#I may use all of this to construct an essay explaining to the rest of my family why I'm never going home

[spicycoffeebean]

If you don't want to answer that's COMPLETELY fine and you can ignore this entirely, but if your comfort zone permits: I happened across your tag and am. curious how someone could use reddit to try and get someone to detransition. Like, do you mean she made a post about it to get people agreeing with her or??

Hi Anon! I'll be honest and say I'm glad somebody took notice enough to actually ask. Because I still refuse to believe it happened.

No! She did not make a Reddit post. She just sent me several posts from r/detrans to get me to detransition.

More below the cut! Idk how long this will be, but cw for transphobia and all around shitty/questionable behavior

For those who don't know (I can't track down the post, but I commented in tags) my own mother (60) has been very actively against my transition (ftm) since I began taking testosterone in November 2021(I have been openly trans and using he/him prns since 2018, so it's not like any of this was "new" information to her) On top of blatant misinformation, my mom tried to source REDDIT, the detransitioner's subreddit to prove that yes, people do detransition. Never once denied her that. My issue here is that no, she did not make a post, she was ~browsing~ the detransitioner subreddit r/detrans to push me to detransition. She was "sourcing" it (I wanna say she said in the same conversation that she doesn't trust sites that have LGBTQ+ flags despite the statistics being very real and very present. I'm an analytics/statistics student.)

I have a million issues with this, but very simply, she is using people's struggles and real trauma to fuel a transphobic agenda to get me to detransition (I was so much happier when I chose to be openly trans let alone when I actually started T last year.) If you actually read the subreddit, 99% of those stories are OP saying "Transitioning did not work for me" but not once do they denounce transitioning. They make it clear that their experiences with it did not work out.

“I talk to detransitioners all of the time” she said “Why don’t you talk to a real trans person?” I asked her “Because I know their story.” is what she said word for word Bitch I’m trans and I don’t know trans people’s stories. I just am trans?? I made it super easy for her. Talk to a doctor or a real trans person. She makes any excuse to NOT DO THIS. A cisgender doctor in California will tell you that you are out right wrong and doing more harm than any good you might see from it.

Less than 1% of people detransition, and the majority of those who detransition ARE STILL UNHAPPY. Even then a handful of people detransition because of society, family, or something simple as healthcare. People are denied healthcare because doctors don't want to provide basic care to a transgender person. (I live in the US where this practice would be illegal) My mother acts like I myself deny that people detransition while she literally won't acknowledge WHY people detransition at all. LGBT clinics are apparently shutting down in the UK, Norway, Sweden etc. Yeah cool cisgender people are losing healthcare too. But apparently that doesn't matter. My brother's(cis) bisexual and he could be denied care if he lived in such a place. I don't think she'd take kindly to that, knowing she was the most supportive when my brother came out well over 10 years ago.

I do not want my story or trauma to be used as fuel for a fire to hurt somebody else. I doubt any of these detransitioners would be happy knowing this either. Their stories are not for my mother to tell

anyway she sends me to college(to study analytics/statistics lol??) and insists I'm brainwashed and need an autism diagnosis(YES, SHE ASKED ME 3 TIMES TO GET ONE. NO I JUST HAVE ADHD. I ASKED DOCTORS FOR 5 YEARS ABT IT LOL)

She's just in denial she spent 1 million usd and 2 years of paperwork on a China doll because "[She] didn't want to try for another son" I was told this my entire childhood and it's haunting me almost every day now.

That's the super dumbed-down version of that Reddit comment. Let alone EVERYTHING ELSE she put me through the last 14 months.

TLDR; She did not make a post to get people to agree with her, she was just taking people's stories and struggles to fuel a hate agenda detransitioners themselves do not agree with (she cannot read.)

[meraki-yao]

Oh people have been racist towards Taylor for a very long time. They can't even hide it well. On Twitter they also complain when he does something dedicated to the film because he looks obsessed and will not do anything else in his career after this film while Nick will have many projects. What I hate most is that they use Nick to bring him down every single time when he wouldn't approve of any of this crap towards Taylor. I'm not making anything up unfortunately. Who knows why T protects himself by staying completely away from that place, right? It's been full of shit towards him since TKB not to mention the details of his private life put all over the place in various threads. It's horrible I don't know how he can stand it.

...Oh God.

That's what I hate most about this shit show too: comparing Taylor to Nick and bringing him down. I have a lot of experience being compared to my own friends, and it's an awful, awful feeling that took me a long time and a lot of growing up to navigate and cope with healthily. And while I believe the boys are mature enough and truly love and respect each other to not do this, things like these do tend to put a rift in relationships and I never want to see that for them.

And exactly. Nick has repeatedly praised Taylor both on his performance and him as a person, colleague and friend. Nick (and Matthew) would be the first to defend Taylor if he saw people saying Taylor was bad (which I hope he didn't, as naive as it may be I just really want the boys to stay away from the negativity)

The film has a special and personal place for Taylor, with the weight of the story itself, how much he connects to Alex, his first leading role, the missed premiere and press because of the timing and the unfortunate passing of his sister. Of course he wants to do something about it. We, as humans, will carry things this important to us for a long, long time, possibly for the rest of our lives. He's gonna carry RWRB with him for a long, long time, rightfully so. Plus it's just been two months, and we're all still freaking hyped about the movie, of course he can do stuff about it. It's already a lot less than what he, what they could have had and done because of the strike. On top of that, signing books and talking a bit about the film with fans is more for us, the fans than himself. And he has been doing other stuff! He can't do anything acting related because of the strike, but he pretty much spent the entirety of last month attending fashion events, which, mind you, is also his job.

I literally can't say anything more about racism other than it's just objectively wrong, racists are shit people, and he doesn't deserve it. (no one does, really.)

Unfortunately, we're not them so we can't protect the boys from seeing things, only they can. And we need to trust them to do so.

But I will say this.

The comments that spawn from things like racism and hatred, there is no actual value. Yes, it hurts to see and hear, but there isn't anything backing it up, there is no evidence to back up these claims. There are, ultimately, empty.

The love and support we have for him/them? Spawn from our reaction to seeing them. Their performances, their interviews, their photoshoots. We write countless essays here explaining and analysing them. Everything we say, every praise we have, didn't come from nowhere. It came from the boys themselves. There's a reason we adore their performance, their relationship, their personality, and we can point to it.

And because of that, our support and love are far more substantial than the hate and hurtful comments, and therefore infinitely more meaningful and worthwhile. We need to remember this, and show the boys our love. That's the only practical and constructive way to combat the stupid hate. We ignore the comments, because their "opinions" are baseless and ultimately meaningless, and we show the boys the support and love that they rightfully deserve.

[cellarspider]

Oh boy I am poked

For those in need of context: I mentioned my desire to fight Noam Chomsky behind a Dennys, after reading The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker (2001).

What follows is a 2000 word essay on why. Holy heck this took all night.

Top-level disclaimer: I am not a trained linguist. I am an enthusiastic amateur at best, thanks to my hobby of constructed language-making. If anybody would like to correct something or discuss the topic, feel free!

Because l have loud feelings about The Atoms of Language. I think the way it conceives of the world has a lot of parallels in how people view science in general. So despite its age, it’s worth giving it a bit of a kicking. Both for its specific claims, and the big picture.

To summarize: the shape of our languages aren’t hard-coded into our brain by genetics. Languages don’t fall into immutable, hard-edged categories based off of binary choices. The author presents only one alternative: random chance, unconstrained by any environmental factors, that each child must learn without pattern recognition. This is a false dichotomy, and one that cuts off far more reasonable means by which languages can evolve and be learned. Science is not a fight between absolute order and absolute chaos.

I have to begin with a two paragraph digression to set the scene.

The sciences are home to a perennial nerd squabble about whose field is the best and most pure, usually in a "physicists and chemists versus everyone else" divide. This is timewasting nonsense, but it's worth acknowledging that physics and chemistry allow for experiments where one can test universal truths to a ludicrously high degree of certainty. This cannot be done in other fields, because there are too many complicating factors. My chosen field of genetics deals with systems that have so many moving parts, they're impossible to fully predict. Social sciences study behavior, which is even harder to make generalized statements about.

Now, this does not mean physicists and chemists can explain everything about genetics or social sciences. Their tools are not suited to the problems tackled in these fields, and anybody who claims otherwise is a blowhard. But sometimes people can get jealous of the certainty of physical laws. They may try to legitimize their field or their pet theory by describing it in terms of physics and chemistry.

And so Mark Baker wrote The Atoms of Language.

You may be able to see where the problems start with this book.

So, what is this book trying to authoritatively explain? Well, a couple of big questions in linguistics are "how do babies learn languages when they are small and bad at everything?" and "why do so many unrelated languages share structures that function similarly to each other?"

Baker subscribes to Noam Chomsky’s theories on the subject, which can be summarized like this: The grammatical structures of all languages are formed from a limited and definable set of parameters, which are predefined by a “Language Acquisition Device” in the brain, found exclusively in humans, due to a single evolutionary event that no other organism has replicated.

In fact, Chomsky asserts that not only is this the root of all language, it’s also the only way that babies could ever learn a language. He posits that they don’t receive enough information to learn their language. Instead, they instinctively pick up on linguistic parameters that the Linguistic Acquisition Device is hard-coded to create, selecting those that are relevant to their first language and discarding the rest.

Using these parameters contained within the Language Acquisition Device, Baker posits a periodic table of language. One that could be used to describe and predict all possible grammatical constraints of language.

This is highly controversial on every level. I’m going to start with the Chomsky stuff and move on to what Baker does with these parameters.

The human exclusivity of syntactically complex language is currently up for debate, with Carolina chickadees and prairie dogs arguably being capable of the same feat in the wild.

Chomsky never tested this theory in a rigorous manner in humans either. However, its structure is similar to many experiments from the past few decades. There was a wave of neuropsychology studies that claimed “we found the brain region responsible for [behavior] via an FMRI study!”. These usually ended up being shaved down by later investigations into "actually that part of the brain does at least six things, and that particular behavior is split between at least fifteen different regions.”

To this date, no single region of the brain has been identified as the source of childhood language acquisition. While it’s hard to get a kid to sit still in an MRI machine, this is backed up by one of the oldest ways to study the brain: looking at what breaks when it’s injured. While there are many brain injuries that can affect one’s ability to speak or to comprehend language, none have been conclusively shown to abolish the ability to form grammatical sentences. Even ones you think really, really should: witness the man who had a key language center of the brain surgically removed, and somehow continued to speak pretty damn coherently all the same.

This is a problem, obviously, but one could argue that a circuit could form between multiple areas of the brain to create a Language Acquisition Module, right? Okay then. Let’s examine the parameters it supposedly contains. These are the fundamental categories that human languages are locked into, according to Chomsky and Baker. While Baker begins with the metaphor of the periodic table, what he actually describes is more of a flow chart: an increasingly specific pattern of choices that build up to form a unique language.

Baker admits he doesn’t have the complete periodic table of language. In fact, he backpedals in the last quarter of the book, and says well, we don't have a periodic table of linguistics yet, maybe we never will, but we could!

And he’s pretty sure of the chart that he does have. And he still considers it to demonstrate immutable categories of language. For example, he says there are two basic word orders: Subject Verb Object (“I eat apples”) and Subject Object Verb (“I apples eat”). He presents this as the most basic thing a child learns about their language’s structure. This is first, all else comes after.

…Except he then admits that actually, there are other word orders, but they’re really rare, so that proves him right anyway.  

This, as the astute in the audience may note, does not in fact prove him right. Language is not behaving like the perfect, hard-edged system he wants, it’s messy. And it doesn’t get any better from there. More and more exceptions pile up, perfectly reasonable in the context of their languages, but they’re problems to this model. Baker asserts that culture has no meaningful effect on the structure of language.

To Baker, these parameters cannot have evolved independently based on cultural trends. This must be set in stone, or everything would be chaos. He argues that two languages coming up with similar structures independently by means of culturally-influenced linguistic evolution would be like two people flipping a coin a hundred times and getting the same sequence of heads and tails.

How languages end up the way they do is still a topic of study and debate. But Baker is pulling out an argument often used by creationists, so we’re in my wheelhouse here. I will briefly use biological evolution as a metaphor to explain why he’s wrong.

Biological evolution keeps coming up with similar structures and adaptations across wildly different species. Birds and scallops have eyes, even though their last common ancestor didn’t. Bees and bats can both fly. How is this possible, if evolution is a random process and isn’t directed according to some plan? Because all organisms are dealing with similar environmental pressures. Why are snakes and ferrets and eels all long, thin, slinky tubes? Because hunting and hiding in small burrows is easier that way. Snails and turtles and beetles have hard shells because being chewed on is bad. The environment creates restrictions on what sorts of bodies can feasibly exist, and that results in convergent evolution.

Language is working within a more restricted environment: You have a vocal tract.* You are a social animal. It benefits you and your kin group to be able to communicate things about yourself and the world around you. What does that mean? Telling people about the location of things. The qualities of things. Describing actions that have a cause and effect. You need some way to say "There is food here" or "I hit it with a stick, and then bees came out."

These desirable qualities mean that languages are subject to massive environmental pressures to maintain a minimum level of ability to communicate specific kinds of information, regardless of how they change over time. And you're presenting the information through a linear medium, one word at a time. These physical and behavioral traits limit the possible things a language can do.

So while I do not have the technical knowledge to propose a detailed model of linguistic evolution, I do not find it unlikely that human languages could experience convergent evolution, producing highly analogous structures completely independently of each other. Are there components of human cognition that lead humans to prefer some forms more than others? Almost certainly. But again, they’ll be messy! And they will be very, very hard to tease apart from the social context of language.

So, why did I just spend 1500 words ranting about this? Because despite the fact that this book was published not long before most linguists rejected these premises, it still plays into a lot of misapprehensions people have about science. Can we come up with absolute, iron-clad laws for everything? No. Many systems are so complicated that with our imperfect knowledge, they resist the language of certainty.

Does that mean that science is useless in those cases? No!! You can still figure out restrictions on what can and can’t happen, what is and isn’t reasonable to expect. This is the language of probability. The more we rigorously study a subject, the more precise we can be. That’s what we do in science.** We describe the world as precisely and carefully as we can, using the resources we have. It’s not always elegant, but not everything will be.

And I think that’s a good excuse for me to end this without a neat little closing thought.

---

*and hands, but I am not qualified to discuss sign languages.

**The desire to be achingly comprehensive is strong. You have no many times I had to delete tangents in this thing. They would have made my points more precise. I could have talked about synaptic pruning in the developing brain. I could talk about multiple testing correction while calculating probabilities. I wrote a footnote ramble about Japanese serial verb constructions, but I deleted it! Go me!!!

[jasontoddiefor]

Retranslation of the Sith Code from a Linguistic Perspective

Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Nwûl tash. Dzwol shâsotkun. Through passion, I gain strength. Shâsotjontû châtsatul nu tyûk. Through strength, I gain power. Tyûkjontû châtsatul nu midwan. Through power, I gain victory. Midwanjontû châtsatul nu asha. Through victory, my chains are broken. Ashajontû kotswinot itsu nuyak. The Force shall free me. Wonoksh Qyâsik nun.

Star Wars has a couple conlangs – from Huttese to Ryl, many cultures in a galaxy far, far away have their own words. The, admittedly, most famous conlang is Mando’a, the language of the Mandalorians. It has recently gained even more popularity due to The Mandalorian and the many headcanons about the clones and their culture floating around in fandom. While Mando’a is undoubtedly the conlang with the most extensive vocabulary, it is not the soundest Star Wars conlang from a linguistic perspective. That honor belongs to the version of the Sith conlang that was later amended and developed by Ben Grossblatt.

The Sith Code, as we know it, was developed by David Gaider in 2003 for the game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Grossblatt’s conlang was created seven years later in 2010.

When you consider this, Grossblatt had two options when creating his conlang and translation of the Code. He could translate the Code from English into Sith, or he could pretend the English (or “Basic”) version of the Code resulted from a translation from Sith.

Why does this matter?

[AO3]

This question is easily answered when you think about the various meanings of the words. As every bilingual person knows, translating a text from one language to another isn’t easy because there are no two languages whose vocabulary matches completely. Let’s take an example from the Code:

“asha” (noun) is translated as “victory”.

This translation, however, does not explain what kind of victory “asha” refers to. While English may have only one term for victory, a Sith could differentiate between “victory you achieved on your own” and “victory by decimating your enemies”. Or “victory” might only be one translation of the word and others could be “dominance, control, superiority”. All these words lean into the direction of “victory” through the worldview of the Sith.

Basically, Grossblatt had to decide whether the English version should be the end result or the starting point of his version of the Code in Sith.

In this essay, I intend to treat the English version of the Code as the translation of the original Sith language. This is important because it means that this deconstruction of the Sith Code will be influenced by my own interpretation of the various other meanings as possible Sith word could have, which are not necessarily Canon/Legends based. I will be translating this Code line by line and, in the end, create a new version of the Code which will deviate from the Canon one but hopefully picks up the grammatical cues from the Sith version that the current one is lacking.

TLDR: I don’t want to just explain the grammar, I want to analyze it.

Now, a brief look at the in-universe history of the Code of the Sith to shed some light on the perspective I’ll take into consideration while translating.

The Code itself was allegedly created by the Fallen Jedi Sorzus Syn. It was meant to be a pendant and an update of the Jedi Code simultaneously. While this is technically speaking fine, we do run into some troubles from a historical perspective.

The Code was first authored on the planet Korriban in 6900 BBY. The Jedi Exiles didn’t speak the language of the Sith species, which were enslaved by the Jedi Exiles. They used translation talismans, which granted them the ability to speak and read Sith as if it were their mother tongue.

…

Yeah, that’s stupid. I know. But it’s space fairy tale science fiction, so we’ll accept it and move on.

If you are bilingual, you might notice that you are more capable of speaking about a given topic in one language than in the other. Therefore, it would make sense if it were easier for the Jedi Exiles to talk about the Dark side in Sith, which was uniquely suited to speak about it. However, when the Code only exists as a differentiating point to the Jedi, they were bound to slip into a rhetoric that would be more along the lines of that they’d used as Jedi. That could explain why the Sith Code in Basic/English seems to parallel the Jedi Code so much. My working hypothesis is that the Sith Code – given that it is supposed to reflect Sith philosophy – can stand on its own with its own meaning. Otherwise, the Sith would only ever see themselves in contrast to the Jedi, which, given their superiority complex, is a rather strange view. Therefore, my translation will focus on staying as close to the original Sith language as possible.

Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Nwûl tash. Dzwol shâsotkun.

Now tackling that first line of the Code. The interesting part here is that Basic translates the two sentences as one. The first sentence – Nwûl tash – consists of two nouns: “peace” and “lie”. The present tense copula (the “to be”) is dropped, leaving the two nouns. When comparing this to the following sentence, we immediately see the first issue. The verb dzwol refers to “to be”. We also know it can be translated as “to exist”, “to abide”. The question that arises at this point is whether the first sentence drops dzwol or another verb referring to “to be” that we don’t know. What becomes clear, however, is that different emphasis is put on the two sentences. Many languages drop the tense copula. When the copula is dropped, the relation between the other constituents (components of the sentence) is understood. So reading the first sentence, you gain the impression that the statement “Peace is a lie” is a fact of life. “Peace = Lie” would be a mathematical way of writing it down.

Another critical thing to mention here is that Sith, as far as we know, doesn’t make use of determiners (a/the), and as such, the statement could possibly also be read as “The peace is the lie” or “A peace is the lie” and so on. But given that we do not have any information on the grammar in that aspect, I will not elaborate any further.

Now, let’s take a look at the second sentence by comparison. Here we have an explicit present tense dzwol. Unlike the rest of the Code, this sentence follows the VSO word order. Given that the rest of the Code uses topicalization, we can conclude that the verb dzwol is the focus of this sentence. Given that we are also given the translations “to exist, to abide”, perhaps it would be a more appropriate choice to use one of these words when translating to properly show the difference between the omitted present tense copula and the explicit one here.

Following this, we have to deal with shâsot and -kun. -kun refers to the adjective “only” and modifies the noun. shâsot is interesting because we are given the translation “passion” in the Code. The vocabulary list, however, translates it as “struggle”. While both have overlapping meanings, I would argue in favor of the “struggle” translation.

“Passion” stems from the Latin “passio” meaning “suffering, enduring”. Nowadays, it is used­ in Christianity to describe the suffering of Christ, but also, citing Merriam-Websters here, “the state or capacity of being acted on by external agents or forces”, as well as being motivated/moved by intense emotions. However, “struggle”, is defined as “to make strenuous or violent efforts in the face of difficulties or opposition” and “to proceed with difficulty or with great effort”. Given that the first sentence of the Code refers to the idea that peace doesn’t exist, I believe an emphasis on the aspect of fighting, which we find in “struggle”, would be appropriate.

Personally, I’d prefer “to exist” over “abide” for the verb as well. “abide” may imply that only the struggle has to be endured. I’d favor a reading that instead emphasizes the contrast that the absence of peace means the presence of nothing but struggle. My translation of the first line of the Sith Code would therefore be:

Peace is a lie. Only struggle exists. Nwûl tash. Dzwol shâsotkun.

Now we can consider the next line: Through passion, I gain strength. Shâsotjontû châtsatul nu tyûk.

Before we can tackle the translation, we have to consider three grammatical construction.

Sith is typically VSO (Verb Subject Object).

Sith has instrumental case, which is marked on the noun with -jontû. Generally, this is translated as “by” or “with” or “using”.

Sith has alethic verb mood, which is marked on the verb with -atul. Alethic mood refers to “the truth in the world” as opposed to epistemic mood, which is “the truth in an individual's mind” (epistemic). While this differentiation is not without criticism, given that all truths in the world are filtered through our perceptions of the world, it is interesting to note that Sith apparently does make this difference.

Now that we have considered these, I will break down the second sentence. The first thing I have to mention is that this sentence and the following ones are topicalized. Shâsotjontû is the word shâsot in instrumental case. As before, I prefer the “struggle” translation. The instrumental case itself is translated as “through” which is an interesting choice as that is not a standard translation. I’d instead go with the “using” translation as it further highlights that a Sith utilizes whatever tools they deem necessary and needed. Objects and people are measured against what value they have for a given person, how useful they are if you want to spell it out. Furthermore, it highlights that the Sith, at one point, actually discussed the Code and the “best” way to use the Dark side.

The verb châtsatul is in alethic mood and translates to “gain”. This, again, also fits well with the “using” translation of the instrumental case. The subject of this sentence is nu the first person pronoun “I”. tyûk translates to “strength”. Here we run into the previously elaborated victory problem as well. The Code gives us no explanation of what kind of strength is meant here. The idea that it’s only physical strength is, of course, ridiculous. It could also cover mental strength and strength in the Force, as well as the words “might”, “courage”, “durability” and so on. This issue concerning the lack of vocabulary will continue to follow us through the complete translation of this text. As I have now elaborated on it twice, I will only make references to it in the future, with perhaps here and there a suggestion for a more appropriate translation.

My translation of the second line, taking -atul into consideration, would therefore be as follows:

Shâsotjontû châtsatul nu tyûk. Using struggle, I necessarily gain strength.

Now we can turn to the third line: Through strength, I gain power. Tyûkjontû châtsatul nu midwan.

The only new word here is midwan, which is translated as “power”. Again, the definition of power in this context isn’t clear. The translation of this line would be:

Tyûkjontû châtsatul nu midwan. Using strength, I necessarily gain power.

We can now turn to the next line: Through power, I gain victory. Midwanjontû châtsatul nu asha.

I already elaborated at length on the various possible definitions of “victory”. I, personally, prefer a reading that equals “victory” to “dominance”. What I also thought was interesting here is that the morpheme “asha” appears to be very common in Star Wars across cultures and languages. There are multiple people named with variations of that morpheme. And then, of course, there is also the planet Ashas Ree, which is deep in the territory of the former Sith Empire and had a Jedi Temple built on top of a Sith Temple. Ashas Ree could be the Basic version of a Sith term. While we do not have the word “Ree”, phonologically, it would be pronounced /riː/, and Sith has the consonant /r/ and the vowel /i:/.

A side note about Sith phonology: Sometime between the Jedi Exiles taking over and the Prequels era, the Sith lost the vowel /e/ or /ɛ/ as the Sith of that time still had words like “jen” meaning “shadow”, “dark”, and “hidden”. As this word, and others making use of it, are apparently still in use today, their vowel probably changed to /i/, /æ/, or /aɪ/. Or maybe the word “jen” is pronounced as it once was as English/Basic does have these vowels, and people can therefore say “jen”.

Returning to our translation, we can read:

Midwanjontû châtsatul nu asha. Using power, I necessarily gain victory.

And now we’re going to look at a line that made me cry:

Through victory, my chains are broken. Ashajontû kotswinot itsu nuyak.

Once more, before we can actually look at the translation, we have to look at the grammar. This is the breakdown Ben Grossblatt made of that sentence:

Ashajontû kotswinot itsu nuyak. Victory+INSTR break+ERG+LG INAM OBJ chain my+PL. Through victory, my chains break.

INSTR refers to instrumental case I already elaborated on.

ERG refers to Ergative. The interfix -win- is added to a transitive verb to indicate ergativity, meaning that the grammatical subject of that verb is its semantic object, while the true semantic agent remains unexpressed.

LG INAM OBJ means “large inanimate object”. This refers to the fact that the verb kots is part of a group of verbs called “handling verbs”. These verbs mark what kind of object is affected by them. -ot is the marker for “large inanimate object”. When searching for languages that use these “handling verbs”, Navajo was one of the first results.

Sith plurals appear to be marked on the articles or, given the lack of such, on the possessive markers: nuyak is therefore “my” and “the object I possess is plural”.

Now that we have tackled the grammar, I will elaborate on how it applies to this sentence. The ashajontû construction should be well-understood by now, so I will not linger on it.

Interesting is here that the possessive marker nuyak also indicates the number of the possessed object. In a way, this enhances the claim on the object as it is more intrinsically connected to it. The possessed object here is itsu, the “chain”, which only gains its plural through the possessive. It would be interesting here to know what the other verb markers are as “chains”, in this context, are categorized as physical objects. At the same time, their meaning is obviously meant to be metaphorical. Knowing whether Sith can make the difference and might choose to do so here would be beneficial when analyzing this line. However, evoking the image of physical chains here, which are broken, makes the act seem more striking.

And now we’ll tackle the verb. The root kots gets inflicted twice by the ergative marker and the object marker. According to Grossblatt, it can be read as “completely shatter” or “completely break”. As the purpose of the object marker -ot has already been elaborated on, I will now focus on the ergative marker.

Ergativity is one possible way of hiding the concrete agent of action without passivizing the sentence. Consider “The window broke” vs. “The window was broken” vs. “I broke the window”.

This makes the overall translation of the sentence rather interesting. The original translation reads “Through victory, my chains are broken” which is passive and not ergative. Therefore, it would be more correct to follow Grossblatt’s reading of “my chains break completely”. Still, the fact that we do not have an overt agent here makes this sentence quite interesting. While the method – ashajontû – is known, the agent could be either the speaker themself, or another person doing it for them. Given that the adverb “completely” is added to the verb, perhaps this sentence suggests that on your own, you can come quite far breaking your chains but not reach that finalized step. For that, you need victory.

Furthermore, this offers an interesting perspective on the Sith and their teachings, especially on the Banite Sith, if you read “victory” as something closer to “dominance”. In this case, the sentence almost seems to imply that by becoming stronger and surpassing another person, perhaps your Master, you manage to break your chains completely. An even deeper reading might allude to how the Sith conceptualize the chains that keep them. They appear to put their own freedom and thirst for power above everything else. Perhaps that is already too much interpretation for one line, but it was worth noting. In any case, my translation of that sentence is:

Ashajontû kotswinot itsu nuyak. Using victory, my chains break completely.

After this heavy sentence, we only have one left!

The Force shall free me. Wonoksh Qyâsik nun.

This sentence is relatively uncomplicated. nun is the accusative pronoun “me” and Qyâsik is the Sith word for Force. wonoksh is the word for “to free” in future tense. The future tense is marked by -oksh and this is the part where we get to the slightly complicated/annoying part of the sentence.

Again, we don’t know if this is the only future tense Sith has or what its exact purpose is. As opposed to English, which technically speaking only has the tenses “past” and “not-past”, Sith marks a definite future. However, this future could also have undertones such as an imperative mood. Sadly, we don’t know anything about it. Now for the future tense. As inquires across the globe have told me, “shall” is pretty outdated. In a modern translation of the Code, you’d probably say:

Wonoksh Qyâsik nun. The Force will free me.

But that detail is relatively minor. Now that I have broken down every line of the Code, let’s put it back together.

Peace is a lie. Only struggle exists. Using struggle, I necessarily gain strength. Using strength, I necessarily gain power. Using power, I necessarily gain victory. Using victory, my chains break completely. The Force will free me.

Does this Code sound better than the original work? Probably not. I have to say, I do prefer the “struggle” translation and I like the first line more in my version, but otherwise, this Code doesn’t sound particularly great. However, it was also not meant to sound good. The purpose was to create a translation closer to the Sith language version, to reverse-engineer it if you want. I do think that this endeavor was worthwhile as, for me, it has shed some more light on the thinking of the Sith.

And also this:

Sources

Star Wars: The Sith

Sith Language

Speak like a Sith article

Sith Code

Ben Grossblatt’s breakdown of his translation

Sorzus Syn, author of the Sith Code

History of the Sith Dynasties

Wookiepedia Search of asha

Translation talisman

Ashas Ree

Temple of Ashas Ree

Grammar

Zero copula

Merriam-Webster on passion

Merriam-Webster on struggle

Alethic modality

Navajo Handling Verbs

Navajo Classificatory Verbs

Ergativity

Instrumental case

Color Coded Version of this Essay

[feigeroman]

Station to Station (funk to funky...)

So, spurred on both by one of my previous headcanon posts getting liked and reblogged by @mean-scarlet-deceiver​ (who is totally awesome - go check them out), and by The Unlucky Tug’s magnum opus of a video essay about his take on the Island of Sodor (check it out below, and then check him out - both are totally awesome), I decided it’d be a fun idea to share some of my own headcanons about Sodor. Most of these are things I remembered while watching the video, which you can see here...

...And I’ll be presenting them in the order I remembered them. The video isn’t strictly necessary to understand this post - I just wanted to share it. It’s also worth having a copy of the Sam Wilkinson map (mentioned in the video) to hand, as it’s what I used as the basis for my take on Sodor. Yes, I know it’s a bit of a clusterfuck, but so is my version of the timeline, so...

***

1) Knapford is Tidmouth, and Elsbridge is Knapford

What do I mean by this? Well, what the RWS calls Tidmouth, the TVS calls Knapford. And what the RWS calls Knapford, the TVS calls Elsbridge.

Confused? I certainly was the first time I tried typing that! I’ll just explain the headcanon:

Basically, I go with what the RWS says. In other words, what the TVS calls Knapford, I call Tidmouth (incidentally, I prefer this version with the big yard alongside)...

...And what the TVS calls Elsbridge, I call Knapford. I know this shot doesn’t really show the station, but I decided the yard in the background is part of Knapford as well.

2) Which harbour is which?

This is somewhat similar to HC1, in that I’m changing up some of the names of established locations. There are many docks and harbours on Sodor, but the show mainly focuses on Brendam (and either Knapford or Tidmouth in earlier seasons). Those locations change drastically from season to season, and I wanted to account for most of the various appearances. So in no particular order:

For Tidmouth Harbour, I use the current Brendam Docks (though my headcanon is something nearer to the real-life Southampton Docks).

For Knapford Harbour, I use a mix of S2 Knapford Harbour and S3B Brendam Docks Just imagine that the former evolved into the latter over time.

For Brendam Docks, I use the S2 Brendam Docks.

I’ve loosely based Arlesburgh and Kirk Ronan on the real-life Bristol and Weymouth harbours, respectively.

3) Two or three-track mind

Okay, this was something I only thought up after seeing Tug’s video. He points out that the number of tracks tends to vary between sets, and he decides on the following:

Three tracks means it’s somewhere on the main line.

Two tracks means it’s a branch line.

One track means it’s either the far end of a branch line, or a freight-only line.

However, he also makes the point that some parts of the main line are inexplicably double-tracked, such as Cronk Viaduct (which he moves to Wellsworth, but that’s neither here nor there):

In cases like this, my headcanon is that the main line was originally completed as a double-tracked railway, with most of it being upgraded to triple-track later on. Obviously it may not have been possible or feasible to upgrade certain sections, hence them being left as double-track.

4) Lower Tidmouth

Now here’s one that I really like. This unnamed station from The Three Railway Engines was christened Lower Tidmouth by the TVS modelmakers. It’s located between Tidmouth and Knapford, and sits on the southern outskirts of the former town. Even though Tidmouth is a pretty large town - especially in my headcanon - its main station seems to cope well enough on its own, so why this extra station?

My headcanon is this: During the War, Tidmouth would most likely have been of great strategic importance, with its harbour and rail links - and therefore a prime target for air raids. Just in case the main station was bombed out of action, Lower Tidmouth was constructed just outside what was then the edge of the city, to serve as a temporary passenger terminus. After the War, the rudimentary station was given a major upgrade, after it was discovered that many people living to the south of Tidmouth found it more convenient than the main station.

5) Lower Tidmouth Tunnel

A much smaller idea now. This short tunnel is located between Tidmouth and Lower Tidmouth, and I just want to say I like to imagine that this looks the same as Henry’s Tunnel does in the TVS - two tracks in one bore, one track in the other. The only difference is that it’s built from red brick, as shown here.

6) Some ideas above Edward’s Station

This is a double-barrelled headcanon concerning Wellsworth. One concerns the station itself, and the other concerns its goods yard.

Firstly, the station itself. There’s been a lot of debate about which way round it should be. Should the footbridge be at the western or eastern end? Personally, I think it should be at the western end. My reasoning is that that would allow the bay platform siding (where Henry is in the above picture) to be at the eastern end, facing towards Gordon’s Hill. I assume that’s where Edward would normally be stabled when he’s waiting to bank trains up the hill. I just think it’s more convenient on that front.

As for the goods yard?

Well, I think this is Wellsworth Yard. That’s it. That’s the headcanon.

7) The Parkway Stations

This next headcanon concerns a rather obscure part of the Sodor railway geography - namely, these two tiny stations on the main line.

These stations serve the tiny villages of Balladrine and Kellaby respectively - though, in true railway fashion, they’re actually located some distance from the communities they serve. My original idea was to go down the usual route and just add the suffix Road to the station names, but then I was struck by a flash of real-life inspiration.

In the 1970s, British Rail opened a number of park-and-ride stations, which basically means you drive to the station, park your car and continue your journey by train. They usually have the suffix Parkway, as the first one was built close to the M32, which is also known as the Bristol Parkway.

Anyway, that’s the gist of this headcanon. The North Western jumped on this Parkway bandwagon around that same time, allowing people from the villages to either drive or catch a bus to the stations, and then catch a train to wherever.

8) The new Kellsthorpe Road

In my own personal timeline (which is a whole other headcanon in itself), Season 8 takes place in 1976, and it’s during this season that we see Kellsthorpe Road being built. Obviously the station had existed since the railway was built, so what’s with this new one?

Well, I like to think this was actually a relocation to somewhere more convenient for both the town and the junction with the Kirk Ronan branch.

9) Crovan’s Gate and other small works

I already touched upon this idea before in my Victor’s Haulage Truck headcanon, but if you haven’t read that, it goes like this:

I’m not a huge fan of the Steamworks and Dieselworks being separate facilities in separate locations. I just think the RWS version of Crovan’s Gate makes more sense, seeing as you would want all your major repair equipment and facilities to be concentrated in one location.

That being said, I wouldn’t say all this sort of work should be concentrated at Crovan’s Gate. It’s implied in the RWS that more minor repairs are carried out at smaller workshops across the rest of the system - I’d assume these are located at all the major engine sheds, and that there’s at least one on each branch line. These would also be useful for when there’s more work than Crovan’s Gate can take on at once.

10) The Sheds

Speaking of sheds, I have a handful spread across my version of Sodor. Basically, I have a couple at each end of the main line, and one on each of the branch lines. And since the highest operating district number in real life was 89 (for Oswestry), I’m gonna say all of the NWR’s engines are allocated to District 90, covering all sheds on the region:

Tidmouth (90A)

Knapford (90B)

Crovan’s Gate (90C)

Vicarstown (90D)

Barrow In Furness (90E)

Arlesburgh (90F)

Ffarquhar (90G)

Brendam (90H)

Peel Godred (90I)

Kirk Ronan (90J)

Great Waterton (90K)

Norramby (90L)

11) Dryaw Goods Station

Alright, this one is more about a specific episode than a location, but I thought it was worth throwing into the mix. This goods station only appeared in Thomas Gets Bumped, and nobody is quite sure where it’s meant to be. Some people say it’s Hackenbeck. Others say it’s Toryreck. Me? I’ve always thought of this as the original Dryaw Station, on what is now the Harbour line on the Ffarquhar branch.

I say this because the surrounding scenery matches what’s shown on the map, and it makes sense for a freight-only station to be located on what is now a freight-only line. But if that’s the case, why does Thomas seemingly pass through daily with his passenger train?

I toyed with the idea of Thomas being there because he’s pulling a workers’ train, but then I came up with something better. In my personal timeline, this episode takes place during the initial construction of Knapford Harbour, and the new passenger line with it. More specifically, during a brief interim period between the closure of the original Dryaw to passengers, and the opening of the new passenger line.

12) The Sports Field Halt

At the end of the Sodor Explained video essay, Tug admits that he couldn’t think of anywhere to put this station from Three Cheers For Thomas.

Sam Wilkinson’s map places this halt just south-west of Elsbridge, and that’s where I’ve decided to place it too. Not just because it’s semi-canon, but because do you know what other location is just south-west of Elsbridge?

Yes, this cricket field. In my headcanon, I’ve merged these two locations together. Makes sense, right? They’re both sports related things, next to an embankment, and just south-west of Elsbridge. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch, and you can always imagine the halt is a request stop serving the sports field.

***

Alright, I think that’s enough headcanons for one post. Firstly, because I underestimated just how much I had to talk about. And secondly, I’ve always said it’s not wise to put all your eggs in one basket. It’s much more sensible to just put out a short thing, let it simmer for a while, and then finish off the rest later.

I hope you guys have enjoyed this post. I certainly enjoyed finally getting all these thoughts out there. Stay cool, stay safe, and I’ll share the rest of my thoughts at some point in the future (even if they are as insane as the ones I’ve already shared so far!)...

[letterboxd]

Best of Sundance 2021.

From pandemic-era stories, via portraits of grief, to the serendipitous 1969 trilogy, the Letterboxd crew recaps our favorite films from the first major festival of the year.

Sundance heralds a new season of storytelling, with insights into what’s concerning filmmakers at present, and what artistic innovations may be on the horizon. As with every film festival, there were spooky coincidences and intersecting themes, whether it was a proliferation of pandemic-era stories, or extraordinary portraits of women working through grief (Land, Hive, The World to Come), or the incredible serendipity of the festival’s ‘1969 trilogy’, covering pivotal moments in Black American history: Summer of Soul (...Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Judas and the Black Messiah and the joyful Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street.

The hybrid model of this year’s Sundance meant more film lovers across the United States—a record number of you, in fact—‘attended’ the prestigious indie showcase. Our Festiville team (Gemma Gracewood, Aaron Yap, Ella Kemp, Selome Hailu, Jack Moulton and Dominic Corry) scanned your Letterboxd reviews and compared them with our notes to arrive at these seventeen feature-length documentary and narrative picks from Sundance 2021. There are plenty more we enjoyed, but these are the films we can’t stop thinking about.

Documentary features

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) Directed by Ahmir-Khalib Thompson (AKA Questlove)

One hot summer five decades ago, there was a free concert series at a park in Harlem. It was huge, and it was lovely, and then it was forgotten. The Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 brought together some of the world’s most beloved Black artists to connect with Black audiences. The star power and the size of the crowds alone should have been enough to immortalize the event à la Woodstock—which happened the same summer, the film emphasizes. But no one cared to buy up the footage until Ahmir-Khalib Thompson, better known as Questlove, came along.

It would have been easy to oversimplify such a rich archive by stringing together the performances, seeking out some talking heads, and calling it a day. But Questlove was both careful and ebullient in his approach. “Summer of Soul is a monumental concert documentary and a fantastic piece of reclaimed archived footage. There is perhaps no one better suited to curate this essential footage than Questlove, whose expertise and passion for the music shines through,” writes Matthew on Letterboxd. The film is inventive with its use of present interviews, bringing in both artists and attendees not just to speak on their experiences, but to react to and relive the footage. The director reaches past the festival itself, providing thorough social context that takes in the moon landing, the assassinations of Black political figures, and more. By overlapping different styles of documentary filmmaking, Questlove’s directorial debut embraces the breadth and simultaneity of Black resilience and joy. A deserving winner of both the Grand Jury and Audience awards (and many of our unofficial Letterboxd awards). —SH

Flee Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

Flee is the type of discovery Sundance is designed for. Danish documentarian Jonas Poher Rasmussen tells the poignant story of his close friend and former classmate (using the pseudonym ‘Amin Nawabi’) and his daring escape from persecution in 1990s Afghanistan. Rasmussen always approaches tender topics with sensitivity and takes further steps to protect his friend’s identity by illustrating the film almost entirely in immersive animation, following in the footsteps of Waltz With Bashir and Tower. It’s a film aware of its subjectivity, allowing the animated scenes to alternate between the playful joy of nostalgia and the mournful pain of an unforgettable memory. However, these are intercepted by dramatic archive footage that oppressively brings the reality home.

“Remarkably singular, yet that is what makes it so universal,” writes Paul. “So many ugly truths about the immigration experience—the impossible choices forced upon people, and the inability to really be able to explain all of it to people in your new life… You can hear the longing in his voice, the fear in his whisper. Some don’t get the easy path.” Winner of the World Cinema (Documentary) Grand Jury Prize and quickly acquired by Neon, Flee is guaranteed to be a film you’ll hear a lot about for the rest of 2021. —JM

Taming the Garden Directed by Salomé Jashi

There’s always a moment at a film festival when fatigue sets in, when the empathy machine overwhelms, and when I hit that moment in 2021, I took the advice of filmmaker and Sundance veteran Jim Cummings, who told us: “If you’re ever stressed or tired, watch a documentary to reset yourself.” Taming the Garden wasn’t initially on my hit-list, but it’s one of those moments when the ‘close your eyes and point at a random title’ trick paid off. Documentary director Salomé Jashi does the Lorax’s work, documenting the impact and grief caused by billionaire former Georgian PM Bidzina Ivanishvili’s obsession with collecting ancient trees for his private arboretum.

“A movie that is strangely both infuriating and relaxing” writes Todd, of the long, locked-off wide shots showing the intense process of removing large, old trees from their village homes. There’s no narration, instead Jashi eavesdrops on locals as they gossip about Ivanishvili, argue about whether the money is worth it, and a feisty, irritated 90-year-old warns of the impending environmental fallout. “What you get out of it is absolutely proportional to what you put into it,” writes David, who recommends this film get the IMAX treatment. It’s arboriculture as ASMR, the timeline cleanse my Sundance needed. The extraordinary images of treasured trees being barged across the sea will become iconic. —GG

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World Directed by Kristian Petri and Kristina Lindström

Where Taming the Garden succeeds through pure observation, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World relies on the complete participation of its title subject, actor Björn Andrésen, who was thrust into the spotlight as a teenager. Cast by Italian director Lucino Visconti in Death in Venice, a 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella about obsession and fatal longing, Andrésen spent the 1970s as an object of lust, with a side-gig as a blonde pop star in Japan, inspiring many manga artists along the way.

As we know by now (Alex Winter’s Showbiz Kids is a handy companion to this film), young stardom comes at a price, one that Andrésen was not well-placed to pay even before his fateful audition for Visconti. But he’s still alive, still acting (he’s Dan in Midsommar), and ready to face the mysteries of his past. Like Benjamin Ree’s excellent The Painter and the Thief from last year, this documentary is a constantly unfolding detective story, notable for great archive footage, and a deep kindness towards its reticent yet wide-open subject. —GG

All Light, Everywhere Directed by Theo Anthony

Threading the blind spots between Étienne-Jules Marey’s 19th-century “photographic rifle”, camera-carrying war pigeons and Axon’s body-cam tech, Theo Anthony’s inquisitive, mind-expanding doc about the false promise of the all-seeing eye is absorbing, scary, urgent. It’s the greatest Minority Report origin story you didn’t know you needed.

Augmented by Dan Deacon’s electronic soundscapes and Keaver Brenai’s lullingly robotic narration, All Light, Everywhere proves to be a captivating, intricately balanced experience that Harris describes as “one part Adam Curtis-esque cine-essay”, “one part structural experiment in the vein of Koyaanisqatsi” and “one part accidental character study of two of the most familiar yet strikingly unique evil, conservative capitalists…”. Yes, there’s a tremendous amount to download, but Anthony’s expert weaving, as AC writes, “make its numerous subjects burst with clarity and profundity.” For curious cinephiles, the oldest movie on Letterboxd, Jules Jenssen’s Passage de Vénus (1874), makes a cameo. —AY

The Sparks Brothers Directed by Edgar Wright

Conceived at a Sparks gig in 2017 upon the encouragement of fellow writer-director Phil Lord, Edgar Wright broke his streak of riotous comedies with his first (of many, we hope) rockumentary. While somewhat overstuffed—this is, after all, his longest film by nearly fifteen minutes—The Sparks Brothers speaks only to Wright’s unrestrained passion for his art-pop Gods, exploring all the nooks and crannies of Sparks’ sprawling career, with unprecedented access to brothers and bandmates Ron and Russell Mael.

Nobody else can quite pin them down, so Wright dedicates his time to put every pin in them while he can, building a mythology and breaking it down, while coloring the film with irresistible dives into film history, whimsically animated anecdotes and cheeky captions. “Sparks rules. Edgar Wright rules. There’s no way this wasn’t going to rule”, proclaims Nick, “every Sparks song is its own world, with characters, rules, jokes and layers of narrative irony. What a lovely ode to a creative partnership that was founded on sticking to one’s artistic guns, no matter what may have been fashionable at the time.” —JM

Narrative features

The Pink Cloud Written and directed by Iuli Gerbase

The Pink Cloud is disorienting and full of déjà vu. Brazilian writer-director Iuli Gerbase constructs characters that are damned to have to settle when it comes to human connection. Giovana and Yago’s pleasant one-night stand lasts longer than expected when the titular pink cloud emerges from the sky, full of a mysterious and deadly gas that forces everyone to stay locked where they stand. Sound familiar? Reserve your groans—The Pink Cloud wasn’t churned out to figure out “what it all means” before the pandemic is even over. Gerbase wrote and shot the film prior to the discovery of Covid-19.

It’s “striking in its ability to prophesize a pandemic and a feeling unknown at the time of its conception. What was once science fiction hits so close now,” writes Sam. As uncanny as the quarantine narrative feels, what’s truly harrowing is how well the film predicts and understands interiorities that the pandemic later exacerbated. Above all, Giovana is a woman with unmet needs. She is a good partner, good mother and good person even when she doesn’t want to be. Even those who love her cannot see how their expectations strip her of her personhood, and the film dares to ask what escape there might be when love itself leaves you lonely. —SH

Together Together Written and directed by Nikole Beckwith

Every festival needs at least one indie relationship dramedy, and Together Together filled that role at Sundance 2021 with a healthy degree of subversion. It follows rom-com structure while ostensibly avoiding romance, instead focusing on how cultivating adult friendships can be just hard, if not harder.

Writer-director Nikole Beckwith warmly examines the limits of the platonic, and Patti Harrison and Ed Helms are brilliantly cast as the not-couple: a single soon-to-be father and the surrogate carrying his child. They poke at each other’s boundaries with a subtle desperation to know what makes a friendship appropriate or real. As Jacob writes: “It’s cute and serious, charming without being quirky. It’s a movie that deals with the struggle of being alone in this world, but offers a shimmer of hope that even if you don’t fall in fantastical, romantic, Hollywood love… there are people out there for you.” —SH

Hive Written and directed by Blerta Basholli

Hive, for some, may fall into the “nothing much happens” slice-of-life genre, but Blerta Basholli’s directorial debut holds an ocean of pain in its small tale, asking us to consider the heavy lifting that women must always do in the aftermath of war. As Liz writes, “Hive is not just a story about grief and trauma in a patriarchy-dominated culture, but of perseverance and the bonds created by the survivors who must begin to consider the future without their husbands.”

Yllka Gashi is an understated hero as Fahrjie, a mother-of-two who sets about organizing work for the women of her village, while awaiting news of her missing husband—one of thousands unaccounted for, years after the Kosovo War has ended. The townsmen have many opinions about how women should and shouldn’t mourn, work, socialize, parent, drive cars and, basically, get on with living, but Fahrjie persists, and Basholli sticks close with an unfussy, tender eye. “It felt like I was a fly on the wall, witnessing something that was actually happening,” writes Arthur. Just as in Robin Wright’s Land and Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come, Hive pays off in the rare, beaming smile of its protagonist. —GG

On the Count of Three Directed by Jerrod Carmichael, written by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch

It starts with an image: two best friends pointing guns at each other’s heads. There’s no anger, there’s no hatred—this is an act of merciful brotherly love. How do you have a bleak, gun-totin’ buddy-comedy in 2021 and be critically embraced without contradicting your gun-control retweets or appearing as though your film is the dying embers of Tarantino-tinged student films?

Comedian Jerrod Carmichael’s acerbic directorial debut On the Count of Three achieves this by calling it out every step of the way. Guns are a tool to give insecure men the illusion of power. They are indeed a tool too terrifying to trust in the hands of untrained citizens. Carmichael also stars, alongside Christopher Abbott, who has never been more hilarious or more tragic, bringing pathos to a cathartic rendition of Papa Roach’s ‘Last Resort’. Above all, Carmichael and Abbott’s shared struggle and bond communicates the millennial malaise: how can you save others if you can’t save yourself? “Here’s what it boils down to: life is fucking hard”, Laura sums up, “and sometimes the most we can hope for is to have a best friend who loves you [and] to be a best friend who loves. It doesn’t make life any easier, but it sure helps.” Sundance 2021 is one for the books when it comes to documentaries, but On the Count of Three stands out in the fiction lineup this year. —JM

Censor Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond, written by Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher

The first of several upcoming films inspired by the ‘video nasty’ moral panic over gory horror in mid-’80s Britain, Prano Bailey-Bond leans heavily into both the period and the genre in telling the story of a film censor (a phenomenal Niamh Algar—vulnerable and steely at the same time) who begins to suspect a banned movie may hold the key to her sister’s childhood disappearance. Often dreamlike, occasionally phantasmagorical and repeatedly traumatic, even if the worst gore presented (as seen in the impressively authentic fictional horrors being appraised) appears via a screen, providing a welcome degree of separation.

Nevertheless, Censor is definitely not for the faint of heart, but old-school horror aficionados will squeal with delight at the aesthetic commitment. “I’m so ecstatic that horror is in the hands of immensely talented women going absolutely batshit in front of and behind the camera.” writes Erik. (Same here!) “A great ode to the video-nasty era and paying tribute to the great horror auteurs of the ’80s such as Argento, De Palma and Cronenberg while also doing something new with the genre. Loved this!” writes John, effectively encapsulating Censor’s unfettered film-nerd appeal. —DC

CODA Written and directed by Siân Heder

A film so earnest it shouldn’t work, with a heart so big it should surely not fit the size of the screen, CODA broke records (the first US dramatic film in Sundance history to win all three top prizes; the 25-million-dollar sale to Apple Studios), and won the world over like no other film. “A unique take on something we’ve seen so much,” writes Amanda, nailing the special appeal of Siân Heder’s coming-of-ager and family portrait. Emilia Jones plays Ruby, the only hearing person in her deaf family, at war between the family business and her passion for singing. While Heder is technically remaking the French film La Famille Bélier, the decision to cast brilliant deaf actors—Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant—makes this feel brand new.

But it’s not just about representation for the sake of it. A sense of authenticity, in humor as much as affection, shines through. With a script that’s 40 per cent ASL, so many of the jokes are visual gags, poking fun at Tinder and rap music, but a lot of the film’s most poignant moments are silent as well. And in Ruby’s own world, too, choir kids will feel seen. “I approve of this very specific alto representation and the brilliant casting of the entire choir,” Laura confirms in her review. Come for the fearless, empathetic family portrait, stay for the High School Musical vibes that actually ring true. —EK

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

Perhaps the most singular addition to the recent flurry of Extremely Online cinema—Searching, Spree, Host, et al—Jane Schoenbrun’s feature debut ushers the viewer into a haunted, hypno-drone miasma of delirium-inducing YouTube time-suck, tenebrous creepypasta lore and painfully intimate webcam confessionals. Featuring an extraordinarily unaffected, fearless performance by newcomer Anna Cobb, the film “unpacks the mythology of adolescence in a way that’s so harrowingly familiar and also so otherworldly”, writes Kristen. Not since Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse has there been such an eerily lonely, and at times strangely beautiful, evocation of the liminal spaces between virtual and real worlds.

For members of the trans community, it’s also a work that translates that experience to screen with uncommon authenticity. “What Schoenbrun has accomplished with the form of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is akin to catching a wisp of smoke,” writes Willow, “because the images, mood and aesthetic that they have brought to life is one that is understood completely by trans people as one of familiarity, without also plunging into the obvious melodrama, or liberal back-patting that is usually associated with ‘good’ direct representation.” One of the most original, compelling new voices to emerge from Sundance this year. —AY

Judas and the Black Messiah Directed by Shaka King, written by King, Will Berson, Kenneth Lucas and Keith Lucas

It was always going to take a visionary, uncompromising filmmaker to bring the story of Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party, to life. Shaka King casts Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield as William “Wild Bill” O’Neal, the FBI informant whose betrayal leads to Hampton’s assassination. Both actors have never been better, particularly Kaluuya who Fran Hoepfner calls “entrancing, magnetic, fizzling, romantic, riveting, endlessly watchable.”

Judas and the Black Messiah is an electric, involving watch: not just replaying history by following a certain biopic template. Instead, it’s a film with something to say—on power, on fear, on war and on freedom. “Shaka King’s name better reverberate through the halls of every studio after this,” writes Demi. A talent like this, capable of framing such a revolution, doesn’t come around so often. We’d better listen up. —EK

Pleasure Directed by Ninja Thyberg, written by Thyberg and Peter Modestij

A24’s first purchase of 2021. Ironically titled on multiple levels, Pleasure is a brutal film that you endure more than enjoy. But one thing you can’t do is forget it. Ninja Thyberg’s debut feature follows a young Swedish woman (Sofia Kappel) who arrives in Los Angeles with dreams of porn stardom under the name ‘Bella Cherry’. Although Bella is clear-eyed about the business she’s getting into, Thyberg doesn’t shy away from any of the awfulness she faces in order to succeed in an industry rife with exploitation and abuse. Bella does make allies, and the film isn’t suggesting that porn is only stocked with villains, but the ultimate cost is clear, even if it ends on an ever-so-slightly ambiguous note.

Touching as it does on ambition, friendship and betrayal in the sex business, Pleasure is often oddly reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Or rather, the gritty film Showgirls was claiming to be, as opposed to the camp classic it became. There’s nothing campy here. Kappel is raw and fearless in the lead, but never lets the viewer lose touch with her humanity. Emma puts it well: “Kappel gives the hardest, most provocative and transfixing performance I’ve seen all festival.” “My whole body was physically tense during this,” writes Gillian, while Keegan perhaps speaks for most when she says “Great film, never want to see it again.” —DC

Coming Home in the Dark Directed by James Ashcroft, written by Ashcroft and Eli Kent

A family camping trip amidst some typically stunnin—and casually foreboding— New Zealand scenery is upended by a shocking rug-pull of violence that gives way to sustained terror represented by Daniel Gillies’ disturbingly calm psychopath. The set-up of this thriller initially suggests a spin on the backwoods brutality thriller, but as Coming Home in the Dark progresses and hope dissipates, the motivations reveal themselves to be much more personal in nature, and informed on a thematic level by New Zealand’s colonial crimes against its Indigenous population. It’s a stark and haunting film that remains disorientating and unpredictable throughout, repeatedly daring the viewer to anticipate what will happen next, only to casually stomp on each glimmer of a positive outcome.

It’s so captivatingly bleak that a viewing of it, as Collins Ezeanyim’s eloquent reaction points out, does not lend itself to completing domestic tasks. The film marks an auspicious debut for director and co-writer James Ashcroft. Jacob writes that he “will probably follow James Ashcroft’s career to the gates of Hell after this one”. Justin hits the nail on the head with his description: “Lean and exceptionally brutal road/revenge film … that trades in genre tropes, especially those of Ozploitation and ’70s Italian exploitation, but contextualizes them in the dark history of its country of origin.” —DC

The World to Come Directed by Mona Fastvold, written by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard

Mona Fastvold has not made the first, nor probably the last, period romance about forbidden lesbian love. But The World to Come focuses on a specific pocket in time, a world contained in Jim Shepard’s short story ‘Love & Hydrogen’ from within the collection giving the film its name. Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby are Abigail and Tallie, farming neighbors, stifled by their husbands, who find brief moments of solace, of astonishment and joy, together. What shines here is the script, a verbose, delicate narration that emanates beauty more than pretence. “So beautifully restrained and yet I felt everything,” Iana writes.

And you can feel the fluidity and elegance in the way the film sounds, too: composer Daniel Blumberg’s clarinet theme converses with the dialogue and tells you when your heart can break, when you must pause, when the end is near. “So much heartache. So much hunger. So much longing. Waves of love and grief and love and grief,” writes Claira, capturing the ebb and flow of emotion that keeps The World to Come in your mind long after the screen has gone silent. —EK

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[possessivesuffix]

Doing some work again on organizing my various linguistics drafts and notes, running back 10 years, and it's noteworthy (ha) just how much of this requires constructing a typology-of-documents, or how choices on this are going to differ depending on their purpose

I keep the papers I have on my computer organized primarily by language family (for anything descriptive or comparative-historical, which is most of what I have around) or subfield (e.g. phonology, history of linguistics). But this is really not workable for drafts. For one, often enough something that starts e.g. as an observation on or examination of Finnish might later end up extending itself to cover all Finnic languages or some larger group still. For two, the majority of the drafts I have around would really end up in a single bin "comparative Uralic phonology", most of the rest also in a handful of similar ones like "comparative Khanty phonology" or "comparative Uralic morphology". Studying a wide range of different languages is important in comparative linguistics, but in research you do have to pick foci (or risk ending up only contributing superficial results in a common mold… e.g. there's a guy who puts out lots of glottochronological analyses of all sorts of language families but seems to know nothing about or be unwilling to use any other methods of classification or absolute dating).

Anyway, some of the document subtypes I've ended up with instead so far, in case this helps anyone else:

"datasets": raw or minimally organized data on a topic, generally spreadsheet-ish formats, sometimes with associated notes files on sources, principles of compilation, or explaining various more esoteric marker columns I may have ended up adding

"data dumps": similar to the above but more incomplete, perhaps pulled from a single source, perhaps not for particularly much later use but just to look over if some or someone's data has any glaring statistical patterns (for better or for worse); sometimes perhaps equal in planned scope to the first but just extremely in-progress (e.g. I have several starts of digitized indexes of old dialect dictionaries that currently cover no more than 5%-ish of their source)

"surveys": selections of data for exploring or elucidating some hypothesis or the other; for me most often of the shape "what are the reflexes of segment(s) *X *Y… across a given set of language varieties {A B…}". Mostly aligned plain text files since these need flexible commenting options and not much dynamic sorting options.

"graphs": fairly self-explanatory, includes things like statistics, family trees, schematic maps (of e.g. areal features), graphical representations of sound correspondences or relative chronologies

"notes": somewhat heterogeneous things, mostly bibliographic things like quotes, collections of references on a topic, my own comments or annotations on lengthy sources; or collections of observations on a hypothesis (possible arguments pro/con, etc.)

"draftlets": paper outlines or paper idea outlines, isolated chapters or paragraphs that could be incorporated into a paper, essay or blog-post-ish writings

actual drafts of papers or publishable datasets; these and the documents below not filed in a common subfolder but in their own primary folders. Also, any notes, data, presentation slides etc. directly associated with these will also not be filed in general thematic subfolders but instead together with the draft itself. Actually published works and works I'm aiming to publish next are given running numbers.

as an all-important singular notes file, the list of etymologies I've thought up, with subsections including published / presented / rediscovered / publishable / needs more research / anti-etymologies

under work currently, an index of blog posts I've posted on the main blog, or also the more effortpost-like ones here, over the years (will be put online once I'm done with it). (I should probably eventually have a list of "recognized" publications separate from my CV in general, but you know, those are currently countable on one hand while even just my main blog posts are in triple digits.)

lastly, a general list of planned publications which tracks what the state of any particular ideas of mine are currently (i.e. if there are drafts, draftlets, notes, surveys, blog posts…), independently of more specific publication plans for particular projects such as my PhD studies in particular

[becuzitisbitter]

Meeting Your Maker

Another essay I wrote for school.  This one’s about 4 pages and is a reading of Susan Stryker’s  My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix, for the benefit of my composition 101 class.

    In “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” Susan Stryker makes an emotionally-powerful statement to the world which has rejected her as a transsexual woman by mobilizing a critical reading of Mary Shelley’s foundational science fiction novel, Frankenstein, to give an account of her situation and to make the case for the transformative power of rage against all that is supposed to be natural from the position of the unnatural. It was originally delivered as a performance piece at California State University in 1993 as part of a conference aimed at theorizing rage.

    Stryker grabs the attention of the reader immediately with a few short, rapid-fire sentences: “The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction.” Next, she begins to explain what she means and presents the essential analogy of the piece, adding “It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” This identification with the monster’s unnatural origin is central to the piece, but the monster’s rage with its creator and the entirety of the world from which it is excluded is also essential. These two themes, that her body is unnatural and that this unnaturalness is the basis of an exclusion which she feels as an enraging pain, work together to drive the piece to its conclusions.

    The tendency to associate transgender bodies with Mary Shelley’s work predates Stryker’s work, though.“I am not the first to link Frankenstein’s monster and the transsexual body,” (Stryker 2) she clarifies. She proceeds to quote the transphobic remarks of Mary Daly and Janice Raymond, a pair of influential feminists, comparing transgender people to Frankenstein’s monster. Her response is to return to the text, arguing that the monster importantly appears in the story as Frankenstein’s “...dark, romantic double,” (Stryker 2) She asks what making such comparisons between transgender people and the Monster might imply about the people making them, “Might I suggest that Daly, Raymond and others of their ilk similarly construct the transsexual as their own particular golem?” (Stryker 2)

    Stryker doesn’t shrink away from the monstrous associations such transphobic feminists make, instead she embraces the archetype, turning on them the way the monster turned on its maker. She says, “When such beings as these tell me I war with nature, I find no more reason to mourn my opposition to them—or to the order they claim to represent—than Frankenstein’s monster felt in its enmity to the human race.” (Stryker 3) Indeed, she does not shrink away from these critics’ company, she roars “...gleefully away from it like a Harley-straddling, dildo- packing leatherdyke from hell.” (Stryker 3)

    Examining what it means to be labelled a creature, Stryker says that it is essentially to be something (presumably something with a subjective experience) which is created rather than appearing naturally. She does not elaborate on the reasoning behind this premise, but goes a step further to say that people take offense at being called or compared to creatures precisely because most people are accustomed to affording themselves a higher status, that of creator rather than created. Her reactive impulse is markedly different. She says, “I find no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix of possibilities.” (Stryker 4) She doesn’t see the appeal of the civilizing separation between Man as maker and creator on the one hand, and the rest of the world on the other, which is presumed to be infinitely passive, infinitely subject to use and attribution by others. Instead, she allows this schism to drive her back into solidarity with all that is unnatural.

    For Stryker, revulsion toward transgender people stems from their inability or refusal to conform to the supposed natural order, distilled to its most-essential form in the rigid categories of man and woman. Although the transgender body is said to be monstrous because of its artificiality, Stryker says all that is called Nature and used as a cudgel against transgender people is actually just as artificial, just as constructed as the transgender body. She warns the reader against the falsity of Nature as a concept, “Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense.” Here, she asserts the general threat transgender people pose to the social order, which is to make-visible all of the horrible techniques by which each person is made into themselves. After all, she says, “You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both.” (Stryker 4) The author is attempting to make good on the threats her experience is said to pose toward nature; in fact, this is exactly the way forward she suggests, “Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.” (Stryker 4)

    In spite of her close identification with the creature, Stryker specifies that their situations are not the same, noting that, “Unlike the monster, we often successfully cite the culture’s visual norms of gendered embodiment.” (Stryker 4) Transgender people cite these visual norms through the manipulation of subtle signifiers such as hair length, cut of clothing, use of makeup, wearing packers and binders, and medically altering the appearances of their bodies. This becomes subversive, she says, when transgender people, “...declare the unnaturalness of our claim to the subject positions we nevertheless occupy. (Stryker 4)

    Stryker reminds us that after Frankenstein’s monster learns the details of its creation, “...rather than bless its creator, the monster curses him.” Frankenstein cannot control the monster’s mind. “It exceeds and refutes his purposes.” (Stryker 5) This is central to one of Stryker’s main uses of the Frankenstein analogy; if the Monster’s mind is not beholden to Frankenstein, the transgender consciousness is also not determined by the doctors who reshape flesh or the entrepreneurs who sell synthetic penises. Although medicine is capable of making a body seem natural to any observer, being the subject of such techniques might permanently alter the way one views nature or medicine in general, or as Stryker says, “engaging with those very techniques produces a subjective experience that belies the naturalistic effect biomedical technology can achieve.” (Stryker 5)

    In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein meets with his creation at last while hiking the glaciers above the village of Chamounix. The two go to a cabin together where the monster spends almost a quarter of the book telling Frankenstein its story from its own perspective to explain why it has turned against him. The essay itself enters Stryker’s analogy, “These are my words to Victor Frankenstein, above the village of Chamounix.” (Stryker 6) She goes on, later in the passage, “I, too, have discovered the journals of the men who made my body, and who have made the bodies of creatures like me since the 1930’s.” (Stryker 6) She is well aware that the scientists who developed sexual reassignment surgical and hormonal treatments did so for wildly different motivations than those that led her to engage in them. However, by nature of her desire to engage in them, she must submit herself to their categorizations, and of course at the time of her writing, to be transgender necessarily meant maintaining a proximity to diagnoses of mental illness. She comments on the effect of this, “Through the filter of this official pathologization, the sounds that come out of my mouth can be summarily dismissed as the confused ranting of a diseased mind.” (Stryker 6) This highlights the uneasy relationship between transgender people and the medical community at large. After all, the doctors who perform sexual reassignment surgeries and the like are not accused of insanity, as are the patients who submit to their care.

    The essay shifts into a journal entry about the day the author’s partner gave birth. She describes a powerful and moving birthing process, awkwardly interrupted for her alone by a thoughtless designation by the baby’s biological father, upon seeing the baby’s genitals, “It’s a girl!” (Stryker 7) Returning home, she was filled with a well of pent-up emotions. She says, “To conclude the birth ritual I had participated in, I needed to move something in me as profound as a whole human life.” (Stryker 7)

    She looks inward, and backward through time, reflecting on the relationship she had been in when she had her first child, before coming out as a woman. She remembers, “I had always wanted intimacy with women more than intimacy with men, and that wanting had always felt queer to me. She needed it to appear straight.” The author wanted to love women as a woman and her partner needed love from a man. Thus, refusing the gender she was assigned at birth, she refused the love that was predicated on it. In other instances related to the most recent birth, after she came out as a woman, people would ask if she were the baby’s father, of which she says, “It shows so dramatically how much they simply don’t get about what I’m doing with my body.” (Stryker 8) This interconnected web of rejections and losses is perhaps what leads her to conclude that “Nature exerts such a hegemonic oppression.” (Stryker 8)

     The text continues in italics, in a more-poetic tone before breaking into poetry completely. The author was reeling from the day’s compressed emotions: the intensity of birthing, the dark cloud of the baby’s gendering, and the recollection of past relationships. She seems sad here, and angry, but also resolute, saying, “I can never be a woman like other women, but I could never be a man.” (Stryker 8) This hard realization drives her to reject that false choice. Instead, she says, “I do war with nature. I am alienated from Being.”

    From here she moves on into the actual poetry. She references drowning and becoming water to escape, “If I cannot change my situation I will change myself.” (Stryker 8) This moment of recognition of her existence in an unlivable space and being forced to become something else carries through to the final lines of the poem, “In birthing my rage, / my rage has rebirthed me.” (Stryker) and into the final portion of the essay.

    If the categories of gender are transmutable, then anyone with the power to “...cite the culture’s visual norms of gendered embodiment.” (4) also has the ability to reduce all the trappings of identity to a tactical level and explore new possibilities, or as Stryker puts it, “... by mobilizing gendered identities and rendering them provisional, open to strategic development and occupation, this rage enables the establishment of subjects in new modes, regulated by different codes of intelligibility.” (10)

    Gender attribution robs individuals of this tactical posture toward gender and expression, pushing them into narrow corridors of expression instead. Babies are unable to choose this fate for themselves. This is critical because fotr Stryker, gendering a child is not a simple labeling, it is a prescription for a lifetime of behaviors that will have to be programmed into the child. She explains, “Gendering is the initial step in this transformation, inseparable from the process of forming an identity by means of which we’re fitted to a system of exchange in a heterosexual economy.” (Stryker 10) This fitting for a system of exchange, she says, is exactly what is meant by phrases like, “It’s a girl.” (Stryker 10) It is for exactly this reason that to be without gender, or even to perform gender incorrectly, would form the basis for social exclusion. If gender is meant to be a universal means of social coding, being able to express one clearly is a precondition to be understood. Stryker puts it this way, “A gendering violence is the founding condition of human subjectivity; having a gender is the tribal tattoo that makes one’s personhood cognizable.” (Stryker 10) Considering her own participation in gendering an infant, she speculates about the baby’s future, “I stood for a moment between the pain of two violations, the mark of gender, and the unlivability of its absence.” (Stryker 10) As violent and painful as her relationship to gender has been, she wonders whether it would be possible for the child to exist at all in our world without a gender, “Could I say which one was worse? Or could I only say which one I felt could best be survived.” (Stryker 10)

    In bringing the piece to a close, Stryker continues to look toward the future and its possibilities for herself and other creatures like her. Even if gender presents itself as inescapable, that does not preclude the strategic approach to its expression she suggested earlier, “Though I cannot escape its power, I can move through its medium.” (Stryker 10) Perhaps, she suggests, by using the medium against itself, she can short-circuit the meanings that gendered signification are meant to communicate and even elaborate new and exciting ways to use the social coding of gender to express new ideas, “Though I may not hold the stylus myself, I can move beneath it for my own deep self-sustaining pleasures.” (Stryker 11)

    In spite of this optimistic note about the potential to play with gender’s meaning, she holds that transgender people undermine this system’s integrity, because “To encounter the transsexual body, to apprehend a transgendered consciousness articulating itself, is to risk a revelation of the constructedness of the natural order.” (Stryker 11) She also reasserts that one cannot take part in this process without being transformed by it, “Be forewarned, however, that taking up this task will remake you in the process.” (Stryker 11)

    The ultimate subversion is that the monstrous are resolute in articulating themselves in spite of the peril such expression spells for civilization. “Like that creature, I assert my worth as a monster in spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face, and redefine a life worth living.” (Stryker 11) After all, Stryker didn’t ask to be born into this particular world. Like the monster, she asks, “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?” (qtd. in Stryker 11)

    In the end Stryker parts with her reader with a sort of benediction, “May your rage inform your actions, and your actions transform you as you struggle to transform your world.” (Stryker 11) In the final words of the essay, then, she is returning to one of its central themes. One cannot engage with the world without being changed by it. Perhaps this is the process by which the world moulds monsters from each of us. It is only by investigating our seams and sutures for ourselves that we can learn the impact the world has had on us, or the impact we might have on it.

    Works Cited

Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix” June 1993, https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Stryker-My-Words-to-VF.pdf

[writing-the-end]

WS Chapter 47- Fire and Brimstone

Previous Chapter

Masterpost

So.....i didn’t have the chance to fully edit this. I got some really unwelcome news followed by an argument, and suddenly it was almost 8:30. If there’s any mistakes, feel free to yell at me in the comments or my ask.

Ecto belongs to @cooler-cactus-block

Red belongs to @theguardiansofredland​

Avon was on watch, but Ecto slips into the darkness without her friend noticing. Normally, all three wanderers try to sleep close together. To minimize the threat of attack, and to make packing up easier. Plus, cuddles. But since their fight, Ecto had distanced herself. Kept the fire between herself and the others. She ate alone, she curled up to sleep alone. She was used to being alone- that’s how she was for most of her life. 

So leaving alone shouldn’t have been so hard. But it was. It took all her strength not to turn around, to return to the warmth and comfort that the fire, that her friends offer. Ecto was not backing down- not now. She’s decided what she’ll do. She can’t sit around and let people decide her fate, sit around and watch things happen. She was going to stand, and fight. Put herself between the danger and those who aren’t as strong willed as her. And get to bash a few enemies in the process was a bonus.

Ecto didn’t know how to make a nether portal- rather, she didn’t know how to make obsidian. She tried to rip it apart from a pond of cooled lava a few days back, but the fragile volcanic glass shattered in her hands. It was while Ecto was watching rain fall, cooling the lava into the black stone that she realized what she can do. 

She may not have the tools to mine obsidian, but she does have two buckets and two pools of liquid nearby. It’s a consuming process, dangerous at best. Lava pours from the heated bucket, and she has to be quick to douse the flames before they burn down the forest around her. She singes her fingers and hair a few times, but manages to construct an obsidian rift frame. Ecto takes a step back, counting to make sure she has the right dimensions. The black frame is imposing, volcanic glass absorbing and refracting light away from the structure. 

Ecto pulls out the flint and steel, looking over her shoulder. She doesn’t know what she’s looking out for, or searching for. Maybe she’s searching for prying eyes- either the hellspawns or her own friends. Maybe she’s hoping her friends will see her, join her. But the only other creature watching as she ignites the portal is a pig. And even the pig flees. Ecto gets a shiver in her spine, a feeling in the pit of her stomach that this is a stupid, dangerous idea. 

Which is why she jumps in before her body can hesitate. Ecto has grown used to the feeling of traveling between worlds and dimensions. She’s used to the feeling of everything and nothing, used to feeling like she’s hungry and full, used to being in unbearable agony and perfect euphoria. 

But it still doesn’t mean she’s able to catch herself when she stumbles to the other side. She goes crashing into the red dirt. It’s clumpy, like clay rather than soil, staining her skin and clothes the color of blood. Ecto checks to make sure it isn’t actually blood, breathing out relief when she clears herself. 

Ecto stands to her feet, looking around. So this is the Nether, the one thing Avon fears above everything else. It’s hot...really hot, and that’s coming from Ecto. She looks up, trying to find the sun as she walks. It has to be the sun that is making this so- 

She catches herself before she drops into lava. One foot already over the ledge, she practically jumps back from the sizzling sea of molten rock. Okay, it’s not the sun. It’s entire lakes and seas of lava. Grey sand catches on Ecto’s feet as she walks the beach, the grain sticking to her shoes and wisping across with her. Dragging her down, making her slower. She swears it feels like hands are on her feet, and with each step she can hear a distant scream. Is that the sand? Or some creature she’s yet to lay her eyes on? She feels like she’s walking in a massive cavern. There is no sky, only more and more of this netherrack and soulsand. Not the endless void of the End, or the midnight sky of the Overworld. The only light comes from the sea of fire below her, or the few deposits of glowing stone above her head. Starbursts of yellow light, across the angry red scene before her. 

Sometimes, when Ecto is walking, she passes by slight changes in the nether. The air grows cooler, calmer. Beneath her feet, she notices the netherrack has been disturbed. Blue and red fungus buried in their own soil, crushed and overturned. She can see the roots of trees, long cut and burned away. She crouches down, picking up a broken vine. The cut is clean- cut with a tool. 

At first, Ecto can’t see the fortress. The red brick blends in with the red wall and the red ceiling and the red mist that it’s hard to outline. It’s not until she gets closer, noticing the heavy foot traffic in the netherrack that Ecto understands where she is. The fortress rises from the netherrack, grand staircases and fences in the same uniform style and color as the rest of the building. Pylons emerge from the sea of fire, holding up open air bridges high in the cavern. Square, enclosed buildings rise from the bridges, guarded by beasts that seem to be aflame as they move. Blazing, curling and turning like dancing fire as they hover. Definitely not something Ecto wants to deal with. 

She ducks into the long halls, the tunnels along the bridges. She can hear murmuring in the distance, and the ringing of metal against metal echoing down the halls. While initially drawn towards the sound of a fight, Ecto backs off. Avon was right about one thing- they’re outmatched. And as long as they have the dragon egg, as long as they have the upper hand, the wanderers will continue to only be runaways. She’s not here to fight a battle- she’s here to win a war. Hit them where it hurts. 

It’s been a long time since Ecto’s been alone. How long have the wanderers been travelling? The heat does remind her of her desert, a comfortable warmth that she does her best not to get distracted by. She misses the hot, dry climate of her home biome. And now, she finds that she’s starting to miss the presence of friends. She’s so used to being alone, why now does it bother her? Why does she wish for Red’s bouncing enthusiasm, Avon calm demeanor? She doesn’t need them to do this. She can do this by herself. She didn’t need to wait for them to forget her, to leave her. 

She left them. Ecto jumps into a patch of warty fungi, ducking under a staircase as armored footsteps march down the stairs. She covers her mouth and nose with a wrapped mask, tight and secure along her lower face. Muffling her harsh breath, and filtering a little bit of the awful brimstone scent in the air. How does anyone learn to live with this scent, like chicken eggs left in a chest for too long? 

Ecto slips down the hall, trying to be as stealthy as her lanky body can let her. She pulls her scarves close, and runs across the hard netherbrick like she’s running across sand. Soft footsteps in bouncing strides that disturb as little as possible. She peeks down the corridors, slips up staircases, edges around lava pits. 

Until she stops. At first, the voices sound exactly like Red and Avon. Red’s lighter, higher toned voice against Avon’s pitchy chatter. Except the tone of Red’s voice is sharp, like a knife cutting through their enemy, while Avon’s doesn’t have the husky tone from years of disuse. 

That’s not Red and Avon. They haven’t followed Ecto into the end. It’s their antithesis- Blu and Nova. And Endo. “Would you just shut up already, Nova? You don’t need to go telling the whole goddamn barrack about this brilliant master plan.” 

“It’s not like you came up with it in the first place.” Blu posits, blade swinging in lazy circles as they come around the corner. Ecto crams herself into a high up corner, dark and hopefully out of view of the hellspawns. She could’ve run, or hidden beneath the stairs- but that’s just not her train of thought. 

“But I’m the best one to explain to the rest of the army! What, would you rather Endo bores this entire squadron to death with her long winded essays on perfect battle strategy and undercutting the enemy?” Nova whacks her hand against Blu’s head, embers bursting from the firey hair tied back in a short ponytail. “And I doubt your rattled mind even knows what the plan is.” 

“I know that we need to do something with that egg.” Blu hisses. “And I know that this would all be over with already if we could just kill off those three idiots!” 

Endo shakes her head, the slick magma of her hair shifting color but hardly moving. “No matter how much we raize the nether, warped forests and fungi keep regrowing. The warped magic is coming from the End, but we can only guess that crimson magic is invading from the overworld.” 

“Of course it is. That place is freaky and weird enough, it just had to spill over and start growing shit all over the nether. But what does that have to do with the egg?” The trio pass by, hardly walking in unison. In fact, Ecto couldn’t say any of the three look remotely like friends, or even allies. They’re bodies are tense, especially when on gets too close to another. Ecto isn’t sure if he’s ever heard them not fighting- not just bickering like Ecto and Avon sometimes do, but full on attacking one another. Ecto leans out, trying to listen in as the hellspawns keep walking on. 

“You would like to know, wouldn’t you?” Endo stops, letting the others screech to a halt. Endo doesn’t look over her shoulders, but a horrible chill goes down Ecto’s spine all the same. “A little far from home, aren’t you Overlander?”

[arcticdementor]

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked why it is that the Woke won’t seem to have a debate or discussion about their views, and I’ve been meaning to write something about it for ages, probably a year at this point. Surely you’ll have noticed that they don’t tend to engage in debates or conversation?

It is not, as many think, a fear of being exposed as fraudulent or illegitimate—or otherwise of losing the debate or looking bad in the challenging conversation—that prevents those who have internalized a significant amount of the Critical Social Justice Theory mindset that prevents these sorts of things from happening. There’s a mountain of Theoretical reasons that they would avoid all such activities, and even if those are mere rationalizations of a more straightforward fear of being exposed as fraudulent or losing, they are shockingly well-developed and consistent rationalizations that deserve proper consideration and full explanation.

…

There are a number of points within Critical Social Justice Theory that would see having a debate or conversation with people of opposing views as unacceptable, and they all combine to create a mindset where that wouldn’t be something that adherents to the Theory are likely or even willing to do in general. This reticence, if not unwillingness, to converse with anyone who disagrees actually has a few pretty deep reasons behind it, and they’re interrelated but not quite the same. They combine, however, to produce the first thing everyone needs to understand about this ideology: it is a complete worldview with its own ethics, epistemology, and morality, and theirs is not the same worldview the rest of us use. Theirs is, very much in particular, not liberal. In fact, theirs advances itself rather parasitically or virally by depending upon us to play the liberal game while taking advantage of its openings. That’s not the same thing as being willing to play the liberal game themselves, however, including to have thoughtful dialogue with people who oppose them and their view of the world. Conversation and debate are part of our game, and they are not part of their game.

…

The first thing to understand about the way adherents to Critical Social Justice view the world is just how deeply they have accepted the belief that we operate within a wholly systemically oppressive system. That system extends to literally everything, not just material structures, institutions, law, policies, and so on, but also into cultures, mindsets, ways of thinking, and how we determine what is and isn’t true about the world. In their view, the broadly liberal approach to knowledge and society is, in fact, rotted through with “white, Western, male (and so on) biases,” and this is such a profound departure from how the rest of us—broadly, liberals—think about the world that it is almost impossible to understand just how deeply and profoundly they mean this.

In a 2014 paper by the black feminist epistemology heavyweight Kristie Dotson, she explains that our entire epistemic landscape is itself profoundly unequal. Indeed, she argues that it is intrinsically and “irreducibly” so, meaning that it is not possible from within the prevailing system of knowledge and understanding to understand or know that the system itself is unfairly biased toward certain ways of knowing (white, Western, Eurocentric, male, etc.) and thus exclusionary of other ways of knowing (be those what they may). That is, Dotson explains that when we look across identity groups, not only do we find a profound lack of “shared epistemic resources” by which people can come to understand things in the same way as one another, but also that the lack extends to the ability to know that that dismal state of affairs is the case at all. This, she refers to as “irreducible” epistemic oppression, which she assigns to the third and most severe order of forms of epistemic oppression, and says that it requires a “third-order change” to the “organizational schemata” of society (i.e., a complete epistemic revolution that removes the old epistemologies and replaces them with new ones) in order to find repair.

…

Bailey’s point is clear: the usual tools by which we identify provisional truths and settle scholarly disagreements are part of the hegemonically dominant system that, by definition, cannot be sufficiently radical to create real revolutionary change (a “third-order” change, as Dotson has it). That is, they can’t reorder society in the radical way they deem necessary. The belief, as both scholars explain in different ways, is that to play by the existing rules (like conversation and debate as a means to better understand society and advance truth) is to automatically be co-opted by those rules and to support their legitimacy, beside one deeper problem that’s even more significant.

The deeper, more significant aspect of this problem is that by participating in something like conversation or debate about scholarly, ethical, or other disagreements, not only do the radical Critical Social Justice scholars have to tacitly endorse the existing system, they also have to be willing to agree to participate in a system in which they truly believe they cannot win. This isn’t the same as saying they know they’d lose the debate because they know their methods are weak. It’s saying that they believe their tools are extremely good but not welcome in the currently dominant system, which is a different belief based on different assumptions. Again, their game is not our game, and they don’t want to play our game at all; they want to disrupt and dismantle it.

…

Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. Because they know the dominant liberal order values those things sense far less than rigor, evidence, and reasoned argument, they believe the whole conversation and debate game is intrinsically rigged against them in a way that not only leads to their certain loss but also that props up the existing system and then further delegitimizes the approaches they advance in their place. Critical Social Justice Theorists genuinely believe getting away from the “master’s tools” is necessary to break the hegemony of the dominant modes of thought. Debate is a no-win for them.

Therefore, you’ll find them resistant to engaging in debate because they fully believe that engaging in debate or other kinds of conversation forces them to do their work in a system that has been rigged so that they cannot possibly win, no matter how well they do. They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out. Even the concepts of civil debate (instead of screaming, reeeee!) and methodological rigor (instead of appealing to subjective claims and emotions) are considered this way, as approaches that only have superiority within the dominant paradigm, which was in turn illegitimately installed through political processes designed to advance the interests of powerful white, Western men (especially rich ones) through the exclusion of all others. And, yes, they really think this way.

…

Secondly, the organizing principle of their worldview is that two things structure society: discourses and systems of power maintained by discourses. Regarding the systems of power, their underlying belief is genuinely that of the Critical Theorists: society is divided into oppressors versus oppressed, and the oppressors condition the beliefs and culture of society such that neither they nor the oppressed are aware of the realities of their oppression. That is, everyone who isn’t “Woke” to the realities of systemic oppression lives in a form of false consciousness. Members of dominant groups have internalized their dominance by accepting it as normal, natural, earned, and justified and therefore are unaware of the oppression they create. Members of “minoritized” groups have often internalized their oppression by accepting it as normal, natural, and just the way things are and are therefore unaware of the extent of the oppression they suffer or its true sources. In both cases, though in different ways and to different ends, the falsely conscious need to be awakened to a critical consciousness, i.e., become Critical Theorists.

Adherents to this worldview will not want to have conversations or debate with people who do not possess a critical consciousness because there’s basically no point to doing such a thing. Unless they can wake their debate or conversation partner up to Wokeness on the spot, they’d see it as though they’re talking to zombies who can’t even think for themselves. Unwoke people are stuck thinking in the ways dominant and elite powers in society have socialized them into thinking (you could consider this a kind of conditioning or brainwashing by the very machinations of society and how it thinks). We will return to this aspect of the problem further down in the essay.

…

Again, it is difficult to express from within the liberal paradigm (to their point, I guess) just how fully and profoundly they believe this. Their view constructs, in fact, a metaphysics of discourses that, in some sense, becomes the operative mythology underlying all of society and its operation. Because of the already critical orientation of the postmodernists and then the further amplification of taking on Critical Theory much more fully later, Critical Social Justice views this metaphysics of discourses in a very particular way with regard to the moral valence of how discourses are constructed.

…

That’s a bit complicated, I admit, and so a simplification of this idea is that adherents to Critical Social Justice see discourses—ways we think it is legitimate to talk about things—as the true fabric of reality and thus the core site of ethical consideration. This is their mythology, in a nutshell. As such, they will not be willing to participate in any process that reinforces, maintains, upholds, reproduces, or legitimizes the unjustly dominant discourses, as they see them. Supporting those is, in fact, just about the highest sin one can commit in the Woke faith. The discourses must instead be engineered into a state of perfection—God’s Kingdom through Perfect Language—and it would not be permissible to engage in any behavior or process that allows oppression to be spoken from or into our discourses. Conversation and debate with people who speak from and in support of the dominant discourses would certainly therefore be considered highly problematic, and anyone who participates in it intentionally or even neglectfully would similarly be problematic.

…

Thirdly, adding to this is a theme we draw out significantly in the eighth chapter of Cynical Theories: they believe all disagreement with them to be illegitimate. If we followed from Dotson in the paper named above and another slightly earlier one (2011) about “epistemic violence,” it could be pinned on what she calls “pernicious ignorance.” Robin DiAngelo would call it “white fragility” to disagree. Alison Bailey refers to it as an attempt to preserve one’s privilege under the kind of term George Carlin lived to make fun of: “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback” (four words, twelve syllables, one hyphen). Further, Bailey said all attempts to criticize Critical Social Justice thought, because they come from that “critical thinking” and not the “critical theory” tradition (within which they’d obviously agree), generate “shadow texts” that follow along but don’t truly engage (in the correctly “critical” way; i.e., agreement with her). Barbara Applebaum said similar in her 2010 book, Being White, Being Good, wherein she explains that the only legitimate way to disagree with Critical Social Justice education in the classroom is to ask questions for clarification until one agrees (which, you might notice, isn’t disagreeing at all).

In general, as mentioned a bit earlier in the essay, if you disagree, you either have false consciousness or the willful intention to oppress, and so your disagreement isn’t genuine. Only disagreement that comes from a Critical Theory perspective would be genuine, but this isn’t actually disagreement with the Woke worldview, only with superficial aspects of how it is playing out. The Woke view genuinely is that unless you agree with the Woke worldview, you haven’t disagreed with the Woke worldview in an authentic way, and therefore your disagreement cannot be legitimate. Read it again: unless you actually agree, you didn’t disagree correctly (cue Jim Carrey as the karate teacher defending against the knife attacker).

…

Fourthly, the Critical Social Justice view sees people who occupy positions of systemic power and privilege and yet who refuse to acknowledge and work to dismantle them, to the full satisfaction of the Critical Social Justice Theorists, to be utterly morally reprehensible. They are racists. They are misogynists. They hate trans people and want to deny their very existence. They are bigots. They are fascists. They are “literal” Nazis. Not only that, they are willfully so, and their main objective is to defend and spread their hateful ideology in the world. If you truly believe this about the people you’ve been asked to have a conversation with, would you be about to help them do that by giving them a platform and lending your own imprimatur to them? Of course not. Such views are not even to be tolerated, much less entertained, engaged with, platformed, or amplified.

Furthermore, because of the theories of complicity in systemic evils that live at the heart of Theory, such a stain is automatically contagious, in addition to whatever real damage it does to further its advancement into the world. As they tweet, so they are: “ten people at a table with one Nazi is eleven Nazis at a table.” And not only are they supposed to endorse the platforming of that by sharing a stage with people they see this way, but they’re supposed to do it in ways that the dominant system, which is all of those things as well and their guarantor, approves of and advances its own interests through. These horrible ways include civil conversation and debate, which aren’t happening.

To give you some idea of just how extreme they are in their fear of being associated with people “on the wrong side of history,” there is a (somewhat fringe) concept within the Critical Social Justice worldview called “non-consensual co-platforming” (two words, nine syllables, one hyphen). What this concept describes is the following situation. Imagine that a Critical Social Justice Theorist were to publish an essay in the New York Times Opinion column this month, and a couple of months from now, I were invited to do so and did. Now we’re both people who have essays published in the New York Times Opinion column. The logic of “non-consensual co-platforming” would be that the editors of that column did a bad by putting me, a known undesirable, in the Opinion pages where there is also a Woke purist, obviously without having first got her consent to have been “co-platformed” with me in the same publication. (This example is rare, but more common is the same claim made about being platformed to speak at the same conference.) Now, the Woke purist is in the unpleasant situation of having been published in a place that is willing to sully its own reputation later by the publication of some deviant rascal. This is how seriously they take the stain of guilt by association.

…

As a fifth and final point, since this is getting pretty long already, remember that Critical Social Justice activists tell us more or less constantly how exhausting it is to fight this constant uphill battle in which no one takes them seriously (read: fight shadows of their own nightmarish projection). They tell us constantly about the high emotional labor costs of doing the “work” they do (and never being taken seriously for it). To invite them to a public conversation or debate is to ask them to get exploited in this way for other people’s benefit by getting up on stage in a dominance-approved paradigm with a bad-faith moral monster who just wants his opportunity to reinforce the very dominance that exhausts them in front of an audience who not only doesn’t but can’t actually get it, unless they already do. Again, that’s not happening. Even if very handsomely (read: ridiculously and exorbitantly) paid for their “emotional labor” to subject themselves to this situation, the other four points make it a nonstarter (and would drive up the price to basically literally infinity).

In Sum

One of the biggest mistakes we keep making as liberals who do value debate, dialogue, conversation, reason, evidence, epistemic adequacy, fairness, civility, charity of argument, and all these other “master’s tools” is that we can expect that advocates of Critical Social Justice also value them. They don’t. Or, we make the mistake that we can possibly pin Critical Social Justice advocates into having to defend their views in debate or conversation. We can’t.

These principles and values are rejected to their very roots within the Critical Social Justice worldview, and so the request for an advocate to have a debate or conversation with someone who disagrees will, to the degree they have adopted the Critical Social Justice Theoretical ideology/faith, be a complete nonstarter. It’s literally a request to do the exact opposite of everything their ideology instructs with regard to how the world and “systemic oppression” within it operates—to participate in their own oppression and maintain oppression of the people they claim to speak for.

These facts about the Critical Social Justice ideology extend from the microcosm of engaging in debate and conversation to each of those specific “master’s tools” a—science, reason, epistemic adequacy, civility, etc.—every bit as much as they do to the whole system that these tools combine to form: liberalism in the Modern era. This is a system that advocates of Critical Social Justice repeatedly tell us must be dismantled in the sparking of a “critical” revolution that replaces the whole of it, including its basic epistemology and ethics, with Critical Theory.

The hard truth is this: if you don’t yet understand this, you don’t know the fight we’re in or have the slightest idea what to do about it.

[rowanthewizard]

Let us take a moment, in these dark times, to laugh at how out of touch JK Rowling is.

This tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269389298664701952?s=20

No one is saying sex isn’t real. Sex is a medical construct, the same as blood type. Your doctor is the only one who really needs to know it. If some rando on the street walked up to you and asked what your blood type was that would be real fucking weird. Same if some rando walked up and demanded to know you’re chromosomes. It’s kinda weird.

Gender is a social construct, which also means it’s real but not intrinsic to humanity. It’s just something society came up with to help organize. Seeing as reproduction isn’t nearly as crucial and surviving is a lot easier now, the construct of having the population that has to carry children and nurse them separate from the part that doesn’t have to do that isn’t really necessary anymore. It’s like an old filing system, still usable, and many people still love it and are attached, but it isn’t wrong for some people to start using the newest model.

Tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269401983095648259?s=20

You... you wrote a series... you wrote a series where you called every woman a witch...

Also I call myself way worse words than bitch. I can’t speak for anyone else but bitch and cunt have lost all effect on me. Like, thanks for the giant red flag Mr uncreative, I’ll be leaving now. Has anyone heard the word ‘feminazi’ used in the last, what, 4 years? It seems to have died with gamergate.

Tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269406094595588096?s=20

“The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades”

Hahahahahahahahahahaha! Tell that to Rita Skeeter! Did you even read the books you wrote??????

Article: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/

“accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline“

Stop listening to Twitter! It’s a dumpster fire! Twitter is not real life!

“I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.“

I don’t know if this is a joke or not. But I really hope someone composted them. The image of someone chucking all 7 books onto a compost pile is fucking gold. Can the next brand boycott be a composting one? I want to see angry fanboys fucking composting their nikes! I can’t stop giggling, it’s like 1am.

“because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender”

I don’t have a joke for this one. She never says what she thinks gender is, so I have no concept of why this would be a bad thing seeing as she’s been conflating the two in every post.

“The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.”

ThInK oF tHe ChIlDrEn!!!!!!

“The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it”

People being mean to you on twitter is not an affront to your freedom of speech. Freedom of speech protects you from the government not the internet. Why is this such a hard concept?

“I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition ........ Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.”

... do you think transphobia is easier than homophobia???? You’re more likely to face a hate crime if you’re not cis than if you’re not straight.(both are high, but non-cis is higher per capita than non-straight)  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/06/28/anti-gay-hate-crimes-rise-fbi-says-and-they-likely-undercount/1582614001/

“Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.”

Now, is this 5 close friends realizing at the same time that they are all binary trans people, because that would be statistically weird. Or, is this a group of children where one of them realized strict gender performances are kind of pointless and a pain, explained it to their friends, and they didn’t have the words to describe it other than ‘trans’. The second scenario sounds much more likely.

“The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves.”

Well that’s simplistic, but even so google the suicide rates. It’s that simple. They are very fucking high. All this takes is one google search. Also, you don’t have to medically transition right away. Puberty blockers won’t hurt you, and buying a teenager a binder or a packer really isn’t that hard. Some trans people never medically transition.

“When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’”

Maybe... that’s cause... you know... you’re human. There’s not much different between male and female. one chromosome, three hormone differences, and like four genes. That’s it. That’s not really enough to make differently functioning brains. The only differences are learned ones.

“As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s”

Yes you did. There were plenty of trans men in the 80s. Trans women were the ones who led Stonewall! A nonbinary person is the hero of a Babylonian(?Sumerian?) myth that’s several thousand years old! This is not a new thing! Pick up a book!

“A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.”

What country are you living in cause it’s not England! I follow a trans youtuber and he started sobbing when he got the sex on his birth certificate changed to male because it had taken years and he had had to jump through so many hoops. It’s not even legal to change a many documents in several US states.

“We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced.”

Ah yes, gaining the right to vote doesn’t hold a candle to the evil trans women who want to *checks notes* live peacefully. Doctors diagnosing women with hysteria and giving them lobotomies is nothing against people wanting to go about their day!

“Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now.”

I remember the day when my father sold me off to my husband for 20 goats, 5 cattle, and a magnificent draft horse!

“None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people;”

...Sure... they just “don’t agree with the lifestyle” don’t they?

Anyway, I read her entire essay. There’s nothing interesting in it. I dug through the poop to find the gold nuggets for you. That rest of it is just the standard “But predators in the little girls room, think about the children” shit we’ve heard for years. I also recognized a lot of conservative talking points and gotchas which surprised me for a moment, but after thinking about the two positions it made sense.

[sporddreki]

"ive wrote an essay months ago about how sasoris puppets work but ive decided not to finish it does anyone want that" Ugh, I am so new to Tumblr, I was trying to figure out how to leave a comment just to say, yes, I would be interested in this.

alright here you go B) i havent touched it ever since so no promises

Guess what - I finally start writing down all the trivia I know about Sasori, because it’s been some kind of strange fixation a while ago and I will regret never having written all of this down, so… this time it’s about Sasori’s specialty: the Hitogugutsu or the Human Puppets. But only from the “mechanical” side rather than the psychological (that comes later). Some warnings: This will be dealing with gore and other pretty gross stuff, so be careful, also English isn’t my first language so excuse any possible mistakes. Without further ado, let’s jump straight into the rabbit hole!

So first things first, what are the Hitogugutsu? If you’ve read or watched Naruto Shippuden and you paid attention to what Sasori is all about, you’ll immediately be confronted by his obscure obsession with puppets that stems from his childhood. As the story went on Sasori has made his first puppet out of a human being, his best friend Komushi to be exact, and then went on with indulging in this gorey procedure for the rest of his life, leaving him with a total of 298 human puppets in his possession. In this analysis we’re going to look at the what rather than the why, how they’re created, how they’re used in battle and what distinguishes them from normal puppets.

As you heard, Hitogugutsu are made from human bodies, preserved and equipped with a bunch of puppet mechanics. His most famous Hitogugutsu, the Third Kazekage puppet, which he has built out of his former village leader, is a great example for what his creations have to be like to adequately perform their jobs - Hitogugutsu are mainly used as a weapon in battle and are a form of “eternal art” in Sasori’s eyes. Means the human puppet has to be 1) effective in physical fights and 2) match Sasori’s ideal picture of what he considers art. These are the two most important points and will become significant throughout the analysis.

Let’s talk about the battle efficiency first. The key part of Hitogugutsu is that they can contain the chakra and the kekkai genkai the “material” (the person the puppet has been made out of) used to have, which can be used by Sasori in battle. Throughout Naruto Shippuden this attribute has only been showed once by the Third Kazekage and his magnetic iron sand ability. We are left to speculate about the other 297 Hitogugutsu and whether they have kept their chakra/kekkai genkai or not - but counting on Sasori’s words, they did. Other than that they’re barely able to distinguish from normal puppets, at least fighting-wise. Keeping that in the back of our heads, the construction of Hitogugutsu will give us the following problems:

1) Easiest first - a bunch of mechanics, weapons and special attacks have to fit in them to be useful in battle. Hence the general puppet structure, which is the best way for Sasori to manipulate them as he pleases.

2) They have to be well preserved to not decay and be robust enough to not immediately break in battle. Proper preservation and a stable foundation is the key here. Additionally, they have to be immune to Sasori’s poison.

3) An intelligent ten-year-old needs to be able to make at least a simplified version of them. Sasori was only a child when he made his first one out of his friend Komushi and it looked authentic.

4) The chakra needs to not just be stored inside the body, but to be able to flow, to be released through physical attacks and to be regenerated. This is essentially the biggest problem of human puppets, since they lack the (functional) organs needed to create chakra in their own, personal chakra nature.

5) Another important detail is his “ultimate” Performance of a Hundred Puppets where he controls all of them individually with a chakra string coming from his chest, which means the mechanics of a puppet must be adjusted in a way to be able for Sasori to do that.

Sounds like a bunch of obstacles Sasori has to overcome, and we with him since that’s part of the analysis - but it’s possible, especially when calculating Naruto logic into it. Before the question comes up, I’m purposely not trying to be as exact to the canon as possible nor do I think all of this was Kishimoto’s masterplan, but i will try to find the most efficient way for Sasori to achieve all of this and stay reasonable at the same time.

*** Now heres the thing: As mentioned above, the main problem seems to be the whole chakra story and we have to question how chakra works and then how Sasori used it for his techniques. We are walking on eggshells here because nearly everything is speculation. Considering the Hitogugutsu kept their chakra inside of them and are able to release it (e.g. the Third Kazekage), they have to have some sort of modified chakra system inside of them. The problem is that this chakra is a consumable, means it’s not an infinite resource and since the bodies are dead there is no way for them to regenerate their chakra. However, Sasori is using it anyway and has pride in stating that he preserves people’s chakra in puppets eternally, so what’s going on here? Here’s the problem - the Naruto logic is completely broke here. I’ve spent days rummaging the Naruto Wiki but there’s no canon way for Sasori to do that, but we know he does it, so he somehow has found a way. If he made some kind of apperature or jutsu that can convert his own chakra to the human puppet’s nature, everything would make sense, but the canon has forsaken me here. However, there were some cases where that actually happened through some kekkai genkai or a ~fortunate coincidence~ so stuff like that is possible in the Naruto universe, for Sasori too, but sadly I can’t describe it here until now. For real, hit me up if you guys have an idea, otherwise I have no choice but to accept that as indescribable Naruto logic and get my own theories and speculation going. ***

Of course we won’t let that stop us - its just time to get our minds going and make some own theses. I’ve got two for you: One that prioritizes the battle efficiency and one Sasori’s view of art.

1) The Chakra conversion theory

The only “renewable chakra source” we have is Sasori himself. Means, if Sasori found a way to convert his own chakra to have the nature of the puppet’s chakra, it would pretty much be solved. This would require some sort of gadget or jutsu, but I won’t be understimating Sasori’s genius - **********

Assuming Sasori has built in a convertor of some sort into the puppet, it gets a little easier. To use chakra in the first place, Sasori has to store it inside of the puppet. Nothing as easy as that coming from a family that predominantly uses Fūinjutsu (or Sealing Techniques) - we’re gonna dig into the lore to make it possible that also a young Sasori could’ve used this technique with a certain effort.

May i present you: The Puppet Brigade of Sunagakure, with Chiyo as its head and a mighty forbidden jutsu in her hands - the One’s Own Life Reincarnation. You may have heard of that when Chiyo revived Gaara, but it was initially for a way different cause, and that is to give life to puppets. It works as following: The user takes their own life energy to revive a dead person, but dies by themselves in return. The brigade wanted to use it to “breathe life” into puppets for more efficiency in battle, but it was banned by Sunagakure for being unethical. You heard it - puppets, so it is possible to transfer life energy into a puppet to bring it to life, somehow. Fortunate for teen Sasori of course, who just began with his cruel passion of making Hitogugutsu. Let’s take a look at how the jutsu works:

Simple. Here comes the interesting part - Sasori could’ve modified this jutsu to store the living person’s chakra inside of the puppet, and even had access to the technique by being involved in the puppet brigade himself. He just needed to rummage through the forbidden files in there. Once you think about it it seems pretty plausible, right? Now let me explain how a modified jutsu would work:

The sealing technique stays the same, but with an extra step, which uses Sasori as its “medium”. He prepares the body as the shell and later seals the person’s chakra into it. The scroll is just a placeholder by the way, Sasori puts the energy in whatever aperture its later kept in and builds it into the puppet. It never got shown in the canon, but maybe it looks similar to his core. I believe the step of sealing the chakra away before preparing the body is important; otherwise the person would die and lose their chakra before Sasori is finished. So that’s how the chakra gets preserved inside of the puppet.

Next step, what happens to the chakra? Since Sasori was fond of collecting rare kekkai genkai users as his material, his puppets need to use their abilities in battle somehow. Not just that, here’s an extremely efficient option of navigating puppets and we can connect that to the Performance of a Hundred Puppets problem.

Each of the Hitogugutsu has an internal chakra “skeleton” (similar to those that you use for Blender models + it’s probably more complicated), which Sasori is able to manipulate using his own chakra. If the convertor idea is correct, he has the ability to let his chakra flow into the puppet to start a circulation inside and trigger the conversion.

How’s that related to the Performance of a Hundred Puppets? When we see Sasori opening his chest lid, a hunded chakra strings pop out at once and every single of them gets connected to one of his puppets. The key part is that Sasori needs only one string to control a puppet with its full range of mobility. And an efficient way to achieve that is by giving them a chakra skeleton he can manipulate, which only needs one point of connection to get the flow going.

Another thing that bugged me was the fact that he only used taijutsu when fighting with all of his puppets at once. If his puppets had their own chakra preserved infinitely and eternally inside of them somehow, he could’ve just bombarded Sakura and Chiyo with all of their jutsus at once but instead he focuses on hand-to-hand combat and weapons. The chakra conversion theory simply explains this with Sasori not having enough chakra to pour into his puppets, since he was at the very end of his battle.

This theory prioritizes the “eternal art” point, since the Hitogugutsu do stay eternally functional and usable. So tldr; the human puppets have an internal chakra skeleton that can be manipulated by Sasori letting his own chakra flow through a theoretical convertor (which might as well be the seal he revamped from Chiyo’s old reanimation jutsu), which turns it into the puppet’s chakra nature and can then be used in battle.

2) The disposable puppet theory

Now, personally, I’m not very fond of this theory since it pretty much dumps the whole “eternal art” point into the garbage, as much as the psychological aspect - but it’s way too legit and rational to ignore. The main idea is that the puppets Sasori used for his technique were “empty” Hitogugutsu with their chakra already consumed which had no choice but to fight without ninjutsu. Meaning once Sasori has preserved their chakra it cannot be regenerated and the puppet is left behind as an empty shell. The reason why I’m still going with this theory is because the Third has a special gadget in his chest that makes him special and that got me thinking - the magnetic apperatus he uses for his Iron Sand abilities.

First of all some information about the Third Kazekage - he’s known for his kekkai genkai that is the Magnet Release, which he inherited through his bloodline. The Iron Sand technique is an adaptation of Shukaku’s (the One-Tails) abilities, which he created himself. When Sasori transformed him into a puppet he kept his abilities, but noticably weakened. Sasori has been using him as his “favorite weapon” ever since he was a young man and he has shown no sign of missing chakra. At the same time he has the (so far) unique apperatus that lets him use his magnetic abilities. So why isn’t the Third emptying out?

Now here’s the thing: The chakra we’re seeing in this picture isn’t the Thirds - its Sasori’s. The puppet has an unique appeatus that artificially creates the Thirds abilities, thus making them weaker than they originally were. Since the Third is both the only puppet we’ve seen keeping all of his abilities and the only one having the apperatus, he’s basically the only actual “eternal” puppet owned by Sasori. His inner chakra system just needs to get flowing by Sasori’s input and activates the magnetism, so it works similar to electricity.

Carrying on, we can see Sasori having holders attached to his back, four in total with the first one already being used in the picture (to shoot fire out of his palms). The second one is for the Performance of a Hundred Puppets, the fourth one is for shooting water out of his hands and well… the third one? No one knows. If we follow the theory of empty and full puppets, the third scroll can be used for puppets that still contain their chakra, while the second holds the empty ones, of course. This could explain Sasori’s reckless fighting style, the empty Hitogugutsu are pretty much “waste” and serve no purpose other than overwhelming the enemy by numbers - not just in the battle against Sakura and Chiyo, but also in the attack of the Land of This. So theoretically Sasori still had an ace up his sleeve but didn’t decide to use it.

As I’ve mentioned above, this theory is logically reasonable but at the same time signs Sasori off as, well, pretty much a liar when it comes to his view of eternal art. After the chakra of one of his puppets is worn off, their special abilities become unusable and the effort of making Hitogugutsu in the first place seems over-the-top to me personally. While their bodies stay “eternal”, their abilities get lost by usage, and later recklessly destroyed by a Performance of a Hundred puppets attack. So tl;dr - chakra regeneration in human puppets is impossible, their abilities can be used once or twice before their chakra runs out, Sasori later only uses them for taijutsu and contradicts his own view of art.

[raymondrroberts]

A Brief Defense of Liberal Democracy

This essay is pieced together from excerpts of a paper I delivered in Bangkok in November 2019.  Observers note that the quality and quantity of liberal democracies is in decline[1]  Globally, authoritarianism and ethno-nationalism are on the rise. It seems like a good time to consider why Christians ought to support liberal democracy.

This map indicates the state of democracies worldwide, for an explanation click this link.

I have a general target in mind when I talk about liberal democracy. By liberal I mean provisions that require states to protect the rights of individuals and groups, particularly minorities, through its laws. By democracy I mean forms of government that empower citizens to regularly elect their political leaders in free, fair, and meaningful elections.[2] While some scholars distinguish liberalism and democracy, identifying “illiberal democracies,” I note that liberalism and democracy are mutually dependent. When liberalism declines, a tyranny of the majority emerges.[3]  

Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr famously rooted his defense of democracy in Christian anthropology, saying,

"[The human] capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but [the human] inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."[4]

Image of God

A Christian anthropology begins with the conviction that all people are created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27). This belief supports the dignity of every person and authorizes a special concern for the poor, weak, and vulnerable. It undercuts elitist ideologies and ethnic prejudices, providing a point of solidarity across what can sometimes appear to be unbridgeable tribal, racial, national, linguistic, historical and cultural differences. In the face of humankind’s incredible diversity, gifts, status and conditions, it provides a metaphysical-moral reason for equality before the law. People who view others as bearing the image of God have good reason to oppose illiberal populisms and ethno-nationalism.

Natural Law

A Christian anthropology also holds that God has endowed every human being with a natural law, or a moral sense.[5] This idea was developed from the Apostle Paul’s observation that gentiles who lack the revealed law of God nevertheless possess the capacity for moral reasoning. The Apostle Paul said that God had written the law on their hearts, giving them a conscience (Romans 2:14-15). This is why people of other religions or no religion so often manifest good will.

In the 11th Century the conviction that every person was capable of discerning right and wrong became the foundation on which natural law thinking developed and European law was reconstructed. Since Hugo Grotius in the 17th Century, natural law and the Protestant (and, later, enlightenment) elevations of the individual conscience provided a foundation for international law, secular government, and inter-religious dialogue.[6] The belief that human beings can discern right and wrong undermines exclusionary claims that moral insight and practice is limited to religious texts, the interpreters of these texts, or the members of communities formed around these texts.

As it relates to democracy, the belief in natural law funds a hope that societies can find thin ethical agreement across the diversities of religion and culture. [7] Natural law provides a foundation for social solidarity among dissimilar peoples, grounding confidence that individuals can transcend personal and tribal interests to imagine common public goods. Similarly, it mandates that every citizen participate in democratic conversation and decision-making. It also undercuts defenses employed by oppressive states that claim their violations of human rights reflect distinctive cultural values that deserve respect. Together, the doctrines of the image of God and natural law provide a theological rationale for the human capacity for justice.

Sin

While everyone has a moral sense, we everywhere see how this sense can be muted and twisted to evil ends. Christians attribute this failure to sin, a doctrine built on the Apostle Paul’s statement that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23). As a description of human nature, the doctrine of sin accords with observations that human beings are inclined to estrangement and destruction. Whether from finitude, anxiety or trauma, human interests, moral reasoning, laws, and institutions tend to “curve in on themselves” (Augustine). That is, human beings pursue constricted visions of the good that fail to honor the Creator and Redeemer’s expansive purpose for “all things” (Colossians 1:15-20).

Sin is inventive.[8] Calvin described human beings as “idol factories” constantly finding ways to turn from God. Sin is not necessary, but it is universal. Its corrupting distortions infect every aspect of human being. In the Reformed Tradition this aspect of sin is conveyed in the term, “total depravity.” Sin is embedded in and passed down in culture, deforming every individual and institution in society. It even corrupts individuals and movements engaged in redemptive efforts to heal souls, ameliorate sins affects, and reform social evils. The cross of Christ specifically arouses suspicion of political and religious power.

The doctrine of sin prompts us to recognize the countless ways human beings and their institutions pursue evil purposes. It leads us to anticipate the inventive ways that social, economic and political systems fall short of their life-giving promise. It amplifies sensitivity to corporate and structural evil and triggers apprehension whenever we face concentrations of power. People equipped with a strong doctrine of sin are not dismayed when they confront xenophobia, racism, imperfect democratic institutions, or desires for a strong authoritarian leader.

The doctrine of sin makes the church skeptical that moral and religious appeals can, by themselves, correct injustice or protect the common good. It underwrites efforts to surmount problems inherent in concentrations of power through mechanisms of transparency (reporting requirements, whistleblower protections, freedom of information laws, and a free press). It seeks to diffuse the problems of concentrated power by setting power against power with checks, balances, and limits.

Sin’s realism about the human capacity for evil points to the necessity of vertical democratic systems of transparency and accountability (voting) and horizontal checks on power across the various branches of government. It predicts that, over time, governments that are not required to protect the rights of individuals and groups, particularly minority groups, can be counted on to violate those rights. Indeed, it predicts that even governments that are required to protect the rights of individuals and groups will fail at their responsibilities. Again, while authoritarian governments may efficiently pursue public goods, over time they can be counted on to abuse their power in ways that are destructive to individuals and society.[9] Just as the human capacity for justice makes democracy possible, human sin makes democracy necessary. NOTES [1] For example see Larry Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy 26 (1) (2015): 141-155. https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Diamond-26-1_0.pdf.

[2] In this definition I follow John J. Mearsheimer’s definition of “liberal democracy, adding a responsibility to protect group rights.” See The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2018), pg. 11.

[3] Mearsheimer is an example of the former scholar.  Yashca Mounk is an example of the latter scholar. See, The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Dangers and How to Save It (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018).

[4] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), pg. xiii.

[5] Jean Porter claims that natural law viewed as a “universal capacity of moral discernment.” She claims the later was the foundation for the development of the natural law tradition. See Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Press, 1999). See also, Jean Porter, Nature as Reason:  A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Press, 2005). Notice that this Reformed perspective, after taking scriptural bearings, turns to some Roman Catholic resources.

[6] While Grotius is sometimes credited with providing a secular basis for international law, we ought not forget that his optimism concerning natural law grew out of his Christian faith. See Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, Book 1 (Indianapolis:  Liberty Fund, 2005). In a similar way, Edwin Corwin has argued that American Constitutional Law rests on this higher law background. See, “The Higher Law Background of American Constitutional Law,” Harvard Law Review (XLII, No. 2, December 1928), pg. 149ff. http://www.romeroinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/CorwinHigherLaw.pdf.

[7] It also suggests that thin ethical agreements, such as the United Nation’s statement on rights, can inspire peoples to construct thick moral reasons for supporting those rights. For a discussion of the contributions of Protestant views of natural law to liberal political thought see Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York:  Free Press, 1992).

[8] This creativity may explain why the church has marshaled many metaphors to describe sin and its remedy, grace. Metaphors for sin and grace abound, they include:  sickness and salvation, bondage and liberation (redemption), non-alignment (missing the mark) and justification (alignment), estrangement and reconciliation, debt and forgiveness, disorientation (lost) and reorientation (found), constriction and expansion, disordered love and reordered love, corruption and renewal, death and life.

[9] Other doctrines have similar practical relevance. The doctrine of covenant illumines the social nature of human being and can help us understand what we owe God and one another. The doctrine of creation has ecological ramifications that can reframe the economic challenges faced by nations and the global community. The doctrine of reconciliation has horizonal dimensions that speak to estrangement between people.

[siriusist]

Recommendations for Social Sciences Literature:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Feminist Theory:

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

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

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

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

(A heavy focus on intersectionality ♥)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Disability Theory:

Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education: 

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

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

3. Black Theory:

Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon: 

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

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

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

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide: 

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

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

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

4. Immigration Theory:

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. LGBT+ Social Theory/History:

Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution:

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

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

6. Canadian Indigenous Theory/History:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Toxic Masculinity:

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

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

Happy reading, everyone. ♥

[chemicalmagecraft]

The Gamer Hero, Deku Chapter 17

A/N: I know I said that I probably wouldn't post for a while because finals, but then I had a flash of inspiration and my poor time management instincts took over. But seriously, now that I'm done clearing my WIPs so they don't distract me later, it'll probably be a week or so until I start working on my fanfics again. Need to do a bunch of essays, then I'm giving myself a bit of time to be lazy once break starts up. So for once, I'd like to ask you guys to not give me suggestions for a bit...

The first part of this chapter is something that I figured should happen eventually. How would magic change an already superhuman society?

Have a Little Feith: Thanks for the suggestion! I certainly don't mind using legendaries, however I already have plans for that particular one. My idea for Momo was more along the lines of manufacture.

Xekless: With the exception of elementals, humans (and some animals) are the only inherently magical beings that exist as of this point in the story. Let's just say there's a reason nobody knew of magic before Midoriya...

xoxoxo

In the weeks leading up to the sports festival, we saw a surprising amount of magical advancements in the world. Supernatural healing, which was once considered rare and often involved some sort of caveat that meant it couldn't be used freely, turned into a matter of training, skill, and mana, even if it was weaker. I actually did some volunteer work helping some local hospitals out with the spells, as well as the regular medical help I needed to do for Shuzenji-sensei's healing course.

While only lightning mana could be directly converted into electricity, special generators were built to use other kinds of mana as fuel, meaning more people could work at power plants and more clean energy. There was probably also research being done to use mana as it was. More water-users meant improved water services. Construction businesses flourished with earth mages. Apparently Uraraka's parents in particular gained some profit because she was able to use her elementals to get her parents a few interesting spells in their elements. She and Aizawa were really happy about that, actually.

Conservation only benefited from a new wave of bio-elementalists and other kinds of magic-users. In fact, I heard there was a group that was in the process of getting permits to use magic to deal with the trash in the sea and on the beaches better. Not to mention, even unaspected magic was incredibly useful in agriculture, so farms were able to produce more crops. I even heard about some experiments in infusing plants with magic, which sounded interesting.

While there was, unfortunately, a bit of a rise in villain attacks with the advent of magic, pro heroes were better able to combat it with the fact that hero agencies had more or less turned into modern-day mage guilds. I'm sure there was someone out there biding their time until they learned how to cast Ultima or Raise Greater Undead, but at the same time pro heroes were organized, well-funded, and now produced their own spells, so they could handle it. I even saw on the news that the Wild, Wild Pussycats now had a series of cat-themed spells.

There were still some limitations on dissemination of magical knowledge to the general public, but a few weak spells were made available to everyone. With the buzz about magic, I heard there were talks about reducing Quirk- and magic-usage laws, which was exciting. I mean, I may or may not have been using my magic in public a bit already, but it'd be nice to be a bit less sneaky about it...

xoxoxo

"Poor thing," I said as I looked at the small, gold-furred cat that Juniper alerted me was in a nearby alley. She was missing part of her right foreleg, and the stump was bleeding. She had a few more scrapes, and her fur was dirty. She gave me a weak meow. I'd always liked cats, so I felt a pang in my heart to see one so hurt. "What happened to you?

Stray Cat

LV 6

Kitten

I reached my hand out to her, but she shied away. I concentrated, trying to use Magycked Words to put my intention into what I was about to say. "I want to help," I murmured in a soothing tone, then closed a popup for a new skill, Animal Whisperer. She looked a little bit calmer now. "Good, now just hold... still..." I slowly reached my hand out to her, whispering affirmations to her. She let me touch her, and I activated Healing Hands. "That's a good girl. I'm healing you now."

Unfortunately Healing Hands couldn't do much for her missing limb, but at least it wasn't bleeding anymore. After her wounds were dealt with, I gave her a quick rinse to clean her off, making sure to dry her off completely before she could get cold. Oddly enough, though, her temperature didn't drop at all from the water. She purred at me, now doing much better. She didn't have a collar, but... "Does she have a chip on her, Raimon?" I asked.

"I don't... think so?" he said. "I can't find anything like that on her."

I grinned. "Then I guess you're coming with me, girl." I picked her up. "A cat with golden fur... I think I have the purrfect name for you." She purred, and her fur... glowed. She got really warm. "Okay nevermind Yang it is," I said.

Stray Cat

LV 6

Yang

A cat with a Quirk... I'd heard of people having pets with Quirks before but I wasn't entirely sure what the rules were. I assumed I'd have to register her, though.

"Don't you still have school today?" Claude asked.

I bolted up. "Crap! School!" I looked at the time. Kacchan was probably looking for me. I looked around for a place to put Yang, then had an idea.

xoxoxo

"The hell were you taking so long?" Kacchan asked me when I ran up to him.

"I, uhhh... had a magic thing?" I said, then rubbed the back of my head.

Wait crud that's was the wrong hand! I quickly lowered my arm, but not before a meow escaped from my sleeve...

"Why the fuck did I just hear a cat?" Kacchan asked.

"Oh I don't know, maybe there's a cat nearby?" Kacchan looked around, then focused on my sleeve. I acted totally natural, nothing up my sleeves at all! For a second I felt like he would buy it.

He didn't buy it.

"Oi Deku, what's up your sleeve?" He grabbed my hand a bit more forcefully than I'd have liked, causing it to fall out of my sleeve. "...What the actual fuck," he said after a few moments of holding my disembodied right hand.

"Stupid Rayman limbs..." I muttered.

"Meow," Yang said as she poked her head out of my sleeve. To be honest I wasn't entirely sure how my sleeve was staying in proper shape considering most of my forearm was made out of air, but it was. Somehow.

"Did... Is your arm a cat now?" He looked between my still very much real hand and the cat's head coming from my sleeve. "You know what, I'm going to hold your hand hostage until you fucking explain."

"Not my hand!" I shouted. "I need that to not get arrested." I started trying to fly my hand out of Kacchan's grasp. Because my hand was attached to a body part I'd turned to air, it could fly. Somehow. It wasn't strong enough to escape Kacchan, though. Actually, I wondered how much of my body I had to turn into air before the rest would fly. I'd have to test that later...

"Stop muttering and answer the damn question."

"I wasn't just going to leave Yang there! She lost a leg."

Kacchan facepalmed, letting go of my hand. It floated back to Yang, and I scratched her chin with it before nudging her back so I could put my hand back in place. She was taking Air Embodiment surprisingly well. I was actually a little worried she'd activate her Quirk... "You named her already. In hindsight, though, I'm more surprised you haven't done something like this already. Actually, is it okay that the cat's breathing your arm?" He stopped walking and just rubbed his temples. "Hang... hang on, I just need a fucking moment to process how fucking absurd that last sentence was."

"I've confirmed that it's perfectly safe for both me and whatever's breathing me. Same for other elements. And I'm sure someone's said something like that before."

He started walking again. "Right. Your life is fucking weird. Not gonna give myself a headache. So how long can you do that?"

"Partial Embodiment is a lot less taxing than Full Embodiment, so it's just slightly more than what Mantra gives me back. In fact, if I get another point of INT, then it might just break even. If I use Meditate every so often, I'll be able to keep this up until we get home. Assuming we don't have practicals in Hero Studies today."

He shrugged. "Fuck it, good for you. Now we should probably hurry as fast as we can without you jostling the cat. We're already a little late."

xoxoxo

I was walking in the hallway on my own when I heard a meow. I froze and so did Aizawa-sensei, who was walking past me. I silently pleaded with Sonia to help. She gave me a grin. A grin I could almost describe as like the Cheshire Cat's...

"Meow," she said. Audibly. Even with Gamer's Mind, I could feel my heart pounding. I tried not to let it show on my face. I tensed up, though, when Yang meowed again. Though I noticed that Aizawa also grimaced. Yang pushed my hand out of the way, but at the same time a black cat with golden eyes poked her head out of Aizawa-sensei's capture weapon.

Alley Cat

LV 4

Blake

I nodded at him.

He nodded at me.

Yang and Blake meowed at each other.

I offered Aizawa-sensei my right arm in an invitation to pet Yang. He gratefully did so, then pointed to Blake. I used my floating right hand to pet her.

We nodded to each other, then gently nudged our cats back into their hiding spots and walked away. I had to Meditate in the bathroom for a bit because the stress of the moment deactivated Mantra, though.

We never talked about our encounter, though we did trade a few cat puns later in the day. I'm not an expert, but I think that makes us brothers.

xoxoxo

"Hey mom?" I said as I opened the door. "I have something I'd like to ask you about..."

"What is it, sweetie?"

I brought Yang out from behind my back. "Her name is Yang."

Mom sighed. "Honey, you know a cat is a big responsibility..."

"I promise I'll take good care of her!" I promised.

She frowned, then nodded after a moment of thought. "Alright, you can keep her."

"Thank you!" I shouted. "Oh, uh... By the way, she has a Quirk..."

"Izuku..."

xoxoxo

As it turned out, the Japanese government is very approving of Quirky animals being pets with responsible owners, though there was some red tape surrounding it. It made sense that they wouldn't want animals who had no concept of Quirk usage laws just roaming the streets... First I had to get her registered and fitted with a special chip that could withstand a lot more heat than normal chips thanks to her fire-based Quirk. Then we had to go to specialized classes for us to be able to deal with her if she activated her Quirk. I also got a good prosthetic for her with some of the money I got for various prizes related to discovering magic.

Thanks to Animal Whisperer I gained an increased understanding of all animals. After a few talks with Yang, I could pretty much speak cat, which was neat. I was hoping to get a familiar skill, though. Even if I never used Yang like a proper familiar, a familiar skill might give me access to her Quirk, I Burn, which would be nice.

For my preparation for the sports festival, I decided to focus mainly on DEX and INT. Because I was more or less indestructible due to Damage Reduction and Elemental Embodiment, I didn't need to worry about VIT at all. Because of that, I decided to focus on my original idea I'd had before Roaring Muscles to train my DEX, though with INT training as well to power up my magic. It was close, but a few days before the sports festival I got both above one hundred.

DEX gave me three skills, Light Step, Flash Step, and Weird Flex. Light Step was the next version of Fleet Foot and Flash Step was, well, a Flash Step. I could use MP to cross a few meters in the blink of an eye. Weird Flex... had a fitting name. It seemed to just make me disturbingly flexible. The flavor text implied that it was what made contortionists contortionists, and I couldn't really disagree with that. It seemed like it'd be useful, though, because it was a passive that didn't use MP.

Raising INT gave me Mana Talent, Eye for Magic, and Open Mind. Mana Talent, like Light Step, was a better Mana Affinity. Eye for Magic, which I got because I had an eye-enhancing spell, was a spell that allowed me to "see" magic, which was absurdly useful. I could probably copy spells just by looking at them, for one. It gave me really bad eye strain, though. Open Mind was also a potentially useful spell. The flavor text said it was mind magic, which was useful in and of itself because it gave me a base for mind magic, and it allowed me to hear other people's thoughts. When I used it, I was able to hear the internal monologues of everyone in the spell's radius, and could hone in on one person in particular. I wouldn't use it much because it was clearly an invasion of privacy, but I was sure I could put it to good use.

With my stats where I wanted them, I spent the rest of the time before the sports festival practicing various spells and skills. The day of the sports festival, I knew I was ready.

xoxoxo

A/N: I thought of that scene with the cats and was legally obligated to write it. This is a little shorter than my usual chapters, but I figured you guys would prefer one short one now and then a longer one in however long it'll take me to do all my school stuff and then start the sports festival arc than just an especially long one later. And now I have no excuse not to do my schoolwork. Pray for me...

[thequeerafrican-blog]

Queer History in Uganda

I want to begin by focusing on an East African country that has long been in the news but is still wildly misunderstood and misrepresented: Uganda. It is a beautiful nation that I am proud to come from, known for its hospitable people and gorgeous wildlife; but I am not here to promote tourism. Instead, I want to shed light on how Uganda has been known for other less beautiful things, such as the blatant hostility expressed by government officials and religious leaders toward sexual and gender minorities. But Ugandan history as it stands shows that their moral arguments against queer identities are unfounded, and I want to explore some of the facts that contradict their ideas that queerness is a Western construct foreign to Uganda. 

Uganda is infamous for its staunchly homophobic government. Every now and again, videos of preachers or parliamentarians will make viral rounds on social media, discussing their disillusionment or disgust with same-sex relationships, particularly when those relationships involve two men. Perhaps most recently known is the video of a 2012 television news interview with Ugandan human rights activist Pepe Julian Onziema, who also identifies as a transgender man. In the beginning, the host boldly asks Onziema, “Why are you gay?”. The interviewer is obviously making a grave mistake by confusing gender and sexuality, something many people everywhere conflate, and his pointed question has turned into a renowned meme.

But the interview takes a very dark turn when Onziema is bombarded by the violently homophobic guests that attend and call in to the show, questioning his humanity and mental health because of his gender identity. But although this video has brought many laughs to those who may or may not have seen it in its entirety, it is a prime example of pure ignorance toward Onziema’s identities and others in the LGBTQIA+. I believe that this ignorance, when coupled with power in politics, turns into a blind hatred that has manifested itself through homophobic legislation and a c against queer Ugandans.

Ignorance is a scary thing that yields even scarier outcomes.. Within the last six years in Uganda, there has been a rise in anti-LGBT+ sentiment mostly propagated by religious leaders that disavow gender nonconforming people and sexual minorities. An article written by the South African theological professor Dr. Jaco Beyer highlights how in 2010, prominent Ugandan tabloids released lists containing the identities of those accused of being queer, with calls to incite physical violence and legal penalties against them. Moreover, reports of assaults increased from 12 in 2009 to 300 in 2004 in the capital city of Kampala. Public shaming, physical violence, evictions, and threats are all results of this deep-seated ignorance. Many Ugandan politicians began to blame “Western values” as endorsing queer behavior and threatening the nuclear family model (Beyers 154).

However, many historians have questioned whether or not this is something truly  inherent to the African continent, as many people believe it is. Besides, representation of queer African people outside of activist circles is relatively hard to find and news of legislation to ban same-sex practices crops up constantly. But is queerness inherently “un-African”? The answer: of course not. 

Accorting to the scholars Therese Migraine-George and Ashley Currier, a number of indigenous and exogenous factors have led to the status of queer Africans on the continent today. Colonialism, for example, has superimposed the idea that the histories and customs of European imperialists are superior to those of the African people they colonized. Colonial homophobia brought about by British anti-sodomy laws has obscured the same-sex practices that have occurred in indigenous societies. 

These values hold true today and are still being propagated by leaders in places like Uganda, which has motivated activists, artists, and intellectuals to engage in queer archival work to produce the evidence that queer identities have existed in Africa for centuries. Moreover, scholars have not only highlighted same-sex practices in indigenous African societies, but have also shown that colonization is hugely responsible for creating a culture of homophobia in Africa.

Pre-colonial Uganda was a much different place than it is in the present day. British colonialism brought with it a new penal code for ethics which believed that Ugandan society was not on par with its ideas of what was morally acceptable or unacceptable, particularly with regard to sex. Ugandan activist and academic Dr. Sylvia Tamale states in a 2003 essay that the patriarchy plays a huge role in the suppression of same-sex relationships and queer identities . She elaborates that these relations and identities undermine mainstream “male power bases” by challenging what it means to be a “man” or a “woman”, reconfiguring the concept of a “family”, and disrupting the patriarchal order. But in pre-colonial times, homosexuality was neither suppressed nor condoned. Many practices that correspond with today’s understanding of same-sex relationships were even institutionalized and accepted. 

As a matter of fact, one of Uganda’s prominent tribal kings, Kabaka Mwanga, was known to be a gay man. Ugandan human rights lawyer Adrian Jjuuko explains that the story of the Uganda Martyrs, or the young men known as the king’s pages with whom he had sexual relationships with, is such that the young men began to practice Christianity and deemed his advances to be unacceptable, leading to their execution. Moreover, ethnic languages have long used words expressing the action of same-sex relations. In essence, Uganda has a long and diverse history of queer identities and practices that was hindered and erased by colonial imperialism that deemed it unacceptable.

Kabaka Mwanga of Buganda 

The world should be aware of this history of queer identities that have existed long before British colonialism. I hope that more people begin to realize that even though countries like Uganda are censured for their queerphobic governments, this does not mean queer people and their history have never existed in Uganda and other African countries. But alas, the effects of imperialism are very difficult to reverse. In the future, I hope Western activism highlights the roles of advocates and queer people in Uganda rather than just highlighting the egregious statements of political and religious figures. Additionally, I hope that further education about queer identities in Uganda and the rest of the continent continue to shift the conversation on queer liberation and rights the world over.