#I will write pieces analyzing aspects of OP

[gildedmuse]

I agree with these tags with one MINOR exception.

His beating Sanji doesn't just make sense, it's the single sign that we don't live in bizarro world but actually, despite everything happening, this universe CAN get something right! It might be something small, but damnit, it's proof that we can fix this world and make things right!

Corazon is a fucking human angel, the embodiment of caring mom energy, and deserves to be higher in popularity polls not only then Sanji but every single non-swordsmen Strawhat (and also Brook).

I said what I said.

"Girls can beat boys, but no woman can defeat a man."

- Kuina, OPLA, EP 4

When I first started watching One Piece of was because all my siblings did, and while my siblings aren't really "fandom" types, my sister had exactly one non canon theory: that Kuina was killed by her father.

Now, that doesn't seem likely (at least in the sense she meant it) but this? This mindset that she could never TRULY be a great Kenshi?

That is entirely on her father

Listen, she is the best in the dojo, the best in ALL the dojos on the island based on what we know, and yet somehow she has been taught that girls cannot grew up to the best, that is a MAN'S place. And while I'm sure there is an element of all society pushing that narrative, as someone who grew up with parents who DIDN'T ever push those sort of gender limits while I had friends' whose parents did, I feel like at her young age the major influence would have been her father.

And, sure, it would be easy to come up with a headcanon where Kuina and her father end up in a fight because Kuina is training so hard with Zoro, and she is finally entering that point of adolescent where your friends often have more influence than parental figures, and how that could have resulted in an accident that ended with her falling down a flight of stairs. Its not a hard jump to make.

More importantly, this is about how Kuina could have been great but was told it was impossible. Because of her sex. And that attitude seemingly extends to most of the islands they visit. And how fucked up is that?

To be clear: Kuina isn't Zoro's tragic backstory

Kuina's is the tragic backstory of how the patriarch shapes the minds of young girls to believe they can't.

[shouldertallabyss]

ObsidianPen’s Fanfiction and Why It Lives Up to the Hype

As you have eyes, this is a rant. Apologies, I could not be brief. These thoughts literally roll around when I’m running, driving, standing in the pickle aisle at the grocery store, etc. I very much wondering if I’m not just off my nut. Fearing the worst, I have come to the Internet to commiserate.

How good is the Haunted and Hunted series? Allow me to try to put it into examples:

- It’s like, if you were leaning over the edge of the CN Tower--fun, right? Enjoying the Views? Then someone comes up behind you and pushes you off. That’s the adrenaline.

- It’s like, you had a first crush--teetering on obsessive, right? Really infatuated. Then, before you get the chance to tell them how you feel, because you’re so nervous to get rejected, you find out they’re with someone else, interested in someone else. That’s the emotional impact, but only topically.

- Say you’re a little religious--you see symbolism in the little things of life, yeah? You can look up at the stars and it makes you feel small, like your choices don’t matter, but then you look at the friends you’ve had in your life--even one nice person that you liked--and you remember that you had an impact on them as much as they had an impact on you. This includes the perspective that one or both of you don’t even realize the impact, because life sometimes just happens, consequences happen--all because of choice. That’s the humanity aspect.

- Say you’re athletic, or were ever forced to run the mile in a gym class--you know what it’s like for you to lose your breath, but keep going, yes? When the mile was over, how did you feel? Exhausted? Exhilarated? A mix of the two? That’s the end of most chapters.

- Have you ever looked at something for a long time, and then realized that you’ve just been staring off into space, not even thinking about what’s in front of you? That’s been me for two years (two years?), hi.

- Two years ago, I read the Haunted and Hunted series in one sitting (one weekend, I read slowly, don’t @ me) and then later moved on to No Glory, which was a MISTAKE, because I just wait for updates and it’s a semi-inconvenient distraction from my real life. Always worth the wait, as good entertainment is--the anticipation is part of the experience.

- I swear on it, I do not see the world the same way after thinking through all the aspects of OG Hauntingly. There have been plenty of other fictions that are good, but Hauntingly already has the pull of the love you have for the Harry Potter fandom, and it adds another real story, despite it being the same story, to the mix.

- In my heart, there is the Harry Potter series as J.K. Rowling wrote it, intended it, and finished it...and then there is the fork in the road that happened before Harry’s 6th year, and changed my love for the Harry Potter universe. It definitely made it deeper, because it parallels the canon timeline perfectly, and introduces all of the points from the view of Harry being removed. Not a common theme in canon, but still maintaining Harry at the focal point. Astonishing. Outstanding.

- J.K. Rowling created and ObsidianPen took that groundwork, that beautiful masterpiece, and shaped something new...using almost all of the themes from the OG HP plot. Wow.

- These are not just stories, they are philosophies. I believe that, because they have been written from a place of passion--for the fandom, for friends, for the sake of telling the same story with a few elements removed, and how a few elements make all the difference. Despite every new take OP makes, it is always in a way that is not too far off of being familiar. That’s just what I think.

- The dialogue is incredibly in character. Dialogue feeds interactions, and makes those scenes come to life in a more authentic and real way. You could have a whole story without dialogue, but here, it is the beloved characters continued.

- These are my own opinions, but like, seriously, I’ve been down the rabbit hole, and I have so much respect for the writing style of ObsidianPen--who is an artist in stunning form, in captivating ways--and I’m wondering if I will ever be in a mindset where I will live my life not analyzing the end of the series every other month. It’s like, burned in my memory.

- Let me try to explain that more:  it wasn’t even the story that had me so captivated. It was everything that was so emotional, every new word that floated up and described a mental state, or an emotional renaissance, or just trying to be human. The “just trying to be human” piece is what throws me, because it will always be philosophical, full of change, and you could read how Harry falls apart from the surface, or you could go deeper, take the dive, blend with what is being told to you...and listen to the undercurrents. ObsidianPen has a grasp on writing fiction in a consistent and impassioned manner. There is world-building, on the bones of the landscapes that Rowling describes, as well as just the world at large. It is the familiar with the new, mentioned above. It is perfectly temporary, just like life. This fanfiction is not a story I took lightly, and I just want to KNOW that all of these listed things weren’t just coming out of some fever dream that attached me to it. It really got me. It didn’t necessarily teach me something new, but it opened my melancholy heart to the love, or compassion, that exists when someone tries to say something that they think is important, and has the means to do it well. Like with the intermixing of philosophies, fandom feels, and unique character expression that you can find inside yourself.

- ObsidianPen, without dispute, has the means to do art well. In this narrow-scoped case, through fanfiction writing. I know OP is an artist in other fantastic ways, we are just not getting into that. Life’s a journey, and it is as complex as the descriptions in the Haunted and Hunted series, round 1 & 2.

- No spoilers for the sake of the rewrite, but gd if I don’t sometimes stand in the shower and just think about church.

- Or maybe I’m off my flipping rocker......irrelevant. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Read these works, if you haven’t. They are...godlike.

[itsclydebitches]

You know what I think is funny, fandom loves to throw "the animation and writing teams don't work together" as a reason we can't read into different things happening onscreen (Which regardless, that's really stupid, since acting/animation/intonation of the lines/etc can impact the way the story is perceived). But they're also the same ones talking about how the animation is showing the little love things between Blake and Yang and other small tells we see that shows the team hasn't changed much.

This is a problem with all analysis and something that everyone is inclined to do (simply because we all have our opinions and we all want to be right lol). At its most basic, it’s pointing to certain events in a story as proof of an argument while simultaneously ignoring other events that disprove it. We see this all the time when people discuss characters they like/don’t like: you’ll either get a list of all the good qualities or a list of all the bad, with the “analysis” refusing to engage with that other list. Once you move past that roadblock - once you train yourself to consider everything in the text, even when it’s frustrating - you get more complex readings. The stuff that says, “Yes, on the surface it looks like this character has all these bad qualities too but we need to take context into account as well. Like the fact that when they did this Bad Thing someone was blackmailing them into it whereas they did this Good Thing of their own accord.” Or, “Yes, this character has a mix of Good and Bad qualities so maybe we should be acknowledging a more nuanced reading of their morality rather than insisting ‘They’re the devil’ or ‘uwu they’re a baby who did no wrong’” The purpose of analysis is for the text to drive your argument, not for your argument to drive the reading of the text. When something doesn’t fit well you need to take that into account and re-evaluate your thesis. You don’t ignore/twist that wrinkle in an effort to maintain the argument you first started out with. Which is why you analyze the text first and come up with the thesis second. 

Now yes, apply all this to the animation issues. We cannot simultaneously say, “Aspects of the animation prove that Blake/Yang is becoming a thing” as well as, “It doesn’t matter if we saw Clover wink at Qrow. That’s meaningless.” Authorial intent does have some bearing on how we read this, in that we’ve gotten confirmation that some animation choices - like Oscar running down the hall before punching Neo - were mistakes, but in order for that to fully drive our reading of the show as a whole we’d need confirmation regarding every single piece of animation. Did you mean for Ren to look sad in that scene? Were Blake and Weiss supposed to exchange that glance? Is it a mistake that this character rolled their eyes or was that, unlike some other things, intentional? Unless we get a comprehensive list of every animation choice - which we will literally never have for obvious reasons - analysis must function under near absolutes: either the animation has meaning or it doesn’t. Pick one and stick to it (though preferably pick the former because, as you say, of course our visuals impact the reading of the show. They were always supposed to!) You cannot say that the animation choice is full of meaning when Ren and Nora cast loving glances because you adore them as a ship, but then claim that the animation choice to have Yang, Weiss, and Blake draw their weapons on Qrow is meaningless because you don’t like the idea of the girls doing something awful and having to grapple with that. Anything else is just the behavior of the first paragraph, emphasizing the things you like because they support the arguments you also like, while failing to either a) acknowledge these other aspects at all or b) explain how they don’t actually undermine your argument like they appear to at first glance. That’s why I acknowledge the ramifications of Ironwood shooting Oscar. It doesn’t matter how much I hate it, it exists in the text and needs to be taken into account (work a). It’s likewise why I explain in detail why arguments about the Ace Ops losing aren’t persuasive. They initially look persuasive, but poke at them a bit and you’ll see all the holes (work b). 

For the record, this stuff is really hard. There’s a reason why we take classes in analysis. There’s a reason why you study for 6+ years before you’re considered good enough to start publishing papers. These trends - particularly ignoring parts of the text or trying desperately to twist them into something that fits your original argument, rather than revising the argument to fit the evidence - are all mistakes that everyone makes when they first start analyzing things. I did! And those mistakes will seem very persuasive to others who don’t practice analysis enough to recognize when they - or others - are repeating those trends. Which is how you end up with posts arguing non-persuasive or even nonsensical things but are praised extensively. You have to learn how to spot those mistakes and learning how to avoid them is even harder. It’s not just a skill but a kind of mental fortitude. In order to produce persuasive and compelling analysis you have to be willing to potentially chuck your argument in the bin at any given moment. It’s a lot like science that way. Oh, something just disproved our theory? That sucks but we can’t ignore this new evidence just because we spent years chasing something else. We can’t allow personal desires to overcome facts. (Though that’s not to say the chase was wasted. The mere act of working through “wrong” arguments is an important part of hitting on the “right” ones.) 

For the record, this kind of difficulty with critical thought/rhetoric is the same reason why dangerous bigotry like “Getting vaccines will give your child autism” or “Accepting trans people will lead to women getting attacked in bathrooms” take off. Those are both arguments, but the people consuming them often don’t know how to work through the evidence provided to decide if that argument is persuasive - or even know to look for evidence at all. They stop after reading the statement, taking it as an automatic fact, just like a newbie writer in their Freshman high school course may write out a thesis and think that’s it. What do you mean I have to prove it? What do you mean my proof is subjective, unsubstantiated, and is ignoring other pieces of evidence? It’s not proof at all? Oh... It gets particularly difficult when you chuck in the sheer complexities of most political situations and add in a dash of learning that the mere existence of some evidence (“evidence”) doesn’t automatically outweigh all the rest. A perfect example being: 

Don’t be that woman. But all that takes time to learn and it requires the ability to admit you were wrong. Sometimes about small things (“Oh yeah, I forgot that happened!”) as well as about incredibly massive things (“Shit. I’ve been basing my identity around this inaccurate concept and using it to hurt many, many people...”) Both of which are needed to create compassionate human beings who, by default, are not born knowing All The Things Ever. Thus, this is why analyzing “stupid” shows like RWBY isn’t the useless activity that many would prefer to paint it as. If you can learn how to critically engage with what people say about your favorite show, you’re developing the same skills needed to critically engage with, say, what the president is currently tweeting about...

ANYWAY, that’s a bit more of a deep dive than the ask probably meant to produce. But here we are :D

[grizzlegreertrash]

Let me shill about Norman real quick... (manga spoilers)

And when I mean “real quick,” I mean thousands of words worth of analysis. 

Disclaimer: I started writing this out last weekend, before the release of 125, so some of my original stances have since changed. I reference a thread written months ago that has been proven to be false, so don’t mind that too much. 

Some of these introductory feelings are bitter, kind of directed towards a post that has since been deleted poking fun at Norman stans like me who are “defending” his current actions in the manga. Regardless, addressing those claims are not what this post is about. 

I will add on to this eventually, talking about Norman’s “bad boy” tendencies, but who know’s when that’ll be? 

So, I’ve been observing and analyzing Norman throughout the escape arc to give myself a good interpretation of his character. Why?

I’m getting tired of people making him out to be a black and white character.

What do I mean by that? Well, let’s talk about how ever since his reintroduction, there have been quite a few fans out there calling him evil, a villain, or worse a sociopath. I get that people are untrustworthy, and they have a right to be. I understand the position, especially since this isn’t everyone’s first rodeo with character arcs like this. I’m afraid to say we don’t have the answers to the questions we all have just yet. Like if he was modified or what exactly happened at Lambda. But what we do know is that what he experienced was definitely traumatic, and it is something he is still dealing with. 

Now Emma, Ray, and the rest of the escapees have had to go through their fair share of traumatic experiences, but what doesn’t change is the kids’ sense of family and close companionship. 

Norman doesn’t have that. He is forced to deal with his situation alone. 

Have ya’ll noticed that Norman constantly refers to the current group of escapees as “Emma’s family?” He doesn’t even associate them as his family anymore. He has isolated himself from the concept of family because at this point, he is above it.

I’ve already discussed Norman’s position as a symbol with some others in a thread last month, but the stance has since changed slightly with new information from chapters 124 and 125. Along with inheriting the title, the network, and the base, he also took on the persona to keep his identity as a cattle child from those he would soon choose to ally/play with in attempts to topple the demon society and change the world. He’s just playing a character, and with that comes isolating and hiding himself from the people who look up to him. 

Having subordinates and followers cannot compare to the family of Gracefield kids, where everyone is on equal footing and everyone is supporting each other. Norman is supporting a large group of kids by himself. Looking strong, confident, and cool headed, like he always has...

Let’s turn back to the escape arc, shall we?

One of Norman’s defining traits is his high-level intelligence. Like duh, this is kind of the frame work for his character. His mind, though is a double edged sword. On one hand, he effectively outsmarts everyone by the end of the arc, making the escape successful. Despite the outcome, it wasn’t easily gained. 

Through his inner mind’s eye, you can accurately see the mental strain Norman is putting himself through in attempts to outwit the adults, and to a lesser extent, Ray. Like any child prodigy, comes with a certain level of arrogance. And to while Norman doesn’t parade his intelligence to belittle his family, a certain frustration comes from a lack of control over the situation. In this game of survival, he is out to win, but not just for himself. 

In comes the most important factor in his character, Emma.

We all know that Norman’s love care for Emma drives his motives and actions throughout the arc. His first defining character moment is when he assures Emma that escape is possible for everyone, with that signature smile on his face. Even though very shaken by the recent revelation, he quickly buries his feelings to comfort Emma, as they would soon have to return to the facade of ignorance about the secret to save themselves from suspicion. He is shocked upon hearing her rather ambitious goal for their family, but immediately associates it as an admirable quality. One that he aspires to posses. I’ll touch on that aspect in another post. 

When explaining this event to Ray, he vows to utilize himself to the best of his ability to protect her. We know that Norman’s feeble body cannot protect Emma as well as she can protect herself, so how does he live up to this? 

By protecting her emotionally.

We all know that while Emma is reckless to a fault, her conviction is one of her strongest qualities. Norman is aware of this, and constantly hides his overwhelming stress over planning to keep her eyes focused on her main goal to escape with every orphan and change the world. 

Though he wants to scream, pull his hair out, and or bang his head against the wall in frustration, he cannot falter or show vulnerability, or else Emma will lose hope and all is lost. 

This of course comes to an impasse when faced with his incoming shipment. Entering the iconic “I want to live” scene, his first thoughts are of how disgusted he was with himself over “making Emma look so devastated.” 

He then takes it upon himself to make the rest of his life as useful as possible to aid the escape. With that comes deceiving his friends and working around new information like the pen from Krone and what was found over the wall, all while still hiding his true feelings about his dilemma. 

Then comes his departure from the house, when Emma’s reckless nature nearly comes to ruin her and the plan. This is when Norman’s calm facade is shattered as he tries to get through to Emma to save her from destroying everything they had worked for. But he made one fatal mistake. 

He forgot to factor in Emma’s emotional intelligence. 

While trying to protect her feelings, he underestimated her, neglecting the fact that she had seen right through him the entire time. This revelation along with her actions and outburst reignite his admiration of how true she is to herself, and that her care for him is as genuine as they come, resulting in him fully accepting his fate. He’s grateful for the life he had been blessed with, and is fully prepared to face his death with a smile.

Now we know that these sentiments are not completed, because instead of getting killed, he gets a one-way ticket to Lambda, but that’s besides the point.

But that’s what I’ve gathered about the escape arc specifically and there is more that I will add onto later. I may or may not touch more upon Norman’s character since his reintroduction, only because a lot of people are beating me to the punch and not all of the pieces have been put together just yet. (This is kind of why I’m working with things I already know)

I’ll be bedridden for 2 weeks post op on Tuesday, so I’ll continue this thread sometime in the coming weeks

Thanks a bunch :)

[sweet-star-cookie]

Forgive me, I almost never add commentary directly onto posts outside of tags because I lack brevity, but I'm REALLY passionate about this and I was discussing it with a friend literally yesterday, so it's fresh on my mind. I'm also a novice writer working on her first solo project, so analyzing and learning from this stuff is very important to me for my scripting and character writing.

I think we need to remember what the definition of filler is actually supposed to be in this context: Pointless padding or additions that serve no purpose outside of "filling" run time. And that's a key word there: Pointless.

Episodes or plot lines that diverge from the main plot of a story are not INHERENTLY pointless, they can have other uses even if it's as simple as giving the characters a break. That break then becomes the purpose of that episode, and can be good for the audience as well as the characters. I would argue that, in most cases, it is a NECESSARY inclusion. It allows for the audience to slow down and process everything, and allows the characters to have slower or lower-stakes scenarios and interactions. Like OP said, "the action doesn't hit as hard without the quiet moments". It's all about that balance. There are also many ways to incorporate important things within these episodes as well. And don't get me wrong, "filler" episodes that actually have secret lore or are otherwise plot relevant are very cool ways of threading the needle between the two, and I think media needs more of this too.

But even if it has NOTHING to do with the main plot at all and never will, not even lore wise, simply putting characters into fun or interesting situations can be an excellent way to showcase their personalities, their dynamics with other characters or parts of the world, or just provide a fun "what if" scenario that can endear an audience to a cast even more than before. It's a bit like improv, and it's your job as the writer to follow the "yes, and" principle, at least every once in a while.

A common piece of writing advice that I've come across is that the concept or story should always be second to the characters themselves. If you have good characters, you can put them into almost any scenario and still make it entertaining. If done well, it can be just as fun to see an action hero save the world as it is seeing him go to the grocery store or walk his dog. Mixing the complex with the simple or mundane adds variety, the spice of life!

I often think about how tight the scripts for Pixar movies were prior to their decline in recent years, and how every aspect of a scene could inject character and purpose into it, as well as setting up important foreshadowing or just hints at personality.

I think of Up as an example, not just because of the excellent first 10 minutes, but what happens immediately AFTER that too. We see Carl's morning routine, how he gets up, what he eats for breakfast, and so on. Normally, this would be incredibly boring to watch in isolation, but it's the CONTEXT that gives these quiet moments their importance. We're not just seeing Carl's morning routine, we're specifically seeing what his life is like without Ellie. This scene, despite how mundane it is on paper, is NECESSARY for contrast to the opening and the adventure that occurs later in the movie. We see how empty and lonely Carl is without his wife. This is all expressed completely without dialogue as well, and thus relies on the character acting through the animation and shot composition.

Moreover, we see so many little details about Carl's personality in these scenes too. The time he wakes up in the morning, how he adjusts the little bird figure after putting it on the mantle, how many locks he has on his door, the grape soda cap pinned to his clothes that seems out of place because we don't have context for it yet. In my opinion, the movie would be significantly weaker if this scene was taken out and we immediately jump to Carl meeting the people from the senior's home right after the opening, even if that would speed up the plot progression to do so.

What I'm trying to say is, injecting as much character and personality as you can into "filler" scenes or episodes, even mundane ones that aren't plot relevant, is not only important but also NECESSARY to fleshing out characters and worlds. Omitting those scenes entirely does much to harm not only the pacing of a work, but the characters and overall impact of the story itself.

It doesn't have to be complex or nuanced either, I've seen so many stories with simple but good characters and interesting concepts, but they simply aren't given enough time to tell those stories properly, and "filler" is an important part of fixing that. Relying entirely on the breadcrumbs of characterization of plot-heavy scenes is often not enough for it to be effective. Don't you want to see MORE of your favourite characters, not less?

genuinely one of the worst things that’s happened to television in the last few years (exacerbated by streaming services) is death of Filler. going from 20 episodes to 8 because “we didn’t really need that episode where the main characters went to the beach right? it had no long lasting effect” but we DID!!! we needed to see how they act without the Big Bad Plot and to establish the dynamics between the characters and lay in the sun (do they forget sunscreen? how do they react to a thieving seagull? do they get buried in the sand or do they do the burying?). the plot isn’t everything. the action doesn’t hit as hard without the quiet moments. give us character development and our little scenes back

[arcticdementor]

Sometimes a piece of writing so perfectly distills a cultural moment and mood that it deserves to be given outsized attention. That's very much the case with Farhad Manjoo's op-ed column in Thursday's New York Times, "The Perfect Pronoun: Singular 'They'."

…

The first thing to be said about these convictions is that, apart from a miniscule number of transgender activists and postmodern theorists and scholars, no one would have affirmed any of them as recently as four years ago. There is almost no chance at all that the Farhad Manjoo of 2009 sat around pondering and lamenting the oppressiveness of his peers referring to "him" as "he." That's because (as far as I know) Manjoo is a man, with XY chromosomes, male reproductive organs, and typically male hormone levels, and a mere decade ago referring to such a person as "he" was considered to be merely descriptive of a rather mundane aspect of reality. His freedom was not infringed, or implicated, in any way by this convention. It wouldn't have occurred to him to think or feel otherwise. Freedom was something else and about other things.

The emergence and spread of the contrary idea — that "gender is a ubiquitous prison of the mind" — can be traced to a precise point in time: the six months following the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision, which declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right. Almost immediately after that decision was handed down, progressive activists took up the cause of championing transgender rights as the next front in the culture war — and here we are, just four short years later, born free but everywhere in chains.

How should we understand this astonishingly radical and rapid shift in self-understanding among highly educated progressive members of the upper-middle class? (In addition to calling himself a "cisgender, middle-aged suburban dad" at the opening of his column, Manjoo confesses that he "covet[s] my neighbor's Porsche," so it seems exactly right to describe him in this way.) I suspect Manjoo would say that his consciousness has been raised. Once he was blind, but now he sees. Once he slumbered, but now he's awake — or "woke."

Others have noted the religious connotations of the term. This has even been reflected in the prevalence of the formulation "Great Awokening" among sympathetic journalists seeking to explain the trend. It gets at something important. A kind of spiritual-moral madness periodically wells up and sweeps across vast swaths of the United States. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these Great Awakenings were decidedly "low church" affairs and invariably emerged from America's plethora of Protestant sects. Today, for perhaps the first time in American history, it is a nominally secular, progressive elite that finds itself swept up into a moral fervor and eager to overturn (linguistic and other) conventions in a surge of self-certainty and self-righteousness.

…

What is it, exactly, that Manjoo finds oppressive about the use of gendered pronouns? In addition to raising a fusty objection to the ungrammatical use of a gender-neutral plural pronoun to refer to single, gendered individuals, grammarians might also point out that English is far less gender-infused than many other languages. Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and many other languages divide the world into masculine, feminine, and sometimes (but not always) neuter nouns. Masculine chairs, feminine houses, and so on, reflected in definite and indefinite articles and pronouns in every sentence ever read, written, spoken, or heard in languages across the world. Talk about a prison with little prospect for escape!

…

But what is this freedom that Manjoo and so many others suddenly crave for themselves and their children? That's more than a little mysterious. Slaves everywhere presumably know that they are unfree, even if they accept the legitimacy of the system and the master that keeps them enslaved. But what is this bondage we couldn't even begin to perceive in 2009 that in under a decade has become a burden so onerous that it produces a demand for the overturning of well-settled rules and assumptions, some of which ("the gender binary") go all the way back to the earliest origins of human civilization?

The beginnings of an answer can be found in the writings of a number of thinkers who have analyzed, often critically but from a range of religious and political perspectives, the potential excesses of liberalism and democracy — and especially the antinomian logic of individualism. Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Nisbet, Christopher Lasch, Walker Percy, Michel Houellebecq, and others have reflected deeply on what might be called the phenomenology of individualism — how a society devoted at the level of principle to the liberation of the individual from constraints can easily produce citizens who continually feel themselves to be newly enslaved and in need of ever new and more radical forms of liberation.

…

This is how a progressive in 2014 can consider it an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for gay couples to be denied the right to marry — and base that argument on the claim that a gay man's love and natural desire for another man, like a lesbian's love and natural desire for another woman, is irreducible and ineradicable — and then insist just five years later that it is an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for anyone to be presumed a man or a woman at all.

As Andrew Sullivan has powerfully argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible. The first, which morally justifies same-sex marriage, presumes that biological sex and binary gender differences are real, that they matter, and that they can't just be erased at will. The second, which Manjoo and many transgender activists embrace and espouse, presumes the opposite — that those differences can and should be immediately dissolved. To affirm the truth of both positions is to embrace incoherence.

But that assumes that we're treating them as arguments. If, instead, we view them as expressions of what it can feel like at two different moments in a society devoted to the principle of individualism, they can be brought into a kind of alignment. Each is simply an expression of rebellion against a different but equally intolerable constraint on the individual. All that's changed is the object of rebellion.

Will Manjoo's call for liberation from the tyranny of the gender binary catch on in the way that the push for same-sex marriage did before it? I have no idea. What I do know is that, whatever happens, it's likely to be followed by another undoubtedly very different crusade in the name of individual freedom, and then another, and another, as our society (and others like it) continues to work through the logic of its devotion to the principle of individualism.

The only thing that could halt the process is the rejection of that principle altogether.

[collinmun]

And just like that, my semester ends on a high note all because of a student!

Student highlight! So, this isn’t a “where are they now” post however, this is definitely a post to remind all of us that there are exceptional future leaders out there and here is a spotlight on the student enabled me to end this semester on a high note!

Mauricio Cantu Garza was part of this semesters Collin College Model UN  team. Throughout the semester he stood out right from the beginning by putting in the overtime hours working on position papers, taking on an exceptional leadership role during our class simulation and then at the MUN conference he demonstrated his unwavering support for a teammate when she encountered unwanted sexual advances/harassment from a student from a different school (but still at the same conference) . After the incident was addressed and handled** I recall Mauricio asking me what else can men like him do to be better allies to women who experience sexual harassment and, what can he personally do to help facilitate the changes that society still needs. In that moment I teared up because all I could think of was how fortunate I was to have such an introspective student like Mauricio on our team and in my class.  We had a very thought provoking conversation that evening and it is what led me to create the final exam in the format I did for this course.  

For the final exam, students were given the below prompt and they were given the choice to write their response either as an OpEd piece or as a Speech to the  UN Women’s Summit ( of course there were other instructions but no need to go into that kind of detail ;-)  

Final Exam Prompt “In 1995 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) brought rape charges against a former Serb leader Radislav Krstic. This was the first time ever that a sexual assault case had been prosecuted as a war crime by itself and not as a larger case. This case also publicly  illustrated the gendered aspects of warfare and the necessity for the international community to re-examine gendered violence. Find, explain, assess and analyze two specific  instances where gender motivated violence has occurred in a country.  In your assessment you can address things such as : how was this instance discovered? Have the punishments fit the crime? Based on the cases you are using, what is one aspect that needs to be improved to ensure this doesn’t happen again?”

Check out the full article at :   https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xXieOgOSwSho0ak4mAMX7_rpZOzqrNi-P_aA6-MN1Ko/edit?usp=sharing

to read Mauricio’s OpEd and see why my semester ended on a high note.

Mauricio, your OpEd is nothing short of exceptional and it is students like you who continue to give me hope and excitement as to what our future leaders will be like. Ubuntu.

Prof. Iwanek

** The NMUN staff handled and addressed the sexual harassment with care and concern and gave us the choice of how we wanted to handle this. In the spirit of the overall goals of the NMUN conference, we chose to have this turn into a teachable moment for all involved parties and I couldn’t be more proud of the NMUN staff and my students on how they addressed, handled and resolved the issue.

[luxe-pauvre]

“Whatever we call it - mind, character, soul - we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that ‘animates’ us. A lot of mind, though, is turning out be brain. A memory is a particular pattern of cellular changes on particular spots in our heads. A mood is a compound of neurotransmitters: Too much acetylcholine, not enough serotonin, and you’ve got a depression. So, what’s left of mind? It’s a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is 'stale, flat and unprofitable’, even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought. That leaves a lot of mind room. Something is interpreting the clatter of neurological activity. But is this interpreter necessarily metaphysical and unembodied? Isn’t it probably a number - an enormous number - of brain functions working in parallel? If the entire network of simultaneous tiny actions that constitute a thought were identified and mapped, then 'mind’ might be visible. The interpreter is convinced it’s unmappable and invisible. 'I’m your mind,’ it claims. 'You can’t parse me into dendrites and synapses.’ It’s full of claims and reasons. 'You’re a little depressed because of all the stress at work,’ it says. (It never says, 'You’re a little depressed because your serotonin level has dropped.’) Sometimes its interpretations are not credible, as when you cut your finger and it starts yelling, 'You’re gonna die!’ Sometimes its claims are unlikely, as when it says, 'Twenty-five chocolate chip cookies would be the perfect dinner.’ Often, then, it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. And when you decide it’s wrong, who or what is making that decision? A second, superior interpreter? Why stop at two? That’s the problem with this model. It’s endless. Each interpreter needs a boss to report to. But something about this model describes the essence of our experience of conciousness. There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don’t feel the same. They must reflect quite different aspects of brain function. The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the non-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read each other’s work. One needs data, the other needs an overview, they influence each other. They get dialogues going: Interpreter One: Pain in the left foot, back of heel. Interpreter Two: I believe that’s because the shoe is too tight. Interpreter One: Checked that. Took off the shoe. Foot still hurts. Interpreter Two: Did you look at it? Interpreter One: Looking. It’s red. Interpreter Two: No blood? Interpreter One: Nope. Interpreter Two: Forget about it. Interpreter One: Okay. A minute later, though, there’s another report. Interpreter One: Pain in the left foot, back of heel. Interpreter Two: I know that already. Interpreter One: Still hurts. Now it’s puffed up. Interpreter Two: It’s just a blister. Forget about it. Interpreter One: Okay. Two minute laters. Interpreter Two: Don’t pick it! Interpreter One: It’ll feel better if I pop it. Interpreter Two: That’s what you think. Leave it alone. Interpreter One: Okay. Still hurts, though. Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two. An exemplary piece of confusion: Interpreter One: There’s a tiger in the corner. Interpreter Two: No, that’s not a tiger - that’s a bureau. Interpreter One: It’s a tiger, it’s a tiger! Interpreter Two: Don’t be ridiculous. Let’s go look at it. Then all the dendrites and neurons and serotonin levels and interpreters collect themselves and trot over to the corner. If you are not crazy, the second interpreter’s assertion, that this is a bureau, will be acceptable to the first interpreter. If you are crazy, the first interpreter’s viewpoint, the tiger theory, will prevail. The trouble here is that the first interpreter actually sees a tiger. The messages sent between neurons are incorrect somehow. The chemicals triggered are the wrong chemicals, or the impulses are going to the wrong connections. Apparently, this happens often, but the second interpreter jumps in to straighten things out. Think of being in a train, next to another train, in a station. When the other train starts moving, you are convinced that your train is moving. The rattle of the other train feels like the rattle of your train, and you see your train leaving that other train behind. It can take a while - maybe even half a minute - before the second interpreter sorts though the first interpreter’s claim of movement and corrects it. That’s because it’s hard to counteract the validity of sensory impressions. We are designed to believe in them. The train situation is not the same as an optical illusion. An optical illusion does not contain two realities. It’s not that the vase is wrong and the faces are right, both are right, and the brain moves between two existing patterns that it recognizes as different. Although you can make yourself dizzy going from vase to faces and back again, you can’t undermine your sense of reality in quite such a visceral way as you can with the train. Sometimes, when you’ve realized that your train is not really moving, you can spend another half a minute suspended between two realms of consciousness: the one that knows you aren’t moving and the one that feels you are. You can flit back and forth between these perceptions and experience a sort of mental vertigo. And if you do this, you are treading on the ground of craziness -  a place where false impressions have all the hallmarks of reality. Freud said psychotics were unanalyzable because they couldn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality (tiger vs. bureau), and analysis works on precisely that distinction. The patient must lay out the often fantastic assertions of the first interpreter and scrutinize them with the second. The hope is that the second interpreter has, or will learn to have, the wit and insight to disprove some of the ridiculous claims the first interpreter has made over the years. You can see why doubting one’s own craziness is considered a good sign: It’s a sort of flailing response by the second interpreter. What’s happening? the second interpreter is saying. He tells me it’s a tiger but I’m not convinced, maybe there’s something wrong with me. Enough doubt is in there to give 'reality’ a toehold. No doubt, no analysis. Somebody who comes in chatting about tigers is going to be offered Thorazine, not the couch. At that moment, when the doctor suggests Thorazine, what’s happening to the doctor’s mental map of mental illness? Earlier in the day, the doctor had a map divided into superego, ego and id, with all kinds of squiggly, perhaps broken, lines running among those three areas. The doctor was treating something he or she calls a psyche or mind. All of a sudden the doctor is preparing to treat a brain. This brain doesn’t have a psychelike arrangement, or if it does, that’s not where its problem is. This brain has problems that are chemical and electrical. 'It’s the reality-testing function,’ says the doctor. 'This brain is bollixed up about reality and I can’t analyze it. Those other brains - minds - weren’t.’.’ Something’s wrong here. You can’t call a piece of fruit an apple when you want to eat it and a dandelion when you don’t want to eat it. It’s the same sort of fruit no matter what your intentions toward it. And how strong is the case for a categorical distinction between brains that know reality and brains that don’t? Is a non-reality-recognizing brain truly as different from a reality-recognizing brain as a foot, say, is from a brain? This seems unlikely. Recognizing the agreed upon version of reality is only one of billions of brain jobs. If the biochemists were able to demonstrate the physical workings of neuroses (phobias, or difficulties getting pleasure from life), if they could pinpoint the chemicals and impulses and inter-brain conversations and information exchanges that constitute these feelings, would the psychoanalysts pack up their ids and egos and retire from the field? They have partially retired from the field. Depression, manic-depression, schizophrenia: All that stuff they always had trouble treating they now treat chemically. Take two Lithium and don’t call me in the morning because there’s nothing to say, it’s innate. Some cooperative efforts - the sort the brain makes - would be useful here. For nearly a century the psychoanalysts have been writing op-ed pieces about the workings of a country they’ve never traveled to, a place that, like China, has been off-limits. Suddenly, the country has opened its borders and is crawling with foriegn correspondants; neurobiologists are filing ten stories a week, filled with new data. These two groups of writers, however, don’t seem to read each other’s work. That’s because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.”

Mind vs. Brain, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

[mathewphilippo]

So, this post kinda has a lot of good points, that I haven't seen to be analyzed in the way that i did, when I tried to crack this up for myself, so I'm gonna try to write it.

Let's start with gender. As I understand (correct me if wrong, cause I'm a cis men here, so I might just fuck up about everything) it there are at least two sides to gender. A psychological and a social. in the psychological aspect, people have their own gender as part of their identity, and in the social, there are certain expectations when having a certain gender. so when you're born they look at your body and decide which gender you have. Some people, trans people, decide that they don't feel comfortable with their gender expression inside the gender they've been assigned, so they change that. Some go to the other gender, some stay in the two, some leave both, some don't have at all, or have their own gender.

Also, when talking about social expectations we need to mention how society teaches men and women alike, their own behavior patterns. With that I mean, men are made by society to be violent and aggressive in the same way women are made to be passive and sweet. Of course, this is garbage. People have their own way of behavior, we can't match behavior with gender but society doesn't give a fuck.

So, as I see it (again I might be completely wrong, pls correct me if I am), the problem arises when the social expectation for men meet the gender identity of men. I'm a man, society teaches me to be a "bad person", but I don't want to be a bad person. Cause they suck. And I think that's what caused the problem of op, who developed internalized transphobia, because he doesn't want to be the man that they expect him to be. (again pls if I'm wrong correct me)

Of course from that, comes a lot of complicated feelings. Men are known to be trash to everyone, but especially women, so how does that arises when I, a man, treat women. I'm scared that unconsciously I'm treating them like garbage. How can I be sure to love a girl without being predatory. How do I treat people with the respect and dignity they deserve, if all I've ever been taught how to be is a piece of garbage. Well, it's hard. You have to actively try to be better. Be better then what they expect you to be. And when they say men are trash, they mean that. At leats I do. So try to change the meaning of men, socially, is the hard part. And is the work that has to be done.

So the solution would be, create a new definition of men for society. Of course that's not as easy as it sounds. But we need to try to make men not as actively bad as they are. Not as misogynistic. We, as men, need to be better.

Hey so "all men are trash" posts help terfs

I'll explain if one of you want

[a-sleep-i-insomniac-blog]

Boku No Hero Academia: Shonen Boiled Down To Its Basics

My relationship with the shonen genre is quite complicated. For one, I love hype, and am hype whenever a show gets hype. After all, my favorite anime of all time is Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and that show has the most hype ending in the history of the world. Twice. However, I also despise one of the trademarks of shonen anime: filler. Thus, whenever the action in a shonen grinds to a halt so the entire ensemble cast has a chance to voice their opinion about the situation, I find myself groaning and my attention waning. Plus, I really dislike filler and recap episodes. I do understand that sometimes they can help people remember the plot if they are watching on a week to week basis, but I tend to marathon things. Therefore, when I decided to watch this entire show in two days, the small recap segments in the beginning of the episodes were far from welcome. Don’t get me wrong, I do think that recap episodes can be done right. I loved it when Kill La Kill compressed its entire recap episode into the beginning part of one of its episodes, and was able to move onto new material by the time the Op had finished playing. I appreciate that Boku No Hero Academia puts all of its recap in the beginning, making it really easy to just skip to the Op to get to the new stuff, but these segments can drag on for up to 3 minutes. While Kill La Kill’s recap segment was probably around 5 minutes long, it was the spectacle of it that made it watchable. Firstly, it was the first recap segment to occur in the entire show, and occurred about halfway through the series. Thus, instead of condensing the previous episode like MHA did, Kill La Kill needed to condense about 12 episodes into 5 minutes. Furthermore, the fact that Senketsu’s voice slowly accelerates in speed as he talks, and you can hear him slowly run out of breath, was extremely entertaining on its own just to listen to. And, such a thing never happens again. Thus, it is played off more as a joke than an actual recap segment.

Now before I start talking about how much I hate recap episodes for 392385 hours, let’s move onto the other technical aspects of the show. For the record, I did not do any research on the staff of this show before writing this post, so some of the assumptions that I make may or may not hold water. Personally, the directing in this show was miles better than BONES’s previous work Kekkai Sensen, which I will cover more in depth in the near future. It felt very shonen, similar to how FMA Brotherhood was put together. In other words, solid and unmemorable, but doesn’t screw anything up in the process. The animation is also very solid, with a few great looking scenes of Sakuga peppered in for good measure. I adored Hakuyu Go’s cut on All Might’s battle during the finale, as well as that cut of Deku punching that giant mech during the exams that I can’t find of Sakugabooru for some reason. The character designs, especially of the costumes, were very appealing to me, and I found myself just admiring the character art when not much was moving on the screen. I really like how thick All Might’s outline is and how intense his shading is when he in his muscular mode, as it really exemplifies how he is a larger-than-life hero in the eyes of the many, while when he shrinks down to his true form his shading becomes less intense, and his outline become more normal, as this is when he is the most down-to-earth and subdued. Designs like that really helped me get a sense of the characters of this show, as boy are there a lot of characters. Also, special mention of that invisible girl. She gets like a combined screen time of about 10 seconds, and each time I burst out laughing as it’s just a pair of floating gloves.

Great character designs aside, the characters that inherit those designs are a little less realized than they designs entail. Deku, the protagonist of MHA was a very easy lead to get behind. I’m always for the hardworking type in anime, having admired figures like Rock Lee, and violently admired people like Nanami Aoyama. Deku is no different. In a world of superpowered people, he is born without a quirk, and is bullied and has his dreams crushed because of this. Thus, when there’s an entire training montage of him working to inherit his power All For One, the payoff is that much greater than if he were just a naturally gifted person like your average light novel protagonist. I also like how analytical he is, as he grew up fanboying and analyzing his favorite heros, as well as the fact that the nature of his power makes so that he needs to be systematic in his approach to fighting, instead of going all Super-Saiyan. I do think his power is very shounen and main character-ish, but is it is executed well enough that I was able to buy into it. Deku is the only character in the entire show’s expansive cast that seems to undergo any real development. Granted, every character has his or her own gimmick, a “quirk”, if you will, but are otherwise rather one-note. One guy has a very strict moral code and can run very fast. One girl is caring, but kind of an airhead, and can negate the gravity of anything she touches. One girl is just a frog. Like actually. While they are fun to watch interact, they lack any real depth for me to actually get invested in them. Of course I love frog girl and think she’s best girl, but I feel like if less people had been introduced, and the core cast had had a little more room to breathe, they would have been more memorable characters as a whole.

Another thing I wanted to touch upon was the show’s fanservice. What struck me the most about this show’s fanservice was the fact that there actually was any. While I don’t think that the fanservice to be extremely tasteless and found it to be rather playful, I nonetheless was not able to shake the feeling that the show was trying to pander to me with these brief sequences. It’s similar to that of Kiznaiver, as 95% of the time there is no fanservice at all, but then all of a sudden, everyone is talking about another character’s boobs for some reason. I found it be distracting at times, as it was just so jarring from the tone of the rest of the show. I think the moment that broke me on this was when the girl that could just create matter (for some reason) gets her shirt blasted off for a few seconds, you we get that classic shot of strangely convenient positioning of props that just happen to block the camera’s view of the character. However, I don’t think that this is uncharacteristic of such a show from an Shonen Jump manga, as you need only need to look at Bleach or One Piece to see that fanservice isn’t exactly something unknown to this genre. Even FMA Brotherhood had that infamous seen with Winry accidentally changing in front of Ed.

As you can see, MHA does not do much to distinguish itself from its shonen contemporaries. The character designs, directing, protagonist, and story are all very shonen. To me, it feels like MHA is a shonen boiled down to all of the basic building blocks that make shonens work.  While a lot of what I just said has a lot of negative connotations attached to it, I feel like the reason that I liked MHA as much as I did is because Shonen as a genre works. Furthermore, it cuts through a lot of the excess and waste that you would get in Naruto or Bleach, focusing more on the good than the bad aspects of the genre. It had hype moments, and poignant moments. By the end of the first season, I found myself cheering for All Might, and shouting “PLUS ULTRA” along with him, while pumping my fists up in the air. Thus, I think this show deserves a strong 7 to a light 8 out of 10. I know that a second season has been confirmed, and will start airing in 2017. Thus, I look forward to continuing this story with this cast of fun and likable characters.

[gibsongirlselections]

Another MEK Sock-Puppet? Conservatives Should Care About Pro-War Disinformation

There is at least one more foreign policy opinion writer from the Mujahideen-eKhalq (MEK) whose existence is dubious, based on a study by a social media analyst and statements from a defector from the group. Amir Basiri, who contributed to Forbes 9 times, the Washington Examiner 52 times, OpenDemocracy, Algemeiner, and The Hill once also appears to be a fabrication.

The MEK is an Iranian exile group for which John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, and other foreign policy luminaries have given paid speeches. Dems like Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean have also spoken on their behalf. But the group has American blood on its hands, has been accused of practicing forced sterilization, and their belief system has been described as a mixture of Marxism and Islamism. Its supporters claim they, and their front group the National Council of Resistance of Iran, are a sort of government-in-exile, despite nearly nonexistent support for the group within Iran. They also have waged a substantial disinformation campaign in the Western press, in particular targeting conservative media.

“Amir Basiri and Heshmat Alavi are two fake accounts,” Hassan Heyrani, an MEK defector told TAC. “At Camp Liberty, near the BIAP airport in Iraq, I was in the political unit of the organization with some of the persons who grew up in America and Canada. We worked as a team to write the articles analyzing the Iranian regime. The MEK put them in The Washington Post and all the newspapers in Western countries.”

Basiri’s op-eds focus on the need for regime change in Iran which he claimed is “within reach.” The thrust of Basiri’s writing – last placed at the Examiner in October of 2018 – is to encourage American readers to take an interest and sympathize with the plight of Iranian protesters and dissidents. Basiri consistently argued against the Iran nuclear deal, downplayed terrorism against Iran, called for tougher sanctions as a method of regime change and highlighted the necessity of Trump working with the Iranian opposition.

“We are currently looking into the matter, so I won’t comment on this specific byline,” Philip Klein, Executive Editor and Commentary Editor of the Washington Examiner told TAC. “But I will say that we have recently instituted more rigorous vetting of outside contributors, including but not limited to asking for photo identification if necessary. We are especially on guard when it comes to unsolicited foreign policy commentary.”

A request for comment from OpenDemocracy, a site greatly concerned about disinformation campaigns, has not been returned as of press time. Basiri’s articles on Forbes are no longer online.

The list of MEK disinformation tactics also includes fake online since-deleted sites such as PersiaNow and ArabEye and questionable sites such as Iran Focus whose domain was formerly registered under the name of an NCRI spokesperson and is now anonymously held.

MEK’s recent influence campaign on Facebook spearheaded by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) was recently reported on last year by Lachlan Markey at the Daily Beast. Markey explained how NCRI lobbyist Soheila Aligholi Mayelzadeh has helped place paid ads on Facebook reaching between 500,000 to 1.4 million users as part of the campaign to sway US public opinion in favor of MEK and intervention in Iran.

The list of outright fakes recently in the realm of foreign policy analysis is significant: there is the apparent Emirati fabrication Raphael Badani to MEK sock puppet Alavi, first revealed by The Intercept, to deepfake non-existent anti-Palestinian activist Oliver Taylor, whose work was placed at highly-respected publications in the United States and Israel.

As Adam Rawnsley wrote for the Daily Beast, “Badani is part of a network of at least 19 fake personas that has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different publications. The articles heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates and advocated for a tougher approach to Qatar, Turkey, Iran and its proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon.”

Geoff Golberg is the founder of Social Forensics, which tracks and monitors online social media networks and disinformation campaigns. Golberg’s run-in and exposure of various pro-MEK personas, sock puppets and boosters came just prior to his Twitter suspension in July of 2019, the official reason for which was calling an account he believed to be fake and interfering in Canada’s elections a “moron.”

“Rather than suspending accounts that blatantly violate Twitter Rules, Dorsey instead opted to silence my voice. Specific to Iranian-focused platform manipulation, along with The Intercept, I helped out ‘Heshmat Alavi’ as a sockpuppet propaganda operation run by the MEK. Remarkably, despite initially suspending the fake account, ‘Heshmat Alavi’ has been reinstated by Twitter and continues to disseminate propaganda,” Golberg said, adding that Basiri – whose account is currently suspended by Twitter – is another fake persona which has been on his radar for some time. He produced the following graphic demonstrating the interconnectedness of the two accounts:

Golberg said he knows little of geopolitics or political aspects and was led to investigate sock puppet accounts fomenting war with Iran because he noticed many oddities about their networks, followers and tweeting patterns. His further research and analysis led him down a rabbit hole of connections and resulted in death threats, mass reporting of his account and accusations that he sympathized with the Ayatollah’s regime.

Rather than the hype over Russian bots, the real danger on platforms like Twitter is fake accounts and troll farm accounts which amplify hashtags, spread lies and bolster the desired propaganda of their paymaster, Golberg says.

“Despite media coverage that tends to focus on ‘bots,’ which simply means fully-automated accounts, Twitter’s much larger problem is actually fake accounts. There are more than 100K fake accounts that exist solely to create the illusion of widespread sentiment that the US should go to war with Iran,” Golberg told TAC, adding, “Take ‘Sheldon,’ @patrick_jane77, for example, an account that reflects having nearly 120K Followers. Very few of the account’s Followers are authentic accounts, yet given Twitter refuses to enforce their own rules, it is easy to mistake “Sheldon” for being a popular account. Twitter’s entire platform is propped up by misleading or inflated Followers/Following counts. Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, has built a house of cards and continues to commit ad fraud at a massive scale.”

Golberg sued Twitter earlier this year, alleging that the platform engaged in “deceptive practices” and hasn’t stood by its own terms of service.

Accusations from MEK supporter Hanif Jazayeri that The American Conservative itself and senior editor Daniel Larison act as a mouthpiece for the mullahs are part of a broader campaign aimed at maligning the reputation and integrity of anyone who opposes regime change in Iran. Tweets calling for investigations of TAC also came from noted MEK sock puppet Alavi, MEK spokesman Shahin Gobadi and NCRI’s Ali Safavi.

A barrage of accounts retweeted Jazayeri’s accusations, many with only a few followers and which solely tweet boosting the MEK and supporting regime change in Iran.

It’s worth noting that Amir Basiri was following Heshmat Alavi prior to his suspension, as were others closely connected to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies such as Jerusalem Post Iran hawk Seth Frantzman, @sfrantzman, Jazayeri and a number of other pro-MEK shills. It is a hall of mirrors amplifying the case for war with Iran, and the ad money from NCRI and pro-MEK accounts seems to have dampened Twitter’s desire to crack down. A request for comment from Twitter was not returned as of press time.

As a matter of journalistic ethics any organization engaging in systematic dishonesty like this has provided a very good reason to blacklist them. Failing to do so will encourage other foreign interests to do the same in the future, so conservative publishers should decline all content and interviews from the MEK in the future. This is not a matter of foreign policy differences: if you wish to see the U.S. pursue regime change in Iran, the MEK does not help make that case. Any publishers or think tanks who are aware of this dishonesty and still treat them like a legitimate opposition group should be considered part of a campaign not wholly different from the last time we were lied into a Mideast war.

Arthur Bloom is the managing editor of TAC.

Paul Brian is a freelance journalist. He has reported for the BBC, Reuters, and Foreign Policy, and contributed to The Week, The Federalist, and others. You can follow him on Twitter @paulrbrian or visit his website www.paulrbrian.com.

Arthur Bloom is editor of The American Conservative online.

The post Another MEK Sock-Puppet? Conservatives Should Care About Pro-War Disinformation appeared first on The American Conservative.

[loislaneinvestigatesauthors]

From lab science to the art of the novel: historical fantasy writer Linda McCabe

Linda McCabe speaks in Oakland, CA at 2pm at the California Writers’ Club meeting at 1204 Preservation Park Way this Sunday, October 21st. Open to the public for a $10 cash donation at the door. 

More info on the Club and on Linda here. 

1. What drew you in to Greek mythology and to the story of Orlando  Furioso? Why do you think those stories have appealed to readers  throughout time? I started reading Greek mythology as a small girl. I loved the larger than life stories and characters. The first time I ever stayed awake reading until the wee hours of the night was with D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths. I adore that book. It is wonderfully illustrated and it introduces each member of the Greek pantheon with their own story. My favorite Greek goddess is Athena. She is powerful, respected and derives her strength from her intellect and not from beauty.  She's not only the goddess of wisdom and victory, but also of the arts such as weaving tapestries. One of my favorite stories is of a mortal who was a gifted weaver who had boasted she was more skilled than Athena. The goddess disguised herself, tried to get the girl to take back her words. The girl, named Arachne, refused to take back the boast and instead issued a challenge to the goddess. Athena threw off her disguise and accepted the challenge. They both created incredible tapestries. While Athena's depicted the Olympian gods in all of their glory, Arachne's made fun of Zeus and his various wives. Athena's wrath brought about the destruction of the irreverent artwork and transformed the talented girl into a spider who would weave for all eternity.

Harsh, but fair punishment. Pride cometh before the fall. Hubris. Greek mythology is filled with these kinds of stories. I started reading Orlando furioso in 2003 when I was engaged in online debates regarding the Harry Potter series. This was before the series was finished, and there were many various theories floating about. One theory involved the symbolic meaning of hippogriffs. I wound up reading Ariosto's masterpiece because that was the first time a hippogriff was used as a character in literature. I became drawn to the love story between Bradamante and Ruggiero, which was considered one of many subplots in this epic poem. Bradamante reminded me of Athena. She was a respected warrior who was cool under pressure. The major difference is that Bradamante fell in love, whereas Athena never allowed herself to love a man. Bradamante was the niece of Charlemagne and was a Christian. She fell in love with an honorable warrior who was a Muslim and on the opposing side of a holy war. Their love was kept secret until they could find a way to be together with honor, and there were many, many obstacles for this couple to overcome. She was even given the Call to Adventure to rescue him when he was being held captive by a wizard. It is amazing that this incredible kick-ass heroine was created over 500 years ago, but has somehow become largely forgotten over the years.

These stories become timeless because they demonstrate heroism and perseverance as well as Karmic punishments for those without honor. 2. How do you know when you've done enough research and you're ready to write? This is a gut feeling. There's a point when I feel like I am procrastinating more than I am doing research. Sometimes I just have to shift gears and stop researching if the aspect I am trying to understand isn't "knowable" or maybe isn't all that important. I spent over a week wondering about diapering in the middle ages. This was all because I wanted to have a character do some action in a scene with her baby. I started imagining the characters in my setting and thought of where would the dirty diaper would be placed. Then I wondered how the diaper would be closed, (did they have diaper pins?) How often would they wash them? How many diapers would a noble household have for a baby? Some research suggested that babies might not have been put in diapers at all. Instead, the parents would watch them carefully and hold them at arm's length over straw to absorb urine flow. I considered this matter for too long. I was obsessing over a minor detail that did not enhance or further the plot. I decided to take it out and not "go there." Instead, I described the baby as been freshly bathed in the scene.

3. Conversely, where can you go to make sure your writing doesn't contain obvious  historical errors or anachronisms? Are there 'continuity readers' or  'historical readers' available to regular authors?  I have several beta readers who have looked at various passages or  aspects of the story to give me this kind of feedback. Finding experts  for your writing can be a challenge. I suggest during the writing  process to try and identify those who may be able to provide specific feedback. I joined different list servs where I could ask experts questions that I had been unable to find answers to on my own. 

There is a wonderful internet resource for a multitude of disciplines called H-Net for Humanities and Social Services. https://networks.h-net.org/ I recommend that resource for those who wish to find experts. Go to the website, explore different listings, subscribe and read back postings to get familiar with the style of discussion before posting. Most of the subscribers are university faculty members, so being an "independent scholar" will set you apart. Don't be intimidated, but try not to ask overly broad questions showing that you haven't done research on your own first. Tell them you are a writer and have a few specific questions. Or write a post stating that you are looking for beta readers for historical accuracy who will give feedback. Many of the professors read fiction in their spare time, make an appeal asking for help in identifying errors might work.  Finding good 'continuity readers' is a more difficult nut to crack. You have to find close, careful readers who will notice nit-picky items that contradict earlier details in your story. This cannot be done effectively for beta readers who get a few pages here and there. You need critique group members who will read large chunks or the entire manuscript *and* will focus on minutiae. For example, someone who will pull up a calendar from the year your story takes place and notice if there really was a full moon on the night of the murder. That's the kind of thing I do for my critique group partners, and sometimes they appear annoyed prior to expressing gratitude for my corrections/feedback.

In regard to historical errors or anachronisms, I have had some instances where I balance historical accuracy versus dramatic needs. I initially try to find a way to make the historical record work, but there are times when it would lessen the drama. Or it would cause the narrative to become immensely more complicated. In those occasions, I will choose dramatic necessity over historical accuracy and write a disclaimer in my author notes to detail the reasons behind my decision. I feel that the greatest sin a writer can commit is to bore readers. 

An example of this type of decision regarded the Medieval walls around the city of Paris. The poets described a complex set of ramparts that were first built by King Philippe Auguste in the 12th century.  The story of Charlemagne and his knights is set in the 9th century. I considered removing the historically inaccurate walls, but quickly realized that my already complicated plot would become exponentially worse. I decided to keep the walls and mention my dilemma in my author notes. After all, I am retelling a grand story originally written to entertain one noble family in Italy and it featured wars that never took place with mostly fictional characters, magical realms and flying hippogriffs. Therefore, know that I took care in telling this tale, so please just enjoy the ride! 4. I notice you also write essays and editorials in addition to your  historical fiction. Would you agree with the advice I myself heard as an aspiring novelist, to get other pieces of writing published before you  go out there to agents and publishers with a first novel? While I believe that having publication credits is important to demonstrate your authority as a writer, it isn't as important to an agent as the sample pages of your completed novel. Writing an article or short story is like running a 100 yard dash while writing a novel is more like running a marathon.  Perfecting the art of the query letter or verbal pitching to an agent in order to get the request to submit sample pages is a different skill set than regular writing. Once you get the go-ahead to send your manuscript and synopsis, your overall craft will be on full view. The agent and subsequent potential publishers will only green light a publishing contract based on the strength of your finished product and not because you had an op-ed published in the LA Times. Honestly, I think getting a pithy book description will do more for you with agents and publishers than having multiple credits to your name. However, it is a different matter if you are writing non-fiction. If you had publication credits in magazines or peer-reviewed journals and you were submitting a book proposal on the same topic - it might help influence the decision of the agent/publisher to sign you as a client/author.

5. How do your feel your "day job" has influenced your writing? And what is your educational background? While I love writing, my education is in the sciences. My undergraduate degree is in Laboratory Medicine and my master's degree is as an Historian of Science. I also have training in competitive public speaking from high school and acting in plays. My only creative writing classes were in screenwriting and those were taken without being applied to any degree program. Screenwriting helped me analyze scenes in movies to determine how best to distill narrative and reveal characters into scenes that further a plot. Participating in debate and drama helped me understand how to craft a strong argument and then overlay my steel girder like-logic with pathos to stir the emotional senses. As a laboratorian, over the years I have developed a keen analytical mind. One of my previous jobs, I managed the organ recipient list of over one hundred patients for a laboratory in downtown Detroit. I reviewed and monitored changes and updates to the statewide list published by the Organ Procurement Agency of Michigan. Soon after I took over that responsibility  I discovered and corrected numerous errors on our list of patients . Learning to have a scope of memory to track and manage so many details helped prepare me for adapting a story of epic grandeur with a massive cast of characters.

Similarly, having been trained in historical methods of researching for my master's degree, I feel obligated in learning about the time, place, cultural practices, etc., in my story. I have done my best to ground this story in a real time and place, giving my narrative the historical details of ninth century Francia. So once I decided on doing an adaptation of Orlando furioso, I had to learn about Medieval history and the life of Charlemagne. I immersed myself in research while simultaneously trying to determine parts of the story to retain and parts to cut. After doing an intense analysis of my source material, I discovered continuity errors. One enchanted castle was located in three (!) separate and distinct locations. The narrative is immensely complicated, and I doubt the patrons noticed the discrepancies let alone raised any objections. However, I am well aware of L.O.O.N.s (the League of Obsessive Nitpickers) and so I had to fix one location for this enchanted castle and made this determination based on my plot necessities. I also moved several locations of other plot points that I felt made more logical sense.

The Carolingian legend cycle spanned several centuries in the south of France and north of Italy. The jongleurs and troubadours told and retold these legends for the nobles and the masses. By the time Ludovico Ariosto and Matteo Maria Boiardo wrote their masterpieces, these characters were popular. My contribution in this legend cycle is to transform a portion of these stories into a tale for modern day audiences using current storytelling techniques. ***side note*** The Italians do not capitalize the second word in the title of the poems. I'm not sure why, because I do not speak Italian or know the particulars of Italian grammar rules. So my use of Orlando furioso and not Orlando Furioso is not accidental, it is purposeful. If you do a quick Google search, the results for capitalization are not consistent. However, once this was pointed out to me, I have endeavored to follow the Italian convention.

More about Linda McCabe and her current works here. 

[brassyy]

Helping out with strike on Saturday night after the concert completely screwed up my sleep schedule... I slept pretty much all day on Sunday... then today I fell asleep when I got home, and woke up around 11:30... and I’m currently wide awake... but I’ve been developing some ideas for my various papers. I have a paper for every class. It’s horrendous, but there’s not much left to do this semester, so I think it’s manageable. I guess I’m most worried about my music paper on Madame Butterfly because I haven’t been too invested in it beyond reading books, plus it’s challenging researching a different culture when you don’t have many experiences with that culture... and one of the things that I want to do with this paper is make connections to authenticity, and see where it’s perhaps not authentic/more western or stereotypical.

Anyways, I have some time for this paper. And my paper on free jazz, which I was going to argue was “true” black expression, but now I’m wanting to frame is as a “different” form of black expression, because part of my world music class has recently included a look at Mbube/Wimoweh/The Lion Sleeps Tonight and Paul Robeson’s Old Man River, among other things... and there’s just this huge history of expression through music that I feel needs to be taken in consideration! ...but I can’t really touch on this too much because it’s not the focus of the paper, so I’m incorporating some of these into the introduction, but I’m not sure about the extent.

For my Gender and Women’s studies class, I’ll need to attend a performance of some sort... or a lecture or whatever... to connect it with some of the themes we’ve been studying... this is a challenge because I’m rarely in Madison at night when these events are held... but it should be pretty easy to write about, as I basically just need to write a review/observation of the event and connect it with themes.

Then... I have an op-ed due on Thursday for my language policy class. I’ve started on this three times, when I’ve gotten worked up over something or other. The first time was when I was noticing how people seem to disregard signs, such as where to walk... and then I saw someone run across the street in the middle of traffic and it’s like... ??? Then, I got worked up when that white mother was complaining about how her son was held up by TSA, because how would we react if this was some middle-eastern family in the same situation? Would it get a bunch of media attention, or would it just be ignored? 

More recently, I was considering language during the audition process... because that’s one thing that I’ve been wondering about. How important is language when I’m auditioning? Should I be saying more when I’m introducing the piece? Should I be saying something in particular afterwards? Am I being disadvantaged because I’m not the most gifted speaker? etc.

NOW... I read a Facebook article about how some bars are filtering hip hop out of their jukebox system... which is clearly a problem because it stereotypes, but this article doesn’t really touch on the language aspects of music, and I think I’m going to focus on that now. Another thing is that a couple weeks ago, I noticed that this Chinese student was contributing more in class when we were going over some Chinese forms of music... and he seemed to have more of a reaction to some of the music than the rest of us... and I think I’ll make the argument that music is not a universal language (because that’s a very popular misconception among A LOT of people), but taking some time to appreciate and analyze music of other genres can help us develop more of an understanding.... or something along those lines... not 100% sold on how I’m wording things, so this is gonna be rough! haha. but at least I have a topic that I can really connect with. 

It’s cool that I’m making so many connections in my classes with music education, because hopefully it’ll be an interesting aspect of my next music application... I hope I get in or can work something out with the professors.... I do want to focus on trumpet since I think it’ll be easier to balance, but maybe I can talk to the horn professor as well in case he has space available.. who knows. 

Anyways, I should definitely finish reading for class tomorrow and probably go to bed, even though I’m STILL not tired at all after spending about an hour writing this super random tumblr post. Oh well. It’s good to get thoughts out of my head.  

[myattorneyusa]

Overview of Scotus Nominee Neil Gorsuch's Background and Record

INTRODUCTION 

On January 31, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Judge Neil M. Gorsuch of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit to the United States Supreme Court [see blog]. Judge Gorsuch was nominated to fill the seat that has been vacant since the death of former Justice Antonin Scalia on February 13, 2016 [see blog on Justice Scala's career]. In this article, I will offer an overview of Judge Gorsuch's career and known positions, with an emphasis on issues that relate to the administration of the immigration laws. In conclusion, I will explain why Judge Gorsuch is an exceptional pick for the vacant Supreme Court seat and why the Senate should move expeditiously to confirm him. 

BACKGROUND 

Judge Gorsuch recently submitted his responses to a questionnaire issued by the Senate Judiciary Committee [PDF version]. This committee will vote whether to refer the nomination to the full Senate following a hearing at which Judge Gorsuch will appear. We will rely on the questionnaire and other sources to examine Judge Gorsuch's background in brief. 

Judge Gorsuch was born on August 29, 1967. At 49 years of age, he is the youngest individual nominated to the Supreme Court since now-Justice Clarence Thomas was nominated at 43 years of age in 1991. 

Judge Gorsuch obtained his undergraduate degree from Columbia University in 1988. He procured his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1991. If confirmed, Judge Gorsuch will be the sixth Justice on the Court to have graduated from Harvard Law School. Judge Gorsuch subsequently studied at Oxford University, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy in Law degree in 2004. 

After completing Harvard Law School, Judge Gorsuch clerked for Judge David B. Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1991-1992. Judge Gorsuch then clerked for Justice Byron White and Justice Anthony Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court from 1993-1994. If confirmed, Gorsuch will be the only Justice to have clerked for one of his colleagues (Justice Kennedy). 

Subsequent to his clerkships, Judge Gorsuch worked in private practice from 1998-2005. From 2005-2006, he worked in the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) as a Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General. In 2006, President George W. Bush nominated Gorsuch to replace Judge David M. Ebel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Gorsuch was confirmed by the United States Senate by voice vote with no registered opposition.[1] Judge Gorsuch has served on the Tenth Circuit since he was confirmed in 2006. 

In an interesting side-note, Judge Gorsuch's mother — Anne Gorsuch Buford — served as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for two years under President Ronald Reagan. 

INTERESTING WRITINGS 

Before examining Judge Gorsuch's record on the bench, it is work noting two pieces of writing that he completed prior to being confirmed to serve on the Tenth Circuit. 

The subject of Judge Gorsuch's research at Oxford University was assisted suicide. After completing his dissertation, Judge Gorsuch published a book titled The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (Princeton University Press 2006). In the book, he examined assisted suicide in great detail and assessed the moral and legal arguments for and against it. The issues touched on in this book are outside the scope of what I will focus on in this post, but it is a noteworthy book that is likely to come up in Judge Gorsuch's confirmation hearings. In the book, he argued against assisted suicide, concluding, “All human beings are intrinsically valuable, and the intentional taking of human life by living persons is wrong.”[2] 

In an article more relevant to the scope of what we will be examining, Gorsuch penned an article for the conservative National Review in 2005 — prior to taking the bench — titled Liberals'N'Lawsuits.[3] In the article, Gorsuch opined that “American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than on elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda…” Gorsuch contrasted this with relying on the judiciary only in “extraordinary” cases. He argued that such reliance by the left on the judiciary to advance policy objectives “is bad for the country and bad for the judiciary.” Part of the problem, he noted, was that once judges rule that a policy is unconstitutional, one side wins and the other side loses, which robs society “of the give-and-take of the political process and the flexibility of social experimentation that only the elected branches can provide.” Furthermore, Gorsuch noted that in his opinion relying on the judiciary to advance policy objectives leads to the politicization of the judiciary. In conclusion, he observed that, during the New Deal, liberals recognized that the “elected branches are generally the appropriate engines of social reform,” and he praised Democratic-appointed judges of that era for arguing for “judicial restraint and deference to the right of Congress to experiment with economic and social policy.” 

In an op-ed published recently in the New York Daily News, noted lawyer and legal scholar Ilya Somin expressed concerns with Gorsuch's National Review article.[4] Somin praised many aspects of Judge Gorsuch's record on the bench. However, referring to the opinions voiced in the article, Somin criticized Gorsuch's praise for the Democratic-appointed judges who, during the New Deal period, employed “judicial restraint and deference to the right of Congress to experiment with economic and social policy.” As Somin notes, “Liberal jurists of that period advocated near-total abdication of judicial enforcement of limits on federal power.” Somin acknowledged that it is possible that Judge Gorsuch “did not intend to embrace the full implications” of his statements (including those advocating relying on courts only in “extraordinary” circumstances). However, Somin argued that, in light of threats that Somin sees with President Trump's positions on a variety of issues, Judge Gorsuch's stated position should be taken “both seriously and literally,” even granting his strong record on the Tenth Circuit. 

I share some of Somin's concerns with Judge Gorsuch's article in the National Review, and I believe it is a worthy topic for the confirmation hearings. However, it is important to note that the article was written to concur with an argument that liberals should look for policy solutions to policy debates rather than to the judiciary, thus suggesting that the matters addressed — in Gorsuch's opinion — presented pure policy questions rather than legal issues appropriate for judicial review. However, he did indeed go beyond that in seeming to advocate excessive judicial deference to the political branches. Fortunately, as we shall examine, Judge Gorsuch's record on the bench and his general approach to the law suggest that he is more willing than he suggested in that article to exercise judicial review where it is warranted. 

JUDGE GORSUCH'S LEGAL PHILOSOPHY 

Judge Gorsuch has often been compared to Justice Antonin Scalia in his legal philosophy. He is known as being a textualist, meaning that he seeks to analyze statutes by analyzing the plain meaning of the text, to the exclusion of things such as legislative history and intent. We will see these principles at play in a small selection of Judge Gorsuch's written decisions. 

Judge Gorsuch wrote a law article upon the death of Justice Scalia [PDF version], in which the stated that Justice Scalia had reminded judges “[t]hat judges should … strive … to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to the text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be-not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences that they believe might serve society best.”[5] Judge Gorsuch disagreed with criticisms of Justice Scalia's legal philosophy to the effect that he had focused too much on process and not enough on results. Judge Gorsuch described himself as “an adherent to the view that outcomes (ends) do not justify methods (means).[6] Judge Gorsuch further described judicial power as “[n]ot a forward-looking but backward-looking authority.” By this, he explained, he meant that judicial power was not for “making new rules of general applicability, but a means for resolving disputes about what existing law is and how it applies to discrete cases and controversies.”[7] 

Although it is never a given how an individual will rule once he or she is on the Supreme Court, Judge Gorsuch's principles of legal interpretation bear strong similarities to those of Justice Scalia, although they may differ on several key issues that we will examine. On the current court, Judge Gorsuch's textualist approach bears similarities on the surface to the approach of Justice Clarence Thomas. 

JUDGE GORSUCH ON THREE AREAS RELATING TO IMMIGRATION 

Federal judges handle cases from all areas of law, and the vast majority of issues do not implicate the immigration laws. The three areas through which federal judges have the most significant effect on immigration law by their rulings are criminal appeals, immigration appeals, and administrative law decisions. In the following sections, we will examine a few of Judge Gorsuch's opinions in these areas and look for clues as to how he may rule on the Supreme Court. 

However, it is important to note that, as a circuit court judge, Judge Gorsuch has been bound by Supreme Court precedent. That means if the Supreme Court has previously spoken to a legal issue that is before the Tenth Circuit, the Tenth Circuit is required to follow the Supreme Court precedent. Conversely, the Supreme Court may reconsider any prior precedent and revise or overrule it. Thus, as a justice of the Supreme Court, Gorsuch would have significantly more latitude. 

The question faced by a Supreme Court Justice in general and in any given case is ultimately the degree of his or her acceptance of stare decisis, that is, determining cases in accord with precedent. It is hard to say at this time how Judge Gorsuch would balance the interest in stare decisis in deciding a case when he believes a prior decision — or line of decisions — was wrong. This is one area where the views of two of the Supreme Court's most well-known textualists — Justices Scalia and Thomas — differed. With regard to stare decisis. Justice Scalia was generally more deferential to the principle of stare decisis than Justice Thomas. 

CRIMINAL LAW 

Eric Citron of Scotusblog described Judge Gorsuch as believing that “criminal laws should be clear and interpreted in favor of defendants even if it hurts government prosecutions (like Scalia).”[8] In the immigration context, Supreme Court precedent on how to interpret and apply criminal statutes has a significant effect on aliens with criminal convictions. Please see our articles on Descamps v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2276 (2013) [see article] and Mathis v. United States, 579 U.S. __ [see article] for two examples of cases where the Supreme Court created precedent for reading federal sentencing enhancement statutes and criminal statutes in a manner that was generally favorable to aliens with criminal convictions. 

One of Judge Gorsuch's most notable pieces of writing from the bench came in United States v. Games-Perez, 667 F.3d 1136 (10th Cir. 2012) [PDF version]. 

The question regarded the requirements for a conviction under 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(1) and 924(a)(2). 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(1) makes it unlawful for an individual “who has been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year” to “ship or transport in interstate or foreign commerce, or possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition; or to receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.” 18 U.S.C. 924(a)(2) states that “[w]hoever knowingly violates subsection … (g) … of section 922 shall be fined as provided in this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.” 

A three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit (which included Judge Gorsuch), had found that the government was not required to establish that an individual knew that he or she had been convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year in order to secure a conviction under the relevant provisions. Judge Gorsuch concurred in the judgment because he felt bound by precedent, but he expressed his issues with the Tenth Circuit precedent and urged reconsideration. 

The appellant made an en banc request asking for a hearing from the entire Tenth Circuit. The Tenth Circuit denied rehearing en banc 6-4. Judge Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the 4 judges who dissented from denial of rehearing en banc. Interestingly, Judge Gorsuch had been on the 3-judge panel that decided the case initially, and concurred in judgment because he felt bound by precedent, but expressed his issues with the Tenth Circuit precedent (and urged reconsideration) in his concurring opinion. 

In his dissent from denial of rehearing en banc, Judge Gorsuch argued that 18 U.S.C. 924(a)(2) requires a showing of “knowingly violat[ing] [18 U.S.C.] 922(g), a statute that in turn prohibits (1) a convicted felon (2) from possessing a firearm (3) in interstate commerce.” He took issue with the Tenth Circuit's finding that the government was only required to establish that the appellant had knowingly possessed a firearm and not that he had known that he was a convicted felon as defined in 18 U.S.C. 922(g). Wryly, Judge Gorsuch stated that the Tenth Circuit precedent the Court had relied on interpreted “Congress's mens rea requirement as leapfrogging over the first statutorily specified element and touching down at the second listed element — def[ying] grammatical gravity and linguistic logic.” Judge Gorsuch cited to the Supreme Court decision in Flores-Figueroa v. United States, 556, U.S. 646, 650 (2009) [PDF version], stating that “when a criminal statute introduces the elements of a crime with the word 'knowingly,' that mens rea requirement must be applied 'to all the subsequently listed [substantive] elements of the crime'” (emphasis and alliteration added by Judge Gorsuch). Judge Gorsuch also criticized both the Government's and the Tenth Circuit's reliance on legislative history, stating that “[t]he problem with all this is that hidden intentions never trump expressed ones.” 

Judge Gorsuch's concurrence is highly interesting and worth reading in full. It provides a window into how he reads criminal statutes, and it offers evidence that he may often do so in a way that favors criminal defendants. 

In a side-note, we recently posted an article about Voisine v. United States, 579 U.S. (2016) [see article], which addressed the related section 922(g)(9) (statute that prohibits firearm ownership for a crime of domestic violence). 

JUDGE GORSUCH ON IMMIGRATION AND ADMINISTRATIVE LAW 

In 2015 — well before we knew that Judge Gorsuch would be nominated to the Supreme Court — we wrote a comprehensive article on a decision penned by Judge Gorsuch, De Niz Robles v. Lynch, 803 F.3d 1165 (10th Cir. 2015) [see article]. On January 23, 2017, I posted a follow-up blog on Judge Gorsuch's decision on a similar issue in Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, 834 F.3d 1142 (10th Cir. 2016) [see blog]. 

We have already covered both of these decisions in great detail on this site, and I encourage you read our full articles for detailed analysis. In this section, I will address the decisions in brief while providing commentary on a passage Judge Gorsuch wrote about De Niz Robles in the law article he wrote after the death of Justice Scalia. 

Both cases addressed whether the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) could apply its precedent decision in the Matter of Briones, 24 I&N Dec. 355 (BIA 2007) [PDF version], retroactively to a case in which the Tenth Circuit had reached a different conclusion prior to the BIA decision. 

A key issue in both of these cases is that of Chevron deference. Under the Supreme Court decision in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 847 (1984) [PDF version], courts are generally required to defer to an administrative agency's reading of a statute where the statute is ambiguous and the agency's reading of the statute is reasonable. The Supreme Court decision in National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services, 545 U.S. 967 (2005) [PDF version] extended deference to administrative agencies in the face of contrary judicial precedent, provided that the statute in question is ambiguous. 

In both cases, Judge Gorsuch followed Chevron and Brand X in deferring to the Board's decision in the Matter of Briones, but he found that neither allowed the Board to apply Briones retroactively when there was contrary Tenth Circuit precedent. In his concurring opinion in Gutierrez-Brizuela, Judge Gorsuch expressed his qualms with both Chevron and Brand X — and the threat he saw in their vesting too much power in the Executive branch — in great detail. Both decisions are worth reading in full — along with our articles — as they are instructive about administrative law issues and provide a window into Judge Gorsuch's thinking on one of the most important issues that will come before the Supreme Court. 

In Judge Gorsuch's article written upon the death of Justice Scalia, he described the De Niz Robles case as follows: “an executive agency acting a faux-judicial proceeding and exercising delegated legislative authority purported to overrule an existing judicial declaration about the meaning of existing law and apply its new legislative rule retroactively to already completed conduct. Just describing what happened here might be enough to make James Madison's head spin.”[9] Judge Gorsuch laid out the issues that he believed were at stake: “combining what are by design supposed to be separate and distinct legislative and judicial powers poses a grave threat to our values of personal liberty, fair notice, and equal protection.” 

On the issue of administrative law, Judge Gorsuch's views may be distinguishable from not only those of Justice Scalia but also from those of the other Justices sitting on the court currently (note that Justice Thomas was the author of Brand X). However, despite Justice Scalia's acceptance of Chevron, he did read it more narrowly than did most of his colleagues, leading Citron to suggest that “given [Gorsuch's and Scalia's] parallel commitments to textualism and their parallel understandings of the relative roles of agencies and courts, even this seems like a bridgeable divide between Gorsuch and the justice he might replace.” 

Judge Gorsuch offered an interesting opinion dissenting from rehearing en banc in United States v. Nichols, 784 F.3d 666 (10th Cir. 2015) [PDF version], addressing the non-delegation doctrine in the criminal law context from the standpoint of its potential danger to the separation of powers and individual liberty.[10] 

Please see our article about Judge Gorsuch's opinion in Montano-Vega v. Holder, 721 F.3d 1175 (10th Cir. 2015) [PDF version], to read about another interesting precedent decision by Judge Gorsuch on immigration law. 

CONCLUSION 

With the nomination of Judge Gorsuch, President Trump fulfilled his campaign promise to choose a worthy replacement to Justice Scalia for the Supreme Court. Judge Gorsuch has impeccable credentials, and his textualist approach to reading law will be a valuable addition to the Court that arguably only has one Justice — Justice Thomas — who is a full-spectrum textualist and originalist. As Josh Blackman wrote, “[a]s a committed originalist, sound jurist and brilliant writer, Gorsuch will serve as a worthy intellectual heir to Justice Scalia.”[11] 

In the immigration context, Judge Gorsuch's record suggests that he may read the law in a way that would be favorable to aliens in the criminal law context. Judge Gorsuch's views on administrative law and judicial deference have the potential to be his most significant contribution to the bench, if they gain traction with his colleagues. I encourage the Senate to confirm Judge Gorsuch expeditiously, and I look forward to seeing him on the Supreme Court. 

Please visit the nyc immigration lawyers website for further information. The Law Offices of Grinberg & Segal, PLLC focuses vast segment of its practice on immigration law. This steadfast dedication has resulted in thousands of immigrants throughout the United States.

Mulkern, Anne C., “Gorsuch confirmed for 10th Circuit,” denverpost.com, (Jul. 20, 2006)

Hawkins, Derek, “Neil Gorsuch wrote the book on assisted suicide. Here's what he said.” washingtonpost.com, (Feb. 1, 2017)

Gorsuch, Neil, “Liberals'N'Lawsuits,” nationalreview.com, (Feb. 7, 2005)

Somin, Ilya, “Supreme Court pick Neil Gorsuch has troubling views on federalism and judicial review,” nydailynews.com, (Jan. 31, 2017)

Honorable Neil M. Gorsuch, 2016 Sumner Canary Memorial Lecture: Of Lions and Bears, Judges and Legislators, and the Legacy of Justice Scalia, 66 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 905 (2016), 906

Id. 906

Id. 910

Citron, Eric, “Potential nominee profile: Neil Gorsuch,” scotusblog.com, (Jan. 13, 2017)

Gorsuch, Memorial Lecture, 915

Feder, David, “The Administrative Law Originalism of Neil Gorsuch,” yalerjreg.com, (Nov. 21, 2016)

Blackman, Josh, “My Take in Politico on Judge Gorsuch: 'The Kennedy Whisperer,;” joshblackman.com, (Feb. 1, 2017) 

Lawyer website: http://myattorneyusa.com