want to read it all and just my general thoughts, you can just skip on down to that! But I hope you read it all!

In this fandom, as a whole, no matter what ship or characters are our faves, we've all be debating whether or not it's right to still have Voight as the lead, or if they should write out his character.

If we break it down, take out all the nuance and the external and internal factors, I say yes. But if we don't, it's much more complicated than that.

I watch Chicago pd primarily for Burzek, that is why I decided to emotionally exhaust myself with a new show. But I liked that it was set in Chicago, and it lent into all the bad/darkness of Chicago, and not just on the streets, but the cops (even if they can and should do better there, because it's still very much on the side of bad cop propaganda).

And like it or not, Voight is a big part of that. People call him an anti hero, and by definition, he is, but I struggle to like addressing him as such. But the way that he is, his characterisation, it is woven into the very essence if the show, into the unit, into their dynamics and group chemistry.

This is why it's a complicated matter, that should Voight be written out is not a simple question with either yes or no as the answer. Or, at least, not just a yes or a no.

Taking Voight out of the unit isn't like taking out Jay or Kevin, or any of the others. The other team members are easily replaced. Of course, their specific dynamics and chemistries will never be replaced, it's a sign of a badly written character and storyline if it is. But they are, in the grand scheme of things, replaceable. It is as easy as having Jay transfer one episode and introducing a new detective the next. (The only other exception, I should mention, is Trudy. You get rid of Trudy and you'll just get a desk sargeant as a replacement, with none of that chemistry in any way).

Voight is different. He's the lead-- and leads are always harder to move out a show without it crumbling-- and he's the literal leader of the unit. Every dynamic within the show is interlinked through Voight's character even if Voight has no impact on the dynamic. And so you can't just write him out one episode and then introduce a sparkling new sargeant the next-- especially if the sargeant is a pre-existing character.

A lot of this fandom wants Voight gone asap and Jay as sargeant immediately after. That's just unrealistic and honestly it would be a bad move on the show's half to do so. In general, I don't want Jay to be sargeant. Not even for the reasons I'm about to list-- well, not just them-- but for personal ones. However, if it's in a few seasons time, I'd be more up for that, if the show gave time to improving his character-- even if I'd still grumble to myself about it!

As I said, removing Voight's character and immediately replacing it would already be a bad idea because of how much the show's dynamics are mixed up in him. Jay being the replacement would fuck this up even more, because he's already got his own dynamics with his unit.

Jay is definitely a leader type character. He was brought in to be. I could see him being a sargeant, and he's definitely the 'big brother' of the unit, even if they're all around his age. He definitely can have a clear head and is tactical and has that aura that people would be comfortable following his lead.

But he's also ignorant, impulsive and selfish. People say he'd make a good sargeant because of his morals-- but they're very much surface level morals. It's actually why I can see what drew him to joining the military, not just that want to leave, but he's clearly got a good-bad black and white line drawn in his head and this is what makes the military attractive to him.

Jay always thinks he's in the right. And technically, on the surface, he is. But he misses the nuance and he gets very caught up in his black and white view. This is what also makes him impulsive. He mentally, clearly, orders people into the good and bad categories in his mind and then he's pretty rigid in them-- jumping to conclusions.

He's got a good heart, but he doesn't take much time to stop, think and learn. Like with the racial issues prevalent and blm, he's only got a surface understanding and he does not make any effort to get a deeper one. Mainly because he doesn't realize-- because he thinks a lot of himself, in his black and white view. He is "good" and he cares that people suffer and therefore he thinks he understands.

He does not.

Say what you want about Adam-- and I'll be leaving my own personal biases out of this-- but even if you say he has a worse understanding than Jay, he's better because he makes more of an effort. He gets that he doesn't understand, and he's brash and vocal when he shouldn't be, but he also listens. And he tries to learn, he really, really does.

Jay doesn't. And Jay's also from canaryville. He went to Catholic school, Catholicism was clearly very prevalent in his life growing up. His father was an emotionally closed off man. He went to war. He's got his own biases but he's got this basic understanding and thinks that's that.

It's not. And it's barely okay with his current position in the unit, and it would be definitely not okay if he was their leader. Especially if he did what the greater part of the fandom wants, and leans on Hailey. Which let's face it, he would, because Jay doesn't think he has anything to learn and what he may think he does he thinks he can do it on his own, that he doesn't need to ask Kevin for guidance.

And yeah, Kevin is "only" an officer (and I'll get back to this point). Jay's got the higher role. But Kevin has been a black man, living in Chicago... Oh yeah, all of his life. That trumps promotions and titles, especially when Kevin has also been a cop for a lot of his adult life and has raised two kids in this racially charged city.

And then there's the fact that-- and most of this is because the show refuses to show the team bonding-- he's actually quite isolated from the team. We rarely get to see his supposed friendships with them, and this would affect how he can lead them and how they can follow. The dynamics would be off and it would be filled with conflict and, at times, be like a herd of sheep without their shepherd.

So, Ree, you ask. How should the show move on from Voight?

The show has been incredibly short sighted when it comes to Voight. He's been a problematic character from the literal start, and now we're reaching a point that a lot of the fans want him gone. And since the most vocal are the upstead and Hailey stans, I do believe the show will be thinking of ways to do this.

In my opinion, this should've been built up from season five, from when the reform storyline began. Instead, the show just shaved some aspects away from Voight's character.

He has changed a great deal, has grown a lot. I don't see what happened with Roy as a sign he can't change, because everyone's journey has back and forths. Especially when Voight likes to have control when people are hurting his family, he sees himself as their protector, but not as a bodyguard, but as an executioner.

And so I think the show will do two things to eventually write him out-- either promote him, or have him retire. But even this isn't simple and needs a lot of build up and work.

The show should've seen that Voight's days are potentially numbered and set up things so it's easy to slot his exit in place. For example, they should've kept consistent with having a captain in the precinct, even a lieutenant. This would have pre-existing roles for Voight to slot into easily, so they can still have his character around but let other characters get promotions or take on more work.

This would also help set up for retirement. Because even if he just retires as a sargeant, we already have other leader characters in the show for the others to bounce off-- instead of just introducing someone new. This would also help a sargeant Jay storyline, because then he'd have bosses to report too, making it very much seem that he is just the next link in the chain and would help balance out those dynamics.

Although, in a way, I don't blame them for not having foresight in season five. For other reasons but also-- because back then we also had Antonio and Al. We had a more layered and diverse unit. Instead, now we have the dad and the five children. Antonio would've made a good next sargeant, especially if we introduced a lieutenant role. Because I can see him aiming higher and helping to groom Jay into his replacement. Especially if Al was still around as a nice wall to bounce off, although it'd still be okay if we didn't.

Antonio would also be a good stepping stone because he had well developed relationships with every member of the unit. Well, apart from Hailey, but if they went down this route, they could've nurtured a dynamic there.

It would've also helped if they replaced their characters when they wrote them out. I get why they didn't. Al leaving made the partners even numbered, Rojas was after Antonio. And I wonder if covid affected their ability for season eight. But it's still the massive problem-- they keep trimming the fat, when it's unnecessary and not believing that maybe they should fix that.

And of course. They're all young. Even when they did bring in others, they're still young. And officers. And that would be okay, if they actually bothered promoting Kim, Kevin and Adam.

The unit's dynamics and feel is already off because of the lack of diversity in characterisation, race and age. And the show is doing nothing to fix this, and Voight should not leave until they have. Especially when against popular belief, history actually shows that Voight doesn't like blank slates, but people whose core characteristics fits what he wants his unit to be.

So: what does life after Voight look like? Well, hopefully, a more racially diverse group, with more age differences, different dynamics and friendships explored, Jay (and Hailey) being called the fuck out on their biases, more out of unit bosses dynamics to stop it being so insular and a happy ending exit for Voight. Because let's be real here-- Voight is not going to be written out by going to prison.

Even if he deserves it because one-- the unit would not survive that and they'd be repercussions for all and two-- realistically, as he was in prison once, the brass would not let this happen because how it would reflect on them.

In this day and age, they'd rather force him to retire quietly than publicly admit they got him out of prison and now is putting him back in. It may not be right, but realistically, they'd cover their ass first.

#ree has thoughts #that no one asked for #chicago pd #hank voight #jay halstead #<- bc i talk A LOT about sargeant jay

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yellowmagicalgirl · 3 years

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Once and Maybe Future Chapter 14: Incognito Patrol

When Nimue sees a girl with far too many hairclips and radiating dark magic, it's up to her and Douxie to save Arcadia.

Heyyy, yes I know it's been over six months since I last updated and this fic is now very much not canon compliant. At least this chapter is half the length of all the previous chapters combined.

Originally this was going to be a single chapter covering the events of both "Night Patroll"/"Terra Incognita II" as well as "So I'm Dating a Sorceress" and "The Exorcism of Claire Nuñez", but due to the length I decided to only have it cover the events of "Night Patroll"/"Terra Incognita II" in this chapter; another chapter is going to finally get around to the Clairegana-and-Douxie confrontation and not just the aftermath.

AO3

FFN

It was a normal day at the Zimue records store.

Which was to say, it was absolutely boring, but there were enough customers around that Nimue couldn’t practice magic… or even really do homework for her independent study courses, considering that her manager was here today.

The door opened and closed with a blast of warm late May air.

Nimue shivered and grabbed the counter as the flashback overtook her.

Nimue-the-first did not leave her lake often. She was busy enough with her forge, and she didn’t care much for most people, especially not in crowds. She frowned as she saw wagon tracks on the road; she was getting close to a village or at least a farm. She preferred for her adopted son and his family to visit her rather than the other way around. They may be royalty, but she was a sorceress and far older. They could show her some respect.

Instead, she’d be paying her last respects to her son and her daughter-in-law.

There was a war outside her lake, and there was dark magic fueling it beyond what the Gumm-Gumms could normally use. It had been a long time since she had last seen Uther’s stepdaughter or her green-eyed gaze, but Nimue-the-first knew that Morgana had corrupted herself and was fueling the war. That, or the war was fueling Morgana; Nimue-the-first could feel it in her bones.

Nimue’s bones ached as she was released from the flashback to her first lifetime. She glanced around, trying to figure out just what had caused the flashback this time. However, there was nothing new in Zimue, nothing that would’ve set her off, and definitely not anything that would’ve caused her to flash back that far. Nimue inhaled deeply, trying to see if maybe Douxie was cooking something up next door, potion or otherwise. That had set her off once. She had been tempted to tell him then and there the truth about why she had magical powers, but she had stopped herself. Wizards were normal. Relatively rare compared to most of humanity, but normal.

Reincarnation, as far as she knew, was not. Heck, every legend about King Arthur returning was propaganda, so it wasn’t like he’d reincarnate, much less anyone else from her first lifetime.

It was kind of lonely, walking around with so many memories of bygone eras, but it had been Nimue’s life since she was twelve. Besides, the magic was more than enough to make up for it.

Then again, Douxie would never practice dark magic, and even if he wanted to surely Archie would stop him. She squeezed her eyes as she manned the register. She felt worse with every customer, though it was possible that she just was getting a headache and mistaking it for dark magic. Dehydration, maybe, as ironic as it was.

A girl stepped to the front of the line, holding the new Papa Skull album. She had a white streak running through her dark hair, with multiple colored hairclips and a matching Papa Skull shirt. She looked a little sick, a little sleep deprived, a little younger than Nimue.

Nimue gulped as the girl placed the album on the counter. The girl smiled shyly before coughing into her elbow, loud and shaking.

Magic radiated off the girl as Nimue rung up the album. It was old, and it was dark.

Perhaps being the only one with magic and memories from bygone eras would have been for the best, as lonely as it was.

The girl walked out, taking most of the dark magic with her. There were some traces of it lying in the air like a miasma.

Nimue quickly swiped her hand over her pocket to make sure her phone was there. She’d ask her manager to let her take a break, text Douxie, and the two of them would go after the girl with the dark magic. Hopefully she was just some kid with latent talent who found a dark magical spell on the internet.

“I’m taking my lunch break,” her manager told her right before she could open her mouth. “Make sure we don’t get robbed.”

Nimue made sure her back was turned to her manager before she grimaced and hoped that she had enough hay fever that it was distorting the amount of dark magic she was sensing.

“Nimue, calm down and talk a little more slowly,” he said. They were both on break, her from her day job and him from band practice with Ash Dispersal pattern. Specifically, Hank and Raoul were off to grab burgers for their lunch.

Nimue took a deep breath. “Look, this girl came into Zimue and there was something bad about her. Like, I could feel the dark magic coming off her in waves.”

Douxie decided not to ask her just how she knew it was dark magic, though he did wonder. For someone who had had no training outside of spell books on the internet and his father’s attempted tutelage of the two of them, she progressed remarkably fast. Douxie hoped that Nimue wouldn’t be able to sense years-old dark magic. “Okay, do you want me to fake being sick and go after her?”

“Uh… she left the shop an hour ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Douxie was secretly glad. Nimue’s reaction to dark magic users scared him.

“Because my manager already doesn’t like me and this was the soonest I could go on break… it could be hay fever, but I made sure to take my allergy meds and I don’t think it is.”

“Okay, okay, well, what does this girl look like?”

“Uh… brown or black hair with a white streak, green, wait, no, brown eyes…” That certainly didn’t narrow down the field that well, but it did help affirm the fact that there was something about the girl Nimue had seen that had her spooked. “Oh, yeah, she was wearing a Papa Skull shirt, and hairclips? Uh, like, two, no, three, no, there might’ve been more… it’d be easier if I could show you.”

“Nimue, we both know that the extent of your drawing abilities are runes and stick figures.”

“No, not a drawing, there’s surveillance video in the store, and she came straight up to the register.”

“Isn’t that illegal? Somehow? We don’t need the law coming in and messing things up somehow.”

“I mean, technically the improvements on your pipes might also be illegal since you didn’t tell your landlord about them and they’re also giving you extra water.”

Douxie grimaced; he still wasn’t entirely sure if one day he’d have to deal with the magically enhanced water turning what was supposed to be his dinner into a potion of some sort.

Zimue closed at 7 PM every day, so at 9:30 PM Nimue snuck out of her house to break in. Her parents thought that she was sleeping after having prepared for finals she’d be taking. She wore a beanie and long sleeves to cover up her dyed hair and magically induced tattoo.

“Douxie, I thought I told you to do something that would make you less recognizable,” she said. He was wearing what he wore every day, except he didn’t roll up his sleeves.

He dramatically placed his hood over his head, and then awkwardly tucked his dyed bangs behind his ears. “Why’d you want the water bottle?” he asked, pulling one out of his pocket.

“For this,” Nimue said, sighing wistfully. She preferred shopping for clothes in the women’s section, but she missed having space in her pockets. She took the water bottle, uncapped it, and then upended it. As she handed the water bottle back to him, she made a swirling motion with her other hand.

Another good reason for wearing long sleeves: her tattoo was probably glowing right now.

A thick fog surrounded the two of them and the storefront.

“Oh. Cool,” Douxie said.

“Wish it could’ve been a smoke bomb instead of a steam bomb, but this is good enough, I guess,” Nimue said. “Besides, we don’t want to set off a smoke alarm.”

Douxie knelt next to the door, pulling out a pair of straightened paperclips. He inserted them into the lock, wiggling them around. His expression grew frustrated, and he closed his eyes. When he stood up once more, he held the lock with one of his hoodie sleeves.

“I thought you could pick locks,” Nimue said. “Well, without magic, anyways.”

“Last time I picked a lock I was in foster care, and before that…” Douxie stared off into the distance, a morose look on his face.

“Before that?”

Douxie blinked and put on an obviously fake smile. “Eh, tragic backstory stuff.”

“That joke stopped being funny halfway through ninth grade.” Nimue pushed past her friend and opened the door. Fog filtered in, covering the cameras. “Okay, so we keep the security footage over this way.”

Douxie closed the door behind him. “You know, I don’t even know if the magic shop has security cameras.”

“Good thing mystery dark magical girl came here, then.” Nimue pulled up the footage. “And good thing my boss showed me how to go through this in case we ever get shoplifted from or anything. Not that we probably will, ever. At least, if we do it’s probably gonna be on my day off. And, there!”

Douxie looked over her shoulder at the slightly grainy video, taking a photo of the girl. “She goes to our school. I saw her outside Mrs. Barros’s office last year. I think she’s a year younger than us?”

Nimue groaned, standing up and beginning to erase the evidence that she and Douxie had broken in. “If she’s a year younger than us, then she might be a member of that stupid pilot program where freshmen could graduate in a year and a half.”

“I can ask the guys; they might know since they still go to actual school.”

“Make sure you get a name; it might make it easier to go after her.”

“Hey, Nimue?” Douxie asked. She threw a glance over her shoulder as she locked up the store.

“Yeah?”

“What are you going to do to her, once we find her?”

“I don’t know exactly, but she’s got dark magic. She’s dangerous, and we’re the only non-dark wizards in Arcadia. We need to stop her.”

Douxie gave her the same sort of faraway, morose look that he did whenever he accidentally shared a detail about his childhood before foster care. Without a word, he turned away and walked to his apartment.

Nimue let the enchanted fog roll away and began to walk home. She tried not to think about Douxie’s question too much. Anyone who used dark magic had to be evil since they’d know better than to use it. They deserved what was coming to them.

“Hey, does this girl still go to our school?” Douxie asked, holding his phone out to the other members of Ash Dispersal Pattern.

“What, do you wanna ask her, wait, no, sorry, forgot you were gay,” Raoul said. Honestly, Douxie was still a little surprised that he had even had to come out to Raoul and the other guys last October. After all, Douxie trying out for Ash Dispersal Pattern had been him trying to confess his crush to Hank back in freshman year. Not that it mattered, anymore, since all the other guys in the band were straight and Douxie had moved on from his crush six months after the band had formed. “Uh, I don’t know?”

“Nimue saw her at the record store, fiddling with a ring, and she dropped it. Nimue found it after she’d left, and she wanted to try to find a way to give it back to the girl. I remembered seeing her outside of Mrs. Barros’s office last year, but I’ve got no idea about if she’s in the year-and-a-half program.”

Hank walked over and squinted at the photo. “She doesn’t go to our school; she transferred to mole high. She’s friends with my ex; the girl’s name’s Claire. Do you want me to go over?”

“Dude, Mary isn’t gonna get back together with you,” Dominic said.

“No, well, I have no idea about Hank’s ex. But no, I’ll go over,” Douxie said.

“Hand out the Battle of the Bands flyers when you get there, will ya?” Douxie took the stack of papers from Dominic. Good, now he actually had a reason to go there.

Multiple female students of Arcadia Oaks High swarmed Douxie, but not as many of them grabbed the flyers he was passing out. None of them were Claire, either. One of them mentioned the nickname that Nimue hated. Personally, Douxie wasn’t sure why it was such a problem; Hank had gone through a phase where he’d called everyone by their first initial, but there were two guys with a name starting with the letter “d” in the band and Dominic was significantly shorter than Douxie. Therefore, “Big D” and “Little D”.

A girl pushed through the crowd and tripped, dropping her books. Douxie knelt next to her helping her grab her books, and then he felt the waves of dark magic coming off of her. Something about them felt familiar, but how? Douxie placed a smile on his face.

“C-Bomb, is it? Consider me blown away, because you are nuclear.” If she knew that he was a wizard, then she would understand that this was a sign of respect. A sign that he recognized her power, but also a sign that he recognized the danger she radiated.

She smiled back but said nothing. Hmm. Maybe Nimue’s theory of Claire being an inexperienced wizard who accidentally cast a dark magic spell was possible, but that powerful without knowing how to sense for magic? That was strange. Perhaps she was goading him?

A boy in blue walked up to them, slinging his arm around Claire’s shoulder. “So, what brings you to our humble school?”

The boy placed a hand on Douxie’s chest, pushing Douxie away as Claire began to cough. That was nice of him. Something about the boy felt oddly familiar, and not just because Douxie remembered seeing him at Benoit’s multiple times. No, Douxie almost felt caught in a feedback loop, like he had sent his own magic outwards and then it got sent back at him. Almost. The magic that got sent back felt purer, less tainted. Innocent, and not yet marred by necromancy.

“The Battle of the Bands is coming up,” Douxie said as he handed a flyer to Claire. “Ash Dispersal Pattern – that’s my band – will be crushing this.” And maybe the hand motion Douxie made was a little too threatening, but there was something odd and Douxie felt like he had to do something to show a little of his strength. Not too much, but enough to make himself seem like he wasn’t a victim. “But, we’re encouraging others to give it a shot.”

Claire coughed again after congratulating Douxie on Ash Dispersal Pattern’s headline performance for Papa Skull last fall. Douxie couldn’t help but wonder if it were a regular cold, or if perhaps the illness were magical in nature. If so, maybe he, Nimue, and his father could find –

No. Douxie would have to help her on his own. Nimue and his father thought that dark magic users were evil and dangerous. They would probably advocate for letting Claire die if the illness caused by her own meddling in dark magic, or perhaps the two of them would grant “mercy” to Claire by killing her. They would probably do the same for Douxie if they ever found out the truth.

Two girls rushed over to Claire, exclaiming that they should be a cover band. Neither of them seemed to have anything magical going on, but Douxie was pretty sure one of them was Hank’s ex.

“I don’t know,” the boy said, pushing Douxie away once more. “We’re pretty busy with our after-school activities.”

Hmm. Were Claire and the boy perhaps trying to learn magic together, much like Douxie and Nimue were?

Claire took the flyer back from the boy and agreed with the girls about starting a band. Douxie glanced to his hands and quickly put them in his pockets. They were empty, and they were trembling. But why? Claire seemed powerful, but not necessarily threatening.

“I look forward to seeing you again, Fair Lady Claire,” Douxie said before walking away. Yes. Perfect. That was exactly the right amount of respect to show to a fellow wizard whose diplomatic position towards you was still unknown but was clearly dangerous due to her clearly dark but hidden power. It was good to know that, after a millennium and a half for everyone else and eight years for himself, his diplomatic training as a prince had finally paid off. If only his parents, Merlin, or Uncle Kay could have been alive and in the right mind to see him.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. This whole morning was stupid. Nimue had been so stupid as to tempt fate. She glanced up from the tile she was trying to kill with her eyes when the door opened and closed, and her best friend walked into Zimue Records.

“Everything okay?” Douxie asked.

“We got fucking robbed,” Nimue said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen to me! If this was going to happen, why not on my day off?”

“Well, at least you have security cameras. Was anyone hurt?”

“No, though the shoplifters played dumb like they didn’t know what shoplifting was. Ugh. At least some cop got there so no permanent damage was caused and I didn’t even need security cameras. How’d flyers go?”

“Fine, I found Claire.”

“Okay, and?”

“And what?”

“And what have you done about her? Fireballs? Potions turned Molotov cocktails?”

“What? No! I’m not blowing up our rival school, and neither are you! No, I just got a feel for her, and I treated her with the proper amount of respect.”

“Proper?”

“Yes. Given that she’s powerful, I called her by the term Lady,” Douxie said as Nimue smacked her forehead. “What? There’s no need for her to immediately want to kill us for disrespect!”

“Douxie, this is why people think you’re straight.” She wrinkled her nose. “Please tell me you’re just being cheeky when you call me Lady Nimue and not trying to curry favor.”

“I’m being respectful to you because you’re my friend… but also sometimes it bugs you.”

Nimue rolled her eyes. “Okay, so what are we going to do about Claire? You have any ideas about how to fight a dark wizard?”

The door opened and closed, but no human walked in. “You two won’t be.”

“You told him?” Nimue said.

“No, but he should have,” Archie said. “You two are louder than you think.”

“I didn’t want you to worry,” Douxie mumbled.

Archie raised an eyebrow at Douxie. “Between raising you,” he said before turning to Nimue, “and teaching you my fur has gotten plenty grayer without the two of you taking needless risks like tracking down a dark wizard.”

“But she could be hurting people! And we’re the only ones in Arcadia who could save the day! If we pull off some sort of sneak attack – “

“You won’t be,” Archie said. “If the two of you are to be fighting another wizard, which you won’t be, I expect you to fight with honor.”

“She’s a dark wizard. She’s evil.”

“Or she’s young and hasn’t had the training that you have. She might not know the difference between regular magic and dark magic. After all, did you know the difference when your powers first awoke?”

Nimue’s breath caught in her throat. Of course, she did; she knew so many things instinctually from her past lives.

“Or Claire’s desperate,” Douxie mumbled, breaking Nimue from her thoughts. Archie turned to him.

“That’s not an excuse to use dark magic, and it’s especially not an excuse I want to hear coming from your mouth – either of your mouths,” Archie said. “If this girl turns out to be a danger to others, or to be using dark magic while being fully aware of the consequences, then fine. I will guide the two of you in planning an attack. But I do not want either of you getting near this dark wizard without me. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Archie,” the two of them said in unison.

“Good. Now, how is studying for finals going?”

#toa zoe #claire nuñez #hisirdoux casperan #jim lake jr #toa archie #tales of arcadia #trollhunters #3below #once and maybe future #my writing #toa mordred #ash dispersal pattern #tight jeans hank

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thesethingsofours · 4 years

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Parents are the Worst.

I recently began listening to Nice White Parents, a new podcast hosted by self-confessed nice white parent, Channa Joffe-Walt. It’s produced by the people in and around Serial, This American Life, S-Town and The New York Times. If you are familiar with those titles, you’ll know what to expect – in-depth, considered analysis of a heretofore, under-exposed social issue, executed with an East Coast progressive liberal stride; a pleasingly audible, irreverent gait and the swagger of emotional intelligence and self-aware humility. Through research, interviews and attaching herself to the Brooklyn School of International Studies for several years, Joffe-Walt tells the story of the New York Public school system and its apparent failure to meaningfully integrate itself since Brown v Board of Education made racial segregation illegal over 65 years ago.

In episode 2, Joffe-Walt tracks down and interviews some nice white parents from around the time the school opened in 1963. These people had written letters encouraging the school board to erect the school building closer to their own neighbourhood (and consequently further away from the darker-skinned families it was more likely to serve). They expressively emphasised their wishes to send their kids there and virtuously aid the process of integration, which they believed to be morally imperative.

But apparently, none of these letter writers subsequently sent their kids to that school. It remained, as anticipated, a predominantly non-white school. Laid alongside the tense machinations of the contemporary school’s invasion by a large new cohort of white parents and their issue, Joffe-Walt’s hypothesis is that white parents have always held liberal aims, and the clout to impose them, but do so with little consideration for their non-white counterparts or any real commitment to seeing through the incumbent practicalities. From the outset, this natural conclusion is persistently hinted at, not least from the podcast’s deliberately provocative title. Perhaps, on an individual level, this hypothesis contains some truth.

However, as the story extends, the blame gains weight and the theory mutates into a generalised accusation. Responsibility for the mediocre state of New York’s (and by implication, America’s) public schools is explicitly laid at the pale feet of white parents. It's an exposition of what is often described as “White Guilt” and its corresponding effort at contrition (i.e. the guilt felt from the inherited sin of one’s ancestors’ oppression of non-white people, primarily through slavery). While White Guilt might have its conceptual uses for a few people to come to terms with idea of race (although even there I am sceptical), its value as a wider social narrative is deeply unconvincing, and potentially damaging. Nice White Parents does a good job showing why.

In the podcast, anecdotal evidence is drastically extrapolated to justify White Guilt. Unless backed up by unequivocal data, it is inherently flawed to base so much on interviews with a handful of people in their 80s about a letter they wrote in the 60s, and (in episode 3) a now middle-aged woman about her perception of school when she was 13. Equally so is to use the example of a single New York school to imply that nice white parents are universally responsible for all the failings of American public schooling. A quick empirical comparison with countries unburdened by America’s racial psychosis would almost certainly reveal this argument to be fundamentally false. I hazard to suggest that Joffe-Walt set out, either consciously or subconsciously, to prove the theory of Nice White Parents, and has therefore fallen into the trap of verification bias.

Of course, the truth is likely to be far simpler – green, cheddar, dead presidents and moolah (which middle-aged white people in American disproportionately possess). Better schools arrive from broad, deep and perpetual community investment – from good, affordable housing and well-paying jobs to well-paid teachers and decent facilities. That means higher taxes on the wealthy and better provincial management. If a completely non-white school district received $50 billion to invest in their community with educational improvement as its ultimate goal (that or the abolition of private schools), I suspect the idea of nice white parents would quickly evaporate.

It is plainly a damaging distraction to focus on the role of supposed-predisposed-racism of well-meaning, middle-class people, who simply want the best possible education for their children. Instead, the message for the “hereby accused” should be to use their numerical majority and voting power to advocate for systems that would reduce inequality, regardless of race. In this respect, it strikes me that wealth is a sacrosanct subject in America, something that one can never apologise for having too much of. Quite the opposite – the culture is built on celebrating those who hoard capital. Is it possible that Americans are taught never to apologise for having money, so those who see something wrong develop other issues, such as race, for which they can atone?

More deeply, the podcast reveals how the White Guilt narrative is in ideological conflict with the very wrong it is supposedly trying to right. Taken to its conclusion, it inevitably reinforces the idea that white people are innately superior, and race is the primary determining factor for success in American life. In the context of the podcast, it is applied to suggest that New York public schools are destined to fail their students unless white kids and their parents get involved. It is gloriously ironic that condemning the influence of white parents on public schools serves to reinforce the supposed inferiority of non-white participants in the education system… because of their lack of whiteness. At the end of episode 3, Jaffe-Walt lays this out:

Nice white parents shape public schools even in our absence, because public schools are maniacally loyal to white families even when that loyalty is rarely returned back to the public schools. Just the very idea of us, the threat of our displeasure, warps the whole system. So “separate” is still not equal because the power sits with white parents no matter where we are in the system. I think the only way you equalise schools is by recognising this fact and trying wherever possible to suppress the power of white parents. Since no one is forcing us to give up power we white parents are going to have to do it voluntarily, which, yeah how's that going to happen? That's next time on Nice White Parents…

(Consider replacing every mention of “white” in this excerpt with “affluent”. Would that not feel infinitely more true?)

In fairness, the honourable, “anti-racist” intention is clear – in order to defeat “white supremacy” white people need to accept their inherited and systemic superiority and eliminate it. Sadly, any idea centred around race – whether malicious or well-intentioned – is bound to collapse under even the slightest pressure. To be truly anti-racist is to recognise that race itself doesn’t exist (other than as an abstract concept that, having infected people’s perceptions after four centuries of concerted, localised propaganda, must be eradicated). Race has no basis in science or nature; it cannot be quantified in any reasonable, measurable way. Simply, it is a lie; invented to excuse the exploitation of others for the purposes of wealth-generation. To base one’s actions on it in any way is to take a leap of faith into a void with no landing. Race is a malignant, empty God; belief in which is destined to lead to malignant, empty behaviour. “Racism” and “Anti-Racism” (as it is currently understood) are therefore both empty, malignant religions, practiced in service of a non-existent deity.

Notably, there are still two episodes to go (released August 13th and 20th). Either might serve to recover some balance. But by episode 3, the stage is not only set for this conclusion to be drawn, but the 1st Grade nativity is in its final scene and the wise men are long since gone.

All that said, if you let the incessant racialization of all things drift past you rather than choking on it, as plain entertainment – storytelling rather than journalism – it’s still an engaging listen; well-constructed and convincingly told. Furthermore, on a non-racial level (if you can somehow listen beyond it), the podcast does have some value, since it reminds me of something I have long half-joked about – that parents (of all stripes) are the worst.

Aside from the obvious, complex Freudian reasons, on a socio-political level, when a choice arises between a laudable, achievable change and putting one’s own children at a perceived disadvantage in order to effect it, a parent will choose its child’s advantage almost every time. No matter their colour, few parents will sacrifice their own child’s prospects – even minutely – to advance the hypothetical children of someone else, or society more widely. Parents are company directors whose primary obligation is to their miniature, genetically-derivative shareholders – they’ll only vote for large-scale change if it is net-profitable or government-imposed.

And of course, parents should pay their kids the maximum dividend. Who else will? A parent is legally and morally obliged to do the best for the young life they are charged with defending. And therein lies the joke. Parents are the worst only because they are ubiquitous. They created you, me and everyone else. We all had them, and most people end up being one. It is therefore less of a criticism than an inevitable, evolutionary truth – just one we should probably be more honest and upfront about. Unknowingly, underneath (and in some ways, because of) its misguided, exhausting racial handwringing, Nice White Parents just about makes this point.

Listen to Nice White Parents here or wherever you get your podcasts.

#nice white parents #podcast #parenting #education #race relations #critical thinking #review #podcast review #npr #this american life #new york times #capitalism

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unfortunate-stranger-losers · 5 years

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Six Baudelaires AU, Part Three {AO3} {Masterlist} {Part One} {Part Two}

Chapter Twenty-Six → in which the harpoon is fired

By the front of the pond, Dewey said, “I was really hoping you’d show up soon. Kit said she wasn’t sure when she could pick you up.”

“If you’re a Denouement,” Nick asked, giving him a curious glare, “Why don’t we know about you?”

“I stay hidden in the hotel. Frank and Ernest get all the attention, while I hide in the shadows and wind the clock.” He gave the Baudelaires an enormous sigh, and scowled into the depths of the pond. “That’s what I don’t like about VFD. All the smoke and mirrors.”

“Oh, there’s a lot more to hate about your fucked-up-” Nick began.

“Smoke?” Sunny asked.

“Smoke and mirrors,” Klaus explained, “Means ‘trickery used to cover up the truth.’”

“Before the schism,” Dewey said, “VFD was like a public library. Anyone could join us and have access to all the information we’d acquired. Volunteers all over the globe were reading each other’s research, learning of each other’s observations, and borrowing each other’s books. For a while it seemed as if we might keep the whole world safe, secure and smart.”

“That must have been wonderful.” Lilac said.

“I wouldn’t know.” Dewey said. “I was four years old when the schism began, scarcely tall enough to reach my favorite shelf in the family library- the books labeled 020. But one night, just as our parents were hanging balloons for our fifth birthday party, my brothers and I were taken.”

“Taken where?” Violet asked.

“By whom?” Sunny asked.

“Well,” Nick said, very darkly, glaring daggers at the pond, “Take a wild fucking guess.”

Dewey followed Nick’s gaze. “The woman who took me said that one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. And she took me to a place high in the mountains, where she said such things would be encouraged.”

“The Headquarters in the Valley of Four Drafts.” Violet said.

“Did your parents miss you?” Lilac asked hesitantly.

“They perished that very night in a terrible fire.” Dewey said. “I don’t have to tell you how badly I felt when I heard the news.”

The Baudelaires sighed, and then Nick said, “Yeah, a little suspicious, isn’t it? Your parents burned to death the same night VFD saw fit to drag you all out.”

Violet nodded grimly, while Lilac and Klaus gave Nick careful looks, and Solitude and Sunny gasped quietly. Dewey scanned him with his eyes. “You would get along with Ernest.” he said finally.

“I don’t get along with a lot of people, especially not people from your-” Nick shut his eyes, breathing deep. “I hope you don’t expect to recruit us, it’s a bit hard to drag us by the ankles out of our home when it’s been ash for a few months now.”

Dewey didn’t meet his eye. “With each generation, the schism gets worse, and there are less noble places and less noble people.”

“Or maybe that’s just your bullshit propaganda.” Nick hissed.

“Nick, please-” Lilac began.

“I’m not letting this cult bullshit us anymore, Li. They want us to die for their fucking Sugar Bowl without telling us anything about it, they kidnap kids for their recruits, they-” Nick shut his eyes, and Solitude gave him a soft hug.

“I understand your hesitation, Nick.” Dewey said. “After what happened to you-”

“You could have done something.” Nick said.

“I’m afraid we couldn’t, and I’m sorry.” Dewey said. “But everyone is like the men in the elephant poem. We only have fractions of the truth. But hopefully, Thursday, that will all change.”

“How?” Klaus asked, glancing at Nick and also starting to look concerned.

“At long last,” Dewey said, “All of the noble people will be gathered together, along with all the research they’ve done, all the observations they’ve made, all the evidence they’ve collected, and all the books they’ve read. Just as a library catalog can tell you where a certain book is located, this catalog can tell you the location and behavior of every Volunteer and every villain. For years, while noble people wandered the world observing treachery, my comrade and I have been right here gathering all the information together. We’ve taken every crime, every theft, every wicked deed, and every incident of rudeness since the schism began, and catalogued them into an entire library of misfortune. Eventually, each crucial secret ends up in my catalog. It’s been my life’s work. It has not been an easy life, but it has been an informative one.”

“So you’re, like, a librarian taken to the max.” Violet said.

Dewey smiled a little. “Your parents used to call me a sub-sub-librarian, because my library work has been largely undercover and underground. Every villain in the world would want to destroy this evidence, so it’s been necessary to hide my life’s work away.”

“That’s gotta be a huge fuckin collection.” Nick said, still looking incredibly skeptical. “Where could you hide something that big?”

“Right here.” Dewey said.

Sunny understood first. “Pond!” she said.

“Exactly!” Dewey said. “The truth has been right under everyone’s noses, if anyone cared to look past the surface. The real last safe place is where the sign is not backwards- at the bottom of the pond, in underwater rooms. Our enemies could burn the entire building to the ground, but the most important secrets would be safe.”

“Then why are you telling us this secret?” Solitude asked.

“Because you should know.” Dewey said. “You’ve wandered the world, observing more villainy and gathering more evidence than most people do in a lifetime. Who better than you to keep the world’s most important secrets?”

Nick tensed up, and Lilac said, “What do you mean?”

“After Thursday, you won’t have to be lost at sea anymore, Baudelaires.” Dewey said, smiling at them. “I hope you decide to make this your permanent home. I need a mechanical genius who can repair anything that comes her way, and someone with an inventive imagination who can improve on the aquatic design of the catalog. I need someone with the heart of an explorer who and a researcher who can work together to expand the catalog until it is the finest in the world, and a herpetologist who can advance her field of interest. And, of course, we’ll need to eat, and I’ve heard wonderful things about Sunny’s cooking.”

Nick was stone silent, as Sunny grinned over at the sub-sub-librarian. Then, Violet asked, “The people at the hotel. Did you call them?”

“Yes. The Noble people of this world have been looking to help you for some time, Baudelaires.” Dewey said. “People just as noble as you.”

“We’re not noble.” Lilac said.

“We’ve caused misery wherever we went.” Violet nodded.

“You’re noble enough, Baudelaires.” Dewey said. “That’s all we can ask for in this world.”

Lilac shut her eyes to keep herself from crying. Violet and Klaus grabbed onto each others’ arms, and Solitude and Sunny leaned on shoulders.

Quietly, Nick said, “Sure, we’re noble enough. But are you?”

Before Dewey could answer- if, indeed, he heard him- a taxi drove up. The Baudelaires jumped, but Dewey said, “Don’t worry, children. It’s an associate.”

“Who?” Sunny asked.

Just then, a woman stepped out of the taxi. “Thank you,” she said to the driver, “My suitcases are already here.”

They recognized her voice immediately.

“Justice Strauss!” they all cheered, even Nick, and they raced forwards.

“Baudelaires!” Justice Strauss beamed, rushing towards them as the taxi left. She held out her arms, and Lilac reached her first, throwing herself at her and hugging her as tight as she could. Violet came next, and soon everyone was clinging to the Justice as if she was the last stable thing.

“Justice Strauss!” Lilac started to cry, and Violet said, “How did you find us?”

“Oh, I’ve been looking for you for so long!” Justice Strauss said. The children pulled away to look at her, and she said, “As soon as that dreadful banker took you away, I knew I had done the wrong thing, and when I heard the dreadful news about Dr Montgomery, I began searching for you. Eventually I found other people who were also trying to battle the wicked villains of this world, but I always hoped I would find you myself, if only to say how sorry I was.”

“You were looking for us.” Violet repeated joyfully.

“You were trying to help.” Klaus said.

Nick’s face flickered. “You… met other people? Are you a… a Volunteer now?”

“You could say that.” Dewey came up behind them, smiling. “She has helped us immeasurably. She has reported the details of your case to the other judges in the High Court, and done critical research on injustice.”

“Whenever I looked for you, Baudelaires, I found selfish plots to steal your fortune.” Justice Strauss said. “I wrote us a book to help with the trial- Odious Lusting After Finance chronicles the history of greedy villains, treacherous girlfriends, burgling bankers, and all the other people responsible for injustice.”

“All of them?” Nick asked, adjusting his hold on Solitude.

“Wait,” Violet interrupted, “What do you mean it will help with a trial?”

“That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you.” Dewey said gently. “VFD has researched an entire catalog of Olaf’s treachery. On Thursday, Justice Strauss and the other judges of the High Court will hear from each and every one of our volunteers. All of the villains will finally be brought to justice.”

“You’ll never have to hide from Olaf again,” Justice Strauss said, “Or worry that anyone will steal your fortune. You just have to wait for the trial, and all your troubles will finally be over.”

“Well,” said a familiar and very unwelcome voice, “Wouldn’t that be something?”

The Baudelaires tensed up, and immediately, Nick let out a small scream. Lilac pushed him behind her before she could turn around, and the group saw, as they did, the very villain they were discussing, standing at the edge of the pond. He looked around to give the orphans a wicked smile.

“Count Olaf.” growled Justice Strauss, putting one hand on Violet’s shoulder and one on Klaus’s, pulling them a bit closer.

“Isn’t this touching?” Olaf smiled wickedly, his eyes darting between the children. “I finally have you orphans in my clutches.”

“We’re not in your clutches, rat bastard.” Violet said. “We’re just standing in roughly the same area.”

“That’s what you think, orphan,” Olaf said, “But I’m afraid that man is one of my associates. Ernest, hand them over.”

“I’m not Ernest.” said Dewey.

“Alright, then, Frank, hand them over.”

“I’m not Frank, either.”

“You can’t fool me!” Olaf took a step forwards. “I wasn’t born yesterday! You’re one of those idiotic twins!”

“Triplets. Triplets run in my family, not twins.” Dewey said. “I’m Dewey Denouement.”

“No, you’re not.” Olaf said. “Dewey Denouement is a myth, like unicorns or Giuseppe Verdi.”

“For the love of God,” Klaus snapped, “Giuseppe Verdi is an operatic composer!”

“Silence, bookworm!” Olaf ordered. “Children should not speak while adults are arguing. Hand over the orphans, adults!”

“Nobody’s handing over the Baudelaires!” Justice Strauss said, and with that, she pushed Violet and Klaus behind her, reaching forwards to grab onto Nick and Lilac, too. “You have no legal right to them or their fortunes!”

“I would suggest you watch yourself.” Olaf said with shiny eyes. “I have associates lurking everywhere in this hotel.”

“So do we.” Dewey said. “Many Volunteers have arrived early, and within hours the streets will be flooded with taxis carrying noble people here to this hotel.”

“How can you be sure they’re noble people?” Count Olaf asked. “A taxi will pick up anyone who signals for one.”

“These people are associates of ours,” Dewey said fiercely. “They won’t fail us.”

“You can’t rely on associates.” Count Olaf said. “More comrades have failed me than I can count. Why, Hooky and what’s-her-face double-crossed me just yesterday and let you brats escape, and then stole my submarine!”

“Good for her.” Sunny said, almost unfazed, too furious at Olaf to feel much fear at the moment.

“We can rely on our friends more than you can rely on ours.” Violet said.

“Can you?” Olaf gave them another awful grin. “Can you, really? How many people have failed you again, Baudelaires? Including that woman right there? How many people have you thought you could trust who couldn’t help you? How many people refused to help you?”

Nick shuddered, and shouted, “It’s not their fault! It’s yours! Everything is your fault!”

“Really? I thought I told you, Nick,” Olaf said, in a dark voice, “Exactly whose fault it was.”

Nick stepped forwards, shouldering past Lilac, though he stayed far back enough that Solitude wouldn’t be in danger. “What they did doesn’t matter. You made your own choices, and you chose to be a murderer, a thief, a pedophile and a monster. They didn’t make that choice for you, and I don’t want to hear your bullshit anymore!”

The Baudelaires and Justice Strauss looked to him in confusion. “What are you talking about?” Violet said.

Nick bit his lip. “It doesn’t matter. Don’t listen to him.”

“Ah, so there are some things you haven’t told them.” Olaf smiled wickedly. “Just as there were things your parents never told you.”

“Our parents were noble people.” Lilac snapped.

“Really?” Olaf raised his eyebrow. “You think that, Lilac?”

Nick growled, “Say one more word and I will rip your throat out.”

“Nick.” Justice Strauss looked shocked; she’d never seen the boy sound so violent, or look so enraged.

“Why don’t you ask Dewey to tell you, then?” Olaf said. “Ask him what your parents did at the opera with their poison darts.”

Dewey flinched back, just as Nick said, “Lilac, hold Solitude, I’m going to take out his vocal chords first.”

Lilac stepped forwards to take her, before they heard a call of, “Oh, don’t ask Frank that stupid question. I’ve got a better one.”

They looked to see Esme emerging from the hedges, flanked by Hugo, Colette and Kevin, with Carmelita dancing around them, waving her harpoon gun like a baseball bat.

“Fuck, Esme, tell her not to wave that around. We don’t want to waste harpoons.” Olaf said.

“I won’t waste harpoons! I’m too adorable!” Carmelita said.

“And I don’t want to waste time, darling, like you have.” Esme strutted past Olaf, glaring down Dewey. “We wanted to talk about the Sugar Bowl. Carmelita shot down the stupid crow with the harpoon gun Violet gave her.”

“You brought her that harpoon gun?” Justice Strauss asked.

Violet looked to her, panic flitting across her eyes. “I had to perform concierge errands as part of my disguise. What else could I do?”

“I hit two crows!” bragged Carmelita. “Now Countie has to teach me to spit like a real ballplaying cowboy superhero soldier pirate!”

“Don’t worry, dear, he’ll teach you.” Esme said. “Won’t you, Olaf?”

“Whatever.” Olaf sighed.

“Anyway,” Esme said, “The crows fell onto that birdpaper- who hung that out the window again?” She turned to her minions behind her. “One of you talked to Ernest, right?”

“That would be Klaus.” Kevin said.

“Klaus, you hung the birdpaper?” Justice Strauss asked.

“Ernest told me to.” Klaus said, grabbing onto Violet’s hand. “I had to obey him as part of my disguise. What else could I do?”

“The crows hit the birdpaper and dropped the Sugar Bowl.” Colette reported. “And it fell down this weird funnel thing.”

“A laundry chute.” Esme sighed. “Everyone knows that, freak.”

“Don’t call them freaks!” Lilac said.

“But they are.” Esme said.

“Why do you stay with her?” Violet asked, moving forwards to put a hand on Nick’s shoulder. “You could be noble people.”

“Not really.” Hugo said. “Nobody will ever accept us.”

“Of course they will.” Dewey said. “You still have a choice.”

“So do you, Frank.” Esme said. “Tell me where the Sugar Bowl is, or die.”

“That’s not a choice, and I’m not Frank.”

“Fine,” Esme said, “You have a choice, Ernest. Tell me where the Sugar Bowl is-”

“Dewey.” Sunny said.

Eme blinked at her. “What?”

“Yes,” Olaf said, looking very annoyed that Esme had taken his spotlight, “Apparently he’s real, not like Verdi.”

“Is that so?” Esme turned slowly to him. “Someone has really been cataloging everything that has happened between us?”

“It’s been my life’s work.” Dewey said.

Esme’s face darkened, and she took one threatening step forwards. “Then you know all about the Sugar Bowl, and what’s inside. You know how important that thing was, and how many lives were lost in the quest to find it. You know what it means to Volunteers and Firestarters alike.” She pointed one, painted-silver fingernail at Dewey. “And you know,” she said in a terrible voice, “That it is mine.”

“Not anymore.” Dewey said.

“Beatrice stole it from me!”

“There are worse things than theft.”

“There certainly are.” Esme growled, and her eyes flickered to Nick. “Aren’t there?” She stepped back, and said, “Tell me how to open the door to the laundry room, or this little girl will harpoon you.”

“I’m not a little girl! I’m a ballplaying cowboy superhero soldier pirate!” Carmelita said. “And I’m not going to shoot any more harpoons until Countie teaches me how to spit!”

“You’ll do what we say, Carmelita,” Olaf growled. “I already purchased that ridiculous outfit for you, and that boat for you to prowl the swimming pool. Point that weapon at Dewey this instant!”

“Teach me to spit!”

“Point the weapon!”

“Teach me to spit!”

“Weapon!”

“Spit!”

“Weapon!”

“Spit!”

With a raspy roar, Count Olaf roughly yanked the harpoon gun out of Carmelita’s hands, knocking her to the floor. “I’ll never teach you how to spit as long as I live!” he shouted.

“Darling!” Esme gasped. “You can’t break your promise to our darling little girl!”

“She’s a spoiled baby!” Olaf said. “I never wanted a brat around anyway! It’s about time she was shown some discipline!”

“But discipline is Out for darling little girls such as her!” Esme said, as Colette moved to help Carmelita to her feet.

“I don’t care what’s Out and what’s In!” Olaf cried. “I’m tired of having a girlfriend obsessed with fashion! All you do is sit around rooftop sunbathing salons while I run around doing all the work!”

“If I hadn’t been on the roof, VFD would have gotten the Sugar Bowl, and I was guarding-”

“Nevermind what you were doing!” Olaf said. “You’re fired!”

“You can’t fire me! I quit!”

“Well, you can leave by mutual agreement.”

At that moment, Solitude said, “Can we please just leave now? Babbitt needs to pee.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Olaf turned, pointing the harpoon gun at Dewey, “We’ll make this fast so we can all leave. Tell me how to open the Vernacularly Fastened Door and search the laundry room!”

“You won’t find the Sugar Bowl in the laundry room.” Dewey said. “The lock is a decoy.”

“Decoy?” Olaf said.

“How do you not know what a decoy is, you piece of fuckshit?” Nick asked, reaching back to grab Klaus’s hand.

“Of course I know what a decoy is, Baudelaire!” Olaf hissed. “But if the lock is a decoy, then the sub-sub-librarian won’t mind telling me how to open it.”

“Sure.” Dewey said, though Lilac glanced towards him and realized he was only trying to sound calm. “The first phrase is a medical condition that all six Baudelaire children share.”

The Baudelaires exchanged a look.

“The second phrase is a weapon that left you an orphan, Olaf.” Dewey said.

Nick stared very hard at his feet.

“And the third,” Dewey said, “Is not the chorus of Row Your Boat.”

At that, Nick gasped. He shot up and said, “You know? You… you know! And you’re still with them!”

“Don’t you understand by now?” Olaf hissed. “They don’t think as much as they claim they do.”

Nick whipped towards him. “You’re no better, shithead! And I don’t give a shit how fucked up they all are, if it means they can kill you and set your corpse on fire!”

“And none of this matters!” Olaf said. “I don’t have time to examine the Baudelaires! If I don’t hear the exact phrases used to open the lock by the count of ten, I will fire this harpoon gun and tear you to shreds!”

“Are we still here for this?” Carmelita asked Esme, looking bored. “I want to go play in the mud.”

“Just one moment, darling, Mommy’s watching a Volunteer die.” Esme said.

At that, Lilac turned to her siblings, just as Olaf counted, “One!” They all shared a look of agreement, even Nick, who was occasionally glancing at Olaf with contempt. “Two!”

“Stop, in the name of the law!” Justice Strauss said.

“Three!”

“Stop!” Lilac shouted, and the Baudelaires immediately raced in front of the adults, shielding Dewey themselves.

“If you want to kill Dewey, you’ll have to kill us!” Violet shouted.

“Or put gun down!” Sunny said.

“I wouldn’t mind harpooning you either, orphans.” Olaf shrugged. “Four!”

“You’ll never get our fortune.” Klaus said.

Count Olaf blinked, but did not move the gun. “F-Five!”

“And,” Nick added, as each Baudelaire took a step closer to him, “I feel like this would be pretty shitty revenge, wouldn’t it?”

“Six!”

They took another step, and Solitude said, “You have a choice now, bastard. You can choose not to be wicked.”

“I feel like calling him a bastard won’t help things, Soli.” Lilac muttered.

“We call each other names all the time.” Solitude shrugged.

“Seven!”

“You can choose not to pull the trigger!” Klaus said, as they took another step.

“Please.” said Sunny.

“Eight!”

They took one step closer.

“Nine!”

One last step, and then the Baudelaires put their hands on the ice-cold harpoon gun. They tried to pull the weapon out of Olaf’s hands, but their first guardian did not let go, and for a long moment the youngsters and the adult were gathered around the terrible weapon in silence. Lilac looked at the dart, pointed right at her and her siblings, while Violet looked at the trigger Olaf held. Nick looked at the man, almost daring him, while Klaus looked at the gun itself, the weapon created to harm and destroy now held in the hands of someone who would use it for that purpose. Solitude put a hand over her pocket and stared at the man in front of her, and Sunny looked into Olaf’s eyes for even the smallest sign of nobility.

“What else can I do?” the villain asked, so quietly the children could not be sure they heard him correctly.

“Give us the gun.” Lilac said.

In that instant, they heard a loud cough behind them, and in that instant, everything changed.

In shock, Count Olaf thrust the gun into the hands of the Baudelaires. Unable to handle the weight, they felt the gun slip from their hands and clatter against the stone.

The trigger clicked, and the harpoon shot out.

“What’s going on?” Mr Poe demanded, looking ahead. “I heard people arguing. What in the world- Baudelaires?”

The Baudelaires didn’t even notice him.

Their eyes were only on the harpoon lodged in Dewey Denouement’s chest.

“Kit.” he whispered, and then, as the other adults stepped away in shock, he fell into the pool.

“Dewey!”

“DEWEY!”

The six Baudelaires raced to the pool, ignoring shouts that came from around them and from the hotel.

They dropped by the pool, just in time to see Dewey sink into its depths.

Nick shocked his siblings by letting out a shrieking cry. He stumbled back, holding a wailing Solitude close to his chest in case she fell. Lilac screamed, too, and Klaus dropped to the ground, numb, as Sunny let out a sob in his arms. Violet stumbled back, shaking her head. “He’s fine.” she said. “He’s fine, he’s fine…”

“What’s going on?” came a voice.

“I heard a shot!” came another.

Lights flickered on, doors and windows swung open, and people started to gather.

“Who are those figures?”

“Is that a body?”

“We should observe everything carefully!”

“I disagree! We should intrude!”

“Call the authorities!”

“Call the concierge!”

“Call the manager!”

“Call my wife!”

“Mob psychology.” Sunny whispered into Klaus’s shirt.

At that moment, Justice Strauss ran to them. “Baudelaires, get up.” she said quickly. “We’re getting you somewhere-”

“We killed him.” Violet said, her voice blank.

“He…” Nick looked to be in shock.

“Who are they?” shouted someone; the Baudelaires realized that guests had started to flock out of the hotel.

“They’re the murderous orphans from The Daily Punctilio!”

“They must have killed that man!”

“No.” Nick trembled, stepping back, looking for Olaf, but he and his associates had vanished into the crowd.

“Now, now! Don’t jump to conclusions!” Justice Strauss stepped towards the crowd, blocking them as she spoke. “Now, listen. If we all sit down and discuss this-”

Lilac clung to herself and shook so hard her hat fell from her head, and her bun, which was loosely tied to begin with, fell as well, letting her hair waterfall over her. Violet slowly moved to her, helping her to her feet, just as Sunny looked over.

“Taxi.”

They looked up, seeing a taxi pull into the lot.

“Should we leave?” Klaus asked, shakily standing up. “They won’t believe us.”

“They might.” Violet said.

“They won’t.” Nick said. “They’ll just make things worse.”

“But what good would running do?” Solitude said.

“Is it Kit?” Lilac asked, still shaking.

They watched as someone got out of the drivers’ seat; a man, his face covered by the shadow of a hat. Curious, and unsure of what else to do, the Baudelaires stepped closer to him, so that they were far enough away that nobody in the crowd could hear their conversation.

They looked up at the man, finally able to see his face, and Nick completely froze over. He was so still that Solitude, for a moment, thought he’d literally turned into a statue. His eyes went wide, staring hard at the man as he said, “Do you Baudelaires need a ride?”

“How do you know us?” Lilac asked, putting an arm around Violet.

The man looked at her sadly. “That’s the wrong question.”

Nick’s eyes darted from Lilac to the man and back again and back again, and he opened his mouth and closed it, as if he kept wanting to say something, thinking better of it, and then deciding again to try and speak. Solitude put an arm around him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I can take you far away from here.” he said. “Away from villainy and injustice. I can’t promise a safe or easy life, but I can promise you won’t have to face all of this.” They watched him some more, and then he said, “That is, if you are who I think you are. Are you who I think you are?”

The Baudelaires, still shaking, looked to each other, except Nick, whose gaze now adjusted to also darting to the ground instead of just the driver and Lilac. They were still trembling, and still in shock, and still trying to process not only what had just happened, but what had happened over the last several months.

Finally, Sunny said what they were all thinking. “We don’t know.”

The man sighed, and then Lilac said, “Nick, are you okay?”

He shook more, and said, “Li, I…” and then he trailed off and shut his eyes.

“Baudelaires?” they turned, seeing that Justice Strauss was calling them. The crowd was starting to go inside, and she was watching them.

“You can still come with me.” the man offered.

Lilac looked to her siblings, who looked to her, and then each other.

Then she shook her head at Violet, who shook her head at Nick and Klaus, and while Nick just shut his eyes and shivered, Klaus shook his head to Soli, who shook her head to Sunny.

“Thank you.” Violet said.

“But we can’t run forever.” Klaus said.

“We wish you well Mr…” Lilac realized he hadn’t given a name, and when the man didn’t answer her, she put her hand in Violet’s, and they walked away.

Klaus followed, carrying Sunny. Nick turned to go, and then paused. Slowly, he put Solitude on the ground and said, “I’ll be right there.”

Solitude gave him a concerned look, but knowing he needed space, she nodded and raced after their other siblings.

Nick turned to the taxi driver, and they met each others’ eyes, and they both knew what the other knew.

Slowly, Nick pulled a photo from his pocket, and held it out to the man.

“It’s her.” he said.

And when the man took the baby picture, Nick turned and left without another word.

#asoue #asoue netflix #a series of unfortunate events #asoue movie #six baudelaires au #six baudelaires official fic #the penultimate peril #mine #my fanfic

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abundantchewtoys · 5 years

Text

HS Epi: Meat p16 reaction

Reaction under the cut!

Still in the process of, well, processing the defeat of Lord English and all those deaths.

I wonder if, through some esoteric means, Jade's body would be used by Caliborn to try and escape his fate. She's an ex-First Guardian, so he might have a connection to her body. Plus, if that would happen, that would be the final time the wolf head could be connected to LE - since Jade's half dog.

Blaperile thought also of the server representing LE's DNA, running somewhere in the Furthest Ring. Maybe that fell into the Black Hole too, though?

I wonder what is even going to happen to John now. I mean, he still has the Ring of Life, someone could find him and put it on his finger. Someone like Terezi. It could be Meenah as well, in an ultimate sacrifice - she once said she'd run him through again to steal his ring, but maybe she'll sacrifice her chance at life for him. Some form of ultimate redemption for the Condesce, in a way.

If Terezi finds him, odds are she'll have found out about Vriska somehow. :/ I doubt any ghosts are left in the Furthest Ring on the one hand. On the other hand, we haven't seen any mention of any of the other trolls mentioned in the character list. Nor of GO Vriska & Terezi, though they might have double died through the cracks that encroached on them.

A third option to find John is Aradia - since she was so intent on witnessing the end of Paradox Space and seeing what'd happen if the place came falling apart.

Or maybe John will have some sort of vision, like a special afterlife, with his Dad there, before he wakes up / revives? I can only hope.

I doubt the Ring is multi-use, but if it were, it would sure be something if Meenah could be revived as well as John! And for Aradia and Terezi (and Meenah?) to come back with him to Earth C, now there's nothing left in the Furthest Ring for them. If Meenah came to Earth C, the Crocker run for president would have some serious competition! :P Not that I'd really root for Meenah to win, though, since she's quite clearly unfit to lead a country, only a strike force.

I've also got to wonder how long Andrew has been planning to have Davesprite be the one to kill Lord English? I'm sure much of what Davepeta became grew organically, as well as the other components of Lord English, but it seems to me the Davesprite part was always planned. But he sure is a master of tying in later details into the evolving story.

Like, for instance, LE biting Dave's head off reminds me of Hearts Boxcars doing the same for Eggs. Dave and eggs...

So, it was all doomed and retconned selves that were instrumental in bringing down Lord English, you know. John is pre-retcon, the other B2 kids came from a temporary offshoot. Tavros was also pre-retcon. Meenah came from a scratched session. Davesprite was doomed. All those troll ghosts were doomed. Alternate Calliope was doomed. The only exception is the Nepeta part of Davepeta, and she was so irrelevant to the timeline's major events before her prototyping as to almost not count. These were the glitches in spacetime that could kill Lord English. It's fitting, since Lord English was so focused on the main timeline and being the 'alpha', that he couldn't see where his 'doom' would come from.

Anyway. The page ended with a command to John, so I'm rather convinced the next page will continue from John's perspective.

---

"ROSE: When I was a child, I wrote a novel." Well, never mind!

Well, okay, I guess that, even though John's perspective has just ended in what could have been the ending of Homestuck, I would very much like to learn more about Complacency of the Learned and its potential ramifications as to the rest of the plot! Guess now's the moment to find out why the story isn't ending just yet.

"She has both hands resting on the chassis of his recent project, Sawtooth 3.1." Soooo... Was Sawhoo supposed to be Sawtooth 2.0? :P I wonder what improvements Dirk could be implementing. Also, whether he ever intends to use the rapbot on his show. I get a feeling most of the robots there never leave novice mode, actually.

"DIRK: Another one of those Lalonde childhood wizard fics, I presume?" Yeah, now I'm reminded of Wizardy Herbert, Roxy's supposed work. I never did get through that draft of it Andrew wrote all those years prior, I got to admit.

I'm guessing Rose has found a way to connect her old fic to the grander context of canon, realizing some of the stuff she put into the story came from her aspect?

"With the sunset behind her she’s a shadow ringed in yellow light that turns white at the tips of her hair." Pfff, circumstantial simultaneity strikes again! That's just like how Reload Rose looked. Alternatively, she has a bit of a halo right now.

"ROSE: It’s more raw. It betrays considerably more sincerity than my young self was surely ever aware of stitching into the prose." Hah, guess Rose was not as good at hiding her own feelings as she tried back then, hiding behind that passive-aggressiveness.

I wonder if this is Andrew talking about how some of his early work, maybe even early Homestuck, was a lot closer to his heart than the epic story it grew into, despite said level of epicness.

"ROSE: It meant something." Maybe adult Rose's work was too polished, too betraying of her literacy and a bit removed from the essence of what she was trying to say. That could be due to its nature as anti-propaganda aimed against Condesce.

"DIRK: Hmm." There Dirk goes again, with the autoresponder-enabling short responses.

"ROSE: For all its plainly evident amateurism as the literary product of a child, I’ve come to believe it’s a much stronger work standing alone as a single volume, its meaning and symbolism potently compressed, and its message shining through more nakedly, undisguised by the cleverness of a more seasoned writer." Again, Andrew comparing Team Special Olympics and such things to his later work?

"The plot concerns the machinations of twelve wizard children." Oh, I thought it was focused on twelve adult wizards, including Zazzerpan?

"ROSE: It isn’t their intent to commit atrocities, or within their nature to do so originally. They become corrupted by an overabundance of knowledge. The kind never meant for the mortal mind to grasp." They went grimdark. :P Also, I suppose this leads into Rose's misgivings regarding the ultimate self.

"ROSE: It certainly wasn’t the most fucked up thing I’ve ever written." ... Oh right, the MEOW code. Yeah, that must take 1st place.

"as if I were pulling inspiration from beyond myself—channeling the story, rather than writing it." Almost as if she got it from the Void more even than her then-latent aspect!

"spiderwebs of gold that dissolve into dust" ... Really, sure, go ahead, keep rubbing salt into that wound. :P

"ROSE: You could almost call the process... [...] She’s smirking now, just a little." Brace for pun-pact!

"ROSE: ...enlightened." Eyyyyy!

DIRK: It also sounds like it’s the opposite of what was going on?" Dirk also thinks it sounds more like a Void thing?

"DIRK: Sounds more like you were trapped in a sort of dire creative fugue state causing you to chart your own mental profile using metaphor revolving around murderous, omniscient children." ... So that's where the locquacious genes came from. Also in-deep-analysis.

"ROSE: Well, consider the playful pun rescinded.

ROSE: Apologies for diminishing your presence with my suboptimal health and the toll it has taken on my wordplay.

DIRK: Thanks. It’s been very difficult for me.

ROSE: You’ve been a real trouper." These two, are the best.

"ROSE: Anyway, my point is that I’ve long suspected my story was a pre-manifestation of my Seer of Light powers. I was seeing beyond my universe into another." Yyyeah, but, the analogy with the trolls doesn't hold up after the first glance, and she (or her adult self) also incorporated things from other timelines and universes. The genderqueer Cal... I forgot what the full name was..., for instance.

Meanwhile, Dave has been well aware his subconcsiousness is influencing him, and he has been looking and found the "least psychologically revealing" SBaHJ comic, as a result.

"ROSE: My original thesis was that the children represented the twelve trolls who created our universe." Ooh, so she noticed it too. Guess she might now be thinking the twelve are representations of the B2 kids, Karkat, Kanaya, Calliope and... someone else?

"DIRK: Twelve. That’s how many players went through the door at the end of our game." Riiiight, Terezi went through as well!

"When she finds herself leaning against him—probably without thinking about it, Dirk imagines, because neither of them really “do” that—he doesn’t pull away. If it’s her, it’s all right." That just shows the difference in how he and Rose behave versus he and Dave, where the distance or proximity is always a tangible thing.

"DIRK: You describe this as a fact of numerological significance.

DIRK: Which makes it seem you suspect these correlations are something less than utterly providential. As if there is a part of you holding on to the belief that certain figures are coincidental. That their significance and repetition smacks of bullshit." Heheh, there are a LOT of repeating numbers in the story though, bullshit or not. Twelve is just one of them: 4 6 10 11 12 13 25 ... Seems like Dirk holds them in higher esteem than Rose, though. If he's sincere.

"It’s unclear exactly which things are smacking, just as it’s unclear that when it comes to bullshit, whether or not smacking accurately describes what is being done per se." This metaphor has gone off track again.

"DIRK: I’m just saying it’s all evidence of a grand design. An immortal, metatextual apparatus beyond our ken that we can only catch glimpses of when we’re proverbially shitting our brains out through our nose." They can almost see Andrew. :P In-canon, the closest to such a reveal were John and Jade, but they let the moment of epiphany pass them by as they started their 3-year-long journey. :P

"ROSE: They were filled with the light of knowledge and one by one they succumbed to it, turning insane or evil or, most often, both." Ah, right, like the guy that filled that tome with knowledge and was crushed by it, that Roxy named Jaspers after.

"ROSE: If this is the effect unchecked powers have on players living in a post-canon victory state, then why isn’t it affecting any of our other friends?" Let the theories about evil power-hungry Jane commence! Though, what other effects could we even see right now, not much. Plus, Kanaya, Karkat, Terezi and Calliope won't feel the effects of an ultimate self ascension, at least.

"DIRK: Well." Don't say "now you mention it", Dirk. Please.

"some of us have stopped using our powers completely." Oh, he thinks that it's not so much power that corrupts, but the continued use of it?

"emergency resurrections" But he also doesn't seem to think then that what Jane is planning reeks of her getting slowly corrupted, huh.

"sportsball riot" I wouldn't be surprised if sportsball is an actual thing on this planet, courtesy of Dave's influence in shaping society.

"ROSE: In that case...

Rose sways suddenly." Eesh, she's starting to get woozy.

"ROSE: Maybe I was a fool for imagining I could settle down here." :/ It would be shitty for Paradox Space to do this to the players for no good reason, though. Then again, Sburb.

"occasional banter about adoption with her wife" Ooh, cool. Well, yeah, it would stand to reason Maryams like to become mothers. :)

"ROSE: I assumed it was just that feigned Strider Stoicism, but you seem to be taking this...

DIRK: In stride?" Awww-yeah. Sorry Rose, you have nothing to top Strider Dad jokes.

DIRK: But I’ve got more practice at this than you do. I spent most of my life before the game multitasking my entire fucking subconscious. I’ve had several times my age on paper to contemplate these mysteries.

DIRK: Years of prying open can after can of worms filled with answers I don’t like.

DIRK: Cut yourself on the edge more than once and you stop getting surprised by all the blood.

ROSE: I see." So it's as if, due to Dirk already having such an extensive memory from juggling dream and awake selves, he's handling all the input better. Maybe, relatively speaking, it's less that's coming in for him, too. I mean, his dream selves mustn't have gone through many different things. Plus, maybe merging with Lil' Hal does something for you to be able to handle big data. :O

"ROSE: In fact, I don’t think it’s the expansion of my powers that is causing the headaches, but rather my own resistance to it.

ROSE: Sometimes I get this feeling that I could, if I really wanted to, just let go." I think Rose might prefer to keep to her current self, if she could. Like the narration said, she's basically still a solitary creature. The expansion of experiences is proving too jarring.

"ROSE: I’m forcing myself to stumble through my life as a sleepwalker. All this pain and sorrow could go away if I would just allow myself to wake up." Between this and "letting go", it seems like an ultimate self ascension is perhaps even going to go further than the psychologically, maybe even physically. If that's so, Dirk might be further ahead but not there yet. But once they'd ascend, there wouldn't be coming back from it, I would think, and they'd leave their old lives and Earth C behind, to go to another plane of existence, maybe?

"ROSE: Because I’m not sure that the person opening her eyes will be me." ... Now I'm thinking about how the last command aimed at John was for him to close his eyes. :/ Could that mean he's about to go through a sped-up ascension?

Rose has the unfortunate occasion to compare her ascension to Jasprosesprite^2, so I very much understand she has very grave misgivings about "expanding her mental horizons", so to speak.

"Then, in a deliberate motion, he pulls off his shades." ... Say, would his eyes have changed if he merged with Lil' Hal, even just psychologically? I know the autoresponder was a pair of shades without eyes, but the Hal monitor had that red buzzing light which represented his eyeballs on at least one occasion.

"DIRK: I know I sound pretty nonchalant most of the time, but actually I’m scared shitless of myself.

DIRK: I’ve always had this uncanny ability to chart a course from A to Z and not give a fuck about any of the letters in between.

DIRK: I’m not sure anyone should be allowed to have that much foresight. Especially a guy like me." Well, that's a healthy self-assessment and fear. Though, foresight? It would be more akin to intuition, right, knowing how people responded in different situations? ... Which sounds like Mind powers, actually, come to think of it.

"ROSE: The farther above the board you fly, the harder it gets to care about the pieces." Is that part of the reason Terezi left, if she forced an ultimate self ascension on her with her Remem8er act?

"DIRK: And yes, I may be a shitty human being, but,

DIRK: As a mechanic, I’m off the fucking charts." Well, that certainly are points to Dirk being at least marginally better as an adult than Bro, if only out of self-awareness. Speaking of, does he have access to Bro's memories now, too? Also, the mechanic part is leading into the Soulbot I theorized about? Wait, mechanic... Dirk and Darkleer should have a build-off.

"Rose’s eyes have grown distant, almost mirrorlike. Dirk can see himself reflected in her vacant stare.

ROSE: All the pieces in their place.

ROSE: The mechanisms all running smoothly." Has Dirk... hypnotized her?

"She says this in a hollow tone. It’s the disarming voice a puppeteer ventriloquizes for a marionette. Her head falls toward her shoulder slowly. Dirk catches her cheek as she slides into sleep. It’s difficult for the untrained ear to spot the exact moment in their conversation when the words she was saying stopped being hers and started being his." ... What did I just watch. ... How. Why? ... Did Dirk use any Heart powers here? I can't...

"Does it really matter? In many respects, they’re basically the same person, aren’t they?" Kind of creepy to say that about your hypnotized daughter, though.

"Kindred spirits in blood and perspective, the puppet masters of the respective games they like to believe they’re playing." ... Puppets. Puppets and games. ... This is building up into a Saw reference and I don't like it one bit. "I want to play a game." ... I do hope Dirk's ascension hasn't seen him get influenced by Lord English.

... You know, though, maybe Dirk was able to influence Rose because of their strong connection, since she's so close to his self she's almost like another shard of him, more so than other people that contain shards of his essence, like Brain Ghost Dirk for Jake.

"But you already knew that, right?" Aaaaaaah, he took over the narration! ... He took over Andrew??? Is that a power for ultimate selves, to get access to the narrative prompt?? If so, then Caliborn was not an exception, just the primary example.

... He's pulled a Doc Scratch on us.

Dear god.

What to make of this. I think Dirk might be the hidden antagonist of Earth C. His Heart powers might be able to influence and even control people.

I just hope he isn't going to absorb them all.

... Man, this started baring on innocuous and look at how chilling the ending of the page is.

I think through his influence, people might start behaving exactly as he predicted, enforcing him being right and securing influence at the same time. I mean, if he merged with memories from Lil Hal, Doc Scratch and perhaps even LE... He's become a master manipulator.

... This is basically "shh, only dreams now" D:

#homestuck #upd8 #homestuck epilogues #homestuck liveblog #dirk strider #rose lalonde #spoiler alert #reaction

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tanadrin · 6 years

Text

Two visions of the future

For comparison, two different Medium essays, one by the artist James Bridle, one by the World Economic Forum.

Bridle's essay is getting at several distinct but related things, and approaching them interrogatively, so there's some stuff to unpack here. We also have to separate, insofar as possible, our participation in the normal generational cycle of anxiety over new media ("Video games are corrupting the youth!" "TV is corrupting the youth!" "Comic books are corrupting the youth!" "Novels are corrupting the youth!") from legitimate and useful criticisms of what's going on. My own reaction is probably 50/50 to be honest. I'm keenly aware that this kind of thing didn't exist when I was a small child, and when I was a young teenager and first spending a lot of time on the internet, I was somehow fortunate enough to be able to develop a healthy understanding of how the internet functioned, of what did and did not deserve my attention on the internet, and how to separate online interactions from other kinds of interactions. But the internet is a very different thing now than it was in the noughties, and between Youtube as small children, games like Minecraft as prepubescent children, and the slate of online interactions like other video games and porn as adolescents, the internet as my children will experience it is very different from the internet as I experienced it. They will probably be fine; probably, the trick as with all media when you're a parent, is to try to consume it with your children as much as possible, and to talk to them about it. Bridle's handwringing may prove unnecessary. But I don't think it's misplaced.

I'll also note here he's using some terminology in a way I find consistent with how people on the political left talk, but idiosyncratic in a more general context. This carries over into assuming certain things that I think the left has yet to prove, like capitalism necessitating exploitation to a degree greater than any other system of social organization, but his broader point here is that the incentive structures of large websites like Youtube have created a little locus of grotesque horror that, unless we're careful, we'll let our children go toddling off toward. Now, maybe the outcome of this is merely leaving our kids with a few weird memories, or some things they have to work out with a therapist in twenty or thirty years. Bridle's anxieties about violence and sexuality in this medium seem to be continuous with anxieties about violence and sexuality in other media, and sure, these examples seem weirder and more disturbing. But I have yet to see strong evidence linking violence in media consumed with violence in society at large, and our terror as a society about any contact between the domains marked "sex" and the domains marked "children" is unfounded.

So does the phenomenon Bridle describes worry me? Yeah, it does. Less than it does him, but it's still weird, it's still likely to have strange, unknown consequences, and it's part and parcel of a model of internet content distribution that has selected a really terrible metric for deciding who sees what. We're at a really ugly point in the development of our online channels of information that prioritizes advertising and technologies optimized for advertising without much thought to the effect it's having on the rest of what we consume, the actual information we go online to seek people out. This is the same phenomenon that's driving the distribution of nearly uniquely terrible information ("fake news") on Facebook, contributing to political polarization and instability, and the worst part of it all is that the people responsible, the ones who run Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, and the like, refuse to take any kind of moral responsibility for the shape these systems have acquired. But more on that in a second.

The second essay presents another version of the future. In just thirteen years, it says, the world will be a technologically-facilitated wonderland. It's a nice vision! It's a cool, slick, Star Trek future, and not the fuddy duddy 60s version where we still had to use physical buttons. It's J.J. Abrams Star Trek, it's Star Trek Discovery! Naively, it seems hard to criticize. Even those of us who aren't perennially in love with the newest and niftiest devices can see the appeal of living in a genuine science fiction novel.

And yet... this is the same future we've been promised lies roughly ten to fifteen years from now, for ever. It executes that greatest of the futurological rug-sweeps, which is ignoring the details of implementation: the annoyance of getting all your devices to sync up, or alternatively of being locked into a single corporate device ecosystem, the frustrations when promising device concepts turn out to be substandard or half-baked, the real and deep failures of the Internet of Things already (which show no signs of abating), and, of course, the fact that unless global poverty is not only solved in thirteen years but everyone is propelled to the position of senior management in their own technology firm, the fact that this is a very narrow vision of the future indeed.

But of course, as William Gibson observed, the technology of the future is always unevenly distributed. And that's the other problem: this is a vision of the future that is concerned only with the future of a narrow slice of the human race. It's not a vision of the future, it's a vision of their future. The narrowness of this vision on the part of technology companies already produces frustrations in my life: assumptions that the rest of the world has about the budget for a data-heavy cell phone plan and the constant internet connectivity of an average tech/software employee in southern California means you have devices that update at inconvenient times, badly designed apps that chew up half a month's data in an afternoon, phone OSes that become obsolete and un-upgradeable in the expectation that you'll just buy a new phone when next year's iPhone comes out. Since internet connectivity is unlike previously existing luxury goods, and thus devices that enable it are not like previous luxury goods, this is a mild inconvenience for me, but a form of structural inequality for people much poorer than me. Narrowness of vision in the target audience for these technologies produces, or at least exacerbates, tangible social issues, which the producers of these technologies seem mostly unconcerned about.

Improvements in technology that mostly benefit the already well-off still have knock-on benefits for the global poor as well, much in the same way that growing the entire economy, in principle, still helps people who have a small share of the economy. But just as we never seem to get around to implementing policies that redistribute some of that wealth downward, we never seem to get around to really investing in the development of more stable, more dependable versions of existing technologies that have a different economic context in mind. I have no doubt that Moradi and Yang's future will come to pass, if not in 2030 then at some point (albeit with more cursing at incompatible devices and more spambots using your smart house to market penis enlargement pills). I also have no doubt that they're not really thinking of the world at large when they imagine this future. It troubles me that, at the very least, how these technologies might affect people who live very differently from them is not a topic of interest to them.

One of the things I agree with Maciej Ceglowski about is that the people who design software often aren't concerned with the moral implications of their design. It reminds me of a conversation I once had with an engineer friend in university who said he would be quite happy to design weapons of mass destruction, if he got a cushy job doing so--since it was not his responsibility how they were used. It's not that modern software is a weapon of mass destruction; but it is powerful, and I don't think we obviate our personal responsibility to consider the implications of what we create just because we're further down the hierarchy of decisionmaking that governs how these creations are actually used. Our guilt should be commensurate with our responsibility: Mark Zuckerberg has more responsibility for flooding people with lies and political propaganda than your average Facebook codeslinger. But the low-level employee still has some responsibility, and certainly the tech industry as a whole has a responsibility, which it is assiduously avoiding, of confronting the large-scale failures of its approach to business.

In an ideal world, content providers like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and Reddit are amoral vehicles to facilitate communication, skimming a bit of your attention off the top in the form of advertising to make a profit. This is the world I suspect the leadership of these companies imagines that they inhabit. Unfortunately, this is not the case; the design of these platforms affects what information is transmitted, and how. The channel cannot be entirely divorced from the message. Content-distribution algorithms that aggravate preexisting failure modes of human communication can and do cause actual harm, up to and including loss of life. The algorithm that decides what shows up on your Facebook news feed is not amoral, and it's not apolitical, no matter how much the person who made it would like to think.

Bridle's Peppa Pig dental torture example is probably pretty low-key as far as these things go. There are way worse molochian outcomes than instilling in a small child a terror of the dentist, like flooding the culture with nonsense videos out of which it's impossible to pick useful or meaningful content, or training a generation on a short-attention-span instant-gratification media consumption, or lowering the effective level of national political discourse to the equivalent of what your drunk racist uncles shout at each other after dinner every Easter. Even at their worst these may not devour our culture, but they will make it a damn sight harder build the kind of world we actually want to live in, and it's not helping that everyone involved in this trend is happy to let it keep continuing, forever, so long as they get their driverless car, their genetically engineered pet, and their smart house.

Both these futures will come to pass, is what I'm saying. Both these futures are here already, more or less. They're not intentional creations. We're stumbling into them senselessly. But there is a better way, except I don't think you're going to like the answer.

Governments are not the danger.

These forces are non-governmental. No system of government in the world has the incentive to show your kids weird or horrifying Dadaist Youtube videos. Wealth redistribution, of the kind necessary to ensure that the owners of half-tiger CRISPR'd housecats don't find themselves on the wrong end of a bloody revolution, does not occur naturally under the normal operation of capitalism. The only institution capable of solving this particular coordination problem is one that has the authority to reach both broadly and deeply into the economic and social systems out of which these forces spring, and plug them at their source. This is pretty much the thing modern government was designed to do.

Yes, I know: the FDA proves government kills babies. Regulatory capture, professional licensing, the EPA, Donald Trump, whatever your favorite stand-in for the bugbears of government, this is sufficient evidence that the worst sentence in the English language is "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." But there exists a layer of technical policy creation in governments all over the world which is devoted to solving important social, economic, and scientific issues and which, believe it or not, mostly functions well, despite cynicism about government and high pay attracting many otherwise good administrators to the private sector. The trouble with this layer is that, when it works well, it is invisible. When the FDA does its job right, people do not die from tainted drugs. When professional licensing works correctly, people are not butchered by someone who was charismatic enough to convince the people around him he was a great surgeon when he did not know what he was doing. But the successes of government are often invisible. We do not praise occupational licensing every time our doctor doesn't kill us, because our doctor not killing us is the expected outcome, the bare minimum. The problem is, government (this layer of government, the most useful layer of government) mostly exists to prevent things falling below this threshold. We would notice it only by its absence, and the race to the bottom that would ensue. Sometimes, it does its job so well we think, "Okay, the FDA was useful in the past, but no longer; the literal snake-oil salesmen are all dead, and we can create Yelp for drugs now, so we'll be fine." If you think this, I implore you (besides looking closely at the failures of online rating systems like Yelp) to look at the Voting Rights Act and what has happened since the Supreme Court decided that it had done its job and we didn't need it any more. It may be that we don't need the FDA, but you will need a lot more evidence than "we have Yelp now" to convince me of that.

But concern about bad regulation (which does exist, and indeed abounds), and about the "series of tubes"/Andrea Leadsom types making policy that affects emerging technologies is not misplaced. I will suggest two things to you, though. First of all, the level at which this policy is often made is at a level below actual elected representatives: bills are written by staff, and implemented by civil servants. This is the level at which technical specialists are hired, because nobody is ever going to get elected to Congress on the basis of their ability to write code, and they shouldn't be. Writing good code is not a qualification for Congress; being able to advocate for the preferences of your constituents is. This requires social/political skills, not technical ones. So we don't want a legislature of technical types: we want a legislature that relies on technical types to accomplish technical functions of government, which is, in fact, how many government agencies are set up in practice. Second, the thing that would most improve the ability of government to create good policy in these areas is for government to have the services of capable interpreters, people with sufficient technical understanding and creative ability that government agencies are not only at the mercy of charismatic outside manipulators.

If you want a path forward, this is the admittedly difficult one I suggest. More people with deep understanding of technical issues, who are concerned about the interaction of new technologies in unintended ways, need to be willing to go into government. People who are libertarian enough to know that rules for the sake of rules are terrible, that inflexibility on things like nutritional formulae for babies with short-bowel syndrome literally kills babies, but who are not ideologically opposed to the existence of government in the first place. People who can act as facilitators and interpreters both to other civil servants, and to legislators and ministers. People working for technology companies, and on the development of new technologies, or the improvement of existing but so far underdeveloped technologies, need to take moral responsibility for the things they create. They need to have conversations about that responsibility with each other, and when they find themselves in leadership positions (or just talking to people already in leadership positions), they need to advocate for that responsibility forcefully.

Government could incentivize this, even by something as lame and noncommittal as a "Moral Leadership in Technology" award. Private industry or well-off private persons could probably also incentivize this. (Elon Musk or Bill Gates could definitely do it.) Media could in theory also do this, but I'm skeptical that it would result in anything other than hand-wringy outrage, which is one of the least useful things on the planet. Outrage alone rarely suffices to address structural issues.

There are probably other useful paths forward, and problems with this path that I haven't thought of. But I do think these are issues that need to be addressed if we want to reap the greatest benefits from the future, if we want a world more utopian than dystopian. And I think these are issues that are tractable, even if it won't be easy.

#i am the world's worst anarchist

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whogoesthere-cleveland-blog · 7 years

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John’s Diner

The Place: John’s Diner Location: Lakewood, Ohio

Susan: John’s Diner - Where even your lowest expectations are already too high.

Shannon: Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they will finally be disappointed.

Overview of John’s Diner

Shannon: There is so much potential here. A great location, ample parking, and historic roots. Unfortunately John’s Diner doesn’t capitalize on any of this. In fact, their overt reluctance to give this joint the facelift it so badly deserves and turn it into that quaint nod to yesteryear should be an obvious indication of their all-around slapdash attitude. They aren’t really concerned with you, the patron, nor are they interested in helping continue to revitalize a city that’s recently been named one of the top ten most exciting suburbs in the nation by real estate blog, Movoto. The owners of John’s Diner are in business to serve, alright, but unfortunately all they seem to serve are their own interests. Anchored at the corner of Detroit Avenue and Park Row in Lakewood, Ohio, it seems that John’s Diner has become a beacon for the downtrodden. I used to visit this place as a kid and recall many a happy Saturday mornings liberally applying packet after packet of grape jelly to my white toast or pouring stainless steel carafes of warm syrup all over my pancakes - griddle cakes in greasy spoon parlance. I even learned my first lesson in commerce at John’s Diner when I was tasked with a responsibility well beyond my years: ’Go on up to the counter and pay the check’ my mom would instruct as she handed me a well-worn collection of one dollar bills from her embroidered wallet and continued to smoke and jaw-jack with the other adults. But times have changed, and where there once existed home cooking served “piping hot as you like it” there is now only propaganda and neglect.

Susan: I’ve never been here before. My only reference to John’s Diner is when a friend of mine said the cook was smoking a cigarette while preparing food on the grill. Granted, this was back when one could still smoke in restaurants, but still, that had to be a health code violation even in the 90s. I’m supposed to add a description of the interior, but I don’t think mere words could do it justice. Authentic 50s diner front with a perhaps 60s addition. There’s an organ in the foyer that doesn’t work. The interior décor was both confusing and filthy, and if that’s a design aesthetic, they nailed it. Oddly framed prints or articles cut out of the newspaper hung askew on the walls. Some were sports related (but not necessarily Cleveland sports), but others were just random, faded “art”. I don’t know. Half of the ceiling fans were painted bright red and royal blue, though this did not match any color scheme in the restaurant or the other crud colored ceiling fans. The booths were crimson and Duct tape. It was strangely silent in there, except if one sits at the counter, then you can almost hear a radio playing Richard Marx.

After being seated, we both started off with coffee.

Susan: The coffee can best be described as mothball flavored hot water, but with an acrid, bitter aftertaste. I mean, I’m not really a coffee snob. I’ll drink diner coffee with the best of ‘em, but this was just a completely different animal. Like they really went out of their way to make it taste bad in a manner that no other diner coffee is bad. In this area, John’s Diner excelled.

Shannon: My guess is that maybe they were storing the mothballs too close to the industrial sized drum of Folgers crystal flakes - a coffee that may have fooled upscale coke heads at Tavern on the Green in the 80s, but wasn’t fooling us in the here and now. Coffee is a staple in diners across the land. Plus we live in an age where private roasteries are busting out all over and yet John’s Diner somehow manages to turn a blind eye to each and every local purveyor of quality beans, and instead goes with whatever generic blend they’ve been brewing since time immemorial. Coffee could be an easy and inexpensive fix that would immediately boost the dining experience and make patrons a little more forgiving about the rest of the troubling menu.

We both ordered simple meals:

Susan: I got the grilled cheese and fries. Uh, it was of a lower quality Denny’s variety. Very, very generic, however, I felt it was least likely to induce dysentery and therefore, my best choice. I ate it. It was unremarkable. I did not get sick. The bar was set low for John’s Diner. Shannon - I got a pretty generic breakfast. Scrambled eggs and pancakes. I don’t want to brag, but I can make this stuff at home so I was kind of hoping a place specializing in breakfast might be able to create this dish with a little more elan than what I’m capable of. Not so. The scrambled eggs seemed to be hemorrhaging water, and the pancakes - Susan, you pointed out that they looked like McDonald’s hotcakes - also pretty much tasted like them. Something I learned pretty quickly was that you need a backup plan for breakfast once you leave John’s Diner. I went to Starbucks immediately after and got the Gouda sandwich. Susan- Your breakfast was deemed “room temperature flavored”. Mmmm….Just like Gramma used to make!

We both worried about the elderly waitstaff:

Shannon: Maybe these waitresses (and let’s face it, they are waitresses; the word server somehow passed this generation by) are just looking for a way to make a little money during retirement or maybe John’s Diner is located in the Twilight Zone; either way, I worried they might be a little too old to be on their feet for that many hours per day; and quite possibly lacked the mental acuity to keep track of the myriad requests from each table. Then again, this job could be a punishment for a crime they committed in a past life and slinging hash at John’s Diner is their own brand of purgatory until they have atoned for their sins. I’m not really sure, I just know I felt uncomfortable being served by someone who already seemed to have outlasted their expiration date - although outlasting an expiration date seems to be a popular theme at John’s Diner. Susan: Yeah, a veteran wait staff, for sure. Ha! Your hypothesis was that these ladies were part of an octogenarian work re-entry program hosted by the Department of Aging. This would make me feel better if this were true. Otherwise, it’s kind of a bummer. But I will say, our waitress was very attentive and pretty nice. We did not want for anything (except for wanting to not be there). I would have felt bad if I had to ask for anything additional. Oh! Maybe that’s why the coffee is so God awful! These Golden Girls aren’t trying to run back and forth for refills all damned day long! OK, now it makes sense.

Who Goes There? Susan: Aging sea captains (primarily Greek), elderly men who live in boarding houses, a few regular people, a few regulars, and those that have lived a life of regret.

Shannon: People who never learn from their mistakes.

What philosophical school of thought would be most comfortable at John’s Diner?

Shannon: Nihilists and the hopeless.

Susan: No frills pragmatists with declining taste buds.

If John’s Diner were a TV show hangout, who would be a regular?

Susan: Maybe Archie Bunker...

Shannon: I could see Ralph Kramden stopping by every morning to shoot the breeze and fill his thermos with some of that signature hot mothball water.

Susan: In other words, curmudgeons with no more fucks to give.

Additional thoughts:

Shannon: I was pleased to see the smoking section had been relocated from the kitchen to a space out back with one plastic lawn chair. The last time I was there - which was easily a decade ago - the cook was standing over the grill with a cigarette hanging from his mouth and six inches of ash ready to drop and get scrambled out of existence. Another thing, it might not hurt to hire a professional cleaning crew. The waitstaff probably can’t really operate heavy water-soaked vintage mops anymore what with all those hip replacements and bad knees, so maybe once a week the owner could spring for a legitimate cleaning crew to swing by with a little bleach just to help ensure that the E. coli has less options for breeding.

Susan: Yeah, speaking of which, when I told a mutual acquaintance we went there she immediately said, “OH! Did you get sick? My friend just went there and she swears it made her sick!” What could I say other than, “Probably”?

Would you go back?

Shannon: Maybe. Like if the car broke down in front of the place right in the middle of a snow blizzard.

Susan: No. Not even then. I really can’t think of any circumstance that would compel me to return to John’s Diner. Oh, maybe on a dare. I would go on a dare if the stakes were high enough.

Is it a good place to bring Neal in a Baby Bjorn? Susan: I think yes, because the cleanliness standards are already so low. Why would they care if you brought a cat in there? What’s going to happen? He’s going to somehow “mess it up”? Bah hahahaha! That’s absurd. At the very least, he would improve the overall experience for diners.

Shannon: Yes. Somebody has to catch the mice.

Hours of Operation and Payment Options: John’s Diner only accepts cash (and probably sobriety tokens and gold doubloons); and is open Monday through Saturday, 7 am - 8 pm and Sunday, 7 am - 3 pm

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goron-king-darunia · 7 years

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So I watched this video out of curiosity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxVM2CABL0Q

I like McIntosh and I want to be aware if he’s doing problematic things. But the entire video was just an attack on him, so as a feminist, I needed to speak out. Here’s what I commented on the video:

First of all, everyone has the right to block anyone for any reason. If I try to argue with you that the sky is green instead of blue, you have the right to block me for the simple reason that I happen do disagree with you. "But the sky IS blue, you're debating a fact and being a troll." Firstly, no, the sky is a lot of different colors depending on what time of day it is. Just like there are many different ways of looking at the same problem. And guess what? A lot of what he talks about IS fact, and the debatable aspects are probably not the things that are being talked about when he decides to block people. Also, not everyone is polite when they try to "debate". And you're not entitled to his attention. No one has to listen to you. As for bias, EVERYONE is biased, even scientists. That's why we try to design experiments to control for bias because everyone makes decisions that are consciously or subconsciously informed by past events, not even a baby can be truly unbiased. But McIntosh is a lot more qualified to talk about this stuff than you are because he actually knows a lot about the issues. Also, what would even be the other side of the argument that he should talk about to be "unbiased?" "Okay, so I talked about how being unable to express emotions is harmful to men and boys because it limits our methods of coping with difficulty, makes it hard for others to understand us and help us, and further enforces an arbitrary divide between men and women. Now let's talk about how being emotionally constipated is good for you and how being able to be open about your feelings is bad." Like, what? What even is the counterargument? He has science on his side. Also, a lot of people don't identify as feminists because they don't understand what feminism is and a few bad apples have spoiled the bunch. Even I didn't used to identify as a feminist because I thought it was all about hating men. Because misandrists have been calling themselves feminists, the two things have been conflated so that people aren't able to tell what is what and therefore don't associate with the feminist movement. But there are a lot of "non-feminists" or "anti-feminists" that are actually by definition feminists because they believe in equality. They call themselves egalitatians mostly. But they're still feminists. Feminism is all about elevating women and other oppressed groups to equal status of the privileged group (in America, this group is straight white men), so if you think men and women should be treated equally, congrats! You're a feminist! Propaganda is a huge buzzword and just because something has a certain spin doesn't mean it's propaganda. Just because something promotes a certain way of thinking doesn't mean it's propaganda. If that were the case then all news would be propaganda, all ads would be propaganda, even your video would be propaganda for the small-minded "ideals" you espouse. Don't conflate opinion with propaganda and don't conflate sharing facts with propaganda. Also, male feminists are some of the best feminists and allies that women have because they are seen as more informed and more credible than women. And it's sad that we live in a world where men are seen as having more knowledge about women than women do, but guess what? That's also the American government. And unlike McIntosh, the government wants to use that notion to take away women's rights. McIntosh is using that platform to instead speak about how we can help women and men be better. He's not attacking boys and men and so many people ARE benefiting from all this new stuff. So many boys and men ARE benefiting from being told that it's okay to cry. Also the "create your own characters" is BS for several reasons. First of all WE DO. But the powers that be don't think it's something "the masses" want to see. We're constantly shot down because "no one wants to see a gay male character, no one wants to see sensitive men, no one wants to see strong women, no one wants to see people of color". Wonder Woman almost didn't get made. And the Wonder Woman we did get is so so important because the alternative was just such a garbage fire of antifeminist "propaganda" as you might say, that it would have just reinforced the mountain of terrible tropes we already have, but you conveniently act like they don't exist. It takes time and energy and a position of power to "make your own character or story" which is why looking at existing characters through a different lens is so important because they already have the platform and the audience needed to get the ball rolling. "Create your own" is easy if your character happens to be a straight white hypermasculine man because there's already a market for that. I can create a dozen characters like that and make them successful because publishers and producers know that those stories will make money and will be willing to invest. But if my character is a lesbian and she doesn't exist only to be eyecandy for men, she's going to be very hard to market. Also, people take the few diverse and nuanced characters that do exist and turn them into the same old shit we already have, so say that to both sides. Stop taking people of color and whitewashing them. Stop taking gay or LGBT characters and making them straight. Stop taking strong nuanced women and making them objects. Two sides buddy. If you're going to say that to one side. Say it to both sides. Also, why would seeing new versions of old characters be "confusing" or a "slap in the face" to new and old fans? Why is Little Orphan Annie being black "confusing". Yeah the original character was white. But her race wasn't essential to the character so why is it so "confusing" to see it change? Yeah, Captain America is straight, but why is it a slap in the face to old fans if someone wants to explore what it would be like if he was gay? He's still straight in the canon. It doesn't change who he is. In essence gay Captain America IS a new character because it explores things that can't be explored in the original. I get that having the status quo being challenged can be distressing, but don't blame others for your own discomfort and think about why new things bothers you so much. Also, he's been very clear on how masculinity itself isn't a problem. It's specific behaviors that are problematic. I don't know why it's controversial to say "Hey, maybe beating up on people isn't the best solution and it's concerning how many shows try to teach kids that violence is the answer." Or why it's controversial to say "men are generally not allowed to be emotive at all, whether it's crying or being affectionate or even being happy and this can be problematic because generally boys and men aren't able to express a full range of emotions which isn't really fair to them." Why is it controversial? Why is this something that you think needs to be argued over? Why is saying "maybe we should teach boys to be gentle and emotive" something that needs to be argued about? What's the alternative? "All men and boys should be aggressive to a fault and should beat everything up and never cry?" Or is the argument simply "sexism doesn't exist and all boys already know it's okay to cry now, you're not teaching anyone anything?" Because let me tell you even as a girl I had to unlearn some toxic masculinity. I had several behaviors that were harmful and traditionally masculine and it took me years to unlearn them. Clearly this is still an issue and it needs to be talked about so that people like me can stop being harmful and learn how to be helpful. I'm still trying to unlearn toxic ideas like "crying is shameful" and "being aggressive means you'll get what you want so fight everyone all the time" and I'm a damn girl. These are good lessons he's teaching and I'm glad McIntosh exists. Also of course he's going to highlight people with large audiences. Those are the people we're most likely to know about. And also a lot of the "pushback" really is just blaming women spreading more toxic masculinity. A lot of this is really just people playing ostrich and trying to act like real problems don't exist. Also, I really don't see how he's playing the victim card. He's genuinely feminist and I have no idea what kind of problems you think you're discussing that he isn't. He talks about real problems men face and he doesn't blame those problems on women, but rather, he blames those problems on a society that treats women and anything feminine badly. Also, I haven't seen anyone having a polite disagreement. This whole video you being bitter and attacking McIntosh. You were really vague and didn't even point out alternatives. You just said what he did was bad but didn't actually say how he could improve.

#original #feminism #long post #rant

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