#We still depend on these platforms to represent ourselves...

[kbluebirdart]

I think at this point, No matter which platform you go to, you can't escape. Do you think they hire hundreds of programmers and set up hundreds of servers just to provide free services?

Nope! Twitter/X is not the product; the users themselves are the product

We are the product...

You become one as soon as you register and create an account on any social media platform. : (

[ladydeadpoolismyspiritanimal]

Copied from Reddit

A Community Project to Celebrate a Year of r/OnlyFangsBG3

Hello to our lovely community of darlings, blood bags, and precious little Bhaal babes! As you may remember from last week, your hardworking mod team is in the process of putting together a little project to celebrate our one-year anniversary. We wanted to give ourselves a tiny head start (and, yes, maybe drum up some curiosity!) but we are now ready to announce that…

# We Are Assembling an Astarion Coloring Book!

The community we’ve assembled here is so incredibly talented in such an amazing variety of ways, and we thought this could be a fun way for our creative folks to get to come together and share that talent. ~~And. I mean, yes, *some* of us are slightly sad that we don’t have artistic skill but still want to make pretty pictures of the pretty vampire, *okay??*~~

We are currently looking for visual artists to help us by donating their original line art featuring Astarion, which other members of the sub can then color in whatever media they choose and share with all of us! **If you are willing, please send us your submission no later than September 23, 2024.**

While we are soliciting this art, we will be promoting a selection of charities that Neil publicly supports (more on those in a minute). No money will be going through us at any time, we will only be encouraging you all to donate to the charities directly. If you wish, you can then send us (redacted!!) receipts so that we can get a tally of how much the sub has raised and celebrate our community with some altruism. We won’t be requiring anyone to donate in order to get access to the coloring book, just encouraging donations to those causes on his behalf. At the end of the event, our sub’s birthday (September 30), we will share how much we raised and release a link to the compiled coloring book.

Anyway. That’s what we’re looking to accomplish!

## Requirements

* You are welcome to send us line art from an existing work, or create something new for the event. As long as the art is your own original work, you’re good to go.

* You may create line art by tracing or using filters on your own screenshots. If you use someone else’s screenshot, you must get their permission and credit them appropriately.

* Line art only, please!

* No AI artwork will be accepted.

* Artwork must contain Astarion; otherwise, please feel free to chase your muse. NSFW is fine, solo, M/M, M/F, multiple, the whole tadpole crew, Batstarion, comic panels, whatever floats your boat.

* Feel free to submit as much as you’d like! Depending on the volume of submissions, we may have to narrow things down a bit, but we will make sure that all contributors are represented in the final product.

* Include your name or handle in the bottom left corner. Those posting colored versions of these pages will be required to leave this legible (or rewritten elsewhere on the page) or they will be taken down.

* If you are not a frequent poster on the sub, we may do a bit of extra vetting to try to confirm that the work is your own. Please understand that this is us doing our due diligence to protect artists’ hard work and has nothing to do with you as an individual.

## How to Submit / File Info

If you would like to participate, you may submit your art in a few different ways. You can send an email to onlyfangsbg3@gmail.com with the attached image. Or you can send us a [modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=r/OnlyFangsbg3) and include a link to your art on Tumblr, Twitter, Imgur, or other platform that your image is hosted on.

As for file types, please submit them as something lossless - so no crunchy jpegs or anything. Types such as PNG, TIFF, SVG (hell even BMP if you can find space to host it lmao) will do splendidly.

For size, we are hoping to stick to "standard letter" sizes - either US Letter (8.5x11 inches), or A4 (21.0x29.7cm). We figure those sizes make the most sense for a coloring book project!

## What Charities Can You Donate to?

We’ve picked two charities from a handful that were listed on Neil’s Twitch channel that you can donate to. These two were picked just to narrow down the choices a bit for simplicity’s sake, but if any of the other ones speak to you, we won’t stop you from donating to them! The ones we’ve selected are:

* [The Red Card](https://www.theredcard.org/) - “Show Racism the Red Card (SRtRC) is the UK’s leading anti-racism educational charity.”

* [Black Lives Matter](https://blacklivesmatter.com/) - “Black Lives Matter Foundation is an abolition-centered foundation fighting institutional injustice and serving Black people globally.” (US-based)

From Neil’s Twitch page

> Please have a look at these charities- Be an ally. Do your bit.

> I am. My family are. We all can.

> Support, move, scream and keep the momentum to help even in small ways like this.

As stated earlier, there’s no requirement to donate to receive the completed coloring book at the end of the sub’s anniversary event; it just seems like a very nice way that we can show our support for Neil and our community! If you do donate, please send us a [modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=r/OnlyFangsbg3) with your receipt (blur out any personal information, of course) showing the total you donated. We will tally these up through September 29 and announce the grand total we raised for these charities on September 30th.

## Using the Coloring Book Pages

We’d love it if you shared what you did with the coloring book with the community! Whether you print it out and paint it by hand, color it digitally, use colored pencils, or whatever else your heart comes up with, we’d love to see! We will create a new flair for this purpose as we get closer to The Big Day.

That being said, be sure to credit the original artist! Any posts made with these images that fail to credit the original, or remove the artist's name/signature from the image, **will be removed**. Don't try to pass this off elsewhere as your original work.

## Spread the Word!

Do you know any artists, either friends or via patreon discords, that might be interested in participating? Then please (politely, gently!) see if they want to join in!

##tl;dr

* Send us line art by September 23

* Donate to charities and send us receipts by September 29

* We will release the full coloring book and the total we raised on September 30

* Share your beautiful pages, being sure to credit the original artists

Bonus Angel screenshot that I feel like has some meme potential

[warmglowofsurvival]

Twenty One Pilots reminisces about early days in Ohio on latest tour

Josh Dun and Tyler Joseph of Columbus indie-pop act Twenty One Pilots.

(Fueled by Ramen)

CLEVELAND, Ohio – It's a sunny day in late August and Josh Dun, drummer for indie-pop band Twenty One Pilots, is walking around Columbus wondering what time it is.

"We just got home from doing some of our own shows in Australia and then traveled to Japan for a festival," says Dun. "I'm still all completely messed up time zone wise, but it was really fun."

When Dun joined TWP founding member Tyler Joseph in 2011, the thought of global domination was a mere dream. Dun had just replaced original drummer Chris Salih and Twenty One Pilots was self-releasing music via websites like SoundCloud.

Then the record deal came. The duo signed with Fueled by Ramen, the home of pop-punk heavyweights like Paramore and Panic! at the Disco. The deal paved the way for "Vessel," Dun and Joseph's 2013 breakthrough album that spawned two top-10 singles on Billboard's Alternative Songs chart.

The album's success also gave Twenty One Pilots a bigger platform to showcase its unique blend of rock and pop. The band performed at the 2014 MTV Movie Awards in March and at the inaugural AP Music Awards in Cleveland this past July.

Twenty One Pilots stole the show at the APMAs when Joseph climbed to the top of the scaffolding, shocking everyone, including Dun, who relived the experience with us during a recent phone interview:

Take me back to the AP Music Awards.

That was a really fun night. It's cool that it was the first year for that show and it was cool to be an Ohio band and kind of represent our home state. Our families were there. It was nice for us to rub shoulders with bands that we don't know of or know, but might not play with.

Were you surprised by the nominations or the invite to perform?

I don't know if we really fit with what else was going on. In a way, I kind of like that and I feel honored that they would have us there even if we don't fit the mold of that scene.

There was a lot going on during your performance. Do you plan something like Tyler climbing the stage?

Some of the stuff we do is really dependent on the venue and what it looks like. I don't always know what Tyler's going to do. Sometimes we're in the middle of a song, I look around and he's already halfway up the scaffolding.

Do you worry?

One time, we were in Korea and for that particular festival, we had him strap a GoPro on his chest and watched him climb all the way up the truss. Watching that footage makes my hands sweaty. That guy scares me sometimes, but I trust he's going to be safe.

The first two shows of your fall tour, in Columbus, sold out in a matter of days.

It's crazy. When we started we never knew how many people were going to show up. There were times when no one came or maybe just three or four people. Now it's kind of cool and exciting for Tyler and I to look at each other and realize there are actually going to be people there.

Does it feel different when you perform in Ohio?

It's interesting because I'm not in Ohio very often, but I love coming here and thinking about the times where we would only play Ohio at the Grog Shop multiple times and would love it. Anytime we come back to Ohio, in Cleveland or Columbus, it's a special time.

What can people expect on this tour?

We're changing a couple of things. I think until we're done playing music, which will be when we die; our goal is going to be to keep outdoing ourselves. It gets to be challenging to put together a different set list each time. We try to get creative with how to approach a song. We try to be more strategic and intentional with how things look aesthetically on stage with the setup and the lighting. We're constantly brain storming. For us, performing and playing is our favorite thing to do.

"Vessel" has been out for about a year and a half. Is there a timeline for new music?

We're always working on stuff. There's a bunch of songs written. The next step at the end of this year or the beginning of next year is to partner with a producer that meets us where we're at from a stylistic standpoint. I personally want to up my game drumming wise on this next record. We can't wait to get back to the studio and bring these ideas to life.

[forest-of-stories]

Throwback Thursday, Fandom Edition: In Another Life

From the end of 2008, through most of the following year, I created a story with a few of my friends.  We were all in our mid-twenties at the time.  I’ve talked about this experience on other platforms, but rarely (if ever) on this one.   Still, you can probably assume that it was on my mind when I’ve shared posts about the intimacy of creating something together, or what it's like to fixate on a guy who exists to three people.   (Another person wrote a few stories in the same universe and shared them with us, but when I talk about my collaborators, I will primarily be referring to the three who lived in the Boston area.) These characters, their world, and our shared creative energy overwhelmed my fannish life and my social life, and we came up with enough ideas to possibly keep the story going for years, even though that didn't end up happening.

Recycled Notes, as we called our project, was inspired by a popular anime but focused primarily on original characters, and used reincarnation as the central plot device.  Any questions of temporal or metaphysical logic were beside the point, since feelings and vibes were the point.  We created in-character blogs on one of the many LiveJournal clones that existed in the 2000s, where we posted a mishmash of first-person journal entries and pieces of third-person narrative.  I drafted a lot of mine in longhand before typing them up and posting them on my character journal for my three collaborators to read.

I lived in another city, about an hour’s train ride away, and whenever I visited those friends, we also acted out scenes in person, in a much more casual version of the organized live-action role-playing in which we also participated as part of a larger community.  Each of us “played” several characters, depending upon which scenes struck our fancy, though we all definitely had particular favorites.  We envisioned a five-arc structure for the story, as if it were a TV show or a podcast, even though some of the plot never made it past the discussion stage.  Our storylines involved political intrigue, telepathy, forays into alternate universes (both original and based on existing media), bargains with mythical beings, guilt and responsibility and shared trauma and redemption, and all the hurt/comfort that our own hearts could stand.  We weren’t creating for a larger audience, only for ourselves, so no idea was too self-indulgent.  For instance, I wrote several scenes that take place after one character is trapped in the memories of his past life – thanks to an exercise in psychic powers gone wrong – and consequently thinks that the rest of the group are their former selves, as well.

(I’m not sure that I was consciously thinking about that when I wrote about Martin losing himself in Barnabas’s memories in my Magnus Archives vampire fic, but the parallels might have been lurking somewhere in the back of my own memory.)

Meanwhile, our characters still went to school and to work and fell in love and visited their families on the holidays.  The narrative throughline was “found family with lots of emotional baggage living their everyday lives while the supernatural or unexplained hovers in the background and intervenes from time to time,” which is a storytelling framework that I still adore both in fanfiction and elsewhere.

If you’ve ever created an ongoing story with your friends, you already know how transporting and fulfilling it can be.  Maybe you were also involved in a journal-based or Tumblr roleplay, or maybe it was a LARP, or a D&D game.  Depending on the format and the origin of your character, you might have chosen a celebrity to represent them in the icons/userpics that accompanied your posts, as we did.  Maybe you eagerly awaited game-related emails and stayed up late chatting online – or, when you could, in person – with other players about possible scenarios or bits of character trivia, as we did.  Maybe you compiled lists of songs that reminded you of the story (and when you’re deep enough in an obsession, that could apply to almost all of the songs that you hear).  Maybe you or someone else created fanart of the characters, like my drawing of Tiffany (left) and River (right).

If you haven’t experienced anything like this, I hope that you do, someday.  

I also hope that you continue to have a full and rich and varied life outside the writing and/or role-playing.  And I hope that, if it comes to an end before you’re ready, you adapt to those changes with grace for yourself and others.  I’m not sure that I managed either of those things. I’ve long since recognized that it wasn’t a great idea to attach so much of my personal and creative self-worth to one activity with one group of people; when those people lost interest in that activity, and I was far from ready to move on, I made my grief and alienation into everybody else’s problem, which was definitely a bad idea.  I’ve tried to learn from those mistakes, but my memories of Recycled Notes carry a lot of regret and shame, as well as a tremendous amount of unbelievable joy.

I’ve found some of that joy in other friendships and other fandoms, in the times that I’ve managed fearless and self-indulgent writing (I’m a lot better at reblogging tumblr posts about that mindset than I am at actually putting it into practice), and even in some collaborations with other creators.  Jekyllock was one of those; The Magnusquerade was and is another.  None of them have been as immersive or as closed-off as Recycled Notes, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, no matter how much I once missed the closeness that I shared with my collaborators (and still do, sometimes, even 15 years later).  In one old LiveJournal entry, I wrote, “it contained a lot of the elements that made fandom itself wonderful: the creativity, the camaraderie, the ability to share our narrative kinks with each other, no matter how ridiculous (and some of our plotlines were pretty ridiculous). And it also contained some of the elements that make fandom difficult for me personally: the insularity, the fear of rejection by my fellow writers, and the self-deprecation at being so invested in something that's not even ‘real…’”  The story that we made together was and wasn't like my other fandoms, and for better or for worse, I might never have another experience exactly like it again.

[techtired]

Is Manganato (Manganato.com) Safe and Legit to Read Manga Online?

Manganato is a free manga site that offers free and limitless stories of adventure, romance, and more. Did a whole new world appear before your eyes as you turned the pages of a manga? We love comics as much as you do. As manga fans, we constantly search for fresh series to immerse ourselves in. There are a lot of places online where we can read manga that we love. This includes sites like Manganato.com, which have recently exploded in popularity among manga fans all around the globe. Whether Manganato is safe to use has become more critical in light of growing worries about the legitimacy and security of internet activities. Could it be real? To help you relax and enjoy reading manga online, we've included the answers to these questions and more in this post. Website Name Manganato URL https://manganato.com Type Online Manga Reading Platform Content Manga (Japanese comics) Languages Supported English Monetization Advertisements Introducing Manganato Manganato is an open-source website that hosts several manga, visual novels, and comic books created in Japan. An astonishing array of genres, including action, fantasy, romance, horror, and slice-of-life, are represented on the site. Thanks to its minimalistic design, users may quickly peruse their favourite titles or find new ones on Manganato. An easy-to-use search bar allows users to zero in on specific manga titles or browse the site's many categories. Before diving into a manga title, readers can get a feel for a manga title from the site's thumbnail description, genre label, and user ratings. Nevertheless, users may encounter pop-up advertising while exploring Manganato, as the platform is free and depends on ad revenue. What Kind Of Manga To Read On This Website? Different kinds of themes can be found on this site: Adventure Kids School Life Shounen Horror Romance Drama Bishoujo Parody Comedy Fantasy Military Bishounen Harem Shoujo Yaoi Historical Magic Mystery Mecha Key Features and Offerings Among manga fans, Manganato is the app of choice due to its many valuable features: With the platform's extensive manga selection, you can find something that suits your taste. An intuitive design that makes reading and navigating the site a breeze. The bookmarking system lets users keep their preferred titles for future convenience. New chapters and titles are added to the library regularly. User ratings and reviews are a great community feature for readers to choose what to read next. Manganato depends on ad money to keep running; thus, users should be aware that pop-up advertising may still appear despite these measures. How safe is Manganato? As a way to keep its people safe, Manganato has several safety features: HTTPS Protocol: This protocol ensures that all the data sent between your computer and the website is encrypted and safe from hackers. Pop-up ads: The site is safe, but its ads might not be. These ads could take you to unsafe websites or ones that have viruses. Ad Blocker: People who visit Manganato should use an ad blocker to make their experience safer. Updating the antivirus software on your computer is another way to protect it. Users should be careful and use their best judgment when using this website, just like they should when using any other website. Tips for Comfortably Reading Manga Online on Manganato Taking Necessary Precautions When Visiting Online Manga By following these steps, you can guarantee that reading manga online is both secure and enjoyable: Look for legitimate platforms that collaborate with manga publishers and uphold IP rights; these are the platforms you should trust. Always keep your antivirus software current. While it's normal for legitimate websites to request some personal information, you should be wary of those that request excessive data. Getting unauthorized access to copyrighted content can lead to ethical and legal problems. Steps to Take to Prevent Cyber Threats Keep your security software up-to-date to stave off new threats. Please avoid random download links from sites you don't trust; they can include malicious software. Always use strong passwords and use two-factor authentication wherever possible. Keep up with the latest updates for your device's OS and applications. Use a virtual private network (VPN) if you cannot avoid using public Wi-Fi. Before you give out any personal information, be sure the site is secure. Be wary about clicking on links or providing personal information in unsolicited emails. Always be aware of the latest cyber threats and how to safeguard yourself. Looking At Issues Of Legality When looking into whether Manganato is legal, it's essential to know that the site is in a legal grey area. Manganato gives you access to a massive library of manga, some of which may be protected by copyright. It might not be illegal for users to read manga on these sites, but it can be prohibited to share copyrighted material. The website has no material; it only links to other websites with content. This makes the law complicated and different in each place. Top Alternatives Of Manganato Zinmanga Website - link Zinmanga is a website that allows users to read free manga without signing up. Title, author, or genre searches are all easily implemented into its intuitive interface. Updates regularly guarantee manga fans a constant flow of new and popular series. Reaper Scans Website - link Read horror, comedic, fantasy, and action manga comics for free on Reaper Scans. You must register. With its user-friendly design and regular updates, users worldwide may easily add new content to their ever-expanding library of electronic books. ManhuaScan Comics from several genres, including action, romance, and horror, are available at ManhuaScan. Users of all ages and walks of life enjoy the platform's frequent upgrades, powerful search engine, and ease of use. Conclusion Manganato has become a popular online platform for reading manga. The most crucial factors are safety, verifiability of facts, accessibility, and the library's significant attraction. You can enjoy Manganato with less risk by installing and updating security software, being cautious around download links, using strong passwords, keeping your device up-to-date, avoiding public Wi-Fi, verifying the accuracy of websites, being careful of email scams, and learning more about cybersecurity. Remember that websites aren't the only thing that can keep us secure online; our actions and awareness are equally important. FAQs Can You Trust Manganato with Your Health? Manganato has a tonne of manga, but there are certain security risks if you visit the site. There is no security assurance because the site may have malicious pop-up advertising. Manganato: Is it a Scam? Sites like Manganato are not permitted. It cannot pay the authors who created them because they do not have the rights to most of the manga series they air. Is It Dangerous to Use Manganato and Similar Sites? The obtrusive pop-up adverts on sites like Manganato put your device in danger of cyber threats like viruses, malware, and legal risks. Where Can I Find Legitimate Online Manga Readers? Manga Plus by SHUEISHA, Crunchyroll Manga, VIZ Media, ComiXology, Kodansha Comics, Book Walker, Fakku, NETCOMICS, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Amazon are just a few of the many legitimate online manga reading options. Read the full article

[battle-of-alberta]

Who is the farthest on either side of the political spectrum ?

ok so to preface: i'm not going to answer this question with my usual "political compass" style charts for a Reason which I will Explain first.

I'm hesitant to make 100% "this is how they are on the spectrum" because

It oversimplifies the fact that they represent a bunch of different people (which I get is hard to avoid in this genre lol) but also that they are old and have time to watch long term change and (hopefully) remember the results historically

Political alignment is very relative and it's hard to say "this is how they are all the time" from one perspective because, as some of you know, there's regional Nuance and Complexity and (primarily due to oil) AB politics is absolutely batshit insane even without comparing ourselves to other parts of Canada and,

I like to imagine that the crazy batshit insane part is temporary and I like to imagine a future that's less like the present and I'm not interested in making people feel the same way about their city that the news (or the "news") makes them feel because We Can Do Better Okay, and I don't want people to just make assumptions about characters based on politicians and parties because it's always more complicated than a platform.

What I will do is just draw a scene, a snapshot in time, if you will, from the May Long Weekend Battle of Alberta Northern AB Family BBQ (plus Calvin who still had his playoff beard at the time)

I would - from my comfortable vantage point in the One consistently not-conservative riding in the province both federally and provincially - describe the current political landscape in alberta thusly. Long and drawn out explanation follows that probably doesn't make a lot of sense to people outside the province/country but I tried my best to keep it simple. My biases are obvious, keep in mind the political spectrum looks different in AB than the rest of the country, different in Canada than the US or elsewhere, yada yada. And as usual I can't not be emotional about this because I'm one of the idiots who lives here.

On the 'extreme' left (which the rest of Canada would call 'centrist' because there has been a significant drift since the great depression) is Edith representing the former city of Strathcona and the seat of the leadership of the official opposition. I tend to represent her as more left leaning than the party HQ'd here as reflective of the people i know here who do tend to hold more radical views than the party line (which is still a very pro-pipeline pro-oil "UBI-is-too-radical!" party at the end of the day) (yes i wrote angry letters and got disappointing responses how did you know)

On the 'extreme' right is Mac who I think represents what people think of when they think of Alberta to some extent (the young rural oil bro who is tired of real and perceived slights from central Canada and wants to separate already despite not knowing how to cook rice). The former former leader of the opposition is based here (and please please please keep him out of the big chair Please)

(and surprise they both hate the current government for polar opposite reasons lmao)

Ed and Cal are backstage in this battle because the big cities tend to be the exception to the rule politically; because of how our stupid voting system is set up in part and because they look different depending on whether you're looking at them from inside or outside the province and from an urban or rural vantage point. Edmonton is becoming an increasingly radical orange blob on the map the more that the current government takes out everything they hate about us on us while traditional conservative stronghold Calgary, oddly enough, is still experiencing the "wait did I help catapult J Trudes into the PM's chair" hangover, which is not the first non-conservative hangover Calgary has had after accidentally creating the CCF/NDP in the first place...

(I still remember a conversation overheard in class at U of T between two Albertans. AB1 said she thought Notley was doing a good job as premier and AB2 snidely said "that's because you're from Calgary and I'm from Fort Mac and Lethbridge, sooo" as if Calgary were a well known Liberal base (and as if there was actually any difference between Liberals and Conservatives lol) (and that guy went on to raise his hand in class and embarrass everyone with some Vote with our Feet Power of Our Dollar anti public transit rant that I cringed all the way through lol)

Finally GP and Red Deer are doing who knows what off in the corner and we worry about them and they're weird conspiracies and separatist parties, we really do. Sad to say the last person I encountered from GP was literally one of those conspiracy nutcases and there's reasons all the nutcases in the whole country gravitate to that area unfortunately. Anyone in those cities probably knows what I'm talking about and I hope for all our sakes the culture changes. Let's manifest it together.

I ran out of space (both on the paper and mental space) to include other cities but I think you get the gist of the major players in the political stage, I hope, and you'll understand why I'm not a fan of saying "this character I made for you to like is based on all the worst sterotypes and the worst people" and instead prefer to say "this character understands why people gravitate to batshit insane politics during trying times and may even allude to those in gag strips but doesn't endorse it because i didn't make this blog for bigots"

also, i started this blog while i was in toronto, and i am so tired of smug people in oh so liberal and multicultural and progressive uwu toronto (both canadians AND americans who had not even set foot in alberta before) telling me about my province's politics and how xyz is inevitable as if they don't have their own political tirefires. i made this blog because, like many albertans, i am filled with spite and rage - just not for the usual reasons. I personify because i want to humanize and provoke empathy and i dunno Care and Decency instead of repeatedly shitting on the shitty province which everyone loves to do instead of fixing anything. Like right now, this is for every single person telling me not to celebrate Jason resigning "because someone worse will appear!": Yeah, I am VERY AWARE all the devils are already here and i already have to live with them and I get to choose when I can take a break and feel happy about it and I get to hope there's more than a snowballs chance in hell of them completely bombing the election due to this. Grab a goddamn shovel and start mucking or mind your own fuckin' business, you don't get to just pay attention to our tire fire when it makes you feel better because you think of us as America Lite.

that's all folks [crawls off the stage and back into the lilacs]

[lizaloveslevihan]

Hii <3 I dont want to offend anyone but do you think that some people on aot twt get a little too offensive and rude over Hange's gender? I mean I know its a sensitive topic and I as a non binary person really appreciate that I can use they/them pronouns for Hange too, but since its ambiguous every interpretation is correct right? Theres no need to bash anyone for using her/ she, no?

Hi! Thank you so much for the ask. My apologies if it took a bit of time for me to reply, but I wanted to convey my perspective on this sensitive topic as best as I can. 

The issue and conflict regarding Hange’s gender will honestly never end. There will always be disputes here and there on any social media platform, and I suppose, that’s just how it is. It all just depends on the severity of the disputes. Now, Twitter has always been a minefield. It’s like a busy New York City street. You can argue here on Tumblr and it wouldn’t have the same intensity as it did if you had it on Twitter. That’s just the nature of their platform which makes cancel culture so much more prevalent over there. 

You’re right in saying that Hange’s gender is completely up to interpretation. Using either pronoun is absolutely and 100% valid AS LONG as you acknowledge AND respect the fact that other people may see things differently. As long as you understand that there isn’t a fixed gender for Hange in the first place. The problem lies in failing to do such things. 

Around the first two weeks of me being on Twitter, someone had posted this thread talking about why they thought Hange was female. At first glance, it seemed harmless, but once you read the entire thing, it was pushy and offensive and overall unnecessary to do. I would say that this instance, and perhaps many instances before it, has caused people to just generally be on their toes when it comes to she/her pronouns for Hange (at least, on Twitter.) Because the thing is, to non-binary folks, Hange isn’t just a comfort character, but rather, someone who represents them. Someone very important to them. Especially since there’s barely any representation of them in the media and pop culture. And we all know how important good representation is and how scarce it is. 

But then it becomes this cycle, you see. People who use she/her will force their interpretation on others. People who use they/them will do the same. They will both argue and become defensive, and next thing you know, they’ve canceled each other out. Then there are those people on both sides who’ve always been chill and have respected the ambiguous nature of Hange’s gender who will get roped in with those who don’t. And oh man, these disputes can be incredibly messy and frustrating and overall toxic. 

Personally, I’ve always seen Hange as female and used she/her pronouns. Because I wasn’t part of the LGBTQ+ community, I lacked education regarding the importance of gender neutral pronouns and what being non-binary meant. However, talking to all these people I’ve met online and forming relationships with them have helped me gain more knowledge and understanding regarding these matters. I’m so grateful for that because I would have been walking blind this entire time. And honestly? I still have a lot to learn. 

And so that’s how we have to solve this problem. By educating others and understanding where they’re coming from. By preventing ourselves from saying unnecessary things and conveying our opinions the best way possible. But of course, we will still encounter people who will continue with their unacceptable behavior despite doing all the things above. And by all means, they deserve to be called out. 

Alright, so to wrap it up, what I’m essentially trying to say is that there will always be offensive and rude behavior on every social media platform. There will always be conflicting ideas regarding Hange’s gender, even if it was stated that it’s ambiguous and that every interpretation is valid because there will always be people who try to force their interpretations on others even if it isn’t necessary at all. And of course, when these things happen on Twitter specifically, you can expect it to get much more out of hand and intense compared to Tumblr or Instagram, etc because that’s just how it is. In the end, we just have to equip ourselves with open-mindedness and understanding because maybe people just lack education, you know? But if they make it clear that they still choose to be difficult, then we ought to really, really call them out for it. 

@lonelypalmtree and a couple of others have talked about this issue as well and I love the points they made about educating oneself and doing our best to use gender neutral pronouns. We just have to make it a point to wake up every day and understand that we’re not the only ones who live on this planet. 

[divineknowing2021]

viewing guide

At its core, divine knowing is an exhibition about knowledge, power, and agency. It’s become a more common understanding that governments, institutions, and algorithms will manipulate the public with what information they frame as fact, fiction, or worthy of attention. Though I am early in researching this topic, I've only come across a minimal amount of mainstream discourse on how the initial threat limiting our scope of knowledge is a refusal to listen to ourselves.

In a world faced with so many threats - humans being violent toward each other, toward animals, toward the earth - it can be a bit unsettling to release the reins and allow ourselves to bear witness for a moment, as we slowly develop a deeper awareness of surrounding phenomena and happenings.  

divine knowing includes works by formally trained and self-taught artists. A majority of the artists are bisexual, non-binary, or transgender. Regardless of degree-status, gender, or sexuality, these artists have tapped into the autonomous well of self-knowing. Their artworks speak to tactics for opening up to a more perceptive mode of being. They unravel dependencies on external sources for knowledge and what we might recognize, connect with, or achieve once we do.

The installation Femme Digitale by Sierra Bagish originates from a series she began in 2017 by converting photographs of women that were taken and distributed online without the subject’s consent into paintings. Her practice at the time was concerned with female abjection. Sourcing images found via simple keywords and phrases (e.g., passed out, passed out drunk) she swathes a mass-circulated canon of internet detritus that articulates and produces aggression towards women. With her paintings, she circumvents the images’ original framing mechanisms and subverts these proliferated images through a sincere and personal lens.

These paintings divulge the blurred space between idolatry and denigration these online photos occupy, asking whose desires these images fulfill and what their propagation reveals about the culture producing them.  While Bagish's work contends with political motivations, she also remains keenly observant of form and the varying utilities of different media.

“I use the expressive potential of paint as a vehicle to intervene and challenge ideas about photography as a harbinger of the real and everyday.”

Chariot Birthday Wish is an artist and angel living in Brooklyn. They have seen The Matrix 28 times in 2 years and love horses. The tarot series included in divine knowing is their most intuitive project, something they revisit when unsure of what to work on next. The Major Arcana are composed of digital collages made from sourced images, the Minor Arcana are represented by short, poetic, interpretative texts about the cards. The series is played on shuffle, creating a unique reading for each viewer. This is a work in progress that will eventually finalize as a completed deck of digital collages available for purchase.

Chariot's work emerges from a constant consideration of apocalypse and connection. They reference technology in tandem with nature and a desire for unity. Underneath their work's surface conversation on beauty, care, and relationship exists an agenda to subtly evoke a conspiratorial anti-state mindset. Through a collective imagining of how good things could be and how good we want them to be, we might be able to reckon with how bad things are in contrast.

“I think about texting my friends from the middle of the woods...

Humans are a part of nature and we created these things. There's this Bjork quote where she says that "You can use pro tools and still be pagan." I'm really into the idea of using technology as a tool for divination and holy connection with nature. I imagine a scene; being in moss, it's absolute bliss, and then the connection of texting, sharing an image of moss with a friend, sharing that moment through cellular towers.”

The album "adding up" by thanks for coming is composed of songs Rachel Brown wrote during what they believe to be the most challenging year of their life. Rachel now looks back on this time in appreciation, recognizing they grew in ways they had never imagined. The entire year, they were committed to following their feelings to wherever it may lead.

“If I hadn't been open to following the almost indiscernible signs I was being sent, then I would have missed out on some of the most important moments in my life.”

Kimberly Consroe holds a Masters in Anthropology along with degrees in Archaeology, Literature, and History. She is currently a Research Analyst at the US Department of Commerce. Her artwork is a passionate escape from a hectic professional life and touches on themes of feminism and nature.

Her works begin as general ideas; their narrative complexity growing with the amount of time she invests in making each one. Her decoupage process starts with cutting hundreds, if not thousands, pieces of paper. The accumulation of clippings sourced from vintage and current-day magazines overlap to tell a story. In Domestication, Kimberly borrows submissive female figures from found images of Ryan Mcguinness's work and places them in a position of power.

“I believe intuition is associated with emotion and experience. It is wisdom and fear, empathy and outrage, distrust and familiarity. It is what we know before we know it. This relates to my artwork in that, from beginning to end, there is never one complete idea concerning the outcome: it is a personal journey. It emerges from an ephemeral narrative that coalesces into a definitive story.”

Anabelle DeClement is a photographer who primarily works with film and is interested in relationships as they exist within a frame. She is drawn to the mystery of the mundane. Intuition exists in her practice as a feeling of urgency and the decision to act on it  ---  a drive often used to describe street photography where the camera catches unexpected moments in an urban environment. Anabelle tends to photograph individuals with whom she has established personal relationships in a slow domestic setting. Her sense of urgency lies in capturing moments of peak intimacy, preserving a memory's informal beauty that otherwise may have been forgotten or overlooked.

Gla5 is a visual artist, poet, bookmaker, production designer, and educator. Play is at the center of their practice. Their process is an experimental one embracing impulse and adventure. Their compositions are informed by relationships among bodies of varying shapes, materials, and densities. Interests that come up in their work include a discernment between symbols and non-symbols, dream states, the portrayal of energy in action, and a fixation on forms such as cups, tables, and spoons.

“I generally think of my work as depicting a layer of life that exists underneath what we see in our everyday lives.”

Gladys Harlow is a sound-based performance artist, comedian, and activist who experiments with found objects, contact mics, textures, range, analog formats, present moments, and emotions. Through raw, avant-garbage performance art, they aim to breakdown societal barriers, abolish oppressive systems, and empower communities. Gladys was born in Queens, NY, raised in Miami, FL and has deep roots in Venezuela. Currently haunting in Philadelphia, PA, Gladys is a founding member of Sound Museum Collective. SMC holds space for reconstructing our relationships to sounds by creating a platform for women, nonbinary, and trans sound artists and engineers.

Street Rat is a visceral exploration of the mysteries of life. Attempting to bring heavy concepts to your reality, it is the eye on the ground that sees and translates all intersecting issues as they merge, explode, dissolve, and implode. Street Rat is Gladys Harlow's way of comprehending, coping, feeling, taking action, disrupting the status quo, and rebuilding our path.

All Power To The People originated as a recorded performance intended to demystify sound by revealing the tools, wires, and movements used to create it. All Power To The People evolved into an installation conceived specifically for this exhibition. The installation includes a theremin and oscillator built by Gladys, a tarot deck they made by hand, and books from the artist's personal collection, amongst other elements. Gladys has created a structure of comfort and exploration. They welcome all visitors of divine knowing to play with the instrument, flip freely through the books, and pull a tarot card to take home.

Phoebe Hart is an experimental animator and filmmaker. A majority of her work is centered around mental illness and the line between dreams and reality. Merry Go Round is a sculptural zoetrope that changes in shape and color as it spins. Its form is inspired by nature and its color by the circus. The video’s sound was produced by Hayden Waggener. It consists of reverbing chimes which are in rhythm with the stop animation’s movement; both oscillate seamlessly between serene and anxious states.

“I often don't plan the sculptures or objects I am fabricating, there is a vague image in my mind, and my hands take care of the rest. I find that sometimes overthinking is what can get me and other artists stuck. If I just abandon my judgments and ego, I can really let go and create work that feels like it came inherently from me.”

Powerviolets is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Violet Hetson who is currently based in New York. After experiencing several false starts while bouncing coast to coast, recording and performing with several lineups, Hetson has finally released her debut album. ~No Boys~ namesake is a sarcastic sign she hung on her suburban CT teenage bedroom door. Violet Hetson grew up primarily listening to punk and hardcore. She parses elements of these genres with influences from bands such as X and Suburban Lawns. ~No Boys~ takes a softer, melodic approach to Hetson's punk roots. Powerviolets' music is linear, unconventional, dark, and airy with a sense of humor.

Mary Hunt is a fiber artist specializing in chain stitch embroidery. This traditional form of embroidery uses vintage machinery and thick thread to create fibrous art and embellishments. They use an approach called "thread painting," which requires each stitch to be hand guided by the turn of a knob underneath the table while the speed of movement is controlled by a foot pedal. Chainstitch works can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 200 hours, encouraging a slow and thoughtful process. Mary uses a Cornely A machine, made in Paris more than 100 years ago.

“I think we are sent messages and guidance constantly. Our intuition is simply our ability to clear the path for those messages. The largest obstacles on my artistic path are usually self-imposed negative thoughts. I simply do things to take care of my spiritual well-being, first and foremost, and the rest follows. If I can trust the universe, trust the process, then I am much more likely to listen to the messages sent my way.”

Jes the Jem is a multi-media artist working with acrylic, watercolor, mold clay, and whatever else she can get her hands on. She uses vivid color to bring joy into the lives of those who view her art. Jes the Jem has experienced a great deal of pain in her life. Through that unique displeasure, she has been gifted a nuanced perspective. She aims to energize the present while paying homage to the past events that shape us. In her art, her life, and her interpersonal relationships, Jes the Jem appreciates the gift of all of life's experiences.

“The pursuit of happiness and understanding is instinct.”

Pamela Kivi pieces together visual scraps she has saved over the years, choosing to fuse them at whatever present moment she sees fit. Her work reflects on creative mania, fleeting emotions, and memories. Pamela's collages are a compilation of unexpected elements that include: old notebooks, cut-outs, text messages or Facebook message conversations, nostalgic cellphone photos, and visual materials she has chosen to hold onto. She prints out, cuts up, scans, edits, repeats. Pamela's artistic practice is deeply personal. It is a submittal to the process of dusting things off until a reflection can be seen, all enacted without an attachment to the end result.

“I rely on intuition and whatever state of mind I am in to whisk me away. In life, I often confuse intuition with anxiety- when it comes to creative work, I can decipher the two.”

Through sobriety, Kendall Kolenik's focus has shifted toward self-discovery and shedding old adaptive patterns, a process that led her to a passion for helping others heal themselves too. In autumn, she will begin her Masters in Social Work at Columbia University.

“I love how when I'm painting my self-doubt becomes so apparent. Painting shows me exactly where my doubt lies, which guides me towards overriding it. When I paint something and lean into doubt, I don't like what comes out. When I take note of the resistance and go with my gut more freely, I love it. This reminds me of my yoga practice. What you practice on the mat is a metaphor for how you show up in life. By breathing through the uncomfortable poses on the mat, you learn to breathe through challenging life moments.

I think we all grow up learning to numb and edit ourselves. We are taught not to trust our feelings; we are told to look outside ourselves for answers when we already have a perfectly good compass within. Painting is an archway back to that for me - rediscovering self-reliance and faith in my first instinct. When I'm creating these rainbow squares, sometimes I move so fast it's like something else is carrying me. I sort of leave myself and enter a trance. Like how you don't have to tell the heart to beat or the lungs to breathe - thinking goes away and I can get so close to my knowing that I become it. I love how art allows me to access my love for ambiguity, interpretation, and an interpretation that feels closer to Truth. I find no greater purpose than guiding people back to safety and reconnecting them with themselves. The most important thing to ever happen in my life was when I stopped trying to deny my reality - listening to your intuition can be like a freefall - no one but you can ever know or tell you - it is a deep trust without any outside proof.”

Lucille Loffredo is a music school dropout, Jewish trans lesbian, and veterinary assistant doing her best to make sure each day is better than the last. Lucille tries to find the music rather than make it. She lets it tell her what it wants to do and what it wants to be. The Wandering EP was in part written as a way to come out to herself. She asks all listeners to please be gentle.

“Change will come, and it will be good. You are who you think you are, no matter how far it seems.”

Whitney Lorenze generally works without reference, making thick, graphic pictures with precise forms conceived almost entirely from her imagination. Images like a slowly rolling car crackling out of a driveway, afternoon sun rays shining through a cloud of humidity, or headlights throwing a lined shadow across a black bedroom inspire her.

“As it concerns my own practice and the creation of artworks generally, I would define intuition as the ability to succumb to some primal creative impulse. Of course, this implies also the ability to resist the temptations of producing a calculated or contrived output.”

Ellie Mesa began teaching herself to paint at the age of 15, exploring landscapes and portraiture. Her work has evolved into a style of painting influenced by surrealism where teddy bears will morph into demons and vice versa. Her work speaks to cuteness, the grotesque, and mystical beings. The painting "Kali" is an homage to the Hindu goddess of creation,  destruction, life and death. This was Ellie's first painting after becoming sober and is an expression of the aforementioned forces in her own life. Through meditations on Kali, Elli has been able to find beauty in the cycle of love and loss.

“To me, intuition means doing the thing that feels right whether or not it's what you want it to be. When I'm painting or making a sculpture, I give myself the freedom to follow what feels right, even if that means starting over or changing it completely. I allow the piece to present itself to me instead of forcing something that doesn't want to be.”

Mari Ogihara is a sculptor exploring duality, resilience, beauty, and serenity as experienced through the female gaze. Her work is informed by the duality of womanhood and the contradictions of femininity. In particular, the multitude of roles we inhabit as friend, lover, sister, and mother and their complex associations to the feminine perspective.

“Intuition is an innate, immediate reaction to an experience. While making art, I try to balance intuition, logic, and craftsmanship.”

All Of Me Is War by Ames Valaitis addresses the subconscious rifts society initiates between women, estranging them from each other and themselves.

“It is an unspoken, quick, and quiet battle within me as the feeling of intuition purely, and when I am making a drawing. I am immediately drawn to poses and subject matter that reflect the emotion inside myself, whether it is loud or under the surface. If a line or figure doesn't move me, after working on it for a few minutes, I get rid of it. If something looks right to me immediately, I keep it; nurture it. I try to let go of my vision, let my instinct take hold. I mirror this in my life as I get older, choosing who and what to put my energy into. The feeling is rarely wrong; I'd say we all know inherently when it is time to continue or tap out.”

Chardel Williams is a self-taught artist currently living in Bridgeport. Her biggest inspiration is her birthplace of Jamaica. Chardel views painting as a method for blocking out chaos. Her attraction to the medium springs from its coalescence of freedom, meditative qualities, and the connection it engenders. rears.

“Intuition for me is going where my art flows. I implement it in my practice by simply creating space and time to listen. There are times when what I'm painting is done in everyone else's eyes, but I just keep picking at it. Sometimes I would stop painting a piece and go months without touching it. Then, out of nowhere, be obsessed with finishing. I used to get frustrated with that process, but now I go with it. I stopped calling it a block and just flow with it. I listen because my work talks.”

[dumb-american]

The Rebuild of Final Fantasy VII: Your Expectations Will (Not) Be Met

I apologize for the stupid title and I promise I’m going to talk about the Final Fantasy VII Remake, but I have to get this out of the way first. Sometime in the mid 2000s, acclaimed artist and director Hideaki Anno announced that he was going to remake his beloved anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion the way it should have been the first time, free from technical and budgetary restraints. Evangelion had a notoriously strange ending when the original anime aired, consisting of character talking over still images, abstract art, and simple animations. It was highly polarizing and controversial. Anno, for his part, received death threats and the headquarters of the studio that produced the anime was vandalized. Soon after the initial uproar Anno would direct The End of Evangelion, a retelling of the final two episodes of the anime, and that seemed to mostly satisfy the fanbase. Looking back now, The End of Evangelion wasn’t “fixing” something that was “broken,” no, it was a premonition: a vision of things to come. Why remake the ending when you can just remake the whole damn thing?

The mid 2000s also saw the birth of the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII: a sub-series of projects expanding the universe and world of the video game that had “quite possibly the greatest game ever made” proudly printed on the back of its CD case. The Compilation consisted of three games, all on different platforms, and a film. First was Advent Children, a sequel to Final Fantasy VII, where three dudes that look like discarded Sephiroth concept art all have anime fights with our beloved protagonists, culminating in a ridiculous gravity defying sword fight between Cloud and Sephiroth. Before Crisis and Crisis Core are prequels that expand the story of the Turks and Zack Fair, respectively. Then there’s Dirge of Cerberus, an action shooter staring secret party member and former Turk Vincent. Were these projects good? I’d say they were largely forgettable. Crisis Core stood out as the obvious best of the bunch and I think may be worth revisiting.

As a business model, the practice pioneered by the Compilation would continue on and eventually brings us FFXIII (and sequels), FF Versus XIII (which would later become FFXV), and FF Agito XIII (which would later become FF Type-0). If that’s all incredibly confusing to you, I’m sorry, I promise I will begin talking about the Final Fantasy VII Remake soon. Suffice it to say, both Final Fantasy VII and Neon Genesis Evangelion have a certain gravity. They punch above their weight. They are both regarded as absolute classics, flaws and all. And yet, in both cases, the people responsible for their creation decided that their first at bat wasn’t good enough and it was time to recreate them as they were meant to be all along. I think this way of thinking about art is flawed, limitations are as much a part of the creative process as vision and intent. Yet, we find ourselves in a world with a remake of Final Fantasy VII, so I guess we should talk about it.

From this point forward, there’s going to be major spoilers for every Final Fantasy VII related media. So, be warned.

So, is the Final Fantasy VII Remake any good? To me, that’s the least interesting question, but we can get into it. FFVIIR is audacious, that’s for sure. Where Anno condenses and remixes a 26 episode anime series into four feature length films, the FFVIIR team expands an around 5 hour prologue chapter into a 30+ hour entire game. Naturally, there will be some growing pains. The worst example of this is the sewers. The game forces you to slog through an awful sewer level twice, fighting the same boss each time. This expanded sewer level is based on a part of the original game that was only two screens and was never revisited.

Besides the walk from point A to point B, watch a cutscene, fight a boss, repeat that you’d expect from a JRPG, there’s also three chapters where the player can explore and do sidequests. The sidequests are mostly filler, but a select few do accomplish the goal of fleshing out some of the minor characters. You spend way more time with the Avalanche crew, for example. Out of them, only Jesse has something approaching a complete personality or character arc that matters. The main playable cast is practically unchanged which was a bit surprising to me. I figured Square-Enix would tone down Barret’s characterization as Mr. T with a gun for an arm, but they decided, maybe correctly, that Barret is an immutable part of the Final Fantasy VII experience. Also, it’s practically unforgivable that Red XIII was not playable in the remake considering how much time you spend with him. I don’t understand that decision in the slightest.

The game’s general systems and mechanics, materia, combat, weapon upgrades, etc. are all engaging and fun and not much else really needs to be said about it. I found it to be great blend of action/strategy. Materia really was the peak of JPRG creativity in the original FFVII and its recreation here is just as good. The novelty of seeing weird monsters like the Hell House and the “Swordipede” (called the Corvette in the original) make appearances as full on boss fights with mechanics is just weaponized nostalgia. In general, the remake has far more hits than misses, but those misses, like the sewers and some of the tedious sidequests, are big misses. It is a flawed game, but a good one. If I were to pick a favorite part of the game, I’d have to pick updated Train Graveyard section which takes lore from the original game and creates a mini-storyline out of it.

If that was all, however, then honestly writing about Final Fantasy VII Remake wouldn’t be worth my time or yours. The game’s ambition goes way further than just reimagining Midgar as a living, real city. There’s a joke in the JRPG community about the genre that goes something like this: at the start of the game, you kill rats in the sewer and by the end you’re killing God. Well, when all is said and done, the Final Fantasy VII Remake essentially does just that. Narratively, the entire final act of the game is a gigantic mess, but if you know anything about me then you know I’d much rather a work of fiction blast off into orbit and get a little wild than be safe and boring.

In the original games, the Lifestream is a physical substance that contains spirits and memories of every living being. Hence, when a person dies, they “return to the planet”. It flows beneath the surface of the planet like blood flows in a living person’s veins and can gather to heal “wounds” in the planet. In the original game, the antagonist, Sephiroth, seeks to deeply wound the planet with Meteor and then collect all the “spirit energy” the planet musters to heal the wound. The remake builds on this concept by introducing shadowy, hooded beings called Whispers. The Whispers are a physical manifestation of the concept of destiny and they can be found when someone seeks to change their fate, correcting course to the pre-destined outcome. Whispers appear at multiple points throughout the game’s storyline both impeding and aiding the party. The ending focuses heavily on them and the idea that fate and destiny can be changed. We receive visions throughout the game which some will recognize as major story beats and images from the original game. After dealing with Shinra and rescuing Aerith, the game immediately switches over to this battle against destiny and fate that you’re either going to love or hate. The transition is abrupt and jarring. While Cloud has shown flashes of supernatural physical abilities throughout the game, suddenly he has gone full Advent Children mode and is flying around cleaving 15 ton sections of steel in half with his sword. The party previously took on giant mutated monsters, elite soldiers, and horrific science experiments, but now the gloves are off and they’re squaring up against an impossibly huge manifestation of the Planet’s will. Keep in mind, in the narrative of the original FFVII, the Midgar section was rougly 10%, if that, of the game’s full storyline. This is, frankly, insane, but I’d be lying if I didn’t love it.

The Final Fantasy VII Remake, with its goofy JRPG concluding chapter, is forcing the player to participate in the original game’s un-making. We see premonitions of an orb of materia falling to the ground, we see an older Red XIII gallop across the plains, we see a SOLDIER with black hair and Cloud’s Buster Sword make his final stand, we see Cloud waist deep in water holding something or someone. We all know what these images represent, they’ve been part of imaginations for decades. But the Final Fantasy VII Remake allows us (or forces us, depending on perspective, I guess) to kill fate, kill God, and set aside all we thought we knew about how the game would play out post-Midgar. The most obvious effect of our actions is the reveal that Zack survived his final stand against Shinra and instead of leaving Cloud his sword and legacy, helped him get to Midgar safely. I have my doubts and my worries about the future of this series. I’m not sure when the next part of the game will be released or what form it will come in, but I can’t believe I’m as excited as I am to see it.

Of course, part of me wishes they’d just left well enough alone. Remakes are generally complete wastes of time and effort. Not all, but most. Maybe I’m, to borrow a term from pro wrestling lingo, a complete mark here and I just love JRPGs and Final Fantasy VII so much that I’ll countenance close to anything bearing its name. I’ve tried my best to be as critical and fair as possible to the game and I hope that if you’re on the fence and reading this I’ve maybe helped you decide if it’s for you or not. I think the Final Fantasy VII Remake is worth your time if you’re looking for a good, meaty JRPG. It’s not perfect and it’s final act is insane, but that just makes me love it more.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like for Zack, Cloud, and Aerith to face Sephiroth in the Planet’s core? I know 15 year old me did. And he may get his wish.

[theswordofpens]

Letters to Society's Children Issue #5

My dearest children of society, 

    I write to you on the subject of the labor force. The problems that the labor force currently faces are many and varied, depending on your needs in our society. For many of us, being a part of the labor force requires us to work exhausting hours and sometimes in dangerous conditions in order to make ends meet or to achieve the dreams we seek. Some of us are scared to take sick days to go to a doctor that we truly should see and instead we work harder so we may make more money. Many of us go on strike to demand for a living wage instead of the bare minimum that we earn. Some of us hide who we because our employer has demeaning or discriminatory views. Many of us have to work almost throughout our entire pregnancy because our country’s labor laws doesn’t give us paid maternal leave. Even still, there are those among us who lie as to where we are from so we may be able to provide for our families. 

Whoever or whatever we are, we all are suffering simply out of the necessity and desire for a better life not only for ourselves but our loved ones as well. The companies that many of us work for see us as replaceable as a piece of faulty machinery rather than the human beings we are. Rather than to risk the compny’s name to be tarnished, time and again CEOs and managers have brushed aside alligations and reports of sexual harassment and misconductwithin the walls and confinds of their companies and businesses. 

My children, we have to take a stand against this kind of evil. The workings and struggles of those before us who fought for a better job environment were noble indeed, but we cannot allow their efforts to be in vain. We allow this when we allow for there to be a gender pay gap. We allow this when we allow employers to discriminate people from all walks of life based on their own preconceived notions. We allow this when harassment and sexual misconduct is allowed in the workplace without anyone so much as blink an eye. We allow this when we continue to allow mega-monopolies and big corporations to force their workers to work in dangerous and unsafe conditions. We allow this when we continue to allow our labor laws to exclude women from having paid maternity leave, such as most of the rest of the world has. 

Now you may ask yourselves, my children, “How do we stand against such nonsense?” The answer is simple: Vote. Rally and march for change. Elect a representative that supports your platform and has a track record of doing what they say they’ll do. Demand that those responsible for such terrible atrocities in the work force be held accountable for their actions, no matter if they’re the janitor or if their the CEO and President of the company. We as a society look to you as the future, so we must do our best now to allow that future to be bright. And that, dear children, requires massive change within the working class of our society. 

    Criss Jami, the modern day American poet and philosopher once said, “Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man's true worth.”

Signed, Joshua Paul Villanueva

[didanawisgi]

CAN WE PULL BACK FROM THE BRINK?

Sam Harris, June 18, 2020

In this episode of the podcast, Sam discusses the recent social protests and civil unrest, in light of what we know about racism and police violence in America.

This is a transcript of a recorded podcast.

“OK…. Well, I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week—and have been unsure about whether to record it at all, frankly.

Conversation is the only tool we have for making progress, I firmly believe that. But many of the things we most need to talk about, seem impossible to talk about.

I think social media is a huge part of the problem. I’ve been saying for a few years now that, with social media, we’ve all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent, and it’s not at all clear how it will turn out. And it’s still not clear how it will turn out, but it’s not looking good. It’s fairly disorienting out there. All information is becoming weaponized. All communication is becoming performative. And on the most important topics, it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time.

We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually, crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination, and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one other on that basis.

So I’d like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest, and its possible political implications, and other cultural developments, and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here. I’m going to circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism, because that really is at the center of this. There is so much to talk about here, and it’s so difficult to talk about. And there is so much we don’t know. And yet, most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago.

I’ve been watching our country seem to tear itself apart for weeks now, and perhaps lay the ground for much worse to come. And I’ve been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance—not because I don’t have anything to say, but because of my perception of the danger, frankly. And if that’s the way I feel, given the pains that I’ve taken to insulate myself from those concerns, I know that almost everyone with a public platform is terrified. Journalists, and editors, and executives, and celebrities are terrified that they might take one wrong step here, and never recover.

And this is really unhealthy—not just for individuals, but for society. Because, again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. If we can’t reason with one another, there is no path forward, other than violence. Conversation or violence.

So, I’d like to talk about some of the things that concern me about the current state of our communication. Unfortunately, many things are compounding our problems at the moment. We have a global pandemic which is still very much with us. And it remains to be seen how much our half-hearted lockdown, and our ineptitude in testing, and our uncoordinated reopening, and now our plunge into social protest and civil unrest will cause the Covid-19 caseload to spike. We will definitely see. As many have pointed out, the virus doesn’t care about economics or politics. It only cares that we keep breathing down each other’s necks. And we��ve certainly been doing enough of that.

Of course, almost no one can think about Covid-19 right now. But I’d just like to point out that many of the costs of this pandemic and the knock-on effects in the economy, and now this protest movement, many of these costs are hidden from us. In addition to killing more than 100,000 people in the US, the pandemic has been a massive opportunity cost. The ongoing implosion of the economy is imposing tangible costs, yes, but it is also a massive opportunity cost. And now this civil unrest is compounding those problems—whatever the merits of these protests may be or will be, the opportunity costs of this moment are staggering. In addition to all the tangible effects of what’s happening—the injury and death, the lost businesses, the burned buildings, the neighborhoods that won’t recover for years in many cities, the educations put on hold, and the breakdown in public trust of almost every institution—just think about all the good and important things we cannot do—cannot even think of doing now—and perhaps won’t contemplate doing for many years to come, because we’ll be struggling to get back to that distant paradise we once called “normal life.”

Of course, normal life for many millions of Americans was nothing like a paradise. The disparities in wealth and health and opportunity that we have gotten used to in this country, and that so much of our politics and ways of doing business seem to take for granted, are just unconscionable. There is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth. What we’re seeing now is a response to that. But it’s a confused and confusing response. Worse, it’s a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation. And this makes it dangerous.

This isn’t just politics and human suffering on display. It’s philosophy. It’s ideas about truth—about what it means to say that something is “true.” What we’re witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we’re attempting to have in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what’s going on in the world? What is real? If we can’t agree about what is real, or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we’re stuck with one other.

So, what’s happening here?

Well, again, it’s hard to say. What is happening when a police officer or a mayor takes a knee in front of a crowd of young people who have been berating him for being a cog in the machinery of systemic racism? Is this a profound moment of human bonding that transcends politics, or is it the precursor to the breakdown of society? Or is it both? It’s not entirely clear.

In the most concrete terms, we are experiencing widespread social unrest in response to what is widely believed to be an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at the black community by racist cops and racist policies. And this unrest has drawn a counter-response from law enforcement—much of which, ironically, is guaranteed to exacerbate the problem of police violence, both real and perceived. And many of the videos we’ve seen of the police cracking down on peaceful protesters are hideous. Some of this footage has been unbelievable. And this is one of many vicious circles that we must find some way to interrupt.

Again, there is so much to be confused about here. We’ve now seen endless video of police inflicting senseless violence on truly peaceful protesters, and yet we have also seen video of the police standing idly by while looters completely destroy businesses. What explains this? Is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities? Are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them, and simultaneously trying to teach society a lesson by letting crime and mayhem spread elsewhere in the city? Or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters? Or is the whole spectacle itself a lie? How representative are these videos of what’s actually going on? Is there much less chaos actually occurring than is being advertised to us?

Again, it’s very hard to know.

What’s easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down. It seems to me that we’ve long been in a situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum have been amplifying one another and threatening to produce something truly dangerous. And now I think they have. The amount of misinformation in the air—the degree to which even serious people seem to be ruled by false assumptions and non sequiturs—is just astonishing.

And it’s important to keep in mind that, with the presidential election coming in November, the stakes are really high. As most of you know, I consider four more years of Trump to be an existential threat to our democracy. And I believe that the last two weeks have been very good for him, politically, even when everything else seemed to go very badly for him. I know the polls don’t say this. A large majority of people disapprove of his handling this crisis so far. But I think we all know now to take polls with a grain of salt. There is the very real problem of preference falsification—especially in an environment of intense social pressure. People will often say what they think is socially acceptable, and then think, or say, or do something very different in private—like when they’re alone in a voting booth.

Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy. I know the stock market has looked good, but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy. According to the stock market, the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year, before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. And a lot can happen in the next few months. The last two weeks feel like a decade. And my concern is that if Trump now gets to be the law-and-order President, that may be his path to re-election, if such a path exists. Of course, this crisis has revealed, yet again, how unfit he is to be President. The man couldn’t strike a credible note of reconciliation if the fate of the country depended on it—and the fate of the country has depended on it. I also think it’s possible that these protests wouldn’t be happening, but for the fact that Trump is President. Whether or not the problem of racism has gotten worse in our society, having Trump as President surely makes it seem like it has. It has been such a repudiation of the Obama presidency that, for many people, it has made it seem that white supremacy is now ascendant. So, all the more reason to get rid of Trump in November.

But before this social unrest, our focus was on how incompetent Trump was in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. And now he has been given a very different battle to fight. A battle against leftwing orthodoxy, which is growing more stifling by the minute, and civil unrest. If our social order frays sufficiently, restoring it will be the only thing that most people care about in November. Just think of what an act of domestic terrorism would do politically now. Things can change very, very quickly. And to all a concern for basic law and order “racist”, isn’t going to wash.

Trust in institutions has totally broken down. We’ve been under a very precarious quarantine for more than 3 months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political Right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They’ve been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public officials by the thousands, signing open letters, making public statements, saying it’s fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy. Especially so, because the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all. How many people will die because of these protests? It’s a totally rational question to ask, but the question itself is taboo now.

So, it seems to me that almost everything appears upside down at the moment.

Before I get into details on police violence, first let me try to close the door to a few misunderstandings.

Let’s start with the proximate cause of all this: The killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. I’ll have more to say about this in a minute, but nothing I say should detract from the following observation: That video was absolutely sickening, and it revealed a degree of police negligence and incompetence and callousness that everyone was right to be horrified by. In particular, the actions of Derek Chauvin, the cop who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly 9 minutes, his actions were so reckless and so likely to cause harm that there’s no question he should be prosecuted. And he is being prosecuted. He’s been indicted for 2nd degree murder and manslaughter, and I suspect he will spend many, many years in prison. And, this is not to say “the system is working.” It certainly seems likely that without the cell phone video, and the public outrage, Chauvin might have gotten away with it—to say nothing of the other cops with him, who are also now being prosecuted. If this is true, we clearly need a better mechanism with which to police the police.

So, as I said, I’ll return to this topic, because I think most people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this video, and from videos like it, but let me just echo everyone’s outrage over what happened. This is precisely the kind of police behavior that everyone should find abhorrent.

On the general topic of racism in America, I want to make a few similarly clear, preemptive statements:

Racism is still a problem in American society. No question. And slavery—which was racism’s most evil expression—was this country’s founding sin. We should also add the near-total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil. Any morally sane person who learns the details of these historical injustices finds them shocking, whatever their race. And the legacy of these crimes—crimes that were perpetrated for centuries—remains a cause for serious moral concern today. I have no doubt about this. And nothing I’m about to say, should suggest otherwise.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that the two groups I just mentioned, African Americans and Native Americans, suffer the worst from inequality in America today. How could the history of racial discrimination in this country not have had lasting effects, given the nature of that history? And if anything good comes out of the current crisis, it will be that we manage to find a new commitment to reducing inequality in all its dimensions. The real debate to have is about how to do this, economically and politically. But the status quo that many of us take for granted to is a betrayal of our values, whether we realize it or not. If it’s not a betrayal or your values now, it will be a betrayal of your values when you become a better person. And if you don’t manage that, it will be a betrayal of your kid’s values when they’re old enough to understand the world they are living in. The difference between being very lucky in our society, and very unlucky, should not be as enormous as it is.

However, the question that interests me, given what has been true of the past and is now true of the present, is what should we do next? What should we do to build a healthier society?

What should we do next?  Tomorrow… next week…. Obviously, I don’t have the answers. But I am very worried that many of the things we’re doing now, and seem poised to do, will only make our problems worse. And I’m especially worried that it has become so difficult to talk about this. I’m just trying to have conversations. I’m just trying to figure these things out in real time, with other people. And there is no question that conversation itself has become dangerous.

Think about the politics of this. Endless imagery of people burning and looting independent businesses that were struggling to survive, and seeing the owners of these businesses beaten by mobs, cannot be good for the cause of social justice. Looting and burning businesses, and assaulting their owners, isn’t social justice, or even social protest. It’s crime. And having imagery of these crimes that highlight black involvement circulate endlessly on Fox News and on social media cannot be good for the black community. But it might yet be good for Trump.

And it could well kick open the door to a level of authoritarianism that many of us who have been very worried about Trump barely considered possible. It’s always seemed somewhat paranoid to me to wonder whether we’re living in Weimar Germany. I’ve had many conversations about this. I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast, who’s been worrying about the prospect of tyranny in the US for several years now. I’ve known, in the abstract, that democracies can destroy themselves. But the idea that it could happen here still seemed totally outlandish to me. It doesn’t anymore.

Of course, what we’ve been seeing in the streets isn’t just one thing. Some people are protesting for reasons that I fully defend. They’re outraged by specific instances of police violence, like the killing of George Floyd, and they’re worried about creeping authoritarianism—which we really should be worried about now. And they’re convinced that our politics is broken, because it is broken, and they are deeply concerned that our response to the pandemic and the implosion of our economy will do nothing to address the widening inequality in our society. And they recognize that we have a President who is an incompetent, divisive, conman and a crackpot at a time when we actually need wise leadership.

All of that is hard to put on a sign, but it’s all worth protesting.

However, it seems to me that most protesters are seeing this moment exclusively through the lens of identity politics—and racial politics in particular. And some of them are even celebrating the breakdown of law and order, or at least remaining nonjudgmental about it. And you could see, in the early days of this protest, news anchors take that line, on CNN, for instance. Talking about the history of social protest, “Sometimes it has to be violent, right? What, do you think all of these protests need to be nonviolent?” Those words came out of Chris Cuomo’s mouth, and Don Lemon’s mouth. Many people have been circulating a half quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about riots being “the language of the unheard.” They’re leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed riots harmed the cause of the black community and helped the cause of racists.

There are now calls to defund and even to abolish the police. This may be psychologically understandable when you’ve spent half your day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters. Those videos are infuriating. And I’ll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute. But if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind. Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food. Having a police force that can deter crime, and solve crimes when they occur, and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system, is the necessary precondition for almost anything else of value in society.

We need police reform, of course. There are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing—its hiring practices, training, the militarization of so many police forces, outside oversight, how police departments deal with corruption, the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job, and yes, the problem of racist cops. But the idea that any serious person thinks we can do without the police—or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones—this just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails. Yes, we should give more resources to community services. We should have psychologists or social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill. Perhaps we’re giving cops jobs they shouldn’t be doing. All of that makes sense to rethink. But the idea that what we’re witnessing now is a matter of the cops being over-resourced—that we’ve given them too much training, that we’ve made the job too attractive—so that the people we’re recruiting are of too high a quality. That doesn’t make any sense.

What’s been alarming here is that we’re seeing prominent people—in government, in media, in Hollywood, in sports—speak and act as though the breakdown of civil society, and of society itself, is a form of progress and any desire for law enforcement is itself a form of racist oppression. At one point the woman who’s running the City Council in Minneapolis, which just decided to abolish the police force, was asked by a journalist, I believe on CNN, “What do I do if someone’s breaking into my house in the middle of the night? Who do I call?” And her first response to that question was, “You need to recognize what a statement of privilege that question is.” She’s since had to walk that back, because it’s one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said, but this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane. You cannot say that if someone is breaking into your house, and you’re terrified, and you want a police force that can respond, that fear is a symptom of “white privilege.” This is where Democratic politics goes to die.

Again, what is alarming about this is that this woke analysis of the breakdown of law and order will only encourage an increasingly authoritarian response, as well as the acceptance of that response by many millions of Americans.

If you step back, you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air. And it’s destroying institutions. It’s destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information—universities, the press. The New York Times in recent days, seems to be preparing for a self-immolation in recent days. No one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable—certainly not anyone who has more wokeness points than they do. It’s just become too dangerous. There are people being fired for tweeting “All Lives Matter.” #AllLivesMatter, in the current environment, is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy. That is how weird this moment is. A soccer player on the LA Galaxy was fired for something his wife tweeted…

Of course, there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests. People who have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world—or young people who fear they never will—people who have seen their economic prospects simply vanish, and people who have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops—people by the millions are now surrendering themselves to a kind of religious awakening. But like most religious awakenings, this movement is not showing itself eager to make honest contact with reality.

On top of that, we find extraordinarily privileged people, whatever the color of their skin—people who have been living wonderful lives in their gated communities or 5th avenue apartments—and who feel damn guilty about it—they are supporting this movement uncritically, for many reasons. Of course, they care about other people—I’m sure most of them have the same concerns about inequality that I do—but they are also supporting this movement because it promises a perfect expiation of their sins. If you have millions of dollars, and shoot botox into your face, and vacation on St. Bart’s, and you’re liberal—the easiest way to sleep at night is to be as woke as AOC and like every one of her tweets.

The problem isn’t just with the looting, and the arson, and the violence. There are problems with these peaceful protests themselves.

Of course, I’m not questioning anyone’s right to protest. Even our deranged president can pay lip service to that right—which he did as the DC police were violently dispersing a peaceful protest so that he could get his picture taken in front of that church, awkwardly holding a bible, as though he had never held a book in life.

The problem with the protests is that they are animated, to a remarkable degree, by confusion and misinformation. And I’ll explain why I think that’s the case. And, of course, this will be controversial. Needless to say, many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here. I could have invited any number of great, black intellectuals onto the podcast to make these points for me. But that struck me as a form of cowardice. Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, these guys might not agree with everything I’m about to say, but any one of them could walk the tightrope I’m now stepping out on far more credibly than I can.

But, you see, that’s part of the problem. The perception that the color of a person’s skin, or even his life experience, matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion. For the discussion we really need to have, the color of a person’s skin, and even his life experience, simply does not matter. It cannot matter. We have to break this spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything.

Ok…

As I’ve already acknowledged, there is a legacy of racism in the United States that we’re still struggling to outgrow. That is obvious. There are real racists out there. And there are ways in which racism became institutionalized long ago. Many of you will remember that during the crack epidemic the penalties for crack and powder cocaine were quite different. And this led black drug offenders to be locked up for much longer than white ones. Now, whether the motivation for that policy was consciously racist or not, I don’t know, but it was effectively racist. Nothing I’m about to say entails a denial of these sorts of facts. There just seems to be no question that boys who grow up with their fathers in prison start life with a significant strike against them. So criminal justice reform is absolutely essential.

And I’m not denying that many black people, perhaps most, have interactions with cops, and others in positions of power, or even random strangers, that seem unambiguously racist. Sometimes this is because they are actually in the presence of racism, and perhaps sometimes it only seems that way. I’ve had unpleasant encounters with cops, and customs officers, and TSA screeners, and bureaucrats of every kind, and even with people working in stores or restaurants. People aren’t always nice or ethical. But being white, and living in a majority white society, I’ve never had to worry about whether any of these collisions were the result of racism. And I can well imagine that in some of these situations, had I been black, I would have come away feeling that I had encountered yet another racist in the wild. So I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that. Surely that’s one form of white privilege.

So, nothing I’m going to say denies that we should condemn racism—whether interpersonal or institutional—and we should condemn it wherever we find it. But as a society, we simply can’t afford to find and condemn racism where it doesn’t exist. And we should be increasingly aware of the costs of doing that. The more progress we make on issues of race, the less racism there will be to find, and the more likely we’ll find ourselves chasing after its ghost.

The truth is, we have made considerable progress on the problem of racism in America. This isn’t 1920, and it isn’t 1960. We had a two-term black president. We have black congressmen and women. We have black mayors and black chiefs of police. There are major cities, like Detroit and Atlanta, going on their fifth or sixth consecutive black mayor. Having more and more black people in positions of real power, in what is still a majority white society, is progress on the problem of racism. And the truth is, it might not even solve the problem we’re talking about. When Freddy Gray was killed in Baltimore, virtually everyone who could have been held accountable for his death was black. The problem of police misconduct and reform is complicated, as we’re about to see. But obviously, there is more work to do on the problem of racism. And, more important, there is much more work to do to remedy the inequalities in our society that are so correlated with race, and will still be correlated with race, even after the last racist has been driven from our shores.

The question of how much of today’s inequality is due to existing racism—whether racist people or racist policies—is a genuinely difficult question to answer. And to answer it, we need to distinguish the past from the present.

Take wealth inequality, for example: The median white family has a net worth of around $170,000—these data are a couple of years old, but they’re probably pretty close to what’s true now. The median black family has a net worth of around $17,000. So we have a tenfold difference in median wealth. (That’s the median, not the mean: Half of white families are below 170,000 and half above; half of black families are below 17,000 and half above. And we’re talking about wealth here, not income.)

This disparity in wealth persists even for people whose incomes are in the top 10 percent of the income distribution. For whites in the top 10 percent for income, the median net worth is $1.8 million; for blacks it’s around $350,000. There are probably many things that account for this disparity in wealth. It seems that black families that make it to the top of the income distribution fall out of it more easily than white families do. But it’s also undeniable that black families have less intergenerational wealth accumulated through inheritance.

How much of this is inequality due to the legacy of slavery? And how much of it is due to an ensuing century of racist policies? I’m prepared to believe quite a lot. And it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here. Of course, one will then need to talk about reparations for the Native Americans. And then one wonders where this all ends. And what about blacks who aren’t descended from slaves, but who still suffered the consequences of racism in the US? In listening to people like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes discuss this topic, I’m inclined to think that reparations is probably unworkable as a policy. But the truth is that I’m genuinely unsure about this.

Whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past, we have to ask, how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism and to existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth? And the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts.

The problem with the social activism we are now seeing—what John McWhorter has called “the new religion of anti-Racism”—is that it finds racism nearly everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath. But it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university, or in Silicon Valley, or at the Oscars. And those exaggerations are toxic—and, perversely, they may produce more real racism. It seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group, even a group that has a long history of real victimization.

The imprecision here—the bad-faith arguments, the double standards, the goal-post shifting, the idiotic opinion pieces in the New York Times, the defenestrations on social media, the general hysteria that the cult of wokeness has produced—I think this is all extremely harmful to civil society, and to effective liberal politics, and to the welfare of African Americans.

So, with that as preamble, let’s return to the tragic death of George Floyd.

As I said, I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing. So, people of any race, are right to be horrified by what happened there. But now I want to ask a few questions, and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately. And I really want you to watch your mind while you do this. There are very likely to be few tripwires installed there, and I’m about to hit them. So just do your best to remain calm.

Does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

Does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

In other words, do we have reason to believe that, had Floyd been white, he wouldn’t have died in a similar way?

Do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years, of black men being killed by cops, do they prove, or even suggest, that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed especially at black men and that this violence is motivated by racism?

Most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that to even pose them as I just did is obscene. The answer is YES, and it’s a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets.

The problem, however, is that if you take even 5 minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence, the answer appears to be “no,” in every case, albeit with one important caveat. I’m not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990. But in the last 25 years, violent crime has come down significantly in the US, and so has the police use of deadly force. And as you’re about to see, the police used more deadly force against white people—both in absolute numbers, and in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society. But the public perception is, of course, completely different.

In a city like Los Angeles, 2019 was a 30-year low for police shootings. Think about that…. Do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles, peacefully and violently, do the people who were ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds—in many cases, businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods—do the people who caused so much damage to the city, that certain neighborhoods, ironically the neighborhoods that are disproportionately black, will take years, probably decades to recover, do the celebrities who supported them, and even bailed them out of jail—do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30-year low for police shootings in Los Angeles?

Before I step out further over the abyss here, let me reiterate: Many of you are going to feel a visceral negative reaction to what I’m about to say. You’re not going to like the way it sounds. You’re especially not going to like the way it sounds coming from a white guy. This feeling of not liking, this feeling of outrage, this feeling of disgust—this feeling of “Sam, what the fuck is wrong with you, why are you even touching this topic?”—this feeling isn’t an argument. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, the basis for your believing anything to be true or false about the world.

Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that I or anyone else needs to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that you should respect. In fact, it is something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind, this feeling can mislead you.

If you care about justice—and you absolutely should—you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly. Justice requires contact with reality. It simply isn’t the case—it cannot be the case—that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be the most offended by conversation itself.

So, I’m going to speak the language of facts right now, in so far as we know them, all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people’s assumptions. Many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong. And that should matter to you.

So just take a moment and think this through with me.

How many people are killed each year in America by cops? If you don’t know, guess. See if you have any intuitions for these numbers. Because your intuitions are determining how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis.

The answer for many years running is about 1000. One thousand people are killed by cops in America each year. There are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year, and about 10 million arrests. That’s down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually throughout the 1990’s. So, of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police, and the police decide to make an arrest, about 1000 of those people die as a result. (I’m sure a few people get killed even when no arrest was attempted, but that has to be a truly tiny number.) So, without knowing anything else about the situation, if the cops decide to arrest you, it would be reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around 1/10,000. Of course, in the United States, it’s higher than it is in other countries. So I’m not saying that this number is acceptable. But it is what it is for a reason, as we’re about to see.

Now, there are a few generic things I’d like to point here before we get further into the data. They should be uncontroversial.

First, it’s almost certainly the case that of these 1000 officer-caused deaths each year, some are entirely justified—it may even be true that most are entirely justified—and some are entirely unjustified, and some are much harder to judge. And that will be true next year. And the year after that.

Of the unjustified killings, there are vast differences between them. Many have nothing in common but for the fact that a cop killed someone unnecessarily. It might have been a terrible misunderstanding, or incompetence, or just bad luck, and in certain cases it could be a cop who decides to murder someone because he’s become enraged, or he’s just a psychopath. And it is certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some number of these unjustified killings.

Another point that should be uncontroversial—but may sound a little tone-deaf in the current environment, where we’ve inundated with videos of police violence in response to these protests. But this has to be acknowledged whenever we’re discussing this topic: Cops have a very hard job. In fact, in the current environment, they have an almost impossible job.

If you’re making 10 million arrests every year, some number of people will decide not to cooperate. There can be many reasons for this. A person could be mentally ill, or drunk, or on drugs. Of course, rather often the person is an actual criminal who doesn’t want to be arrested.

Among innocent people, and perhaps this getting more common these days, a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do, ethically or politically or as a matter of affirming his identity. After all, put yourself in his shoes, he did nothing wrong. Why are the cops arresting him? I don’t know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race. But I can well imagine that if it’s common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police, that could lead to greater levels of non-compliance. Which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death. This is certainly one reason why it is wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community it’s policing. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that this will reduce lethal violence from the side of the police. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. But it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is a likely explanation for police behavior, which itself might reduce conflict.

When a cop goes hands on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest, that person’s resistance poses a problem that most people don’t understand. If you haven’t studied this topic. If you don’t know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non-compliant person who may be bigger and stronger than you are, and if you haven’t thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt while attempting to do that—a gun that can be grabbed and used against you, or against a member of the public—then your intuitions about what makes sense here, tactically and ethically, are very likely to be bad.

If you haven’t trained with firearms under stress. If you don’t know how suddenly situations can change. If you haven’t experienced how quickly another person can close the distance on you, and how little time you have to decide to draw your weapon. If you don’t know how hard it is to shoot a moving target, or even a stationary one, when your heart is beating out of your chest. You very likely have totally unreasonable ideas about what we can expect from cops in situations like these. [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]

And there is another fact that looms over all this like the angel of Death, literally: Most cops do not get the training they need. They don’t get the hand-to-hand training they need—they don’t have good skills to subdue people without harming them. All you need to do is watch YouTube videos of botched arrests to see this. The martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects. Cops also don’t get the firearms training they need. Of course, there are elite units in many police departments, but most cops do not have the training they need to do the job they’re being asked to do.

It is also true, no doubt, that some cops are racist bullies. And there are corrupt police departments that cover for these guys, and cover up police misconduct generally, whether it was borne of racism or not.

But the truth is that even if we got rid of all bad cops, which we absolutely should do, and there were only good people left, and we got all these good people the best possible training, and we gave them the best culture in which to think about their role in society, and we gave them the best methods for de-escalating potentially violent situations—which we absolutely must do—and we scrubbed all the dumb laws from our books, so that when cops were required to enforce the law, they were only risking their lives and the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem necessary and just—so the war on drugs is obviously over—even under these conditions of perfect progress, we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified, and therefore tragic. Every year, there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son or daughter, or father or mother, or brother or sister. And videos of these killings will occasionally surface, and they will be horrific. This seems guaranteed to happen.

So, while we need to make all these improvements, we still need to understand that there are very likely always to going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable, or inexplicably stupid, that results in an innocent person’s death, or a not-so-innocent person’s death. And sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black. We have 10 million arrests each year. And we now live in a panopticon where practically everything is videotaped.

I’m about to get further into the details of what we know about police violence, but I want to just put it to you now: If we’re going to let the health of race relations in this country, or the relationship between the community and the police, depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again, the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed.

About a week into these protests I heard Van Jones on CNN say, “If we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man, this country could go over the edge.” He said this, not as indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become. He seemed to be saying it as an ultimatum to the police. With 10 million arrests a year, arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world, I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is.

We have to put these videos into context. And we have to acknowledge how different they are from one another. Some of them are easy to interpret. But some are quite obviously being interpreted incorrectly by most people—especially by activists. And there are a range of cases—some have video associated with them and some don’t—that are now part of a litany of anti-racist outrage, and the names of the dead are intoned as though they were all evidence of the same injustice. And yet, they are not.

Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight and got out of his car and tried to flee. There might have been a brief struggle over the officer’s taser, that part of the video isn’t clear. But what is clear is that he was shot in the back multiple times as he was running away. That was insane. There was zero reason for the officer to feel that his life was under threat at the point he opened fire. And for that unjustified shooting, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. I’m not sure that’s long enough. That seemed like straight-up murder.

The George Floyd video, while even more disturbing to watch, is harder to interpret. I don’t know anything about Derek Chauvin, the cop who knelt on his neck. It’s quite possible that he’s a terrible person who should have never been a cop. He seems to have a significant number of complaints against him—though, as far as I know, the details of those complaints haven’t been released. And he might be a racist on top of being a bad cop. Or he might be a guy who was totally in over his head and thought you could restrain someone indefinitely by keeping a knee on their neck indefinitely. I don’t know. I’m sure more facts will come out. But whoever he is, I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd. Think about it. He was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed. Unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history, it seems very unlikely that he was intending to commit murder in that moment. It’s possible, of course. But it doesn’t seem the likeliest explanation for his behavior.

What I believe we saw on that video was the result of a tragic level of negligence and poor training on the part of those cops. Or terrible recruitment—it’s possible that none of these guys should have ever been cops. I think for one of them, it was only his fourth day on the job. Just imagine that. Just imagine all things you don’t know as a new cop.  It could also be a function of bad luck in terms of Floyd’s underlying health. It’s been reported that he was complaining of being unable to breath before Chauvin pinned him with his knee. The knee on his neck might not have been the only thing that caused his death. It could have also been the weight of the other officer pinning him down.

This is almost certainly what happened in the cast of Eric Garner. Half the people on earth believe they witnessed a cop choke Eric Garner to death in that video. That does not appear to be what happened. When Eric Garner is saying “I can’t breathe” he’s not being choked. He’s being held down on the pavement by several officers. Being forced down on your stomach under the weight of several people can kill a person, especially someone with lung or heart disease. In the case of Eric Garner, it is absolutely clear that the cop who briefly attempted to choke him was no longer choking him. If you doubt that, watch the video again.

And if you are recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos, you really should watch the killing of Tony Timpa. It’s also terribly disturbing, but it removes the variable of race and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops about as clearly as you could ask. It really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos.

Tony Timpa was a white man in Dallas, who was suffering some mental health emergency and cocaine intoxication. And he actually called 911 himself. What we see is the bodycam footage from the police, which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived—a security guard had cuffed him. And then the cops take over, and they restrain Timpa on the ground, by rolling him onto a stomach and putting their weight on him, very much like in the case of Eric Garner. And they keep their weight on him—one cop has a knee on his upper back, which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck—but they crush the life out of him all the same, over the course of 13 minutes. He’s not being choked. The cops are not being rough. There’s no animus between them and Timpa. It was not a hostile arrest. They clearly believe that they’re responding to a mental health emergency. But they keep him down on his belly, under their weight, and they’re cracking jokes as he loses consciousness. Now, your knowledge that he’s going to be dead by the end of this video, make their jokes seem pretty callous. But this was about as benign an imposition of force by cops as you’re going to see. The crucial insight you will have watching this video, is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony Timpa, they don’t take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they’re doing is perfectly safe—perfectly within protocol. They’ve probably done this hundreds of times before.

If you watch that video—and, again, fair warning, it is disturbing—but imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony Timpa had been black. If the only thing you changed about the video was the color of Timpa’s skin, then that video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society, exactly as the George Floyd video did. In fact, in one way it is worse, or would have been perceived to be worse. I mean, just imagine white cops telling jokes as they crushed the life out of a black Tony Timpa… Given the nature of our conversation about violence, given the way we perceive videos of this kind, there is no way that people would have seen that as anything other than a lynching. And yet, it would not have been a lynching.

Now, I obviously have no idea what was in the minds of cops in Minneapolis. And perhaps we’ll learn at trial. Perhaps a tape of Chauvin using the N-word in another context will surface, bringing in a credible allegation of racism. It seems to me that Chauvin is going to have a very hard time making sense of his actions. But most people who saw that video believe they have seen, with their own eyes, beyond any possibility of doubt, a racist cop intentionally murder an innocent man. That’s not what the video necessarily shows.

As I said, these videos can be hard to interpret, even while seeming very easy to interpret. And these cases, whether we have associated video or not, are very different. Michael Brown is reported to have punched a cop in the face and attempted to get his gun. As far as I know, there’s no video of that encounter. But, if true, that is an entirely different situation. If you’re attacking a cop, trying to get his gun, that is a life and death struggle that almost by definition for the cop, and it most cases justifies the use of lethal force. And honestly, it seems that no one within a thousand miles of Black Lives Matter is willing to make these distinctions. An attitude of anti-racist moral outrage is not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct.

I’ve seen many videos of people getting arrested. And I’ve seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be inappropriate use of force by the cops. One overwhelming fact that comes through is that people, whatever the color of their skin, don’t understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe. People have to stop resisting arrest. This may seem obvious, but judging from most of these videos, and from the public reaction to them, this must be a totally arcane piece of information. When a cop wants to take you into custody, you don’t get to decide whether or not you should be arrested. When a cop wants to take you into custody, for whatever reason, it’s not a negotiation. And if you turn it into a wrestling match, you’re very likely to get injured or killed.

This is a point I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Loury, and it became essentially a public service announcement. And I’ve gone back and listened to those comments, and I want to repeat them here. This is something that everyone really needs to understand. And it’s something that Black Lives Matter should be teaching explicitly: If you put your hands on a cop—if you start wrestling with a cop, or grabbing him because he’s arresting your friend, or pushing him, or striking him, or using your hands in way that can possibly be interpreted as your reaching for a gun—you are likely to get shot in the United States, whatever the color of your skin.

As I said, when you’re with a cop, there is always a gun out in the open. And any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun. A cop doesn’t know what you’re going to do if you overpower him, so he has to assume the worst. Most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person without shooting him—for good reason, because they’re not well trained to do that, and they’re continually confronting people who are bigger, or younger, or more athletic, or more aggressive than they are. Cops are not superheroes. They’re ordinary people with insufficient training, and once things turn physical they cannot afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer the benefit of the doubt.

This is something that most people seem totally confused about. If they see a video of somebody trying to punch a cop in the face and the person’s unarmed, many people think the cop should just punch back, and any use of deadly force would be totally disproportionate. But that’s not how violence works. It’s not the cop’s job to be the best bare-knuckled boxer on Earth so he doesn’t have to use his gun. A cop can’t risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out, because there’s always a gun in play. This is the cop’s perception of the world, and it’s a justifiable one, given the dynamics of human violence.

You might think cops shouldn’t carry guns. Why can’t we just be like England? That’s a point that can be debated. But it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns on the street. The United States is not England.

Again, really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person. It’s not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested. Does it matter that you know you didn’t do anything wrong? No. And how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by your not following police commands? I’m going to ask that again: How could the fact that you’re innocent, that you’re not a threat to cop, that you’re not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own, how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment he’s attempting to arrest you by your resisting arrest?

Unless you called the cops yourself, you never know what situation you’re in. If I’m walking down the street, I don’t know if the cop who is approaching me didn’t get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery. I know I didn’t do anything, but I don’t know what’s in the cop’s head. The time to find out what’s going on—the time to complain about racist cops, the time to yell at them and tell them they’re all going to get fired for their stupidity and misconduct—is after cooperating, at the police station, in the presence of a lawyer, preferably. But to not comply in the heat of the moment, when a guy with the gun is issuing commands—this raises your risk astronomically, and it’s something that most people, it seems, just do not intuitively understand, even when they’re not in the heat of the moment themselves, but just watching video of other people getting arrested.

Ok. End of public-service announcement.

The main problem with using individual cases, where black men and women have been killed by cops, to conclude that there is an epidemic of racist police violence in our society, is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops, and there are actually more of them.

In 2016, John McWhorter wrote a piece in Time Magazine about this.

Here’s a snippet of what he wrote:

“The heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters. That has seemed plausible to me, and I have recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrage us in cases such as what happened to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam Debose, and others.”

So, McWhorter issued that challenge, as he said, and he was presented with the cases [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]. But there’s no song about these people, admonishing us to say their names. And the list of white names is longer, and I don’t know any of them, other than Tony Timpa. I know the black names. In addition to the ones I just read from McWhorter’s article, I know the names of Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, and Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile, and now, of course, I know the name of George Floyd. And I’m aware of many of the details of these cases where black men and women have been killed by cops. I know the name of Breonna Taylor. I can’t name a single white person killed by cops in circumstances like these—other than Timpa—and I just read McWhorter’s article where he lists many of them.

So, this is also a distortion in the media. The media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops; activists are not demanding that they do this. I’m sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot, who knows? But in terms of the story we’re telling ourselves in the mainstream, we are not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence.

So back to the data: Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we’re talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren’t the cases we’re worried about. We’re worried about the unjustifiable homicides.

Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. Afterall, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism.

Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts:

Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes.

If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I’m pretty sure that most black people wouldn’t set the dial at 13 percent either.

And here we arrive at the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black-on-black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black-on-white crime. For more than a generation, crime in America really hasn’t been a story of much white-on-black crime. [Some listeners mistook my meaning here. I’m not denying that most violent crime is intraracial. So, it’s true that most white homicide victims are killed by white offenders. Per capita, however, the white crime rate is much lower than the black crime rate. And there is more black-on-white crime than white-on-black crime.—SH]

The murder rate has come down steadily since the early 1990’s, with only minor upticks. But, nationwide, blacks are still 6 times more likely to get murdered than whites, and in some cities their risk is double that. And around 95 percent of the murders are committed by members of the African American community. [While reported in 2015, these data were more than a decade old. Looking at more recent data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the number appears to be closer to 90 percent.—SH]

The weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide—when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community, 92 people were shot, and 27 killed, in Chicago alone—one city. This is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community. And this is far more representative of the kind of violence that the black community needs to worry about. And, ironically, it’s clear that one remedy for this violence is, or would be, effective policing.

These are simply the facts of crime in our society as we best understand them. And the police have to figure out how to respond to these facts, professionally and ethically. The question is, are they doing that? And, obviously, there’s considerable doubt that they’re doing that, professionally and ethically.

Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who’s work I discussed on the podcast with Glenn Loury, studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force.

His paper is titled, this from 2016, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.”

Fryer is black, and he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there’s an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at black men. But he didn’t find that. However, he did find support for the suspicion that black people suffer more nonlethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do.

So let’s look at this.

The study examined data from 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. Generally, Fryer found that there is 25 percent greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones—cuffing them, or forcing them to ground, or using other non-lethal force.

Specifically, in New York City, in encounters where white and black citizens were matched for other characteristics, they found that:

Cops were…

17 percent more likely to go hands on black suspects

18 percent more likely to push them into a wall

16 percent more likely to put them in handcuffs (in a situation in which they aren’t arrested)

18 percent more likely to push them to the ground

25 percent more likely to use pepper spray or a baton

19 percent more likely to draw their guns

24 percent more likely to point a gun at them.

This is more or less the full continuum of violence short of using lethal force. And it seems, from the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. What accounts for this disparity? Racism? Maybe. However, as I said, it’s inconvenient to note that other data suggest that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. I’m not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that.

Are there other explanations? Well, again, could it be that blacks are less cooperative with the police. If so, that’s worth understanding. A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate, given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force.

Whatever is true here is something we should want to understand. And it’s all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops, due to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black, and an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods, and an increased propensity for cops to go hands-on these suspects, with or without an arrest, for whatever reason—it’s easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism, whether or not racism is the underlying motivation.

It is totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop. And, given the level of crime in the black community, a disproportionate number of innocent black men seem guaranteed to have this experience. It’s totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police. This is another vicious circle that we must find some way to interrupt.

But Fryer also found that black suspects are around 25 percent less likely to be shot than white suspects are. And in the most egregious situations, where officers were not first attacked, but nevertheless fired their weapons at a suspect, they were more likely to do this when the suspect was white.

Again, the data are incomplete. This doesn’t not cover every city in the country. And a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture. But, as far as I know, the best data we have suggest that for, whatever reason, whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted. And a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. And it is simply undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society.

Can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well-oiled machine of woke outrage? Our society is in serious trouble now. We are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic and our response to it has been totally inept. On top of that, we’re being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a full-on economic depression. And the streets are now filled with people who imagine, on the basis of seeing some horrific videos, that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans. Look at what this belief is doing to our politics. And these videos will keep coming. And the truth is they could probably be matched 2 for 1 with videos of white people being killed by cops. What percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way? In light of the belief that the disparity must run the other way, people are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves, and to even loot and burn businesses. And most people and institutions are supporting this civil unrest from the sidelines, because they too imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers. And all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump—and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video.

As I hope I’ve made clear, we need police reform—there’s no question about this. And some of the recent footage of the police attacking peaceful protests is outrageous. Nothing I just said should signify that I’m unaware of that. From what I’ve seen—and by the time I release this podcast, the character of all this might have changed—but, from what I’ve seen, the police were dangerously passive in the face of looting and real crime, at least in the beginning. In many cities, they just stood and watched society unravel. And then they were far too aggressive in the face of genuinely peaceful protests. This is a terrible combination. It is the worst combination. There’s no better way to increase cynicism and anger and fear, on all sides.

But racializing how we speak about the problem of police violence, where race isn’t actually the relevant variable—again, think of Tony Timpa— this has highly negative effects. First, it keeps us from talking about the real problems with police tactics. For instance, we had the recent case of Breonna Taylor who was killed in a so-called “no knock” raid of her home. As occasionally happens, in this carnival of moral error we call “the war on drugs,” the police had the wrong address, and they kicked in the wrong door. And they wound up killing a totally innocent woman. But this had nothing to do with race. The problem is not, as some commentators have alleged, that it’s not safe to be “sleeping while black.” The problem is that these no-knock raids are an obscenely dangerous way of enforcing despicably stupid laws. White people die under precisely these same circumstances, and very likely in greater numbers (I don’t have data specifically on no-knock raids, but we can assume that the ratio is probably conserved here).

Think about how crazy this policy is in a nation where gun ownership is so widespread. If someone kicks in your door in the middle of the night, and you’re a gun owner, of course you’re going to reach for your gun. That’s why you have a gun in the first place. The fact that people bearing down on you and your family out of the darkness might have yelled “police” (or might have not yelled “police”; it’s alleged in some of these cases that they don’t yell anything)—the fact that someone yells “police” isn’t necessarily convincing. Anyone can yell “police.” And, again, think of the psychology of this: If the police have the wrong house, and you know there is no reason on earth that real cops would take an interest in you, especially in the middle of the night, because you haven’t done anything (you’re not the guy running a meth lab)—and now you’re reaching for your gun in the dark—of course, someone is likely to get killed. This is not a racial issue. It’s a terrible policy.

Unfortunately, the process of police reform isn’t straightforward—and it is made massively more complicated by what’s happening now. Yes, we will be urging police reform in a very big way now, that much seems clear. But Roland Fryer has also shown that investigations of the cops, in a climate where viral videos and racial politics are operating, have dramatic effects, many of which are negative.

He studied the aftermath of the investigations into police misconduct that followed the killings Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Lequan McDonald, and found that, for reasons that seem pretty easy to intuit, proactive police contact with civilians decreases drastically, sometimes by as much 100 percent, once these investigations get started. This is now called “The Ferguson Effect.” The police still answer 911 calls, but they don’t investigate suspicious activity in the same way. They don’t want to wind up on YouTube. And when they alter their behavior like this, homicides go up. Fryer estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into 1000 extra homicides, and almost 40,000 more felonies, over the next 24 months in the US. And, of course, most of the victims of those crimes were black. One shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect we’re about to see nationwide… I’m sure the morale among cops has never been lower. I think it’s almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force. And it will be much more difficult to recruit good people.

Who is going to want to be a cop now? Who could be idealist about occupying that role in society? It seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards. I’m pretty sure there’s a difference there, and I think we’re likely to see that difference expressed in the future. It’s a grim picture, unless we do something very creative here.

So there’s a real question about how we can reform police departments, and get rid of bad cops, without negatively impacting the performance of good cops? That’s a riddle we have to solve—or at least we have to understand what the trade-offs are here.

Why is all of this happening now? Police killings of civilians have gone way down. And they are rare events. They are 1/10,000 level events, if measured by arrests. 1/50-60,000 level events if measured by police encounters. And the number of unarmed people who are killed is smaller still. Around 50 last year, again, more were white than black. And not all unarmed victims are innocent. Some get killed in the act of attacking the cops.  [EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE]

Again, the data don’t tell a clean story, or the whole story. I see no reason to doubt that blacks get more attention from the cops—though, honestly, given the distribution of crime in our society, I don’t know what the alternative to that would be. And once the cops get involved, blacks are more likely to get roughed up, which is bad. But, again, it simply isn’t clear that racism is the cause. And contrary to everyone’s expectations, whites seem more likely to get killed by cops. Actually, one factor seems to be that whites are 7 times more likely to commit “suicide by cop” (and 3 times more likely to commit suicide generally). What’s going on there? Who knows?

There’s a lot we don’t understand about these data. But ask yourself, would our society seem less racist if the disparity ran the other way? Is less physical contact, but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed a form of white privilege? Is a higher level of suicide by cop, and suicide generally, a form of white privilege? We have a problem here that, read either way, you can tell a starkly racist narrative.

We need ethical, professional policing, of course. But the places with the highest crime in our society need the most of it. Is there any doubt about that? In a city like Milwaukee, blacks are 12 times more likely to get murdered than whites [Not sure where I came by this number, probably a lecture or podcast. It appears the rate is closer to 20 times more likely and 22 times more likely in Wisconsin as a whole—SH], again, they are being killed by other African Americans, nearly 100 percent of the time. I think the lowest figure I’ve seen is 93 percent of the time. [As noted above, more recent data suggest that it’s closer to 90 percent]. What should the police do about this? And what are they likely to do now that our entire country has been convulsed over one horrific case of police misconduct?

We need to lower the temperature on this conversation, and many other conversations, and understand what is actually happening in our society.

But instead of doing this, we now have a whole generation of social activists who seem eager to play a game of chicken with the forces of chaos. Everything I said about the problem of inequality and the need for reform stands. But I think that what we are witnessing in our streets, and on social media, and even in the mainstream press, is a version of mass hysteria. And the next horrific video of a black person being killed by cops won’t be evidence to the contrary. And there will be another video. There are 10 million arrests every year. There will always be another video.

And the media has turned these videos into a form of political pornography. And this has deranged us. We’re now unable to speak or even think about facts. The media has been poisoned by bad incentives, in this regard, and social media doubly so.

In the mainstream of this protest movement, it’s very common to hear that the only problem with what is happening in our streets, apart from what the cops are doing, is that some criminal behavior at the margins—a little bit of looting, a little bit of violence—has distracted us from an otherwise necessary and inspiring response to an epidemic of racism. Most people in the media have taken exactly this line. People like Anderson Cooper on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times or public figures like President Obama or Vice President Biden. The most prominent liberal voices believe that the protests themselves make perfect moral and political sense, and that movements like Black Lives Matter are guaranteed to be on the right side of history. How could anyone who is concerned about inequality and injustice in our society see things any other way? How could anyone who isn’t himself racist not support Black Lives Matter?

But, of course, there’s a difference between slogans and reality. There’s a difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims. And this can be genuinely confusing. That’s why propaganda works. For instance, many people assume there’s nothing wrong with ANTIFA, because this group of total maniacs has branded itself as “anti-fascist.” What could be wrong with being anti-fascist? Are you pro fascism?

There’s a similar problem with Black Lives Matter—though, happily, unlike ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest, which is hugely important. So the problem I’m discussing is more ideological, and it’s much bigger than Black Lives Matter—though BLM is its most visible symbol of this movement. The wider issue is that we are in the midst of a public hysteria and moral panic. And it has been made possible by a near total unwillingness, particularly on the Left, among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations, and fear being hounded into oblivion online—this is nearly everyone left-of-center politically. People are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America.

We are making ourselves sick. We are damaging our society. And by protesting the wrong thing, even the slightly wrong thing, and unleashing an explosion of cynical criminality in the process—looting that doesn’t even have the pretense of protest—the Left is empowering Trump, whatever the polls currently show. And if we are worried about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, as I think we really should be, this is important to understand. He recently had what looked like paramilitary troops guarding the White House. I don’t know if we found out who those guys actually were, but that was genuinely alarming. But how are Democrats calls to “abolish the police” going to play to half the country that just watched so many cities get looted? We have to vote Trump out of office and restore the integrity of our institutions. And we have to make the political case for major reforms to deal with the problem of inequality—a problem which affects the black community most of all.

We need police reform; we need criminal justice reform; we need tax reform; we need health care reform; we need environmental reform—we need all of these things and more. And to be just, these policies will need to reduce the inequality in our society. If we did this, African Americans would benefit, perhaps more than any other group. But it’s not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society.

Just ask yourself, what would real progress on the problem of racism look like? What would utter progress look like?

Here’s what I think it would look like: More and more people (and ultimately all people) would care less and less (and ultimately not at all) about race. As I’ve said before in various places, skin color would become like hair color in its political and moral significance—which is to say that it would have none.

Now, maybe you don’t agree with that aspiration. Maybe you think that tribalism based on skin color can’t be outgrown or shouldn’t be outgrown. Well, if you think that, I’m afraid I don’t know what to say to you. It’s not that there’s nothing to say, it’s just there is so much we disagree about, morally and politically, that I don’t know where to begin. So that debate, if it can even be had, will have to be left for another time.

For the purposes of this conversation, I have to assume that you agree with me about the goal here, which is to say that you share the hope that there will come a time where the color of a person’s skin really doesn’t matter. What would that be like?

Well, how many blondes got into Harvard this year? Does anyone know? What percentage of the police in San Diego are brunette? Do we have enough red heads in senior management in our Fortune 500 companies? No one is asking these questions, and there is a reason for that. No one cares. And we are right not to care.

Imagine a world in which people cared about hair color to the degree that we currently care—or seem to care, or imagine that others care, or allege that they secretly care—about skin color. Imagine a world in which discrimination by hair color was a thing, and it took centuries to overcome, and it remains a persistent source of private pain and public grievance throughout society, even where it no longer exists. What an insane misuse of human energy that would be. What an absolute catastrophe.

The analogy isn’t perfect, for a variety of reasons, but it’s good enough for us to understand what life would be like if the spell of racism and anti-racism were truly broken. The future we want is not one in which we have all become passionate anti-racists. It’s not a future in which we are forever on our guard against the slightest insult—the bad joke, the awkward compliment, the tweet that didn’t age well. We want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant. And if you don’t agree with that, what did you think Martin Luther King Jr was talking about?

And, finally, if you’re on the Left and don’t agree with this vision of a post-racial future, please observe that the people who agree with you, the people who believe that there is no overcoming race, and that racial identity is indissoluble, and that skin color really matters and will always matter—these people are white supremacists and neo-Nazis and other total assholes. And these are also people I can’t figure out how to talk to, much less persuade.

So the question for the rest of us—those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings, merely—the question is, how do we get there? How does racial difference become uninteresting? Can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it? Can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity? Can it become uninteresting by our having thousands of institutions whose funding (and, therefore, very survival) depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world?

Can it become less significant by being granted more and more significance? By becoming a fetish, a sacred object, ringed on all sides by taboos? Can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood, at any moment, by saying one wrong word about it?

I think these questions answer themselves. To outgrow our obsession with racial difference, we have outgrow our obsession with race. And you don’t do that by maintaining your obsession with it.

Now, you might agree with me about the goal and about how a post-racial society would seem, but you might disagree about the path to get there—the question of what to do next. In fact, one podcast listener wrote to me recently to say that while he accepted my notion of a post-racial future, he thinks it’s just far too soon to talk about putting racial politics behind us. He asked me to imagine just how absurd it would have been to tell Martin Luther King Jr, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, that the path beyond racism requires that he become less and less obsessed with race.

That seems like a fair point, but Coleman Hughes has drawn my attention to a string of MLK quotes that seem to be just as transcendent of racial identity politics as I’m hoping to be here. You can see these quotations on his Twitter feed. None of those statements by King would make sense coming out of Black Lives Matter at the moment.

In any case, as I said, I think we are living in a very different time than Martin Luther King was. And what I see all around me is evidence of the fact that we were paying an intolerable price for confusion about racism, and social justice generally—and the importance of identity, generally—and this is happening in an environment where the path to success and power for historically disadvantaged groups isn’t generally barred by white racists who won’t vote for them, or hire them, or celebrate their achievements, or buy their products, and it isn’t generally barred by laws and policies and norms that are unfair. There is surely still some of that. But there must be less of it now than there ever was.

The real burden on the black community is the continued legacy of inequality—with respect to wealth, and education, and health, and social order—levels of crime, in particular, and resulting levels of incarceration, and single-parent families—and it seems very unlikely that these disparities, whatever their origin in the past, can be solved by focusing on problem of lingering racism, especially where it doesn’t exist. And the current problem of police violence seems a perfect case in point.

And yet now we’re inundated with messages from every well-intentioned company and organization singing from the same book of hymns. Black Lives Matter is everywhere. Of course, black lives matter. But the messaging of this movement about the reality of police violence is wrong, and it’s creating a public hysteria.

I just got a message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science talking about fear of the other. The quote from the email: “Left unchecked, racism, sexism, homophobia, and fear of the other can enter any organization or community – and destroy the foundations upon which we must build our future.” Ok, fine. But is that really the concern in the scientific community right now, “unchecked racism, sexism, and homophobia.” Is that really what ails science in the year 2020? I don’t think so.

I’ll tell you the fear of the other that does seem warranted, everywhere, right now. It’s the other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue. It’s the other who will not listen to reason, who has no interest in facts, who can’t join a conversation that converges on the truth, because he knows in advance what the truth must be. We should fear the other who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren’t something to be corrected for, because they’re the very foundations of his epistemology.  We should fear the other who can’t distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science. Or worse, can make these distinctions, but refuses to. And we’re all capable of becoming this person. If only for minutes or hours at a time. And this is a bug in our operating system, not a feature. We have to continually correct for it.

One of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the Covid-19 pandemic was first landing on our shores, and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools, was that for tens of millions of American kids, going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. I’m pretty confident that most of the kids we’re talking about here aren’t white. And whatever you think about the opportunities in this country and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind, there is no question that some of us start on third base, or second base. Everyone has a lot to deal with, of course. Life is hard. But not everyone is a single mom, or single grandparent, struggling to raise kids in the inner city, all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered. The disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable. And we need to have a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions.

We have to pull back from the brink here. And all we have with which to do that is conversation. And the only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments—a willingness to update one’s view of the world when better reasons are given. And that is an ongoing process, not a place we ever finally arrive.

Ok… Well, perhaps that was more of an exhortation than I intended, but it certainly felt like I needed to say it. I hope it was useful. And the conversations will continue on this podcast.

Stay safe, everyone.”

[racefortheironthrone]

Thoughts on House of X #6

The penultimate issue!

While You Slept, the World Changed:

Before I get into the content, let me say that I think Hickman et al. really brought it with their two final issues, which are some of the best of the miniseries. 

Showing Hickman’s love of circular storytelling, we flash back to the speech from the very first page of House of X #1, where Xavier announced the formation of Krakoa. The always-frustrating timeline is cleared up a little: Xavier’s speech happened a month ago, although we know from that same issue that work had been going on on Krakoa for “months” before the announcement - more evidence that the schedule was important.

Despite this all of this preparation, Xavier takes a moment before the speech to ask Moira and Magneto to join him for this “leap of faith,” which requires “total commitment.” (Which is interesting, given Namor’s questioning of same.) Moira agrees quickly, but then hangs back and watches, as is her wont (as we’ll see in Powers of X #6). 

By contrast, Magneto makes a significant shift from his earlier pledge of unrelenting accountability to burying the hatchet completely (I love how “all the anger at the other’s relentless ideology and unyielding persistence” so perfectly describes both men) and promises his complete support (and possibly more, depending on how you interpret the hand-on-hand-on-shoulder panel) going forward. That’s a big moment for the two of them.

And then we get Xavier’s speech in full, which I’m going to do my best to annotate. 

“Humans of the planet Earth...I am the mutant Charles Xavier and I bring you a message of hope. ”

The first thing I’ll note is that we’re already seeing a rather significant change in Xavier’s behavior: for decades, Charles Xavier refused to come out of the closet as a mutant even when asked directly, and only did so in New X-Men when possessed by Cassandra Nova. Here, he’s straightforwardly describing himself as “the mutant Charles Xavier,” putting his group identity before even his name.

Secondly, there’s an interesting tinge of classic sci-fi in the way that Xavier addresses “humans of the planet Earth” - it’s very reminiscent of The Day The Earth Stood Still - and I wonder whether part of this has to do with the so far largely unspoken Krakoan ambition of beating humanity to the Moon, to Mars, and the stars themselves.

“In the coming days, you will learn of several far-reaching pharmaceutical breakthroughs that have been discovered by mutant scientists. These drugs extend human life, heal disease of the mind, and will prevent - or cure - most common maladies. Influenza, Alzheimer’s, ALS, many cancers...gone. Overnight. These drugs will make life on this planet...better. Remarkably so.”

First, this is very much of a part of Hickman’s technocratic futurism from his F.F run, which I have to imagine often leads to a bit of frustration with the editorial mandate not to use super-science to make the world unrecognizable.

At the same time, I’m all the more convinced that the point of this proffer (in addition to buying U.N votes and diplomatic recognition) isn’t to mess with human biology - I think the drugs actually do what’s advertized, rather than mind-controlling people or activating the X-gene - but rather (according to what we learn in Powers of X #6) to dull the drive to achieve post-humanity, solving humanity’s problems but leaving the source out of their hands. This is a theme that featured quite heavily in the finale to Hickman’s Transhuman.

“All this...we have made for you. In the past they would have been a gift. Something freely given by me -- to you -- because I believed it would create harmony between our two peoples. That was my dream -- harmony -- but you have taught me a harsh lesson: that dream was a lie. You see, all I ever wanted was peace between humans and mutants. All I ever wanted was to love you and for you to love us.”

Here’s a great example of how comics can use text and imagery in different ways. Visually, what this page shows us is different levels of humanity: ordinary people in a hospital room, who see Xavier’s speech as a message of hope, the promise of deliverance from disease; a board room full of businessmen who probably see either opportunity or competition, depending on their market position; and a situation room of national security types who represent human power structures that have always viewed mutants as a threat.

At the same time, I think the text is an answer, if not a rebuke, to those fans who’ve been decrying Charles Xavier as acting “out of character” or spinning conspiracy theories about how it’s actually the Maker or the like. This is clearly the same Charles Xavier, who has come to change his mind about his vision of society, because he’s seen how humans have responded over again. (I think it also gets at one of the problems of grounding the X-Men in a “dream” of harmonious co-existence when genre conventions prevent that dream from ever coming to fruition. Especially given how the serial nature of comics leads to repetitions of “anti-mutant hysteria,” it’s not surprising how much of the fandom have shifted to a “Magneto Was Right” perspective.)

“We wanted to save you -- and we did, many times -- but in return, all you did was stand by while evil men killed our children. Over 16 million of them. So there will be no gift...for you have not earned it. We will -- however -- let you pay for it. In return for two things, we will provide you with the means to have a better life. One without pain or suffering and full of hope -- and it will cost you so little.”

Here, instead of constrasts, the text and images are working in concert, with the art giving pointed examples of whom Xavier is referring to - pointing to the Avengers as “stand[ing] by while evil men killed our children” (given that the Avengers tend to specialize in threats to the planet, but have had a decidely mixed record when it comes to threats to mutants specifically, to say nothing of the fallout from the Scarlet Witch’s actions), or the Fantastic Four as having “not earned” his “gifts,” given that the FF haven’t exactly been at the forefront of applying scientific advancement to specifically mutant concerns. Similarly, Doctor Strange was willing to brave the dangers of hell to bring the city of Las Vegas back from the dead, but didn’t do the same for the victims of Genosha.

At the same time, it becomes clear that what Xavier is getting at isn’t just direct complicity in anti-mutant violence, but the broader systemic problems of human apathy towards anti-mutant violence. (Although, to be fair, he’s bringing this up as, essentially, emotional blackmail to justify his economic policies and his political demands.)

On a different topic, it’s interesting that Xavier is offering something of a utopia for humanity - “a better life...without pain or suffering and full of hope” - but may instead be planning to put humanity inside a walled garden where they will be cared for but kept out of mutant-kind’s way.

“First, you must accept the island of Krakoa as the nation-state of all mutants on this planet. We will happily go through the same process as any newly formed nation with the U.N, but there is an expectation that our sovereignty will be recognized. Second, all mutants -- by birth -- can claim Krakoan citizenship. And with that citizenship, we expect a period of amnesty. So that those who have been singled out as criminals -- or punished and imprisoned by humans -- can overcome man’s bias against mutants.”

So here we get Xavier’s main political ask: international recognition of Krakoan sovereignty, mutant citizenship, and amnesty for mutants in prison.

It’s clear from his tone, however, that Krakoa is going through the “same process as any newly formed nation” mostly as a formality, with “an expectation that our sovereignty will be recognized” - both because humanity needs what Xavier is offering and the unspoken fact of mutant power.

One thing that caught my eye is that the citizenship/amnesty isn’t just a one-for-one copy of Israel’s law of return; given the heavy focus on human judicial system’s “bias against mutants,” it also borrows heavily from the 1966 platform of the Black Panther Party, which called for “freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails,” because they had been denied a trial by jury of their peers.

“From this day forward, mutants will be judged by mutant law, not man’s. These are our simple demands, and they are not negotiable. In return for making our lives better, we will do the same for you. And if you find yourselves asking, who are these mutants to think they can dictate terms to us? We are the future. An evolutionary inevitability. The Earth’s true inheritors. You closed your eyes last night believing this world would be yours forever. That was your dream. And like mine...it was a lie. Here is a new truth: while you slept, the world changed.”

Here’s where we get a firm statement of mutant-kind’s manifest destiny, although how accurate a description of “evolutionary inevitability” it might be is up for debate, given what we learn about Moira’s Sixth Life in the next issue. No wonder that Magneto is eating it up, but Moira seems more ambivalent.

One important thing to note: as the art demonstrates, ORCHIS is very much in operation when Xavier makes his announcement. Rather than being a response to a more militant and separatist Krakoa, their motivations are much more driven by eugenic fears of demographic replacement, which is way less defensible. 

Quiet Council of Krakoa Infographic:

In the wake of Powers of X #6, we now have to ask ourselves whether the (un-elected, possibly temporary) Quiet Council is, if not a Potemkin government (this would be a bit much, given what they get up to in this issue), but perhaps not the only locus of authority on Krakoa.

In addition to continuing the naturalistic themes of Krakoa, I wonder whether the Autumn/Winter/Spring/Summer designations suggest a kind of rotating chair system for a council in which all are supposedly equal...but who is primus inter pares? Xavier is acting as speaker, setting out the agenda and moving the action along, but he’s not the only voice in the room - a sign that he is sharing power to a significant extent.

So let’s talk about the membership of the Quiet Council:

Autumn: here we have the three ideological leaders whose ideas have led to the formation of Krakoa (although Apocalypse’s contributions are less public), and potentially Moira’s exes (although we never learn whether Moira was romantically involved with Magneto in her Eighth Life). 

Winter: is “where we parked all of the problem mutants” other than Magneto. Mostly, this seems to be on the basis of both necessity and “better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” One question I have is whether Exodus, as someone who used to basically worship Magneto, is a vote that Magneto can count on, since clearly he and Sinister aren’t on the same page, and Mystique is very much on her own.

Spring: here is Emma’s quid-pro-quo, and a recognition that the economic and foreign policy might of the Hellfire Corporation has to be represented within the governing structure of Krakoa. Given the structure (down to the very seating), I have to think that Xavier and Magneto had always planned for the third vote that Emma demanded. It’s also quite notable in later deliberations how limited Sebastian Shaw’s influence is on the Council. 

Summer: as we might expect, given who’s extending the invitations, Xavier gives three seats to “my children,” which gives Xavier at least four votes that he can count on - although Ororo, Jean, and Kurt clearly have their own minds and priorities. As the Krakoan national project continues, counting votes will only become more important.

Speaking of which, we can’t forget about Krakoa and Cypher. While not formally one of the twelve, they are nonetheless a powerful influence who have a voice if not a vote on the Council. And ultimately Krakoa’s voice is quite loud, because the whole enterprise cannot happen without its consent.

The Great Captains:

So here we see the division of civilian and military government, with the “great captains..assum[ing] the responsibility of defending the state” during “times of conflict or war.” 

The more curious question to me is what counts as a “state-related excursion” - it would seem to cover X-Men missions like the one at Sol’s Forge and at the ORCHIS facility in X-Men #1, but does it mean that Kate Pryde wouldn’t be in charge of her own vessel if Bishop steps on board? Does it cover X-Force clandestine operations, or would plausible deniability be important? Who does X-Force report to?

Cyclops as first among equals makes sense, although it does raise a question of what happens when you have two other captains in the field.

So Bishop makes sense as a head of whatever the name of the agency in charge of resurrection-related investigations is (possibly X-Factor), but I was surprised to see him show up in Marauders #1.

I wonder what Magik’s role as a Captain is supposed to be, especially since it seems she’ll be heading off to space in New Mutants. Down the line, I’m going to guess she’ll be involved in Krakoa’s version of Inferno, but what’s her intended role supposed to be?

Finally, what’s Gorgon’s role as Captain supposed to be.

The First Laws of Our Nation

Before I get into the content of this section, I want to talk about the beautiful panelling here that starts wide, shrinks down to the nine panel grid as the political debate intensifies, and then opens up again once the decision is made. 

Similarly, I like the use of the two key symbols: the X of the chairs and the sigil on the ground (secular authority), Krakoa’s face looming over them all like a heart tree (spiritual authority)

Given what we learn in Powers of X #6 about why various council members was chosen, describing three of the four seasons as “family, friends, and allies” is highly ironic.

Sabertooth is removed from watery confinement - which, if Krkaoa can just hold people in water bubbles for an extended period, why isn’t that the punishment used late? - and Kurt sets an appropriately Biblical tone by noting that “our first bit of business is the oldest kind on this planet...judgement.” (Appropriately for Kurt’s themes, the judgement in question also centers on how to punish the first murder in this new land, and ends with exile.) Also, for those of you keeping track of how much Krakoan justice accords with human conceptions of justice, I will point out that Sabertooth comes out of the bubble threatening his judges/jury, which is never a good look for a defendant.

So let’s talk about the trial:

One of the things that jump out to me immediately is that it’s interesting seeing Magneto in the role of an idealist - “this is the establishment of a nation...and I would have it be one of laws.” - whereas Xavier’s acting as the pragmatist, acknowledging that “I cannot say everyone here best represents the ideals of what any society should be based on,” but that they have to do the best with what they’ve got. Ultimately, I think this is a tension at the heart of all national projects.

Meanwhile, we get precisely three speakers in before conflict erupts: Sinister is a camp shit-stirrer who (publicly, anyway) really only partakes in the meeting to poke at Xavier and Exodus. Meanwhile, showing how little bloc voting there will be in the “problem mutant” camp, Exodus goes right for direct threats, prompting Sinister to propose criminalizing “mutant-on-mutant violence” (again, the political resonances here are obvious), not because he believes murder is wrong but because he’s enjoying trolling Exodus.

Showing how much Krakoan technology and the...unique worldviews of the Council members are going to produce new forms of political philosophy, Aopcalypse opposes Sinister’s motion, because he doesn’t think it should be “a crime to kill someone who cannot be killed,” since killing mutants is now a non-lethal way of testing them for social Darwinian worthiness. 

This clearly does not track with Storm’s morality, and in a rare moment in HOXPOX where we get to see Jean Grey operating as a forceful political presence, she uses Storm’s interjection to pivot to an appeal to “the highest of ideals” (perhaps aiming her words at Magneto as well as her fellow X-Men) that it should be the “highest crime...killing someone who cannot come back.” (This is more in line with her more recent appearances in X-Men: Red.) Thus, the Second Law of Krakoa is established...without actually taking a vote. It seems that the Council operates on the basis that any proposal not actively objected to becomes law, which I imagine the political scientists out there have some thoughts on.

Before the law passes, Mystique raises the question of self-defense against human aggression (which fits her first X-appearance nicely). Showing how much his earlier views have shifted now that he’s operating in the context of a mutant nation-state, Magneto distinguishes between “murder” and killing “done in defense of a nation,” and while that question is formally tabled, it does suggest an exception for formal armed conflict at least in the founder’s intent.

Supporting my theory that he’s going to be the de-facto Chairman or Speaker, Xavier not only drives the agenda (although he’s not alone in this, Magneto is definitely acting in this capacity), but also makes sure to “call the question,” deciding when proposals become law as long as no one objects.

Another point wrt to the justness of this process: well before he’s found guilty, let alone sentence is passed, Sabertooth threatens murder and cannibalism against his judges...which isn’t a persuasive defense against murder charges (even if he’s just threatening the murder of mutants...which isn’t legal AFAWK, just not as illegal as the murder of humans.)

A nice bit of character work, and another rare rmoment where we see Jean’s power in action, Emma and Jean collaborate to silence Sabertooth’s ranting. 

With the Second Law established, and Sabertooth’s trial technically in abeyance, the Council moves on to “any new business.”

As we might expect from a neoliberal robber baron, Sebastian Shaw calls for “property rights, wealth, currency,” to be legislated for next.

In an interesting turn of events, Doug Ramsey interjects that “Krakoa is alive. Not a place, or a biome -- a person.” Krakoan (real) property rights will have to have a decidedly non-capitalist orientation, because as we see further in Marauders #1, in addition to not having rights in the land, you have to ask for Krakoa’s consent in order to build grow a house.

In a development I didn’t see coming, Storm takes the position that  that mutants can still own property, but “it has to be...out there...in the world. No one has said we have to run from it.” This is somewhat more capitalist than I might expect from Storm, but it does make sense that someone with her particular entanglements in the wider world would take a less isolationist position. This raises an interesting question: if mutants own property in a sovereign nation, and they decide to plant Habitat flowers on their property, does that make that property now part of Krakoa?

Doug’s position gets supported by Exodus (in a characteristically religious tone), and Xavier once again calls the question, creating the Third Law of Krakoa. For those of us keeping track of the colonial theme, it is interesting that this largely European-led nation state has taken a legal position on land ownership that’s much more associated with indigenous peoples. 

Befitting her role as the true power in the Hellfire Trading Company, Emma Frost tables the discussion of economic legislation, due in no small part to it impinging on Krakoan diplomacy and international economic policy.

With a decidely mocking air aimed at her son, Mystique shifts the agenda from the secular to the sacred. After a moment’s thought, Kurt who fires back with the original “manifest destiny” out of Genesis (the first creation), and we get the First Law: “make more mutants.” In addition to continuing the very horny feel of the issue, this law raises a set of interesting questions about Krakoan attitudes with regard to the right to choose, access to family planning services, and sexuality - although as Hickman has pointed out, the implications of an egg-based system for (re)growing people point in completely different directions. Why assume Krakoa will follow human social mores in any area?

With the fundamental laws established, the Quiet Council can now decide how to apply them to Sabertooth:

In an example of how subtly powerful agenda-setting can be, Xavier makes the question of voting guilty or not guilty a question of “making an example...that no one is above mutant law” or “giving you one last chance.” Fitting his somewhat collectivist bent in Powers of X #1, he frames this question not in terms of the civil rights of “Mr. Creed,” but in terms of how the decision “benefits our new society.”

While it doesn’t quite settle the post facto question, Magneto argues that Sabertooth’s killing of the Damage Control guards violatted the “strict instructions” he was given when Magneto dispatched him on the mission, making it not merely a question of the First Law but also of obedience to the chain of command. Apocalypse, who knows something about managing an aggressive workforce, agrees.

Sinister and Exodus, for once, are on the same page, and while Mystique ultimately goes along with the emerging majority, her body posture and dialogue suggests a degree of internal conflict - after all, she was the one leading the mission, so some responsibility falls on her shoulders.

Turning to the X-Men side of the room: as befits his spiritual role, Kurt feels shame for not turning the other cheek, Jean takes a moment but is more assured, and of course Storm has no problem with a bit of divine judgement.

Continuing the trend of divisions among the Hellfire Club, Emma is all about getting rid of Sabertooth, while Sebastian goes along with the emerging consensus because he doesn’t care. 

And once again proving that a defendant representing themselves is always a bad idea, before all the votes are in (and we don’t know whether Krakoan juries require a unanimous verdict) or the sentence is given out, Sabertooth threatens familicide of the Quiet Council. Not exactly a strong argument for leniency, since Sabertooth hasn’t exactly been pleading innocence at any point. 

Finally, Doug asks Krakoa to bring the hammer down, and Sabertooth is dragged down to hell put into an oubliette. As Xavier explains, “we cannot send you back into the world” (because Sabertooth is a serial killer who can’t restrain himself, and Krakoa just promised the world it would hold mutants accountable for their actions), they won’t jail him because “we tolerate no prisons here” (this seems a technicality), they won’t kill him, because seemingly the “resurection protocols” are non-optional (which is interesting, given what we learn about Destiny in the next issue), and so they “exile him.”  

One interesting question: given the resources available to them, why is it necessary to leave him “aware but unable to act on it” rather than have him be unconscious during stasis? My guess is that Xavier wants to motivate Sabertooth to “redeem” himself down the line. 

And then finally, we get Xavier’s concluding statement, where I think Hickman’s views on nation-states (“it’s distasteful, I know, this business of running a nation”), the proper attitudes one should have about holding and exercising political power (”I pray we never get used to it...never grow cold from it...never learn to love it”), and even parenthood come through.

Just Look At What We’ve Made:

But in the meantime, the council emerges to what almost everyone has analogized to the Return of the Jedi celebration: not only do we see bonfires and fireworks and a riot of color everywhere, but we see mutants flying around, using their powers, for the first time really feeling that they can live as mutants without fear for their lives.

As the Quiet Council walk down the steps, we see some of the reasons why and the consequences: the Five party as one, but near them we see the formerly dead raising a glass with the living. And echoing Magneto’s earlier statements about how Krakoa will change the way mutants see their own powers, we see Siryn and Dazzler combining their powers for the purposes of culture rather than warfare or high tech.

Xavier’s final message is that the Quiet Council will work like hell to ensure that the next generation of mutants “sleep in soft fields of lush green, staring at the stars and dreaming of a future where they hold those stars in their hands.” Once again, a sign that Krakoa’s manifest destiny lies in space, a common theme of Hickman’s from his FF run. As this happens, we see three of the O5 goofing around (I’m surprised how many people didn’t notice that Bobby had frozen Warren’s drink while he wasn’t looking), and Exodus leading storytime with the children as Sinister watches in the background.

But that’s not what people are really here for - as nice as it is to see Broo and Synch and Skin and Pixie, what people really care about is the Jean/Logan/Scott panel. As the now infamous architectural diagram in X-Men #1 makes very clear, this is not a case of a mere open marriage: the most famous romantic triangle in X-Men history is now a throuple, founded on the principle of beer and tummy rubs. 

Almost as exciting for much of the fandom is the next page, where Jean goes to make peace with Emma while Scott hangs out with Alex. One of the big questions going on is what Emma’s role is in the polycule, since she doesn’t seem to be living at the Summer House. My guess is that Emma is “part of it” (to quote David S. Pumpkins), but may only be with Scott, and definitely would refuse point-blank to share communal living quarters with Logan. We will have to wait for more evidence to be sure.

And so we end with Xavier and Magneto looking out over the celebration, taking a moment to feel (rightly?) proud of “what we have made.” And yet, all is not well, because Apocalypse, the third ideological force who (through Moira) helped to create Krakoa, broods on what he lost when Krakoa was born.

Krakoa Infographic:

With Krakoa now extant as a nation-state, we get one more infographic...that shows us that there is a Krakoa Atlantic to go along with Krakoa Pacific. This points to an important truth about this new polity - it would be a mistake to see Krakoa as an island nation like Genosha or Utopia, because the nation of Krakoa exists wherever the physical entity of Krakoa exists. It’s in the Pacific and the Atlantic, it’s on the moon, it’s on Mars, it’s everywhere a Krakoan flower has been planted. Which makes it a post-geographic power.

So what’s on Krakoa Atlantic?

The Pointe is one of Xavier’s Cerebro back-up locations, so that an attack on Krakoa Pacific won’t destroy the database. 

Danger Island is the X-Men’s new and expanded training facility.

Transit allows for instant transportation between Pacific and Atlantic to allow the X-Men to respond to a threat to either island or cradle, and possibly a final keep to fall back to if everything else is lost.

And finally we get one last map of Krakoa (All), and there’s a lot we don’t know about these locations:

The House of X and the House of M are Xavier and Magneto’s residences, and the location of one of the Cerebro “cradles.”

The Arbor Magna is the big tree where the Resurrection system is located in/on.

The Arena we don’t know anything about, but from the name it suggests that it’s a combat-oriented location, either for training or for entertainment purposes. 

The Akademos Habitat is almost certainly Krakoa’s educational facility that Jean mentions back in House of X #1, but the fact that it’s a Habitat is interesting, because a Krakoan Habitat is a ”self-sutained environment” of its own that is “part of the interconnected consciousness of Krakoa,” and I had thought that having a Habitat on Krakoa itself, as opposed to one out on the moon or Mars would be redundant. My guess is that this is meant to provide an additional layer of safety to the next generation of mutants.

We saw Transit back in House of X #1, this Transit location is the Grand Central Station for Greater Krakoa, linking all gateway locations together. Yet another sign that, for Krakoa, their nation has a different conception of distance. 

The Oracle is, I would guess, probably one of the Krakoan Systems, most likely either Sage’s or Beast’s part of the system.

I don’t know what the Grove is supposed to be, but given its proximity to the Akademos Habitat, I think it’s supposed to be a living space, possibly just for the young and possibly not. 

The Cradle, it turns out, is just a cradle.

The Resevoir could be that lagoon we saw back in House of X #1, which would make sense if the Wild Hunt is a nature preserve, because animals love to congregate at watering holes.

The Carousel’s name suggests it’s an entertainment facility. 

We know what Bar Sinister is from its last appearance; it turns out that Sinister recreated his little island Edwardian eugenics nightclub on Krakoa. Interesting that it’s locsated so close to Transit; maybe Sinister wants to be able to make a quick getaway.

Speaking of the fruits of faustian bargains, it turns out that the quid-pro-quo for becoming the economic engine of a nation is that the Hellfire Trading Company gets a whole Hellfire Bay to itself as its headquarters. 

Red Keep is almost certainly Kate Pryde’s new pad, which is conveniently ocean-ajacent for our newest mutant pirate privateer queen.

Blackstone is Sebastian Shaw’s Gilded Age “gentleman’s” club.

The White Palace is naturally Emma’s boudoir, complete with buzzsaws and spikes. 

The unnamed location 18 is clearly Moira’s No-Space.

[sirianni581-blog]

Are Investment Costs of Business Internet Marketing Higher Than You Might Think?

Having just started to use internet marketing in our own business and trying to bring together all the different components to deliver a set of desired outcomes, we have discovered it is not a simple task. We have created a huge amount of online content from websites, blog sites, micro-blogging, and social media network participation. But and it is a big but, how do you convert all this activity (or lack of it) into a coherent message that brings visitors to your target online content and transcends to registrations and / or sales?

To be honest we have been merrily creating web content, accounts on twitter, Facebook pages, blogs and regularly posting but without paying specific attention to the direction or the message. This has been a conscious choice on our part as we were not ready to join everything up yet, so we just started by increasing our online profile until we were set to go. I think this is one of the big hurdles for most people entering Internet Marketing at any level is... why am I doing this? Why am I posting content onto Blogs, twittering, when no one is visiting anyway? I'm not reading my other 1000 followers tweets, so I am sure they are not reading mine! If I'm the only one ready what I'm writing I'd sooner not bother! 2 Blog posts a day, why? for what? What am I going to say? What difference will it make?

We expect those new to Internet Marketing to blindly accept that 'you should get a blog, you should use Twitter and join Facebook... trust me... you will see the benefit, later on everything will be much clearer...'

Here then is the issue... of course signing up to these services, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Linked in or any other social media platform is not in itself going to make any difference to a business. Just the same as printing some leaflets for a mailshot and leaving them in the garage, or attending networking meetings and not talking to anyone, these won't make much impact either dropshipping .

The facts are that Internet Marketing is a complex business. It performs the functions of building individual's profiles and credibility, Brand awareness and product / service sales via one medium. Each of these areas requires different techniques, services and strategies online, but you can't go about this in a half baked, apathetic manner. Internet Marketing has the ability to transform businesses, enable small companies to compete with the 'big boys' and build new enterprises from nothing but not by making one blog post a week, the odd twitter tweet now and then and complaining that sales haven't increased yet!

So what is the reality? The reality is this, that Internet marketing provides the ability to reach 100,000's of people and quickly, but it won't happen without effort... A LOT OF IT!

Most Small Business's are owned privately, very often by the entrepreneur who found a niche, designed a new product or took advantage of an opportunity. These individuals are often technical people and suffer from the old 'Feast and Famine' syndrome that finds refuge in Micro and small businesses. When we're in Sales mode we are extremely busy, when servicing customers, prospects dry up... then we're found scratching around for business again which happens, eventually, months after we needed it.

Now typical business owners don't think of themselves as sales people and will readily admit they don't like this part of the business and yet without it the business can't survive. I've heard many a business owner admit they are not sales people, 'I'm basically too honest to be a sales person' as if a sales person's role was to somehow convince someone to buy a product they don't need and don't want. Well, let us now separate Marketing from Sales.

Marketing is encouraging people to consider your products and services... visitors if you like, whereas Sales is the matching of the customers requirements to your offerings. At no point in this is there any persuasion or manipulation... better still, much of this sales process can be automated with Internet Marketing. Marketing requires an audience to market too... sales requires us to provide information, substantiate our offering and provide a method to engage with us.

You will hear this time and time again with the Internet Marketing crowd... 'the money is in the list!' and if we are to market successfully then having a list to inform on a regular basis is absolutely essential. If we apply this to offline marketing, most of the hard work in sending out a mailshot was creating a quality list of people in the first place... our target audience! If we are to engage the services of a Direct Marketing company for a telephone campaign... at some point before this a list must be found, either from an existing database or bought from an organisation specialising in such Lists, the higher the quality the better.

So let us now see what relevance our Online - Internet Marketing activities have in identifying a target market. Consider Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, Blog subscribers and Registrations for an ezine or other regular communication... what are these?

They are lists of course! lists of people who in some way have connected with you and are probably comfortable to receive correspondence from you or your business. Herein lies the secret then behind why we should bother at all to seek people out, follow and be followed. List building... and the good news is that it can be quite good fun too!

Now in our business we have 5 main products offerings... some of these products have an overlapping potential audience, others do not. It may be necessary therefore to have multiple accounts for Twitter and / or a separate Facebook page for the different audience. Already you can see that if we are to manage, maintain and post for each product on a regular basis (desirable) then this is a substantial amount of work.

One of the difficulties that some of my colleagues have with building a large list of friends or followers is, 'How can you possibly keep in touch with all these people?, I struggle to stay in touch with my immediate relatives' and for sure, personally corresponding with 60,000 people is not viable... but this is not the point.

These social sites represent a massive network of interconnected people, you are not necessarily communicating on a 1-2-1 basis (although you can do this) but rather are broadcasting what you want to say to everyone who is connected and often to their immediate connections as well!! Suddenly we have the ability to get a message to a very large audience with a single post.

Now... most people certainly with Twitter won't see your post, and a good many won't in Facebook or Linked-In either, however this is not an issue. It is not our problem to worry about who will see our posting or not, that is not our responsibility and we should avoid getting attached to the outcome. Our role is to provide the information (post), that is it... Now there is a magic number in marketing and sales this is 3%. This little number is very important. It is the recognised average response rate in a cold market... sometimes it can be more, often less. If we sent out 1000 mailshots then it would be acceptable to set a benchmark of 30 as the number of positive responses. This is about the same % that I have experienced in responses to click-through's on Tweets and Facebook postings. Taking these numbers if we tweeted with a follower list of 30,000 then we could expect around 900 visits. We have absolutely no idea which ones will click the link... or tell a friend or retweet, however the figures can be quite staggering... Imagine if you worked with other 'Big List' owners and offered a percentage to tweet to their lists... and you did this 3 times per day... the number of visits could become very large indeed.

The lists provide us with a 'potential market' for our products and the purpose of this article is not to go into the detailed techniques for building lists, only that it should be very high up on the list of priorities. So how much time, money and effort should be put into this exercise?

The answer to this question depends on the nature of a business, the ideal customer profile and many other factors, clearly a restaurant has a different set of requirements to someone selling a digital product (such as an ebook) globally. The first thing is to decide an Internet Marketing strategy which is complimentary to the business, once this is defined then the activities required become much clearer.

Once the basic Architecture of the marketing is defined then comes the work and the Investment. If I look at our business as an example, we have invested in three key areas, Colateral, People and services. Lets look at what is involved in each of these -:

Collateral

We have 5 blogs, 6 websites (some complex, some a single page), 7 Twitter accounts, Facebook (4 Business Pages), Linked-In, Ecademy, Hub Pages, StumbleUpon, Squidoo and other online social networking accounts, all these had to be set up, populated, and now managed on an ongoing basis. This is not something which can be done in 20 minutes per day. We have to work all of these resources on a regular basis to keep ourselves in the 'Public eye'.

People

We have invested in 1 full time person, plus both myself and another member of staff allocate 3 or 4 hours per day to Internet Marketing activities. Firstly staff require training to use the tools that enable us to work our internet marketing, including analyze results. These resources manage our social networking sites, engage with our contacts frequently, update profiles as things change and post new content constantly. This cost alone is over $3000 per calendar month, developing and building our online presence.

Services

We utilise a number of 'helper' services which are online and rented monthly, these include subscriptions to some Business Networks, Shopping cart and checkout services, Databases that contain sign-ups for ezines and regular communication, Membership platforms, Blogging services and many many more. None of these services are hugely expensive month on month but vital to continue our Online Marketing activities.

In Conclusion

Business Internet Marketing - Taking an offline business and using Internet Marketing techniques to increase sales utilises many of the techniques and tools that conventional Internet Marketing has developed and built over the past 8-10 years. We have all heard the stories of individuals with no overheads generating large monthly incomes without setting foot outside their door, but Internet Marketing is moving into a new phase, one where Offline Businesses will seek to engage the Internet to work for them.

I speak with many Micro and Small businesses on a regular basis and most are oblivious to Internet Marketing and what it could do for them, whether this is because no one has yet bothered to show them, or there is a fear and reluctance to dance with the unknown, or a bit of both perhaps. One thing is for sure, Business Internet Marketing will be deployed by every business over the coming 10-20 years and it is set to be one of the largest markets worldwide.

As we saw with offline marketing in the past where we had PR, Advertising and Marketing agencies, so we shall see the emergence of similar businesses offering Business Internet Marketing services. Traditional companies in this marketing space will need to evolve and offer a completely new range of services The print industry went through a similar metamorphosis some years back, when pre-press production moved entirely to computers and revolutionized the marketplace.

As the Internet Marketing industry matures and the 'Get Rich Quick' mentality fades, successful Internet Marketers will bring a wealth of experience and begin to offer professional Business Internet Marketing solutions to Small and Medium sized businesses. Not shackled with the conventional trappings of offices the Business Internet Marketers will manage a network of global outsourced resources to deliver high quality, low cost Internet Market solutions. The services will include the whole range of activities from setting up infrastructure services such as Blogs or Shopping carts to transactional activities such as managing Twitter accounts, searching and posting tweets, finding / posting suitable blog posts, even writing articles and sending email campaigns.

Without doubt we are on the edge of yet another evolution with the Internet. Some larger companies, such as IBM and Dell have already woken up to the power of using the Internet and Social networking to engage with a global audience, small businesses have been busy surviving the recession... but as the recovery gathers pace, I am sure that Business Internet Marketing will become an attractive proposition for many.

Chris Ogle is Managing Director of Internet Power Systems Ltd. and is author of his best selling book, In 2 The Clouds. Chris has lived in Watford, England for the majority of his life and is a keen Table Tennis player.

In a career spanning 30 years in the computer industry Chris has worked with 000's of businesses from small Micro companies through to large multinationals such as Laing O'Rourke. With the exposure to such a diverse range of businesses and their operating processes coupled with his technical background Chris was well placed to design and create one of the first completely web based business platforms for SME's.

Drawing on 7 years of providing Cloud computing solutions to the SME marketplace coupled with a detailed understanding of Internet Marketing has culminated in SME7 - 7 Steps to getting the Business that you really want - more Profit, more time and more Choices! Chris's book 'In 2 The Clouds' takes us through these 7 Steps and removes the mystery of escaping the rat race 'no time and no money' to the more desirable 'More money and more time to enjoy it'!.

[kfirerising]

KUNDALINI AND FEAR

“Have no fear of being open

about the skills and experiences. Though what the Kundalini brings and does is a real and viable phenomenon, it isn't for those who have a locked five sense mentality. Neither is it for those merely searching for phenomena. It is not until one becomes directly involved with the Kundalini that one begins to have an understanding of just how broad and diverse the expanded reality truly is.

Knowledge about the Kundalini is a way of controlling the fear that can sometimes come from its infusion and activity upon the five body's of expression.

When a person injects copious amounts of fear into an activation of the Kundalini, the creative and expansive process will bring those fears into a seemingly real form. Typically this is experienced as visions or waking dreams. This can move into real time experiences.

Real as waking life to you.

Because the fear and therefore the imagined reality is so strong the visions will be amplified by the power of the Kundalini and can be experienced as a real life event. They are not but they will seem to be. So control of fear is a meaningful and needed teaching.

These fears can carry over into the physical sensations as well. Making one leap to the conclusion that something is wrong with the body and waste a lot of money, as I did, in discovering it is just part of the process. So it is very important to control and understand what fear is to this process and how to move through these areas without succumbing to it.

When a person continuously operates from a point of love, and I mean by that a multi-faceted, multi-platformed aspect of love indicating strength and compassion and patience and diligence and discipline, honesty and integrity, and forgiveness one will understand the frail qualities of what fear truly represents. Attachment. Attachment to things and power and many other things that

we "attach" importance to.

When we begin to adjust our attachments some of the first aspects of fears to be understood are the "fear of loss" and the "want of gain". When you can begin to adjust these programs you will soon understand that there is nothing to lose and nothing to gain. Everything you need you already have. Everything that is

attachment is under your control.

So in many ways this comes down to choice. You choose to be inside a belief structure that supports fear. Fear motivates and fear controls and fear answers.

Kundalini gives a person the opportunity

to see and directly experience a different approach. When activated, in many cases, one is introduced to some very deep and significant spiritual experience and instruction such as deep love of God and creation.

These instructions and experiences show the person how to navigate through the programs of fear that are so basic to the world and reality we live in.

Divine guidance is another way to describe it. Yes this is where incredulity can seep into the equation for those of us attached to the scientific method. We are raised and educated to not have an appreciation for this type of experience. But it is a real thing and it is there whether we choose to believe it or not.

Physical bodies are only the evolutionary beginning not the end. In our struggles we can be seen as the end product of self imposed conscious, blind, expression. Yet we continue to grow despite our limitations. A big step in this growth is the Kundalini and its maturation within a person.

We are a convergence between the divine world and the physical world. Kundalini is the bridge between these realities.

Due to the social programming of our society and

how we view ourselves and our world we can become dependent on the

physical for everything. We can find ourselves ridiculing any other formats that may have influence but because of our limited belief structures, not allowed to have influence. And yet the Kundalini comes. All by itself or from a practice or person who activates it.

And we are left, here in the western societies, with a special problem. How to understand a phenomenon that occurs to people who

we label as "disturbed" and yet is happening for people who not disturbed and yet exhibit symptoms that contradict our chosen beliefs as to what is normal.

So the doctors inject the drugs and we take the pills and yet it still keeps happening and a bit worse in some cases. Some people awaken Kundalini but have dispositions and experiences that are not negative. It is through these people that the knowledge can be distributed without having to stretch the paradigm too thin.

So embrace this quality with in you and

begin to practice the safeties "daily" and with conscious intent to do so. This will begin to condition your response to the phenomena of the Kundalini.

- blessings”

—CHRISM

[starsaboveyouadoption]

by way of introduction

If you’re reading this blog, the chances are you are somebody from the UK who is either currently going through the adoption process, or already an adoptive parent yourself. Or perhaps you’re an adoptee, a foster carer, a social worker, a birth parent, a fellow adoption blogger…or maybe simply someone curious about the world of adoption. And I guess that’s a good point to start from, adoption certainly is its own “world”. Sometimes those of us within this world, or bubble, feel like we are staring outwards into the supposed normalcy of the world from a neighbouring planet, and that those “back home” are similarly peering back but can’t quite get a view, blocked by our fogged atmosphere. Sometimes even those of us on this planet feel lost amongst “our kind”, not knowing which way to turn to find help, the rest of our own population so distant from us that we can’t even reach out internally. And this is where I’m going to stop trying to make metaphors about planets and the solar system as I can see as I’m typing this, this isn’t really going anywhere!

But suffice to say…good information on the adoption process, and the world it is attached to is hard to find, and particularly hard to find if you are interested in the UK adoption scene in comparison to quite a saturated social media and internet presence about the US scene, which even in itself, is primarily dominated by stories of private and/or international adoptions. Like others, I’ve been able to find very little about UK adoption in general or US adoptions specifically from state foster care. This is something we will return to in much more detail in a future blog, but suffice to say that the vast majority of UK adoptions are domestic adoptions from the foster care system, and differ greatly from the majority of content about US style adoption, which can often be problematic and confusing. This is so not least for those of us adoptive parents who find ourselves met with stereotypes about adoption derived from a very 2D model of adoption proliferated by a collage of what people have gleaned from the internet, Hollywood films, and US YouTube vloggers (and by the way there is no blame attached to this, this is just the way things have come to be and I would probably have reached the same conclusions had adoption not touched my own life), but also for those who are just starting out, and trying to understand the journey in the UK on which they are about to embark. Or perhaps for those friends and relatives of adopters who want to better understand the process. It all gets quite muddled. This is something that a fantastic UK vlogger, Aimee Vlog has picked up on so well, and Aimee has done an amazing job of helping to fill that gap. I would highly recommend Aimee’s content for those of you wanting to get to know about UK adoption in an accessible, knowledgeable and engaging way. I thought about vlogging on YouTube but apart from what my hair has looked like since adopting(!), I know my strength better lies in writing (and that way I can sit comfortably behind a screen looking a complete mess!)

Even if you do find yourself in the adoption world, it can all be a little…vague. When I started out on my adoption journey, yes there were books for recommended reading, and some of which I have really held on to that genuinely offer very specific, nuanced advice – but if I’m honest? A lot of it was very generic, surface level stuff. Adoption content for newbies often falls into one of two camps – very basic information about the process which is very mechanical and clinical, and doesn’t really answer any complex questions, offers very surface level information that to be honest people could have got just by Googling – and most importantly doesn’t offer the human, road-travelled insight that real-life adopters can provide. Or, there are books you can read by very well experienced adopters, and whilst these have been a God-send for many moments throughout my journey, they can tend to be a genre that clusters around an extreme end of the spectrum where people have had a very hard time, and adopted children with very significant additional needs with very little support, which whilst of course, are extremely valid, sad, and important stories to tell, don’t represent the majority of adopters’ experiences, and can end up worrying people off the idea before they even begin. And for a bonus point, if I’m being really picky, my experience of the world of adoption forums has resulted in a little of the Mumsnet-curse. Either glowing reports of angelic children who supposedly settled into family life perfectly, loved their adoptive parents instantaneously, and are a joy from morning til night – or slightly holier-than-thou scoldings from adoptive parents who perhaps perpetuate a little of a martyr complex in the adoption community. That said, believe me, it is not all doom and gloom. There are some amazing, warm hearted, courageous, inspiring adopters out there in the world that I have learned so much from, and there is some really good content out there if you know where to look for it. I’d also not entirely dismiss the US platforms as I’ve found some great, down-to-earth adoption bloggers, who keep it real and are able to bridge the cultural gap. One such person is Angela Braniff at the Gathered Nest who would be my number one choice for anyone wanting an in depth look at the adoption world.

However, I do feel there is some room out there for more of us bloggers who can offer a real-life and down to earth perspective of adoption. With this blog, I’d like to lift a lid on the adoption world, in the hope of encouraging those considering it, or helping family/friends of adopters/ees to understand it, show some of the behind-the-scenes aspects which don’t get talked about in more generic texts, and provide some room for discussion and perhaps some Q&A depending on how this blog goes. I will certainly not claim to be a perfect parent, nor will I claim to be a particularly experienced parent at the time of writing. But I would like to be able to offer my experiences, thoughts, musings, for what they are worth, with the hope they help somebody like me when I started this journey a few years ago, dispel a few myths along the way, and provide a little more detail and food for thought.

So, a little about me…I’ll start with saying that due to the nature of adoption in the UK, it would be inappropriate for me to share too much personal information about my story. If someone who knows me in real life is generous enough to indulge me in following my blog, I trust them implicitly to honour and respect my child’s story and not identify them through their interactions with it. They know more detail about my journey and luckily I am blessed with hugely supportive friends and family who “get it” – which is not always the case! If you are somebody else reading this, I am an adoptive Mum of one child of pre-school age who I adopted as an older baby through the support of a local social services agency. I have a long-term partner who I have known for about 15 years now, and we started our official journey to adoption about 2 years ago, although I would say the story started about 7 years ago. To help place my story a little (and don’t worry I’ll share a little more that I’m able to as the blog goes on), our adoption was a domestic, but long-distance adoption, and we came to adoption as our first choice following infertility. We have not tried after receiving this diagnosis, to conceive a biological child despite the odds, and didn’t feel the IVF or surrogacy routes were right for us (more on that another time).

It may help as we start this journey to say a little about what I will and won’t be able to include. For reasons which I will definitely write about in more detail in a future blog post (I currently have about 4 pages of ideas for blog entries, so we’ll get to the deeper dive stuff I promise!), I’m choosing not to share identifying information about my child. Throughout the blog, I’ll refer to my child as Little Star. I’m afraid I won’t be sharing photos, or any specifics of the agency we adopted through, my child’s back story, specific individuals involved in their care, or any identifying information about where they lived etc etc…you get the picture. I already have a blog post in mind about this, but something that is sometimes hard for people to understand is why adoptive parents can’t share details of their background. I suppose there is a little morbid curiosity about these things. My partner and I are of the belief (which is commonly held by adoption agencies) that adopted children benefit from ownership of their story, and autonomy over who and how they choose to share it with as they grow old enough to understand it for themselves. Suffice to say that any child adopted from social services (the vast majority of UK adoptions) will have been categorised under one or multiple categories of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse and/or neglect, and the situation will have had to have got to the point where the child is deemed as at immediate risk of harm should they continue to be parented by their birth parents. Many adopted children, even those with relatively “stable” experiences in foster care, will grow up with feelings of shame about where they come from, struggle with low self-esteem rooted in feelings of otherness and believing themselves to be unwanted, and be on their own quest to fill what can be huge gaps in their knowledge of their own story. So, it is to be understood, I feel, that their life story sits best with them, their parents, and close family. If you can imagine that even by the time you are a young adult, there will still be people who may know more about aspects of your life and how you came into the world than you do, it’s not so hard to see why adoptive parents need to be protective over these details.

That said, what I can share is my general experiences with adoption, down to quite specific information about the process, what you can expect, my thoughts about common issues and dilemmas that arise with adoption, and a deeper, real-life insight into some of the things that opening a generic book about adoption won’t tell you. I hope to be able to shed some light on how it might feel to:

-        Grow to love your child and they to love you?

-        Have to ask permission to go on a family holiday?

-        Prove yourself to be a fit prospective parent again and again?

-        Examine your own childhood (and any associated traumas) forensically to understand how it has affected your own parenting ability and style?

-        Experience heartache and loss of an adopted child through a broken match?

-        Develop and draw upon reserves of resilience you never knew you had to fight for your right to start a family?

-        Make significant changes in your lifestyle to accommodate a child you’ve never met yet?

-        Parent a child who may look, act, think and learn entirely different to the “normal” in your family?

-        Experience “choosing” or “being chosen for” your child, or as some may feel their child “choosing them”?

-        Parent a child who has experienced grief, loss, separation, and trauma?

-        Not know your child’s medical risk or heritage?

-        Know that your child may one day choose to reconnect with the first parents they knew?

-        Have the confidence (or need!) to go against the grain of conventional parenting wisdom to parent a child for whom those strategies may be entirely inappropriate or out of step with their developmental age?

-        …Have your cat or dog assessed for your suitability to adopt? (Yes really!)

All this and more to come I hope, if you have the patience to read through my ramblings! I’d love for you to join me on what I hope will be a new journey, my passing forward all the generously given advice, support, insight and help that I was afforded by the UK adoption community and support networks when I was going through the process.

A final note – if this blog goes well, I’d love to be able to answer some questions that may be on people’s mind about adoption. I do understand, for what it’s worth, that adoption is a subject that people can feel a little bit intimidated by. It’s easy to feel you ae “saying the wrong thing” or putting your foot in it, and that thinking can stop otherwise curious people from stepping forward and asking what they need to know. So please know that this blog is not intended to crucify anyone with a genuine interest, who may sometimes stumble on the “right” wording or terminology, and I am always happy to take Q&A from people who may wish to do so anonymously. There’s a world of difference between a badly phrased but innocent question and an invasive, and offensive sweeping statement, and I’ve learnt not to be too defensive and decipher between the two…so, if you want to ask, please do. If I can’t answer your question, I’ll let you know, but if I can, I will. You can private message me on my personal Instagram if we are friends, or via Tumblr.

Until next time…

[wandererfrombeaconhill]

Hello all you lovely people!

I know politics is super touchy and frustrating and a lot of people feel powerless or like there is no winning...

But as flawed as it can be - voting is literally how we voice what issues we care about, how we want the money we pay in taxes to be collected and redistributed, how we want the government to be serving us and our fellow Canadians, and how we want to secure the future for ourselves and the generations to come.

Do the parties fall short? Always! Do politicians get up to shit, make deals with ulterior motives, and go back on their word? Certainly!

But you know what? The parties we Canadians empower with our votes will shape the trajectory of our future whether we like it or not. Each and every vote cast weighs in on which areas and issues will be given the opportunity to get federal attention and resources.

Our individual votes add up however the equation is structured. Each vote stands for a single Canadian's agenda. Every non-vote amplifies the weight of those others who voiced an agenda. Even if we distain the system and abstain altogether our inaction matters - it has weight. Which may seem appealing - why not just let your apathy or ambivalence serve to promote the agendas of those who feel so compelled to vote? After all, they may be more willing to vote because they have a better grasp on politics - and even if they are not necessarily well informed, all together they will probably represent the general populations interests - right? Yeah, not so much as it turns out...

Now agendas can be positive or negative. Some people who care a lot vote and some people who care a lot don't. But you know who is definitely going to weigh in? People that believe that they can exploit the system to further their interests - regardless of how it will impact others or our collective future. Those people are voting. Do you believe adding weight to their votes by abstaining will result in attention and resources being directed in a way that will leave you and yours benefited in any way let alone in a way that does-no-harm?

Unfortunately, as much as we might want to wash our hands of the whole process - we all have stakes in this game. And the action or inaction of every Canadian eligible to vote will direct the outcome.

Want to avoid lending support to agendas that may hurt you or someone you care about? Looks like you gotta vote!

But how to vote responsibly? Especially when information is often misleading and manipulative or when you've relied on voting for a certain party because it aligned with your family history or self-image but you acknowledge you don't actually know their stance or track record in areas that truly effect and matter to you? You simply don't have the time and resources to become a political expert and you can't control the party or predict the future!

I know it's a lot - but you can do this. We can do this. Various people and groups are doing their best to make the particular agendas of each party more accessible and easy to digest. I found this link a useful overview to help you decide which party has the agendas that align best with your values. It also indicates areas where the party has acted against their claimed agenda or have neglected to propose how they might forward that agenda. Of course you don't need to base your vote off of one source! Delve as deep as you want / can tolerate or spare or be bothered to do. If any particular points in this resource catch your curiosity you can always investigate more from there :) But if browsing this shorter more digestible resource is all you can manage? That's okay! You are doing more good by voting on your semi-informed party than not voting at all! And it definitely does more good than voting for a party based on things like stereotypes, habit/tradition, trending topics, viral posts, vague impressions, attack ads, or mud-slinging.

TLDR: 1) VOTE

2) You are not powerless and voting matters. You have an impact on this election whether or not you are voting.

3) As unreliable as they may be, the federal parties we empower will direct where attention and federal resources are allocated.

While they may not follow through on exact plans or promises, the type of party you vote for will generally invest resources in line with their political platform.

4) Resources like this link I'm sharing can be a great tool to help you get informed on these general platforms / agendas.

5) Avoid voting blindly or falling victim to indecision paralysis. However brief or extensive your efforts toward better understanding what-the-parties-actually-support are - you'll still be making sure that your choice is informed. You'll be more likely to put your weight behind initiatives that reflect the kind of society you want to see rather than letting your vote or non-vote add further fuel to agendas that may go against the wellbeing of you, your loved ones, and your communities.

6) There is no heroic Prime Minister that will be completely unproblematic. There is no perfect party you can always depend on. But this does not make our options equivalent or "equally bad". A party's platform and demonstrable integrity will give you a glimpse into the types of choices they will make and opportunities they will take. Your vote is an endorsement towards the potential for change. Your vote is a chance to support the kinds of opportunities available to us as a society.

7) We all have stakes in this game and we all have the opportunity to nudge the wheel towards the direction we want for ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities.

So get informed and vote responsibly. :D

P.S. Your life matters. Your voice matters.

Lend your voices not towards that which you wish to be free from!

P.S.S. I believe in you <3