#and that creating a space that is kind of insular and isolated from the 'outside world' is not like. cowardly | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dabistits · 4 years

Text

To talk about Twice and villainy is to talk about class and criminality (IV)

(Masterlist)

cw: references the dehumanization of “terrorists,” like, irl

The trash of society

“Disposability” is a framework that interrogates the way human lives are valued. Arising from observations about material disposability in the rapid industrialization of post-’45 and the increasing hold of mass-production and consumerism, “disposability” eventually expanded to an investigation of the human cost of this modern landscape. Theorists raised the question of how the disposability of human lives could be understood in tandem with the disposability of material goods, linking together issues of class, poverty, migration, imperialism, race, production, and consumerism. In essence, disposability as a framework investigates how human lives come to be rendered as disposable—and thus, like waste, byproducts of a lifestyle of endless growth.

This concern is one that receives frequent exploration in fiction that delves into the framework of humans-as-waste; for example, the sci fi dystopian short story Folding Beijing follows a waste worker in his efforts to fund the education of his adoptive daughter, who he found abandoned outside his waste-processing station. Although the conditions in BNHA aren’t nearly as grim, there are nevertheless clear connections drawn between its villainous characters and the concept of humans-as-waste, to the point where villains refer to themselves or are referred to by others as “trash.” Quirks may have effected a massive social upheaval, but that didn’t do away with, only shifted, the specifics of the idea that there are people who are deserving and people who are not, innocent people and criminals.

Throughout the series, we see characters mistreated while a society of deserving innocents looks on. There was little concern from the public when Izuku was mocked and bullied for his Quirklessness, when Rei was sold into a marriage for the benefit of a wealthy and abusive pro hero, when five-year-old Tenko wandered the streets alone, and when Jin was left to fend for himself as a teenager. Under the framework of disposability, they might as well have been rendered “waste,” as Zygmunt Bauman writes: “[t]he story we grow in and with has no interest in waste[...],” instead

“[w]e dispose of leftovers in the most radical and effective way: we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking. They worry us only when the routine elementary defences are broken and the precautions fail—when the comfortable, soporific insularity of our Lebenswelt which they were supposed to protect is in danger.” [source]

It is, interestingly, a bigger-picture version of the charges Shigaraki Tomura directs against the world of BNHA: like Bauman says, the innocent civilians are oblivious, recognizing neither the fragility of their peace nor the artificiality of it as it is maintained by heroes, unwilling to acknowledge the "leftovers”—the people who weren’t saved—until they return as villains and that very peace is threatened.

As for the leftovers themselves, they feel their alienation acutely. According to Bauman, to be “redundant” in a productivity-driven economy is to “share semantic space with ‘rejects’, wastrels’, ‘garbage’, ‘refuse’—with waste.” He outlines the conditions of redundancy thusly, describing it as a kind of “social homelessness”:

“To be redundant means[... t]he others do not need you; they can do as well, and better, without you. There is no self-evident reason for your being around and no obvious justification for your claim to the right to stay around. To be redundant means to have been disposed of because of being disposable[...]”

The experience of this kind of disposability is evident in BNHA, as class and exploitation seem to be highly correlated with social isolation. The members of the Shie Hassaikai were used and abandoned, and bonded strongly to one another after joining Overhaul. Jin’s experience of “social homelessness” shows him walking alone through empty city streets, before he ends up talking to his own clone below an overpass. Jin, too, finds companionship in joining a group, the League of Villains, but fears of disposability and further isolation plague his thoughts. Whether or not he genuinely believes League of Villains would abandon him, Jin feels the need to continue justifying his place among them. The societal bleeds into the personal; Jin’s disposability to society, best represented by his interactions with law enforcement and with his employer, also becomes an anxiety in his interpersonal relationships. Horikoshi’s decision to characterize Jin in such a way makes it impossible to ignore the larger issues that created him; namely, class issues that reflect real-world concerns.

As Jin sits below the overpass, talking to his clone, he asks whether he went wrong somewhere. The other Jin responds that it must have been “being born without an ounce of luck.” Bauman comments on unluckiness thusly:

“In Samuel Butler’s Erewhon it was ‘ill luck of any kind, or even ill treatment at the hands of others’ that was ‘considered an offence against society, inasmuch as it [made] people uncomfortable to hear of it.’ ‘Loss of fortune, therefore’ was ‘punished hardly less severely than physical delinquency’.” [source]

These observations are perfectly applicable to the characters we’ve met. It’s often the “unlucky” who get treated the worst: Izuku was bullied relentlessly for his “unlucky” Quirklessness, and Rei wound up trading her “unlucky” marriage for an institutionalization of ten years. Jin was fired from his job after an “unlucky” accident, fell into a life of crime, and is finally killed by the same hero who offered him a second chance. When Dabi probes Tokoyami Fumikage in an attempt to make him contend with Jin’s “ill treatment” at Hawks’ hands, Tokoyami dismisses it and justifies Jin’s execution, undoubtedly because it would be uncomfortable, possibly even world-shattering, to acknowledge Dabi’s charge. The fact that these people have been unlucky, or have even been actively mistreated or failed by others, turns the public’s gaze away in an attempt to escape the discomfort elicited by these embodiments of society’s waste. For the “redundant” to remind society of its human cost—or even to remind the non-redundant of the small gap of bad luck that separates them—they become objects of revulsion, to be forgotten or discarded as quickly as possible. Rendered “invisible” and “unthinkable” as leftovers, they become “ontologically non-existent.” [source]

Some of the anxiety towards the “redundant” is precisely because the framework of “becoming waste” is permeable. This permeability accounts for the possibility of transforming from citizen to disposable human; perhaps, then, when “all it takes is one bad day,” the line which separates citizen from villain is just as permeable. In the framework of hero society, it may be argued that villains are not simply redundant waste, but the trash whose alienation hero society relies on in a highly visible way. "The disposable, the waste as objects and humans, inhabit a place of exclusion from society which provides not only an unrecognized space of reinforcement for society itself, but also the fuel and the labor for maintaining the status quo.” [source] In BNHA’s terms, not only are villains excluded from a deserving, innocent society, they are also the fuel for maintaining it by embodying its opposite—the guilty and undeserving—their exclusion constantly reinforced through the public spectacle of their arrests and the public idolization of heroes. Villains are no longer simply inert leftovers that can be easily ignored, as Bauman described; villains have broken past hero society’s elementary defenses, and threaten the Lebenswelt of deserving innocents. While their visibility transforms villains back into an acknowledgeable existence, the very act of breaching their invisibility renders them a kind of waste that must be permanently disposed of.

A livable life?

Heroes do not kill. This is stated in 251 by the death-seeking Ending, who, despite his best efforts, is spared an unceremonious execution at the hands of a hero, who the readers know is a domestic abuser. The deathless resolution to Ending’s conflict, then, further compounds the horror of chapter 266, when Jin is eliminated with extreme prejudice by Hawks, who admires the aforementioned hero. The irony is shocking and bitter as readers witness the violation of one of heroism’s fundamental tenets, broken no less for the elimination of one of the series’ most sympathetic villains, after Hawks himself concedes that Jin is “a good person.” It may be said that heroes do not have carte blanche to kill, but neither is it an inviolable principle, and of course a no-kill mandate says nothing about the ways villains have been injured or tortured at the hands of heroes. While arguments can be made about the imminent risk of certain occasions, the issue remains that it’s often the most vulnerable people who pay the highest price for maintaining a nebulous definition of societal “safety” (a “safety” which always seemed to exclude certain people), a concept that is primarily defined by the state and the policing class. Furthermore, the willingness of a hero to kill in defense of hero society begs the question: who may be killed without consequence, and under what circumstances?

In her collection of essays addressing responses to terrorism, Precarious Life, Judith Butler writes:

“Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as "grievable."”

The notion of a “safe” society hinges on the protection of those sanctified lives, at the expense of vulnerable lives deemed “disposable” through poverty, homelessness, or criminality. A threat against the deserving innocents or the murder of a hero unites every other hero and every citizen in public mourning, and then in opposition against murderous villains—there is no such mobilization for the suffering of Quirkless kids, abused women, or orphaned, destitute teenagers. The threats against their well-beings are considered part-and-parcel to their world—normal, unavoidable, and indeed not violence at all. Certainly, a murdered villain will not find such unanimous grief nor anger mobilized in the wake his death, not even directed toward changing the isolated, impoverished conditions which made villainy an appealing choice in the first place. Jin’s death is privately witnessed and privately mourned, only by those who comprised his ibasho. It’s through these uneven displays of grief that Butler questions: “what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?”

Butler argues that certain lives are removed from the bounds of “normative” humanity, and thus “grievability.” Violence against vulnerable lives is dismissed or legitimized by the state through their dehumanization: in the world of BNHA, villains are “presented [...] as so many faces of evil” and treated as mere vessels of a killing instinct.

“Are they pure killing machines? If they are pure killing machines, then they are not humans [...]. They are something less than human, and yet somehow they assume a human form. They represent, as it were, an equivocation of the human, which forms the basis for some of the skepticism about the applicability of legal entitlements and protections.”

This kind of dehumanization is, of course, explained through the claim that certain people are “dangerous,” a designation which (as Butler points out) is determined by none other than the state itself.

“A certain level of dangerousness takes a human outside the bounds of law[... T]he state posits what is dangerous, and in so positing it, establishes the conditions for its own preemption and usurpation of the law[...]”

Perhaps, then, if villains are something other-than-human, something so dedicated to violence that they can be stopped only through death, no "sanctity,” and no law, is violated if they are killed.

The ability of the state to designate certain people as “dangerous” is linked to another political strategy: defining the difference between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence. Butler explains:

“The use of the term, "terrorism," thus works to delegitimate certain forms of violence committed by non-state-centered political entities at the same time that it sanctions a violent response by established states. [...] In this sense, the framework for conceptualizing global violence is such that "terrorism" becomes the name to describe the violence of the illegitimate, whereas legal war becomes the prerogative of those who can assume international recognition as legitimate states.” [source]

In the world of BNHA, clearly such a discernment exists between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence. Although certain readers have been quick to draw the “terrorism” analogy, the series itself tends to differentiate between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence not through charges of terrorism, but through the designation of “hero” and “villain.” Legitimate violence is wielded by heroes in defense of the state, in defense of property, and against villains, whereas illegitimate violence is wielded by villains against the state, against property, and against heroes. This difference between “hero” and “villain” is, in actuality, insubstantial as far as the question of morality, as even labeled villains such as Gentle Criminal behave within a palatable frame of ethics, while some career heroes are just as capable as villains of taking and ruining lives; nevertheless, the state has a vested interest in strongly promoting the idea of this divide—of legitimate, heroic violence as moral, justified, and legal, and illegitimate, villainous violence as immoral, unjustified, and unlawful. In this way, the state can engage in “legal war” with very little questioning or dissent from its populace, and it further delegitimizes the violence of its opponents. The violence of heroes is justified, and therefore they have an understandable human rationale; on the contrary, the violence of villains is unjustified, it is attributed to their innate violence, which is incomprehensible and inhuman.

“The fact that these prisoners are seen as pure vessels of violence [...] suggests that they do not become violent for the same kinds of reason that other politicized beings do, that their violence is somehow constitutive, groundless, and infinite, if not innate. If this violence is terrorism rather than violence, it is conceived as an action with no political goal, or cannot be read politically. It emerges, as they say, from fanatics, extremists, who do not espouse a point of view, but rather exist outside of "reason," and do not have a part in the human community.” [source]

No one personifies this better than Tomura himself. He is named the “Symbol of Terror” by AFO, and is undoubtedly viewed as such by the heroes and civilians of BNHA. It has been repeatedly emphasized that to everyone but the League of Villains, Tomura is not so much a human as he is the embodiment of thoughtless destruction. Tomura is referred to as a monster, as someone unshackled to humanity, as an “it,” as something that cannot be reasoned with. This is an idea that Horikoshi himself seems to play into somewhat, because although Tomura voices certain critiques of the hero system, he nevertheless seems to remain rather apolitical in who or what he decides to target. It’s Jin, then, who lends a political voice to the villains by criticizing pro heroes from his very first narrated chapter, but even a clear articulation of his grievances gets him no understanding reaction from the hero in front of whom he raises these charges.

While the fictional heroes may see villains as nothing more than vessels of violence, it can be argued that Horikoshi himself went through an extensive effort to depict the rationale and humanity of the villains. As I’ve stated before, Jin is very clearly connected to the real-world struggles of certain Japanese citizens, making him real and relatable in ways other characters may not be. At the same time, the rationale and humanity that Horikoshi recognizes are things that heroes like Hawks can’t grasp: as someone who idolized a hero as a child, and who was, for better or worse, enveloped by the hero system, he does not question the legitimacy of the hero system. Hawks understands only unluckiness in Jin’s circumstances, and shows little awareness of the fact that Jin was failed by the very society Hawks defends, that his suffering was both enforced by the legal system and by his boss, and ignored by institutions supposedly designed to help. Jin, of course, is not so obtuse—he reiterates his awareness that he is one of those disposable, ungrievable lives that heroes don’t save, and he is ultimately proven right—when Hawks’ offer of rehabilitation is rejected, he instead moves to kill. Jin, and other villains, are so thoroughly dehumanized, likened to killing machines, that it doesn’t occur to any hero that they can possibly be reasoned with.

Could there have been any other conclusion? I don’t believe so—not without a significant shift in thinking from heroes. For many of the villains, there’s very little to gain from rejoining the society that they were ejected from. Bauman writes that, for “disposable” humans:

“Unwelcome, tolerated at best, cast firmly on the receiving side of socially recommended or tolerated action, treated in the best of cases as an object of benevolence, charity and pity (challenged, to rub salt into the wound, as undeserved), but not of brotherly help, charged with indolence and suspected of iniquitous intentions and criminal intentions, [they have] few reasons to treat ‘society’ as a home to which one owes loyalty and concern.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Jin rejects Hawks’ offer of a “socially tolerated” rehabilitation into the society that both caused and ignored his suffering, which he has no reason to believe wouldn’t outcast him again for another slip-up. Of course, he instead chose the place he was understood, where his mistakes were met with patience, where he wasn’t forced to justify his presence, where his sense of belonging felt stable. The people he called his ibasho were a home, a place he was allowed an ontological existence—the very inverse of that old, disposable life.

Conclusion

Bubaigawara Jin should be read as class commentary. The various obstacles in his story are all too reflective of the systemic issues of real-world Japan, concisely highlighting the shortcomings and common abuses of the alternative care system, the justice system, and the workplace. It’s also highly likely that Horikoshi himself is aware of economic inequalities on some level, which seems to reflect in the obvious and less-obvious ways he addresses class in BNHA. I think this probable intentionality is important, as it can lend itself to our speculation on the series’ messages and themes. Importantly, if Jin’s story is a commentary about the real-world trials of economic marginalization, then surely this also applies to the way he is treated by heroes and by wider society. Beyond simple evaluations of “X did this, which forced Y to respond,” certain narrative choices may be better understood as a pattern of illustrating disposability, of the way this fictional society creates “human waste,” and to relate them to real-world patterns of which lives are considered worth saving.

I somewhat downplayed the real-world inspirations for Bauman and Butler’s texts, because I believe those are true and serious topics about capitalism and war that should be discussed on their own merits, unrelated to a fictional series; however, they also perfectly show how certain beliefs in the real world are transferrable to BNHA’s world. Because these beliefs are transferrable, readers’ reactions to certain narratives in fiction are rooted in certain truths we believe about the real world as well. For example, it would pointless to call the League of Villains “terrorists” as a condemnation, unless someone believes that the charge of “terrorism” in itself tells us anything meaningful about morality. As Butler has explained, and as real life shows (e.g. through the designation of black radical groups like the Black Panthers or antifascist groups as terrorist organizations), the term “terrorism” alone holds no inherent moral implication. Imagining that the label of “terrorist” can meaningfully convey anything about morality, and that "being a terrorist” removes a person from the boundaries of “normative humanity” (and thus due legal process in-universe, and reader sympathy out-of-universe) reflects an ignorance about certain real-world political processes.

Injustice in the world doesn’t only take the form of obvious oppression and violence; manipulation is also involved. There is a vested interest by the ruling class in guiding the ways people think and perceive reality, teaching us what we deserve and don’t deserve, what prices are acceptable and unacceptable to pay for human life. These lessons must be rejected from the outset, leaving rules and definitions open for interpretation. What qualifies as violence? Is violence more than a physical act of harm? Is it violence to isolate “unproductive” members of society? Is it violence to deny them food and shelter? Is it then violence to cage and execute them when they do not non-violently accept their subjugation? What forms of violence are unacceptable and why? Where does violence really begin?

Dismantling oppression can only be achieved by questioning its very foundations and the language used to justify it; fiction, by enveloping us into a new reality—a new world with new rules—should make this questioning easier if we’re willing to divest ourselves of certain beliefs fed to us by those in power. BNHA, as imperfect as it is, certainly tries to raise some of these questions about the designations of “heroes” and “villains,” about the deserving and undeserving, about who is saved and who gets left behind. I would go further, and argue that to invest legitimacy into the hero system is to invest legitimacy into everything that perpetuates it: the poverty, the violence, the disposability of those judged “villainous,” and the idea that agents of the state are uniquely positioned to enact legitimate violence. Confronting crime means eliminating the need for it and the conditions that give rise to it, and only then, not a moment before, will the problem of villains largely cease to exist.

#jin bubaigawara #bubaigawara jin #bnha meta #the exhaustive meta about i love twice

149 notes · View notes

adorkablegrrl-blog1 · 6 years

Text

Regarding Andrew Blake

So I deleted my last post because it was truly a TL;DR word vomit that made me, personally, seem incredibly manic and disorganized. I was pissed when I was writing it, because I keep seeing AB’s stan, Chris, making comments calling my best friend’s honesty and integrity into question. And, while I feel like everyone in the “Andy Awareness” biosphere has been doing a good job of calling that nonsense out for what it is (thank you @theteablogger, thank you @kumquatwriter, thank you @returnofthenecromommycon) seeing Molly and/or Chris and/or any of our friends who interacted with AB dragged in any capacity makes me feel quite stabby. It’s probably the pregnancy hormones that have exacerbated it to the word vomit state... I blame everything on pregnancy hormones right now. As is fair. I am growing a human.

I have pretty much said what I needed/wanted to say about the chronology and facts of what happened with Andy in LA here, so I’m not going to rehash the entire timeline. Besides it’s not my story to tell, really. It’s Molly’s. And, she’s doing a fine job of doing just that. And, I have been assured by her that she is not afraid of or worried about being dragged by either AB or his minions. (I still worry, but I will take her word at that and try to not go Mama Bear on people talking shit about her unless she asks me to.)

That being said, as a witness to these events, there are a couple of important things I feel like I want to share. These are conclusions I came to after spending an ungodly amount of time going down the Andrew Blake rabbit hole this past weekend to try to wrap my mind around the largeness of this mindfuck of a story which is his life.

#1: Andy has all the hallmarks of an addict -- in so much as he “lies, cries, and denies.” He lies about his past and present circumstances. He cries/deflects/minimizes to make it seem like he’s a victim of gossip and mean-spirited people projecting their own personal problems/experiences onto his behavior, and when confronted with the truth he denies that he has done either of the previous two actions. He also claims frequently to be reformed with no tangible evidence that he actually is (further signs of an active addict.)

I have intimate experience with addicts. Both those who are active in their addiction and those who are in successful recovery. And, I am here to tell you -- that the number one bedrock, hallmark, tenant of recovery is accountability. You have to be completely transparent about your life, where you are at, your past mistakes, and your present struggles. If you are lying about ANY of this, you are not a recovering addict. If you are minimizing your behavior (past/present) you are not a recovering addict. If you are deflecting responsibility for what you do and have done onto other people... you are not a recovering addict. Andrew Blake is not out of fandom. He is not done with leading cults. He is not done using people for money, connections, concrete daily needs for living. This has been clearly demonstrated by not only how he behaved in the past, but how he behaved with us before we even KNEW his past. And, this behavior was enough to set me on edge (and I only met him IRL twice) and set at least 8 other people outside myself, Molly, and Chris on edge. We were all creeped out by him, none of us wanted him around... Here is a brief list of 5 major things he lied to me directly about: 1. He said he’d never been to LA before and acted shocked at how expensive living here was.

2. He said he was working “in-house” for the summer for an established costumer who was working on a “big” project. For those not familiar with the industry, that implies he was working in a more permanent capacity, for a film or television production -OR- that he was a staff member at one of LA’s various large costume production houses. That was not the case, he was doing piece work on an “as needed” basis and that alone was not foundation enough to warrant moving to LA for. (Nor was it lined up before he got to LA, to my understanding.)

3. He said he was staying the whole summer with Molly and Chris. Which was not true. As Molly told me, after I questioned her as to why she’d let someone live rent free for three months, that she had agreed to let him stay a week in exchange for a costume commission.

4. He said he had more costuming experience than he did. And, in fact, pointed me to an IMDB page for a different Andrew Blake who is an established costume designer in the UK. (And, my fault lies in believing this, as I didn’t do more than just look briefly at the page and go “oh cool, he has an IMDB page and some experience, he might be good to recommend to [name redacted] as a second assistant or something.” Had I looked more in-depth I would have realized his lie IMMEDIATELY and brought it to Molly’s attention.)

5. He told me he was 23. I believed him. He told me he was a cis-gendered man who was born a cis-gendered man. I believed him. He has a young face. I do not question people’s gender... though it gave me great pause to find out that he was transgender, presenting as cis, making transphobic and homophobic comments to my good friends. And, when confronted with those lies, he has either said “oh no, no- you misunderstood me, that’s not what I said, that’s not what I meant” (gaslighting 101) or directed his minions/stans to try to discredit those confronting him with his lies. This is addict behavior 101.

#2 He is SO not out of fandom...

Of course he knew who the Because Science guy was when questioning my friend C about her boyfriend (the Because Science guy.) Of course he pushed Molly to introduce him to the Critical Role cast (including that RIDICULOUS menu he suggested for a dinner party... hamsters and peacocks? JFC.) Of course when he found out that both Molly and I ran close with the Geek & Sundry crowd (Molly still does, I do not convention or comic con or podcast anymore due to stuff) and that we know Wil Wheaton and Stan Lee (frankly, who doesn’t?) he pushed us to make introductions. BECAUSE HE’S NOT OUT OF FANDOM.

It was suggested by one of his stans that he wanted to make those connections because it would bring him costuming work. Um. No. Celebrities have ZERO, zilch, nada, niente, nothing to do with hiring staff at the level Andrew was/is at. Knowing celebrities is only good for two things: 1. Getting into parties, B. Stroking your own ego and sense of self-importance in a very impersonal and tough industry. And, sometimes actual friendship, but rarely. Also one rule those of us who know and/or are friends with famous people follow is that we don’t introduce randos to them, no matter how big a fan, how well intentioned we believe them to be. And, given the stalky-stalk-mcstalkerson-from stalksylvania-ness of AB’s LoTR and SPN fandom scams (and, possibly a Bucky Barnes/Avengers scam? I am unclear how close he did or did not get to Sebastian Stan) -- it’s as obvious as the nose on my face why he actually wanted those introductions. And, that is not only creepy AF, but it is calculated and not at all about getting costuming work.

#3 He’s NOT DONE with being a cult leader...

Like I said up top (I know, this one is TL;DR, too... Sorry, I have things to say) I went down the Andy Blake rabbit hole this weekend and read as much of the information out there about supernova shitstorm of a life he leads that I could before my head exploded. That includes the incredibly trainwreck-y book that was written about the LoTR scam; Abbey and Diamond’s accounts of their time with them (which ripped my heart out, I cannot even,) and the horrifying account of AB’s involvement in and exacerbation of the circumstances/climate which lead to Brittney’s murder (which is ghastly.)

What I noticed about all these circumstances was a pattern. Specifically, a pattern about how Andy interacts with couples. He finds someone who is kind and has empathy and other good attributes who shares a geeky aspect with him; he engenders himself to them and lovebombs them and disorients them and ingratiates himself into their social circle; he then moves into this person’s real life space; he creates conflict and friction between the person and their significant other or friends, thusly isolating them, making it into a “them against us” situation; and, finally he maneuvers into that that person of importance’s place in his target’s life. He then builds an insular group of people around them who share the “them against us” mentality. And, then the real fuckery begins...

He clearly did this with Abbey, he clearly did this with Brittney, he seems to being doing this with his Chief Stan... and, based on the behavior I observed, he was trying to do that with Molly AND if he hadn’t succeeded he had already decided he was going to move in on the relationship of another couple within our social circle.

This is horrifying to me to consider. Though I am proud of Molly and Chris that they recognized what was going on (before they were told about AB’s actual past and before they realized the scope of his lies.) But, it garners the thought of “what would have happened had he succeeded?” Was he trying to install himself into the LA cosplay scene and create a new cult around some fandom or another? I think he was. He surely targeted the group who he thought most likely to accept or tolerate his nonsense. He didn’t count on the fact that we’re all really close, already, and we are also adults who are pretty established in LA, in our careers, and in “the scene” and we’ve seen enough of this kind of bullshit before (though not on such an epic scale) to immediately throw up red flags when a pattern begins to appear. Where would his manipulations have led had he been successful? I don’t care to speculate other than saying it would not have been good. Which leads me to my conclusion:

#4 Andrew Blake is still dangerous....

This might seem like a given. In fact, it is a fact. And, though I honestly wish nothing more than he actually was being sincere about his desire to reform his life and start fresh, his behavior -- even in this narrow two week span of time -- belies his actual intentions. Is his pathology a sickness or is it deliberate? I don’t know how to tell. As someone with mental illness issues, I resent him blaming his bad behavior on mental illness, so I don’t think that’s true. Is it possible he is a sociopath or has a BPD that he cannot control? Maybe? But, then again, much of what he has done in the past and present show a particular cold calculation designed to best manipulate emotions and behavior of others. Some are pathetic and transparent (like The Stickening) and some are more insidious (I’ll leave others to detail those instances since I have only heard about them second hand, not experienced it myself.) Further I’m not a qualified diagnostician, so I cannot speculate on his mental stability, other than to critically look at what he has put out about himself.

I will say this, however -- personally, due to a really intense triplet of tragedies, in 2015 I had a complete nervous breakdown. Of which I was totally incognizant, but which was observed by those close to me. They intervened and pretty much strong armed me into treatment. For about a year I had a “care team” because I was considered very fragile and it was thought that I might backslide into my breakdown psychosis. That care team was in weekly, if not daily, contact with me, my husband, my parents, my friends -- and, EVERYONE had a list of warning signs to be on the lookout for that would indicate that I needed more help and support and possibly a medical intervention. And, given my diagnosis (C-PTSD, Major Depression, Social Anxiety, General Anxiety) it required the utmost focus and work from me... I couldn’t even think about making major changes to my life, let alone being social, I was in (sometimes daily) therapy and trying to recover for a whole year before I could even think outside myself enough to make changes to my work, residence, relationships, etc. And, I was never outwardly destructive, but the intervention and treatment was that intense.

I’ve read various pieces around the different blogs about AB saying he has a care team and that he’s being held accountable and that he’s better and in treatment and he’s burned fandom to the ground, etc.... all I know is this: If that is true, and multiple people have “had productive conversations” (and, yes I’m the one who talked for two hours to Chris whatshisname) with people who are supposedly on said care team (though, has someone called the Players about this LA nonsense?) saying they had witnessed troubling behavior patterns that were indicative of a serious backslide.... and the care team haven’t acted on implementing an intervention for him? That calls into question if said care team actually exists and/or if he was or is in any kind of treatment for whatever his problems actually are. Are his problems actually diagnosed or just an additional layer to his “backstory” he made up to garner sympathy? Having been there, done that, got the t-shirt with serious, in-depth mental health care, I’m guessing the latter. It just doesn’t pass the sniff test. Anyhoodle... there are my eighty-bajillion words about Andrew Blake. I am hoping that now that I’ve spit them out I can stop ruminating on his latest fuckery and it’s impact in my group. Mostly, we here in LA are just glad AF that we excised him from our lives so quickly and with such precision. And, we hope that the pro-Andy stans leave Molly and Chris and the rest of our community alone. He ain’t welcome around these parts. If you have questions, comments, please don’t hesitate. Please be aware that any aggressive, mean spirited shit will not be acknowledged. Otherwise this is the one and only Andy Blake specific post I am going to ever make on Tumblr. Because I just don’t have the time or bandwidth for this brand of crazy anymore.

#andrew blake #andy blake #thanfiction #tentmoot #tf-talk #crazy

42 notes · View notes

lovehaswonangelnumbers · 5 years

Photo

New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/monthly-astro-forecasts-march-2020/

Monthly Astro-Forecasts March 2020

By Sarah-Jane Grace

Message for March 2020

Watching the stormy seas crash over the rocks and the sea wall (from the safety of the café!) is both invigorating and enlivening. As the waves grow larger and larger, their power and force become clear as they toss large pebbles and pieces of driftwood into the air without a care as though they are twigs. The booming crash is both exciting, but terrifying. The sea holds such power and majesty, as it shapes and defines the land, carving out new features as it goes. Whilst we, as humans, try to bend and shape the seas from sea walls to flood defences, the sea takes no prisoners. It just does what it does with grace and impunity.

Watching a tree changing from one season to the next invokes a great many different emotions from new life in the spring when the leaves grow green, blossoms burst and buds start to form, from the spectacular array of colour before the leaves start to fall in the autumn, to the quietening down as they rest in wintry slumber. Animal, plants, trees and the natural world move from season to season, accepting the cycle of life, constantly adapting, finding ways to thrive and survive even during times of challenge and adversity.

It’s easy to create a long list of the majesty of the natural world and the awe-inspiring presence it has in our lives, yet it is clear to see that nature is struggling with the rapid pace of change of the earth, from fires to floods, melting ice caps to extremes of temperatures. There is a sense of confusion as we struggle and flounder, trying to outwit and outsmart something far beyond our reach.

It seems clear that the time to outwit and outsmart is beyond us, but we are now in a time of reverence and respect. Instead of assuming that others will ‘sort it out’, we each need to take responsibility in order to live as respectfully as possible. Of course, we can carry on regardless, but the price is an ever-increasing unpredictability of the world in which we live.

When we create waste (plastic or otherwise) we each need to consider the impact of this. Whilst it may get burned, stuffed in landfill or shipped off overseas to be processed, our choices have consequences. When we insist on wanting more of nature’s more delicate crops and the result is increased use of pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals, we need to realise that our choices have consequences. When we lovingly clutch our new healing crystal, we need to realise the devastation the mines create and accept that our choices have consequences.

Yet, it’s not just about how we treat the earth and her non-human inhabitants, we also need to consider how we treat one another. In the age of social media, there seems to be a growing trend for individuals to bully and spout hate. Packs of ‘trolls’ lambast others for fun, not considering that their actions can destroy a life.

In a world where we can be anything, do we really want to be defined by the things we don’t want, rather than simply embracing the traits we know to be wholesome from kindness and wholehearted living? So many of us have forgotten how to be wholehearted as we have shut down in order to get through the business of everyday life.

It’s time to be loving, compassionate, kind and thoughtful, respecting all living things and trying to live in the best possible way, not just so future generations have an earth, but because it’s the right thing to do. So many people now seem to have adopted an attitude of let everyone else sort it out. If we all do that then the future doesn’t look bright.

Personally, I delight in watching the trees change season; seeing nature in her true majesty fills me with awe. Yet human beings create blocks to the natural flow by living in concrete jungles where an awareness of the natural cycles fade away. A chicken wrapped in plastic on the supermarket shelf is disconnected from the chicken who (hopefully) lived a good life. Chicken is just food, not a gift and certainly not honoured for the life it sacrificed. Many of us live juxtaposed to the natural flow. We can have foods all year round now, not just when they are in season. The fact that the food accumulates thousands of air miles in the process is forgotten. We want whatwe want, whenwe want it.

We may be an adaptable species, but there is a deeper sense of disconnection consuming so many hearts and souls as we step away from the natural cycles of life. Blue light pollution from phones, tablets and other items light up the sleep space, the outside world is often disregarded for the virtual world of 24/7 constant stimulation. So few have the time to notice the changing leaves, the birdsong, the majestic forests whispering in the moonlight.

As much as we may try, we simply cannot outsmart and outwit nature. The more we continue to live out of kilter with the rest of life feeds the disconnection and it becomes harder and harder to feel integrated and a part of the whole. Yet, we are. It’s easy to feel isolated from life, and more at home in a virtual world, but that’s not real. It’s understandable that so many seek retreat in technology as a distraction from life, but this only exacerbates the problem. It’s therefore important for us to start pushing back, to re-connect to the earth, to life and to each other.

March looks set to be a month where the momentum of re-connection starts to grow stronger. We each have a choice as to how we live. This is a time to stand up, to be whole-hearted and to consciously re-connect to the natural flows in life. Of course, we cannot know where such a path will lead us, nor will we know if others will follow suit, but we owe it to ourselves to do the very best we can do to live in the best way possible.

Change is happening on many different levels and in many different ways, and we need to stop losing ourselves in our virtual and concrete worlds and start to live once again. It’s time to breathe more deeply into life and to step fully into each and every moment. Intent is a powerful force, and not one to be underestimated. It’s our willingness and passion to create change that builds and grows, reaching out to others, being carried across space and time before being breathed in again somewhere else.

We are not insular beings and although we may shut ourselves away and close our eyes and ears to the bigger picture, we are each being pushed towards awakening fully in order to wholeheartedly acknowledge that every choice has a consequence and to connect consciously to the world in which we live rather than remaining locked away in a virtual state of disconnection and discord.

It’s easy to feel overcome with emotion when we look at the world around us, but we need to channel this into love, compassion and positive change. We each have our parts to play, however small. The time is now…

For now, I wish you all kinds of wonderful.

With love,

Sarah-Jane

Aries

♈

Your life has been all-steam ahead lately, as though someone pressed the fast forward button and forgot to release it again. As a result, you’ve barely had time to take a breath, let alone take stock of your surroundings, as there has been so much to do, people to see, places to go and things to achieve. You have always placed yourself under pressure to do more, be more and achieve more, but the added fast pace of life seems to have sent you into something of a spin, as you’re not quite sure if you’re coming, going or somewhere in between. Whilst you do usually thrive under pressure, even you are wilting as you simply cannot keep up with the pace; although you have ticked a great many items off of your great big ‘to do’ list of life, you seem to have lost sight of the bigger picture. Your focus is on getting things done, but this seems to be at the cost of many of your goals and dreams gathering dust in the corner of your heart and soul.

It’s therefore easy to see why you are buckling under the load of things to do, people to see, places to go and tick lists to complete. Of course, with you being you, you also need to add to the mix the plethora of ought’s, must’s and should’s. It’s exhausting just reading about it! March looks set to bring you an opportunity to re-set the balance and to have a good re-think as to your true priorities in life. It’s time to stop trying to be superhuman and to start loving yourself more as you take care of your true needs and love yourself for all that you are rather than all that you do…

Taurus

♉

March looks set to be a month to create some more breathing space as you begin to find new ways of simplifying and streamlining your life. Whilst you don’t tend to choose to make your life more complicated, there is a sense that you have been overwhelmed with responsibilities and things to do recently, and this has left you tied up in knots, feeling rather bewildered and in a spin. It’s as though you have lost your usual earthy sure-footedness, and find yourself suspended in mid-air, trying to regain your footing in order to breathe deeply once again. The harder you try to return to solid ground, the more you seem to spin, so it’s important for you to realise that most (if not all) of the spin is in your control. You’re busy and stressed because you don’t like to say no, and you’ve over-complicated your life by not honouring your own needs.

The time has come for you to pause for a short while in order to regain your perspective. You are a wise, compassionate and creative soul, and in order to function to the best of your abilities, you thrive on the challenge of trying to be everything to everyone. Of course, you forget about your own needs in this, but you gain a sense of your self-worth from being the person that everyone else wants you to be. This takes skill and tenacity, and you have both by the bucket load, but you’ve spent so long with your breath held in, trying to do your best and be the best, and it feels slightly hollow unless you are wholeheartedly feeling it. In essence, it’s time to open up your heart and soul towards thriving and blooming once again as you take a big deep breath of life…

Gemini

♊

Life is full of a seemingly random collection of incongruent moments. Some flow together well, others are juxtaposed and awkward, unable to fit together as though they are like two repelling north magnets. Each moment is a fragment in time where you can experience an infinite possibility of emotions and thoughts; you never know what you’re going to get, but the rollercoaster ride of choices, decisions and consequences can sometimes leave you in a daze. On the whole, you manage these moments rather well as you’re open-minded and can see the different flows of consciousness with each moment, sometimes gaining wisdom from the bigger picture and other times feeling able to go with the flow. Of course, there are times when you want to know more and you push hard to dig, question and make sense of why things are the way they are. Sometimes you get an answer, mostly you don’t, and whilst this doesn’t stop you trying, it seems that you are beginning to realise the power and majesty in letting go and going with the flow.

March looks set to be something of a collision of moments; a coming together of many different facets of your life into something new. Such collisions do happen, and they usually take your breath away, but this one feels different as you seem so ready for it. It’s as though you have reached a turning point in your life, and you are eager to explore new terrain and reconnect to your emotional and spiritual roots. You have spent a great deal of your life trying to be the person you felt you ought to be, but the time has come to be yourself and to love yourself for it. You are vibrant, inspirational and intuitive, so use these gifts to shine brightly. This is your moment; enjoy it…

Cancer

♋

There is a powerful sense of release and renewal in the air throughout March as you begin the process of re-establishing your awareness in the here and now. You seem ready to let go of the past and to stop keeping your focus on the future, as you step more consciously into where you are now. You’re usually so busy keeping on keeping on that you don’t have the time to realise just how out of balance you’ve become. It’s only when you pause for a short while that you begin to realise just how much you’ve been drifting. Of course, both the past and the future have their uses, as both give context and meaning to the present, but the present moment is what you have now, and this is surely the most important thing? What may or may not happen tomorrow shouldn’t guide your today, nor should past experiences be the sole guide of choices made today.

In short, it’s time to trust your phenomenal intuition in order to live more consciously and in tune with your true essence. You seem ready now to stop thinking about the path you’ve walked and the path you want to walk to instead focus on the path you’re now walking. This isn’t to say that you should stop having dreams or stop gaining wisdom from past experiences, as both have learning potential, but use them as a reference point rather than a place to hang out. Be in the moment and you will quickly realise there really is no other place to be. It’s important to remember that yesterday is behind you and tomorrow hasn’t happened yet; by shifting more consciously into the here and now you can start to breathe more deeply into life whilst allowing life to breathe into you…

Leo

♌

March looks set to be a month of breakthrough as you begin to shift your awareness towards acknowledging your true priorities and dreams in life. You have spent a great deal of time trying to be the person you thought you ought to be and whilst this has seen you achieve a great deal, you seem ready now to listen to your heart and soul in order to be the person you truly are. A time of breakthrough may suggest change and shift, and both are likely as you step into a new chapter of your life. You may feel the fluttering of uncertainty inside, as you’re not yet clear as to what this new chapter entails, but despite this, intuitively you know you are not only ready, but you want it, need it and feel excited to welcome it into your life. Of course, alongside this excitement, there is a layer of apprehension and uncertainty, but you seem ready and open to the process now, so intuitively you know it’s time to believe in yourself.

Try not to let those inner butterflies take over as your more cautious side may start to hold back as you step towards unchartered terrain. This is your moment to re-shape the story of your life and whilst what lies ahead cannot be set in stone, you know it’s the right path as your soul is burning brightly with passion and joy. It seems clear that the more you can acknowledge your true priorities, the more clarity you will gain when it comes to sorting the wheat from the chaff in all areas of your life. At the same time, stop feeling like you’re not enough as you are not only enough, you are extraordinary, glowing and magnificent…

Virgo

♍

Over recent weeks and months there is a sense that you have felt as though you’ve been torn into two, on one hand trying to be everything to everyone, but on the other, trying to acknowledge your own self-worth, sense of self and path of destiny. It’s as though you have split yourself in two, feeling as though it’s a case of either one or the other. Of course, intuitively you know this isn’t the case, but logically when you look at your life, you cannot see how you can honour yourself and your dreams when you give so much to so many. As a result, you have lost some of your sure-footedness as your inner landscape feels stormy and chaotic; you are doing battle with yourself trying to outwit…yourself. This may sound strange, but you are a master thinker and over-thinker, and whilst you can sense the inner divide, instead of pausing to find a way through it, you are oscillating in a kind of no-man’s land where you’re not really sure if you’re coming or going.

Your inner storms suggest you are now beginning to include yourself in the equation of your life, but this still seems to sit juxtaposed to your sense of purpose as though you think taking care of your own needs is somehow self-indulgent or selfish. It’s not! The stormy landscape reflects the turmoil within you as you want to honour yourself more, but feel guilty for doing so. This really needs to stop now, and you need to remember that you truly are the wisest person you know so listen to yourself and apply your wisdom to know that it’s perfectly possible to heal this inner divide in order to become whole again. In fact, it’s more than becoming whole, it’s realising just how marvellous you truly are…

Libra

♎

Finding peace with your true nature is something you have long strived to do. You have spent a great deal of time pondering this as you so easily see the bigger picture, as well as the finer details, of life. It’s as though you are nearing a point of shift where you are finally beginning to wholeheartedly accept your natural state of being. You have an active mind, and an expansive and vast consciousness, and these blend together to form the whirling, swirling inner maelstrom within your heart and soul. Of course, you have long done battle with your inner maelstrom, feeling as though peace and tranquillity should be your natural state of being as that is what so many others believe. However, you are not like other people and you really need to stop comparing yourself to them as this only serves to stifle your self-belief.

Your inner maelstrom may be troubling to a great many souls as they strive for inner peace, however, your path to peace and tranquillity is about living consciously and vibrantly at the heart of the maelstrom where your passion is on fire and you feeling deeply connected to everyone and everything. Being you is definitely an art and it may take a lifetime to perfect, but it’s time to live, breathe and love being yourself. You’re ready now to channel your courage into being the person you truly are as you let go of doubts and stop trying to blend in; let your true colours shine brightly and allow your gifts to blossom and unfurl. It’s time to stop thinking about the life you shouldn’t be living, or don’t want to be living, and instead start to focus on the living the best life possible. Let your vibrancy, creativity and maelstrom shine brightly. Love yourself for all that you are; your beautiful maelstrom is your gift…

Scorpio

♏

It seems you have spent a great deal of your life trying really hard to blend in; to become another face in the crowd. Your reasons for this are not overtly clear, although on one level there is a sense that blending in makes for an easier life. However, although you have certainly mastered the art of becoming a wallflower, you have found it hard not to want to be that one wallflower that sparkles and shines. In other words, trying not to get noticed when your soul illuminates so brightly makes for a frustrating challenge, as the harder you try to blend in, the more you stand out! Yet, rather than fighting even harder to blend in, it seems time to ask yourself why? Why is hiding your light away an easier path? Why is blending in so desirable?

It’s true that you have had your fingers burned in the past for being a trailblazer and you have felt the pain of the lack of understanding of some around you, but intuitively you know you thrive when you are riding on the crest of a wave or meandering upstream against the flow because you blossom when you allow yourself to be you. You have spent so long wanting to be you, but fought this in order to be the you that you think you should be. Confused? Well, you should be! Who are you? Are you a bright sparkly soul or another face in the crowd? Maybe you’re both? There are no easy answers to any of these questions as you are far from straightforward in the best possible way! It may therefore be wisest to move away from logic and ask your heart and soul what you truly want? Make your decision and find peace with it. Stop struggling and believe in yourself…

Sagittarius

♐

As you continue to contemplate the bigger picture of your life, there is a sense that you are beginning to wholeheartedly lighten the load by letting go of a great deal. You have always been one for collecting ideas, skills and possibilities, keeping them all tucked away in case they one day become useful. As a result, you have learned a great deal, but you have also started to stand a little more hunched as the weight of that backpack is exponential! It’s time now to have the confidence to set yourself free, to trust that the skills and ideas you need will stay with you and to let the rest go. March looks set to be a month that is both liberating and invigorating, as you begin to stoke the fires of your soul. You are a passionate and compassionate free spirit; carrying such a huge backpack acts like a tether keeping you in one place, bringing you self-doubt and frustration. Although your intentions behind the backpack were good, it stopped serving a positive purpose quite some time ago.

It’s hard to let it go because it represents to much hard work and so many dreams, however that hard work and those dreams won’t vanish just because you put the backpack down. It’s time to start believing in yourself and realising that no size of backpack will ever be enough to replace your tenacity, wit and innovative skills. Thriving in life isn’t about carrying around possibilities and ideas, it’s about living those possibilities and ideas to the best of your ability. Stop feeling like you’re not enough or that you need to do more, be more or achieve more as you are so much more than you could ever truly know. Have the courage to believe in yourself, step beyond the backpack and be free…

Capricorn

♑

As you continue to breathe deeply into the nooks and crannies within your heart and soul, you are beginning to gain a stronger sense of purpose once again. For a long time now, you have been focused on the business of keeping on keeping on, not affording yourself the ‘luxury’ of connecting to your dreams or feeling free to open up your heart to your sense of purpose. It’s understandable, after all, you have been working hard to live your life and there has been little time to dream or ponder the bigger picture. However, the more you breathe deeply now, and the more you let go, the more you are beginning to realise that there could be so much more to your life as those nooks and crannies expand revealing untapped potential and hidden reserves. It’s not that you are particularly unhappy, but there is a low rumble of discontentment deep within you as you know just how much you have compromised over the years in order to keep the wheels turning and everyone happy.

Whilst you are not bitter about this, there is clearly some work to do on finding peace with the choices you’ve made and the pathways you’ve walked. In short, it’s time to let go of ‘if only’ in order to ‘just do it’. Now this isn’t to say you should throw caution to the wind, it’s more of a virtual prod in the ribs to remind you to live your life for you, not just for everyone else. Stop hovering on the edge of ‘if only’, as it’s time to find real solutions in order to embrace your dreams and breathe wholeheartedly into life. These solutions may not be obvious, but trust your instincts and let your intuition guide you as March looks set to be a month of revelation and inspiration…

Aquarius

♒

The art of acceptance looks set to take centre stage throughout March as you begin to see yourself, your life and others from a brand-new perspective. As you continue to let go of your in-built tendency to push yourself so hard and to have such high expectations of yourself, you are beginning to see the joy within your quirks and idiosyncrasies. It’s as though you have realised that your quest for perfection keeps you away from living your life as you are perpetually chasing the horizon, rather than being in the moment. Letting go of perfection isn’t giving up or giving in, it’s about acknowledging the beauty in your imperfections and loving yourself anyway.

Acceptance can be a tricky concept to grasp as it means changing the way you see yourself, your gifts, others and your life, but you seem ready now to stop giving yourself such a hard time to do more and be more. Instead you are allowing your aspirations to take on their own life as you breathe deeply into each and every moment, expanding your boundaries and evolving with the changing tides. With less focus on the gap between where you are and where you want to be, you are allowing yourself the opportunity to fully appreciate the value of the here and how. Chasing horizons can be addictive, but with time, you realise it can also be restrictive as well. Acceptance isn’t clear cut or black and white; it’s very personal to you and only you can find your way to this state of being. Yet, it’s not about perfecting acceptance, acceptance is about embracing life exactly as it is. You’re ready now to further expand your boundaries as you grow ever more fluid and free; not a piece of driftwood, but a majestic ship sailing gracefully towards unchartered waters…

Pisces

♓

March looks set to be a month which fills you with tingles of excitement and anticipation, as well as a good sprinkling of magic and sparkle, as a renewed sense of hope and optimism rise up from within you like a daffodil on a spring day. Life has been heavy and onerous lately, particularly on the emotional and energetic levels, and you have been bogged down and overwhelmed trying to get from one day to the next. As a result, there has been little or no time for creative or spiritual endeavours. Most, if not all, of your energy has been channelled towards keeping on keeping on, getting things done and making it through each day. The heaviness is palpable and it’s understandable why you have been feeling so out of sorts. Of course, you are extremely skilled at juggling (as you’ve mastered the art to Olympian level!). However, things are beginning to shift as you stand up and declare a new intention for creating breathing space and exploring pastures new.

You now need to step beyond the confinement your life circumstances have created for you and realise just how stifled your spirit has become. This has left you feeling disconnected and out of sorts, but it’s time to breathe deeply and open up your consciousness towards the bigger picture once again in order to reconnect and feel wholeheartedly alive. You are a vibrant, colourful and passionate soul, so don’t stay hidden in the shades of grey of life. Instead, start to wiggle, wriggle and move, stop juggling so much, learn how to say no, but also how to say yes as asking for help is a sign of strength! Don’t feel guilty for honouring yourself; love yourself, be yourself and allow yourself the freedom to wiggle, wriggle and dance. It’s time to nourish yourself from the inside, out…

******

LoveHasWon.org is a Non-Profit Charity, Heartfully Associated with the “World Blessing Church Trust” for the Benefit of Mother Earth

Share Our Messages with Love and Gratitude

LOVE US @ MeWe mewe.com/join/lovehaswon

Visit Our Online Store for Higher Consciousness Products and Tools: LoveHasWon Essentials

http://lovehaswonessentials.org/

Visit Our NEW Sister Site: LoveHasWon Angel Numbers

https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/

Commentary from The First Contact Ground Crew 5dSpiritual Healing Team:

Feel Blocked, Drained, Fatigued, Restless, Nausea, Achy, Ready to Give Up? We Can Help! We are preparing everyone for a Full Planetary Ascension, and provide you with the tools and techniques to assist you Home Into The Light. The First Contact Ground Crew Team, Will Help to Get You Ready For Ascension which is Underway. New Spiritual Sessions have now been created for an Entire Family, including the Crystal Children; Group Family Healing & Therapy. We have just began these and they are incredible. Highly recommend for any families struggling together in these times of intense changes. Email: [email protected] for more information or to schedule an emergency spiritual session. We can Assist You into Awakening into 5d Reality, where your experience is one of Constant Joy, Wholeness of Being, Whole Health, Balanced, Happy and Abundant. Lets DO THIS! Schedule Your Session Below by following the Link! Visit: http://www.lovehaswon.org/awaken-to-5d/

Introducing our New LoveHasWon Twin Flame Spiritual Intuitive Ascension Session. Visit the link below:

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-twin-flame-spiritual-intuitive-ascension-session/

Request an Astonishing Personal Ascension Assessment Report or Astrology Reading, visit the link below for more information:

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-ascension-assessment-report

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-astrology/

Experiencing DeAscension Symptoms, Energy Blockages, Disease and more? Book a Holistic Healing Session

https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-holistic-healing-session/

To read our Testimonials you can follow this link: http://www.lovehaswon.org/testimonials

Connect with MotherGod~Mother of All Creation on Skype @ mothergoddess8

Request a copy of our Book: The Tree of Life ~ Light of The Immortals Book

Order a copy of Our LoveHasWon Ascension Guide: https://lovehaswon.org/lovehaswon-ascension-guide/

**If you do not have a Paypal account, click on the button below:

If you wish to donate and receive a Tax Receipt, click the button below:

Donate with Paypal

Use Cash App with Our code and we’ll each get $5! FKMPGLH

Cash App Tag: $lovehaswon1111

Cash App

Donate with Venmo

VENMO

Support Our cause in the creation of the Crystal Schools for Children. Visit our fundraising link below:

LoveHasWon Charity for Crystal Schools

Support Our Charity in Co~Creating the New Earth Together by Helping Mother of All Creation. Visit our fundraising link below:

Support Mother Earth!

Support Us on PATREON

PATREON

Support Us Through Our LoveHasWon Wish List

LoveHasWon Wish List

We also accept Western Unionand Moneygram. You may send an email to [email protected] more information.

***If you wish to send Donations by mail or other methods, email us at [email protected] or [email protected]***

**** We Do Not Refund Donations****

MeWe ~ Youtube ~ Facebook~ Apple News ~ Linkedin ~ Twitter~ Tumblr ~ GAB ~ Minds ~ Google+~ Medium ~ StumbleUpon ~ Reddit~ Informed Planet~ Steemit~ SocialClub~ BlogLovin~ Flipboard ~ Pinterest ~ Instagram ~ Snapchat

#5D Astrology #Astrology Updates

0 notes

newcatwords · 3 years

Text

notes on "islands of the mind" by john gillis (ch. 7)

Ch. 7: "Worlds of Loss: Islands in the Nineteenth Century" 121: "It is difficult to imagine losing a mountain or a continent, but islands are forever going astray." "Today, despite the fact that the world is now mapped in the minutest detail, searches for "unknown" islands continue." 122: "Our obsession with getting on, with moving ahead, prompts us to draw up the bridges to our past. The measure of an "advanced" society is the degree to which it has left the past behind; modern maturity is equally dependent on the metaphor of growth, leaving behind a series of extinguished earlier selves. Yet precisely because the modern collective and individual sense of self is so reliant on distancing the past, both have become wholly dependent on tangible evidences of what has been lost to validate themselves. Never before has so much been memorialized, reconstructed, and preserved." "The story modern Western civilization has told itself about progress requires that it distance itself from the past in order to reassure itself of its forward movement. As Fritzsche puts it: "While nostalgia takes the past as its mournful subject, it holds it at arm's length. Nostalgia constitutes what it cannot possess and defines itself by its inability to approach its subject, a paradox that is the essence of nostalgia's melancholy." (quote from "Spectors of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and modernity" by Peter Fritzsche, in American Historical Review, Dec. 2001) 123: "The modern sense of the passing of time depends on a series of bounded, discrete locations--home, school, workplace, retirement communities, cemeteries--which keep each age and era separate from another. In effect, the modern sense of self depends on the spatialization of the past, islanding it by keeping it neatly bounded and distant. Not all spaces are amenable to this function. Open, contiguous spaces do not readily maintain the aura of historicity. Urban life offers few refuges for the past. The period styles of suburbs offer only the illusion of tradition, propelling our quest for the bygone ever farther afield. Remote places seem so much better suited to the preservation of the past, and none better than islands, which have become, often despite themselves, a prime repository of pastness." "Community, something that modernity had torn apart, seems to have survived only on islands." "Once again islands were becoming symbols of something that had little to do with their own realities." "Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth century, the pace of change on most islands was as great, if not greater, than that in many parts of the mainlands. But this did not prevent them from being viewed as anachronisms, mired in the past, appearing as was the fate of the Hebrides, "as if in a rear-view mirror."" (reference here to The Western Isles Today by Judith Ennow, 1980) "Modern nostalgia is the product of the profound sense of historical rupture that came with the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At this critical moment, the past became a foreign country, all the more precious because it seemed so remote and inaccessible." 124: "Islands became important sites for the appreciation of the quaint and the primitive. If islands no longer provided a vision of the future, they were nevertheless ideal venues for time travel to bygone eras. They came to be associated with the infancy of mankind and with childhood itself. Reconfigured as places of origin, islands were no longer treated as gateways to the future but as access to a mythic past. Once the favored destination of male adventurers who left women and children at home, islands became the resort of families, identified with domestic pursuits and with home itself. What had once provided space for masculinist dreams of escape now nurtured fantasies of return to the womb." 125: "Mainlanders were intent on finding on islands peoples who were untouched by the rapid changes that they themselves were experiencing. Yet islands were anything but exempt from modernity's ceaseless creative/destructive

forces, arising first from commercial expansion and later from the industrial revolution." 126: "As genteel mainlanders came to be more frequent visitors to islands, the result was not a diminution but a magnification of differences between them and islanders. Even as physical isolation was being overcome, the illusion of insularity was being cultivated for the benefit of the newly developed tourist industry." 131: "Islands had come to be seen by mainlanders as living museums where what had been sacrificed to modernity elsewhere miraculously survived in a purer, more authentic form."

133: regarding the Hebrides: "Islanders had come to live in a time warp not of their own making. They saw themselves through the eyes of outsiders who were bent on preserving crofting as tradition no matter how recent its origins. In many instances it was the visitors who stood in the way of sensible changes, conserving outmoded ways that the islanders themselves would rather have turned their backs on."

136: regarding Inishbofen: "Islanders preferred canned food to fresh, ignoring the harvest of berries and shellfish that so delighted the tourists. For the people of Inishbofen "the industriousness of years past is now a symbol of poverty, humiliation." They told Tall that they would not eat mussels because it reminded them of famine times when shellfish was all that was to be had on the island." (reference here to The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island by Deborah Tall, 1986)

138: "By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had lost nearly all the original wild places that the first generations of romantics had so glored in. ... Lacking wild lands, the British chose this moment to make the sea their wilderness. It was then that Englishmen began to return to the sea, not as an occupation, but as avocation. It became for them their last frontier, the place where, in small sailing boats, they would test themselves against the elements, proving their manhood to themselves and to the women waiting on shore. "England's only untamed wilderness, where men might still be small and alone in the vastness of Creation, was the sea," writes Raban. "To go to sea was to escape from the city and the machine." (reference here to two books by Jonathan Raban: Coasting (1986) and The Oxford Book of the Sea (1992))

138-139: "Though the sea offered the ultimate escape from stifling civilization, the great adventure for Victorian men seeking to prove their masculinity in an increasingly effeminized domesticated world, the island was a retreat where they could preserve something of their innocence in an otherwise cruel and unforgiving world. There were still plenty of Crusoes, men who viewed islands as their own private kingdoms and a projection of their own inflated egos, but there were also males like Pastor Wyss, the author of Swiss Family Robinson, for whom the island was the setting for family romance, where the instinct for adventure gave way to that yearning for security and comfort that was also a feature of the Victorian era. On land, time moved relentlessly forward, but on the island it moved backward to a more innocent age, toward the beginnings of the human species or to the childhood of the individual. As the fantasy of returning to the innocence of childhood became more powerful among middle-class men in the nineteenth century, the appeal of Crusoe's island gave way to that of Swiss Family Robinson and finally to that of Peter Pan. Ad as islands grew less valuable politically and economically, their reputation for happy domesticity grew proportionally. Islands became ever more associated with the kind of virtuous life that was becoming harder to come by on the mainlands. Occupying a place between the overcivilized land and the wildness of sea, islands were increasingly attractive to a Western middle class yearning for personal freedom but not at the expense of moral respectability. Islands came to be seen as the preeminent "happy Prelapsarian Place." (reference here to The Echafed Flood, or, The Romantic Iconograpjy of the Sea by W.H. Auden, 1950)

139: "By the twentieth century, islands ceased to be thought of as destinations and became places of return, fixed points where an increasingly mobile mainland urban population eager for seasonal respite could savor a sense of stability and continuity."

139-140: "Already in the nineteenth century, people on the mainland were experiencing the erasure of place produced by increased mobility and speed of communication. The resulting sense of rootlessness triggered the uniquely modern quest for place in a placeless world, for home in the vast, featureless landscapes of urban industrial society. The search was not just for residence but for that elusive sense of being at home in the world, as much a mental as a physical endeavor, more likely to be achieved at a distance in the absense of that which was called home. In a world of temporal and spatial movement, where for many there was no long a place to return to, home became a state of mind, "something to be taken along wherever one decamps."" (reference here to the Introduction to Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement, eds. Nigel Rappaport and Andrew Dawson, 1998) (i would also add that the movement of populations & widespead dislocation is also related to and created by the needs of capital.)

140: ""Under conditions of modernity, place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric," writes Anthony Giddens. (reference here to The Consequences of Modernity by Anthony Giddens, 1990) Home became detached from residence, less a physical location than a mental construct, a think of dreams as well as memories, no less real even if it is rarely, sometimes never, actually inhabited."

"Over time the dream house and memory palace moved out, transferring ever farther afield to weekend and summer places. These became locations of "the lost origin and the future dream, both vanishing points where we imagine ourselves at peace, surrounded by comfort and harmony." (reference here to Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses by Marjorie Garber, 2000) It provided easier to animate meaningful, habitable worlds at a distance, with the result that for those who can afford them, the dearest homeplaces are often those they visited only occasionally, sometimes never returned to, however frequently they are visited mentally. Island houses, rarely occupied year-round, were already becoming in the late nineteenth century the quintessential family places where generations, scattered throughout the mainlands, could share time and space, if only occasionally. In Amy Cross's view, the summer place is "not real estate, it is more a state of mind that can be packed and moved to any woods or seaside. And many of us travel through life with a memory of a perfect place waiting for our return." (reference here to The Summer House: A Tradition of Leisure by Amy Willard Cross, 1992)

141: "Modern maturity has been particularly demanding on men, requiring that they distance themselves from domestic, childish things, producing in them a yearning for childhood that has characterized middle-class male culture ever since. In the resulting quest for childhood lost, summer islands became the favored place for retrospection and recuperation. The isles allowed a brief sojourn in childishness that did not threaten the adulthood associated with mainland existence."

0 notes

meditationsinausterity · 6 years

Text

Losing Shame and Using Guilt

Anyone who knows me well enough will know i'm fascinated by the specificity of language. I had a lecturer tell me once that the more precisely you can express yourself, the better you'll be understood. Granted, he was talking about getting to grips with Derrida, but the underpinning sentiment of being understood caught at my very core. As a result, I'll often, mid-sentence, correct myself if the word is not exactly what I mean, particularly in terms of expressing emotion. I get frustrated if I can't make the exact clarification I want to express my point, but in the process of correcting myself I usually arrive at the point I'm driving at. I'm sure we all do this to a certain extent, or the qualifier 'Do you know what I mean?' wouldn't be so prevalent in everyday speech.

I do it in my support sessions all the time when I'm asked how I feel - I take the approach that I need to get as much out of these sessions as possible to progress with my week, my general recovery. If I'm not making every effort to understand and be understood, I don't see the point, do you know what I mean? One such time was after a particularly horrific binge, that saw me physically injured and put the nail in the coffin of my short-lived but long-suffering relationship at the time, where I was asked how I was feeling about it. I said: 'Guilty. But I think it's normal to feel guilty. I don't mean the kind of guilt that paralyzes you and stops you doing anything. I mean the kind of guilt that makes you ask the questions, tell the truth to yourself, and try to learn. There should be another word for it.'

I thought about this conversation while I was walking to the job centre this week, anxious as fuck, and trying to talk myself out of feeling guilty. 'There should be another word for it' kept rolling over my brain, and I scrabbled to think of something until I realized I'd been wrong in the session. What I was feeling after that binge, WAS guilt. what I was feeling on the walk to the job centre, the 'I shouldn't be doing this' breathlessness that made me want to just go home to bed, was shame. And the penny started to drop as to why they were different feelings when I examined the two situations.

On the way to the job centre, my feelings of shame weren't directly coming from anything I did, am, or genuinely believe. Shame can only exist in the light of other people. As a society we're pretty good at shame. There's body-shame, slut-shame, poverty-shame, and probably loads more ways other people make people feel like shit. Shame is a tool used to police others according to the norms of, usually a majority. As a society, the fact these terms exist for different ways in which certain majorities enact this policing shows we're slowly growing into that realization. Shame, and its younger, less crippling cousin, embarassment, can't exist, without other people. If you have a shameful secret, it doesn't technically become shameful until you speak it to anybody else. More prosaically, if you fart in a lift alone there's no shame until someone gets in at the next floor.

I felt ashamed of going to apply for jobseeker's allowance because of how it would have looked to someone on the outside: I'm young, able bodied, adept with people, energetic, and have a work ethic; so what fucking right have I got to ask for help when it ought to be easy for me to get a job? I could hear the imaginary 'you should be ashamed of yourself' in my head, stopping my little trainers in their tracks. Because shame creates paralysis. Shame is what's going to stop you doing something you maybe really need to do, or even just want to do.

There's no arguing with shame if you treat it as something that springs directly from the inside of you. I realized the key to stopping shame from stopping me lies directly in that voice, that 'You should be ashamed of yourself'. For a start, I can tell it's not my own convictions at play here, because I don't call myself 'You' - other people do, when they're not mispronouncing my name. So if it's not me, who the fuck is talking? Once you've asked that question you've already created an access to whatever the external narrative is that's influencing the shame. In the case of me and the job centre, we can cite tabloid hysteria, my working class upbringing, and coming from a long line of proud women who struggle to accept help from anybody; a real tasty blend.

The other key disarming tool here is 'should' - the singlemost efficient way to convey obligation that i know. Think about the amount of times you've bailed on something and explained yourself to someone else by saying 'I should go, but...' That 'should' is the point of tension between what people expect of you and your desires and intentions. Asking 'WHY SHOULD I?' a la an angry teenager, as I did on my walk, may be the fastest and most explosive way to deal with external shaming narratives from stopping me in my tracks. The answers to 'why should I?' are never convincing to the person who questions the power of 'should', which is why the last resort is always 'Because I said so', which, let's face it, never convinced anyone ever. Asking 'why should I?' is a fast and powerful way of undermining all the reasons you are being shamed.

So shame, once you unpick what it is, is simple to counteract. Which is good, because it's the thing that stops people doing what they need to in order to get help. Guilt, however, is more complicated. And I'm going to posit a theory, in no doubt a stupidly long-winded way, that guilt is not there to stop you from doing things, but is in fact a motivational emotion.

I was wrong in my session. There was no better word for what I should have been feeling than guilt. Because guilt is directly related to your inner self, to something you did or didn't do, or say. Guilt was absolutely the right word for how I felt after that binge, because I had done things I knew were wrong. And I knew them to be wrong in accordance with what I genuinely and fundamentally believe in myself, for the simple reason that if i didn't believe I shouldn't be resorting to drinking to blot out anxiety and pain, then why was i engaging in therapy to break that pattern? or, put more plainly and simply, despite all my endeavours to do the right thing lately, I had massively fucked it up, by myself, and guilt is the way in which my mind was holding me accountable for what I had done wrong, by holding it at the forefront of my mind and not allowing me to concentrate on anything else.

And, to go back to what I said earlier about shame being an external process that can't exist without other people, you can be perfecty capable of feeling guilty all alone. To go back to my fart in a lift metaphor, If you fart in a lift alone, and then get out, you'll feel guilty about leaving that fart in that space to fester because you know you did it. You feel guilt because you're to blame. Guilt without culpability already has a name: paranoia. To apply this to my situation; even if nobody had known about my binge and it hadn't affected anybody else (which was emphatically not the case), even if I hadn't sat in a room telling somebody else all about it, I would still have felt guilty. Because I would have known I'd done wrong. But it would have been a kind of double guilt; the guilt of my own culpability, underneath the the guilt of not revealing it, which i'm going to rename 'concealment anxiety' for clarity.

I once read somewhere that 'we're only as sick as our secrets', and in terms of this kind of double-layered guilt, I genuinely believe it to be true. When I sat in the office talking about the binge, there was a definite sense of pressure relief, like the first door of an airlock opening. But the removal of the concealment anxiety is only the first door; it doesn't free you, it just lets you breathe and focus. Concealment anxiety is why problem pages everywhere are crowded with letters asking if people should reveal their adultery to their partners - the uncertainty stems from the knowing it would provide that rush of relief vs. the fact it won't remove the guilt that comes from the actual culpability. Telling the truth about what you did can only remove the concealment anxiety, it can't remove the guilt of culpability.

The reason I use the metaphor of breathing space and an airlock is because until you untangle concealment anxiety and guilt, you can spend a long time in that pressure zone, confusing the two. My therapy, this blog, the practices I'm putting into place to reach out to more people and to be honest about everything, they're all ways in which I've realized i was existing in this dead, hidden zone where all the things i was doing to harm myself were hidden. And that environment was slowly making me sicker, and more isolated, and withdrawn. I wasn't admitting to my actions, which meant I was stuck alone in this space, at eye level with my guilt at all times, and unable to address any of it because I couldn't focus.

Breaking that first seal by gritting my teeth hard and admitting to all the things I was guilty of to people (professionals and loved ones alike) provided me the breathing space I needed to look at the real guilt in a more focused way. The guilt that, as I put it, 'makes you ask questions, tell the truth to yourself, and try to learn.' And it was chronic, in this situation. I say chronic because guilt is visceral, it's a physical emotion. You feel sick, your heart pounds, you sweat, and if you're me, your posture goes totally insular and you can't look anyone in the eye (I'm pretty sure this is also what dogs do). Guilt is your mind's equivalent of putting a huge billboard in front of all your other emotions saying 'YOU FUCKED UP. YEAH, YOU. WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT?'

And that, I think, is the key function of guilt. On first glance it seems like an unfair emotion - you can't undo what you did wrong, because what's done is done, so the 'what are you gonna do about it?' can seem overwhelming. But guilt's 'what are you gonna do about it?' doesn't have to be interpreted as a threat; it's your mind's way, at least I think, of saying, 'you did something horribly wrong, and now we need to focus on ways to make sure you don't do it again.'

((DISCLAIMER: I'm not, here, disregarding the fact that if you did something to hurt somebody else, you should say sorry, or try to make amends, but I am not dwelling on that, because a sorry can't fix anything, and sometimes the amends aren't possible. That's not to say they're not a necessary part of facing up to what you're guilty of, as I certainly said my sorry to the concerned party, meaning every single word of it (as I'm sure he was fully aware), but knowing in the pit of my stomach that no matter how heartfelt the sorry was, it wouldn't fix the damage I'd done. No matter how fundamentally important it is to say and mean, never has any sorry I've ever said had any more power than words ever have over actions.))

But back to that 'what are you gonna do about it?' - That's what's made me see that guilt can be a motivational emotion. For a start, there's the fact that it's so sick-making and anxiety-inducing that you would, in its throes, probably do whatever it takes never to feel it again. And I think that's no coincidence; warning signs are eye-burningly bright, sirens are ear-splittingly loud, because urgent messages need urgent attention. But the process of guilt, the constant reminders; I am finding, the more I notice and interrogate my thoughts; often take the form of ways in which you could have done things differently. I used to think that this was just my brain compounding things by telling what a fucking idiot I was, but now I'm starting to realize that actually, these alternate-plays are not nasty mind tricks, they're useful tools for me to interrogate, using direct example, why I didn't do things differently. I'm using guilt as a motivational tool, by letting these replays provoke questions, and therefore answers, that inform my future decisions. I'm still working on it, but it's very effective. It is literally the emotional equivalent of 'learn from your mistakes'. Guilt isn't your enemy, guilt is your teacher. It's just that it's the teacher you thought was really savage at school who you only grew to respect when you realized that they got shit done (not unrelated: Hi Mrs. Pearman, hope you're well!)

That was probably more long winded than anyone needed it to be, but we all have these negative emotions, and I'm starting to learn that engaging with them is both practical (because they're not fucking going anywhere unless I get lobotomized), and useful (because they have more to tell me than that I currently don't feel very good). So I'm going to become shameless (or more so, as anyone who has encountered how chill I am with being seen naked will attest), I'm going to be as honest as I can to stop that concealment anxiety airlock from closing me in and stopping me breathing again (a decision I've already committed to), and when I am to blame for something, I am going to let my guilt guide me into examining why the hell I did it in the first place, to stop me doing it again.

#personal blog #recovery #guilt #shame #anxiety #emotion #tl;dr #musings

0 notes

trendingnewsb · 7 years

Text

If You Care About Cities, Apple’s New Campus Sucks

The new headquarters Apple is building in Cupertino has the absolute best door handles. The greatest! They are, as my colleague Steven Levy writes, precision-milled aluminum rails that attach to glass doors—sliding and swinging alike—with no visible bolts.

Everything in this building is the best. The toroid glass of the roof curves scientifically to shed rainwater. And if it never rains again (this being California), well, an arborist selected thousands of drought-tolerant new trees for the 175-acre site. Not every Apple employee will get to work in the new building—ouch!—but 12,000 will. Of course, it only has 9,000 parking spaces, but that’s supposed to encourage people to take an Apple shuttle to work. And once they arrive, they’re not going to want to leave. The fitness center has a climbing wall with pre-distressed stone. The concrete edges of the parking lot walls are rounded. The fire suppression systems come from yachts. Craftspeople harvested the wood paneling at the exact time of year the late Steve Jobs demanded—mid-winter—so the sap content wouldn’t be ruinously high. Come on! You don’t want sappy wood panels. This isn’t, like, Microsoft.

Whether you call it the Ring (too JRR Tolkien), the Death Star (too George Lucas), or the Spaceship (too Buckminster Fuller), something has alighted in Cupertino. And no one could possibly question the elegance of its design and architecture. This building is $5 billion and 2.8 million square feet of Steve Jobsian-Jony Ivesian-Norman Fosterian genius. WIRED already said all that.

But … one more one more thing. You can’t understand a building without looking at what’s around it—its site, as the architects say. From that angle, Apple’s new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general. People rightly credit Apple for defining the look and feel of the future; its computers and phones seem like science fiction. But by building a mega-headquarters straight out of the middle of the last century, Apple has exacerbated the already serious problems endemic to 21st-century suburbs like Cupertino—transportation, housing, and economics. Apple Park is an anachronism wrapped in glass, tucked into a neighborhood.

The Architecture

Apple Park isn’t the first high-end, suburban corporate headquarters. In fact, that used to be the norm. Look back at the 1950s and 1960s and, for example, the Connecticut General Life Insurance HQ in Hartford or John Deere’s headquarters in Moline, Illinois. “They were stunningly beautiful, high modernist buildings by quality architects using cutting-edge technology to create buildings sheathed in glass with a seamless relationship between inside and outside, dependent on the automobile to move employees to the site,” says Louise Mozingo, a landscape architect at UC Berkeley and author of Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. “There was a kind of splendid isolation that was seen as productive, capturing the employees for an entire day and in the process reinforcing an insular corporate culture.”

By moving out of downtown skyscrapers and building in the suburbs, corporations were reflecting 1950s ideas about cities—they were dirty, crowded, and unpleasantly diverse. The suburbs, though, were exclusive, aspirational, and architectural blank slates. (Also, buildings there are easier to secure and workers don’t go out for lunch where they might hear about other, better jobs.) It was corporatized white flight. (Mozingo, I should add, speaks to this retrograde notion in Levy’s WIRED story.)

Silicon Valley, though, never really played by these rules. IBM built a couple of research sites modeled on its East Coast redoubts, but in general, “Silicon Valley has thrived on using rather interchangeable buildings for their workplaces,” Mozingo says. You start in a garage, take over half a floor in a crummy office park, then take over the full floor, then the building, then get some venture capital and move to a better office park. “Suddenly you’re Google, and you have this empire of office buildings along 101."

And then when a bust comes or your new widget won’t widge, you let some leases lapse or sell some real estate. More than half of the lot where Apple sited its new home used to be Hewlett Packard. The Googleplex used to be Silicon Graphics. It’s the circuit of life.

Except when you have a statement building like the Spaceship, the circuit can’t complete. If Apple ever goes out of business, what would happen to the building? The same thing that happened to Union Carbide’s. That’s why nobody builds these things anymore. Successful buildings engage with their surroundings—and to be clear, Apple isn’t in some suburban arcadia. It’s in a real live city, across the street from houses and retail, near two freeway onramps.

Except the Ring is mostly hidden behind artificial berms, like Space Mountain at Disneyland. “They’re all these white elephants. Nobody knows what the hell to do with them. They’re iconic, high-end buildings, and who cares?” Mozingo says. “You have a $5 billion office building, incredibly idiosyncratic, impossible to purpose for somebody else. Nobody’s going to move into Steve Jobs’ old building.”

The Landscape

But that’s all future-Apple’s problem. Today-Apple’s problem is how the campus fits into Cupertino and crowded, congested, expensive Silicon Valley.

Between 2010 and 2015 the San Francisco Bay Area added 640,000 jobs, with more than a third of that growth in tech. But the region didn’t add nearly enough housing; with the exception of a spike during the boom years leading up to the 2008 recession, the number of new housing units built in the city of San Francisco has trended steadily downward, and the same is true for other Bay Area cities. Here’s what happens when supply fails to meet demand: The median price for a home in the Bay Area has climbed to $800,000. It’s even higher in Silicon Valley.

That’s starting to change. San Francisco has 62,000 units in the pipeline, and San Jose is adding thousands every year, too. (To be clear, those numbers are still far lower than places like Houston and Atlanta.) But the towns along the 101 and 280, the homes of companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook? Nope. Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto all have tens of thousands of workers in the tech business, adding more and more all the time, but those cities have been reluctant to build new houses or apartments.

How is this Apple’s problem? “Apple’s obviously very important to the city, and when they came in with that plan, we understood this wasn’t going to be just any development,” says Aarti Shrivastava, Cupertino’s assistant city manager. “They had certain needs.” Heightened sensitivity to security was one of them, which meant no public access—and even closing a major road.

In the early days of the project, reports suggest Apple wasn’t willing to participate in “community benefits,” financial or otherwise, and Cupertino’s city council didn’t seem too willing to push one of the city’s biggest employers and taxpayers. The mayor at the time tried to propose higher taxes on the company, but the city council didn’t support the move.

Over time, though, Apple committed to giving the city some money to help with traffic and parking. “We had to bring them into our world. They don’t do urban design. They don’t do planning. We needed to talk to each other,” Shrivastava says.

In its HP incarnation, the site had about 5,000 workers; the new Apple complex will more than double that. Just 10 percent of them live in Cupertino, but according to an Environmental Impact Report on the project that an Apple spokesperson sent me, that still means that demand for Cupertino housing will increase by 284 percent. Apple is paying a “Housing Mitigation Fee” to the city. It’s based on overall square footage, but it turns out Apple is only adding about 800,000 square feet of building over what used to be on the site. So the company agreed to double the usual fee. But since the city had already halved the fee, so Apple is just paying … the fee. It’ll be about $5 million.

You can do math: Ten percent of people working in Cupertino means that 90 percent of the people in the Spaceship will commute. Most of them live in San Jose (10 miles east) and San Francisco (45 miles north). The lack of a cohesive regional transportation network in the Bay Area privileges cars, which is why Google and other tech companies started fielding their own buses in the last few years. (In 2014, San Franciscans angry about gentrification met Google’s buses with resistance.)

Apple has shuttles that range the entire peninsula and into the East Bay and has committed to raising the number of trips to its headquarters not in single-occupancy vehicles to 34 percent. According to the EIR, just 1.5 percent of commute trips to Apple’s existing facilities are on public transit; by that calculation, the company says, the public bus system’s plenty robust enough. That logic is as circular as the building; if you don’t build it, they won’t come.

Of course that wasn’t all Apple worked on with Cupertino. Because part of the new campus subsumed what was going to be public space, Apple paid $8.2 million so Cupertino could build a park somewhere else. And the company agreed to help address the community’s major concern: traffic. Cupertino already had big plans for walkability and bikability; Apple is paying for a lot of those efforts around its campus. It ponied up $250,000 for a feasibility study on improving one of the nearby intersections, and an extra $1 million for another. Recognizing that not having enough parking for everyone on site meant that people were going to park in nearby neighborhoods, Apple is paying $250,000 to Santa Clara and $500,000 to Sunnyvale in parking restitution. “We worked very hard with both cities to figure out what amount would be OK, and Apple was very open to that,” Shrivastava says.

Oh, and two big ones: Apple is one of Cupertino’s biggest sources of tax revenue, but the city used to forgive all of Apple’s business-to-business sales tax. Now the city will get 65 percent of it. And the company built, at a cost of around $5 million, a system to bring recycled water from Sunnyvale to hydrate the new landscape. That’s not a direct community benefit, but developments at two more sites, the Hamptons and the old Vallco Mall, will also use that water if and when they get built.

Still, though…Apple has $250 billion in cash. Against that, these community benefits feel small. The company could have chipped in to double the frequency of CalTrain’s commuter rail. It could have built a transit center in Cupertino, which, unlike Mountain View and Palo Alto, has none. “Apple could have done anything. Money was no object,” says Allison Arieff, editorial director for the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association and lead author of its recent report on corporate campuses. “They want to be innovative in everything, and they’re not innovative in this thing.” Apple is instead making significant improvements to roads and highways. “If the intractable problems of the region are housing and congestion, they’re giving the finger to all that,” Arieff says.

The problems in the Bay Area (and Los Angeles and many other cities) are a lot more complicated than an Apple building, of course. Cities all have to balance how they feel about adding jobs, which can be an economic benefit, and adding housing, which also requires adding expensive services like schools and transit. Things are especially tough in California, where a 1978 law called Proposition 13 radically limits the amount that the state can raise property taxes yearly. Not only did its passage gut basic services the state used to excel at, like education, but it also turned real estate into the primary way Californians accrued and preserved personal wealth. If you bought a cheap house in the 1970s in the Bay Area, today it’s a gold mine—and you are disincentivized from doing anything that would reduce its value, like, say, allowing an apartment building to be built anywhere within view.

Meanwhile California cities also have to figure out how to pay for their past employees’ pensions, an ever-increasing percentage of city budgets. Since they can’t tax old homes and can’t build new ones, commercial real estate and tech booms look pretty good. “It’s a lot to ask a corporate campus to fix those problems,” Arieff says.

But that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t try. Some companies are: The main building of the cloud storage company Box, for example, is across the street from the Redwood City CalTrain station, and the company lets people downtown park in its lot on weekends. “The architecture is neither here nor there, but it’s a billion times more effective than the Apple campus,” Arieff says. That’s a more contemporary approach than building behind hills, away from transit.

When those companies are transnational technology corporations, it’s even harder to make that case. “Tech tends to be remarkably detached from local conditions, primarily because they’re selling globally,” says Ed Glaeser, a Harvard economist who studies cities. “They’re not particularly tied to local suppliers or local customers.” So it’s hard to get them to help fix local problems. They have even less of an incentive to solve planning problems than California homeowners do. “Even if they see the problem and the solution, there’s not a way to sell that. This is why there are government services,” Arieff says. “You can’t solve a problem like CalTrain frequency or the jobs-to-housing ratio with a market-based solution.”

Cities are changing; a more contemporary approach to commercial architecture builds up instead of out, as the planning association’s report says. Apple’s ring sites 2.5 million square feet on 175 acres of rolling hills and trees meant to evoke the Stanford campus. The 60-story tall Salesforce Tower in San Francisco has 1.5 million square feet, takes up about an acre, has a direct connection to a major transit station—the new Transbay Terminal—and cost a fifth of the Apple ring. Stipulated, the door handles probably aren’t as nice, but the views are killer.

The Future

Cupertino is the kind of town that technology writers tend to describe as “once-sleepy” or even, and this should really set off your cliche alarm, “nondescript.” But Shrivastava had me meet her for coffee at Main Street Cupertino, a new development that—unlike the rotten strip malls along Stevens Creek Blvd—combines cute restaurants and shops with multi-story residential development and a few hundred square feet of grass that almost nearly sort of works as a town square.

Across the actual street from Main Street, the old Vallco Mall—one of those medieval fortress-like shopping centers with a Christmas-sized parking lot for a moat—has become now Cupertino’s most hotly debated site for new development. (The company that built Main Street owns it.) Like all the other once-sleepy, nondescript towns in Silicon Valley, Cupertino knows it has to change. Shrivastava knows that change takes time.

It takes even longer, though, if businesses are reluctant partners. In the early 20th century, when industrial capitalists were first starting to get really, really rich, they noticed that publicly financed infrastructure would help them get richer. If you own land that you want to develop into real estate, you want a train that gets there and trolleys that connect it to a downtown and water and power for the houses you’re going to build. Maybe you want libraries and schools to induce families to live there. So you team up with government. “In most parts of the US, you open a tap and drink the water and it won’t kill you. There was a moment when this was a goal of both government and capital,” Mozingo says. “Early air pollution and water pollution regulations were an agreement between capitalism and government.”

Again, in the 1930s and 1940s, burgeoning California Bay Area businesses realized they’d need a regional transit network. They worked for 30 years alongside communities and planners to build what became BART, still today a strange hybrid between regional connector and urban subway.

More About Apple

Steven Levy

Apple’s New Campus: An Exclusive Look Inside the Mothership

David Pierce

Apple's HomePod Puts Siri in a Speaker

David Pierce

Siri Finally Got Its Coming Out Party

Tech companies are taking baby steps in this same direction. Google added housing to the package deal surrounding the construction of its new HQ in the North Bayshore area—nearly 10,000 apartments. (That HQ is a collection of fancy pavilion-like structures from famed architect Bjarke Ingels.) Facebook’s new headquarters (from famed architect Frank Gehry) is supposed to be more open to the community, maybe even with a farmers’ market. Amazon’s new headquarters in downtown Seattle, some of 10 million square feet of office space the company has there, comes with terrarium-like domes that look like a good version of Passengers.

So what could Apple have built? Something taller, with mixed-use development around it? Cupertino would never have allowed it. But putting form factor aside, the best, smartest designers and architects in the world could have tried something new. Instead it produced a building roughly the shape of a navel, and then gazed into it.

Steven Levy wrote that the headquarters was Steve Jobs’ last great project, an expression of the way he saw his domain. It may look like a circle, but it’s actually a pyramid—a monument, more suited to a vanished past than a complicated future.