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mesetacadre · 2 months

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In April 15th, 1920, the National Committee of the Federation of Socialist Youths met in Madrid to, taking the initiative over the PSOE, take the decision of joining the Third International, founded by the Bolshevik party. After a convoluted process that lasted until the 14th of November of 1921, the Communist Party of Spain (Spanish Section of the Communist International) was born, pejoratively called "The party of the 100 children" by its opponents.

The Komintern's policy in its early days was one of the "only front", stating that capital could only be beat via the united effort of all communists in all spheres of life. Its motto became "Towards the Masses!". In Spain, this period was marked by Primo de Rivera's dictatorship between 1923 and 1930, during which almost every political group was banned. The social-democratic PSOE and UGT avoided this by remaining "neutral" towards the dictatorship. Some members of the PSOE even collaborated, like Largo Caballero, who became Rivera's Minister of State. The Communist Party maintained its sole struggle during this time, gaining popularity among the Spanish proletariat.

When the dictatorship ended and the Second Republic was proclaimed in April of 1932, in the midst of the effects of the 1929 capitalist crisis, the 1931 strike in Sevilla and 1932 general strike, the PCE had found itself unable to work outside the dynamics imposed by the dictatorship's repression, and only began to regain its force after the selection of José Diaz as general secretary in September of 1932. The party corrected some of the left-communist and sectarian mistakes that characterized the period of the dictatorship.

The PCE took on an even bigger role in the organization of our class after its crucial role in the October insurrection of 1934 in Asturias, during which the proletariat took power in the mining basin and most of Oviedo, via the Peasant and Worker Alliances, expressions of the aforementioned only front strategy decided by the Third International. The government of the Second Republic, carrying out the needs of a section of the Spanish bourgeoisie, brutally repressed the Asturian revolutionaries, with general Francisco Franco at the helm of the military's intervention. Among the victims was Aida Lafuente, a militant of the Communist Youth and an example of bravery.

This glimmer of worker power was contextualized in the Black Biennium (1933-1935), a period of the Republic when reactionaries accessed the government and expressed the most violent tendencies of the Spanish bourgeoisie against the more than 30,000 political prisoners they took, and against the rapidly developing workers' movement.

It was during this time in Spain and the whole world, when the Third International identified the generalized rise of fascism and reactionarism, and adopted in its 7th Congress, during the summer of 1935, the policy of the Popular Front, failing to link the anti-fascist struggle with the struggle for workers' power, instead advocating for alliances with "socialist" parties and other bourgeois-democratic parties, placing the fight for socialism-communism in the background.

Half a year after this decision, the Popular Front alliance won the elections in the 16th of February, 1936. Shortly after, and only a year after the 7th Congress, sections of the Spanish and international bourgeoisie countered this victory with a failed coup d'etat by fascist generals in the 18th of July, 1936. They had the backing of the nazi-fascist powers in Europe and the complicity of the "democratic" capitalist powers, who were anxious about the strengthening proletariat in Spain. Curiously, the plane that carried Franco from his exile in the African colonies to Tetuán in north Africa, the Dragon Rapide, originally took off from London.

The biggest supporter of the Spanish Republic was the USSR, that, through the enormous effort of the Third International and the Communist Parties in 52 countries, against the banning of volunteering by many of those 52 countries, organized the enlistment, falsification of documents, logistics, arrival and other matters for the arrival of around 35,000 workers, peasants and intellectuals from all over the world. Under the single banner of the International Brigades, and for the first time materializing the historic slogan Workers of the World, Unite!, the Volunteers of Liberty, as they also came to be known, gave their mind and their body to the cause of the Spanish people, armed with the teachings of marxism-leninism. They knew that it was no longer a fight for only the Spanish. As J. V. Stalin put it in October of 1936:

The workers of the Soviet Union are merely carrying out their duty in giving help within their power to the revolutionary masses of Spain. They are aware that the liberation of Spain from the yoke of fascist reactionaries is not a private affair of the Spanish people but the common cause of the whole of advanced and progressive mankind.

In July of 1936 there already were Brigadiers present in Spain, for the occasion of the Popular Olympics (in boycott of the Berlin Olympics) organized by the Red Sport International and the Socialist Worker Sport International in Barcelona, they were among the first to take up arms against the coup d'etat. The Executive Committee's Secretariat of the Third International formalized in the 18th and 19th of September the creation of the International Brigades, which began to arrive in Spain the 14th of October of 1936. Despite the propaganda levied by fascists and bourgeois historiography, the importance of the International Brigades is undeniable today.

After the integration of the Brigades into the Popular Militias in the 22nd of October, the Brigadiers began their training in Albacete and saw action for the first time the 8th of November in Madrid, with the 11th and 12th Brigade. Militarily, the Brigades were present and indispensable in every major battle of the war, but they also played a moral role. After every capitalist power had abandoned the Spanish people to their fate with the policy of non-intervention, the compact and disciplined columns that marched through the streets of Madrid singing songs like The Internationale, Young Guard, or The Marseillaise, made up of workers who barely knew the language but were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, decidedly improved the morale of every militia and civilian in Madrid and in Spain.

But even greater than the support of the Brigades were the more than 300,000 strong military detachments sent by Germany and Italy, with the implicit approval of capitalist democracies, including the Popular Front in France, whose efforts of non-intervention focused exclusively on the republic. And it was the strategy of the popular front that forced the PCE to sideline the revolutionary potential of the hundreds of thousands of militants, instead preserving the legitimacy of the bourgeois republic.

By 1938, the republic was on its last legs and, wishing to evidence the foreign involvement on the fascist side, declared to the League of Nations in the 21st of September that they would disband all volunteers enlisted after the 18th of July, 1936. The 16th of October, 2 years and 2 days after the arrival of the Brigades, the League of Nations' International Committee arrived in Spain to verify the disbandment and departure of the Brigadiers. No such inspection was ever made on the fascist side.

According to the International Committee's report published on the 18th of January, 1939, there were a total of 12,673 Brigadiers in Spain, less than half of the total number of volunteers at around 35,000. They began to depart Spain on the 2nd of November, 1938, through the French border. During the process of departures, some Brigadiers were murdered in Spain, others died protecting the fleeing republicans and hundreds of thousands of refugees at the crossing in France. This was when Mexico, and especially the Communist Party of Mexico which pressured the government, took on around 1,600 brigadiers, mainly Germans, Poles, Italians, Austrians, Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavians, who could not safely return to their homes due to the advance of fascism within their countries. The debt owed by the workers of the world, especially the Spanish, to the Communist Party of Mexico is immeasurable, along with every other Communist Party that helped and the Third International.

The dissolution of the International Brigades did not achieve the result desired by the Republic. Instead, their retreat towards the end of the Battle of the Ebro only accelerated the morale defeat of the republican militias. Most of the brigadiers who survived the war but could not be repatriated in time did not have a pleasant fate. Most of those ended up in the French concentration camps of Gurs, Argèles-sur-Mer, Saint-Cyprien and Barcarès, Septfonds, Riversaltes, or Vernet d'Ariège.

Their fight was not in vein. The experience gained by the few who survived at a high cost proved essential in the development of their own parties, and soon enough, anti-fascist resistance. Everywhere that people took up arms against the fascist occupation, whether inside or outside the concentration camps, ex-Brigadiers were present, continuing the fight they started in the 18th of July, 1936, well after the war that had began that day was history.

Back in Spain, while the moribund republic thrashed for the last few times, the bourgeois republican government, headed by the social-democrat Juan Negrín, began to isolate the PCE with the support of the trotskyists and anarchists. It came to a close after the coup d'etat by the republican general Casado, during and after which the communist militancy was oppressed, and the fascist fifth column that had remained in Madrid opened its gates to the fascist military. This is how the fascist dictatorship began in Spain, with a betrayal by the Popular Front's social-democrats and by the democratic-bourgeois powers of the world. They couldn't help but mirror the collaborationism happening on the world stage; the UK was actively looking for an alliance with Germany, and every other capitalist country was making business with the looted property. All for one purpose that united them; the destruction of workers' power in the form of the marxist-leninist parties that around the world were beginning to challenge the capitalists, with the Third International at the helm.

These are the lessons that Spain and the world learnt during and after its fierce resistance against fascism. No popular front with bourgeois-democrats is sustainable, and their class character will always prevail above the superficial differences with fascism. The only viable tool is the organization of the social majority within the Communist Party, with proletarian internationalism and an altruist disposition as principles. No matter how much social-democracy may fear fascist privatization, and no matter how much they disrespect bourgeois democracy, the class interests that guide them will always prevail when faced with a capable mass of organized workers.

The progressive Popular Front in France, the "appeasing" government in the UK, and the nominally anti-violence liberal democracies, did not ever attempt to do anything else than giving carte blanche to the fascists and hindering their rivals. The betrayal of Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland were all made with the same reasoning: the alliance with fascism to destroy communism. There are no reasons that make the opposite possible today. When reactionarism picks up traction in lockstep with the deepening capitalist crises, all of these bourgeois-democrats some "leftists" like to place their hope in will not vary substantially from the script they followed 85 years ago.

Quedad, que así lo quieren los árboles, los llanos, las mínimas partículas de la luz que reanima un solo sentimiento que el mar sacude. ¡Hermanos! Madrid con vuestro nombre se agranda e ilumina

Rafael Alberti, A las Brigadas Internacionales

#seriousposting #brigades

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etirabys · 22 days

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quick queen's thief reread notes, starting with book 2

spoilery!

the queen of attolia: 5/5

oh it's just too crazy not to give a 5/5 to. the perfect romance. she cuts off his hand for espionage and national humiliation, he comes back after recovering to blackmail her into marrying him.

I also really enjoyed the stretch of the book that's just high level descriptions of war movements. it's really amazing it doesn't feel dry. the talent...

the king of attolia: 4.3/5

more self indulgent than I remember but who cares

a conspiracy of kings: 4/5

the most forgettable one, for me. I was politely indifferent to the romance. I liked the first third of the book more than I remember –Sophos's relief to not have a future is so deftly done. technically he's being cowardly but I was never ever mad at him.

interesting climax featuring no clever victory – merely making unpleasant choices over and over again.

did not buy the strained friendship arc when Sophos comes to Attolia – it felt manufactured, and so did the resolution.

thick as thieves: 4.7/5

better and more interesting than I remember! the relatively isolated story... the stylistic shift into Mesopotamian mythology... a most excellent roadtrip romance novel. structurally closest to 1 but really its own thing

also awesome to see the author dialing the pagetime given to warfare up and down between novels – high in 2, 4, 6, low in 1 (no war), 3 (internal politics), 5 (intense two person journey culminating in a briefly described but hugely consequential military engagement).

return of the thief: 3.5/5

whatever. no it was still good. I'm not sure if using Pheris as a narrator was a good idea but I certainly liked it a lot.

the interpersonal dynamics were noticeably weaker than in the previous novels, where they were excellent. I don't buy the tight knit quartet of monarchs.

I thought the light touch with divine intervention in books 1-5 were great and didn't like the 10xification. I prefer as high a ratio of narrative relevance to plot relevance as possible, for divine intervention in fiction, and the series had achieved this so well up until the last book

overall notes

my goodness, such incredible storytelling economy. I went to a book signing event where she said she wrote (or could write?) a lot of banter, but cut it because it was making the book less streamlined. groaned with disappointment at the time but she's right, these books are sleek little sharks

great prose too: unflashy, elegant, unstrained.

gen is a less pleasant person than I remember. I don't really want him to be high king actually. I'm not sure to what degree his tantrums and... truancy?... are meant to be externalized ambivalence about his duties vs being a good yelly strong minded ancient king who tries to kill someone who gravely insults his wife even though it'll piss off the greatest continental power who'd send you military aid. I'm politely assuming it's the latter because it helps me enjoy

great variety between books in what kind of story they're telling & who's telling them.

#rambl #not the best post i've ever made but i think heaving this out into the world will do me some good

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reddest-flower · 2 months

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The Soviet intervention in Hungary and the Khrushchev revelations produced in Europe a process that led – gradually – to the Eurocommunism of the Communist Party of Spain’s leader Santiago Carrillo, who said, in 1976, ‘once Moscow was our Rome, but no more. Now we acknowledge no guiding centre, no international discipline’. This was a communism that no longer believed in revolution but was quite satisfied with an evolutionary dynamic. The European parties, correct in their desire for the right to develop their own strategies and tactics, nonetheless, threw themselves onto a self-destructive path. Few remained standing after the USSR collapsed in 1991. They campaigned for polycentrism but, in the end, achieved only a return to social democracy.

Amongst the Third World communist parties, a different orientation became clear after 1956. While the Western European parties seemed eager to denigrate the USSR and its contributions, the parties in the Third World acknowledged the importance of the USSR but sought some distance from its political orientation. During their visits to Moscow in the 1960s, champions of ‘African socialism’ such as Modibo Keïta of Mali and Mamadou Dia of Senegal announced the necessity of non-alignment and the importance of nationally developed processes of socialist construction. Marshal Lin Biao spoke of the need for a ‘creative application’ of Marxism in the Chinese context. The young leader of the Indonesian Communist Party – Dipa Nusantara Aidit – moved his party towards a firm grounding in both Marxism-Leninism and the peculiarities of Indonesian history. [...]

In the Third World, where Communism was a dynamic movement, it was not treated as a religion that was incapable of error. ‘Socialism is young’, Che Guevara wrote in 1965, ‘and has its mistakes.’ Socialism required ceaseless criticism in order to strengthen it. Such an attitude was missing in Cold War Europe and North America [...] After 1956, Communism was penalized by the Cold Warriors for the Soviet intervention in Hungary. This played some role in the Third World, but it was not decisive. In India, in 1957 the Communists won an election in Kerala to become the ruling party in that state. In 1959, the Cuban revolution overthrew a dictatorship and adopted Marxism-Leninism as its general theory. In Vietnam, from 1954, the Communists took charge of the north of the country and valiantly fought to liberate the rest of their country. These were communist victories despite the intervention in Hungary.

[...]

Much the same history propelled the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) forward from 1951, when it had merely 5,000 members, to 1964, when it had two million party members and an additional fifteen million members in its mass organizations (half of them in the Indonesian Peasants’ Front). The party had deep roots in the heavily populated sections of east and central Java but had – in the decade after 1951 – begun to make gains in the outer islands, such as Sumatra. A viciously anti-communist military was unable to stop the growth of the party. The new leadership from the 1953 Party Central Committee meeting were all in their thirties, with the new Secretary General – Aidit – merely thirty-one years old. These communists were committed to mass struggles and to mass campaigns, to building up the party base in rural Indonesia. The Indonesian Peasants’ Front and the Plantation Workers’ Union – both PKI mass organizations – fought against forced labour (romusha) and encouraged land seizures (aksi sepihak). These campaigns became more and more radical. In February 1965, the Plantation Workers’ Union occupied land held by the US Rubber Company in North Sumatra. US Rubber and Goodyear Tires saw this as a direct threat to their interests in Indonesia. Such audacity would not be tolerated. Three multinational oil companies (Caltex, Stanvac and Shell) watched this with alarm. US diplomat George Ball wrote to US National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy that in ‘the long run’ events in Indonesia such as these land seizures ‘may be more important than South Vietnam’. Ball would know. He oversaw the 1963 coup in South Vietnam against the US ally Ngô Đình Diệm. The West felt it could not stand by as the PKI got more aggressive.

By 1965, the PKI had three million party members – adding a million members in the year. It had emerged as a serious political force in Indonesia, despite the anti-communist military’s attempts to squelch its growth. Membership in its mass organizations went up to 18 million. A strange incident – the killing of three generals in Jakarta – set off a massive campaign, helped along by the CIA and Australian intelligence, to excise the communists from Indonesia. Mass murder was the order of the day. The worst killings were in East Java and in Bali. Colonel Sarwo Edhie’s forces, for instance, trained militia squads to kill communists. ‘We gave them two or three days’ training,’ Sarwo Edhie told journalist John Hughes, ‘then sent them out to kill the communists.’ In East Java, one eyewitness recounted, the prisoners were forced to dig a grave, then ‘one by one, they were beaten with bamboo clubs, their throats slit, and they were pushed into the mass grave’. By the end of the massacre, a million Indonesian men and women of the left were sent to these graves. Many millions more were isolated, without work and friends. Aidit was arrested by Colonel Yasir Hadibroto, brought to Boyolali (in Central Java) and executed. He was 42.

There was no way for the world communist movement to protect their Indonesian comrades. The USSR’s reaction was tepid. The Chinese called it a ‘heinous and diabolical’ crime. But neither the USSR nor China could do anything. The United Nations stayed silent. The PKI had decided to take a path that was without the guns. Its cadre could not defend themselves. They were not able to fight the military and the anti-communist gangs. It was a bloodbath.

[...]

There was little mention in Havana of the Soviet Union. It had slowed down its support for national liberation movements, eager for detente and conciliation with the West by the mid-1960s. In 1963, Aidit had chastised the Soviets, saying, ‘Socialist states are not genuine if they fail to really give assistance to the national liberation struggle’. The reason why parties such as the PKI held fast to ‘Stalin’ was not because they defended the purges or collectivization in the USSR. It was because ‘Stalin’ in the debate around militancy had come to stand in for revolutionary idealism and for the anti-fascist struggle. Aidit had agreed that the Soviets could have any interpretation of Stalin in terms of domestic policy (‘criticize him, remove his remains from the mausoleum, rename Stalingrad’), but other Communist Parties had the right to assess his role on the international level. He was a ‘lighthouse’, Aidit said in 1961, whose work was ‘still useful to Eastern countries’. This was a statement against the conciliation towards imperialism of the Khrushchev era. It was a position shared across many of the Communist Parties of the Third World.

Many Communist parties, frustrated with the pace of change and with the brutality of the attacks on them, would take to the gun in this period – from Peru to the Philippines. The massacre in Indonesia hung heavily on the world communist movement. But this move to the gun had its limitations, for many of these parties would mistake the tactics of armed revolution for a strategy of violence. The violence worked most effectively the other way. The communists were massacred in Indonesia – as we have seen – and they were butchered in Iraq and Sudan, in Central Asia and South America. The image of communists being thrown from helicopters off the coast of Chile is far less known than any cliché about the USSR.

Red Star Over the Third World, Vijay Prashad, 2019

#vijay prashad

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etherealhighpriestess · 10 months

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Pick a Pile: How to end 2023 successfully?

Pile 1 - Ace of Wands + Judgement + Queen of Cups

Hello, dear pile one 🌈

In your journey to end 2023 successfully, the Ace of Wands urges you to trust your instincts and leap into action. Instead of lingering in the realm of research and excessive planning, take small steps today to breathe life into the projects you've been dreaming of. Embrace the power of immediate action, for it is through these steps that momentum is built, and growth is achieved.

The Judgement card encourages introspection, a moment to evaluate your actions and aspirations. Through self-reflection, gain a clear and objective understanding of your current position, recognizing the necessary changes for personal growth. Whether these adjustments are subtle shifts in your daily life or profound transformations affecting those close to you, embracing change allows for a new chapter to unfold. Release the past to pave the way for a fresh start on your journey towards a fulfilling life.

As you navigate this path, the Queen of Cups appears, guiding you to seek support from others. This feminine presence, whether a tangible person or the trusted inner voice within you, emphasizes the importance of focusing on your emotional well-being before extending aid to others. Prioritize self-love, fostering compassion that will, in turn, enhance your ability to positively impact those around you. In this way, the Queen of Cups encourages a harmonious balance between nurturing yourself and contributing to the well-being of others on your road to success in the end of 2023.

Pile 2 - Death (reversed) + Two of Swords + 8 of Wands

Hi, my sweet pile two 🍰

To navigate the path to success in the end of 2023, the reversed Death card signifies a resistance to change, stemming from apprehensions about letting go of the past or uncertainty about the necessary forward steps. Clinging to familiar ground may create a sense of stagnation, leaving you in a state of limbo. It's time to reflect on your approach to change and acknowledge any fears that might be hindering progress. While the unknown can be intimidating, trust that taking the right steps forward is crucial. Embrace the inevitability of change, for resisting the flow of time may only lead to regrets.

The Two of Swords presents a scenario of stalemate, where opposing forces create a deadlock. Caught in the middle, a decision becomes imperative to break the impasse. Despite the unappealing nature of the choices at hand, progress is contingent on making a decisive move. Without intervention or a commitment to a course of action, the standstill may persist indefinitely. Embrace the discomfort of decision-making, as it is the catalyst for progress and a key to unlocking further possibilities.

The Eight of Wands symbolizes a surge of energy, propelling various aspects of your life forward. Expect rapid movement, swift progress, and quick decisions. So, embrace this dynamic energy to propel yourself beyond stagnation, and seize the opportunities that arise with speed and determination. Success in the end 2023 awaits those who courageously navigate change, make decisive choices, and embrace the unfolding possibilities with enthusiasm.

Pile 3 - King of Cups (reversed) + Six of Cups + Eight of Cups (reversed)

Hello, my amazing pile three ✨

In the quest to end 2023 successfully, the reversed King of Cups reveals a character, perhaps within yourself or someone close, whose emotional equilibrium is disrupted. The usual compassion and wisdom of the King of Cups are overshadowed by volatility, emotional manipulation, and moodiness. This individual, once in control of their emotions, now succumbs to manipulation and emotional control, driven by vengeance and vindication. Recognize the presence of such influences—feelings of being overwhelmed, anxious, cold, and withdrawn. The path to success involves navigating through emotional complexities and avoiding manipulative tendencies.

The Six of Cups, in its upright position, embodies generosity, naive happiness, and a nostalgic connection to the past. It signals a desire to return to a happier time, rooted in childhood or earlier stages of life. While fond memories bring comfort, it's crucial to avoid dwelling solely in the past. Embrace the sentimentality and healing aspects of nostalgia, but don't let it hinder your progress. Success in the end of 2023 requires a balance between cherishing memories and forging ahead into the future.

The reversed Eight of Cups portrays a state of confusion regarding the path forward. Indecision stems from uncertainty about what's best for you, leading to aimlessness and a lack of clear goals. It's a struggle between knowing what needs to change for your well-being and the fear of leaving the familiar—even if it no longer brings joy. The card encourages the courage to break free from stagnation, overcome the fear of change, and pursue a path that aligns with your true desires. Success lies in the willingness to make necessary sacrifices for personal growth, believing that a more joyous journey awaits beyond the comfort zone.

- Ethereal High Priestess 🪻

#pick a pile #tarot reading #tarot #pick a card #oracle #free tarot #tarot community #tarotblr #pick a photo #pick a picture

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hereticpriest · 7 months

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Mercy Chapter 5: Change

Rating: Explicit 18+

MDNI

Relationship: Obi-Wan Kenobi x Reader

Chapter warnings: Canon divergence, heavy flirtation, very light angsty feelings, pining hard. Let me know if there are any warnings you think are missing.

Notes: The smut is coming in the next chapter, guys, I swear! If you have any suggestions, feel free to request in the comments. <3 All this exposition was setting up a world in which I can be indulgent, so prepare for a fun little journey. I already have plans for spicy holos, sex pollen-adjacent stuff, and some very light dom/sub dynamics.

Read on AO3

Masterlist - Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four

Chapter 5: Change

Qui-Gon Jinn will never be a warrior again.

The injury to his hip was bone-deep, and while your swift intervention and healing helped maintain his ability to walk, he won’t be able to fight properly again.

The older man seems to take it in stride, happy enough to teach the younglings, drive Jacosta insane in the Archives, and help his former Padawan train the chosen one. According to Obi-Wan, help is a strong word. He passed his trials easily, and you can see plainly that their relationship has progressed to that of an overprotective mother and a know-it-all grandmother hovering around with advice and candies. Qui-Gon was gentler with Anakin than he’d ever been with Obi-Wan, and he did in fact keep sweets in his pocket for both former Padawan and Grandpadawan. Obi-Wan claimed to be frustrated with it, but you’d caught him more than once with a sweetie in his mouth as he demonstrated a flow of movement for Anakin.

Anakin has had trouble adjusting, so you’ve done your best providing an outside perspective. You give all three of them a safe space to vent, knowing that once they’ve got their frustration with each other out, they’ll be right back to being an adorable display of Jedi lineage. Once upon a time, you would’ve walked among them at Dooku’s side. Now, you belong to your Grandmaster Tyvokka’s lineage, alongside Bultar Swan, your Master’s old apprentice. Your Master’s pride when your Padawan braid was cut and you presented it to him after your trials would forever remain one of your fondest memories. You wanted to help grow the lineage you’d once been a part of but no longer felt was yours to claim. Anakin may struggle, but he would overcome all obstacles - you knew he had the tenacity for it. He just needs the correct amount of love and guidance.

Qui-Gon is convinced that Anakin is the chosen one, while Obi-Wan is noncommittal on the theory. You, however? You’ve outright banned the label, going so far as to speak to the Council about it and convince them that it was in Anakin’s best interest not to have to grow up with that weight and ego on his shoulders. Convincing Obi-Wan had taken very little effort - he agreed that it was a lot of weight for a nine year old boy, and that inflating his ego presented equal potential problems. Qui-Gon had required more coaxing, though you were fairly sure that was simply because Qui-Gon held hope. Hope that Anakin will bring balance. Hope that his dreams for the future of the Jedi Order would one day come true. Eventually, he sees the wisdom in your recommendation, and you breathe a sigh of relief. No nine year old needs to feel all that pressure.

The next suggestion you have comes after several nights spent curled up on the settee with Obi-Wan across from you and a good cup of tea, listening to him vent about his struggles with training his young Padawan. You’re proud of him - he turns his critique inward rather than placing the blame on the boy, acknowledging his position as guide and teacher. You sometimes think that Obi-Wan has somewhat forgotten the youngling he was before he became Qui-Gon’s Padawan. Menace didn’t begin to cover it - to the point that you’d initially avoided getting close to him when you were very young as if his chaos could rub off on you. He struggles with getting Anakin’s sustained attention. No matter how hard he tries to make his lessons interesting, the boy gets restless, and his attention deteriorates swiftly from there. Thankfully, this is something you have experience with. You introduce Obi-Wan and Anakin to moving meditation in a guided lesson, enjoying your chance to be a teacher, and delighting in the opportunity to correct Obi-Wan with gentle hands and teasing praise. By the end of the first kata, he’s pink all the way to the tips of his ears, though he gives as good as he gets.

A murmured ‘Yes Alpha’ as you ask him if he understands your instructions sends heat racing to your cheeks, purple blooming across your face. You chuff at him and he grins cheekily at you, pleased as punch with his teasing. As you guide them through another set of movements, he asks if he’s doing it right, and you know he’s missing the movements on purpose to get your hands on him. What a shameless flirt. You guide him into the right positions, and he looks at you through pale, enviably long lashes, murmuring praise at your teaching skills. Your tail wags behind you, ears twitching to catch each word, your body expressive even as you do your best to tamp down on it.

But of course, Obi-Wan gives you no quarter. You started this, and he will happily finish it. You shiver as he stretches, first showing off the planes of his tummy as his undertunic rolls up, then cracks his neck, a grin tugging at his lips as he shows off his scent glands. Your mouth is watering, but your throat is dry, and you blink dumbly at Obi-Wan for a moment before taking a deep, calming breath. It’s beneath you, but you decide you’d like to win. You cup the back of Obi-Wan’s neck and he melts at your touch, pretty blue eyes flicking up to meet your gaze.

“Good little Omega.” You whisper, and Obi-Wan grabs onto the front of your tunic to keep himself upright. You steady him with strong hands, waiting until he gets his legs under him before you move away to help Anakin. The boy has mostly been ignoring you two, concentrating for once now that you’ve found a way to connect him with the benefits of meditation. When you glance back at Obi-Wan, there’s still a hungry look in his eyes, but it’s softened by something warm and gentle that makes you shiver.

“Alright Sprout. Do you think this will help?” You ask the young Padawan before you, and he smiles up at you, nodding his head as he demonstrates the kata you showed him, his movements surprisingly precise.

“Yeah, this is wizard, Mercy.”

Over the years, Anakin blossoms under Obi-Wan’s tutelage. He’s so gifted with the Force that you could sometimes forget that he didn’t get trained until he was nine. His lightsaber skills grow in leaps and bounds, his thrill of the fight driving him to succeed. He’s cocky, reckless, and his teen years are an absolute terror. You can’t even count the amount of times he’s come to your chambers in the night and asked to stay with you, furious with some minor thing Obi-Wan has done. He works on your droid, the little astromech you’d taken to using ever since your first mission with her, Daisy. He gives her a paint job in your favourite colours, swapping out old parts for better ones, and building new components when he can’t find something he wants. Working with his hands helps to calm him down, and he knows he’s always got a safe space with you if he needs it.

It helps Obi-Wan as well. You’ll receive a comm right before Anakin storms in, and you can reassure the poor man that his Padawan hasn’t run off into the city to get into trouble. Anakin used to go to Qui-Gon, but as the boy aged, the older Jedi had begun to bring him back to Obi-Wan instead of letting him cool off. You became his favoured reprieve purely because unlike his Grandmaster, you never made Anakin leave. When he was very small, you’d sometimes let him lay in bed with you when he needed comfort, but now that he’s a gangly teen, you’ve procured a cot that folds up under your bed. He doesn’t use it often, his temper simmering down swiftly, but there have been times when his fights with Obi-Wan have been that monumental.

The important thing is that you allow him to be a child. Forcing him too quickly from a normal boy to a Padawan learner is sure to cause problems, and you find yourself reminding both Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon of that often. You dig your feet into the wet sand and relax on the shore as Obi-Wan teaches Anakin to swim, then show him how to make the best Jedi Temple with the sand. You teach him to dance with Obi-Wan’s help, and lament that you don’t get to spend more time demonstrating, as the man is a terrific dancer. Because of course he is. Anakin giggles as you spin him, and quietly confesses that he wants to dance with Padmé one day. You hope the young Queen is well. You thought of her often - of her strength, bravery and compassion as she rules a planet at far too young an age. You’re not surprised Anakin is so enthralled with her, though you do keep an eye on his passions.

He grows so quickly you feel sick with it, and your soft nickname for him proves to be true. He sprouts so quickly, growing and learning and becoming the man he’s meant to be. You love him like a son, and you relish the time while he will still cuddle with you and let you kiss his forehead. He has a mother of his own, and you do your best to honour her, knowing he will never be able to look at you the way you look at him. You’ve long accepted that. But privately, in your own head, you call him son and feel proud of the splendid boy he becomes.

He presents as an Alpha at thirteen, and you stay with him through it to help Obi-Wan. The Omega won’t leave - can’t abandon his Padawan - but has little to offer in the counseling of an Alpha going through his first rut. When Anakin gets frustrated and snippy, you scruff him gently and growl until he settles. When he sweats through his blankets, Obi-Wan helps him into the shower so that you can change them. You teach him to apply the scent blockers, and give him his first dose of rut blocker, forcing him to drink water to keep himself from dehydrating. You pet his hair to soothe him to sleep, whisper-singing lullabies that he hasn’t wanted in years, and when he wakes in the morning with a clear head, you explain this aspect of life to him again to make sure he doesn’t have any questions.

He’s growing up too quickly, and it breaks your heart. Thank the Stars for his lingering softness, rare as it is. The moments when he leans into your touch when you brush his hair back instead of moving away from it with a whine. The moments when he comes to you for hugs, lets you press a kiss to his temple and tell him how proud you are of him. Most especially, you thank the Force for the fleeting moments where you, Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan and Anakin get together as something akin to a pack. It feels right, deep in your bones, and you appreciate the dinners, the discussions, and even the training.

You go to Tatooine when Anakin is sixteen and off on a mission with Obi-Wan. He’s begun having nightmares about his mother, and you have finally convinced the Council to let you free her. He can’t focus with his heart worrying for her, and as much as this is an attachment he will need to let go of, you know it will be easier for him knowing she’s safe. When you arrive, you’re too late - Shmi is already freed, and married to a kind older man named Lars. They have a moisture farm, and Lars’ son Owen shows you around the place while you keep an eye out for potential dangers. They’ve been having disputes with the Tuskens, so you hedge your bets, heading off to their village to make peace. It doesn’t surprise you - Tuskens believe themselves to own the sacred water of their planet, as its original inhabitants. You don’t necessarily blame them for being possessive.

It takes effort, but you’re a good negotiator. You’ve got nothing on Obi-Wan, but you are a Consular after all. You have to take out a sand beast for them, along with a couple of canyon krayt dragons that have been encroaching on their territory, but you do what you must. If nothing else, taking out large threats will keep the Lars family safe as well. The Tusken are a proud people, and you trust they will keep their word, leaving the Lars family and specifically Shmi Skywalker-Lars, alone. In return, the Lars family must also promise to leave the Tuskens alone, though they readily agree. It’s not like they want anything to do with the Tuskens.

Before you leave, you give Shmi your commlink code in case of an emergency. You head out into the wastes, following every fleeting brush of the Force as you look for anything that could put the Lars family in danger in the future. Thankfully, you find nothing but the natural predators that roam Tatooine, and you’re soon able to leave the sand-covered hellhole that is this twin-sunned planet. You make it back to Coruscant before those you’ve claimed as your pack return, so you spend your day with Qui-Gon sitting in on his lessons. Your Master had recommended you start teaching, and you’re excited for the opportunity, but you want the chance to observe before you agree to take on your own classes. Luckily, Qui-Gon is a good teacher, both to learn what kind of teacher you want to be, and what kind you don’t.

When Anakin returns from his mission days later, he crumples in your arms hearing that you’ve taken this weight from his shoulders. Obi-Wan, who knew the whole time, smiles fondly at you over his Padawan’s head - a rarity for him now that Anakin has nearly surpassed him in height. You hold your Sprout close to you while he’ll allow it, pressing a kiss to his temple, and his forehead, though he laughs and starts to squirm when you kiss his cheek. You cup his face when he leans back, wiping the tears from his eyes and smiling fondly at him.

“You’re growing too fast, Sprout. Slow down, will ya?” You tease, and he grins sheepishly, embarrassed by the attention even as he relishes in it. Obi-Wan gives your tail a gentle tug, drawing a faux-offended gasp from your lips as you spin to give him a playful look. Anakin heads for his chambers as soon as your attention is elsewhere to escape, and you roll your eyes at his fleeing back. Cheeky.

“Are you sure you’re The Negotiator? Awfully insensitive to go around pulling people’s tails.” You jape, and Obi-Wan snickers, both at your response and the fact that your tail has coincidentally wound itself around his thigh to keep him close.

“You did a good thing for him,” the Omega begins sincerely, tracing his fingers across your tail fondly, “and I have missed you. It’s been far too long.”

Your ears twitch, and you chuff as you approach him, brushing his hair out of his eyes. His strawberry blond hair has grown quite a bit since he was knighted, and you’re especially fond of it long. Though, you’re even more fond of the beard and moustache he’s been growing, more ginger than his hair and soft under your fingertips. Though, that might be mostly your fault, since you comb beard oil through his facial hair any chance he gives you. He won’t indulge on his own, but with your companionship, he allows himself some of the finer things in life. He leans his cheek into your hand, but you don’t hold him for long out here in public.

His force signature brushes against yours, and you brush him back affectionately, but like always, something keeps you from delving into each other. A distant, hidden part of you doesn’t want to chance that he’s not your force-mate. You don’t fear much, but that? That would devastate you, and you know you’re not bold enough to take that chance with all you stand to lose. You’d rather be his best friend, raising his Padawan together and gently flirting along the way than risk the alternative. If you knew, you’d have to stop. You’d have to take a step back away from him and deal with the attachment you felt towards him, and devote yourself back to the Code.

One day, you’d be strong enough to cross that boundary. One day, you would know if he was yours and you were his, but that day was certainly not today.

When Anakin is seventeen, you find yourself called before the Council for a diplomatic mission in the mid rim. You’re shocked to find Obi-Wan waiting for you when you arrive, standing before the Council with a serene smile on his face. You so rarely get the chance to work with him, but you know that Anakin is on a mission with your old Master to take advantage of his piloting skills, so it makes sense. You work well together when you get the chance, and you’re both available. You’re a skilled Consular, and Obi-Wan is called the Negotiator despite being a Guardian.

You listen with excitement stirring in your belly as Master Yoda describes your mission to a remote moon where life has thrived, and an ancient holocron has been recovered. According to reports, the people who inhabit the moon have little interest in giving their treasure to the Jedi, which is where you come in.

Obi-Wan follows you out of the room when you’re dismissed, and you nudge him gently, grinning as he nudges you back. He walks you to your chambers first, then heads along to his own, promising to meet you at the ship set aside for you within the hour. You’ll likely only be gone a week or two at most, so you have little to pack, but you want to shower before you go. The sonic showers onboard starships have nothing on a real shower. Your bag remains packed most of the time, but you tuck your medical bag and datapad into it with your regular belongings.

Just under an hour later, you arrive at the ship, having convinced a very reluctant Daisy that you didn’t need an astromech on this journey to visit people who didn’t seem to even have droids of their own. Obi-Wan is already on board, his bag clipped behind the pilot’s chair, and the pilot’s headset already nestled on his head. You roll your eyes and huff indignantly, practically throwing yourself into the co-pilot chair after clipping your bag in.

“You’re so over dramatic. I’m an excellent pilot.” You insist, and Obi-Wan snorts, flicking on the engines while you put on your own headset.

“You’re a much better co-pilot.” He informs you, and you concede with a petulant sigh.

“You hate flying.” Your voice is a little whiny as you remind him, but he only snickers as he begins take-off procedures.

“I don’t hate flying - I hate the nonsense that Anakin claims is flying.” He corrects you primly, and you groan as the ship begins to make its way into the atmosphere. You lost this battle before it even began, and you know it. You’ll just have to settle in for the ride.

#obi wan kenobi x reader #obi-wan kenobi x reader #obi-wan kenobi #obi-wan kenobi x oc #obi-wan kenobi x original character

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dailyanarchistposts · 2 months

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Introduction

Authoritarianism is on the rise as a key talking point when it comes to finding solutions to the ecological crisis. The same attributes that predominate technological society – apathy, fear, cognitive overload and feeling a lack of agency[1] – are more and more reflected in the mainstream environmental movement, leading us to believe in new leaders, figureheads and ideas, such as green growth.[2] More on this later.

Lately, I have come across multiple texts by Andreas Malm, author and associate senior lecturer at Lund University, who is one such authoritarian calling for an “Ecological Leninism”.

In his recent interview with Verso books[3] he was asked:

How do you explain the gap between the relative dynamism of ecological Marxist theories – in Anglo-Saxon countries in particular – and the weakness of the political intervention of Marxists in these movements?

Malm answers:

Ecological Marxism has a tendency to cripple itself by staying inside academia. It needs to engage with and reach out to the actual movements in the field. Anarchist ideas should be combated; they will take us nowhere. I think it’s time to start experimenting with things like ecological Leninism or Luxemburgism or Blanquism. But the weakness of Marxism in ecological politics is of course inextricable from its nearly universal weakness at this moment in time (i.e., one symptom of the crisis of humanity, alongside acidification of the oceans and everything else).

Malm represents a Nordic example of eco-modernist [R.F. – see ‘The Decoupling Thesis’] authoritarian thought. Establishing a false dichotomy (e.g. centralized vs decentralized) between anarchistic approaches to change making, Malm meanwhile fails to reflect on the impacts of authoritarian systems in any honest way. This combines with a detached and warped perception of the environmental movement’s recent history.

In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Malm advocates, but also shits on direct action. Clearly detached from ecological struggles, referring to anarchists attacks as not big enough, he draws on the work of Micheal Loadenthal who documented “27,100 actions between 1973 and 2010,” in an attempt to discredit decentralized action.[4]

“All those thousands of monkeywrenching actions achieved little if anything,” explains Malm, “and had no lasting gains to show for them. They were not performed in a dynamic relation to a mass movement, but largely in a void.”

Ignoring the actions of the remaining Leftist governments (Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc.), it is clear Malm has no idea what these actions advocate, let alone the continuation and intensification of eco-anarchist attacks in Europe and the rest of the world between 2010–2016 (see Return Fire magazine, 325, Act for Freedom Now, Avalanche etc.). More still, many of these actions, especially Earth Liberation Front (ELF) actions, were supported by local struggles.[5]

He conveniently forgets all the direct actions and sabotage in direct connection to popular movements that helped save wetlands and stop motorways across the UK [R.F. – see Return Fire vol.4 pg89], or the vital role decentralized direct action and sabotage play in the highly effective struggle of the Mapuche people to recover their territory [R.F. – see Return Fire vol.3 pg59], to name just two examples – and there are countless.

And because environmental justice and social justice go hand in hand, we shouldn’t forget the vital role that arson attacks and other major decentralized sabotage actions had in the divestment campaign against the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1980s, or the change in public attitudes towards the racist police in the United States accomplished by direct and decentralized attacks across that country [R.F. – see The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis].

Popular rejection of the police is now so strong, many cities face a shortage of recruits for their police forces, even as local governments fight to expand funding. This example shows the relative merits of the decentralized, grassroots action that Malm derides, versus the government action pushed by leftwing parties. It is also worth noting that Malm is decidedly uninterested in and uninformed regarding antiracist struggles, while also using racist tropes and promoting the technocratic, institutional framework of colonialism in his writings.

Malm’s limited view is not just a defect of his own thinking. The tendency of technocrats to reduce the interrelated problems of widespread ecological devastation, borders and migration, global hunger and lack of food sovereignty caused by the so-called Green Revolution, is a huge problem.

It opens the door to eco-fascism, and gives the fascists and other racists a seat at the table. If we only think about climate, as though it were distinct from all the other entangled social and ecological problems, then we are forced to focus narrowly on bringing down Co2 within the existing institutional framework of states, NGOs, and corporations. This means that ultimately, each state (as the chief administrative unit) is responsible for bringing down its own emissions.

This leads to an entire accounting game of pushing off emissions responsibility onto poorer countries, closing borders, blaming immigrants, promoting socially and ecologically destructive technologies (e.g. ‘smart’ cities [R.F. – see Return Fire vol.3 pg31], low-carbon infrastructures, idiotic conservation schemes). From Austria to the UK, Green Parties and mainstream environmental movements have already been making alliances of convenience with far right parties and organizations. Now, Malm is trying to put Leninism back on the table, mirroring the resurgence of classical fascist groups and authoritarian governments.

Malm unapologetically remains politically naïve to the realities of repression and state violence endured by people engaging in non-violent sabotage and vandalism actions. In a review by Gabriel Kuhn, an Austrian political author based in Sweden, he calls Malm’s ignorance of struggles and movements “offensive,” pointing out how he ignores “The Green Scare” [R.F. – see Return Fire vol.4 pg82] and how, despite minimizing decentralized action, the ELF and eco-anarchist actions were labeled by the FBI as the “number one domestic terrorist threat.”[6]

People are fighting, dying [R.F. – see Return Fire vol.5 pg56], and serving extended sentences in prison (9–22 years, see June11.org or any Anarchist Black Cross), which Malm flagrantly disrespects for his pseudo-academic circus and attempted revival of Leninism. More importantly, however, many fighters are getting away with these actions inflicting economic costs and real delays. Right now, supposedly ecologically militant people like Malm, should be working to socially normalize committed non-violent (but not pacifist) struggles and spread it to this new generations of “climate youth” continues who are eager to make a difference. Yet Malm instead vomits political ignorance, authoritarian romantics, flagrant disrespect and concerted hostility to the people engaged in this fight.

Malm does not have to be a self-absorbed academic unaccountable to reality. All of us, instead, can think like outlaws, like feral cats, and organize with our friends to destroy what destroys us. While I am unsure if their actions were “performed in a dynamic relation to a mass movement” (whatever that means), most participants were entrenched in various “activist” or non-activist communities (for better and worse).[7] There is a relatively small, but viral movement – everywhere – already in place risking life and limb to confront mines, pipelines, energy infrastructure and the authoritarian systems that maintain them.

Malm’s analysis widely ignores how environmental struggles have so far required all kinds of actors, from saboteurs to lawyers, journalists and lawmakers: There is no either/or. Rather than making a career out of bashing them and for a perverse authoritarian leftist agenda, Malm should be part of organizing prisoner support for eco-warriors, curating information nights on struggles, securing lawyers, influencing public policy to eliminate terrorism enhancement charges and so on. There is so much people can do in general, but also established academics. Why not support Indigenous land defense, eco-anarchist attack and actually begin organizing against the sources of ecological degradation, instead of promoting some hair brained Leninist scheme? The Trotskyites at Verso should also take a good look into the mirror and reconsider their political values, but more so it seems unwise to publish and give a platform to uneducated and poorly researched work like this. Where is the pushback?

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allkidsareperfect · 2 years

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#Childrens Physical Therapist #Special Needs Child Physical Therapist #Intensive Physical Therapy #Torticollis Physical Therapy #Pediatric Physical Therapy #Dynamic Movement Intervention #DMI Therapist #Occupational Kids Therapist

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rathologic · 8 months

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Here's a Class A "thought I had that requires a strong assertion but spins into a worrying chain of events". One of the things I like least about p2 is that it frames humanity itself as incompatible with the Earth - the Kin must reject humanity to be able to survive the Earth's pain. (I've talked before about how weird it is that this doesn't extend to the white adult townsfolk who are stripped of their humanity in the Nocturnal ending then walk off to die, and of course how bad it sucks that the core premise of this game is "the Indigenous population are meant to be subhuman", but bear with me.) It's not only an appallingly pessimistic position with respect to real-world sustainability, but goes against extensive histories of human stewardship and care for land. The other thing on my mind lately is how most members of the Kin talk about eagerly awaiting the day they "flood the streets of the Town", killing settlers and reclaiming their lands - reciprocal violence, i.e. the racist fear that self-determination and an end to oppression for the Kin will mean the violent death or expulsion of the oppressors. The image of indiscriminate violence and the cessation of morals is itself what we'd call inhumanity, right? Which is the origin of a certain slur towards Indigenous peoples.

So, "humanity"/"civilization" is the source of the pain that the Earth is lashing out against. The game presents this directly as "the Polyhedron literally harmed the Earth", but the Polyhedron is a recent construction and not the origin of "civilization" on Gorkhon: if anything, it traces back to the construction of the first buildings around the Abattoir as canon's first mention of the "Town" as a concept, which develops into the modern usage of the Termitary: representative of the Olgimskys' control over the Kin (in physical freedom of movement, and financial dependence on factory work; further, culturally wrt. spiritual leader Tycheek being of the Termitary, to say nothing of Oyun). So one can eventually argue (this being the assertion!) that the oppression of the Kin is what is harming the Earth - supported by the fact that in the endings, the Kin and Earth either live or die together, but moreso going back to how similar colonial dynamics have damaged our planet IRL.

And this draws a parallel between the Kin and the Plague itself, where the Plague "floods" the streets of the Town and instills a new order. The pitchforks-and-torches human revolution that Kin characters express their desire for never happens, leaving the Sand Pest as both the closest substitute for this imagery, and the vehicle by which the way is cleared for the Kin's new society in Nocturnal. The violence is still enacted and it's still unconscionable, but it is done by a reflex of the quasi-sentient Earth; that is, it's an act of the Earth as it exists in the Kin's belief system. The connections between the Kin and Earth legitimize their interests as shared: in fact, the Plague was once held back, until a member of the Kin felt it was in their people's best interest to unleash it.

Is it any less offensive to make a game that plays reciprocal violence (as feared by the colonizer) straight, but as an abstracted, automatic process spawned from nothing, rather than something the oppressed people enact themselves? I think it meshes with the treatment of the Kin as helpless and without agency, described as "a realm of infants" by Oyun and (paraphrased) "not understanding themselves" by the art book design notes; underscored by the nonexistence of efforts towards liberation in-game from Kin characters, even including the Haruspex. In the same vein, there's interplay with the way that the Kin's cosmology and beliefs being real in the setting demarcates their people as mystical, wrt. the Earth's magical intervention being the only way the game suggests that the tension between Town and Kin could be solved.

The main takeaway I got from writing this out is that Isidor is more connected to the "flooding the town" idea than previously thought (which is part of the interesting topic of how Isidor conceives of violence and the necessity of violence, in relation to his being implied to be an abusive father), and that merits further inspection... but as always, valuing the writers' choice of themes surrounding the Kin on how well they form Isidor's character isn't very productive from a "how this relates to the real world" standpoint. I don't have a neat ending for it though :saluting_face:

#not going in the crit tag (yet) because it's very darts at the wall on my (white) part and I'd like second opinions #the kin #the plague #p2 spoilers #long post

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literary-illuminati · 2 years

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Book Review 5 - The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabrielle and David M. Perry

Okay, the Harper Collins strike is over, so I can finally post this! As you might notice, the wait has meant I have ended up writing far too much of it. Turns out people really are telling the truth when they say writing negative reviews is funner and easier.

Anyway, I did not like this book! It’s an ungainly thing, torn halfway between wanting to be pop history and wanting to be an intervention in the discourse, and entirely too short to do either well. Insofar as is it history, it’s far less revolutionary than it seems to think it is, and the subjects it actually focuses on either already fit entirely into the pop understanding the book is positioning itself against, or else entirely about symbolism and architecture and generally abstracted from (being partial and small-minded) the stuff I’m actually interested in.

All that said the first and fundamental is pretty simple – it’s just altogether too short to do what it wants to. The book tries to be a history of the European Middle Ages – a thousand years of history for an entire continent (more than, given the repeated digressions about the Middle East and also the Mongols one time) – in 200 pages. Which is just, like, I mean I don’t want to say impossible, but I can’t really see any way you’d do it. Which means what we actually get is a series of snapshots, scattered across space and time – just specific, particular dynamics or situations that rarely have much to do with each other. I’m pretty sure the only specific place we ever return to after focusing on it is Ravenna, and that’s for a big, dramatic bookend starting the age with Galla Placidia and ending with Dante. Also the return is really more about Italian city states as a whole. Which is to say only Florence gets any detail at all.

A necessary causality of the snapshot approach is that there’s wide swathes of the period that just, aren’t mentioned in the slightest. Which again, fair, but also it’s a bit much for one of the lacuna to be the entire Holy Roman Empire, right? (Okay, not the entire, there’s repeated off hand mentions of Emperors, and also talk of how the Italian city-states fought the Empire. Just never any description whatsoever of what it, like, was. Except for the specific disavowal of saying it started with Charlemagne, which was never followed up on.) Which is still better than what Poland or Hungary or Lithuania or Kievan Rus got – if any of them were even mentioned, it was only off hand. Which does end up giving the impression that Medieval Europe included Jerusalem but not Krakow – to be fair, something a lot of actual Medieval people might have totally agree with. But given the amount of time spent on the Crusades to the Levant and the Albigensian Crusade, not even mentioning the bloody Christianize of the Baltic in passing feels negligent to the point of being actively misleading.

Also it’s weird, given the books whole focus on connections and commerce between Europe and the rider world – the steppe is right there! You don’t need to wait for the Mongols!

Speaking of – they give a bunch of apologia for the Mongol Empire that’s – well, basically the same stuff all empires get, brought safety to the roads and allowed free movement and trade, brought people together, spread culture and technology, enlightened and cosmopolitan, etc. Which I mostly just find funny because of how obvious it is the authors would, uh, probably not endorse the same sentiment for any more recent imperial projects.

But okay – it’s not that you can’t tell a useful history in what might seem to be way too little space – John Darwin tries to tell a literal history of the world from the 16th century in ~500 pages and I’d still say After Tamerlane is absolutely worthwhile reading. You just need, you know, discipline. Focus. A firm idea of your thesis and an obsession of what’s relevant to it (or just be entertaining and full of fun memorable trivia). So, what are Perry and Gabrielle actually trying to do here?

Honestly, it’s a little bit unclear? The thesis they present is that the Dark Ages didn’t exist – they insist on referring the whole Medieval period as ‘the Bright Ages’ through the entire book, it’s incredibly annoying – and that the Medieval period get a horribly unjustified bad wrap as uniquely cruel and provincial and barbaric and full of disease, illiteracy, superstition, etc. They explicitly position themselves as being a reaction to the vision of the past you see in Game of Thrones or Vikings (I’d say ‘or the Witcher’ but again, for the purposes of this book Eastern Europe doesn’t exist). Instead, they fill the book with hand picked examples of medieval beauty, sophistication, and connection to the wider world with the quite explicit contention that everything good about the Renaissance (and later) was really just outgrowths of the Medieval, and it was only the bad stuff that was new.

(At the same time, they also do not like white nationalists, and go out of their way at length on numerous occasions to remind you that Nazis are bad. Those digressions do always leave me wondering who they’re for – no actual Deus Vult type is going to get more than five pages into it, and they rarely get much deeper that surface level refutation of things no one else is likely to actually believe.)

Anyway – look, the central, overriding problem of the book is that it’s not nearly as revolutionary as it seems to think it is. Very problematic, when it has such a high opinion of itself for being so. The assorted trivia the book uses as shocking examples of how cosmopolitan and tolerant the period was mostly just, well, fit perfectly fine into the popular imagining of the Medieval era? Like ‘royals and elites imported foreign luxury goods and status symbols at great expense; missionaries, adventurers and religious emissaries travelled across Eurasia to preach, trade and try to find someone to help them invade Muslims ; women often wielded significant political influence by virtue of royal birth of marriage, and were active political players’ – are these statements shocking to literally anyone? Basically all of that literally happens in Game of Thrones!

Part of that is that the book keeps almost committing to a really radical thesis – not to say pure unreconstructed romanticism, but close to it – and then always has an attack of professional ethics and cringes away from it, and just awkwardly brings up how, to be sue, there were serfs and slaves and atrocities, but nonetheless when you think about it the later Crusader States really were fascinating sites of cultural exchange, or whatever.

Psychoanalyzing the authors is bad form, of course, but like – reading this book the overriding sense you get is that they’re proud progressives, and have dedicated their lives to studying the Medieval era. But in the contemporary discourse people on their side use ‘Medieval’ as an insult to mean patriarchal, or brutal, or cruel, and the people who like the Medieval era are all in the Sack of Jerusalem Fandom. The sheer angst and righteous indignation they have about this state of affairs just about oozes through every page – honestly if I’m being maximally pithy and uncharitable, you rather get the sense that the real aim of the book is to make ‘being really into Medieval history’ a less reactionary-coded interest to bring up at professional-class dinner parties.

But honestly I could have forgiven almost all of this if the anecdotes and snapshots the book did focus on were informative and interesting. And this is almost entirely pure personal preference, I fully acknowledge but – the things that the book chose to focus on just really weren’t, to me?

Which is to say that The Bright Ages is incredibly interested in architectural and monumental symbolism, especially of the religious variety – there are whole chapters overwhelmingly dedicated to exploring the layout of churches and how their architecture and lighting was meant to convey meaning, or detailing at great length a specific monumental cross in northern England. These are used as synecdoches for broader topics, of course but, like, an awful lot of word count really is dedicated to describing how Gala Placedia’s chapel in Ravenna must have wowed people. And even as far as using them as synecdoches – the way that monasteries, bishops and the royal household in Paris competed to have the most impressive church/chapel as a way to convey religious authority is genuinely interesting, but I’d honestly have rather heard a lot more of the actual politics and sociology or how sacred authority and legitimacy was gathered around the Capetians in the later middle ages and a lot less about how specifically impressive the royal chapel on the palace grounds was. There’s a massive amount of symbolic and artistic detail, a fair amount of time spent charting great thinkers and proving that there was too such a thing as a Medieval intellectual, and almost none at all on, like, political and social and (god forbid) economic history. Which are, unfortunately, the bits of it I’m actually interested in.

The book isn’t just architecture of course, but much of the rest is either very basic – yes, the vikings were traders as well as raiders and travelled shockingly long distances, yes there was intellectual interchange between Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers across the Mediterranean, yes the Church acted as a vital sponsor of learning and scholarship. I’m sure these are new information to like, someone? - or so caught up in historiographical arguments and qualifications that it loses sight of the actual subject – I swear the book spent more time saying that it’s wrong to call it a Carolingian Renaissance because that implies there were actual dark ages before and after than it does explaining why anyone actually would.

Beyond that – okay, so as mentioned this book is really consciously progressive. Which, beyond a certain antiquarian distaste for how desperately they’re trying to get across ‘see, our field of study is Relevant! And Important! Please please please give us tenure/prestige/funding’ I wholly support. (I mean, like, I do think Medieval Studies deserves tenure/prestige/funding. Just slightly unbecoming to so transparently be grasping for it, and also more than a bit self-defeating) - but, like, the book’s politics are weird? Or weirdly surface level and slightly confused, given how much of the book is focused around them.

Like – the book spends a massive amount of time and attention combating the myth that women in the middle ages were all cloistered and politically mute and totally powerless. But the sum total of what it actually says is ‘did you know: elite women in the aristocracy and church exercised political influence? And a lot of the Christianization of western Europe happened through highborn christian women marrying pagan kings and raising their children Christian?” And while I suppose ‘elite women have influence even in patriarchal societies’ is a useful fact for someone to learn, I’m not sure examples that more or less cash out to ‘queens could have power by manipulating their husbands and sons’ is a particularly novel or progressive take, you know? More broadly – it’s a weakness of the book’s framework of jumping across countries and centuries between anecdotes that we never get any sense of gender roles and how power and influence were gendered systemically, so much as single (or if you’re very lucky, two or three) particular women with a vague gesture that they’re kind of typical. Not to complain about a lack of theory, but there’s really basically zero theory.

The book’s choices of examples for women to focus on are also – okay, not to be all ‘why didn’t you talk about my faves’, but insofar as you’re talking how women were able to exercise power, it’s really very odd that you never talk about any women who, like, ruled in their own right? C’mon, you mention the Anarchy offhand to introduce Eleanor of Aquitaine but don’t even say what it was about, let alone talk about the Empress Matilda? (I’d say the same thing about Matilda of Tuscany and the investiture Controversy, but it’s not like the book actually talks about the Investiture Controversy beyond the absolute basics, so). The final result is a book that talks a lot about how elite women had influence, and then the influence they actually bring up is almost always of the most stereotypically feminine-gender variety imaginable.

All that really pales to how confused the book seems when it talks about Christianity. Which it has to, of course, fairly constantly – it’s a book about Medieval Europe. But it’s kind of horribly torn between two imperatives here – on the one hand, it desperately wants to fight back against the whole black legend of the tyrannical, book-burning, Galileo-murdering, science-suppressing hopelessly venal and corrupt, all-powering Magesterium. But on the other, they really don’t want to come off as supporting, well, the heretic murdering and antisemitism or being the sort of guy online who posts memes of the Knights Templar. So you see this somewhat exhausting two-step where they go on at length about all the beautiful architecture and scholarship preservation the church did interrupted every so often by this concession about how of course it wasn’t all good and obviously pogroms and burning heretics wasn’t great, but- (The chapter on the vikings is much the same, except with a much clearer ‘it’s important not to romanticize these people because the people who do that are white nationalists, but also see how tolerant and far-ranging and cool they are?’)

Discussing the Church is also a place where the book’s whole allergy to social structure and institutions really serves it poorly. I at a certain point stopped keeping count of the number of times where the book called out that the centralized, papal-centric Church was a creation of the high middle ages, and not at all how things worked for most of the period. But then they just never actually explain how they worked instead, or really even how things changed to so enshrine the Pope’s power. They talk about how convents could be wealthy and powerful landholders and their abbesses’ wield significant power, but never even gesture at explaining how they interfaced with the institutional church. It’s really very frustrating.

Of course Christianity still gets far better treatment than Judaism or Islam – there’s a chapter which goes into some detail on the life of Maimonides in the process of extolling Medieval scholarship and talking about how classical learning was never really lost and the Renaissance is fake news. But despite the gestures to the presence of Jewish communities throughout Europe there’s essentially zero, like, description of how they actually functioned, or were organized, or (aside from the occasionally mentioned pogroms) how they interacted with their christian neighbours. The treatment of Islam is much the same – there are some mentions of the Islamic wold and its intellectual traditions, but essentially just to rehash the same points about the Islamic Golden age and Ibn Sina and all the other bits of trivia everyone probably picked up keeping up with the culture war during the Bush Administration. But again, only the most passing mentions of, like, politics or organization or even theology. It felt gratingly cursory, given the emphasis placed on the fact that eg Al Andulas was clearly part of Medieval Europe

Underneath all this is just the fact that The Bright Ages is almost an entirely a history of the elite. Peasants, serfs and slaves only exist in the for the sake of concessions about how of course things weren’t all good. The book has almost no interest in the lives of the lower classes, and barely seems to realize this. It starts to really, really grate, especially when you’re making all these implicit judgments about how the Medieval era was compared to what came after – in which case, the lives of, like, 90% of the population are rather important! Like unironically peasant life is fascinating! What did life actually look like of the overwhelmingly majority of people? If you want to give a sketch of the entire era, it’s kind of important.

I’m almost certainly being unfair here – basically everything about the book’s sensibilities grated on me, so I can’t say I was trying to be especially charitable. But really – the book’s perfectly fine light reading, but as intentional propaganda is hamfisted and it’s unclear who it’s for, and as an actual history it’s just...bad. It’s useful as a way to get a sense of the discourse, I guess, but otherwise I couldn’t really recommend it.

#Book Review #The Bright Ages #Matthew Gabrielle #David M. Perry #history #sorry this is so long

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ngaatee · 9 months

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I'm very curious about the thesis! I've been trying to look into posthumanism/transhumanist ideas more, especially from multiple perspectives. There's stuff I see never talked about irt it, for example, you see a lot of people idealizing robot bodies or whatever, but this sometimes gets weaponized into negative views towards disabled bodies. Meanwhile, the idea in your thesis is a complete blind spot for me and I would LOVE to see what it's about.

Hi anon, thank you so so much for the question! I agree, there are so many areas in this topic that are underexplored and under researched, and I intend to change that. I will be posting more and more research alongside my artwork, but I will probably also make the entirety of my academic thesis available considering how little research there is in the area altogether.... Would that be something you'd like access to? Enough of that though lets get into what the thesis is about:

Broadly speaking before we even get into the posthumanism/transhumanism aspect of bioethics, we have to contend with the increased access in, and the proliferation of biotechnologies. Biotechnology has come to include a lot of medical interventions that could be viewed as falling in line with the positions, goals and aims espoused in posthumanism and transhumanism.

This increase in access has challenged the way that we think about existing within our physical bodies because it changes the limitations of our human bodies that we are bound to. In order to consider the potential impact of biotechnology, bioethics has grappled with issues of the correct ways of “being” or existing within our bodies including but not limited to the emergence of identity, performance of identity, body modification as escapism, and movements such as posthumanism and transhumanism.

However, like much of philosophy as a broader field, bioethics is plagued by the exclusion of ways of thought that are nonwhite, nonmale, non-Western and non-working class and that has been a glaring problem. The above issues that bioethics deals with are arguably all related to the right to bodily integrity which can be defined in this context as the right to protect one’s body from the interference of other people.

In the philosophical space, the right to bodily integrity typically involves but is not limited to reproductive rights and general autonomy. This has made bioethics a space that requires philosophical feminist thought to confront the uneven ideologies about identity formation and the correct ways of existing in one’s body.

Given that Black African women have been greatly impacted by the issue of the right to bodily integrity, it is especially important that there is an African feminist framework that deals with the power dynamics that determine how people are allowed to exist and identify with themselves. The absence of African feminist thought in Bioethics is an epistemic injustice, that has weakened the overall process of collective knowledge building in the field. As a result, the practical application of ethics and morals in biotechnology is skewed into a cisheteronormative and masculinised colonial gaze.

The cisheteronormative gaze or cisheteronormativity refers to the oppressive institutions of socialisation such as the media and structural systems in general that use cisgender and heterosexual behaviours or norms as the prevailing or dominant status quo. By doing this, the lived experiences of queer and transgender people are excluded. This is compounded by the ways that social institutions reinforce white supremacist and patriarchal ideas, creating communities whereby groups that do not belong to the dominant status quo perform their identities in a way that oppressive institutions deem acceptable, similar to the panopticon view presented by Foucault.

The cisheteronormative and masculinised colonial gaze is a socialised way of thinking that favours the assumed moral and ethical values of cisgender, straight and white men, who form the majority of both the biotechnological and the bioethical fields. This gaze imagines existing in one’s body as a stagnant and neutral form of identity whereby decisions that we make regarding our bodies exist in a vacuum away from the impact of colonisation, white supremacist thought, the patriarchy and classism amongst other issues of marginalisation such as homophobia.

The scholar Pumla Gqola refers to the overlap of white supremacy, classism and the patriarchy as the “triple threat of violence”. In this conceptual framework, she suggests that when we consider ways of being, we have an emergence of new identities based on the need to navigate this triple threat of violence. This triple threat of violence has, according to Gqola, led to the treatment of Black African women’s bodies as public property which must be wielded in ways that people who are not Black African women deem appropriate.

The issue of treating Black African women’s bodies as public property is echoed by Gabon Baderoon who uses the case of Sarah Baartman as a means of understanding private and public performances of identity. In doing so, Baderoon highlights the specific ways that Black African women have historically not been treated as having ownership over their own bodies and instead have been made into a spectacle for the consumption of other people who act as voyeurs when it comes to Black African women.

This creation of spectacle has turned Black African women into hypersexualised beings whose bodily integrity has been inherently compromised through colonial violence and violation. These issues are relevant to the philosophical conception of identity, as it highlights the relationship between certain identities and shame or humiliation. Over time, Black African women’s identities have transformed. In part this is because identity evolves with societal, cultural and philosophical developments that challenge our assumptions about correct ways of being. However, this is also in part due to an effort on the part of Black African women to escape the violence and violation of identity, and fantasise about existing anew, in a body that is not subject to public spectacle.

The notion of fantasy is central to biotechnology and by extension bioethics because it imagines the human body and identity beyond biological limitation. The human body and identity beyond biological limitation is a general way of understanding posthumanism and transhumanism as movements.

In my academic thesis, I argued that African feminisms in the space of bioethics would assess whether or not posthumanist and transhumanist technologies compromise their bodily integrity by looking at the extent to which it bodily integrity may push them to either violate their bodies or free them to reimagine their identities, and by extension their bodies anew. I also explained the notion of a “cisheteronormative and masculinised colonial gaze” using Foucault’s panopticon, explained what posthumanism and transhumanism is (and how we tend to differentiate the two), discussed how identities emerge, showing how violation and violence relate to decisions about our bodies, the fantasy about ways of being versus socialised identity and responding to potential objections.

The reason I included Foucault in this is because I wanted to convey the ways that in posthumanism and transhumanism there can be an element of performing specific ways of "being" that are akin to the idea of the panopticon. More specifically, posthumanism and transhumanism force us to contend with what we think "humanness" is, and to what extent it should be preserved, and what that preservation looks like. This has a domino effect of sorts, because when we concern ourselves with what humanness looks like in the posthumanist and transhumanist sense, we also then deal with the idea that our idealised bodies are a performance of some kind of standard.

Overall for the most part, I used the works of feminist scholars from Southern Africa to build up my thesis, most notably Pumla Gqola's notion of triple violence. This is because posthumanism and transhumanism in the philosophical space is also about the way that human bodies can encounter violence, or violation. When we speak of bodily integrity and bodily autonomy, in part we are talking about protecting people from violence, and from violation. What this then means, is that the philosophy and the ethical and moral conceptualisations need to explicitly contend with the history of the human body, and of violence and violation, this also extends into how posthumanism and transhumanism then engages with disabilities, dignity in the difference between bodies and so on and so forth.

I needed examples for this so I opted for the field of biogerontology, an area of biotechnology that can involve things like facial reconstruction which has a use outside of cosmetics, but is also an area with a lot of technology that is strictly cosmetic related to concerns around things like aging which comes up in a lot of posthumanist and transhumanist literature.

Interestingly, as I studied this, I was also tutoring the ethics of artificial intelligence to second year students at my university so I actually noted a lot of overlap in some of the concerns regarding posthumanism and transhumanism, and the way we discuss the positives and negatives of technology with regards to humans as a whole. This was not the focus of my paper, but if you would like to know more about that, I would be happy to explain farther.

I think one of the key elements of bioethics as it pertains to posthumanism and transhumanism is to ensure that the ideas are not treated as though they exist in a vacuum, separate from history, societies and so on and so forth. Rather, bioethics is at its most robust when we confront the relationship between the philosophies and their histories. It is that grey area, between imagination and history, where philosophers who concern themselves with bioethics must reside and it means seeking a balance between the more idealised and fantastical side of biotechnologies, and goes into the realities of what manifests in real life, and what that means for our ethical and moral standards.

That is the basic primer for the thesis that I wrote. Let me know if you have any questions! I really loved answering this, my thesis really truly is my baby you know haha, and I am proud of my firstborn.

#philosophy #bioethics #posthumanism #transhumanism #academia #social science #pumla gqola #panopticon #bodily integrity #bodily autonomy #sociology #academic thesis

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pristyncarereviews · 2 months

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Pristyn Care: Innovations in ACL Surgery: The Development and Use of Synthetic Ligaments

Anterior cruciate injuries are one of the most common but most crippling sports-related injuries caused to athletes from amateur to professional levels. It limits the knee joint from unstable activities for rotating and forward movements. The injury of the ACL can reduce the mobility of joints, causing chronic pain, and deteriorating the quality of life drastically.

In most of the cases, it necessitates surgery. New developments, techniques of production, and ways to use synthetic ligaments nowadays represent a true revolution in orthopedic medicine. All the novelties in treatment were taken into consideration by Pristyn Care in its work to innovate the Pristyn healthcare services, and as soon as the patients began to take the benefit of the most advanced options for ACL repair through minimally invasive interventions, the expanded benefits of minimally invasive techniques began to be evident clearer.

Importance of ACL Reconstruction

The ACL plays a very important part in the stability and movement of the knee joint; basically, activities such as walking, running, and jumping are regulated. These micro-injuries, if not halted in the growth phase, can grow into serious knee instability. The individual is put at risk of further injuries and a high probability of degenerative, destructive joint conditions of the osteoarthritic type. It is estimated that about 200,000 reconstructions of the ACL are carried out annually across the globe, and the question of finding and applying an integral treatment suddenly becomes urgent.

Most notably, the introduction of artificial ligaments entirely changed the idea of ACL reconstruction; it was the arrival on the market of a durable commercial analog of traditional grafts. In most cases, the period of recovery was elongated by the occurrence of pain in the donor area and the need to recover two traumatized areas and to use transplant tissue taken from the body of the patient. Contemporary solutions, backed by state-of-the-art equipment and the teams of surgeons in the Pristin Care facilities, have brought initiation of repair of an ACL tear to a new level—the maximum quality of life that individuals devastated by such an injury can hope for.

Synthetic ligaments. What exactly are synthetic

Some of the commonly used and developed synthetic implants are the synthetic ligaments used in orthopedic surgery. More precisely, they are artificially created biomaterials used in cases of a technique for replacing damaged natural ligaments. The synthetic ligaments are not autografts, allografts, or autografts harvested from the body of the patient but, on the contrary, they are biocompatible polymers in origin.

The various available options of synthetic ligaments and benefits brought by it include good quality, which is consistent; unlimited supply; and no morbidity at the donor site. The extraction of autografts can be a bit frightening to the patient, and most of the time, more time for recovery is needed. Other than that, synthetic ligaments minimize the time used during the surgery because grafting is not necessary.

That is why advanced synthetic ligaments are increasingly being used as a substitute for grafting, since, in some places, the availability of appropriate and right donor grafts is very limited. This, therefore, enhances the access and timeliness of the surgeries for anybody in need of ACL.

Where Technological Innovations Impact Development on Synthetic Ligaments

The development of an artificial ligament, and more so that of an artificial fiber, is an extremely interdisciplinary field of materials science and engineering, aiming to produce fibers with properties analogous to natural ligaments. If performed on a human knee, that material should be strong, flexible, and durable enough to bear the dynamic stresses. Modern ones are made using advanced polymers, usually polyethylene terephthalate, and polyurethanes for their qualities of strength and elasticity.

This is particularly the case since such developments are specifically targeted at the improvement in the integration of such material with human tissue, the further reduction of risks for tissue rejection, as well as the enhancement of the healing process itself. Particularly, "Pristyn Care" is engaged in doing the given research process further enhancing the boundary of what is possible to be done with synthetic ligament technology. Focusing on knee biomechanics allows developers to adapt how a ligament's structure is formed to recreate natural motion while at the same time reducing complications and inducing new methods of natural and efficient ways of healing.

The newest technologies will save artificial knee ligaments from being inferior or just equal to the traditional knee-ligament grafts and most of the time, they will be far above benchmark levels by such a huge amount, marking a huge leap in ACL reconstruction technology.

How Pristyn Care is Changing the Way ACLs are Reconstructed

Pristyn Care leads from the front in the adaptation and innovation of methods for synthetic ligaments in the reconstruction of ACLs. There is a deep commitment to the assimilation of the latest in medical innovations with the aid of advanced technology that supports conducting such complex procedures in ultra-modern surgical facilities. With patient safety and surgical efficacy set to be a priority, the surgical centers of Pristyn Care can perform every ACL surgery under the best of conditions. Moreover, Pristyn Care is actively involved in partnering with advanced medical researchers and bioengineers to further enhance effectiveness and safety in the use of synthetic ligaments.

Reviews of ACL surgery operations under the aegis of Pristyn Care state that the medical staff were professional, the facilities were modern, and generally, surgeries were performed with good outcomes. All these statements refer not to new medical technologies but to the high rates of patient satisfaction and trust.

Advantages of Synthetic Ligaments in ACL Reconstruction

Using synthetic ligaments in ACL reconstruction has one major benefit which is the elimination of donor site morbidity. Unlike conventional techniques that include removing body tissue from a patient, these issues can be avoided by using synthetic ligaments. Therefore, it is widely recognized as an effective approach that lessens the chances of postoperative infection and pain reduction along with a quicker & easier recovery process. Pristyn Care reviews indicate that patients have highly ranked this method because they recover within a short time and experience minimal postoperative discomfort.

Pristyn healthcare reviews indicate that Pristyn Care’s use of synthetic ligament in ACL surgery has yielded outstanding results, which have enabled patients to make fast comebacks for sports and their normal duties.

In Pristyn Care reviews, people talk about how much they are satisfied with the minimal interruption to their lives, and the quickness with which they recovered. Good testimonials through Pristyn Healthcare reviews emphasize how advanced surgical practices and individualized treatments offered by Pristyn Care are geared towards providing high-quality health services resulting in the best outcomes.

Identify the Challenging Issues and Consider

The utilization of synthetic materials in surgical procedures presents both opportunities and challenges. Although these materials can enhance the recovery process due to their design to integrate with tissue without triggering an immune response, their long-term durability remains a concern. Pristyn Care reviews often highlight the rigorous monitoring of synthetic-tendon integration, particularly under the continuous stress imposed by daily activities. This is an area of active research within Pristyn healthcare reviews, focusing on enhancing the material's ability to withstand long-term use without compromising safety.

Additionally, regulatory and ethical factors about these techniques are vital. In addition, all synthetic materials used are strictly regulated by Pristyn Care for maximum safety. This commitment to safety standards is reflected in Pristyn healthcare reviews where the rigorous clinical trials and medical & ethical constraints are highly acknowledged. These materials undergo stringent safety checks before their approval for use so that they conform with the highest possible safety standards hence maintaining the reputation of Pristyn Care as a provider of safe, innovative, and effective Pristyn health care solutions.

Patient Success Stories and Case Studies

Against this backdrop, many life-changing benefits make patients at Pristyn feel that their ACL is rebuilt with synthetic ligaments. This is not on paper, but one watches how a patient describes getting back to sports activity after months of surgery and says great recovery is credited to great care. Another case in point reflects a patient who almost felt no pain with rapid rehabilitation due to advanced surgical techniques at Pristyn Care. These stories strengthen the good reviews about high satisfaction rates and successful surgical outcomes on Pristyn healthcare platforms.

Conclusion

ACL injuries are mostly known as anterior cruciate ligament injuries and they are common and severe, especially in high-impact sports or activities that involve the knee joint heavily. These injuries negatively affect performance, so it requires a well-planned recovery plan to safely go back to what one was doing before. One main surgical procedure through which the normal functions of the knee can be restored is known as ACL reconstruction. The Return to Play (RTP) protocols post-surgery should be focused on total recuperation, prevention of future traumas, and restoration of peak levels of performance. For Pristyn Care, emphasis has been put on RTP post-ACL reconstruction to achieve full patient recovery and enable them to regain their best level of performance. In Pristyn care reviews, there is usually mention of how effective its customized RTP protocols are because these protocols help in preventing reinjuries. Further, Pristyn Healthcare reviews also hail the individualistic approach taken during the rehabilitation period which has significantly improved the success rates for ACL surgeries conducted at Pristyn Care.

#pristyn care #pristyn care reviews #pristyn healthcare #pristyn healthcare reviews #pristyn care lybrate #pristyn care company

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banananutmilk · 5 months

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Apocalypse Now Film Essay (1979)

"My movie is not about Vietnam... my movie is Vietnam."- Francis Coppola

Apocalypse Now is a film directed by the visionary Francis Ford Coppola, a film where all his touches are evident throughout the nearly 2 hour long film. A wild journey throughout a Heart of Darkness inspired Vietnam centered follow. A film that still stands the test of time, still shocking audiences today. Drawing it’s sources and inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s themes of imperialism and moral questioning converted from the Congo imperialism to the contemporary period of post Vietnam War, Francis Coppola set the stage for a film that depicts the moral corruption and ambiguity of the soldiers within the forefront of hell. By adapting Conrad's story to the Vietnam War, Coppola draws parallels between the imperialist ambitions of the 19th century and America's intervention in Vietnam. The film's exploration of the psychological and moral descent of its characters mirrors Conrad's themes of imperialism and the darkness within the human soul.

Upon it’s release Coppola’s film had received widespread critical acclaim along with mixed reception. Critic’s dismissing the film’s lengthy run time and more challenging narrative structure deter the audience.Along with criticisms for it’s contents, glorifying war more than criticizing it. The film doesn’t work enough as an anti-war message and more as a film following a cast of representatives thrown into chaotic situations. In Time magazine when the film first debuted, Frank Rich derided the film as "not so much an epic account of a grueling war as an incongruous, extravagant monument to artistic self-defeat". In comparison to reviews applauding and reveling in it’s philosophical story structure with stunning hallucinogenic visuals that captivate audiences. While Apocalypse Now follows a linear story structure with typical traditional character arcs from war set films. Due to The editing production of Richard Marks along with direction of Francis Ford Coppola and lastly Sound designer Walter Murch. The meticulously crafted film pacing and narrative structure, along with the usage of advanced editing techniques, the film seamlessly integrates surreal and hallucinatory sequences with the film's gritty realism. The incorporation of elements of surrealism and symbolism help to convey the psychological and moral descent of its characters. Dreamlike sequences and symbolic motifs blur the line between reality and illusion, inviting viewers to interpret the film's deeper meanings.

The film contrasts these structures with the utilization of surreal psychedelic visual cinematography, separating the piece from most traditional war films. Garnering a $118,558 upon it’s domestic opening and then eventually accumulating a $104,800 for it’s gross worldwide income. Proving to be a lucrative investment, using it’s $31,500,000 to it’s fullest. having multiple re-releases in theaters and home video formats over the years, further helped bolster its financial success. Now standing as one of the most iconic war films, Apocalypse Now lingers with a legacy of high regard.

Apocalypse Now benefited from advancements in filmmaking technology, allowing Coppola to create epic and visually stunning scenes. Utilizing the skill sets of director of photography Vittorio Storaro. Employing his innovative techniques to capture the film's surreal and epic visuals. With a combination of natural lighting and dynamic camera movements to create a visually striking atmosphere, contributed to the film's immersive portrayal of war. However, these technological feats also came with challenges, such as the logistical difficulties of filming in remote locations and Coppola's infamous struggles with budget overruns and production delays.

implemented in China in 1979, was a government-enforced population control measure aimed at curbing population growth. introduced by the Chinese government as a response to concerns about overpopulation and its potential negative impacts. Due to the enforcement of the policy, varied by region, the penalties for non-compliance would range from fines, loss of social benefits to forced abortions and sterilizations.

The USSR's invasion of Afghanistan, which began on December 24, 1979, was a significant event in both Soviet and Afghan history. The Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan to support the Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan government, which was facing increasing opposition from Islamist insurgents and other rebel groups. The conflict contributed to the destabilization of Afghanistan, leading to the rise of the Taliban and years of civil war.

In conclusion, Apocalypse Now a cinematic odyssey transcends the boundaries of traditional war cinema, offering a mesmerizing journey into the heart of darkness. resonates with a raw intensity that lingers long after the credits roll. As we navigate the moral abyss alongside Captain Willard and confront the haunting monologue of Colonel Kurtz. Through its epic scale and visceral imagery. Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece captivates audiences with its exploration of the human psyche amidst the chaos of war.

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