#dune 2020 discourse

[ghostofacrow]

Dune discourse is uniquely annoying because there's a bunch of extremely obvious, in-your-face orientalism perpetuated by the main characters that's being discussed at nauseum and is very easy to dismiss and completely overshadows any actual issues with the movie, like the refusal to use recognisable arabic phrases or the hiring practices. I'll be charitable here and assume that people have a rightfully negative reaction to how those images of white people, particularly Jessica, are used as marketing material, instead of just not getting the point, and with how often concerns like this are overlooked, I can understand why they aren't receptive to "no this thing that media does uncritically all the time is meant to be bad THIS time actually trust me bro just read this 1000 page book".

Seemingly the entire film crew having cold feet about including references to real world anti-colonial movements or just normal Arabic would always be concerning, but especially given the current situation in Palestine and it's all overshadowed by the colonisers in the book acting like colonisers because every other issue is more complicated. Dune, as a text, still believes in noble savages and "hard times create hard men" nonsense. I'm really not coming at this from a "don't criticise the thing I like" angle, but debates about Jessica's outfit have made me learn nothing besides occasionally seeing really cool pictures of real arabic clothing, while reading Haris A. Durrani's dissections of the books and the current adaptation has actually tought me a lot of stuff about both the book and the real world.

If you haven't seen his Dune essays, you can find a collection towards the bottom of this page: https://history.princeton.edu/people/haris-durrani

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization < This blog post isn't specifically about Dune, but it uses the Fremen as an example to discuss the historic origins of the noble savage trope (Acoup is generally a cool history blog, mostly focused on greek and roman history)

I love Dune but it's so problematic, just not for the obvious reason and dissected Frank Herbert's actual politics and the strange intersection of conservatism and anti-colonialism is fascinating. You should criticise Dune, I would just like the criticism to be better, especially because focusing on the thing that is framed as bad in the story gives every chud an easy way to dismiss criticism of the text as bad media literacy

[timelordthirteen]

The original book Dune iirc isn’t much better; I genuinely don’t recall if I’ve read it or not but I’ve definitely heard this exact discourse before. It’s disappointing that the adaptation didn’t really change or challenge that point.

I sort of disagree? Herbert did try to show the dangers of following so called charismatic leaders, of empires, and of planetary ecology. That said, there is a strong undercurrent of Islamaphobia and of trashing and reappropriating Middle Eastern culture, which is indefensible even for the mid-60s. It is definitely a novel of its time, and like anything has as many good elements as problematic elements. My point in my post is the same as yours, that we can and should do better NOW. An opportunity was there to use a BIPOC actor in a dismantling of those bad tropes and it was missed. The result is another White Savior trope we didn’t need.

I’m still absolutely watching the movie though, do not get me wrong. My love for Dune is deep and everlasting and I’m here for how hot Oscar Isaac looks as Leto. ;)

[wolfy22bookie]

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 favorite works (fics, art, edits, etc.) you’ve created this year and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you’ve brought into the world in 2020. If you don’t have five published works, that’s fine! Include ideas/drafts/whatever you like that you’ve worked on/thought about, and talk a little about them instead! Remember, this is all about self-love and positive enthusiasm, so fuck the rules if you need to. Have fun, and tag as many fellow creators as you like so they can share the love! <3

~~~~

I was tagged by @flipredmonkey. Man this is hard because most of my work is academic and has nothing to do with fandom...Oh well I’ve written a few papers I'm proud of this semester.

A Seasonal Surprise (Din Djarin x Cara Dune)

This is my debut fic in fandom and I’m so very proud of it despite its flaws. I just can’t believe it is still getting kudos and love after 2 months. It was a late night decision to write and post this since it wouldn't let me sleep. Then I couldn’t sleep because I was nervous about seeing the reactions. It gave me courage to write more of the genre and post my second one.

I’ll Fly For You (Din Djarin x Cara Dune) 

I am known in my department at my small University as a drama queen and as a very passionate person. One of my professors describes my writing as me tearing off my shirt in outrage while arguing a point. So writing such a soft moment was a challenge and I’m quite proud of the result. My favourite review of this one is @maryscarlett2u describing it as “a Hersey Kiss of a story”.

Here comes the unpublished stuff! Most of those are just assignments from my classes because I’m a student and have no life!

“GER297 Creative Projet Part 1 A” GER297 From Cosmos to Chaos: The Discourse on Nature in German Culture (That's the name of the class)

I am terrible at naming my assignments so it is untitled. It is a soliloquy from Ursa Minor (The Little Dipper, or Little Bear, constellation) to Ursa Major (The Big Dipper, or Great Bear, constellation) while she is dying on Earth. I find it so sad and beautiful. It’s meant as a critique of light pollution and how difficult it is to stargaze in cities. I might actually post this on Tumblr... I love it so much, but I had to analyze my work and that might have been the bullshitest literary analysis I have ever wrote because I knew exactly what the author meant by the choices so I laughed so much when I wrote it and just put so many footnotes calling myself out on my bullshit. It was a fun one.

“REL112 Final Project” REL112: The Traditions of Ancient Israel

Another assignment! A little background here: Ancient Israelite Mythology, the precursor to Judaism, was polytheistic and Yahweh had a wife/consort named Asherah. So I wrote a play on some stories taken from the Hebrew Bible where Asherah is nagging Yahweh for stuff he did, for example planting the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Eden instead of on the Moon. I found it hilarious and so much to write. Satire is not a style I'm used to, but I really liked playing with it. 

“The Red Berry Theory” Used in 3 classes out of the 5 I took this semester.

This one is purely academic. This is basically a theory/allegory that tries to explain xenophobia and scapegoating as a survival defence mechanism driven from the fear of the unknown mixed with ego and hate, which equal assholery. I still need to work on it to polish it so I can argue it properly, but I’m proud of that one. I might even make it my doctoral thesis in 5ish years (I have so many years left of studies!! Good thing I like studying.)  I first wrote it for a class discussion forum, but I used it in essays to argue the cause of scapegoating minorities. Also it surprised my German Professor because I’m forever on the record for saying “But I don’t wanna think!” It was a joke that became a running gag in the department. 

This is my 5 works! I tagged whoever wants to do it because almost everyone was already tagged... @ooops-i-arted, and @maryscarlett2u I think weren’t tagged already... if it was the case I'm sorry.

[tempestpaige]

timmy chalamet in dune 2020 looking like kylo ren 2.0 is WONDERFUL foreshadowing for the discourse that’s to come for that movie. i can not wait. it’s going to be terrible.

[inapat13]

The Use of Audio-Visual Archives in Histoires d’une nation, at the Service of a Counter-Narrative

         Histoires d’une nation, broadcasted on France 2 in September and October 2018 in four parts, is a documentary on the history of immigration in France since 1870, directed by Yann Coquart. This saga of almost four hours is composed of audio-visual archives, photographs, printed documents, filmed testimonies by immigrants or immigrants’ children, and a voiceover. Audio-visual archives come from diverse collections: Ciné-Archives of the French communist party, Gaumont-Pathé Archives, and INA.

          Audio-visual archives are mostly illustrations of an omnipresent voiceover, which leads the narrative. Most of them are colorised, have sound, and are reframed, so that their archival status is concealed. However, some of the archives are more than illustrative, being studied as a media representation of immigration in a specific period. For example, a film extract, starring Jean Gabin in the 1930s, embodies the idealisation of the working class after 1936 and the Front Populaire. Similarly, the celebration of football players, all of immigrant descent, on a sports channel, shows a period where origins did not seem to have an impact on the media coverage of players.

           The authors, Françoise Davisse et Carl Aderhold, also had to face the ethical issues met by all users of colonial images, and images made out of racist ideologies. They decided not to show British images they had found, picturing stereotyped Jews, because “there is no such thing as an “image of Jews””[1]. However, they chose to show images of the human zoos of the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, because they wanted to oppose these images to the first demonstrations for independence. Indeed, images are necessary to understand what colonial domination was. Still, the representation of colonised bodies raises the question of the right to a person’s image and dignity. Pascal Blanchard’s book Sexe, race et colonies, showing 1 200 photographs of sexualised, submitted bodies, without enough context, was highly criticised by some researchers and afro-feminist associations for these reasons.

           The use of archives in Histoires d’une nation is different from most documentaries concerning immigration. Indeed, these documentaries traditionally focus on individual micro-histories and/or family histories. The aim of Histoires d’une nation is, on the contrary, to include audio-visual archives within an editing in which the voiceover takes precedence over the image. They illustrate a national narrative, of which immigration forms an integral part. Thus, this documentary embodies a new interpretation of the past, with the ambition of having an impact on national memory. Indeed, this documentary was commissioned by France 2, broadcasted in prime time, and was followed by a debate hosted by Julian Bugier, a leading journalist of the channel. It was clearly addressing a broad audience. This demonstrates the will of France 2 to participate, in 2018, in the debate over a conflicting collective memory, especially concerning “national identity” and immigration. Though this documentary is not openly and radically involved politically, it is clearly a reaction against other discourses, themselves broadly publicised, picturing a “national narrative” from which immigration is excluded, or depreciated. Histoires d’une nation is only one example among many of the use of the past, and of audio-visual archives, to highlight conflicting memories, especially since the development of the new digital media.

Esther Montanès

[1] “Histoires d’une nation”, Arrêt sur images, 2018, URL : https://www.arretsurimages.net/emissions/arret-sur-images/histoires-dune-nation-france-2-voulait-une-serie-ni-clivante-ni-lenifiante, visited on the 7th of March, 2020.

[sin-emberstalker]

Get To Know Me.

Rules: Always post the rules. Tag 11 new people you’d like to know better.

1. Dogs or Cats?

Dogs, cat’s love me more actually I think it’s because I am 1000% indifferent to them and that pisses them off that I can out game them. 

2. YouTube celebrities or normal celebrities?

None, don’t elevate people to some special station as they can’t ever be the thing in your head. It’s not fair to them and it has done a lot of harm to the general discourse of progress. 

3. If you could live anywhere where would that be?

Cyprus, it is in my opinion the closest thing to what I gather most people think heaven is like. The progress the country has made to unite peacefully is inspiring. 

4. Disney or DreamWorks?

Disney as Dreamworks is a studio built out of pure spite, but I respect the grift. 

5. Favorite childhood TV show?

Pirates of Darkwater, TMNT(classic), Ghostbusters, Gargoyles, Batman the animated series and batman beyond.

6. The movie you’re looking forward to most in 2020?

I just can’t muster enthusiasm for movies lately, but it does mean I get surprised by some new stuff when it really impresses. 

7. Favorite book you read in 2019?

The only books I have read this year are all RPG manuals and Linux guides. I feel bad but I just don’t have time to read like literature in a while. But I do make sure to read every night with the kids unless Niv is doing it. 

8. Marvel or DC?

Marvel movies/ DC comics

9. If you choose Marvel favorite member of the X-Men? If you choose DC favorite Justice League member?

Marvel - Gambit/Ultimate Colossus (his story is just so god damn cute). 

DC - Constantine/ Hal Jordan 

10. Night or Day?

Night, i love to be awake when the rest of the world is sleeping (at least in my time zone)

11. Favorite Pokemon?

Honestly it’s Evee and all the variations, they are just all so god damn cute. 

12. Top 5 bands:

Pink Floyd, Deftones, Wu Tang Clan, Coheed and Cambria, Tool

13. Top 10 books.

Invisible Man -  Ralph Ellison

East of Eden - Steinbeck

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

The Great Gatsby -  F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Waste Land  - T.S. Eliot

Ring World - Larry Niven

Neuromancer Trilogy - William Gibson

Dune - Frank Herbet 

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 

The Foundation Trilogy - Issac Asimov 

The Trial - Franz Kafka (Bonus addition)

14. Top 4 movies

The Big Labowski. Hellraiser I and II, A Clockwork Orange, The Wild Bunch 

15. America or Europe?

I’ve spent enough time in both to know that the only way a place is valuable is the people we form bonds with and the spaces we share moments in.

16. Tumblr or Twitter?

Both but I don’t post a lot on twitter, but some of the freshest memes come from twitter. Tumblr is like a second home at times. 

17. Pro-choice or Pro-life?

Pro-Choice.

18. Favourite YouTuber?

Noah Caldwell-Gervias - Best in depth game critique you will find, I even find all the early audio issues endearing. 

19. Favorite author ?

T.S Eliot and Kafka are the two that changed my life and I mean that I was going to be a priest before I started to you know, question.

20. Tea or Coffee?

Coffee to amp and tea to chill. 

21. OTP ?

Sinivaeh oh and @karidakdellanir​ @centoridellanir​ for life!

22. Do you play an instrument/sing ?

I used to play guitar and bass but I am so out of practice but I think a few minutes on the drop D I will find my space again.

tagged by @monster-of-master​

tagging @prolificpoisons @crowsaerie-rp​ @fel-temptation​ @covexalexanderkingsley​  @valishoneybee​ @zaennicus​ @amorthonblackwood​ @waroftwowolves​ @aredhelvaltieri​ @seilune​ and anyone else!

[militant-holy-knight]

I cannot wait for the stupid hot takes and political discourse about the Dune adaptation in 2020 specially since it’s going to be election year in the USA.

[pparn]

Oscar Nominations 2022: How the Drive My Car Surge Happened

Adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story, Drive My Car is the underdog success story of the season, rising remarkably over months of advocacy and campaigning. It’s the first Japanese film ever nominated for best picture. The film premiered in Cannes and was hardly, it seemed, the biggest contender to emerge out of the Croisette, with the wild French ride of Titane and Asghar Farhadi’s latest critical darling A Hero taking the top two prizes. (Neither film earned an Oscar nomination.) Drive My Car writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi took home Cannes’s screenplay prize, though, a key win that’d kickstart an unprecedented awards journey.

Unprecedented, because if we think about international movies to score a huge Oscars embrace, like Amour or the 2020 Oscars’ groundbreaking Parasite, they’re usually from directors already fairly known to Academy voters, accessible in their emotional appeals, and…not three hours long. Drive My Car works often as an intimate two-hander, rigorously engaged in the texts of Chekhov and Murakami, before landing as no less than a treatise on the meaning of life and death. It’s a magnificent achievement, one that requires patience and faith, especially seeing as its director had not contended for an Oscar before.

It’s often said critics’ groups do not influence the Oscars. While true in some instances—just ask big winners this season like Lady Gaga and Ruth Negga—the ascension of Drive My Car should be directly attributed to widespread critical support. The film is among a small handful over the last century to have won best picture from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics. These huge endorsements signaled to voters that the film deserved a shot—not just for an international-film nomination, which seemed like a safe bet, but across the major categories. Evidently, voters got the message.

As the Academy goes global, it’s distancing itself further and further from the industry guilds, even if there remains decent membership overlap. Critical support matters more than ever, as it’s typically backed up by international respect. It’s why Drive My Car is nominated over Producers Guild of America–nominee Being the Ricardos and Screen Actors Guild–nominee House of Gucci, mixed-reviewed movies that stayed in the conversation due to their popularity but that would always be a tougher sell with the discerning Academy. You could argue Hamaguchi was so strong with the directing branch, which skews particularly global, that he wasn’t even the one to bump out Dune’s Denis Villeneuve, one of Tuesday morning’s biggest snubs. The support was there.

The Drive My Car campaign revved up as the film won more prizes, led more top-10 lists, found more cinephile lovers. (Isabelle Huppert and Bong Joon Ho made themselves known as fans.) Links were sent out as needed to bolster in-person screenings, and I’d argue the film benefited greatly from omicron putting a pause on in-person campaigning. For an international player that can’t be on the scene as aggressively—unless you stay in town for a few months, as Parasite’s family did—the conversation being centralized online gives you a fairer shot. Especially for the time commitment asked of a title like this, with no (for most) familiar faces or names, reviews and discourse matter tremendously. Perhaps most importantly, the film was great and worthy. Its case was not that it deserved votes, but as happens for films without a huge campaign budget, that it deserved to be seen. The latter would beget the former. สปินฟรี

[micaramel]

Artist: Shuang Li

Venue: Peres Projects, Berlin

Exhibition Title: I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side

Date: February 28 – April 3, 2020

Click here to view slideshow



Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Video: 



Shuang Li, I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side, 2020, 25:27

Images courtesy of Peres Projects, Berlin. Photos by Matthias Kolb. 

Press Release:

Peres Projects is pleased to present I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side, Shuang Li’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition is centered around a video installation with the same title and includes new paintings and sculptures. The exhibition draws from the artist’s own experiences growing up on a factory compound in China while immersed in online culture. These personal experiences are distributed through a fictional narrative of an online love story between a teenage boy working in a yellow vest factory and a French mother, the relationship set against the backdrop of the Gilet Jaunes protests in France, reflecting on the highly mediated reality we live in right now.

Within the framework of this fictional romance, Li imagines how mass produced objects take on an erotic quality. This entanglement of multiple layers of desire, troubles the agency in all these various forms of yearning, and asks us to consider the structures that may modify or anticipate these inclinations – is production located in the assembly of the object, or in the production of the desire itself? She also demonstrates how entire lives are structured around these seemingly banal desires, where the entireties of cities are organized to accommodate, respond to, and manufacture these needs.

Paintings made from the yellow vests, sourced directly from the factories where Li is based, are a distillation of these global processes, in each work we can see how objects are produced, assembled, shipped, put back together again, repurposed, reinterpreted, resold. The artist considers the chain of supply and demand, and asks if that demand could not also be understood more fundamentally as desire, thus the chain oscillates between responses to desires.

Li’s newest works grapple not only with eroticism in digital spaces, but gendered and reproductive labour, as well as geopolitics. Her works explore the link between desire and commodity fetishism, as it is enmeshed in global systems of demand and the corresponding invisibility of supply. Through a meditation on the yellow vest as an object, Li considers and brings together two points on the timeline of the vest’s circulation; the assembly with the end use. These every day, quotidian objects that have become overloaded with affective and political meaning, are traced back to the conditions of their production. Li nestles these works within the discourse on geopolitical, transnational economies, and asks us to consider the conditions of our globalized system, from a unique, on the ground perspective and through the lens of desire.

Shuang Li has had solo exhibitions at Open Forum, Berlin (2019), and SLEEPCENTER, New York City (2018), and has participated in numerous institutional exhibitions including at the Times Museum, which commissioned the work I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side, curated by Biljana Ciric (2019), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2018), Centre Pompidou in collaboration with the Mao Jihong Foundation, Chengdu (2018), Taikang Space, Beijing (2018), Flux Factory, New York (2017), K11 art museum (2016), and at Oberlin College, Oberlin (2015). In 2020 Li will participate in an exhibition titled “Resistance of the Sleepers” at the UCCA Dune, curated by Ara Yun Qiu, and in the first triennial at X Museum, curated by Poppy Dongxue Wu.

Link: Shuang Li at Peres Projects

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3bKHchB

[moanaamovies]

Vivarium review – home is where the hell is

In one of the creepiest episodes of the vintage American TV series The Twilight Zone, residents of the apparently idyllic Peaksville find themselves cut off from the rest of the world, terrorised by the petulant yet godlike mind of a small child. Adapted from a story by Jerome Bixby, the episode (ironically entitled It’s a Good Life) struck a chilling chord with audiences in 1961, watching from behind their picket fences, mesmerised by its darkly comic vision of a world in which failing to think happy thoughts was punishable by death, or worse.

You can see a trace of It’s a Good Life (which has continued to resonate through popular culture) in Vivarium, the second feature from director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley, a paranoid fable in which the aspiration of acquiring a dream home turns into an increasingly surreal nightmare of imprisonment. Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots (who recently co-starred in Riley Stearns’s The Art of Self Defense) are Tom and Gemma, the young couple searching for a place of their own. She’s a teacher, he’s a tree surgeon; together, they have been urged to get on the property ladder. But finding the perfect place is proving tricky.

Vivarium review

One minute Tom and Gemma are happy-go-lucky young lovers, the next they’re terrified, exhausted wrecks When they meet creepy estate agent Martin, whose awkward unearthly smile wouldn’t look out of place in a David Lynch remake of Galaxy Quest, the couple’s instinct is to bolt. Instead (presumably driven by their desperation to become homeowners) they follow Martin to Yonder, a Stepford-style development outside the city (“near enough, and far enough – just the right distance”). Here, they promptly become trapped in a maze of little boxes – endlessly reproduced rows of identical houses, all the same shade of sickly green, all with the same surgical strip of grass out front. And all eerily empty…

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The title Vivarium (a container for observing small animals in a re-creation of their natural environment) provides a signpost for where this is going. Suffice to say that Tom and Gemma find themselves in a pastel-coloured simulacrum of suburban hell, raising a monstrous child whose arrival is prefigured by a horrifying opening sequence of a cuckoo invading a nest, screaming to be fed by its bewildered surrogate mother. “That’s nature,” Gemma tells one of her young charges, “that’s just the way things are,” adding forlornly that “it’s only horrible sometimes”.

As with all such Twilight Zone-style fantasies, it’s the details we recognise that make the unimaginable seem immediate. While Yonder looks less like a set from The Truman Show than an infernal version of Teletubbyland (the digital landscapes and barrage-balloon clouds are appropriately artificial), the gradual disintegration of our central couple remains skin-crawlingly close to home. From their initial in-car bickering about who gets to drive (“Give me a go,” “What are you, six?”) to their chippy despair as entrapment sinks in, Tom and Gemma’s relationship fractures along all too familiar lines. One minute they’re happy-go-lucky young lovers, looking forward to a life filled with possibilities; the next, they’re terrified, exhausted wrecks, held hostage by the shrieking demands of an alien child who mimics their every word and gesture, living in a dream-world neither of them wanted, each blaming the other for their predicament.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Watch a trailer for Vivarium. In his director statement, Finnegan (who reportedly drew tonal inspiration from Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 classic Woman in the Dunes) describes Vivarium as addressing the “fantasy version of reality that we strive towards” in world where “consumerism is consuming us”, and in which the promise of ideal living is “the bait that leads many into a trap”’. There’s an element of Cronenbergian revulsion in the tasteless, plasticated food parcels that keep Tom and Gemma alive, while the echoes of horror movies – from Village of the Damned to Poltergeist – increase as the satire turns ever more sinister. Yet even in its most overtly chilling moments (a third-act descent into hell recalls a memorably hallucinogenic sequence from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil), Vivarium keeps its tongue placed firmly in its cheek, reminding me somewhat of the absurdist, smiling tone of Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe’s recent picket-fence parody Greener Grass.

You can see the seeds of Vivarium in the ghost estates of Finnegan and Shanley’s chilling 2012 short Foxes, and there are times this feels like a single idea stretched to feature length. But there’s enough visual and thematic invention to keep viewers gripped and unsettled, particularly in these unprecedented, isolated times.

Vivarium is available to stream on all major platforms

America faces an epic choice... ... in the coming year, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times. Over the last three years, much of what the Guardian holds dear has been threatened – democracy, civility, truth. This US administration is establishing new norms of behaviour. Anger and cruelty disfigure public discourse and lying is commonplace. Truth is being chased away. But with your help we can continue to put it center stage.

Rampant disinformation, partisan news sources and social media's tsunami of fake news is no basis on which to inform the American public in 2020. The need for a robust, independent press has never been greater, and with your support we can continue to provide fact-based reporting that offers public scrutiny and oversight. You’ve read more than 5 articles in the last four months. Our journalism is free and open for all, but it's made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers like you across America in all 50 states.

[linguistlist-blog]

Calls: 6th International Conference on Functional Discourse Grammar

Call for Papers: The conference is organized by the University of Amsterdam and will be held in Schoorl, The Netherlands. The Venue: FDG2020 will take place in Dopersduin, Oorsprongweg 3, 1871 HA Schoorl, The Netherlands. Dopersduin is a conference center located near the sea and dunes in North-Holland, at approximately an hour's travel from Amsterdam. Affordable full-board (from June 29-July 3, 2020) and bicycle rental arrangements will be offered. The second circular will http://dlvr.it/RGn4qF

[l-in-c-future]

Worldviews and the discourse of history 1D: Old foolish man moving a mountain

The story of the Chinese idiom the Old Man Yu Gong (means foolish old man) Moved Away A Mountain is often used to describe a person who has strongly persistence in his or her mind, and never stops until the goal is reached.

 Once upon a time, there were two mountains Taihang and Wangwu covering a territory of seven hundred square miles, with a ten thousand cubits height. They were formerly situated in the south of Jizhou and north of Heyang.

 Yu Gong of the North Mountain was about ninety years old and he lived in a house facing the mountains. He did not like the mountains blocking his way and making him go up and down or around the mountains when he left home. One day, he asked his families to come together and said to them, “You and I shall set to work with all our strength and level the mountains so that we may have a path leading straight outside and reaching clear to the northern bank of the Han River. What do you say?” The family agreed, but his wife was worried, “With your strength, you can’t even do anything with a little hill. How can you move the two great mountains away? Besides, where are you going to put away all the rocks and soil?” The Old Man said, “We can throw them into the end of the Bohai Sea and the north of Yintu (Siberia).”

He then led three of his children and grandchildren, who could carry loads, chip the rocks and shovel the soil, and carried them in baskets to the end of the Bohai Sea. An orphan boy of the neighbor’s widow, who had just shed his milk teeth, jumped along and came to help them and returned home once a season. The Wise Man of nearby laughed at the Old Man and tried to stop him, saying, “What a fool you are! With all the strength and years left for you, you can’t even scratch the surface of this mountain. What can you do about the rocks and soil?” Old Man YU Gong drew a deep sigh and said, “Your mind is so blocked up that you cannot think straight. I cannot achieve my will definitely, but when I die, there will be my children to carry on the work, and the children will have grandchildren, and the grandchildren will again have children. So my children and grandchildren are endless, while the mountains cannot grow bigger in size. Why shouldn’t they be leveled some day?” The Wise Man could not make any reply.

Now the Mountain God was touched by the old man’s sincerity of heart and ordered the two of his sons to carry the two mountains and placed one in Shuodong and one in Yongna. From then on, the south of Jizhou and north of the Han River became level ground, and the spirit of the Old Man Yu Gong has been passing down.

But how about the other side of the story that is being forbidden to be told?

“On the top of the mountain, people with metal fangs,

Tear off the skeleton of the mountain, 

Blue sheep start on the hillside, hawks hover in the sky, unable to find a rock to stay on, feathers shed in the wind,

On the silent grasslands, those tracks of wheels, like a scar on a young girl’s face oppress the vessel of the mountain, while those irrelevant rocks, exposed

Shapeless blood, whiter than milk, drop by drop flows along with the mound of the hills.”-A censored Tibetan poem originally posted to a blog in Tibet in 2011.

Chinese mining companies and hydro power dam companies can do any land grabbing as they wish under the Communist China. In August 2014, the Greenpeace East Asia website revealed massive illegal coal mining operation on the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai Province operated by the Kingho Group, controlled by a well connected billionaire Huo Qinghua. The open-pit Muli coal field staggering 23 million tons of coals. However, the whole operation was illegal because it violates a number of water protection laws and local nature reserve regulations. The operation has cut off alpine meadows that channel water from glaciers and rainfall in the Yellow River-ironically proudly boasted as one of the two key cradles of the Han Chinese civilization! It posted the greatest nightmare of environmental disasters across China and Asia: paper “National Reservation” parks, removal of nomads, corruption, exploitative mining, grassland degradation and river pollution. The coal mining is situated near the headwaters of the Yellow River, ironically right inside a region previously declared as a “National Reserve”. (Note-THE SAME INSANE DESTRUCTION WAS PROPOSED BY CY LEUNG AND LAM-CHENG IN HK TO CONSIDER THOSE ‘LOW ECOLOGICAL VALUE’ COUNTRY PARKS TO BE REZONED FOR PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT!!!)

While the Tibetan belief holds that digging the earth can cause disasters that could unleash earthquakes, famine, drought, and epidemics because they disturbed the spirits of the nature, the atheist Communist regime, especially laid down by Mao Ze Dong’s founding ‘development’ principles, the belief is otherwise: human beings should at all means and by all costs defeat the nature. All ‘superstitious’ beliefs should be suppressed by the ‘re-education’ (IN FACT BLANTANT indoctrination) to ‘liberate’ people’s mindsets.

It turned out that SCIENTIFICALLY, the ancient wisdom is superior to the Communists’ disastrous belief. They refused to learn anything from the desertification of the Great Northern China caused by their removal of grasslands for coal mining and deforestation for timber logging and urbanization. They repeated the same looting in Tibet and is planning to sell such unsustainable development model to the rest of the developing world through the One Road One Belt. 

Environmental disasters are not the only signature footprints of the Communists. Mao Ze Dong’s crazy demographic policies in 1950s blindly enticed every household to give birth to as many children as possible to achieve his defeat the nature ideology. The policy fatally met with the failures of his series of bizarre political and economic big games induced great famine and economic collapse. One fatal policy was drastically corrected by another equally mad demographic policy-the famously known One Child Policy that disturbed gender balance of China for decades. Now China is eating all the bitter fruits as it faces an aging overburden society without sufficient working age population. Added to these are the social problems of those little emperors and princesses all being spoiled in their growing up process. Some people may not even able to self managed their basic living rituals even when they reach university age! Let alone, leaving tens of millions of men at the lower strata of society unable to find women to marry.

In 2000, mining only accounted for about 3% of Tibet’s economy but according to some Chinese sources, the proportion may rise to 30% by 2020 and 50% by 2050. However, China is facing a stagnant slow growth. Demand for many different minerals are dropping. Mining may become just digging for the sake of plundering the grounds in order to keep a giant population moving or the Communists will face serious social unrest. 

Alarmingly, new technology (IRONICALLY IMPORTED FROM THE WEST) will speed up mining in Tibet because now the engineers can delve into the dark arts of the mountain top removal. In 2014, the Nature journal published an article written by three Chinese scientists who warned about the dangers of wide-scale mountaintop removal in Central China. 

The Chinese government aimed to fill valleys with mountain debris to create flat land for urban expansion as well as for agriculture. What they did not know (what they refused to know) was land created by cutting off hilltops and moving massive quantities of dirt is like performing major surgery on the Earth’s crust. High rise buildings constructed on these infills of unstable lands may topple (indeed, it is not an infrequent phenomenon in China), sink holes may be more seen, there would be more landslides, flooding, altered water course as well as inducing more frequent and vigorous geoactivites. (That may be also one of the reasons why China has experienced more large scale earthquakes in recent years.)  For example, near the city of Lanzhou (700 mountains being levelled off) where mammoth earth moving projects are under way for removal of scores of mountain-tops, researchers have estimated that soil erosion will increase by 10%, and the concentration of dust particles in the air will increase by almost 50%. 

Another research conducted by Chinese scientists in 2016 found that the surface turf, which supports a dense growth of grass and its matted roots, covers the underlying cohesive silty sands in the sandy hills, and both layers protect the dunes against erosion. Mechanical destruction of the protective shell leads to exposure of fossil dune sands. The exposed loose fossil sands are then carried away by the wind, creating scarps, followed by lateral recession at the bottom of the scarp, leading to its collapse. The process then repeats. With the expansion of recession caused by wind erosion, abundant sands are supplied and aeolian activity intensifies. Repetition of this process expands the blowouts, leading to merger of the blowouts and the evolution of mobile dunes. Similar processes occur at the top of cliffs above the Yellow River and Mangla River.

Mind you, this is only a piece of dust among ALL the landscape alterations and destructions in China, let alone in Tibet.  In cities such as Chongqing, Shiyan, Yichang, Lanzhou and Yan'an, tens of square kilometres of land have been created. One of the largest projects, which started in April 2012 in Yan'an in the Shaanxi province, will double the city's current area by creating 78.5 square kilometres of flat ground. Many land-creation projects in China ignore environmental regulations, because local governments tend to prioritize making money over protecting nature.

According to the Develop the Great West policy initiative during the Hu Jin Tao’s era, this type of mega destructive development projects would run for 50 years from 2000. No wonder every Tibetan who is concerned the future of their homeland would be so scary and desperate that whether the WHOLE of the Tibetan Plateau will be levelled off! Even if not, it will be MASSIVELY ALTERATED AND RUINED by China’s exploitative, exclusionary and ill-thought unsustainable developments in 50 years of time. The precedence of Mongolia and the Great Northern China’s desertification was A SOLIDY HORRIBLE SCENE right in front of people’s eyes, only in one decade’s time during Mao Ze Dong’s radical era of ‘developing’ the great remote China.

This new Mao has not only continued Hu’s policy, he plans to export the environmental Armaggadeon in the name of “China’s successful model” to the rest of the world under his big dream of the new ‘humanity’ order of socialist values’ as an alternative of ‘effective democracy’. Except that he denies humanity values down to the bottom of his soul.

What had been done by ambitious autocrats are exactly like the Chinese idiom story: an old foolish man moving the mountain.

IN EVERY ERA OF THE CHINA’S HISTORY OF DEVIOUS AUTOCRACY, THERE IS AN OLD FOOLISH MAN WHO ATTEMPTS TO BLAST OFF A MOUNTAIN THAT STANDS IN HIS WAY. HOWEVER, THIS FOOLISH MAN AND HIS FOOLED CITIZENS DO NOT KNOW THE DERBIS OF THE MOUNTAIN WILL BURY THEM PAINFULLY WHILE IN THE COURSE ALSO BURY MANY INNOCENT PEOPLE IN THE REST OF THE WORLD.

Reference:

Buckley, M. (2014). Meltdown in Tibet. NY: Palgrave Macmillan Trade

Li, Qian & Wu. (2014). Environment: Accelerate research on land creation. Nature 510/(7503). p.29-31. doi:10.1038/510029a  https://www.nature.com/news/environment-accelerate-research-on-land-creation-1.15327

 Li, X., Yao, Z., Dong, Z. et al. (2016).  Causes and processes of sandy desertification in Guinan County, Qinghai–Tibet Plateau.   Environmental Earth Science 75/(650). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-016-5481-0

http://blog.eteacherchinese.com/learn-chinese/chinese-idiom-old-man-yu-gong-moved-away/

Watch: meltdownintibet.com-downstream countries 

[timelordthirteen]

Someone write the discourse dissertation that’s in my head about how a movie with strong themes of imperialism, feudalism, and colonialism with what appears to be a lot of BIPOC being lead by a generic ass white dude whose character is the literal savior is just...gross.