#Cruelty should never be the point but here were are once more in America

[writingwithcolor]

Space based story with prison camps: problematic parallels?

Trigger warnings:

Holocaust

Unethical Medical Experimentation (in the post and resources)

ivypool2005 asked:

I'm writing a sci-fi novel set on Mars in the 25th century. There are two countries on Mars: Country A, a hereditary dictatorship, and Country B, a democracy occupied by Country A after losing a war. Country A's government is secretly being puppeted by a company that is illegally testing experimental technology on children. On orders from the company, Country A is putting civilian children from Country B in prison camps, where the company can fake their deaths and experiment on them. (1/2)

My novel takes place in one of the prison camps. I am aware that this setting carries associations with various concentration camps in history. Specifically, I'm worried about the experimentation aspect, as I know traumatic medical experimentation occurred during the Holocaust. Is there anything I should avoid? How can I acknowledge the history while still keeping some fantasy/sci-fi distance from real experiences -- or is it a bad idea to try to straddle that fence at all? Thank you! (2/2)

We are far from being the only people to have suffered traumatic medical experiments.. 

--Shira

TW: Unethical Medical Experimentation (in the post, and all of the links)

Medical experimentation in history

Perhaps without intending to, you have posed an enormous question. 

I will start by saying that we, the Jewish people, are not the only group to have unethical, immoral, vicious experiments performed on our bodies.  Horrific experimentation has been conducted on Black people, on Indigenous people, on disabled people, on poor people of various backgrounds, on women, on queer people... the legacy of human cruelty is long. Here are some very surface-level sources for you, and anyone else interested to go through. Many, many more can be found.

General Wiki Article on Unethical Human Experimentation

US Specific Article  on Unethical Human Experimentation 

The early history of modern American Gynecology is largely comprised of absolutely inhumane experimentation, mostly on enslaved women (with some notable exceptions among Irish immigrant women)

An Article on Gynecological Experimentation on Enslaved Women

I  also recommend reading Medical Bondage by Deirdre Cooper Owens

The Tuskegee Experiment 

First Nations Children Denied Nutrition

Guatemala Syphilis Experiment

Unit 731

AZT Testing on Zimbabwean Women

Project MKUltra

Conversion Therapy

Medical Experiments on Prison Inmates 

Medical Interventions on Intersex Infants and Children

Again, these are only a few, of a tragic multitude of examples. 

While I don't feel comfortable saying, as a blanket statement, that stories like this should never be fictionalized, it feels important to emphasize the historicity of medical experimentation, and indeed, medical horrors. These things happened, in the real world, throughout history, and across the globe. 

The story of this kind of human experimentation is one of immense cruelty, and the complete denial of the humanity of others. Experimentation was done on unwilling subjects, with no real regard for their wellbeing, their physical pain, the trauma they would incur, the effect it would have on families, or on communities. These are stories, not of random, mythical "subjects," but of human beings. These were Black women, already suffering enslavement, who were medically tortured. These were Indigenous children, who were utterly powerless, denied nutrition, just to see what would happen. These were Black men, lied to about their own health, and sent home to infect their spouses, and denied treatment once it was available. These were Aboriginal Australians, forced to have unnecessary medical procedures, children given brutal gynecological exams, and medications that were untested.. These were inmates in US prisons, under the complete control of the state. These were prisoners of war. These were pregnant people, desperate to save their fetuses, lied to by doctors. These were also Jewish people, imprisoned, and brutalized as part of a systematic attempt to destroy us. 

The story of medical torture, of experimentation without any meaningful consent, of the removal of human dignity, and human rights, is so vast, and so long, there is no way to do it justice. It is a story about human beings, without agency, without rights, it's the story of doctors, scientists, and the inquisitive, looking right through a person, and seeing nothing but parts. This is not some vague plot point, or a curiosity to note in passing, it is a real, terrible thing that happened, and is still happening to actual human beings. I understand the draw, to want to write about the Worst of the Worst, the things that happen when people set aside kindness, and pick up cruelty, but this is not simply a device. This kind of torture cannot be used as authorial shorthand, to show who the real bad guys are. 

On writing this subject - research

If you want to write a fictional story that includes this kind of deep, abiding horror, you need to immerse yourself in it. You need to read about it, not only in secondhand accounts, and not only from people stating facts dispassionately. You need to seek out firsthand accounts, read whatever you can find, watch whatever videos you can find. You need to find works recounting these atrocities by the descendants, and community members of people who suffered. 

Then, when you have done that, you need to spend time reflecting, and actively working to recognize the humanity of the people this happened to, and continues to happen to. 

You have to recognize that getting a stamp of approval from three Jewish people on a single website would never be enough, and seek out multiple sensitivity readers who have personal, familial, or cultural experience with forced experimentation.

If that seems like a lot of work, or overkill, I beg you not to write this story. It's simply too important. 

-- Dierdra

If you study public health and sociology, it is often a given that the intersection of institutional power and marginalized populations produces extreme human rights abuses. This is not to say that such abuse should be treated as an inevitability, but rather to help us understand, as Dierdra says, how often we need to be aware of the risk of treating our fellow humans poorly. Much of modern medical history is the story of the unwilling sacrifices made by people unable to defend themselves from the powers that be. Whether we are talking about the poor residents of public hospitals in France during the 18th century whose bodies were used to advance anatomy and pathology, to vaccine testing in the 19th century, to mental asylum patients in the 20th century who endured isolation, lobotomies, colectomies and thorazine, one can easily see this pattern beyond the Holocaust. 

Even when we shift our focus away from abuse justified by “experimentation”, we have many such incidents of institutionalized state collusion in abuse that have made the news within the last 20 years with depressing regularity. Beyond the examples mentioned above, I offer border migrant detention centers and black sites for America, Xinjiang re-education sites and prisoner organ donation in China, Soviet gulags still in use in Russia, and North Korean forced labor camps (FLCs) for political prisoners as more current examples. I agree with Dierdra that these themes affect many people still alive today who have endured such abuses, and are enduring such abuses. 

More on proper research and resources

Given that you are going to be exploring a topic when the pain is still so fresh, so raw, I think you had better have something meaningful to say. Dierdra’s recommendation to immerse yourself in nonfiction primary sources is essential, but I think you will also want to brush up on many established works of dystopian fiction featuring themes relating to state institutions and the exploitation of vulnerable populations. While doing so, read about the authors and how the circumstances of their environments and time periods influenced their stories’ messages and themes. I further recommend that you do so both slowly and deliberately so you can both properly take in the information while also checking in with your own comfort. 

- Marika

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dead, broke

Of all the moving, wrenching accounts of death during the pandemic, Molly McGhee’s “America’s Dead Souls,” for The Paris Review stands out: haunting, furious and sad, an rude awakening of the status quo that denies any possibility of inaction.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/

I’ve known McGhee a long time, since she worked on my book INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE from McSweeneys, a professional association we renewed when she landed at Tor.

During the pandemic crisis, I’ve had two different connections to her: on the one hand, the consummate professionalism of her emails as we published my novel ATTACK SURFACE in the middle of the lockdown.

On the other hand, I knew her through her wrenching and deeply personal Twitter account of the personal tragedies she’s endured over the same period. Her Paris Review essay brings those tragedies into sharp focus and uses them to pin a huge and heretofore ill-defined feeling.

McGhee’s mother died during the crisis, but the death was the culmination of years of hardship: “[earning] less than $10,000 a year. Suffering from debilitating depression while caring for her aging parents…chronically unemployed, undermedicated, and overstressed.”

Her mother’s debts were on public display through searchable databases, and her life was haunted by both con artists and bill collectors who carpet-bombed her with calls, letters and emails.

She was too poor to fight back: her wages were garnished by the IRS “for back taxes calculated from a years-old misfiling they refused to correct.” McGhee sent her months of her salary, but it wasn’t enough.

She had no answer for her mother’s rhetorical questions, “Why are these people harassing me? What good does it do them?”

Because the answer is obvious and insufficient: “The people in power don’t care if we live or die, as long as they get paid.”

It only took two days after McGhee’s mother died for her creditors to begin harassing her for her mother’s debts. The state of Tennessee seized the house, but Wells Fargo expected her to make good on the mortgage.

The hospital where McGhee’s mother died wanted a quarter of a million dollars. McGhee, not even 26, was staring down the barrel of the weapon that had been trained on her mother, the inheritor of nothing but debt.

The debt-machine is efficient. Bill collectors found out about McGhee’s mother’s death before McGhee’s own family got word. And they’re remorseless, immune to McGhee’s “pleading, bargaining, reasoning, denying, uploading, scanning, begging, faxing, and crying.”

McGhee compares it to Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” a surreal tale of a grifter named Chichikov who buys dead serfs’ souls to sell for profit.

It’s only surreal if you’ve never been in the debt system’s crosshairs, “where one day of lost wages can compound into houselessness.”

We live in a system of winners and losers. The winners’ winnings come from debt, shielded from the system’s cruelty by “professionalism and bureaucracy” that insulate them — and their functionaries — from “feelings of culpability, not to mention empathy or curiosity.”

Poor people have less money, but the system is firmly focused poor people, because people with money can defend themselves. When McGhee went into debt to hire a lawyer, a single letter on official letterhead instantly reduced all that debt by 90% — more than $250k, poof.

It’s expensive to be poor. Take Community Health Systems, one of the largest hospital chains in America. It sues the shit out of poor people. When those people can afford lawyers, CHS loses, because it is chasing debts it is not entitled to collect.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/18/unhealthy-balance-sheet/#health-usury

CHS itself owes $7.6 billion. It turned its first profit in 2020, thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal subsidies, and its executives pocketed millions in “performance bonuses” for a performance that consisted of getting bailed out by the public.

The Trump stimulus handed trillions to the richest people and biggest companies in America. Those companies “leveraged up” their handouts to raise trillions more and went on spending sprees, buying up struggling businesses.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

They loaded these companies up with debt, declared “divi recaps” (where you take out a loan on a company you bought on credit and put that money in your own pocket as a “special dividend”) and crashed the companies, destroying jobs and communities.

Plutes know there are three kinds of debt: workers’ debts (which must be repaid), owners’ debts (to be “restructured” away) and government debt (not debt at all, but still handy for terrifying normies with stories of “mortgaging our kids’ futures”).

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/17/disgracenote/#false-consciousness

Forty years of this approach has turned the economy into a shambling zombie, dependent on the fiction that “consumer” debts — repackaged as bonds through financialization — will be repaid, somehow.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

As an ever-larger share of the world’s wealth has shifted from the workers’ side of the balance sheet to the owners’, the ability of workers to buy things to keep businesses afloat as vehicles for debt-leveraging has only declined.

Wage-theft and stagnation, unions in retreat, monopoly, monopsony, tax-preferencing for home-owners over renters, for capital gains over wages, spiraling housing, health and education costs, worker misclassification — wages are annihilated before they’re even deposited.

With no wages left over to fund consumption, there’s only debt, and as Michael Hudson says, “Debts that can’t be repaid, won’t be repaid.” CHS can comfortably carry billions in debts, but the sick people it sues for $201 have to choose between rent and medical debt.

Every loan-shark knows how this works. The chump with $500 who owes you $500 and owes the bank $500 needs an incentive to pay you ahead of the bank. To assert the primacy of your claims, you need an arm-breaker.

The digital world has given us all kinds of fantastic new arm-breakers: digital repo men who can brick your car or your phone. It’s automated the once rare practice of evictions, creating eviction mills that run with devastating efficiency.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Creating a debt-instrument — a bond grounded in the payments from other peoples’ debts — requires that you convince investors and bond-rating agencies that your arm-breaker will terrorize the debtors into paying you instead of child-support or grocery bills.

“The cruelty is the point” isn’t ideology, it’s pure description. The system — an artificial life-form constituted as immortal colony organism that uses us as gut flora — runs on competing claims to your debt, and victory consists of terrorizing you more than any rival.

The financiers who practice leveraged buyouts destroy real businesses, ruin lives and hollow out communities. They are feted as “job creators.” The workers who must borrow to close the gap they leave are “deadbeats.” Leveraged buyouts are back, baby.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

If you fret that forgiving student loans and making college free will “saddle our kids with debt,” then you’ve been suckered.

Look. Replacing a system that starts all but the richest children with unserviceable debt with one that doesn’t is liberation, not bondage.

Since Reagan, we’ve been hiking tuition, killing deductions for interest, and shielding student debt from bankruptcy.That’s how you can borrow $79k, pay $190k, still owe $236k, and have 25% taken from every paycheck AND Social Security until you die.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid. Student debts do get forgiven, but only for those highly educated, (potentially) highly productive people who can prove that they have been so thoroughly destroyed by debt that they have no future.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#student-debt

And as McGhee reminds us, the tragedy isn’t merely that we educate people on the pretense of betting on America’s future, but really, the principle use that the system makes of the educated is as collateral for securitized loans.

If the arm-breakers who chased her mother wanted to understand that woman’s humanity, McGhee says they should start here:

“Her humor and her rage were unmatched. In the evenings, against the setting Tennessee sun, she liked to drink red can Cokes in the garden while snuffing cigarettes out against the yard’s ant colonies. She could reckon with anyone just by looking them in the eye. Men were terrified of her, rightfully so. She was sweet. In the last week of her life, when she couldn’t understand where she was or who she was talking to, she greeted everyone the same: ‘Hi, pal. Hope you’re doing okay. When can you come pick me up?’”

Take a second. Re-read that.

[thinkveganworld]

Is it possible for the human race to evolve beyond war, extreme income inequality, corporate money’s control of political systems, and other anti-democratic trends? Some people say even hoping for such evolution is too idealistic, even impossible. Others have said if humanity doesn’t evolve it will soon self-destruct. Martin Luther King once said society has to begin to either “love or perish.”

The U.S. today is rapidly becoming more an oligarchy than a democratic republic, and this oligarchy is polluting the environment, siphoning money from the poor and middle class, and dismantling civil liberties and democracy at an ever-accelerating pace. This trend won’t end well.

As our politicians hurtle downhill, the U.S. will experience many disasters and an eventual fatal crash. Many citizens feel their corrupt politicians of both major parties have taken so much power that the people can’t possibly play a significant role in improving the U.S. political system today.

Ordinary Americans often say we oppose our government’s perpetual wars, regressive tax system, extreme income inequality and other ills, but many say it would be impossible to reform the present system. I think meaningful change is possible based on what history has shown us.

The world has always included people who think it’s possible for the human race to evolve and others who say fundamental change isn’t possible. We’ve always had war and greedy politicians. Still, in some parts of the world at given moments in time, human beings have taken sudden leaps and left behind certain inhumane practices. If that weren’t true, we’d still have rampant blood sacrifices, witch burning and the same widespread use of slavery in the same areas of the world where they once existed.

Today some populations still practice those things, but many have evolved beyond them. The changes that happened started with a sort of “tipping point” where enough people acknowledged that a social ill such as slavery should end.

The more enlightened views, anti-slavery, anti witch-burning, etc., picked up speed, and the public took action to move beyond the old way. In a sense, the condoning of slavery, etc., became obsolete and unthinkably cruel. There is no reason to cling to the belief that the U.S. today can’t make perpetual illegal war and other egregious political abuses obsolete.

During the 1860s in the U.S. more and more people began to acknowledge slavery was unacceptable and started to challenge the power structure. Once the public conscience was awakened, people organized abolitionist groups, created the Underground Railroad, and spoke out publicly. Influential writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau spoke out often against slavery. A slave, Frederick Douglass, wrote prolifically and gave passionate speeches.

If those abolitionists and writers had not believed a big leap in human evolution was possible, they would never have made the effort to organize or speak out. Their action started with their confidence that abolishing slavery was possible, and it’s not that they didn’t know what they were up against.

In his May 11, 1847, speech before the American Anti-Slavery Society, “The Right to Criticize American Institutions,” Frederick Douglass talked about the country’s entrenched pro-slavery power structure. He acknowledged that the U.S. government was then so committed to maintaining the atrocities of slavery for financial reasons that he would need to appeal to authorities outside the government to help end slavery.

There are relevant parallels in America today. People who want to help end our country’s continual illegal wars and corporate money’s control of our political system are in a position similar to the one Douglass described.

Douglass said, “Where, pray, can we go to find moral power in this nation, sufficient to overthrow Slavery? To what institution, to what party shall we apply for aid? . . . [Slavery] is such a giant crime, so darkening to the soul, so blinding in its moral influence, so well calculated to blast and corrupt all the human principles of our nature . . . that the people among whom it exists have not the moral power to abolish it. Shall we go to the Church for this influence? We have heard its character described. Shall we go to politicians or political parties.”

He added that instead of helping end slavery, the church, politicians, press and political parties were “voting supplies for Slavery—voting supplies for the extension, the stability, the perpetuation of slavery in this land.”

Today, U.S. politicians, press, political parties and most spiritual leaders keep voting for (by supporting or passively tolerating) perpetual war, income inequality and other injustices. Average citizens who see we need to evolve beyond these maladies feel they have nowhere to turn, just as Douglass did.

However, in the same speech, Douglass also said that although the pro-slavery government was very powerful, there was one thing it couldn’t resist. He said, “Americans may tell of their ability, and I have no doubt they have it, to keep back the invader’s hosts . . . of its capacity to build its ramparts so high that no foe can hope to scale them . . . but, sir, there is one thing it cannot resist, come from what quarter it may. It cannot resist truth. You cannot build your forts so strong, nor your ramparts so high, nor arm yourself so powerfully, as to be able to withstand the overwhelming moral sentiment against slavery now flowing into this land.”

It turns out he was right. It wasn’t that public opinion alone ended slavery, but it was a game-changing factor, just as strong public sentiment against the Vietnam War played an important role in its resolution.

At various points in history, when the people reached a tipping point and became fed up with given injustices, they started to be vocal and organize to move humanity in a healthier direction. Their collective efforts did change things for the better. Humanity evolved.

Even though U.S. politicians have unprecedented power to do evil and squelch dissent, the public can step up its efforts to speak, write and organize to help us evolve beyond perpetual war, devastating income disparity, and the country’s anti-democratic drift. Writers and other public figures can help by clarifying what is going on and urging the few politicians with conscience to join us in finding solutions.

Throughout history the big evolutionary leaps, including moves away from slavery in certain parts of the world, started with the widespread public attitude that change was both imperative and possible. It is imperative and possible for the U.S. to change its war-for-profit paradigm and its condoning and allowing the other government corruption covered here.

A fitting excerpt from the Declaration of Independence says: “Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” People will put up with a large amount of abuse from their government before they make any effort to change it for the better.

It could be the U.S. public hasn’t yet reached a tipping point and will give in to a feeling of powerlessness. There is never a shortage of “can’t do” dialogue, and the pessimists have a point. We’re faced with daunting challenges.

However, as one of my favorite “lefties,” the late historian Howard Zinn once said, “To be hopeful in bad times is not being foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of competition and cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, it energizes us to act, and raises at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Can humanity evolve beyond continual war and rule by the worst among us? Yes and no. We can do it if enough of us begin to see we need this evolution in order for our species to survive, and if we start to believe change is doable and take action. We can’t evolve, and probably won’t survive, if most of us stay in denial about the need for change, give in to a sense of powerlessness and do nothing. Frederick Douglass’s idea that powerful evil political forces can be overcome via the truth and public moral sentiment, and Martin Luther King’s view that humanity must ultimately either love or perish, are keys to sorting out which path we should take.

[96thdayofrage]

The mental and physical impacts of solitary confinement have been clear for two centuries. In 1829, Pennsylvania Quakers opened the first prison designed for solitary, hoping to inspire reflection in the inmates. Instead, many went crazy or committed suicide. Thirteen years later, Charles Dickens made his first trip to America, and after seeing it first hand, solitary confinement shocked a writer whose bleak perspective inspired an adjective for intolerable suffering. “He is a man buried alive,” he wrote.

In the century and a half since, multiple international agreements have codified the practice as inhumane. In 2011, Juan Mendez, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture — who was himself jailed and tortured by the Argentinean military dictatorship for more than a year in the 1970s — declared that more than 15 days in solitary constitutes torture.

“Solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture,” wrote Jeffrey L. Metzner and Jamie Fellnerin in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, in a paper about the medical ethics of physicians who participate in punitive isolation measures.

According to a report by Citizens for Prison Reform, there are 3,200 people in isolation in Michigan for more than 20 hours a day among the state prison population, like Richard Goddard, who has been in isolation for 47 years; James Miller, who has been segregated from the general population for about 36; and Daniel Henry, for 12. Clarence Henderon, who at 67 had been in isolation has been confined to a wheelchair due to severe arthritis. He allegedly goes months without going outside. “It’s just torture,” says Mario Lee, who goes by the name Akesi and has been incarcerated since 2005, currently serving time at the Ionia Correctional Facility.

Chris Gautz, a spokesperson for the MDOC, denies that the department regularly keeps inmates in solitary confinement for years. (A request for comment on the whereabouts of the individuals in Silenced was forwarded to the state’s FOIA office, and we’ll update if we hear back). “As of February of this year, there was one prisoner who has been in [administrative segregation] for more than one year, but less than two, out of 32,000 prisoners,” Gautz said. But Jessica Sandoval, senior campaign strategist with the national Unlock the Box campaign, says the MDOC fudges those numbers by labeling isolation a variety of technical terms, like Mental Health Unit; Observation; temporary segregation. And Alternative to Segregation (START program).

Akesi, who was recently moved to the START program, says the difference is meaningless. “The program is classified as general population. In reality, it’s administrative [segregation]. The only distinguishing features is that we are required to attend and participate in one hour of group therapy sessions once a week,” he says. “On the other hand, the similarities to seg are many. We are allowed one hour of outdoor recreation five days a week, confined to individual enclosures with concrete floors and enclosed by a steel and wire mesh cage.” He says they’re denied access to any congregate activities including religious services. “We spend between 23 and 24 hours per day in our cells. By no stretch of the imagination can the department of corrections claim that this program is general population or otherwise an alternative to segregation.”

“As social (i.e. human beings) one of the most severe punishments humanly possible that society can mete out to a human is to banish and condemn us to the tombs for the living — or otherwise subject us to extreme social isolation and sensory deprivation,” Akesi wrote in 2020 from the Ionia Correctional Facility in Ionia, Michigan. “It’s endless torture, psychological and physical.”

“This is the techno jargon that keeps the system opaque. All these euphemisms are for essentially solitary confinement,” Sandoval says. She says anything that forces an inmate to stay in isolation for longer than sleeping hours should be defined as solitary. (Gautz told Rolling Stone he didn’t have that information and forwarded the query to the department’s FOIA office.) The Michigan Department of Corrections counts 835 inmates in administrative, or long-term segregation, and 130 in punitive solitary detention, as a short term punishment. The race breakdown is stark: more than 70 percent of inmates placed in long term solitary are Black.

The prisoners’ descriptions are remarkably consistent: they describe severe mental health problems arising from solitary, from hallucinations to paranoia to suicidal ideation. One inmate reports losing his vision after staring at nothing in the near distance for so long. Another, Williams says, was screaming on the phone; he’d forgotten how to talk at a normal volume.

Williams points out that it’s not just the “worst of the worst” being held in isolation — Hannibal Lecters who would wreak havoc if they weren’t segregated. Inmates can get thrown in the hole for any reason, she says, or no reason at all. She claims it’s entirely based on the whim of the guards. “One man was sent to isolation unit after knocking over a glass of water,” she claims. (Gautz, the MDOC spokesperson, denied that guards put prisoners in solitary without due process or a just reason.)

Williams also notes that many facilities are in rural, almost entirely white towns: in some cases, the prison is the main industry. “You’re taking Black people to extremely isolated places. The town survives off of these Black bodies.”

“The further you go up North… its like some parts of the South in the 50’s and 60’s,” writes inmate Andraus McCloud. “The KKK turned in their robes for MDOC uniforms,” writes inmate Anthony Richardson. “Nobody is watching while they do their hate practices.”

When Danielle Dunn, a real estate broker, spoke to her little brother, 38-year-old Jonathan Lancaster, in February of 2019, he whispered the entire time. “There was a change in his voice. Clearly he was having mental health issues,” she tells Rolling Stone. Lancaster had been thrown in solitary after a scuffle with another inmate, and had become increasingly paranoid. “He was saying there was gas pumped into his cell. That his food was being poisoned. I said, ‘Are you OK? It sounds like you’re cracking up a little bit.” Lancaster got silent, Dunn recalls. “Then he whispered again, ‘They’re going to kill me.’”

Even as Lancaster started losing weight and continued to act erratically — he suffered from a variety of mental illnesses, his sister says, including schizophrenia — his sister alleges that prison staff failed to get Lancaster proper medical treatment. He began to hallucinate, crouch in the fetal position, and refused food and water. The Detroit Free Press reported that he lost 26 percent of his body weight in three weeks, dropping 51 pounds, according to the lawsuit.

“They didn’t even know why he was still in solitary confinement,” Dunn says. She begged staff to give him proper care but claims she was told he was “physically fine.” March 8th, 2019, he was pepper sprayed and put in an observation room, where he didn’t have access to water, according to the lawsuit. On March 11th, they cleared him for a hospital visit. Early that morning, they strapped him into a restraint chair and left him in his cell for several hours. At 12:50 he was found unresponsive and later declared dead. (Lancaster’s family is suing MDOC staff for wrongful death; Gautz declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.)

“My brother was severely tortured,” Dunn says, tearing up. “They beat him. There were bruises all over him. Pepper sprayed, beat, when he was unresponsive. They sat there and they literally watched him suffer and die.” Her mother was put in a mental health hospital. “It’s all but killed my mother. She’s suffering terribly.”

“The cruelty, leaving him to die in his own waste, suffering,” Dunn says, of her brother.

Surviving in solitary can be its own cruelty. Daniel Henry has spent more than a decade in segregation and, he says, he’s been told he’s never getting out. “It’s been a long 12 years in solitary at ICF and I have learned so much about the darker side of human nature and how cruel people can become when there is no real accountability or oversight,” Henry wrote to Willams. “I have also learned a lot about myself. And I’ve met many people in here and out there who have taught me how to sympathize with the next man’s pain and suffering.”

“Other countries do not utilize solitary confinement like we do let alone incarcerate their citizens for such lengthy sentences that virtually remove any hope for a future life outside of the criminal justice system,” Henry added.

He, and others, worry about Richard Goddard, who’s spent almost 50 years in isolation. “The man is the most kind, caring and humble human being I’ve ever met and he clearly presents no threat to either himself or the MDOC any longer,” says Henry. “The appearance is that they want us to suffer as much as possible on top of being confined to a small space for years.”

Williams hopes to turn outrage over conditions into action; the website has a “Take Action” page that lets people share their stories and lobby political leaders, like Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

“I am hoping that public pressure makes the MDOC admit that there’s a huge problem, and actually work toward fixing it,” she tells Rolling Stone.

She wishes elected officials could really see the conditions they perpetuate with their inaction. “I want legislators to visit these prisons in July or August, to step inside of a segregation cell and close the door when it’s over 100 degrees and see how long they last.”

[cristalknife]

Kadam Week 2021 Day 5 ~ Been There, Done That, Lemme Be...

This is me trying to not start something on a platform only to post solely somewhere else aka AO3 and ff.net  you can find the complete list of Kadam Week 2021 prompts and you might find more stories on the Kadam Week 2021 AO3 collection

That said, today prompt is April Fools Day While I'm not 100% sure on this story hitting the mark, it has at least some of the prompt's elements, revolving around April fools and one of the two options, namely both Kurt and Adam hating pranking... so here we go, I present to you Been There, Done That, Lemme Be... (Or how a joke between Adam and Kurt became a new Nyada's yearly tradition.) (or read on ao3)

Adam didn't mind the differences between his home country and the states that much, not on most days at least.

April first though was the exception, usually Americans' tendencies to go overboard were amusing, but he could admit that in the past few years being on this side of the pond made him look back fondly and longingly to how things were back home.

For one, back in England, the tradition of pranking lasted only till noon, which made only half of a terrible terrible day, and easier to avoid.

But here in America, the whole day was game, and Adam didn't like how easily pranks escalated.

The fact he never had fond memories of the practice didn't help much either.

It was only by a lucky chance, that the previous years, April first fell on days when it was completely ok for him to call in sick or disappear without any suspicions.

While he blessed such coincidence at the time, it was something he somehow regretted now. Because he was unsure on how to broach the subject with Kurt, nor how it would be received.

Simply disappearing for twenty four hours without a warning, was not something he could do to his boyfriend, not when he knew said boyfriend was capable of worrying over the smaller things...

He wasn't that comfortable raising the issue, but it was something they needed to tackle together.

Adam didn't want April fools traditions to be something they got upset about and potentially snap at each other over mere ignorance.

It so wasn't the kind of talk he wanted to have, but clear communication was the key and so a talk they would have.

Without knowing it yet Kurt was facing a similar dilemma.

He never had the chance to walk away from April first, so the possibility had never ever even crossed his mind, especially since in his experience it had always been one more day where it was just more of the same…

Probably with a more cruel edge to the ‘pranks’ done to him, since apparently the date gave permission even to the kinder people to just disregard anything he might feel...

So all in all it was just one more day in his usual life.

The main exhibit example of the escalated condoned cruelty of April fools had been their outside furniture being nailed to the roof...

Everyone simply laughed it out, while his dad had to have the roof repaid adding more expenses to the list of bills to pay...

In a way Kurt had always tried to appear unaffected and bored by the repetitiveness of the jokes and pranks sent his personal way.

The substance in question might have changed during the years and the occasion, but the prank itself had stayed the same. The over unoriginal and completely lacking any creative inventive of trowing a balloon or a container filled with one of the many possibly disgusting choices.

So nothing new compared to the daily slushie facial he got in high school.

In the lucky years when he was younger, it was just chalk powder and or dirt, then the boys hit their fascination for the disgusting and the pee balloons, the slimes and eggs appeared.

The seemingly most innocuous one had been a natural blueberries smoothie… That managed to destroy a complete outfit with stains that never came out.

But now that he was at Nyada, despite having found out how surprisingly similar college was to high school, he had slightly higher hopes for this year.

If the others students were as busy as he was, then hopefully there wouldn't be any time for the traditional pranks.

At least not on school ground, and since some of his professors had been grumpy dragons on Valentine's day, by simply seeing the exchange of flowers and chocolates in the hallways, to the point that the message that not such foolishness and disruption would be tolerated in their classrooms, became the daily mantra. Made Kurt held a tiny candle of hope that he might get through that day unscathed this year.

The only uncertainty came from Adam and the rest of their friends...

The Apples were a playful and excitable bunch on a normal day, though he was pretty sure that any kind of mischief from them would be geared more toward being funny than malicious.

And despite not having known them that long, he was sure that if he asked them to ease up, they all would make everything stop immediately.

But the whole idea of the day was still making him a little anxious, with all his bad experiences, while he was always the one neither amused nor laughing, everyone else seemed to find his situation pretty amusing...

With Blaine he basically never had to worry, his ex was always too needy of being the centre of attention that never bothered to follow any kind of traditions if it didn't benefit him...

And Adam was nothing like Blaine... Which made Kurt all the more worried he'd end up flip out and explode at his boyfriend, over something insignificantly small and harmless.

But it was also exactly the reason why in the end, Kurt shouldn't have been as surprised as he actually was, in receiving a text from Adam on that subject, simply saying 'Can we please talk about April first’s expectations?'

Despite the calm 'Sure, I'll be there in half an hour unless there're troubles with the subway. See you soon xxx' Adam got from Kurt, his nerves were not as calm or collected.

Hopefully Kurt wouldn't be too disappointed. Adam knew there could be pranks not meant to hurt, but he had seen too many backfire to be comfortable with the whole principle.

His uneasiness got gladly interrupted by the doorbell announcing Kurt's arrival.

"Hellu darling" Adam greeted with a smile, he was happy to see his boyfriend even if he wasn't too thrilled about the topic they were about to discuss.

To Adam's surprise and joy Kurt hugged him and pressed a light kiss on his lips before saying "Hi there"

Adam smiled back and pointed to the kitchen where the kettle was on the stove “Tea before we talk?”

Kurt chuckled but nodded following Adam “Such a British offer, I’ll take a cup of what you’re having, thanks.”

Adam chuckled a little himself. It was more a personal preference than a real national trait, he knew quite a few fellow Brits who couldn’t even stand tea, but it was a gesture still common enough that the saying hadn’t died out yet.

Once they both sat at the table with their cup in front of them, Kurt was the first to start their talk "About April fools, is there any chance we might skip the practice altogether? I'm not overly fond of pranks and if we could avoid their cruelty I'd really appreciate it."

Adam sighed relieved then smiled nodding grateful "Believe me darling, if only it was feasible I would have tackled this year's April fools like usual, namely skipping the day altogether. It is the one day a year I miss not being back in England."

Kurt tilted his head curiously and asked "How so? And by that I mean why would you miss England on that specific day?"

Adam grinned at the quick correction, apparently Kurt had already figured out to ask clearly for things he wanted to know.

He knew it was maybe a slightly petty exercise to force on his boyfriend, but it did have the advantage of promoting and teaching how to communicate better, which was a good thing for the both of them.

"It's not like the pranks were better, if that's what you're wondering, but there is the tradition that pranks should happen only until noon and if someone pranks after noon then he is the April fool... A tradition that translating in having to hide only half day instead of the whole day..."

Kurt considered it for a moment then nodded "You know, I never thought of that solution, mainly because in my experience it wouldn't matter anyway, the only real difference on April fools compared to any other day was that more people laughed when something happened..."

Adam frowned and took another sip of his cooling tea, to refrain from offering once more to burn to ashes the kind of place that would allow such things to happen on daily basis...

“I wish we could just pass through a token space, get our stamp of been there, done that, lemme be and then be free for the rest of the day. That would be a relief if only possible.”

Adam’s outburst was more on a joking note, however Kurt was looking pretty lost in thoughts, humming softly before asking “But what if we had such place, let’s say like a table on the cafeteria with an April first menu, and at the end a pin and the request that anyone wearing a pin to be left alone...”

Adam listened interested and wondered reasoning aloud “You know, if we take this idea to the Deans we might actually get the faculty behind it and have at least the school day free of worries. It would be something… I know I’d appreciate that...”

Kurt looked up, panic evident in both his voice and eyes “Wait, you mean it isn’t safe? I thought that with the majority of the faculty acting like grumpy dragons with a toothache no one would dare... Or that at least we’d all be too busy for that?”

Adam snorted and shook his head “Oh Darling, there’re times I forget you’re still a sweet innocent wide eyed freshie... On the contrary, the odds are beyond scary... But if we get the faculty behind that then we might make it happen… And believe me, most professors would love to wear such a pin for the day and delight in enforcing the safe space.”

Kurt pouted a little at Adam’s description, but in a way he knew he was, eyes were still full of wonder for the school, despite the nasty discovery about it being so similar to high school.

But he had to defend himself so he quipped playfully “So, oh wise and jaded senior, what is your take on the idea, think we can pull that off instead and get the whole school an almost prank free zone?”

Adam pondered the question a little and asked back instead “But what could we put on the menu? I can only think of a couple of tea brews that taste like something else, one like chocolate and another like coffee”

Kurt grinned getting excited “What about variations of the theme of the meatloaf cupcakes different combination of meat patty with coloured mashed potato piped on it to seem like frosting with cherry tomatoes or parmesan on top of them as decorations.”

Adam hummed interested, “Talking of cheese it could be fun to have as opposed to those the sweet grilled cheese sandwiches, where you use pound cake instead of bread”

Kurt chuckled looking mischievously “Do you think we can manage to ask the cooks to also add apples’ fries?”

Adam snorted and playfully pointed a finger at Kurt in a mocking scolding before tutting “Cheeky aren’t we? You really want everyone to know who did it with such a signature?”

Kurt laughed carefree, almost to the point of tears “As if the gossips in our school wouldn’t have passed that information through the whole theatre social circles grapevine way before lessons start on April first...”

What had started as a half joke, in front of two cups of tea, shared by a couple who didn’t care for malicious and cruel pranks, was found by the faculty as an intriguing alternative, to a day of growling and shouting at college students acting like kindergartens.

On April first the students found at the front door the announcement that complementary ‘Been There, Done That, Lemme Be, NYADA 12-13’ pins were distributed in the cafeteria for everyone wanting a pranks free day on school grounds. Any student reported or found by the faculty, pranking someone wearing the pin would be reported to their Major’s Dean for appropriate support (read additional remedial homework) for having been unable to read and understand one of the many big announcement’s signs present on the front door and in the main halls all around their school...

In the cafeteria there were multiple choices on how to earn one’s pin. Including, but not limited to, try out one of the alumni kindly sponsored ‘surprise’ food, which for safety reasons were all properly showing the list of contained ingredients.

Officially speaking the Nyada’s faculty took the credit for the event and for the prank free April fools during the AY 2012-13.

The grocery bag containing apples, a pack of sugar, ground cinnamon and an unsigned card with just the words ‘Thank You’, found in the Auditorium 2 the next day, told Kurt and Adam that someone knew exactly who was behind it.

And from the confused faces of their Apples it was not someone from their group. ~The End~

[imagitory]

*exhales heavily*

Okay...I don’t usually go off the deep end in political essays that often. If it’s a quick thing like “f**k Neo-Nazis,” then sure, fine, that’s easy. I don’t have to explain why Neo-Nazis -- especially the cowardly ones that try to label themselves as the “alt-right” in a vain attempt to seem more acceptable to modern society -- can go screw themselves. Everyone already knows they’re awful -- or at least, everyone should already know they’re awful. If you’re the sort of person that wants to try to “teach” me about how the alt-right are not Neo-Nazis, then this post isn’t for you, so kindly don’t interact and keep scrolling.

This post is instead for my Democratic followers, whether you support Bernie, Biden, Warren, whatever. Please feel free to skip over it, though, my dear followers -- I know this whole political season has been very draining, and I have a lot more positive posts on my blog that you can consult instead. If you do want to read my thoughts, though, here’s a cut.

Hi, guys. How’s it going? We really dodged a bullet with Bloomberg dropping out of the race, didn’t we? At least now no one should be able to say Democrats and Republicans are alike, right? The Democrats kicked their racist, sexist, obnoxious, out-of-touch billionaire accused of multiple sexual assaults to the curb, while the Republicans made theirs president.

On that note, though...we still have the Republican version of Michael Bloomberg -- the one and only Donald Trump -- in office. We all remember how he got there...Hillary won the popular vote, but thanks to the ridiculously outdated electoral college rules and Russian interference, the electoral votes went Trump’s way. We could conjure up multiple reasons for Hillary’s loss, but at least in my opinion, I would say we learned a few lessons from the 2016 election that I think we should keep in mind. (Alongside making sure Russians butt the hell out of our elections and fact-checking all the rampant misinformation from our media outlets.)

1) We Democrats have more things in common than we might think, sometimes.

Clinton was infinitely closer to Bernie, politics-wise, than Bernie was to Trump or Gary Johnson. Yet there were those who were so upset about Hillary’s nomination and the role Democratic Party officials had in coaxing  delegates to support her that they protest-voted against Hillary, even if that vote wasn’t in their best interest. We don’t have a system that lets us rank who we want for office from most to least, so sometimes we have to accept a bird in the hand rather than reach for two in the bush. You might feel good about voting your conscience in the short term, but you probably won’t when it results in your vote being a drop in the bucket that doesn’t prevent someone like Donald Trump from winning. We’ve already seen this happen not just in the Trump-Clinton election of 2016, but in the Bush-Gore election of 2000.

2) Despite that first point, if we want unity, our Democratic candidate must be aware of how diverse our party is.

Even if we do end up having to settle for a less liberal candidate in order to win an election, that candidate MUST acknowledge that we are not like the Republican Party. We will not march lock-step with people we don’t agree with just because they’re in our party or we agree with some things, and we will certainly not be satisfied with simple pacifism. The Republican Party has been tilting farther and farther to the right over the last three decades, to the point that their policies now involve mass internment of Mexican immigrants and family separation, directly paralleling plans carried out by the THIRD EFFIN’ REICH. We cannot keep begging for civility and peace and trying to reach a compromise -- you cannot compromise with this kind of extremism without sacrificing all of your principles, because those kinds of people do not make concessions.

I remain convinced even after four years that Hillary should’ve chosen Bernie to be her running mate -- if she had, the rift between the centrist and more liberal branches of the Democratic Party might have been healed enough that we could’ve looked at our ticket with excitement and hope, as we had for Obama and Biden back in 2008. Instead Hillary chose Tim Kaine, an inoffensive centrist Democrat who added absolutely nothing to her presidential bid. He couldn’t even help Hillary out by boosting the campaign with youthful energy or natural charm -- Bernie would’ve both boosted morale among younger and/or more liberal voters and lit a fire under those who were anxious about what a Trump presidency could lead to. The same could’ve been true if Bernie had been chosen to be president -- if he’d chosen Hillary, she could’ve better appealed to moderate voters intimidated by the thought of voting for a Democratic Socialist and run on her international experience as Secretary of State.

3) In order to make any difference at all, we must vote, and we must win.

I’m the first person to acknowledge that I hate voting against my convictions. If the Democrats had chosen Michael Bloomberg, I would’ve probably been ready for whole-scale revolution, right then and there. But let’s be frank here -- in 2016, we got complacent. We assumed that Trump would lose. We assumed that America wouldn’t choose racism, or Islamaphobia, or sexism, or Nazism. BUT WE DID. In the end, our country -- like many other countries before us were -- is more afraid of the promise of social change than we are of the threat of fascism. Yes, I called Trump’s vision of the country fascism, and I stand by it. Fascism is defined as far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial authority, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy and often supplemented with government-sanctioned racism -- and yeah, given that Trump clearly wants to do whatever he wants whenever he wants without facing any consequences for his actions, persecute any so-called “enemies,” make money for himself while in office (even using his office and political power to achieve that end), and scapegoat minorities, I think my point is made. And so I will state it again -- America is more afraid of the future and the progress that could come with it than it is of the cruelty, bigotry, and tyranny of our past. It’s an absolute tragedy, but it’s true. Americans were absolutely terrified of Obamacare until it actually became law and people saw how cool it was, not to be booted off your care for preexisting conditions and stuff. Once that happened, Americans were ready to bite off the hand of any Republican who made any move toward repealing it. If it’s something we’ve never done before, it’s beaten back like the plague, but once it’s something we’ve become accustomed to, you can tear it from our cold, dead hands.

In the 1930′s, Germany had a choice between three political parties -- the Communists, the Democratic Socialists, and the Nazis -- and in the end, the reason the Nazis got power was because the Communists and the Socialists could not band together to stop that greater threat. The Nazis were able to paint a pretty picture to the German people of returning their country to its supposedly long lost, mythic greatness, and they won power, even if they were still not the majority when Hitler got into office. And as soon as the Nazis got power, they never let it go and went out of their way to destroy both Communists and Socialists, just like they did with Jewish people, the Romani, and the rest. We are at such a crossroads now. I am deathly afraid that the Republicans will try to find some way to keep power even if Trump were to lose, but we cannot let that happen. We must stand together, strong and united.

The more liberal of us must acknowledge that radical change cannot be put into place quickly. Our system is broken and falling apart thanks to the Republicans’ on-going sabotage, and we cannot hope to remodel our house until our foundation is secure. Even the Republicans were not able to destroy our country in so many ways these last four years without dismantling a lot of other things first -- corrupting our elections with money thanks to the Citizens United ruling -- sparking two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that drained us of money and added to the backlog of veterans that have yet to receive their deserved financial support -- intimidating political officials away from substantive gun control legislation -- chipping away at abortion rights nation-wide -- stacking the courts, both local and Supreme, with unqualified, strongly right-leaning candidates -- gerrymandering districts like crazy so as to split Democratic-leaning areas and puff up Republican-leaning ones -- even spreading misinformation through shows on their own private so-called “News” network. It will take time to repair all of the damage the Republicans have wrought, but we must first win if we are even to have the chance to try.

On the flip side, the more centrist of us must acknowledge that we cannot go back to the way we were because the way we were was WRONG. We might have nostalgic visions of it being more civil and peaceful, but the tremors of war were still rippling under our feet. The Neo-Nazi rats that elected Trump were gathering under us, and we let them. We let them gain enough confidence to come out into the light in large numbers and we stood by, assuming that they wouldn’t succeed in their goals. We ignored the rampant spread of anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamaphobia -- we downplayed the racism, the homophobia, and the sexism. Sometimes it was due to arrogance, and sometimes it was due to flat-out indifference, because those things didn’t directly affect us. We should know by now that that rosy view of our past was not how things were -- just as many of our Founding Fathers were still slave owners, and America interned our own citizens in camps during World War II, and the supposedly great Ronald Reagan turned a blind eye while thousands of Americans died of AIDS, our country saw the signs of racism, xenophobia, and ultranationalism coming out in full again and didn’t fight back. And now that racist, xenophobic ultranationalism is in control of the Oval Office. If we have any chance of stopping them, we can’t simply go backwards -- we must charge ahead. We can’t simply pretend like everything can go back to normal -- we must accept responsibility for what we’ve done and pursue justice in making things right. We must fight back against these far-right, tyrannical policies and we must pay restitution to those our country has hurt. I do not want the Mexican families we have destroyed to be treated the way our Japanese American brethren were after they were released from the internment camps in the 40′s -- dismissed and forgotten, with our flag figuratively slapping them in the face every time some stupid guy crowed his head off about America being the greatest country on earth. I may have hated Trump’s immigration policy -- I might not have voted for him -- but he still represents my country, and therefore me, to the rest of the world, and even if he’ll never apologize for a single damn thing that he’s done, I want my country to make things right.

Maybe once a Democrat -- even if it’s a centrist like Biden -- is in the White House again, we’ll have the chance for real change -- good change. We certainly won’t get it as long as we’re stuck on the outside looking in.

Now of course, even when this whole presidential thing is done, we can’t rest on our laurels. We must get out in force for local elections too -- we must take back the Senate and keep control of the House. We must pressure our lawmakers to get the money out of politics, and fix gerrymandering, and restore environmental protections, and hold corporations accountable, and tax the rich, and abolish the Electoral College, and put term limits on Congresspeople, and impeach Brett Kavanaugh, and fund dismantling the backlog on VA benefits, and cancel student loan debt, and implement universal health care, and pass gun control legislation, and do all the other things we need done.

I really hope that whichever candidate we end up with -- whether it’s Biden (*sighs begrudgingly*), Bernie (*smiles*), or Warren (*wiggles in glee*) -- that candidate will strongly consider choosing a Vice President who is either more centrist (if they’re more liberal) or more liberal (if they’re more centrist) and filling their Cabinet with those other ex-presidential hopefuls who still have something to offer. Kamala Harris was Attorney General of California -- why not have her become Attorney General of the United States next? How about Tom Steyer as Head of the EPA, or Cory Booker as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development?

Here’s the thing about us being more diverse in thought than the Republicans -- it means we have a great swath of very different members with very different skill sets, as well as the ability to learn, critique, rationalize, change, and improve. And if we are to defeat an institution like Trump’s that demands lock-step, mindless obedience and praise, it seems to me that’s something we should use to our advantage.

[imgilmoregirl]

The Thing She Loves The Most

AO3 Link

Summary:  Five years can change too many things, too many lifes and even though Natasha Romanoff thought she was the only one who wasn't going to be able to move on, the night she found out her best friend had become a murderer changed everything.

Notes: Nope I don't own Marvel, nor anything related to it, just the story.

Spoilers ahead, so read at your own risk. And, if you are a Romanogers fan who is very pissed off at Endgame, please let me know so I can write more. Enjoy it.

The period of five years meant different things to different people: happiness, destruction, despair, compromise. For most it was a difficult beginning, for others it seemed to be just a vast oblivion and for Natasha Romanoff, a great part of this time had meant sadness and guilt - only for being alive of course, whist many were gone - until one call changed the course of her day and eventually, the course of her life. It had happened exactly three years after the battle against Thanos, when Rhodes finally found out who was committing all those mysterious murders and she somehow ended-up at Steve Rogers' door, crying her heart out and babbling about how much she had failed everyone including her best friend, Clint Barton.

After that night, Natasha decided that it was time to follow with her life, for better or for worse and do something about the pain that was killing her inside. She had never thought that losing the Avengers would do this to her, but then she had also never realised how much they meant to her until they were gone. Feeling that much wasn't usual to her, she was a spy, she had a story of cruelties in her life that probably should have taught her to be stronger than that and yet, she wasn't. It was the main reason why she chose to move to the country side of England just a few days after learning what Clint had turned into, truth be told Natasha wanted to help him, but her friend had turned into a ghost who left no trail behind and as much as she tried, she could never get to track him in time. Whenever she got a clue to follow, he was already gone. Just like everyone else.

So now, this is the brief tale of a spy who had a bigger heart than people judged and who lived the uncertainty of the future, the challenges of the destiny and, mainly who loved and lost just to learn that in the end you will do anything to protect the thing you love the most.

...

It was April when Steve Rogers found the letter under the desk. He had been there a million times since she was gone and for some reason he hadn't noticed it until then, maybe because he had never missed her so deeply that he decided to pick up her ballet shoes, left behind in her hurry to leave. The envelope was blue, her handwriting black and elegant, just like her, but none of the words written inside served to soothe his aching heart. All the people he loved had disappeared and she just decided to go away without saying a word when they needed each other the most? Steve couldn't understand it, but then he had never fully understood Natasha, he only knew that he cared about her like no one else in the world.

What was written behind the envelope, however was something that he not only could, but did use. An information, an address, long forgotten along with all the dust. It had taken him across the ocean through a long flight and some more hours of driving, but for someone who just needed a friendly talk, a good old teasing and an exchange of painful smiles, it was all worth it. Steven, however, couldn't say it was the kind of place he had ever imagined Natasha living in, it was too quiet and too small for such a dynamic woman like her and yet, once he reached the cottage he knew she was there.

The air had her perfume, the curtains were dark as she would have liked and the door was painted in a beautiful shade of grey, which made him smile as he lifted a nervous hand up to knock twice before hearing her speaking for the very first time in almost two years. Steve couldn't understand what she said, but it was her voice, he would recognize it anywhere. Then came the steps, the sound of the door being unlocked and suddenly she was standing right in front of him: hair half-red half-blonde, cerulean cardigan, sweatpants and black socks, the perfect image of a very angry version of Heaven.

"What are you doing here?"

The voice was shaky, teary and impossibly rude all at the same. Without knowing what to say at first, Steve pulled her letter out of his jacket's pocket and Natasha gasped.

"May I come in?"

She looked around, once, twice, a bit neurologically which seemed weird to him, but all Steve wanted was an explanation and maybe a good talk over a couple of tea cups and sandwiches, so he didn't mind it at all. He stepped inside the house, noticing how homely and totally unlike her it seemed from there, the cosy living room bringing him a kind of warmth to his heart that he didn't know where could be coming from. Natasha in the other hand, was looking very cautious and cold, she went straight to the couch and took a seat, resting her feet on the coffee table as she stared openly at him.

"I've only found the letter a few days ago," Steve justified himself. "You almost killed me of concern, Nat. Why did you go away?"

She looked down, taking a deep breath and clearly avoiding his glare.

"Everything was so confuse, so painful... I couldn't take it anymore," she whispered. "I'm sorry."

When Natasha looked up, Steve could see the trail her tears had done in her cheeks glowing in the lights. She was silent, but not peaceful and it was enough to make him move towards her, taking a seat on the tiny table and covering her cold hands with his.

"Hey, you have nothing to be sorry about. I do understand you, Nat, I just wish you could have talked to me. That's all."

There was a sniffle and she pulled her hands away from his, looking up at the ceiling as she allowed her more tears to fall down. She was broken, he could see, probably more than anyone else. Natasha opened her mouth to say something, but a loud wail interrupted her, making her head turn as she jumped from the couch, rushing in the hallway's direction and disappearing through a door, leaving Steve to his shock at the noise. He was trying to make sense of it, telling his brain that it got the wrong information when she came back holding a child and his heart lost its pace.

Steve blinked three times, but the image was still the same. He stood up, watching her in awe, wanting to ask away everything that came to his mind, however he couldn't, not when he was seeing the sarcastic, sassy Natasha Romanoff soothing a toddler. She was whispering to him - because it was a boy, he could see - murmuring in Russian, and kissing his red hair as she stroked his back. The truth was being slapped in his face but yet for the ever intelligent Captain America, it wasn't clear at all.

"It is time for you to go home, Steve," Natasha said and her words suddenly broke his state of shock.

"Who is this?" He asked, pointing at the child in her arms, which made her stirr. "What? Are you going to tell me you've got a job as a nanny just for fun?"

"No," she answered louder than before, her voice sounding strong and decided. "I'm not a nanny, he is mine."

"Yours?"

The baby, who at this point had already stopped crying, turned around to see him, laying his small head in the crock of Natasha's neck. His eyes were blue, his mouth thin and pink as it sucked a thumb, a beautiful child indeed and one who certainly resembled her, but still he could remember those late night talks during the missions and the times Natasha had described what had been done to her and it made him certain that she was lying. The Black Widow couldn't have children.

"Yes, mine. Now go, Steve, you shouldn't have come here in first place."

"You left me a letter," he pointed out.

"Well, yeah, but it was before... Before I knew."

His face was contracted in a weird grimace as he tried to place all the puzzle pieces together, heart racing and mouth dry as his brain continued to work towards an answer. He took a step into her direction and Natasha took another back, covering the child's face with her hand, very gently.

"You can't have children, you've said it yourself."

"I know, but apparently there are exceptions," she murmured. "I now know I can conceive with people who have gone through those horrible processes. Just like us."

Then there it was. His breath got caught on his throat as things finally made sense and the images of Natasha naked in his arms whimpering in pleasure crossed his mind. Steve's eyes fell to the toddler she held and the redhead took her hand away from his face so he could take a better look, his pulse quickening when he recognized the nose and the ears he was seeing in the child's face as if he was looking at a mirror.

"What is his name?"

"James," Natasha answered. "Your son's name is James."

[fapangel]

I am being asked by family members; as a Greek-American, do you condone such attacks against Turkish-Americans or Turkish immigrants in general?

ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT, and anyone contemplating such had better fucking hope me or mine aren’t in earshot when they try it, because it will end poorly for them. 

This isn’t an academic question for me as I have family still living in Dearborn - the largest Arab-American community in America, and not terribly far from Greektown in Detroit. Arabs of all creeds and colors living in America typically live here because they ran the fuck away from the brutality and oppression in their home country - which I’m sympathetic to, as Greece isn’t the greatest place on earth, either. I’m of Greek ancestry, but I’m an American by birth, and there’s many things about Greece itself I’m no fan of - how they invented democracy and then forgot how to use it (remember the seven-year military dictatorship in fairly recent history?), antisemitism so virulent it has its own fucking Wikipedia page, backwards and dated views on women, no right to freely keep and bear arms, etc. America embodies the ideals of my ancestors better than Greece does; and even if it didn’t, I’m freer to pursue and nurture them here than in the homeland. 

The Turks living here either came here for those same reasons, or were fathered and raised by people who did, just as I was. They are my neighbors and my countrymen, and a greater safeguard against their own kinsmen who might try to import poisonous ideas from their homeland than I could be, as they’re not only familiar with it, but fled here specifically to escape it, and are thus especially on-guard against it. 

This isn’t limited to America - Greece is in a very ancient part of the world over which armies have won conquest many, many times, so there’s Turks in Greece, as well. There’s also Greeks in Turkey still, despite past population exchanges following the bitter wars between the nations. Hell, there’s even a slavic-speaking minority in Greece. I don’t have to appeal to the American ideology of men of all faiths, creeds and colors loyal to an idea over an ethnicity or religion to make an argument that Greeks and Turks can live in peace - they already do, within Greece itself!

Of all this world’s evils, one of the greatest ones is that innocent people, by the thousands and the millions, must pay the price for the crimes of governments they did not choose. Iran and North Korea are especially tragic examples. But even in those nightmarish dictatorships, true change can only come when the people rise up and liberate themselves - and even then it will be ugly (as Greece’s civil wars following the defeat of Ottoman Turkey, and more recently the Arab Spring has demonstrated.) Others can help (again, as they did in Greece and the Arab Spring) but whether a peaceful and free society emerges from the ashes, or simply another strongman flying another flag, relies entirely upon the people themselves. Others can give them the opportunity (as France once did for America,) but ultimately, only the people themselves can take responsibility. If this is true even for innocents crushed under the heel of brutal dictatorships, it is especially true for nations with denuded-but-functioning democracies, like Turkey. 

The young Turkish men that are going to die in the Syrian fighting is a tragedy, and doubly so because they’re doing it to kill young Kurdish men who needn’t have died either, in a conflict that needn’t have happened. I don’t want any of them to die. But I am also powerless to change the circumstances that has brought this latest tragedy about. Only the Turkish people can change Turkey, as only Americans can change America (and Americans aren’t without a ledger to balance ourselves.) Of all the excellent reasons to hate Turkey as a polity, I hate Turkey most for obligating soldiers of other nations to kill their young men. 

It was not always such for Greeks - I have heard stories of Turkish barbarity and deliberate, sadistic cruelty that would make your fucking hair stand on end and walk right off your skull. And for a people still under constant bellicose threat from what’s essentially the same polity, its inevitable that that hate is going to smolder on. And yet, even true Greeks (citizens of Greece itself, unlike me,) have begun to bridge that gap in recent decades. As well they should, for our ancestors were not just warriors and avengers, but philosophers and poets as well, and pursuing peace on earth and more perfect relations between the disparate peoples of Man is also our heritage to carry forth into the future. The Greek patriots who slew Ottoman Turk soldiers with fury in their blood and black hate in their hearts didn’t do such things so their children’s children’s children could live in the same long shadows that they suffered, but so they might enjoy a happier future. I’ve thought about this issue a lot recently; first for Kant-O-Celle quest, pertaining Americans and Japanese, and then as I watched America start to rip itself in two, right down the seam. There’s people in this country today who absolutely revel in hate, who enjoy and promulgate it, and take obvious and sadistic delight in inflicting cruelty on people who dare dissent from their dogma. It’s been on my mind a lot for the past three years. 

And despite the doubts that always crowd close in my darker moments, I can’t shake the feeling that sooner or later, the hating has to stop. We humans are cursed creatures; naked apes living in our own piles of shit that nonetheless have beautiful minds that can dream of perfection our imperfect souls and quarreling tribes can never attain. But that was our choice, when Adam and Eve ate the apple, and why God cast them from the Garden of Eden; because to realize the spark of divinity within ourselves, to rise to the level of our Holy Father and create things, we have to suffer and toil - because like the Garden, it would not be ours if we didn’t craft it with our own hands. It would be a cradle, not our utopia, not an expression from, of our own souls. All humanity has in this world is that mission, that potential to improve. To carry the torch five more steps, or even one; that is to have succeed. 

To hate and hate and hate forever advances nothing and brings us nowhere. It is to take the torch from the bloody hands of our forefathers and fling it on their funeral pyre to dance around like savages, instead of preserving and improving what they paid such a dear price for. It is to elevate our base impulses to the fore; the instincts of survival, leading to an existence where we exist only to keep existing - without a point. Our survival instincts are powerful and bone-deep; we needn’t guard them, as only the insane (or the indoctrinated-into-insanity) can over-ride them. It’s the higher impulses that demand our conscious care; only we can give our existence in this cosmos meaning. It’s a terrifying thing to take responsibility for, and I don’t feel I’m very courageous in that affair myself, but I’m loathe to actively run from it, for that way lies nothing but soul-death. 

And that’s why, if I should hear a some calling for help with their foot trapped under a track with a train coming on, my first act wouldn’t be to check if he was Greek or Turk, black or white, man or woman, Christian or Muslim. I would simply act. 

I think my forefathers would approve. 

[iamcinema]

IAC Reviews #012: Traces of Death (1993)

Warning: Traces of Death is NSFW/NSFL and this review will go into topics about graphic violence, death media, and other issues that might be upsetting to some readers/viewers. However, this review won’t contain any such imagrey and is marked as safe. If you do want to check it out, then proceed with caution and take the opening [EXTREME WARNING] as your notice if you should leave or not. ________________________________________

In a recent post I made, I mentioned being stumped on what to do next since, as of writing this, I have close to 330 titles on my list to explore and cross off from a wide range of styles and categories; from relatively obscure found footage movies to the most utterly disappointing and abysmal trash that SOV has to offer. Given the explicit or just completely rare nature of some of these, I don’t expect all of these to stay around long. So, it’s probably wise to start from there and branch out to titles that are more accessible to come across in the wild. This means we’re taking another trip back to the world of mondo death media, which I don’t think we’ll be seeing for a while after this one - or at least I can only hope so.

Today, we’re taking a look into one of the most notorious shockumentary films out there, that being the first Traces of Death film; a brutal start in a five part series that marked a turning point within the already niche and controversial subgenre with the birth of the Internet and the dawning of the new millenium.

With the opening, we’re met with a text crawl notice stating that the makers planned on having a series of beeps before the start of the most explicit clips to act as a warning for viewers to look away in the event they see something they’d rather not have. However, this changed and the tones were omitted altogether because this would have meant having tones and beeps before every sequence. That’s a weird flex, but okay. The cold opening also tells us that because of the shocking nature of the film (and soon to be series) containing 100% authentic footage, this would make it the first “true” shockumentary.

I mean...

Yeah, I guess, you aren’t exactly wrong. It’s more authentic than Faces of Death by a landslide for sure and other questionable films around the same time like True Gore. That's something I won’t argue Damon Fox or Darrin Ramage on. However, to call it the first “true” shockumentary is a stretch because Death Scenes came out four years prior to this in 1989, and those photos were authentic. However, if we’re talking about just non-stop death media and imagrey one after the other, then that’s still a really questionable hot take.

It’s been a damn long time since I’ve seen this 13 some odd years ago, so let’s see where this takes us yet again. And yes, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop when the mods decide that me talking about this is not safe for work and it inevitably gets shadowbanned. ________________________________________

Traces of Death in One Gif:

I probably should have saved this gif for when I reviewed Extreme Life & Death, but even now I don’t know if I’m impressed by it or not. But, even here I’m not too sure how I completely feel.

As I said in before, there’s a saying that once you’ve seen one shockumentary, then you’ve seen all of them with their rinse, lather, repeat method of punching you back-to-back with random acts of violence caught on film. Just like its decrepit brothers and sisters before it, this is no different, even if it likes to beat it’s chest about being the new alpha of the pack to lead us into the next generation of shocking content. So, what is it about Traces of Death that has made it have the lasting impact or brutish reputation that it has if everything is at the end of the day “all the same”.

Well, let’s go into that. ________________________________________

The disclaimer and marketing for it helped for sure, solidifying everything that made some people feel cheated by Faces of Death with - that being the authenticity factor.

At this moment in time, Faces of Death IV had come out barely three years ago and the series was taking a bit of a nosedive with what was being pushed out. While there was still a fair amount of authentic footage, there was still a pitiful amount of staged and recreated material that looked very amaturish compared to the series’ hayday back in the late 1970s. It was clear what the gorehounds wanted and it was not only more death, but truly real death that could only be matched by the more obscure shockumentaries that either had yet to come out; like Death File, Death Press, Banned! in America, and MDPOPE, or had been spoken of in whispers and have faded into obscurity to the point of becoming rare and non-existent to the sands of time.

With the Internet being in its young infancy, you now had the power to be connected to others across the world in an instant and the need to seek out the taboo and forbidden was much closer to your fingertips than ever before. This new, booming demand to see and experience death wouldn’t truly be met until the birth of Rotten.com in 1996, oddly enough with the departure of Faces of Death the same year - a sort of sad way of the old days dying with a whimper, rather than the bang it had such high expectations for. If you weren’t able to find the raw carnage you anticipated with the Internet, then you had Traces of Death to curb your appetite until you could - no matter what the topic was.

For me, shockumentaries have at least two schools of thought with their presentation; a narrative style where everything is presented in an organized manner to designate different chapters, such as plane crashes, autopsies, animal death, and so on, or it’s more chaotic and disorganized in nature and you get hit left to right with whatever they can find. Traces of Death follows the more chaotic line of thinking. While it does make an attempt at some kind to figure out what it wants to do, a lot of it jumps around from one subject matter to the next, so you never really know what’s going to happen next. It’s pretty easy to go from a trucking accident one moment to a graphic surgery the next, if that makes sense.

This, in question, is where I sort of have a conflicting problem with whether or not this is the first “true” shockumentary or not. _______________________________________

As I stated previously, there have been other shockumentaries before this one that hone in on death in all its various forms, and is just as authentic as Traces of Death with the media presented. Once again, Death Scenes comes to mind. If the qualifications for it to be a true shockumentary is having an emphasis on death and dying, this helps Death Scenes and it’s case of being the one of, if not the first, genuinely true shockumentary with 100% unaltered media. So, what lead to Traces of Death taking the crown instead is purely anyone’s guess. I’d assume it was because of the in-name connection to Faces of Death and sheer bizarre access they had to so much footage with little to no money tied to the budget, which IMDb says was estimated to be $18 (at least $32.13USD as of March 2020 with an inflation rate of 2.5%).

That’s still absolute chump change compared to the unused news footage the Faces of Death team had access to back in the day, particularly with smuggled footage from overseas that wouldn’t really be seen anywhere else until other shockumentaries like Executions and the Banned! films would be unleashed. Speaking of which, what can we expect with this one in particular? Just like with the films before it, you can expect to see much of the same; graphic animal cruelty, animal attacks, road and sporting accidents, plane crashes, crime scene photos, autopsies, and surgery footage. The Wikipedia page for the series goes into greater detail about other sequences that been traced to other mondo films like True Gore and Ultime grida dalla savana, which makes one of the final sequences showing the death of tourist Pit Dernitz all the more interesting, as there’s been conflicting information about whether or not it was staged. While there’s sources out there that say it was authentic, if it turned out that this was in fake, then it completely damages the film’s reputation of being 100% real.

One thing the series does deviate from, at least as far as this one goes, is the narration as a storytelling tool. While we do get quips here and there from our edgy narrator, Damon Fox, it doesn’t completely guide us in the same manner as Faces of Death, Death Scenes, Executions, and many others would. The scenes mostly speak for themselves, something which Extreme Life & Death couldn’t make up it’s mind on given how it used a copy-and-paste method with stringing stuff along. This may have been to the series’ advantage though, as Damon said later on in an interview that he was told viewers hated the narration and accompanying instrumental soundtrack, and would just watch the movie(s) on mute while blasting their brutal death metal albums. This, in turn, lead to the series taking a big change with Traces of Death II (1994), as the soundtrack switched to showcase and promote metal and grindcore artists - and bands could have wrote in to have their own music featured if they wanted. This lead to artists like Gorefest, Macabre, End of Green, Grave, Dreadful Shadows, Hypocrasy, Meshuggah, and Sinister to be added to the impressive disography list for something with next to no budget, forever helping to change the voice of the series to help it stand out among the big dogs of its ilk. ________________________________________ 

If I had to name something that seriously hurts this, it’s that some scenes drag out for way too long and the shock and horror behind what’s in front of you begins to lose it’s luster after a while. In one way, it’s definetly tied into the saying where once you’ve seen say, one cranial examination, you’ve seen them all. In another, it’s also becoming somewhat unfazed after lingering on a certain image a bit too long - even if it’s bleak beyond words.  One scene in particular goes on for over ten minutes, and while it’s heavy for sure, it does subside a bit after some time...unless that’s just more telling about what kind of person I am. If you’re particuarly sensitive to gruesome content and it makes you uncomfortable, then this will have an entirely different affect on you. However, if you’re like me and you’ve seen, for example, a lot of medical and crime related violence, this won’t exactly be uncharted waters for you. It’s interesting to note though that Japan had a different edit of the film, removing some sequence and adding their own - but the more finer details on what kind of adjustments they made with photo or video evidence is alien to me.

There’s also the issue of the narration, which I feel detracts from the material and can feel annoying and cringy in the same ways that Faces of Gore does with the tasteless jokes and edgelord humor. When I re-examined this, I absolutely get why some viewers tuned out whenever any form of narration came up, since it didn’t do much of anything to push things along from a storytelling standpoint like Faces of Death did. I would have done the same thing as well, and it almost felt unnessary with how sparse it was in general because in the scenes where some form of backstory could have helped make sense of what was going on, nothing happened. It’s nothing particularly special, so whether or not you choose to press mute is up to you since you won’t be missing much if you don’t really care for such pressing matters. ________________________________________ So, what’s there left to say about Traces of Death, at least as far as the first one goes?

Well, I feel like I need to give credit where it’s due in that it was one of the earliest entries in the shockumentary/mondo/exploitation genre to do what it set out to accomplish fairly well. It’s bite was as strong as it’s bark when it came to wanting to stand out in a sea of death and destruction in an era full of pretenders and cash-ins, which this technically is, no doubt. I’m also thoroughly impressed by what it was able to do for an actual shoestring budget that likely helped to pave the way for Banned! from Television and mixtapes like Fist Pig and MDPOPE for being a bizarre collection of violence, sadism, and hardcore NSFW material that could only be found in the grimiest corners of the web or someone’s crawlspace. It’s an impressive collection, I’ll give it that much.

But, when you strip all that away and you take it all at face value, does it hold up? Ehh...sort of, at least to me.

The quality isn’t too great in some areas, but given that this had next to no budget, I shouldn’t expect miracles with scans and film stock transfers. When it comes to being held to the ranks of it’s elder siblings, I feel that it showed what it can do and that it has the staying power that it has. If it didn’t, I don’t think it would have had earned the same amount of controversy it did over the years, going as far as to get banned from Australian Customs and being rejected by the BBFC in 2005 where it still sits today in March 2020 alongside other films like Mikey, Silent Night, Deadly Night 2, Hate Crime, Murder-Set-Pieces, and Bumfights to name a few.

If you’re new to death related media, this one might be a tough pill to swallow, and all the more jarring and annoying with the narration. If you choose to embark on this one, you won’t really be missing much at all if you choose to mute it and add your own music and go off the Wikipedia descriptions to keep up with what’s going on. However, if death related media is your cup of tea and you think this is a total waste of time, then you also won’t be missing much of anything either. I’m pretty sure the vast majority of these sequences can be found online if you look hard enough, even if it means cycling through other shockumentaries and mondo films that this sampled from or sample from this.

At the end of the day, it’s almost all the same, right?

RATING: 4.9/10

[siriusist]

Recommendations for Social Sciences Literature:

So as a recently graduated law student and lawyer (as well as being affected by many areas of intersectionality related below), I’ve been really into studying the social sciences and how society reflects how it treats the least of its citizens. My friend suggested that I draw up a list of recommendations for her, and share it with others as well. 

While my interest in these books might begin in how to consider the perspectives of others and consolidate my own point of view when representing a client, I can safely reassure you all that these are (for the most part) layperson books that I read in my spare time; not ridiculous legal dirges that will put you to sleep. All these books were spectacularly engaging for me, and I’d recommend them highly.

I’d also  like to preface this list with the fact that I educate myself on books that consider intersectionality and how the experiences of individual subsections of society affect society as a whole and an individual’s position in them. While as a result of the topics themselves these books often consider bigotry and sensitive issues/topics, they are academic considerations of societal constructs and demographics (as well as the history that grows from oppression of certain subsections of society), and attempt to be balanced academic/philosophical narratives. Therefore, while difficult topics might be broached (such as, for example, the discrimination transexual women face in being considered ‘women’), none that I have read would ever be intentionally insulting/ extremist in their views, and many are written by scholars and academics directly affected by these issues. Just research these books before purchasing them, is all I ask; for your own self-care. ♥

That being said, I have divided these recommendations into several areas of study. I will also mark when there is a decided crossover of intersectionality, for your benefit:

Feminist Theory: Mostly concerned with the limitation of womens emotions, the experience of women within Trump’s America, and the idealised liberation of women in 1960s, with a particular focus on the UK and ‘swinging’ London.

Disability Theory: Academic Ableism in post-educational facilities and within the immigration process.

Black Theory: This includes the relations between colonialism and the oppressed individual’s underneath its weight, the struggle through American’s history through ‘white rage’ towards the success of African-American success, and a sad history of racial ‘passing’ in America.

Immigration Theory: This mostly focuses on the experience of the disabled and Southern/Eastern Europeans/ Jewish people entering both Canada and the United States. It also provides this background to the immigration policies against a backdrop of social eugenics. I also included a book on the UK history of the workhouse in this category, as immigrants were often disproportionately affected by poverty once arriving in the UK/England, and often had to seek shelter in such ‘establishments.’

LGBT+ Social Theory/History: The history of transsexualism and the development of transexual rights throughout history.

Canadian Indigenous Theory/History: A history of the movements between the Indigenous peoples of North America and colonialists, as well as a two-part series on Canada’s Indian Act and Reconciliation (’Legalise’ aside in its consideration of the Indian Act, these are fantastic for the layperson to understand the effect such a document has had on the modern day issues and abuse of Indigenous people in Canada in particular, as well as how non-Indigenous people may work actively towards reconciliation in the future).

Toxic Masculinity: Angry White Men essentially tries to explain the unexplainable; namely, why there has been such a rise of the racist and sexist white American male, that eventually culminated in the election of Donald Trump (However, this really rings true for any ‘angry white men’ resulting from the rise of the far right across Europe and beyond). It is based on the idea of "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them by THE REST OF US~~~. While good, also just really expect to be mad (not in particular at the poor sociologist studying this and analysing this phenomenon, as he tries to be even-handed, but that such a thing exists at all).

1. Feminist Theory:

Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger: 

As women, we’ve been urged for so long to bottle up our anger, letting it corrode our bodies and minds in ways we don’t even realize. Yet there are so, so many legitimate reasons for us to feel angry, ranging from blatant, horrifying acts of misogyny to the subtle drip, drip drip of daily sexism that reinforces the absurdly damaging gender norms of our society. In Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly argues that our anger is not only justified, it is also an active part of the solution. We are so often encouraged to resist our rage or punished for justifiably expressing it, yet how many remarkable achievements would never have gotten off the ground without the kernel of anger that fueled them? Approached with conscious intention, anger is a vital instrument, a radar for injustice and a catalyst for change. On the flip side, the societal and cultural belittlement of our anger is a cunning way of limiting and controlling our power—one we can no longer abide.

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America: 

Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.Featuring essays by REBECCA SOLNIT on Trump and his “misogyny army,” CHERYL STRAYED on grappling with the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s loss, SARAH HEPOLA on resisting the urge to drink after the election, NICOLE CHUNG on family and friends who support Trump, KATHA POLLITT on the state of reproductive rights and what we do next, JILL FILIPOVIC on Trump’s policies and the life of a young woman in West Africa, SAMANTHA IRBY on racism and living as a queer black woman in rural America, RANDA JARRAR on traveling across the country as a queer Muslim American, SARAH HOLLENBECK on Trump’s cruelty toward the disabled, MEREDITH TALUSAN on feminism and the transgender community, and SARAH JAFFE on the labor movement and active and effective resistance, among others.

(A heavy focus on intersectionality ♥)

The Feminine Revolution: 21 Ways to Ignite the Power of Your Femininity for a Brighter Life and a Better World: 

Challenging old and outdated perceptions that feminine traits are weaknesses, The Feminine Revolution revisits those characteristics to show how they are powerful assets that should be embraced rather than maligned. It argues that feminine traits have been mischaracterized as weak, fragile, diminutive, and embittered for too long, and offers a call to arms to redeem them as the superpowers and gifts that they are.The authors, Amy Stanton and Catherine Connors, begin with a brief history of when-and-why these traits were defined as weaknesses, sharing opinions from iconic females including Marianne Williamson and Cindy Crawford. Then they offer a set of feminine principles that challenge current perceptions of feminine traits, while providing women new mindsets to reclaim those traits with confidence. 

How Was It For You?: Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s:

The sexual revolution liberated a generation. But men most of all.

We tend to think of the 60s as a decade sprinkled with stardust: a time of space travel and utopian dreams, but above all of sexual abandonment. When the pill was introduced on the NHS in 1961 it seemed, for the first time, that women - like men - could try without buying.

But this book - by 'one of the great social historians of our time' - describes a turbulent power struggle.

Here are the voices from the battleground. Meet dollybird Mavis, debutante Kristina, Beryl who sang with the Beatles, bunny girl Patsy, Christian student Anthea, industrial campaigner Mary and countercultural Caroline. From Carnaby Street to Merseyside, from mods to rockers, from white gloves to Black is Beautiful, their stories throw an unsparing spotlight on morals, four-letter words, faith, drugs, race, bomb culture and sex.

This is a moving, shocking book about tearing up the world and starting again. It's about peace, love, psychedelia and strange pleasures, but it is also about misogyny, violation and discrimination - half a century before feminism rebranded. For out of the swamp of gropers and groupies, a movement was emerging, and discovering a new cause: equality.

The 1960s: this was where it all began. Women would never be the same again.

2. Disability Theory:

Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education: 

Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.

(See immigration below for another book by this author on the intersection between immigration policy and disability).

3. Black Theory:

Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon: 

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism: 

Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, the author examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide: 

From the Civil War to our combustible present, and now with a new epilogue about the 2016 presidential election, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race. White Rage chronicles the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America. As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,” she writes, “everyone had ignored the kindling.”Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House.Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life:

 Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss.As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own.Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied―and often outweighed―these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

4. Immigration Theory:

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America:  

A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later.

Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability: 

In North America, immigration has never been about immigration. That was true in the early twentieth century when anti-immigrant rhetoric led to draconian crackdowns on the movement of bodies, and it is true today as new measures seek to construct migrants as dangerous and undesirable. This premise forms the crux of Jay Timothy Dolmage’s new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability, a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American immigration in the early twentieth century.Through careful archival research and consideration of the larger ideologies of racialization and xenophobia, Disabled Upon Arrival links anti-immigration rhetoric to eugenics—the flawed “science” of controlling human population based on racist and ableist ideas about bodily values. Dolmage casts an enlightening perspective on immigration restriction, showing how eugenic ideas about the value of bodies have never really gone away and revealing how such ideas and attitudes continue to cast groups and individuals as disabled upon arrival. 

The Workhouse: The People, The Places, The Life Behind Doors:

In this fully updated and revised edition of his best-selling book, Simon Fowler takes a fresh look at the workhouse and the people who sought help from it. He looks at how the system of the Poor Law - of which the workhouse was a key part - was organized and the men and women who ran the workhouses or were employed to care for the inmates. But above all this is the moving story of the tens of thousands of children, men, women and the elderly who were forced to endure grim conditions to survive in an unfeeling world. 

5. LGBT+ Social Theory/History:

Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution:

Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s.

Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

6. Canadian Indigenous Theory/History:

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America: 

Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, The Inconvenient Indian distills the insights gleaned from Thomas King's critical and personal meditation on what it means to be "Indian" in North America, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands. 

21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality:

Since its creation in 1876, the Indian Act has shaped, controlled, and constrained the lives and opportunities of Indigenous Peoples, and is at the root of many enduring stereotypes. Bob Joseph's book comes at a key time in the reconciliation process, when awareness from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities is at a crescendo. Joseph explains how Indigenous Peoples can step out from under the Indian Act and return to self-government, self-determination, and self-reliance - and why doing so would result in a better country for every Canadian. He dissects the complex issues around truth and reconciliation, and clearly demonstrates why learning about the Indian Act's cruel, enduring legacy is essential for the country to move toward true reconciliation.

Indigenous Relations: Insights, Tips & Suggestions to Make Reconciliation a Reality:

A timely sequel to the bestselling 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act - and an invaluable guide for anyone seeking to work more effectively with Indigenous Peoples.

We are all treaty people. But what are the everyday impacts of treaties, and how can we effectively work toward reconciliation if we're worried our words and actions will unintentionally cause harm?

Practical and inclusive, Indigenous Relations interprets the difference between hereditary and elected leadership, and why it matters; explains the intricacies of Aboriginal Rights and Title, and the treaty process; and demonstrates the lasting impact of the Indian Act, including the barriers that Indigenous communities face and the truth behind common myths and stereotypes perpetuated since Confederation.

Indigenous Relations equips you with the necessary knowledge to respectfully avoid missteps in your work and daily life, and offers an eight-part process to help business and government work more effectively with Indigenous Peoples - benefitting workplace culture as well as the bottom line. Indigenous Relations is an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to improve their cultural competency and undo the legacy of the Indian Act.

7. Toxic Masculinity:

Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era: 

One of the headlines of the 2012 Presidential campaign was the demise of the white American male voter as a dominant force in the political landscape. On election night four years later, when Donald Trump was announced the winner, it became clear that the white American male voter is alive and well and angry as hell. Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and masculinity in the world today, has spent hundreds of hours in the company of America's angry white men – from white supremacists to men's rights activists to young students. In Angry White Men, he presents a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears, anxieties, and rage.Kimmel locates this increase in anger in the seismic economic, social and political shifts that have so transformed the American landscape. Downward mobility, increased racial and gender equality, and a tenacious clinging to an anachronistic ideology of masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them.

Happy reading, everyone. ♥

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Sun Myung Moon could have spent a second spell in a US jail in 2007 – for encouraging poaching baby leopard sharks

Moon is no stranger to lawbreaking — he served thirteen months in prison in the 1980s for federal tax evasion and obstruction of justice.

Sun Myung Moon encouraged Bay Area Pastor Kevin Thompson by saying, “You need twenty boats out there fishing!”

Thompson was jailed for a year; he and his partners were fined $400,000 as part of their sentence.

In a non-prosecution agreement, $500,000 was donated by HSA-UWC (Unification Church of America).

“The world’s largest baby-leopard-shark poaching ring” was broken up. The fish are also known as tiger or cat sharks.

In a sermon given on August 17, 2003 by Kevin Thompson (above) captured on audiotape, Thompson said he personally informed the True Father [Rev. Moon] about the shark enterprise. “When I had the chance to tell our founder Reverend Moon about it … he told me, you know, ‘You need twenty boats out there fishing!’” he boasted. “He had this big plan drawn out, you know.” Thompson, a Brit who speaks with a northern accent, also said he had to convince the excited Moon not to expand the operation, apparently out of fear that it would attract notice.

In the same sermon he said, “We want the smaller the better.” Taking sharks less than 36 inches was banned in 1994 – which Thompson clearly knew by 2003. 

Prosecutors said federal wildlife agents seized sharks ranging from 8 1/2 inches to 17 1/2 inches in length.

Animal cruelty Some of Thompson’s sharks died in transit. Federal investigators know the fate of at least 101 sharks sold by his shark ring. Those pups were put in large water-filled plastic bags, which were stuffed into cardboard shipping boxes and flown on a commercial airliner to an Illinois dealer. The bags, however, apparently contained insufficient water and oxygen, and the pups suffocated. Investigators tracked down 190 air shipments via only three airlines between 1996 and 2004, but there were probably more than double that number. Shipments by other means were not investigated.

One of Thompson’s fishermen told authorities his record single-day catch was 202.

Leopard sharks grow to 6-8 feet in length – as they grow almost all owners have to get rid of their sharks, usually by killing them.

Kevin Thompson’s wife, Masako, was the bookkeeper for the operation.

__________________________________

East Bay Express   July 12, 2006

The Moonies and the Sharks

How a Unification Church pastor went fishing for converts and snagged an indictment as America’s most prolific poacher of baby leopard sharks.

Kevin Thompson is the pastor at San Leandro’s Bay Area Family Church [part of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification].

By Robert Gammon

… If attempts by Kevin Thompson and his cohorts to disguise their activities are any indication, it’s clear they knew for years that they were breaking the law. In 1994, the state Legislature banned the taking of juvenile leopard sharks — defined as those less than 36 inches long. Environmentalists had been fretting that overfishing the sharks before they were old enough to reproduce would eventually lead to their demise. Nonetheless, it was easy for Thompson’s ring to escape detection while shipping baby sharks as small as eight inches. According to court documents, the reverend and his helpers would simply mark the boxes “live tropical fish.” …

But the most damning details, as far the Unification Church was concerned, came from John Newberry, who was eighteen when he started shark fishing with Thompson. For decades, Moon and his top disciples have prided themselves in keeping church-connected businesses legally separate from church activities. When questioned, they have repeatedly maintained that even though church members own and operate the businesses, there are no formal ties to the church. But Newberry pierced that veil when he revealed that he and Thompson stowed their fishing poles, line, hooks, and bait, along with three of the church’s shark boats, at the San Leandro sushi warehouse owned by True World Foods. Newberry also disclosed that at the rear of the True World property was a large shack where they kept their live baby leopard sharks.

Full story:

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-moonies-and-the-sharks/Content?oid=1081440&showFullText=true

__________________________________

▲ Sun Myung Moon fishing

FFWPU attorneys cut a non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco.

The 2007 case involved Ocean Church, part of HSA-UWC, and the alleged illegal capture of thousands of undersized – under 36 inches in length – leopard sharks out of the San Francisco Bay and selling them to aquarium dealers in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

As part of the deal, HSA-UWC founded by Sun Myung Moon, agreed to pay the government $500,000.

May we see a copy of the agreement?

No you may not, the U.S. Attorney’s office says.

Why not?

The parties agreed the agreement would not be made public.

https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/secretsettlements022009.htm

__________________________________

Prosecutors Net Leopard-Shark Smugglers

February 13, 2007

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7379593

AUDIO of Kevin Thompson available here

Federal officials have broken up a major wildlife smuggling ring led by a pastor at a San Francisco Bay area church. The smugglers pulled thousands of baby leopard sharks from the bay, then sold the live sharks to pet stores and private buyers around the world.

Authorities say the operation began many years ago. About that time, the weekly sermon at the Ocean Church in San Leandro, Calif., was devoted to an unusual topic: pet sharks.

“For the past 13 years, Ocean Church has had this little shark business,” Pastor Kevin Thompson said. “We catch these baby sharks, this big. And we sell them to pet stores, live.”

Thompson’s products were baby leopard sharks fresh from the San Francisco Bay. Customers paid up to $40 for each of the one- to two-foot sharks. Fish collectors loved them for their big dark spots and the elegant way they glided through the water.

But the business wasn’t legal. Earlier this year, Thompson and five other men pleaded guilty to wildlife smuggling and Thompson was sentenced to a year in jail.

Federal officials say Thompson ran a poaching gang that may have removed as many as 10,000 baby leopard sharks from San Francisco Bay.

At a press conference at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Monday, Lisa Nichols of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the poachers caught hundreds of sharks a day during the breeding season.

“A majority of them would just fish, hook ‘em, bring 'em in,” Nichols said. “If you’re out there in the dark and nobody checks you, you take it back to your truck and you’re gone. If somebody shows up, they get dumped in the water and the evidence is gone.”

The ring began to fall apart in 2003, when a smuggling expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration saw a baby leopard shark that was for sale on a website and started asking questions. The investigation led him to the Ocean Church and Pastor Thompson [of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification] and his partners, some who also happened to be his parishioners.

Monday, Nichols and other officials closed the book on this investigation by unveiling a $1.5 million plan to restore some the marshes where the leopard sharks give birth. More than $400,000 will come from Thompson and his partners as part of their sentence, and $500,000 will be donated by the Unification Church of America, to which the Ocean Church belongs. The rest of the money will come from foundations and conservation groups.

Lisa Nichols says the prosecution has helped drive other leopard shark poachers out of the business.

“Once we started openly prosecuting people in this case — after the investigation was at a certain level — word spread fairly quickly in the industry,” Nichols said. “Working undercover I tried to make attempts to buy in the last year and it’s pretty much shut down.”

Towards the end, according to investigators, some of these poachers asked their preacher whether they were doing the right thing. He responded, allegedly, that the poaching was God’s will.

After Monday’s press conference, Mike Murray said there are many reasons why the trade in baby leopard sharks should never be allowed to recover. One: that baby sharks don’t stay that way for long.

“They become very large: six, seven, eight feet in length,” said Murray, a Monterey Bay Aquarium staff veterinarian. “That’s a big fish.”

Too big, he says, for the fish tank in your living room.

East Bay Express  July 12, 2006

The Moonies and the Sharks

Fishing was fundamental to Reverend Kevin Thompson’s ministry, but he kept catching the wrong kind. The easy part was luring young people to the shimmering waters of San Francisco Bay. Thompson and a few of his followers would load the teens onto the church’s boat, pull out the angling gear, and start talking about God and committing oneself to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. “In the context of our church, we try to use boats as a training place for young people,” Thompson later explained to authorities. But the reverend said he and the hundreds of teens he took fishing over the years kept snagging fish they didn’t want. “We’d catch these sharks,” he said.

Leopard sharks, also known as tiger or cat sharks, are plentiful in the bay, and at some point in the early 1990s, Thompson and one of his followers realized they could make a lot of money if they stopped throwing them back in the water. Thompson learned that baby leopard sharks were a prized commodity on the black market. Pet dealers would pay handsomely for the exotic and beautiful fish, then sell them to people for their home aquariums.

Over the next decade, Thompson and a few of his fellow Unification Church members hauled at least six thousand of the sharks from the bay, according to an account one of his followers gave to federal investigators. Thompson admitted he sold the animals to wholesale pet dealers, who shipped them around the world. Earlier this year, authorities estimated the street value of the church’s operation at more than $1.2 million, making it the biggest baby-leopard-shark poaching ring environmentalists and federal investigators had ever encountered.

In January, a federal grand jury in Oakland indicted Thompson, two of his followers, and three shark dealers on felony charges. According to court documents, Thompson and several cohorts have confessed to at least some of their crimes, one of the dealers pled guilty last month, and the pastor, who is out on bail and has returned to preaching at his San Leandro church, faces up to eight years in prison. …

Full story:

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-moonies-and-the-sharks/Content?oid=1081440&showFullText=true

__________________________________

Moon’s church to pay in shark poaching

February 13, 2007

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-feb-13-me-sharks13-story.html

__________________________________

Sushi and Rev. Moon

By Monica Eng, Delroy Alexander and David Jackson

Chicago Tribune staff reporters   April 11, 2006

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/chi-0604sushi-1-story-story.html

________________________________________

Sun Myung Moon was found guilty of US tax fraud and sent to Danbury prison in 1984

Guilty Moon. Law firm was paid $100,000 up front and $50,000 a month to obtain a presidential pardon for Moon. It failed.

Sun Myung Moon was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002

Four years in jail for corruption for the publisher of Moon’s Autobiography in Korea. Slush funds used only for book purchasing of the ‘Autobiography’ to push it up the best-seller lists exceeded 2 billion won. It was fraud.

In 1985 the Washington Times sponsored a fund for the Contras who committed atrocities, and trafficked drugs to the US

[arcticdementor]

The past few years have witnessed the inception of a new genre of affluent lament — a kind of marriage of our disparate cultural obsessions with the misery memoir and the university. The progeny of this union is the memoir of the elite university education that confers status but destroys souls. The plot of such memoirs almost always begins with a young scholar thirsting for wisdom who encounters our meritocratic educational apparatus, excels by its standards but is morally disfigured by them, wins admission to an Ivy League school, discovers that the place overlooks his secret cravenness and grants him success with professors and attractive women anyway, and is driven to the extremes of existential angst for a brief period by this discovery. When our wiser and more cynical scholar finally recovers, he concludes that elite education is rotten, graduates from the school, and proceeds to a brilliantly successful career as a writer, abetted by the publication of his memoir decrying the rottenness of his elite education. If these books don’t make obvious the devastating costs of an Ivy League education, what could?

The genre seems to have taken off after the publication in 2005 of Ross Douthat’s Privilege, a memoir of his undergraduate years at Harvard. It was followed by David Samuels’s memoir-disguised-as-reportage, The Runner, in 2008; the most recent contributor to the cause is Walter Kirn, whose Lost in the Meritocracy indicts Princeton. If one were inclined to include former Yale professor William Deresiewicz’s partially autobiographical 2008 essay, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” among these laments, then all three bulwarks of American status-lust — Harvard, Yale, and Princeton — will have come in for a beating. It may be a partially or, if you’re really cynical, wholly deserved beating, and our clever meritocracy lamenters unfurl their verbal whips in so many directions that they do hit some of the truly rotten parts of our elaborate educational mechanism, but the requirements of memoir always direct their thoughts back to crafting narratives of their innocence and corruption.

…

All remark on the class disparities and the snobbery among the student bodies. Douthat and Kirn register the now-ubiquitous complaint against radicalism and obscurantism in the humanities, Kirn and Samuels home in on the arbitrariness of the system of standardized tests and melodramatic personal essays that selects Ivy League admits and condemns the rejects to a life of dullness and obscurity with state-school diplomas, and so on. But there remains something implausible in these authors’ combination of purported naïveté about the meritocratic game and their canny manipulation of it. They manage the impressive feat of becoming unwitting victims of the same system they so cynically and effectively exploited, and then they ask us to sympathize with the raw deal they’ve gotten.

…

This precocious knowingness is essential to the genre. Unless one has been cursed with the kind of crippling cultural deprivation associated with backwoods religious homeschooling and a name like Jedediah Purdy, it’s nearly impossible to make an unironic claim to childhood innocence. So these writers admit to knowing all along that meritocracy is an elaborate status game, that college admissions is about faking the appearance of achievement and intellectual seriousness. But even as they concede that their outsized lust for admission to elite schools deformed their character, these writers insist that they seriously believed that attending these schools would make them whole again. As Douthat puts it, after the trials of being unpopular and overlooked in high school, Harvard “became a beacon of hope to my semi-alienated teenage mind.... At Harvard, athleticism and good looks and popularity would count far less than the things that really mattered: native brilliance, and intellectual curiosity, and academic achievement.” College would transport them away from the craven striving of their high schools to a world of integrity, refinement, truth, and beauty. How such an idyll would be created out of a class of craven strivers exactly like themselves seems not to have come under their consideration.

…

Unsurprisingly, once they arrive on campus and confront a place full of perfect reflections of themselves, all their pleasant illusions are shattered, and they indict their classmates as phonies. The rich — targets we love to hate because all Americans, and particularly the readers of such Ivy League laments, are supposedly part of the long-suffering middle class — come in for the harshest attacks. Douthat’s formative Harvard experience consists in being rejected from a club so exclusive that no nonmember has glimpsed its interior for two centuries. Samuels is tyrannized at Harvard by his roommate’s vast collection of neckties. But it is Kirn’s account of the cruelty of the wealthy that most absurdly plays to popular resentments — he alleges that during his junior year, he was led into a car by “a handsome blond campus prince — the descendant of a legendary industrialist,” blindfolded, and driven for hours out into the country. When he removed the blindfold, he found himself in front of “an actual castle, with countless tall windows, pediments, and columns.” In the middle of New Jersey. “My family’s estate. Behold, poor serf! Behold a power you will never know!” the scion told him, and drove off leaving him stranded.

…

Here again, the conventions of memoir undermine the meritocracy lament’s broader argument against elite education. All these writers want to drive home the quite valid criticism of the hypocritical “diversity policy” at these schools, which Deresiewicz describes as “the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.” The superficial diversity of race and ethnicity masks the underlying social homogeneity that arises from selecting a student body almost exclusively from America’s wealthy suburbs, its elite urban enclaves, and its top hundred high schools. The dominance of affluent culture at elite schools may be a real problem, but not for these authors, who are themselves the children of white businesspeople and professionals. But how else to demonstrate the problem in a memoir except to inflict it on your subject, who happens to be you? The results are barely believable claims of victimization of the rich at the hands of the really rich that do little more than provoke a pointless game of poorer-than-thou, in which the authors’ own claims to victimhood can be easily contested on the grounds that other students have it even worse.

The rich are just as corrupt as we’d like them to be in these stories, but, as blogger and English professor Margaret Soltan has pointed out, these caricatures can backfire: “One reasonable conclusion to draw from Lost in the Meritocracy is that only extremely rich people should go to schools like Princeton. Kirn describes a college culture in which the vast majority of the students — rolling-in-dough Percodan-snorters — are happy and well-adjusted, and the tiny minority of middle-class students like Kirn are miserable and alienated.” Indeed, Kirn himself points out that this is a problem inherent in the idea of meritocracy: “A pure meritocracy, we’d discovered, can only promote; it can’t legitimize. It can confer success but can’t grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow.” Possibly to ward against such a reactionary conclusion, Kirn and his fellow Ivy League-lamenters take aim at every other student type as well — the radical activists and the establishment politicos, the ethnic priders and the anglophiles, the prude and the prurient, the women and the men, the studious and the lazy — all phonies.

…

This contradictory hatred forms the crux of the problem with the meritocracy lament — the authors urge us to save the elite university but describe no one in it as worth saving. The misery memoir makes a terrible platform for serious social commentary — it is too bound up with the author’s own ego and his effort to distinguish himself from the mass of his very similar peers to be able to offer much insight. What they seem to be aiming at is the authority and historical vision of Allan Bloom, but the result is something that rarely gets beyond the pint-sized resentment of Holden Caulfield. In reality, as their own logic inexorably leads us to conclude, the authors are really no better than their classmates, and if they want to expose the rottenness of elite education, they must either excuse themselves from the story and shine a light on these schools objectively, or they should do us the service of finding the kind of students who are what they wish they had been — sincere, honest, diligent, and intellectually independent — and figuring out how they got to be that way.

…

Part of their difficulty lies in the fact that sincere, serious, and intellectually honest students persist beside them — a handful among their own classmates, but more often, at other schools — and their character proves difficult to fit into the meritocracy lament paradigm. Theoretically, no one should be able to pass through the system and remain whole, so how did these students manage to do so? One answer is that they sought after some purpose besides head-patting from adults and distinctions for their résumés.

For some, that purpose is salvation. Religious students are anathema to Samuels and Kirn, who share in common early repudiations of their own faiths. For Samuels, admission to Harvard was his ticket out of the repressive Orthodox Jewish world of his childhood, and Kirn claims to have discovered early on that the Mormon Church was just another branch of the meritocratic system, rewarding shallow displays of oratory with hot chicks to make out with in the parking lot after services.

But religious colleges in America have been sources of explicit opposition to the decadent, established elite ever since Yale was founded in 1701 to preserve Puritan orthodoxy against what some viewed as the increasing laxity of Harvard’s faculty. The social status of these schools seems to vary indirectly with their denominational orthodoxy — the Newman Guide to Catholic colleges, for example, heaps its praises on such schools as Christendom College and Franciscan University of Steubenville for their “vibrant and pervasive spiritual life,” but that’s not enough to sneak these schools into even those backhanded “best colleges you’ve never heard of” guides, not to mention the canonical U.S. News rankings. At the same time, the Newman Guide laments the decline of Notre Dame into degenerate secularism, and Georgetown University, perhaps the highest-status Catholic school in America, doesn’t even merit a mention on the Newman list.

…

Where the meritocracy lamenters come closest to getting at the source of the moral distortions perpetuated by meritocracy is where they put their personal grudges and ambitions aside to report on what is actually happening at these universities. From these accounts emerges a common thread of abdicated adult responsibility. In part, the theme arises out of the conventions of memoir as well — these are all coming-of-age stories, and coming of age is always to some degree a process undertaken alone. However, it is no coincidence that some of the most memorable absurdities described by Kirn and Douthat are moments in which adult authority is notably wanting.

…

Who would leave this kind of money to the sole discretion of a bunch of nineteen-year-olds? It might be said that such responsibility is good practice for a future in which graduates of these clubs will go on to manage even larger sums in investment banking portfolios and national budgets, and perhaps that’s true, at least for those who aren’t caught pocketing the loose change first. But at bottom, the Suzanne Pomey incident illustrates the refusal of adults at Harvard — and, indeed, outside of it — to exercise not just punitive but moral authority over what Douthat calls “the high-IQ club.” Douthat describes the glee with which the campus derided her after the embezzlement was made public, and suggests that justice was served when she was sentenced to probation (the judge argued that “no purpose would be served by a sentence of incarceration”) and denied her Harvard diploma, a punishment that amounts to, as Douthat puts it, being “expelled from the paradise of the American overclass.”

Only that’s not quite how it worked out, or how it ever works out with the children of the meritocracy. Once one attains the requisite credentials — the GPA, SAT, and hours of tutoring underprivileged children — then it becomes increasingly difficult to justify exclusion from elite circles on the basis of mere character flaws. Pomey, like the more recent Harvard disgrace Kaavya Viswanathan, who was found to have plagiarized portions of her much-touted first novel in 2006, fled to the shelter of an elite law school to rebuild her respectability after the Harvard embezzlement flap. Gina Grant, whose admission to Harvard was famously rescinded in 1995 after it became known that she had murdered her mother (a fact she omitted from her application), graduated instead from Tufts. Moral considerations should not stand in the way of a person’s clearly demonstrated “potential,” which may be the only thing the adults in these books value in education and the only realm in which they are willing to exercise authority.

…

In her essay “The Crisis in Education,” Arendt described education as the situation in which “authority in the widest sense has always been accepted as a natural necessity, obviously required as much by natural needs, the helplessness of the child, as by political necessity, the continuity of an established civilization which can be assured only if those who are newcomers by birth are guided through a pre-established world into which they are born as strangers.” And Kirn himself corroborates the value of such authority after he suffers a karmic bout of muteness caused by his lifetime of abusing language to get ahead: “What I learned from [Uncle Admiral], his master lesson — the one that would help me reconstitute my mind after it dissolved at Princeton, worn down by loneliness, drugs, and French philosophy — was that the world could indeed be grasped and navigated if one met it with a steady gaze. Matter wasn’t truly solid, no, but it was packed tightly enough to set our feet upon.”

This is essentially what the adults in these books have removed from the curriculum and from education more broadly. No longer certain of anything about the world, the adults of the last two generations have given up trying to pass it on — the culture, politics, and institutions that have constituted American civilization as a species of the West — but they have found nothing with which to fill the holes left behind. They have lost credibility, and, regrettably or happily depending on whom you ask, ceded authority so that succeeding generations can start from scratch and figure out how to fix things. One of the notable products of this abdication of responsibility has been the rise of the educational meritocracy that continually rewards “aptitude,” which seems like something everyone can still agree is good to have and adults are willing to reward, even when they cannot agree on the essential question of what is worth directing one’s aptitude towards. The result is a system that produces an elite that has no clear idea of its own purpose: “I’d been amassing momentum my whole life,” Kirn explains, “and I knew only one direction: forward.... No one ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient.”

[professormaxwagner]

ooc:

Please be warned there is triggers under the readmore. 

Hey guys, so you are probably wondering why I am writing this on here and not on OOC, well its because its a long story,  So firstly let's get things underway, yesterday I received an OOC warning from main because I have been complaining about abusive anons. Let me show you them before I go any further, please beware they are hurtful and threatening.

  This is what I have been receiving for a while now and instead of being helped by admin I was warned about discussing it, which basically means hey you are getting bullied but dont mention it.  That’s really not a good role model for a roleplay. 

Moving on, the reason I am showing you all this was because I have been in two minds whether or not I should stay. As you may well have known, I have recently broken my foot and it hurt a great deal. While I was in the hospital and when I got home I kept getting messages like these 

as you can see I am keeping the name in on purpose as I would like you all to see what I had to contend with while I was in the hospital. The matter Ali is referring to is a girl called Sarah who was friends with this player in a 1x1 for years and spent every day together until the player joined the group and started mistreating her. This is not something that should have been sent to my roleplay account.  Being told that I was reporting back when I wasnt, was triggering for me as it has never happened and Sarah would also agree to that.  I  told Ali more than once to leave me alone and eventually, she did.  To me, this was uncalled for. For starters, this is not my fight and I do feel that this was a way of trying to upset Sarah further through me while trying to relinquish all the blame she should be admitting to. secondly, the situation between the characters of Quinten and Qhuinn emotional cruelty has been an issue for a very long time, since Ali dropped Sarah for Lecia on more than one occasion and instead of just admitting what was going to happen, she led Sarah on to believe that she would still  want  to write with her when she didn't want to. The fundamental fact is that Qhuinn is playing with Quinten’s feelings in ic for some kind of plot and that means in ooc Ali was neglecting Sarah for a plot that may never happen,  if you are going to lead someone on it shows that you have no care for them, so it is best you leave them alone.  I also dont appreciate the guilt-tripping I am having forced on me,  by accusing me of things I have never done. 

Roleplaying is meant to be a form of escapism and enjoyment, it is not meant to be clique groups who prey on each other, bullying people for fun and using other people till you are bored and want to play with someone else. These are people who put a lot of time and energy into their characters such as the 1x1 which ran for 4 years ( I may be wrong) until Ali got bored. When it comes to Rping, I like to keep busy and talk to as many people as I can, if there are upsets ( and there always is) I move away from the situation and then let the dust settle and RP with people at a later date, I do not gang up on a certain person then go to admin to make them feel bad.

The holidays are a stressful time for everyone, but having this followed by anon threats that Quinten will have me thrown out (because they are close to admin) unless I stop talking to my friend Sarah is not something I am comfortable with.  I can also categorically state that the anons are coming from America although I am still at a loss of what state they are from.  I have met some wonderful people here, but with that, I have also met people who will go to any lengths to get what they want no matter who they hurt in the process and that doesn't sit well with me, I have had ships forced on me and characters who manipulate things to make my character look bad and when I called them out they said they had no control over their character, that is incorrect we all have control over our characters, that's why we write. 

75% of the teens and young people who come into my ward have had online bullying and mistreatment in some way and I will not be part of a roleplaying group the advocates that. And although the people above may be revelling in the fact that they told on me and now I am leaving, I’m strong enough to know that when one door closes a better one opens, the thing I will always remeber was how nice certain people were to me and for that, I am eternally grateful.  I am available at my skype account for those who want to talk to me it's live:zoeyandmaxwagner I believe that talking about a problem is a better solution than ignoring it or “hiding” from it. I have also asked Sarah’s permission to post the submit I received and she allowed it as I would never discuss something which has someone else involved. if you would like to contact her she is on Tumblr @thewhisperingplaces but neither of us will respond to any nasty anons and Sarah has a better tracker then I do so she will know who you are and report you. 

Lastly, anything to do with max from his home to his workplace I asked to be removed as it is my intellectual property @the-institute-rpg. I dont want to leave but being strongarmed into things because Admin is being told to do things by a player who is a bully is not something I put up with, Like I said before Roleplaying is for enjoyment purposes and I will not be part of a roleplaying group the advocates bullying and online neglect which can cause suicidal attempts.  I have never sent any nasty anons as I just dont see the point of them ic or oc,  does it make you feel good to send hate? if the answer’s yes then you are the problem. 

To all the people who were nice to me, I wish you all the best in whatever you do and to the people who are not so nice I wish you could be better but what goes around will come around. 

Zoey. 

Ps. just in case the admins put up a post in a different way to which I have requested, here is my leaving ask

please remove me from the group as per my request. please make it known publicly that  I chose to leave.  I no longer want to be a part of the group which advocates bullying. Please inform Lecia  that her actions have caused a great deal of distress to others and it isnt something to be proud of. Anything to do with max from his home to his workplace I asked to be removed As it's my intellectual property.

[thinkveganworld]

Here’s a link to my article just published at Intrepid Report, “The U.S. is ruled by the worst among us.”

Is it possible for the human race to evolve beyond war, extreme income inequality, corporate money’s control of political systems, and other anti-democratic trends? Some people say even hoping for such evolution is too idealistic, even impossible. Others have said if humanity doesn’t evolve it will soon self-destruct. Martin Luther King once said society has to begin to either “love or perish.”

The U.S. today is rapidly becoming more an oligarchy than a democratic republic, and this oligarchy is polluting the environment, siphoning money from the poor and middle class, and dismantling civil liberties and democracy at an ever-accelerating pace. This trend won’t end well.

As our politicians hurtle downhill, the U.S. will experience many disasters and an eventual fatal crash. Many citizens feel their corrupt politicians of both major parties have taken so much power that the people can’t possibly play a significant role in improving the U.S. political system today.

Ordinary Americans often say we oppose our government’s perpetual wars, regressive tax system, extreme income inequality and other ills, but many say it would be impossible to reform the present system. I think meaningful change is possible based on what history has shown us.

The world has always included people who think it’s possible for the human race to evolve and others who say fundamental change isn’t possible. We’ve always had war and greedy politicians. Still, in some parts of the world at given moments in time, human beings have taken sudden leaps and left behind certain inhumane practices. If that weren’t true, we’d still have rampant blood sacrifices, witch burning and the same widespread use of slavery in the same areas of the world where they once existed.

Today some populations still practice those things, but many have evolved beyond them. The changes that happened started with a sort of “tipping point” where enough people acknowledged that a social ill such as slavery should end.

The more enlightened views, anti-slavery, anti witch-burning, etc., picked up speed, and the public took action to move beyond the old way. In a sense, the condoning of slavery, etc., became obsolete and unthinkably cruel. There is no reason to cling to the belief that the U.S. today can’t make perpetual illegal war and other egregious political abuses obsolete.

During the 1860s in the U.S. more and more people began to acknowledge slavery was unacceptable and started to challenge the power structure. Once the public conscience was awakened, people organized abolitionist groups, created the Underground Railroad, and spoke out publicly. Influential writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau spoke out often against slavery. A slave, Frederick Douglass, wrote prolifically and gave passionate speeches.

If those abolitionists and writers had not believed a big leap in human evolution was possible, they would never have made the effort to organize or speak out. Their action started with their confidence that abolishing slavery was possible, and it’s not that they didn’t know what they were up against.

In his May 11, 1847, speech before the American Anti-Slavery Society, “The Right to Criticize American Institutions,” Frederick Douglass talked about the country’s entrenched pro-slavery power structure. He acknowledged that the U.S. government was then so committed to maintaining the atrocities of slavery for financial reasons that he would need to appeal to authorities outside the government to help end slavery.

There are relevant parallels in America today. People who want to help end our country’s continual illegal wars and corporate money’s control of our political system are in a position similar to the one Douglass described.

Douglass said, “Where, pray, can we go to find moral power in this nation, sufficient to overthrow Slavery? To what institution, to what party shall we apply for aid? . . . [Slavery] is such a giant crime, so darkening to the soul, so blinding in its moral influence, so well calculated to blast and corrupt all the human principles of our nature . . . that the people among whom it exists have not the moral power to abolish it. Shall we go to the Church for this influence? We have heard its character described. Shall we go to politicians or political parties.”

He added that instead of helping end slavery, the church, politicians, press and political parties were “voting supplies for Slavery—voting supplies for the extension, the stability, the perpetuation of slavery in this land.”

Today, U.S. politicians, press, political parties and most spiritual leaders keep voting for (by supporting or passively tolerating) perpetual war, income inequality and other injustices. Average citizens who see we need to evolve beyond these maladies feel they have nowhere to turn, just as Douglass did.

However, in the same speech, Douglass also said that although the pro-slavery government was very powerful, there was one thing it couldn’t resist. He said, “Americans may tell of their ability, and I have no doubt they have it, to keep back the invader’s hosts . . . of its capacity to build its ramparts so high that no foe can hope to scale them . . . but, sir, there is one thing it cannot resist, come from what quarter it may. It cannot resist truth. You cannot build your forts so strong, nor your ramparts so high, nor arm yourself so powerfully, as to be able to withstand the overwhelming moral sentiment against slavery now flowing into this land.”

It turns out he was right. It wasn’t that public opinion alone ended slavery, but it was a game-changing factor, just as strong public sentiment against the Vietnam War played an important role in its resolution.

At various points in history, when the people reached a tipping point and became fed up with given injustices, they started to be vocal and organize to move humanity in a healthier direction. Their collective efforts did change things for the better. Humanity evolved.

Even though U.S. politicians have unprecedented power to do evil and squelch dissent, the public can step up its efforts to speak, write and organize to help us evolve beyond perpetual war, devastating income disparity, and the country’s anti-democratic drift. Writers and other public figures can help by clarifying what is going on and urging the few politicians with conscience to join us in finding solutions.

Throughout history the big evolutionary leaps, including moves away from slavery in certain parts of the world, started with the widespread public attitude that change was both imperative and possible. It is imperative and possible for the U.S. to change its war-for-profit paradigm and its condoning and allowing the other government corruption covered here.

A fitting excerpt from the Declaration of Independence says: “Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” People will put up with a large amount of abuse from their government before they make any effort to change it for the better.

It could be the U.S. public hasn’t yet reached a tipping point and will give in to a feeling of powerlessness. There is never a shortage of “can’t do” dialogue, and the pessimists have a point. We’re faced with daunting challenges.

However, as one of my favorite “lefties,” the late historian Howard Zinn once said, “To be hopeful in bad times is not being foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of competition and cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

“What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, it energizes us to act, and raises at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Can humanity evolve beyond continual war and rule by the worst among us? Yes and no. We can do it if enough of us begin to see we need this evolution in order for our species to survive, and if we start to believe change is doable and take action. We can’t evolve, and probably won’t survive, if most of us stay in denial about the need for change, give in to a sense of powerlessness and do nothing. Frederick Douglass’s idea that powerful evil political forces can be overcome via the truth and public moral sentiment, and Martin Luther King’s view that humanity must ultimately either love or perish, are keys to sorting out which path we should take.

[newstfionline]

A reminder of America’s needless cruelty to migrants

By Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, December 19, 2018

Two tragic stories involving children offered yet another reminder of the Trump administration’s heartlessness toward migrants. After it was first reported by The Washington Post last week, news of the death of Jakelin Caal, a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl who died of dehydration and shock in the custody of U.S. border enforcement officials, horrified lawmakers and dominated headlines for a few days. White House and Homeland Security officials pinned the blame on the child’s father, who they argued should never have brought his daughter on such a perilous trek to the border. Democrats and lawyers for the family, though, are clamoring for an investigation into the administration’s practices and the circumstances of Jakelin’s death.

At the same time, the sad plight of Abdullah Hassan, a 2-year-old Yemeni-American boy on life support in a California hospital, garnered public attention. Both Abdullah and his father, Ali Hassan, are U.S. citizens, but his mother, Shaima Swileh, is a Yemeni citizen living in Egypt. Trump’s travel ban, blocking nationals from several Muslim-majority nations from visiting the United States, includes Yemen, a country currently ravaged by war and hunger. For months, Swileh had been waiting for a waiver from the ban in order to see her dying son, who suffers from a rare genetic brain condition, but to no avail.

“My son, Abdullah, needs his mother,” Ali Hassan said at a news conference Monday. “My wife is calling me every day wanting to kiss and hold her son for the last time.” In a separate interview, he added: “All she wishes is to hold his hand for the last time. If I could take him off the ventilator and to the airplane, I would take him to her. I would let her see him. But he won’t make it.”

After a public outcry, Swileh was granted the waiver Tuesday and will hopefully be reunited with Abdullah one last time.

Neither of these tragic stories should be viewed in isolation. Trump has made his hardline stance on migrants a central theme of his presidency, demonizing whole populations as a menace to America and fearmongering over foreign arrivals to stir up his nativist base. While Swileh obtained a waiver to apply for a visa, numerous other Yemenis with ties to the United States remain in limbo. And Jakelin’s hideous death occurred at a time when the Trump administration is trying to make the process of applying for asylum more difficult, prompting migrants and smugglers to seek more remote--and hazardous--points of crossing.

“What people are doing is they are going further and further out and that is dangerous,” Ruben Garcia, director of a shelter for migrants in El Paso, Texas, told the Guardian. “It is endangering the lives and welfare of families and obviously of children and that is very, very disconcerting.”

As my colleague Nick Miroff reports, the Trump administration is keen on “disincentivizing” the illegal crossings made by the girl and her father at a time when it seems a record number of Central American families have been arrested along the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of children forcibly separated from their parents by U.S. officials remain apart as Christmas approaches.

In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, senior Democratic lawmakers urged the agency to “review policies and practices that may result in increased migration through particularly harsh terrain.” A delegation of Democrats with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus went to tour the places where the girl entered the United States and eventually perished and interview the Border Patrol agents who were with her when she became critically ill.

“The administration could reduce the danger of the crossing by facilitating legal entry into the U.S. for asylum seekers,” explained Vox’s Dara Lind. “In particular, it could end its ‘metering’ policy in which asylum seekers are turned away from high-traffic ports of entry for days or weeks (or longer); U.S. officials argue that they would need to invest a lot of money in port capacity to have enough room, but that’s a thing that could be done.”

For the administration, its dogged stance on the border is as much a matter of ideology as policy. Trump and his lieutenants have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to stick to their nationalist guns, even at the expense of pragmatic governance. On Sunday, for example, Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared that the White House’s insistence on securing billions of dollars in additional funding for its border wall would determine whether “the United States remains a sovereign country.” (On Tuesday, the White House meekly retreated from its threat to shut down the government over this funding.)

Miller’s hyperbole has been most vociferously echoed in the White House’s defense of its travel ban--a measure that had to go through various iterations after getting shot down repeatedly in court. Few in the national security community believe the current ban does much to make the United States safer, while it piles on untold misery and heartache for families caught up in its dragnet. Swileh’s desperation was only the latest illustration of its cruelty.

“We have always said this travel ban is a betrayal of America’s most fundamental values,” Neal Katyal, a lawyer who has challenged the ban in court, told Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. “The administration claimed its waiver process was real, and stories like this show that it was a sham, is a sham and will continue to be a sham.”

A recent New York Times article estimates there are hundreds of Yemeni-Americans separated from spouses or children who are non-U.S. citizens. The uncertainty and stress of the situation is, for some, too much to bear.

“In July, one Yemeni-American man committed suicide in Louisiana after succumbing to the economic strain of supporting his wife and five children after they were denied visas in Djibouti--located across the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa--where rent can be six times as much as in Yemen,” noted the Times.

Or consider the plight of Ahmed Abdulwahab, whose wife had a visa approved that was then revoked once the Trump administration’s ban went into effect. On Monday, the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy organization, filed a federal lawsuit against Trump based on their case and those of two other Yemeni-Americans whose families are waiting indefinitely for visas in Djibouti. The suit argues that the ordeal of these seeking waivers underscores the ban’s “discriminatory animus” and undercuts the defense of the measures made by the Supreme Court.

For Abdulwahab, this is all secondary to his family’s pain. “I don’t know what else to do,” he told the Times, reflecting on how his wife was caught between a war zone and a nation that has closed its doors to her. “I can’t bring her here, I can’t bring her back to Yemen. I just keep hoping that one day it will be over and we will be together.”

[listofnamesinred13]

Okay I’m about to spill some tea

SO “oh look, taylor swift is dragging up past drama to sell her new album, look at her playing the victim again, you’re still over”

is what all the haters happen to be screaming (among over ridiculous things) tonight, following the release of Look What You Made Me Do, the lead single to Swift’s 6th album: Reputation. But let’s take a little trip down memory lane to see if Taylor really is playing the victim. Hold on ladies, it’s gonna be a long one. 

2006-2008  

Taylor broke out in 2006, and when Love Story stormed the charts in late 2008 she became a global superstar and thus named “America’s Sweetheart” a bittersweet and dangerous title for any young female star, because it’s so easy to fall from the top. She was immediately held to an impossibly high standard of perfection, in every aspect of her life, and she handled this with grace. 

2009 - early 2012

We know what happened here, no real need to recap, but the result of this event was Kanye being thought of internationally as a horrific bully. Which he is and continues to be until this day. Taylor went on to be the youngest artist to win album of the year at the Grammys, the world so does love an underdog. 

Taylor responded to West the way she knows best: song-writing. she released her phenomenal 3rd album Speak Now and it featured a heart-breaking track named Innocent. 

It's okay, life is a tough crowd 32, and still growin' up now Who you are is not what you did. You're still an innocent.

Swift, aged only 20, twelve years junior to her bully, responded maturely, forgiving him. At the same time she wrote a grammy-award-winning anti-bullying anthem of the name “Mean,” said to be about a critic who wasn’t constructive in his criticism, just plain cruel. 

Soon after a standing ovation at the 2012 grammys, Swift brought the speak now era to a close.

Late 2012 - 2014

Taylor’s award winning curls disappeared with the release of her Hunger Games singles, and shortly after, she released We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. Now 22, Swift was growing up, and, if you’ll pardon the pun, the release of the Red album caused a swift departure for her “sweetheart” title. Suddenly the romantic theme to her music was causing people to role their eyes. 2013 was a year of jokes about lists of ex-boyfriends, “keep your sons, brothers, dads and boyfriends away from Miss Swift, she’s destroy them, try to bury them with a song.” This is where the words “Playing the victim” first appeared. She was no longer seen as an innocent princess, the grown woman began to wear less fairy-tale-esque clothing, in favour of her now infamous black shorts. she attended award shows, knowing full well she was going to have to take an insult on the chin, and no one would stand up for her. Everyone was laughing. Her unforgettable but brief romance with Harry Styles caused insane online backlash, his fans taking her reputation for writing about personal relationships as an excuse to tear apart their relationship. Just one of many examples of the opinions of people that don’t know her, have never met her, believe they have a right to bad mouth her because “she’s Taylor Swift” 

2014 - 2017

The released of the record-breaking 1989 album saw Taylor win back her popularity for the first time since before Styles. She declared that she could not be thrown off her game by her haters in “shake it off” insisting she will be herself more. But the real take down came in the form of “blank space.” Her satirical chart-topper saw her take back the narrative for the first time. She stated that she decided to play by their [the media’s] rules, writing and performing from the point of view of the “jet-setting man-eating psycho” they insisted she was. And the media, fickle as ever, lapped up every word. Impressed this silly little girl had played them at their own game, they placed her back on the pedestal.

Thus began the age of the “squad” 

Taylor’s Victoria Secret Performance allowed her to form friendships with the angels, and the media nicknamed her ever-growing group of friends a “squad.” People mistakingly believed Taylor had formed this squad as an clique, an army against her latest enemy, Ex-BFF Katy Perry. We all know the details of their feud and Taylor’s smooth take-down track Bad Blood. I guess I can forgive the confusion, but members of the so called squad have stated that it’s not a clique, it’s just a support group of mostly women. Taylor had bitten back at the media’s representation of her, calling them out for being sexist. I however, personally don’t see it as sexism. I see it as bullying. The simple fact is that no other celebrity on the planet get attacked so much for so little crimes as Taylor Swift. This “squad” theory began positively but soon took a dark turn, as numerous times Taylor Swift was referred to as a “Regina George” Who famously played the victim in the 2004 blockbuster hit “Mean Girls” despite secretly being the mean girl herself. 

 Following her new popularity, an old ghost made an appearance in her life. With encouragement from their mutual friend Jay-Z, Taylor Swift and Kanye West made up. 

Taylor even presented an award to him, mocking the infamous  statement: “Imma let you finish...” by ending it with “but Kanye West has had one of the best careers of all time” The legendary feud was over. Taylor was on top of the world. 

Or so we thought. With the release of Kanye West’s “Famous” came a rather degrading lyric: 

“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex Why? I made that bitch famous (God damn) I made that bitch famous”

Once again, we know the details. Taylor’s not completely innocent, maybe she shouldn’t have claimed she knew nothing of it. But take away your opinions on Miss Swift. Imagine if someone who bullied you, humiliated you, suddenly wanted to end all strife and flaunt an alliance. You’d jump at the chance, I know I would, and have. Taylor has previously proved to be the forgiving type, and in that phone call you can hear how eager she is to please. I believe Taylor did not understand exactly how degrading the finally song would sound, brushing her off, taking credit for her success, coupled with a video depicting a life-like naked wax figure of her he commissioned thousands into making right beside him in large bed full of controversial figures, including sex offenders and abusers. Imagine that had happened to YOU. Not Taylor Swift Trademark, the untouchable millionaire business woman, but a real woman, with real feelings. You would be scared. You’d be filing restraining orders. She had trusted him and let him in. He humiliated her for a second time, and in her panic she responded badly. 

And yet, for some reason, the world took his side. This degrading song and disgusting video was somehow righteous over obscuring a little truth. Taylor’s response to the video release was such:

The internet wasn’t having it though. The final sentence became her death sentence, and thus began a meme and a #/taylorswiftisoverparty. Fans of Swift did try to defend her, but they also knew that Miss Swift was definitely not over. 

2017 (present day)

Finally I have reached the release of “Look What You Made Me Do” the lead single of Swift’s 6th and highly anticipated album “Reputation” 

So now we have tracked the history of Taylor “Playing the victim” I would very much like to address why LWYMMD is certainly not her playing it. I would like to push Kanye, Kim, and Katy aside, their actions were not to be admired, but this post is ultimately about the media and the public’s opinion of Miss Swift. 

SO LETS ANALYSE SHALL WE:

The role you made me play Of the fool, no, I don't like you I don't like your perfect crime How you laugh when you lie You said the gun was mine

It was the media and the public that insisted that Taylor was two faced, a snake, they forced her to play a role in their narrative. This public side of the role was like a villain, and the real way they played her was as a fool. The Media tricking her into trusting them, and then pushing her off the pedestal they put her on. 

But I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time I've got a list of names and yours is in red, underlined

Swift is no longer playing nice. Did everyone really expect her to lie down and let Kanye win? She’s out for revenge, and so she should be. 

I don't like your kingdom keys They once belonged to me You ask me for a place to sleep Locked me out and threw a feast (what?) The world moves on, another day, another drama, drama But not for me, not for me, all I think about is karma And then the world moves on, but one thing's for sure Maybe I got mine, but you'll all get yours

This is a general address to those who supported her through her success at the start of the 1989 era, and then abandoned her when she fell from grace. They labelled it as Taylor getting what was coming to her, but she knows that eventually the tables will turn again and their time on the chopping block will come. 

I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me I'll be the actress starring in your bad dreams

Their betrayal has lead to her inability to trust, and as she says, they all believe she’s a snake, she’s two-faced, if they don’t get her first she’ll get them. Her insane success has made her “untrustworthy”  The world is forcing her to be someone she’s not. 

"I'm sorry, the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now." "Why?" "Oh, 'cause she's dead!" (ohh!)

This tongue-in-cheek spoken part is almost a throwback to Blank Space, she joins the taylor swift is over party, okay, we’ll play it your way, just before  I destroy you. It also sadly suggests that their cruelty and endless abuse killed the forgiving version of her. 

Ooh, look what you made me do Look what you made me do

At first, I didn’t quite get this line. She hasn’t done anything yet? What have they made her do? But then it clicked. They made her be a part of the narrative she wanted to be excluded from. They asked for her to play the bad guy, they insisted on her Villainous persona. They insisted she was a snake. So they made her become the snake. 

Taylor has never once purposely “Played the victim.” Swift does not want to be the victim. So, this time around, she’s not forgiving. She’s not crying. She’s not ignoring it. She’s fighting it. Taylor Swift is angry, self-aware enough to know at this point she has no other route to take, bar buying an island and never being heard from again. She’s claiming her own fury, her own narrative, her own reputation. 

And she’s out for blood.

Hiss Hiss.