#and the fact that he understands all identity is social and performative does enable him to like. implicitly understand some

[majimaisms]

queer icon majima is very strange to me DS actually really gets into how he views gender overall so it's weird ? lol

literally so true. a LOT of rambling under the cut because i have sooo many thoughts about majima's queerness and its portrayal in the games. youve opened a whole can of worms with this one

majima could not be a queer icon if his life depended on it i will die on this hill. even if he came out or even if she transitioned or Anything like his worldview and politics are so fundamentally conservative on so many crucial points and hes literally so repressed about sexuality like he could never. he could neverrrrrrrr. he needs to hashtag liberate your mind and stop basing his entire mental model of society and human relationships on The Nuclear Family and honestly completely revolutionize his thinking before he can even begin to take any of the steps necessary to becoming anything resembling a queer icon, or in fact a queer person capable of inspiring and being a positive example for literally anyone*. bro did drag once and it was with the full intention of getting hatecrimed so he'd have an excuse to get into a fight with a man he ASSUMED would be transphobic and he thinks its "demeaning" and "funny" for men to crossdress like give me a breakkkkkk. assigning him 1000 hours in the forcefem dungeon

if im being completely real with you i dont think his understanding of sexuality ever Really went beyond "romantic love is something that happens between a man and a woman" to begin with. i am however planning to use this against him in my fic but i really do think the best we're getting with majima is like. "in a queer romantic relationship but deeply heteronormative about it" im afraid. and the sad thing is he literally cant Afford to move past this even if he wanted to because the position he has situated himself in in society is an active, material obstacle to this, in some ways even more than heternormative society is for queer people in general, because hes responsible for so many people who depend on him. this is how the patriarchy (or any oppressive systemic structure) works, this is why people don't question things; there are real, material consequences to "realizing" things about yourself and society, and to revolutionizing your thinking, and the system is designed that way on purpose. majima is not in a place where he has a strong incentive to do so, the risks far outweigh the benefits for him, and he has so many coping mechanisms set in place to prevent him from looking at mirrors (wow, i wonder why that is !)

also look at how he acts with civilians vs. other yakuza. the ds substory with daigo is him treating a fellow yakuza (outranking him!) this way but the is way more open minded about "unconventional" sexuality when it comes to civilians and women -- first example that comes to mind is kaho (minato girl) from pirates, but he also displays generally open minded attitudes about gender identity and presentation in that game on other occasions. he was even like this in y0, his hostess conversations have plenty of examples of him not subscribing to social norms especially in things like "gender equality". what i mean to say is i think him being in the yakuza IS the biggest obstacle to majima developing a healthier, queerer outlook on sexuality and gender. because its structure is so fundamentally patriarchal that misogyny, transphobia, homohpobia necessarily characterize the bonds between its members. him treating daigo the way he did in that substory is an example of this, but i dont think he would approach a civilian the same way. the yakuza is interesting in this way because it creates a patriarchy within a patriarchy -- like, we do often see this behavior between men who are regular civilians, where daigo and majima couldve been any two guys you know, because its the rules of the "club" -- the social club that is "manhood" as patriarchal society defines it. but the way yakuza place themselves Above civil society creates a different, more exclusive club and it has the same rules, and this means they are not exactly in the same social class as civilian men. so i do think majima might be more open minded re: civilian queer people in general, which is an interesting cognitive dissonance

not that there havent been queer icons who were FAR from being paragons of socially progressive thinking btw (plenty!! thanks to how rampant misogyny is even in queer spaces) but if we're talking about whether or not he would "deserve" the title of "queer icon".... *like i understand majima has helped many many rgg fans come to terms with their own transness, but i think its important not to project our own political beliefs and worldviews onto characters who frankly just. do not share them. reminder that majima is, CANONICALLY, a cis man who was born in ✨1964✨ who divorced his 18 year old wife after hitting her because she ABORTED HIS BABY. he thinks getting het married and having kids is like, the pinnacle of human happiness, forever inaccessible to him -- or he at least believes that's a morally correct thing to believe, but his double standards on this go SO deep that i Have to read it as internalized shame on his part. the cognitive dissonance is insane. you do NOT want to be het married with kids! its just a "dream" hes been sold that he couldnt really let go of because theres nothing else to replace it. because. again. cant afford to come to terms with his queerness

and while im at it i do think a lot of the fandoms revering goromi as some kind of like... paragon of transfem visibility or something (yes, even some of the people who just read this and went "well i definitely dont do that!") is also a result of this "projection" because theyre assuming majima is doing things in a way they personally find agreeable or understandable. but the fact of the matter is that goromi IS a transmisogynistic caricature, and even if shes the transmisogynistic caricature of the writers, technically, she is also majima's as far as in-universe analysis goes. it was not an exploration of gender in good faith on his part at all, and i really do think the fandom's unquestioning treatment of her (and majima) as a "queer icon" is nothing more than transphobia and homophobia and misogyny coming from the queer community itself, which, unfortunately, happens all the time. this is not meant to shit on anyone btw but i do urge everyone to not uncritically accept portrayals of queerness in media -- just because *you* have progressive ideas and can read things from that lens doesn't mean the majority of the people who engage with the same source material will, or that it was intended to be read that way. for most fans, a lot of the portrayals of queerness in rgg will do nothing more than reinforce pre-existing transphobic (especially transmisogynistic!) and homophobic attitudes of the audience. sure, you CAN read everything majima does in a way that *would* qualify him as a queer icon, but also, like, what if the world was made of pudding?

[coldalbion]

Good morning. I was wondering how much wisdom Odin produces on his own? A while ago you said he transforms himself according to the new information, like cutting his eye out at the well. I was thinking of American Gods, Wednesday’s last conversation with Vulcan has similarities to Nancy’s conversation with Ibis. Odin is a bastard, this is well known. I wonder if he’s the original cultural appropriation guy. I imagine he validates the new info like the borg, whereas those that cosplay don’t.

Depends what you mean by “produce” I suppose. In my experience, I wouldn’t say he’s a cultural appropriator within the context of taking-from-a-group- and-claiming-as-own/being better than originators. If anything, lore suggest he engages with things and practices on their own terms - he becomes a woman with the witches. He gains the runes through pain and privation. In  Grímnismál  he allows himself to be put between the two fires and is essentially tortured. He’s a god. He doesn’t have to put up with that, but he does. In a sense, it is less that he takes, and more that he adds-to-himself. That’s to say, Odin is rune magician and seidh-master. These are, at first glance two separate praxes. They require different things, different ways. What unites them in this context is Odin. He is the one who performs them. In this sense, he’s not the Borg because the Borg add to the Collective and in doing so, change themselves but also erase difference.  My experience is that the Old Man glories in, and enhances difference.  A key point to consider is where the phenomenon of bricolage  comes in (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage): “Anthropology In anthropology, the term has been used in several ways. Most notably, Claude Lévi-Strauss invoked the concept of bricolage to refer to the process that leads to the creation of mythical thought, which "expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal" [7]. Later, Hervé Varenne and Jill Koyama used the term when explaining the processual aspect of culture, i.e., education Literature In literature, bricolage is affected by intertextuality, the shaping of a text's meanings by reference to other texts. Cultural studies In cultural studies bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of subcultures such as the punk movement. Here, objects that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and given a new, often subversive meaning. For example, the safety pin became a form of decoration in punk culture. Social psychology The term "psychological bricolage" is used to explain the mental processes through which an individual develops novel solutions to problems by making use of previously unrelated knowledge or ideas they already possess. The term, introduced by Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Matthew J. Karlesky and Fiona Lee[10]The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship of the University of Michigan, draws from two separate disciplines. The first, “social bricolage,” was introduced by cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1962. Lévi-Strauss was interested in how societies create novel solutions by using resources that already exist in the collective social consciousness. The second, "creative cognition,” is an intra-psychic approach to studying how individuals retrieve and recombine knowledge in new ways. Psychological bricolage, therefore, refers to the cognitive processes that enable individuals to retrieve and recombine previously unrelated knowledge they already possess.[11][12] Psychological bricolage is an intra-individual process akin to Karl E. Weick’s notion of bricolage in organizations, which is akin to Lévi-Strauss' notion of bricolage in societies.[ Philosophy In his book The Savage Mind (1962, English translation 1966), French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used "bricolage" to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought. In his description it is opposed to the engineers' creative thinking, which proceeds from goals to means. Mythical thought, according to Lévi-Strauss, attempts to re-use available materials in order to solve new problems.[14][15][16]Jacques Derrida extends this notion to any discourse. "If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur."[17]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, identify bricolage as the characteristic mode of production of the schizophrenic producer.[18]” So given the above, particularly in reference to the re-use of available materials, we find ourselves presented with a very Odinic situation. It’s my contention that bricolage can be used as a justification for cultural appropriation - but it’s a bad one, because for me the essence of magic is the poiesis; the bringing-forth from something that no-one else can bring-forth from. Ordinary people can do things in ordinary ways but the magician is by definition outside of the ordinary - literally extra-ordinary. Not only that, but because of this position, they are able to re-order the ordinary, and thus, everything they contact can be rendered extra-ordinary. In this sense, one could argue that this ability to take restrained or limited context and proper/achieve one’s goals is literally the “spinning straw into gold” of Rumpelstiltskin, the lead into gold of the alchemists, etc. In another, this places magicians - of which Odin is an exemplar- at root as uncanny, almost Lovecraftian monstrosities. This, in one way, renders the occult in its original context of being hidden. That is, it is imperceptible to those who have not been initiated or reconfigured in order to perceive it. It’s important to note that the etymology of perceive is actually rooted in grasping: perceive (v.)c. 1300, perceiven, "become aware of, gain knowledge of," especially "to come to know by direct experience," via Anglo-French parceif, Old North French *perceivre (Old French perçoivre) "perceive, notice, see; recognize, understand," from Latin percipere "obtain, gather, seize entirely, take possession of," also, figuratively, "to grasp with the mind, learn, comprehend," literally "to take entirely," from per "thoroughly" (see per) + capere "to grasp, take," from PIE root *kap- "to grasp."

seize (v.)mid-13c., from Old French seisir "to take possession of, take by force; put in possession of, bestow upon" (Modern French saisir), from Late Latin sacire, which is generally held to be from a Germanic source, but the exact origin is uncertain. Perhaps from Frankish *sakjan "lay claim to" (compare Gothic sokjan, Old English secan "to seek;" see seek). Or perhaps from Proto-Germanic *satjan "to place" (see set (v.)).

Combine this with the common sense of possession in a spiritual context, and we arrive at something Jung wrote in his essay on Wotan in the 1930′s: Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit — a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler– which has indeed actually happened — he is really the only explanation. It is true that Wotan shares this quality with his cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised his influence mainly on women. The maenads were a species of female storm-troopers, and, according to mythical reports, were dangerous enough. Wotan confined himself to the berserkers, who found their vocation as the Blackshirts of mythical kings. Leaving aside whether National Socialism was a kind of madness that seized the world (spoiler: the time period was a perfect storm for horrors) and blaming it on Wotan, Jung’s language is important here - particular because it signals a polarity between seizer and seized. Consider Odin’s role as world-creator in Norse myth. He (and his brothers) seize the giant Ymir, kill him, and in supreme butchery, render his corpse into the worlds we know. Taking one thing, they use it to make another - and it is important to note that, according to mythological genealogy, Ymir is Odin’s maternal ancestor - he is not separate from the jotnar.  Rather, he re-orders their potencies to make the world, and since those potencies are inside him, re-orders his own ancestral potencies into that which humans might call god as distinct from jotun. In this sense, we all do this - our lives, bodies and minds are recapitulations and reconfigurations of our ancestors in new forms. When we suggest that “We are our deeds” or whatever, it is a mistake to ignore that the faculties to perform those deeds come from faculties bestowed on us by environment and heredity. How we experience things depends on how we are configured - though such configuration is constantly shifting due to constant inputs. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the magician deliberately seeks out that  reconfigurative reflex. seek (v.)Old English secan "inquire, search for; pursue; long for, wish for, desire; look for, expect from," influenced by Old Norse soekja, both from Proto-Germanic *sakanan (source also of Old Saxon sokian, Old Frisian seka, Middle Dutch soekan, Old High German suohhan, German suchen, Gothic sokjan), from PIE *sag-yo-, from root *sag- "to track down, seek out" (source also of Latin sagire "to perceive quickly or keenly," sagus "presaging, predicting," Old Irish saigim "seek"). The natural modern form of the Anglo-Saxon word as uninfluenced by Norse is in beseech. This desire, this hunt, can be clearly seen in an Odinic/Dionysiac furor complex - combined with *wen:   *wen- (1)Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to desire, strive for."It forms all or part of: vanadium; Vanir; venerate; veneration; venerable; venereal; venery (n.1) "pursuit of sexual pleasure;" venery (n.2) "hunting, the sports of the chase;" venial; venison; venom; Venus; wean; ween; Wend "Slavic people of eastern Germany;" win; winsome; wish; wont; wynn.It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit veti "follows after," vanas- "desire," vanati "desires, loves, wins;" Avestan vanaiti "he wishes, is victorious;" Latin venerari "to worship," venus "love, sexual desire; loveliness, beauty;" Old English wynn "joy," wunian "to dwell," wenian "to accustom, train, wean," wyscan "to wish." Note the reference to Vanir and Vanadis (by way of vanadium) as well as Venus. That there is a polarity betwixt hunter and hunted is obvious, as with sexual partners (regardless of gender or sex it is two -or more - parties conjoined by desire) and also in the notion of veneration, and winning/victory.

So, perhaps more properly, we might argue that the magician goes-into the world in a more intense fashion - not with the principle of union-with, or reduction to Oneness. Rather, towards profusion  of difference, of options and room-to-move. A peculiar notion of freedom via absolute restraint ; enhanced negative-capability. In such a context, to culturally appropriate is to defang the numinous, make it more palatable, more ordinary. To commodity it. I do not think Yggr, the Terrible One, would do so for mere “safety’s-sake”. Maybe that’s just me though.  

[96thdayofrage]

The anti-racism consulting industry does deserve both some sympathy and some credit. Its intention, to prod white Americans into more awareness of their own racism, is beneficent. And their premise that white people are often unaware of the degree to which racial privilege has enabled their success, which they can mistakenly attribute entirely to merit and effort, is correct. American society is shot through with multiple overlapping systems of racial bias — from exposure to harmful pollution to biased policing to unequal access to education to employment discrimination — that in combination sustain massive systemic inequality.

But the anti-racism trainers go beyond denying the myth of meritocracy to denying the role of individual merit altogether. Indeed, their teaching presents individuals as a racist myth. In their model, the individual is subsumed completely into racial identity.

One of DiAngelo’s favorite examples is instructive. She uses the famous story of Jackie Robinson. Rather than say “he broke through the color line,” she instructs people instead to describe him as “Jackie Robinson, the first Black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.”

It is true, of course, that Robinson was not the first Black man who was good enough at baseball to make a major-league roster. The Brooklyn Dodgers decided, out of a combination of idealism and self-interest, to violate the norm against signing Black players. And Robinson was chosen due to a combination of his skill and extraordinary personality that allowed him to withstand the backlash in store for the first Black major leaguer. It is not an accident that DiAngelo changes the story to eliminate Robinson’s agency and obscure his heroic qualities. It’s the point. Her program treats individual merit as a myth to be debunked. Even a figure as remarkable as Robinson is reduced to a mere pawn of systemic oppression.

One way to understand this thinking is to place it on a spectrum of thought about race. On the far right is open white supremacy, which instructs white people to fight for their interests as white people. (Hence the 14-word slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”) Moving to the left, standard-issue conservatism tends to discount the existence of racism and treat all problems in pure color-blind terms, as though racism has been banished. To the left of that is standard liberalism, which acknowledges the existence of racism as a problem that complicates simple race-neutral solutions.

The ideology of the racism-training industry is distinctively to the left of that. It collapses all identity into racial categories. “It is crucial for white people to acknowledge and recognize our collective racial experience,” writes DiAngelo, whose teachings often encourage the formation of racial affinity groups. The program does not allow any end point for the process of racial consciousness. Racism is not a problem white people need to overcome in order to see people who look different as fully human — it is totalizing and inescapable.

Of course, DiAngelo’s whites-only groups are not dreamed up in the same spirit as David Duke’s. The problem is that, at some point, the extremes begin to functionally resemble each other despite their mutual antipathy.

I want to make clear that when I compare the industry’s conscious racialism to the far right, I am not accusing it of “reverse racism” or bias against white people. In some cases its ideas literally replicate anti-Black racism.

Glenn Singleton, president of Courageous Conversation, a racial-sensitivity training firm, tells Bergner that valuing “written communication over other forms” is “a hallmark of whiteness,” as is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.”

This is not some idiosyncratic oddball notion. The African-American History Museum has a page on whiteness, which summarizes the ideas that the racism trainers have brought into relatively wide circulation.

“White” values include things like “objective, rational thinking”; “cause and effect relationships”; “hard work is the key to success”; “plan for the future”; and “delayed gratification.” The source for this chart is another, less-artistic chart written by Judith Katz in 1990. Katz has a doctorate in education and moved into the corporate consulting world in 1985, where, according to her résumé, she has “led many transformational change initiatives.” It is not clear what in Katz’s field of study allowed her to establish such sweeping conclusions about the innate culture of white people versus other groups.

One way to think through these cultural generalizations is to measure them against its most prominent avatar for racial conflict, Donald Trump. How closely does he reflect so-called white values? The president hardly even pretends to believe that “hard work” is the key to success. The Trump version of his alleged success is that he’s a genius who improvises his way to brilliant deals. The realistic version is that he’s a lazy heir who inherited and cheated his way to riches, and spends most of his time watching television. Trump is likewise incapable of delayed gratification, planning for the future, and regards “objective rational thinking” with distrust. On the other hand, Barack Obama is deeply devoted to all those values.

Now, every rule has its exceptions. Perhaps the current (white) president happens to be alienated from the white values that the previous (Black) president identified with strongly. But attaching the values in question to real names brings to life a point the racism trainers seem to elide: These values are not neutral at all. Hard work, rational thought, and careful planning are virtues. White racists traditionally project the opposite of these traits onto Black people and present them as immutable flaws. Jane Coaston, who has reported extensively on the white-nationalist movement, summarizes it, “The idea that white people are just good at things, or are better inherently, more clean, harder working, more likely to be on time, etc.”

In his profile, Bergner asked DiAngelo how she could reject ��rationalism” as a criteria for hiring teachers, on the grounds that it supposedly favors white candidates. Don’t poor children need teachers to impart skills like that so they have a chance to work in a high-paying profession employing reasoning skills?

DiAngelo’s answer seems to imply that she would abolish these high-paying professions altogether:

“Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism — I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me. But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.”

(Presumably DiAngelo’s ideal socialist economy would keep in place at least some well-paid professions — say, “diversity consultant,” which earns her a comfortable seven-figure income.)

Singleton, likewise, proposed evolutionary social changes to the economy that would render it unnecessary to teach writing and linear thought to minority children. Bergner writes:

I asked whether guiding administrators and teachers to put less value, in the classroom, on capacities like written communication and linear thinking might result in leaving Black kids less ready for college and competition in the labor market. “If you hold that white people are always going to be in charge of everything,” he said, “then that makes sense.” He invoked, instead, a journey toward “a new world, a world, first and foremost, where we have elevated the consciousness, where we pay attention to the human being.”

Whether or not a world along these lines will ever exist, or is even possible to design, is at best uncertain. What is unquestionably true is that these revolutionary changes will not be completed within the lifetime of anybody currently alive. Which is to say, a program to deny the value of teaching so-called white values to Black children is to condemn them to poverty. Unsurprisingly, Bergner’s story shows two educators exposed to the program and rebelling against it. One of them, Leslie Chislett, had to endure some ten anti-racism training sessions before eventually snapping at the irrationality of a program that denigrates learning. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees,” she says, “and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values?”

Ibram X. Kendi, another successful entrepreneur in the anti-racism field, has a more frontal response to this problem. The achievement gap — the long-standing difference in academic performance between Black and white children — is a myth, he argues. The supposed gap merely reflects badly designed tests, he argues. It does not matter to him how many different kinds of measures of academic performance show this to be true. Nor does he seem receptive to the possibility that the achievement gap reflects environmental factors (mainly worse schools, but also access to nutrition, health care, outside learning, and so on) rather than any innate differences.

Kendi, like DiAngelo, argues that racism must be defined objectively. Intent does not matter, only effect. Their own intentions are surely admirable. But the fact is that their insistence on denying that America provides its Black children worse educations inhibits working toward a solution. Denying the achievement gap, like denying the gap in how police treat white and Black people, seems to objectively entrench racism.

It’s easy enough to see why executives and school administrators look around at a country exploding in righteous indignation at racism, and see the class of consultants selling their program of mystical healing as something that looks vaguely like a solution. But one day DiAngelo’s legions of customers will look back with embarrassment at the time when a moment of awakening to the depth of American racism drove them to embrace something very much like racism itself.

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 274

GEN-ETHIC ANXIETY AND SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE GENOME PROJECT

The Genome Project was started at a research institute known as HUGO, which is short for the Human Genome Project, in Montreux, Switzerland on October 1, 1990. This important project, with consequences that are not yet understood, was beyond human imagination at the time it was established, and is expected to provide answers to many questions in our minds.

With the full extent of its use not being understood at the time of its establishment, the project emerged mainly with the pharmaceutical mission to predict, detect, treat, and cure diseases that were caused by genetic anomalies by identifying the genetic information in the human organism.

The desire for such a project was something akin to, or even beyond, the desire to climb Mount Everest, for it aimed to find out something that was unknown at the time. In such fields of biology as cell biology, immunology, and neurology the specialists need genetic information from human organism. The genetic information that an individual organism inherits from its parents can open a door to answer the questions of how an individual develops, how long an individual will live, or how the various species on Earth have lived over many generations.

New developments followed one upon another with the emergence of the Human Genome Project. When the famous Scottish sheep, Dolly, was cloned in 1997, it still seemed to be theoretically impossible to clone a human being. American scientists cloned an ape named Tetra which shared 98 per cent of the same genetic information as human beings. Soon after this, the scientists began to suggest that that all that remained to be cloned was humans.

Dr. Richard Nicholson, the editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, noted that there is no danger in cloning humans, as long as the techniques of doing so are kept under control. If a dictator, however, were to get hold of this information, they would be able to produce an army of genotypically identical soldiers.

The most exciting scientific study of recent years of the Genome Project is that it is trying to develop a complete gene map of an individual organism. According to scientists, a human body has between thirty thousand and fifty thousand genes. All genetic features identifying an individual are found in the gene sequences of the DNA molecules. Eye color, character traits, IQ, and all the illnesses a person may possibly develop are all hidden in the genes. The genome carries all the hereditary features that determine all of life's diversity, determining whether an organism is human or another species, or ape; all living things have their own genomes. The human genome, which is the full complement of genetic material, and which resembles large tablets recording the history of ancient civilizations, is distributed among 23 sets of chromosomes. It is comprised of approximately three billion letters and is the biological record of our destiny.

ETHICAL, LEGAL, AND SOCIAL ISSUES

In H. G. Wells’ classic novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Dr. Moreau conducts hybrid experiments on animals that result in twisted masses of flesh, half-man, half-animal. When the European Patent Office allowed the Australian company Amrad to obtain new embryos by combining human and animal cells, this led to a revival of genetic fears, more than a hundred years after the story of Dr Moreau was published. Not surprisingly, this event alarmed several civilian organizations, including Greenpeace. In a press statement made in Hamburg, Greenpeace drew attention to the fact that we might face “dangerous creatures” in the future that would be created from such techniques. Probably one of the most disturbing facts was that the patent did not disclose how these creatures were to be used. Greenpeace voiced opposition to this for the following reason: “A patent grants its owner the exclusive control over his/her invention. Therefore, patents on life fundamentally change our perception and understanding of living nature and our relationship towards it. Living organisms, which have been ‘created’ by industry and which can be patented cannot have a value of their own, since they are only considered an invention of human beings. Thus they can be exploited without any ethical concerns.”

According to the patent, the embryonic stem cells derived from humans, mice, birds, sheep, pigs, cattle, goats, or fish could be used. The patent covers a “method of producing a non-human chimeric animal” by mixing human and animal embryonic cells: human stem cells are integrated into animal embryos. As a result, the created chimeras are non-human, but they may contain human organs, body parts, nerve cells, and even human genetic codes.

Experts state that the system of producing chimeras is completely different from that of cloning and they drew attention to the risks involved. For example, a virus like the one that caused mad-cow disease could easily pass from one species to another.

THE MEDIA JOINS THE ISSUE

Thanks to the great interest people have shown in the future of genetic studies, we frequently come across news reports that deal with the topic. However, we would like to note that titles like “the homosexuality gene has been found” or “genetic solution to talkativeness discovered” infuriate genetic scientists. Dr Arnold Munnich says that media aims to raise interest by misinforming the public with subjects like “obesity gene” or “laziness gene”; they merely oversimplify the issue. Dr Munnich emphasizes that a gene means nothing by itself.

THE DANGER OF ABUSE

The researches who have worked toward improving gene technology have performed some good for humanity; this is without a doubt. However, there is the risk of abuse. The discoveries in this field may be worth a great deal financially; when we add the rivalry between companies and countries, it seems highly likely that legal bans and ethical rules will be ignored. Some people even object to all kinds of genetic research, not only their abuse. They say that the abuse of seemingly useful genetic technology practices in the future is possible, as has happened in other fields of technology; nuclear researches and laser technology also used to be innocent studies at the very beginning. But we cannot object to the use of electricity just because it is also used for executing people with electric chairs.

Governments and international organizations are quite sensitive to ensure that gene technology will only be used for the good of humanity. There are several international organizations interested in the ethical dimension of the issue. There are certain rules and regulations that establish the fundamental principles that will prevent the abuse of genetic studies, and protect the biodiversity and ecological balance. It is forbidden to carry out research on human cloning and altering human embryos. In the past, dictators like Adolf Hitler attempted to abuse gene technology in this respect. The ruthless Dr Joseph Mengele tried to clone his Fuhrer from the epitel cells he took from him.

WILL CONFIDENTIALITY BE RESPECTED?

Another concern brought about by new diagnosis methods and tests is that the principle of patient confidentiality, which has existed for centuries like a secret agreement between doctors and their patients, has begun to be debated, even violated. We usually talk about such “confidentiality” when the information is likely to be harmful for the patient if publicized. From this perspective, the results obtained by genetic tests can be evaluated as such. It is one of the duties of doctors to maintain patient confidentiality. On the other hand, if the relevant data is also likely to harm society, the hospital staff, and those around the patient, then the doctor can face a dilemma.

Some of the possible problems that may be faced due to the mapping of human genome will be that employers could be provided with forehand knowledge about the potential genetic diseases of applicants; they may know whether the person to be employed will be a future financial burden to the company if they carry such genetic risks as cancer or Parkinson’s. In this way new standards of employment will be developed. Even though systematical public surveys do not indicate any significant dangers at hand, it would be nearly impossible to stop rumors. Several people may be denied insurance if they have the genes for a fatal disease. Another may be dismissed from their job for the same reason. In the USA, it is illegal in 39 states to issue insurance policies according to genetic test results, and it is also illegal in 15 states to expel employees according to these. However, employers and insurance agents take advantage of the gaps in relevant laws and they secretly make use of genetic tests. According to research carried out in 1999, 30% of medium-sized or small businesses use such tests to promote and dismiss their employees.

Psychologically, it does not seem likely that people would consent to their status being determined by genetic tests. Would you really like to face your genetic disadvantages? A survey made with cooperation of Time magazine and CNN revealed that half of the participants did not want to know.

THE FATE OF AN UNBORN BABY

Deciphering the book of life unfortunately brings along ethical problems. The discovery of our genetic codes can also lead to other humans controlling the future of the human race. The critical question is “Can scientists produce human beings with the desired physical and mental qualities?” If so, genomic science may enable biologists to prepare a list of spare parts, parents may “order” a baby, and as altering our children or ourselves gets easier, we may be less tolerant against those who have not been altered. Lori Andrews of Kent University wonders if we were to be informed of mental defects, obesity, shortness or other undesired characteristics beforehand, whether the parents of those babies would still allow them to be born into a society that scorns such qualities. Even now, it is not uncommon to see some doctors and nurses criticize the parents of babies who are born with pre-detectable defects. If we assume that all parents have “ordered” babies, God knows what kind of a world we will have.

WHAT SHOULD THE AIM OF SUCH PRACTICES BE?

Genetic studies should aim to prevent or treat illnesses, not to “enhance” genes. The opportunities offered by genetics should not be a mass elimination medium used by employers or a mechanism of spotting potential criminals in the hands of oppressive regimes. The Almighty One Who has been running the order of our universe so perfectly has granted us some keys to its mysteries. Why should we not do our best and use them for the good of humanity?

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

The Not-So-Amazing Mary Jane Part 34: AMJ #6.1

Previous Part

Next Part

Master Post

You know I considered ending this series after the initial arc. I may well discontinue it after awhile. But for now at least I am going to press on. Thus begins the second of what I and dead certain will be a shitty arc of AMJ. Pray for me.

Before we dive into the issue I want to quote for you the solicit for this issue:

WELCOME TO NY, MJ! After the CAN’T-MISS events of AMAZING MARY JANE #5, your favorite redhead is back home! First stop: Spider-Man! But has her relationship with Mysterio changed things with the love of her life? Next stop: a press tour! Complete with iconic New York guest-starring gigs, and OH NO WHAT’S THAT?!?

We spent over 10 years of seeing Peter and MJ separated in the 616 universe.

Thanks to Nick Spencer they blessedly got back together.

Across 25 issues we got to see Peter and MJ interact and 99% of the time it was awesome and helped some old and open wounds get a little better.

It wasn’t every issue, but that was good. Don’t want to get indulgent right?

Then this series came along and Peter/MJ interactions got limited again due to the nature of the story.

That was a shame but at least we were going to get a great MJ story right?

Except we didn’t. We got a story that paradoxically simultaneously celebrated MJ whilst also inadvertently character assassinating her and just being a disgusting fucking mess in general.

But here we have MJ back in New York where Spider-Man is. This issue is even promising us an interaction between them.

Sounds good right?

Let’s see if it will deliver.

As always here we get the recap.

And once more it gives us the full title of the movie in spite of the comic yet to have done that.

As for the ‘strength of his vision blah blah blah’, you know the drill by now. That’s all bullshit, Mary Jane would never connect to Beck over that or allow him to walk free because of that.

There is also a passage in the recap claiming that MJ connected to Beck over familiarity with his situation. The idea of this being their last chance to make it big. I’ve already talked about how that’s bullshit, see part 12.

Finally, the recap confirms that MJ has still failed to tell Peter the truth. Nice to know MJ will continue to be hardcore out of character moving forward into this new arc.

As the issue starts we see MJ introduced as a guest on some kind of chat show.

As has been the case throughout the series, the art is (stylistically at least) gorgeous.

Beyond that there is little to about this page. Except of course the fact that Mary Jane has thought captions.

Let me repeat that.

For the first time in six  issues the readers are being given an insight into the thoughts of title character!

You know, if this were a brand new run, a re-launch or even say the beginning of an outright new era for a series maybe that’d be okay.

But it isn’t. It’s the same run, the same volume, the same story, merely the next arc. This is like if Nick Spencer hadn’t used thought captions throughout the first five issues of his ASM run but then randomly did for the Trivia Night storyline with Boomerang.

Thought captions are perhaps one of the single most potent weapons in the arsenal of a comic book writer. It allows for immense development of characters and enables writers to combine the strength of prose stories with those of more visual mediums.

Now, it’s not that it’s bad to simply not use them. But be consistent. Thought captions would’ve gone a long way in helping us understand Mary Jane better in the first arc along with elaborating upon her asinine decisions there.

Not to mention for a character so often written off as shallow or just eye candy wouldn’t an insight into her thoughts have helped dispel such accusations? Jed Mackay has been doing that pretty consistently since the first issue of his Black Cat run. There it has done wonders for Felicia and fleshed her out more.

It’s especially bad when we consider we got more of an insight into MJ’s thoughts and feelings in one issue  of Nick Spencer’s ASM run than in the entire five prior issues of her solo title.

Anyway, as her interview with Reilly Redding begins there is some quips and verbal jousting going on. Reilly asks if the movie has wrapped but MJ explains that McKnight and the crew are still shooting in L.A. Reilly asks if MJ is sure about that.

This isn’t a positive, more a general observation. I’m not overly familiar with chat shows, let alone American ones, but to my eyes the host seems influenced by Ellen DeGeneres.

Anyway, let me dispense with the pettiest of gripes first. I hate Reilly’s hairstyle. I hate that hairstyle in general. To me it looks really stupid, like you went for a haircut but gave up halfway through. That’s not in anyway shape or form a fair criticism. I totally own that. It is just a tiny point that really bothers me personally.

On the more positive side, Williams continues her frustrating tendency to nail  MJ’s personality traits within a problematic context. MJ’s social skills are one of her greatest powers and here her charisma and ability to play verbal tennis with Reilly is executed superlatively. When Williams does stuff like this she delivers some of the best Mary Jane writing in a long time. Which is why I hate saying and believing that she shouldn’t work on the character over all. She makes traits of MJ shine whilst nevertheless damaging the character over all.

Case in point, the movie is still filming right? And the Vulture (and probably the other members of the Savage Six) are still out there. Let’s be kind and presume they are in a new secret location. That means Vulture will still want to find out where they are, so all the people (and their families) from issue #4 are still going to be harassed by the Vulture’s paparazzi gang and potentially threatened by the six themselves.

Oh well, MJ still DGAF I guess.

Guess she doesn’t care that she’s appearing in public (in NYC of all places!) in spite of six villains now holding a very direct grudge against her.

Also, we FINALLY get the full name of the movie in the story itself, not the recap pages.

As the interview continues, MJ takes questions from the audience. One man asks what it’s like for her to play a real hero for the first time considering she’s played normal female roles before.

MJ responds that they are all heroes to her. She doesn’t really make the female role distinction quite the same way either. It’s more like she plays a hero who is also a woman.

The next question is about the weird press speculation about Cage McKnight’s conduct. The woman asking the question wants to know what he’s really like. MJ responds that he’s great, just dedicated to the craft and protective of his crew. She points out the paparazzi didn’t take kindly to him because he in turn didn’t take kindly to them hounding the movie.

Reilly then reveals McKnight is here for the interview.

Once more, Williams (with a huge help from Gomez’s art) conveys the charisma and social savvy of MJ here. Gomez’s body language demands particular praise. He conveys MJ’s beauty, flirtation, charm, etc. And he does it on multiple levels. The subtle genius of this page is how Gomez captures MJ putting on a performance for the public, to convince them she’s being utterly genuine and casual.

As for the dialogue, the best faith interpretation of the man’s question, he meant MJ has never played a super hero before, just normal non-powered women. He didn’t mean stereotypical female roles. That interpretation makes MJ’s response make more sense than if the former was the intent. So I’ll give Williams a pass and presume that was in fact her intent.

As for the second question it further highlights the unethical nature of allowing Mysterio to impersonate McKnight. The real McKnight has a lot of gossip and a new public image that was not of his own making. It wasn’t even an unfair fabrication by the press, it existed specifically because someone else was using his name, face and reputation for personal gain.

Also the audacity of Williams to directly reference issue #4 where Ken was harassed by the Vulture’s paparazzi squad but just ignore the fact that that should still be going on.

To MJ’s confusion Cage McKnight joins the interview. However, he doesn’t seem to know anything about the movie at all. He says the first he heard of the movie was when he was contacted for the interview. Meanwhile MJ frantically contacts Beck on her phone. Reilly notices and calls MJ out just before Beck confirms he’s still in L.A.

To MJ’s horror she realizes she’s sitting next to the real Cage McKnight who’s returned from his penguin expedition. Reilly asks why he came on the show if he doesn’t remember movie. Cage responds that just because he doesn’t remember making the movie doesn’t mean he didn’t. he explains that in the past he’s made movies in ‘artistic fugues’ and presumes this is just one such time.

*pinches bridge of nose*

Oh my Gooooooooood this is so dumb.

I get the desire to have humour in a story for the sake of levity. But the world of Spider-Man is not even remotely a borderline Deadpool or Harley Quinn or Lobo comic book. The humour doesn’t come from absurdity or a cartoonlike breaking of logic and reality.

And make no mistake, this is absurd. Scratch that, it’s contrived to the nth degree.

First of all I’m not that well read up on fugue states so I briefly consulted Wikipedia who had this to say:

Dissociative fugue, formerly fugue state or psychogenic fugue, is a dissociative disorder[1] and a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality, and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The state can last days, months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity. It is a facet of dissociative amnesia, according to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

-Wikipedia

Basically a fugue state is a sort of similar condition to Dissociative Identity Disorder, more commonly known as having a split personality. Only instead of an individual’s psyche fracturing into different personalities that take dominance, it’s someone’s mind running away with itself and becoming someone else. The individual forgets aspects of who they are and becomes someone else.

A very good example within fiction can be found in the Doctor Who episode ‘The Next Doctor’. In it a man named Jackson Lake suffers a traumatic experience and in the midst of it (through a sci-fi gizmo) absorbs a lot of information on the character of the Doctor. His traumatized mind consequently decides to imitate what it regards as the Doctor.

What I’m saying is McKnight’s dialogue about his fugues are very probably bullshit unless someone can cite evidence to the contrary. 

Using the above description though McKnight has gotten this rare  psychiatric disorder multiple times and specifically in conjunction with his job as a filmmaker. Yeah, no. Not buying it and neither should you.

Being a film director isn’t a muscle memory skill you can’t forget no matter what. People with amnesia or Alzheimer’s disease do not forget how to play the piano or how to drive. But directing a movie? There are so many moving pieces to that job that rely upon you knowing how equipment and more importantly individual people operate. You have to bear a shitton of theory in mind too. It is physically  impossible to repeatedly  have fugues and then maintain that job.

And even if it was, oh my lord, that is the single most contrived thing in this series yet. Are you SERIOUSLY telling me that Mary Jane and Beck and the entire production got this  lucky. The guy who’s reputation is what the movie is riding on happens  to be someone who repeatedly deals with this incredibly rare mental condition?

Holy shit. That’s Superior Spider-Man levels of contrived.

And yet if you still swallowed all of that it still wouldn’t make sense!

McKnight presumes he made this Mysterio movie in a fugue state right? But he wasn’t, so he would remember his life during that period of time. Meaning that there are lots of public records and personal accounts testifying that he was making the movie at the same time that he  knows he was observing penguins.

If you suffer amnesia or blackouts or DID then there are obviously gaps in time you cannot account for. The overwhelming majority of people who deal with those conditions make a point of keeping track of those gaps, for practical reasons if nothing else. So McKnight would know that there isn’t a gap in time he can’t account for and certainly not for the time period the Mysterio movie has been going for.

Shit, the movie is still  filming! How the Hell does he believe he is still making this movie in a fugue state if he’s consciously aware of lacking any knowledge about it?

Not to mention if he’s been in the Falkland Islands this whole time. A quick Google search informed me that by plane it’d take over 14 hours  to travel between the islands and Los Angeles. How the fuck is anyone supposed to ever commute that distance, let alone regularly. And McKnight sincerely believes he was doing both at the same goddam time?

You couldn’t even argue that McKnight believes he made the Mysterio movie before his penguin expedition. Because the movie is still being made and all his other ‘artistic fugues’ would have a movie as proof of what he was doing during the fugues.

This is just mind-numbingly stupid and lazy writing. It smacks so hard of Williams trying to desperately paper over the holes in her initial story.

More importantly, how fucking stupid is Mary Jane or Beck to never considered this possibility? I don’t mean the fugue bullshit, I mean the idea of McKnight just coming back  from his penguin adventure.

Was Mysterio honestly so incompetent as to have never accounted for that? He seriously never had anything in place to make sure McKnight wouldn’t just decide to cut his journey short? Jesus, and I was dumb enough to buy his line about McKnight spending a year with the penguins.

Even putting that aside, what the flying fuck was MJ and Beck’s plan for when he eventually  came back in the first place? Say he really did spend a year with the penguins then came back to the USA. Suddenly he has a movie with his name attached to it and lots of controversy. Let’s say McKnight’s fugue bullshit added up, there is no indication MJ or beck knew about them. So how the Hell were they planning on getting away with the obvious questions he or his friends or family would have had?

And if they did know about the fugues, why didn’t Williams address that before? That was kind of  a lingering question hanging over the story until now wasn’t it?

God I can’t believe I paid for this!

On the next page MJ spots a guy in an Oni Mask backstage. She presumes he’s there to scare her as part of the show. However, she notices that the P.A.s haven’t seen him. Meanwhile Reilly set up a stupid game for them to play.

I got nothing to say about this page beyond McKnight’s dialogue. Williams is clearly trying to frame the real McKnight in a less than sympathetic manner. There could be many reasons why. I suspect one of the reasons is to incline us more towards Beck’s version of McKnight and to make us not feel as bad about Beck (and MJ) exploiting his identity.

Because being vaguely and lightly sexist means you deserve to have your career, public image, sense of self and life violated and damaged I guess?????????????

As Reilly brings in people from the audience to compete against McKnight and MJ, the latter thinks that there is something weirdly familiar about the Oni-masked man.

I have little to say about this page too.

Reilly’s attitude and facial expressions make me dislike her, even beyond her stupid haircut.

And as for the Oni-Masked man (I’ll just call him Oni for now) my only guess is that he’s affiliated with Mister Negative somehow. He had his goons wear Oni masks at times. And MJ interacted with them and Mister Negative himself in the popular 2018 Spider-Man video game by Insomniac; and it’s adapted comic book City at War. As such perhaps Williams is trying to tie-in or capitalize upon audience familiarity with that.

As MJ plays the dumb game he ponders if Oni could be a lesser member of Peter’s rogue’s gallery. Observing him again she notices him murder a civilian.

The dumb game annoyed me, but that’s just me.

Beyond that all I can say is that MJ’s dialogue about Peter’s rogue’s gallery is interesting. It proves that MJ has at least a working knowledge of Peter’s major foes. Which just further proves she would have been familiar with Mysterio and his crimes, just in case anyone was still clinging to the idea that she wouldn’t.

Also, the art and especially that splash page were beautiful.

Unfortunately for MJ, Oni notices she witnessed his crime. MJ is nervous and backs away in fear, annoying McKnight when she bumps into him. Meanwhile Spider-Man swings across town yelling for to hold on as he is on the way.

Gomez draws a nice Spider-Man.

Anyway, more of Williams making us dislike McKnight, see above for more on that.

MJ backing away in fear has me apprehensive. I don’t know if that’s in character for her. I guess the shock and surprise could’ve thrown her for a loop. And if Oni doesn’t notice her then it gives her a better chance of raising the alarm and capturing him.

I must say, I do like MJ being on the backfoot here after issues #1-5 made her often overconfident and over capable at times (see her nonchalance over the Savage Six in issue #5).

Also, isn’t MJ going to give Oni the benefit of the doubt? Maybe he’s sorry for murdering that guy just now. Maybe he wants to make amends by creating a movie about his life. So why is MJ so scared?

Sure, he just murdered someone, but what is that next to the laundry list of Beck’s crimes?

As it turns out, Spidey wasn’t on his way to save MJ. He was in fact en route to a French restaurant to have dinner with her. He is actually before MJ for a change.

I know Gomez isn’t the only artist on this issue and this doesn’t look like his work. Who ever is drawing it though is doing a very bland depiction of Peter with a overly wrinkly forehead.

The joke about him arriving first for a change was funny though.

Back at the studio, the show wraps up. McKnight insults Reilly’s profession just in case you’ve not realised he is a jerk yet. MJ thinks about persuading everyone to evacuate and searches for her phone. She notices Oni leaving and decides to leave her phone behind.

I already know MJ is going to pursue Oni herself. The stupidity of that aside why the fuck wouldn’t you grab your phone before doing that? You could use it no matter where you wind up and it wasn’t so far away that he’d get that much of a head start.

In fact, if Oni knows MJ is a witness why did he bother hanging around in the first place.

And why didn’t MJ raise the alarm immediately, the worst that would happen is the guy would run away. He’s just stealthily murdered someone and is in a mask. He obviously isn’t going to take the audience hostage, so if her priority is protecting innocents then raising the alarm immediately (or in fact earlier would’ve been her best bet. Yes that’d probably mean he’d have escaped but unlike with say Peter’s origin, getting him the Hell out of there would’ve reduced the immediate threat to the civilians present.

And on top of that if she figures he’s targeting her because she was a witness to his crime then by alerting everyone to his actions she’d have removed his need (at least for the moment) of sticking around to eliminate her, thus getting him away from the audience.

If he’s leaving anyway, MJ could also just grab her phone and put a call in to Peter, her super hero chums or the police and get them on the case immediately. If she was really so determined to go after this guy herself she still could but would’ve had a back up just in case he escapes or kills her. If she fails then she’s insured someone will still pursue him.

And as I copiously detailed in parts 19-22, MJ is not a super hero (and she knows that). She has no idea what this guy’s skills, weapons or powers might be, nor does she know what resources or assistance will be nearby to enable her to survive or subdue him. This isn’t like an armed cop, a martial artist or a super powered person going after a regular crook. She really doesn’t know what she is in for. Even if he is just a normal man, he clearly has a height and weight advantage over her, is obviously willing and capable of chocking a man to death and is armed. MJ meanwhile has little self-defence training, no weapons and hasn’t got the weight or muscle capable of taking him on if she’s backed into a corner. And she’s pursuing him back stage where presumably there is a fair chance of encountering many corners!

I understand that she doesn’t want to endanger innocent people, but there is no point in risking her life there is a much more practical and likely to succeed option available to her. Live to fight another day and all that. Yes the guy might hurt people during or after his escape but that’s a lesser evil vs. going after him herself when she is very unlikely to subdue him, far more likely to die and then the guy will get away without her having passed on any valuable intel on him to someone more qualified to pursue him.

Also once she sees the guy leaving she could just tell everyone the situation and ask the audience to stay put.

Basically if raises the alarm right there on stage and/or calls Peter or the authorities she is over all putting less people in danger and increasing the chances of the guy being apprehended in the long run. But no, instead she is going to gamble on the far slimmer odds that she can capture the guy.

Not to mention, why would the guy even give a shit that MJ saw him? Why would MJ give a shit that she is a witness to his crime? He is wearing a mask! She couldn’t identify him even if she went to the police. It is literally part of the reason her goddam boyfriend wears a mask!

And by the way, are there no security cameras backstage? Wouldn’t MJ consider that or Oni himself?

McKnight apologises to Reilly (so not that much of a jerk I guess) as MJ pursues Oni (barefooted) backstage. As she does this she rehearses what she will say to Peter in her head. This entails telling him that she had to get away from the killer. As she is thinking about this the body of Oni’s victim is discovered. Backstage she comes face to face with Oni who refers to her by name.

Yay. MJ deliberately planning on lying to Peter again. It’s so awesome that Williams understands why this isn’t a really bad idea for the reasons I pointed out in part 17.

By the way, I suspect Oni knows MJ personally rather than just recognizing her work.

I’m actually going to leave it there for now as the next part of the story has a shitton to unpack.

Previous Part

Next Part

Master Post

[inquistior-a]

@ofrevas said   :   𝙷𝙾𝚆 𝙳𝙴𝚅𝙾𝚄𝚃 𝙸𝚂 𝙷𝙰𝙻𝚆𝚈𝙽? 𝙳𝙾 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙱𝙴𝙻𝙸𝙴𝙵𝚂 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝙴𝙽𝙳 𝚃𝙾 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙻𝙴𝙶𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙼𝙰𝙲𝚈 (𝙾𝚁 𝙻𝙰𝙲𝙺) 𝙾𝙵 𝙰𝙽𝙳𝚁𝙰𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙰𝙽 𝙾𝚁𝙶𝙰𝙽𝙸𝚉𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽𝚂 𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝙳𝙾𝙲𝚃𝚁𝙸𝙽𝙴? 𝙷𝙾𝚆 𝙳𝙾 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙴𝚇𝙿𝙴𝚁𝙸𝙴𝙽𝙲𝙴𝚂 𝚆𝙸𝚃𝙷 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙸𝙽𝚀𝚄𝙸𝚂𝙸𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 𝙰𝙵𝙵𝙴𝙲𝚃 𝚃𝙷𝙴𝙼?

halwn believes in the maker, and considers himself andrastian---but he is certainly not devout in the way that he understands the term from childhood. he was raised in a highly religious city-state, a member of nobility in a place where devoutness is both traditional and, at a certain level, even considered fashionable. ostwick is essentially ruled by the chantry, in the sense that its laws are ruled by chantric values and its people assert their identity  (their historic non-tevinter-ism, for lack of better term)  through andrastianism. given that it is literally a tevinter city populated by a variety of transplants, many of whom have at least a few tevinter origins, the great houses use andrastianism as a way of reinforcing their adherence to the traditions of the origins of ostwick and the andrastian rebellions. basically, all good ostwick families, all the players of note, are andrastian, and if they aren’t andrastian then they aren’t really an ostwick house. there are in fact many minor houses in oswtick who remain in good social graces only because of a strong connection to the chantry that enables them to continue to access the upper echelons of of trade and resource negotiation.

halwn’s mother is a deeply devout woman, whose faith is the central focus of her life. she is from the anderfels, where the chantry is perhaps even more influential than it is in ostwick---and the advertisable devoutness of her anders family was what made her an appealing match for halwn’s father. when he was a boy, halwn can remember both a certain jealousy and a then contingent shame that followed that jealousy over the attention his mother paid the chantry vs what she paid to him. essentially, he has always known that his mother loved the maker more than she loved him. while she wasn’t cold or cruel to her children, they were something of a distraction to her dedication to her faith. the older he became, and the more he was able to understand her, he saw that his mother /needed/ religion, needed the focus of established belief and ritual, and the connection it ran in her through her own family, in order to have both structure and meaning in her life. or, at least, to distract her from the emptiness in the rest of her life. in the end, halwn questions whether his mother has ever really thought critically about what she believes, really ever considered the alternatives, and as such he sees her faith as a blind love, and therefor empty---and since it is the greatest love she has in her life, halwn sort of mourns his mother’s religion ?? though he also, as a son, would feel it cruel to ever try to take it from her, to challenge it directly, because he knows that it would be essentially removing her gravity. she is, to him, a lukewarm woman, who only had so much love to give and chose to give it all to the ritual of organized religion rather than to other people. he thinks of that as a terrible waste.

his father, on the opposite end, preforms religion as a member of the gentry in a highly religious state---because it is simply ‘what people do’, but has never shown any indication that he genuinely believes in any of it. there are things that he has said to halwn throughout his life that lead halwn to believe that his father is not a genuinely religious man, and does not actually put any stock in the lore or moral philosophy of the chantry outside of how it informs the law and serves as a basis for tradition, and even seems to look down on those who do---including his own wife. he’s a draconian man, and his religion was always a thin veneer that painted one of two extremes for halwn when it came to understanding the ‘faithful’:  one as his mother, the fragility of the mindlessly devout and unwilling or unable to sacrifice imposed surety for genuine reflection, and the other as his father, using faith as a shield and an excuse to prop up a lack of legitimate confluence with other people. either way, halwn saw religion as something that separated people, something that dehumanized the notion of love and worship.

when halwn refused to marry, his father ‘suggested’ that he join the templars---this being the only other socially acceptable way for a noble in ostwick to avoid marriage without seeming to disregard their parents’ wishes, which is really the onus of where the stigma of not marrying is placed:  on house loyalty and participation in the practice of nobility. there was a time for him when he was a boy who still wanted to please his parents that he thought that being a templar would be a heroic occupation for him, ideal since he’d get to leave, but by his early teens his disillusionment with the chantry was complete enough that he knew he could never be happy with a life centered around formal religion. he also had no idea what templars /actually/ do until he left the city. it should be noted that ostwick is highly insular and extremely ‘traditional’ in the chantric sense. the circle at ostwick is separated from the city by a narrow landbridge, the sort meant to prevent anyone from crossing unless in single-file thus making it easy to pick them off from above. mages do not enter the city walls without templar escort, and even then rarely. as a noble child, halwn would have been instructed to ignore them / not interact with them in a sense that is very much intensely classist---though he was never told this, and wouldn’t have been unless the situation presented itself, for even discussing mages was taboo among the elite houses. halwn did not actually meet a mage or witness magic at all until he left the city at 17 to serve as a knight errant in the teyrn’s name, and even then it was in passing. magick was not discussed, and political topics revolving around mages were relegated to ‘rude’ topics that were only whispered about behind close doors. magick was evil, of course, but almost presented as a non-issue, mythical, since it was understood that no one in good society was ever going to encounter it---proof of the power of the chantry, a kind of self-rewarding and self-perpetuating tactic to avoid the possibility of uncomfortable or even remotely challenging questions.

halwn is something of a natural skeptic. he’s curious, and he loves to learn, and anything rigid or dogmatic tends to darken to him on impulse. he has always been this way, and he was quite young when he realized that he didn’t believe in the same way that the people around him seemed to believe. initially, this awareness was almost guilty. all of his education, outside of the military, was preformed by teachers involved in the clergy somehow, and the amount of shame used as an educational tool in a religious education worked on him for only so long. halwn’s natural mistrust and even animosity for those who are unfailingly dogmatic comes in part from a revulsion he has for those that try to make others feel ashamed---and this revulsion is a protective impulse rooted in the fact that he is the eldest of three children, with a large gap between him and his younger siblings, and he was nine years old when he felt he had to begin silently defending his siblings from their tutors and providing them emotional support to counteract the lack left behind by their ‘religious’ parents in a devout family.

his impulse to defend people comes from this:  from the way that always conceiving of himself as a ‘we’ makes his thinking almost inherently communal, ‘this is what we’re going to do’ / ‘this is what we need’ / etc, as a lot of eldest siblings can probably identify with. in his case, this is because he wanted to provide emotionally for his siblings. this why he’s so warm, so tender, so patient, and so gentle. it’s also why he is so driven to understand, and then forgive, because they are the opposite of what his upbringing taught him, and he never felt like a real ‘part’ of his own childhood and its methods.

he was defending his siblings from their parents absence, but also from the shame and guilt-based tactics of behavioral reinforcement used by the clergy who helped to raise them.

in many ways, halwn associates the chantry with stifling, performance, and wasted lives. he has no nostalgia for the organized religion that dominated his youth, and he was happy to leave it. leaving the city to travel as a knight was the first time he felt he had his head above water. his sexuality factors into this as well, but that’s honestly another entire meta in and of itself. living in ferelden, away from his family and away from the chantry, allowed him to breathe. it should be noted that northern ferelden is a very scattered place home to many refugees, and a lot of halwn’s neighbours and those with whom he became very close with when they formed sort of a communal group during the blight were from all over thedas, and those who were andrastian worshiped in many different ways. faith did not really rise in his mind again until the blight---when he watched people of varied backgrounds / classes / races, and varied religions, comforting one another with what he perceived to be genuine religious principles. he had witnessed a lot of violence and hideousness as a knight errant, had learned more about the world outside of ostwick that way, had suffered emotionally in his early life, but it wasn’t until the blight that halwn was actually stripped of the privilege inherent in his status, though he’d lost a lot of that after being informally disinherited he was still living comfortably by world standards, still had a farm and a house and work and freedom. the blight was the first time he felt real and genuine life-or-death responsibility for other’s lives  (outside of leading a small group of knights, but even then the danger was less dire and lacked the element of despair that thickened the danger of the blight),  he was responsible for feeding people, defending people, but also for being part of a group that just mentally had to find a way to sleep through the night. it was the first time in his life since he was very young that he felt a genuine desire to pray.

the transition from seeing religion as the power-based artifice of the wealthy to finally understanding it as the thing that gets the frightened and hungry through the night is what allowed halwn to accept the part of himself that still believed, and wanted to, that allowed him to let go of the stigma of religion he developed in youth. he hasn’t practiced formally since leaving ostwick, but he never did more genuine ‘believing’ than during the blight and the tumult that followed. saying prayers over the dead, and the ones who hadn’t died, and having to practice martial law based on collective morals, returned some of the private tenderness of belief that he once felt as a child, before that feeling was corrupted.

it’s difficult to exactly quantify his beliefs, as they are partly agnostic though, as i’ve said, he does consider himself andrastian. as a leader, he doesn’t act out of a sense of duty to chantric ideals or chantric laws anymore than he acts out of a sense of duty over anything other than to try to ascertain the truth and act in the most just way possible. he has his own compass, he has since he was a child, and he balances that against as many varied opinions as he can trust to be presented to him honestly. he also doesn’t particularly like being in chantric settings---you may sometimes, particularly when he’s drinking, hear him quote the chant, and hear that tired sting of sarcasm in it, the recitation of a disillusioned youth having his knuckles whipped by a tutor, but you may also hear him quote some small part in a dark time, using the words as words, genuinely hoping to draw and give comfort. there’s a tension, certainly, between his belief and his disillusionment, and it makes being the leader of what is essentially a renegade arm of the chantry both deeply ironic and deeply appropriate for him.

[zhuoqunzhang-ben-blog]

The Wedding Banquet

When we talk about Ang Lee, many people will think about his famous gay movie " Brokeback Mountain ", but few people know that Brokeback Mountain is only the Ang Lee's second queer movie. And what I want to talk about is the queer movie "The Wedding Banquet" which directed by Ang Lee in 1993. This is the first queer movie that he directed in his career, and this film also paved the way for his later movie "Brokeback Mountain ".

The general drama of the story is: Gao Weitong (Chinese) cohabited with his American boyfriend, Simon, for many years, but he was constantly urged by his parents in Taiwan to marry a woman and built a new family. Simon proposed that Gao Weitong pretend to marry the mainland female painter Gu Weiwei, which would not only enable Weiwei to obtain a legal status as a US citizen (green card), but also to cope with his parents. But Gao Weitong’s parents suddenly came to the United States. And his father wants to take the Asian tradition and lively wedding banquet. After the wedding banquet, Wei Tong had sex with Weiwei and made her pregnant. Simon, therefore, have a conflict with Weitong. The secret of Gao Weitong’s homosexuality was also known to his parents, causing conflicts between families. At the end of the film, Gao Weitong finally got the understanding of his parents and Gu Weiwei and formed a new happy family with Simon and Gu Weiwei.

Ang Lee made this film, undoubtedly to show conflict: the conflict between the East and the West; the 5,000 years heavy history and the fashion of modernization; the conflict between homosexuality and heterosexuality and absolute patriarchal with children's desire for freedom. The value of the "The Wedding Banquet" lies in the fact that Ang Lee expounds this new and old conflict with a bright rhythm and a witty atmosphere; in the narrative of the plot, he tries to reflect on the nature of this traditional ethics and customs; Solve and express as much as possible the main ideas and attitudes towards this contradiction ("Mom, dad, I didn't do wrong!", 2018). But unlike other people who want to put these issues in a social or higher dimension to discuss, Ang Lee puts these issues in a small family and presents them in a banquet. Take Ang Lee as the example for a kind of director, their films are more concerned with how individuals and families face these conflicts. This is the main feature of their films. Similar films include: "The Gua Sha treatment "Siao Yu" "Full Moon in New York" and more. In the film, Ang Lee shows his positive attitude towards these conflicts by depicting the family's experiences. Especially, in the end, the good ending he arranged for this family proves this.

Although compared with the content about cultural conflicts, queer content does not seem to be worth mentioning in this film, and can even be understood as part of a cultural conflict. But we still have enough reason to classify it as a great queer movie. Ang Lee uses resistance as a way and methods of expressing queer. This resistance is not only a simple rebellion against heterosexual ideology but also a rebellion against patriarchal power, Chinese traditional family view and so on. At the same time, Ang Lee not only used resistance but also included many compromises. These compromises can be seen as a kind of obedience, which contrasts with the resistance behavior and better highlights the meaning and identity of the queer content of resistance process. For example, the bare body is part of it. The representation of the body is a source of power, which is visual symbolism aims to appeal for constructing homosexuality as a way of resistance against heterosexual domination (Tian, 2014). In the film, Simon maintains the image of the naked body. We can often see his strong muscles through his open clothes. On the contrary, Gao Weitong is relatively conservative in the film, we can see that he wears well most of the time. But Gao Weitong not always does this. At the beginning of the film, we can see the body exposed by Gao Weitong while exercising in the gym. The movie also has several close-ups here. At the same time, Gao Weitong also had several short time naked bodies in the film, and most of them were intimately interacting with Simon. It is easy for us to see in Gao Weitong that the naked body is a sign of resistance, a struggle for rights, and a desire for expression. Relatively well-dressed is a compromise to patriarchy and heterosexual ideology. The state of resistance and compromise coexistence is the expression of Gao Weitong queer identity. The multiple representations of the homosexual body and desire in the film establish the authority of homosexuality and displace heterosexuality from the central position in gender politics (Tian, 2014).

More importantly, this film provides a lot of references for us to study queer from the perspective of globalization and localization. Caution must be taken to avoid imposing the worldview of researchers on the sense-making of participants whether under the guise of academic imperialism, gay imperialism, or the Western gaze (Goltz, Zingsheim, Mastin, & Murphy, 2016). This also represents the study of the queer problem in Asian countries, which represented by China, we must have a general understanding of their culture. Ideally, surveys must be based on ethnographic methods, rather than observations and inferences with subjective opinions. For example, the family issues highlighted in the film. The Chinese family is based on the absolute patriarchal rule and Confucian ideology, which also means that male members of the family will have more responsibilities in their lives, and the inheritance of the family as the greatest responsibility. This duty of responsibility is a serious influence on the expression of the queer identity of Chinese men. These performances in the film are that Gao Weitong's parents rushed to the United States, urged him to marry, and repeatedly expressed his desire for next generations: for example, discussing Gu Weiwei's fertility, directly expressing the desire to want a son, and Before the Banquet, Gu Weiwei was fed a special porridge to strengthen her fertility. At the same time, Gao Wei’s performance in the film conflicts with his queer identity, such as fake marriage, the original motivation is the family responsibility he must bear. Gayness, as a sexual and social identity, is seen to interfere "with the ability to perform one's role in the family", thus becoming a family matter (Cho, 2009). To understand this family problem, we must have a certain understanding of Chinese culture.

Queer is not just about sexual/gender identities, but the process of cultural identification, expression (Doty, 1997). This film undoubtedly provides a great reference for us to study the queer problem in the Asian cultural background. But if we do research based entirely on this film, it will cause many problems. After all, this is the early film of Ang Lee before he formed his personal style. It can be said that this film was created to cater to the market, that is, the American market. The film also exaggerates a lot of Confucian values, patriarchy, and the characteristics of some Chinese. The best description of the status quo of China and most Asian countries should be: tradition and modernization coexist, advanced ideas and old ideas combine. The description of Ang Lee in the film can be seen as a stereotyping. It is based on his own understanding of culture and then processed into what Americans think or want to see. Similar problems also appear in “black movies”: blacks are described as victims, full of violence, and good at music. The excellent queer films in recent years, such as Moonlight breaks down these assumptions in often conflicting ways and succeeds in foregrounding how black queer youth are often criminalized when they attempt to express themselves and/or defend against bullying and harassment (Sikivu, 2017). They pay more attention is paid to breaking the traditional image and thus shaping a new identity. And this is where Ang Lee didn’t do it.

References  

Cho, J. (. (2009). The Wedding Banquet Revisited: "Contract Marriages" Between Korean Gays and Lesbians. Anthropological Quarterly, 82(2), 401-422. doi:10.1353/anq.0.0069

Doty, A. (1997). Making things perfectly queer: Interpreting mass culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

G. (2018, January 08). Mom, dad, I didn't do wrong! Retrieved November 4, 2018, from https://movie.douban.com/review/9054451/

Goltz, D. B., Zingsheim, J., Mastin, T., & Murphy, A. G. (2016). Discursive negotiations of Kenyan LGBTI identities: Cautions in cultural humility. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 9(2), 104-121. doi:10.1080/17513057.2016.1154182

Sikivu, H. (2017, March 06). Moonlight, Black Boy and Teachable Moments Retrieved November 4, 2018, from https://www.thefeministwire.com/2017/03/moonlight-black-boy-teachable-moments/

Tian, M. (2014). Representing Gender, Power and Body in The Wedding Banquet. Asia Pacific World, 5(1), 110-119. doi:10.3167/apw.2014.050108

[newstfionline]

5 Ways You Should Treat Yourself Like a Business

By Ryan Warner, Early to Rise, Apr 5, 2018

Successful businesses are efficient, value-producing machines. They have missions, create detailed investment plans for how to spend their time and revenues, boast a robust network of relationships, and take action every single day to move closer to their end game--whatever their definition of success happens to be.

On a flight from Oakland to Chicago, while reading Richard Branson’s “Losing My Virginity,” I thought about what would happen if I treated myself as a business. What if I lived every day as the president and CEO of RyanWarner.net? How much more productive would I be?

I wrestled with the question for a few days, and ultimately decided to play out the possibility. I’m now three months into managing myself as a business, and have experienced a number of positive benefits:

I have shifted my focus, time, and energy to things that really “move the needle” in my life.

I have discovered (and constantly reiterate) a life mission--something that guides every action I take.

I’ve learned that I’m the only one who will succeed (or fail) in my own life. My butt is on the line, so I make every minute of every day count. I’m driven to make an impact on the world.

If you’re on board with what a business lens can do to your own life, then start implementing the steps below.

1. Define Your Business Philosophy. If someone were to navigate to Yourname.com and click on the About page, what would they find?

Tim Ferris shone a light on this self-definition recently. On his podcast, Ferriss hosted psychologist Michael Gervais, during which Gervais told a story about how he came to develop his personal philosophy, “Make every day a living masterpiece.”

Twenty years back, Gervais was asked by his mentor who he was. A simple question, right? But Gervais fumbled. He jumped into hokums about what he liked to do, what he did in the past, and what his goals were. The elderly mentor smiled and said, “Come back to me when you’re ready.”

Young Gervais--the now world-renowned performance psychologist--could not answer this seemingly simple question. But he endeavored to find an answer. What resulted was his personal philosophy.

You should do the same for yourself as a business. Why? Your business philosophy is what continually reminds you what you stand for. A well-crafted philosophy will not leave room for ambiguity or loopholes; it will hold your feet to the fire every day.

Before you move onto the steps below, then, take a few hours and sketch out your own philosophy. What do you stand for? What is your “business”? What are your end goals? These will need tweaking, of course, but it’s important to start now.

To get you started, here’s my “business” philosophy in a nutshell: Ryan Warner will always be grateful for obstacles. He will maintain the discipline needed to attack every task with absolute focus. He will spread love and laughter every day.

As you can see, philosophies are not all about stuff. In fact, the best ones tackle the most important questions of morality and purpose, leaving money to fall where it may. That said…

2. Capitalize on Investments. Investments are focused on how we spend our time and money. The former is the scarcest resource in the world; we should be mindful of this when we commit ourselves to daily tasks. We want to invest only in those things that move the needle in our “business” every day.

What would a business do with a hefty helping of time? They would invest labor and research in things that create value for shareholders. Likewise, we should put our time into activities that build us up as individuals and enable us to offer value to our family, friends, coworkers, and the world at large.

Here’s a good example: Spend a Sunday morning analyzing your strengths and weaknesses. Be ruthless about your weaknesses, and really drill into what you want to improve in your life. Do you want to learn how to be a better leader or public speaker? Do you want to be more present for your family? Do you wanted to be more invested in your job? What are your friends, family, and colleagues doing well in these areas that you could learn from?

The second piece of our daily investment is financial. How does a business look at finances? In simple terms, it’s about increasing top-line growth while maintaining a tight bottom line. Incoming dollars are viewed not as income, but as revenue, and revenues are re-invested in the company to increase growth.

Now think of yourself as a money-making business. What sort of revenues are you bringing in? And how will you get the best return on investment for the money you spend?

For example, if you--as a business--have $20 left over in the budget after a light month, would you reinvest in yourself or squander that money on meaningless stuff and empty activities? Would you buy a book or head to the bar and buy a round of beers?

By thinking of yourself as a business, always looking to increase value, your investments will start to align with your philosophy.

3. Nurture Relationships. How important are personal connections and relationships to a business? Very. They make or break a business’ success; without relationships, there are no customers, partners, board members, or staff.

You need relationships in your business. A lone wolf will not make it.

Former UFC champion Frank Shamrock has a strategy for building relationships that he calls “Plus, Minus, and Equal.”

For the Plus, he looks for someone who is more successful than he is (however one might define success). This person is at the level where Frank wants to be at some point. He or she would make a great mentor.

On the flipside, a Minus is someone whom Frank can teach. Teaching not only helps a Minus, but also helps you increase your understanding of the topic(s) you teach. After all, you can’t teach a subject effectively unless you know it inside and out.

An Equal is a peer--someone with whom you can share feedback as you move your “business” closer to success. These shared struggles and success stories build on mutual experiences and inform future decisions for even better outcomes--increasingly value exponentially.

It’s important that every business have a balance of Plus, Minus, and Equal relationships to keep them afloat. Each one encourages development, maturity, and social engagement.

4. Maintain Health. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle may seem like a given, but many people ignore it. I love focusing on health for my “business” because it often has the most immediate ROI. Don’t believe me? Hop on an elliptical for 30 minutes, then spend 15 minutes meditating. How do you feel? It’s amazing the amount of energy and focus we gain from working out.

But what’s the business angle here? Well, think of your mind like the CEO of the company and the rest of your body as employees. You want to spend time making sure each part of your body--or “employee”--is healthy so it can work properly, both on its own and in conjunction with other parts of the body.

To make that work, feed your body what it needs--lots of fresh vegetables, lean meats, and limited carbohydrates. Avoid refined sugars and processed foods. Then, keep a regular exercise regimen going.

The result: A healthy body--”collaborative workforce”--that is an unbeatable productivity machine.

But don’t neglect the mind. Dedicate time to meditation, reading, and journaling throughout your week. Challenge your mind with new types of learning, like language study, crossword puzzles, or trivia games. These activities keep your mind sharp, ready for whatever life throws at you.

5. Take Action Every Single Day. A CEO doesn’t take weeks off without working on his/her business, and neither should you. Every day is an opportunity to improve the state of your business and a chance to increase the value you deliver to your shareholders.

Entrepreneur Jesse Itzler takes this concept to a whole new level. He calculates the average life expectancy of a Caucasian male and subtracts his age from it. That leaves him with the number of years he likely has left in this world. Seeing that number in black and white makes only one thing matter: The mission to do the most with your life TODAY.

Jason Feifer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, takes a different approach. He focuses on the hours that comprise a day, and at the end of each hour asks, “What did I just accomplish in the past hour? Would my family be proud of how I lived in the last 60 minutes?”

In both cases, however, the idea is the same; as the old saying goes, “Live your life like there’s no tomorrow.”

There are two parts to this imperative action. The first is your “why”--which is derived from your mission statement. Don’t just act to act; act knowing what you’re doing is a real-life manifestation of your mission statement.

The second is your “how”--derived from your investment strategy. How do you act in relationships, at home, and at work to reflect your commitment of time and money? How are these an accurate reflection of what your mission statement demands?

Don’t let these questions derail you, however. Examine your actions--carefully, but not too long--and act with integrity, confidence, and purpose.

Treating yourself as a business has the potential to reframe your personal development and rebrand your identity with a crystal clear “why.” Be thoughtful about crafting your philosophy and mission statement to make this possible; bear these out in your investment decisions; nurture your relationships with these principles at your core; and act like there’s no tomorrow.

Be energized, be focused, be true to yourself and humbly inspired by the possibilities of your life. If you can manage this--as any good business would--you will find success, however you define it.

[ciaran-nyc]

Beyond iCelebrity Week 3 Assignment

How can we heal as a nation from these twin viruses: COVID19 and The Big Lie/QAnon Conspiracy Contagion? What are some of your proposed antidotes?

Subjectivity and personal experience must be removed from the acknowledgment and understanding of objective facts. With politicians serving as interpreters of complex information for vast swaths of the nation, they must be held to a higher standard beyond personal political aspirations. Facts and real life events cannot be questioned and must simply be agreed upon as a base level in establishing common ground. Disagreement can exist in how to respond to reality but the first step is getting all to choose to exist in a world guided by the truth. There is no moving forward or healing as a nation, when some experience two contrasting realities when under the same circumstances. Alternative news sources and forums will always pop-up under stricter regulations, so if civilians can’t be trusted then the onus must be placed on politicians.

What are your thoughts on Eugene Goodman's actions the day on Jan 6th?

Officer Goodman’s actions on the day of January 6th exemplified extreme bravery in the face of insurmountable odds. He is a true patriot, for he put himself at risk for the safety of our country and the protection of democracy. Goodman’s identity as a black man cannot be overlooked in the context of the video and adds a great weight to his presence as a uniformed officer. Many of the same lawmakers Goodman sought to protect refuse to even acknowledge racism in America and further demonize efforts that seek equal rights for minorities. Watching Eugene Goodman be put in such a dangerous position for the sake of many who won’t truly appreciate his sacrifice is deeply troubling and difficult to reconcile. There is no question he is a hero, but it is a tragedy that his bravery won’t be recognized by the same people that claim to support the police.

Do you think AOC demonstrated bravery in telling her story? How does such a narrative redefine power? How do her relationships with other staff members provide solace and assist with collective healing?

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez demonstrated great strength and perseverance in her vulnerability and openness on such a public platform as Instagram live. Unlike a well crafted political speech, her live performance eliminated the middle man of a television broadcast as she directly spoke to her following. Her candor and honesty challenges much of the secrecy in politics that has sowed great mistrust for the government. By choosing to tell her own story she is taking the power back from the Capitol rioters and giving it to the people. This move certainly had political implications, as it is on brand for her to connect with fans and potential future voters in such a manner, but beyond that, she is refusing to be silenced by threats and violence, proving that American democracy was triumphant. Her symbolic survival of the siege and refusal to concede on her beliefs is meant to provide comfort and inspiration that despite the tough times America is experiencing, we will survive. By invoking her relationships with other staff members, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez creates a picture of a united government and demonstrates that despite the stark divisions in this country, progress can be made by coming together.

What is the difference between Fame and Infamy? What does the insurrection say about the shadow side of celebrityhood and false idolatry?

I think it is difficult to separate fame and infamy because rooted within fame and fandom is a desire to see behind the mask of celebrity into the messy and often traumatic lives of well known figures. A celebrity’s failures and shortcomings make for a far more compelling story than highlighting accomplishments. When a famous person makes a mistake and falls from grace, there is a feeling of reassurance for civilians because it proves that all people are flawed, allowing for normal people to feel more secure in their own failures. Celebrities that openly embrace their flaws can attain a different level of trust with fans, as it mimics an equal dynamic although the power distribution still remains greatly skewed. For many, a significant component of Donald Trump’s appeal was his public struggles in the spotlight, for his fallibility was misinterpreted as a relatable normalcy in rebuke of formality and political maneuvering. Although Donald Trump openly made mistakes, he refused to ever acknowledge them as such, and this resistance to facts was born out of an innate confidence that his supporters sought to mimic. Trump’s fame and infamy are one in the same, for his actions have propelled him to be both revered and reviled by millions. Perhaps Donald Trump’s most significant impact as president will be as a result of his influence as a celebrity and not from his power as president. Donald Trump was able to inspire an insurrection because he is famous; he didn’t have the power to command those civilians to act like he does with the army, he had to rely on his celebrity.

The social media, live-streamed insurrection: what does it mean that the perpetrators of the Capitol siege provided photographic and video evidence of their crimes? Was this more evidence of delusion? Of white privilege?

I believe privilege and delusion are indistinguishable. Privilege affords certain people a life that other’s are not privy to experience, thus creating intense delusions that simply become reality for the privileged. From an outside perspective, the rioters may have seemed delusional, but if in their lives the sum of their experiences has indicated a minimal expectation of resistance or repercussions to their actions, then it is simply a fact of their lives – why would they expect anything different when upping the stakes? The timid response from capitol officers and the delayed arrival of the national guard further maintain the privilege-born delusions that enabled the attempted insurrection in the first place, as it has been reinforced that white people can act with impunity. While the concept of a civilian-led government raid sounds outlandish and delusional, their boldness and total disregard for American customs indicated an inherent confidence that allowed these people to overlook the absurdity of their plots. Although many of the rioters have been arrested after the fact, they were still extremely successful in their motives. Although Joe Biden has been inaugurated, the impact of the siege will be long lasting. The rioters disrupted the world and made history, shaking the very foundation of the country. The widespread documentation of the insurrection led to the arrest and capture of many of the individuals, but also drastically impacted they way all who witnessed the events comprehend American politics and the culture at large. The visual evidence of the insurrection will be manipulated and used for a host of unimaginable reasons for years to come. Although many have ascribed negative attributes to the perpetrators of the Capitol siege, others have glorified them, transforming their image and likeness into a representation of resistance and strength. Without social media, the insurrection would have been far less effective and the long term affect would have been minimal.

Discuss the role of citizen sleuths and the anonymous creator of Faces of the Riot in this ongoing collaboration with the FBI. How does the hive mind serve as a corrective?

The work of “Faces of the Riot” in this situation is extremely important and well intentioned; however, working with the FBI and any government body is a slippery slope. There is no question the Capitol rioters need to be brought to justice, but with civilians aiding the investigation efforts, civilians in opposition will likely feel more emboldened to act. Many of those that stormed the Capital would likely self-describe as internet sleuths that are “fighting to uncover the truth.” Civilian cooperation is essential in solving any crime, but allowing civilians that are driven by no structure or regulations other than their own morals and partiality risks a wide margin of error rooted in personal bias/interest. The concept of a hive mind is potentially scary because of the lack of control once a large body of people are driven by a single directive in accomplishing a shared goal. Although the hive mind’s intentions may be pure, the means of accomplishing said goal will vary based on the individual. Further, those that appear most committed to a cause will likely become one of many leaders for their determination and intensity. Without a means of proper checks and balances of power, the direction of a a hive mind can switch swiftly and without thorough cause. Such switches can be inspired by a charismatic leader, or the desire of a well-connected government agency manipulating information in favor of those with the most social/political power at the time.

With the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950’s, hyperbole and gross over-exaggeration was utilized to manipulate United States civilians into equating communism with an attack on American values, which resulted in an intense national paranoia. Those that were accused of being communists were shunned, expelled from the country, and regarded as anti-American. The FBI’s director J. Edgar Hoover played a pivotal role in this campaign by sowing fear and division within the country as a means of maintaining political influence. The fervor of many Trump supporters and those that ultimately stormed the capital were rooted in misplaced trust in others, which created mob mentality singularly motivated by chaos. While those working to combat the hate witnessed at the Capitol siege can view their work as corrective, there are scores of Americans that fully supported the initial attack. Correction is entirely subjective and can be attempted, but it also entirely depends on access, privilege, and power.

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/12-web-design-best-practices-to-elevate-user-experience/

12 Web Design Best Practices To Elevate User Experience

  According to a survey conducted by British researchers on the users’ trust in health, websites showed how vital web design is. It was revealed that 94% of the feedback was based on the first impression participants had about the website’s design.  

When you decide to buy a house, would you go for an abandoned one built decades earlier, or will you buy a recently renovated one with practical design and updated features? Indeed, you would go for the latter. Undoubtedly, design matters whether in architecture, automobiles, mobile phones, or a kitchen gadget.

Andrew Kucheriavy, founder and CEO of Intechnic, says that Good UX is good business. Escalation of a business is highly dependent on its web design.

UX and Web Design

User experience (UX) of a business website is all about pleasure, ease of use, and a clear understanding. It will display the right solution at the right time to the right user. How would a customer trust you enough to buy from you if your website seems complicated to him?

On the other hand, if your website enables him to thoroughly understand your product and has simplified navigation, there is a much higher chance of him getting converted into a lead.

If you ask him to subscribe to your email list or follow your social media handles, he will most likely obey. This is because he doesn’t have to put much effort or go through any obstacles on the way to purchase the product.

According to Blue Corona, 48% of users see web design as an indication of a business’s credibility.

Below, we have shared the best web design practices that will help you upscale the user experience assuredly.

Responsive Website For An Unmatched User Experience

UX statistics from Finance Online state that 85% of people think a website’s mobile version should match its desktop version‘s quality.

People use multiple devices these days for browsing purposes. Blue Corona suggests that at least 90% of users sequentially use more than one screens. They expect your brand to care about whatever device they intend to use and want a delightful experience regardless of screen size.

Make sure that your website is fast and responsive. Understand that the smaller screens need optimized navigation and call-to-action buttons. The design may differ in tablet and desktop versions, but you can easily create a consistent format with the mobile version.

Seamless Navigation

The navigation on your website needs to be easy, but it must also be predictable to give the user a coherent experience throughout your website. Just browsing through a page or two will provide them with an idea about finding the elements they need.

Effortless navigation is made possible by a structure that is both fast and uncomplicated. Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, sums it up by saying, “Rule of thumb for UX: The more the options, the more problems will occur.”

Harmonious navigation also provides a pleasant visual experience to the user, which adds another possibility of him turning into a recurrent visitor or lead.

For some inspiration in excellent navigation, take the official website of Citizen Watch as an example. With all the necessary elements in the right place, the website is on point with its navigation design.

Source https://www.citizenwatch.com/

  Seo Optimization

SEO and User Experience go hand in hand. Who knows better than the search engine, what is the best possible result for a user? It will only show websites that nail their SEO to reach the top position.

The best SEO tip for web designers is not to use any design element that will hinder the Search engine from indexing your website.

Use relevant keywords in your web copy, alt attributes, and file names to optimize it for a better ranking.

Fast Loading Webpages for Swift User Experience

The majority of the website visitors have very little patience. The benchmark data analyzed by Google showed that  53% of visitors abandon a webpage that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

You certainly don’t want a high bounce rate just because of a slow loading website, an issue that can easily be tackled.

Use a reliable hosting service to ensure a high page load speed. A CDN network is also instrumental in improving visitors’ loading speed from any part of the world.

Your images should be optimized for which you can use any of the image optimization plugin available on WordPress. Larger images are the top reason for a slow-loading webpage.

Also, use caching versions to improve your website speed.

Personalizations

Prioritizing the user is the right approach towards web design that allows a remarkable user experience. In fact, MarketingProfs revealed that Businesses that personalize web design get at least a 19% increase in sales.

A few tips on how to integrate personalized features on your website are:

Each buyer’s persona should be shown testimonials relatable to them—a freelancer’s testimonial shown to freelancer and an agency owner’s testimonial to a company’s CEO.

Show content customized according to their location and time zone. Relevancy will boost conversions.

An adaptive website that can be translated into native languages will surely win the race with its competitors.

Customize CTA’s according to what funnel stage the customer is passing through. Learn moreis a good option for a visitor who is looking for valuable information. Whereas Buy now will target the last stage leads who have probably decided to purchase.

Powerful Yet Simple Copywriting

Copywriting has a humungous role to play in enhancing the experience of the user. You can be a winner with words that you use on your website.

Complex vocabulary, intense jargon, long paragraphs, and sentences are no longer for seamless user experience. Instead, viewers should be able to interpret the core idea behind a copy if you want them to convert.

Be it your chatboxes, notifications, or landing page, be crystal clear about what you are trying to convey. Blo’s website designed by Logo Design Valley is one example where the headline “Giving Future to Your Investment” gives the reader a clear concept about what they do and powerful enough to convince them to invest simultaneously.

Adding Elements That Allow Effortlessness For The Users

Design elements that make a user experience speedy and effortless can certainly increase sales. See how Airbnb does it. It offers a feature known as search as you move map, which allows the visitors to search for accommodations around an area without starting over the search process again and again.

  Source https://www.airbnb.com/

  Another idea is to make sure that if you have any forms to be filled, they should be quickly filled via social accounts of the users like Facebook. It will ease the lead conversion process as users don’t have to make a separate new account and can log in to their respective social networks to fill the form. SocPub states that visitors leave quickly if the forms on your website take too long to fill.

Smart Use Of Branding

Users are humans, and humans pay way more attention to visual elements than text. Keeping this in mind, incorporate branding on your website that establishes your identity but doesn’t feel like in-your-face.

You can use branding elements like your logo, brand slogan, and colors to positively build an association with the user. Once they understand your brand and feel good about it, they will happily purchase from you.

Clear and Concise CTAs

For exceptional user experience, the role of CTAs cannot be denied. They act as a catalyst in increasing sales when done the right way. And what is the right way? Customization!

Customize your Call to actions according to the visitor’s preference. Give him the exact thing for which he came. Hubspot reports that customized CTA’s which are also called smart CTAs, perform 202% better than regular ones.

Source: sproutsocial.com

Sitemap Creation

Creating a sitemap is one of the best web design practices that will aid UX. It is the website’s architecture explained through categorizing the information present on the domain. It is used to develop a site’s hierarchy in the development stage.

You can compare a sitemap to a blueprint while designing a house. You certainly can’t do a better job without having one.

The sitemap will list all the webpages, giving users accessibility and relevance and setting up a clear conversion path.

Sticky Headers

Implementing fixed elements as sticky headers add to the user’s accessibility, giving him ease of use. A sticky header is a header that remains on the screen even when the user scrolls down. Lately, it has become a standard practice that can be seen on the majority of websites.

The primary purpose of fixed elements, such as the sticky header, is to let the user access essential elements no matter how far he has scrolled down a page.

The element is a best practice until you add unnecessary features to the header, which takes up a lot of screen space, especially mobile. Add an option to hide the header on the mobile screen unless the user starts scrolling back up.

Use Of White Space

The use of white space in your web design effectively puts the spotlight where you want it to be. It’s up to you if you wish to go for a minimalist design or not, but white space is worth integrating into your web design to add clarity and highlight important elements. The balance it creates is essential for a smooth user experience.

It’s A Wrap

The Forrester Research recently concluded that a frictionless UX in web design could raise customer conversion rate by 400%. This shows that to hook the visitors, impeccable web design is vital.

If you implement the above-mentioned best practices in your web design, the user experience will definitely improve, bringing you abundant sales.

[96thdayofrage]

As someone who has researched school segregation and interviewed hundreds of white parents, I know that one of the biggest barriers to achieving meaningful integration in public education is how the most politically powerful parents in any school system — usually many of the white parents — come to understand what the “good” schools are and what is “best” for their children.

As a former public school parent and a white woman with a white son who performs well on the metrics that get students into the most selective public schools, I know the peer pressure that white parents feel to get their children into these high-status schools. I remember another white parent, when she learned that my son was not going to the most selective, predominantly white middle school in our district, looking at me in disbelief and saying, “I thought he had high tests scores?”

Yes, he did have high test scores and, yes, he most likely would have been accepted to the selective middle school, which many of his friends’ parents were determined to get their children into. But he did not want to go to that school.

He thought the students there looked bored when he toured it. I did not want him to go there either, because he was a sensitive kid who needed a school with a strong sense of community and care, which that school lacked. We were both upset by the almost completely white student body in this selective school located in the center of a racially and ethnically diverse community school district.

Really, the only reason to send him there would have been because it would give him — and, by default, his parents — a sense of status and prestige. This school had the highest test scores in the district, my son noted, because it only accepted the students with the highest test scores. In his middle school mind, being selective in and of itself did not make a school “good.” He had higher standards for a school than that. Too bad more white parents do not see it that way.

New York City has become the poster child of intense racial segregation, but the issues here are not unique to the Big Apple, nor is the challenge of implementing solutions. The New York City Mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group has released its preliminary report outlining next steps for the city’s Department of Education to lessen chronic racial and social-class segregation in the public schools. This Advisory Group, of which I am a member, laid out reachable goals to address equal access and resources, school accountability for diversity, and new teaching strategies to ensure that all students feel valued and affirmed.

One of the most pivotal factors in how far these recommendations can go in New York and elsewhere is the amount of support that such plans receive from public school parents. In particular, white parents too often say they want integration while simultaneously opting out of diverse schools in favor of those that are more selective, of higher status among their peers, and predominantly white and/or Asian.

Thus, as white parents navigate the shifting terrain of school choice and enrollment, they need to understand that having one’s child at the top of a rigid and segregated hierarchy of schools is not always the best parenting decision, on several levels. Taking a deep breath and paying less attention to what other white parents say and more attention to your children and their teachers will enable you to make choices that can not only better fit their learning styles, but also do more to make our public school system more integrated and better.

Cutting-edge research in brain science and education tells us that students learn better and deeper when their ways of knowing a topic are challenged by those who have different life experiences and worldviews. A recent report on learning by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine demonstrates that the culture of our families and communities plays a major role in how we learn.

This means that in many instances there is not a single right or wrong way of understanding a concept or interpreting a work of literature. We understand things in slightly different ways because of our histories and backgrounds. Having your children exposed to these different ways of knowing prepares them for a world of cultural complexity and constant uncertainty.

Indeed, for the first 175 years of public education in the United States, the “right” answers to most questions have been normed around white and mostly northern European culture. In the last 30 years, we have codified these culturally specific ways of knowing in high-stakes standardized tests that Asian students also tend to perform well on, particularly in math.

Taking a deep breath and paying less attention to what other white parents say and more attention to your child and their teachers will enable you to make choices that can not only better fit their learning style, but also do more to make our public school system more integrated and better.

The result is that we consistently sort and select students based on their cultural histories, ways of knowing and prior opportunities to learn. This racial hierarchy becomes so ingrained that even when schools enrolling mostly black and Latino students have high test scores, we still see them as “bad” schools.

In fact, in a study we conducted on Long Island, we found that the race of the students in the school system affected property values of otherwise identical houses in districts with the same test score data by as much as $50,000. In other words, the perception of “good” schools is too often about the perception of race, even when black and Latino students perform well on tests normed toward white students.

And still, despite this evidence and the call for more integration, many white parents continue to derive status and honor from one another when their children are selected into predominantly white or Asian schools regardless of the climate or characteristics of these schools. As the viral video of a parent meeting on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last year demonstrated, white parents can become very angry when the admissions policies to these schools change.

Too often the parents live vicariously through their children, and thus feel “gifted” or elite themselves when their children are admitted to selective schools. But the fact is that children usually want to be in schools where they feel emotionally safe and cared for by the adults and other children at the same time that they are engaged and challenged to think more deeply about complex issues than the possible answers on a multiple-choice test. As the rich evidence in the National Academies Report demonstrates, students learn best in these settings, even if they’re not the schools with the highest test scores or the most white and affluent students. In fact, it’s the latter schools that often have high rates of anxiety, cheating, drug and alcohol abuse and bullying.

It can be difficult for some parents to choose a more nurturing school for their child if it does not confer status and approval from their family, friends and acquaintances. But until more white parents make those choices, the hierarchy and the racial segregation will remain. While the NYC Mayor’s Advisory Group’s sage advice to rate schools based on diversity as well as test scores is a solid first step to address these race-based perceptions of “good” schools, white parents must also listen to their children and their hearts before saying they support integration while choosing segregation.

[mimiigrace]

Art and Ideas

What is art and where do the ideas come from? Ever since humans have existed we have been using visual practices to illustrate current issues and events unraveling around us. Cave paintings for example. The earliest known to date is found in the winding caves of Lascaux, France. They are nearly 20,000 years old mostly depicting animals that are believed to have occupied the area at the time. These practices, as well as other trades have evolved in an unbreakable constant throughout history. Developing with technologies, cultures and historical events to create new styles, aesthetics, concepts etc. But what really is art and when did it become separated from craft? 

Originally a craftsperson or artisan, someone who had great skill and grace in their practice produced ‘art’. The work would have been commissioned to perform a certain social function in a public space, a place of worship for example. The creator was not of any interest to the viewer as an ‘artist’ was not seen as a creative mind, merely a vessel to reproduce someone else’s idea. The Qualities they required were simply skill and the ability to follow direction. ‘Art’ comes from ‘ars’ meaning skill, craft or facility and that is exactly what art was; a facility to provide a particular purpose. 

Fine art became an established phrase between the 17th and 19th century known to describe academic art practices such as painting, drawing and sculpture. This separated an artist from a craftsman. In 1769 King George III founded The Royal Academy Of Art in order to promote the arts and design through education and exhibition in Britain. This defined the demand for artists. This also encouraged the start of music events and concerts endorsing creative arts as a whole.

In the book ‘The Invention of Art’ by Larry Shiner published in 2001 he suggests that art as we have come to understand it today originated in the 18th century when it broke out of being a social normality and became a cultural desire. Visual art today takes a huge number of forms allowing artists to explore not just classic academic art practices but also venture into film performance photography etc. As a general rule art is traditionally described to have aesthetic context and meaning. It’s purpose it to communicate an idea which the viewers are to interpret and understand for themselves. 

When we talk of ideas shaping the world this refers to mankind’s understanding and application of innovation and philosophy which can be passed on between cultures people and generations. Western civilization is able to track many of it’s current ideas technologies language and aesthetics back to Ancient Greece and Rome. For example contemporary buildings are still built using columns reminiscent of Ancient Greek architecture the perfectly proportioned statues found in cities such as Athens set the standards for the ideal body which is still desirable today. Furthermore the Olympics were introduced in Ancient Greece and still continue as an important tradition which unites the world today. Great ideas are timeless and noticed around the globe. 

Additionally  we get our ideas from intellectuals. Plato one of the great thinkers from Ancient Greece had disagreeing thoughts about mimesis meaning to mimic or create a representation. He thought painting objects was a futile exercise. ‘The Basics: Art History’ by Grant Pooke and Diana Newall explains Plato’s metaphor of a painter painting an image of a table. It says: ‘A painting of a table was merely a copy and had limited practical value since it couldn’t even be used to actually make or design a real table.’ This idea heavily impacted the rise of abstract art in the twentieth century. Artists began to notice that perspective within a flat image didn’t show true fact about objects in the real world. This enabled them to push beyond the accepted idea of objects and form. 

Many of the art movements were influenced by the theories of philosophers and thinkers. The Enlightenment had 3 generations of philosophers who’s ideas revolved around reason and rationality over faith, superstition and myth. Imanuel Kant said ‘Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own reason.’ He believed that religion had too much authority over thought independent of faith. Another theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that civilization was corrupting it’s self. Paying too much time and attention on vanity, indulgence, self love and ignoring self knowledge, love of family and nature. Simple values that show kindness and understanding of others and the world around you.

William Hogarth was influenced by this idea. The Rake’s Progress is a set of 7 paintings depicting a fictional character Tom Bakewell and his accent into wealthy society through his inherited fortune and how it corrupts him descending him to madness. 

The term ‘idea’ it’s self comes from Eidos meaning ‘eye’ in Ancient Greek terminology idea is a ‘thing’ that we see. Therefore an idea was thought of as the way we see the world ourselves. An artist can take an idea and use their practice to visually represent it in a way the public can interpret for themselves. 

We can relate an idea being a thing that we see back to modern art and it’s placement. Would we always notice it as being art if it was placed outside a gallery? Can any object placed in a gallery be glorified as art? In 2016 a teenager dropped his glasses against a wall in a gallery in San Francisco. People began to photograph the glasses believing they were a work of art. Does this mean that art has lost all meaning? Or perhaps art is enabling people to generate their own ideas, giving more meaning to the mundane.

 Art is not created in a cultural vacuum. This is clearly seen by observing the changes and development of art through the ages as well as the variations in subjects seen within art from over the globe. We can see this from the changing themes in the art movements from The Enlightenment, involving rational reasonable thinking to Romanticism a polar opposite. Concentrating on feelings and emotion demonstrating imagery of the sublime. 

We admire art created in response to war, religion, believes, myth, politics and society etc. Each of these things mould our cultures and form a part of history. 

Postcolonialism is an excellent example of how important culture is in the creation of art. It demonstrates the loyalty artists have to their culture but can also show how different cultures are able to integrate. Battle Of Britain by Anthony Lam shows how Chinese culture has been accepted by Britain through food. He charted out the location of Chinese takeaways over a map of the UK and the outcome is astonishing as they cover the vast majority of areas. 

Kerry James Marshall a contemporary artist who works with a wide range of media to comment on black identity in the US and in Western art says ‘I’m not working in a vacuum. I’m working in a world that has culture and history.’ Artists are able to embrace and learn about culture and use their knowledge and creative skill to visually represent their thoughts and feelings on it.

Art and ideas work hand in hand to creatively examine issues, believes, concepts etc. Art has the ability to represent ideas in such a personal captivating way. It shares similar qualities to mainstream media in that is has a purpose and information to carry across although art has an infinitely more expressive, thoughtful way of doing it.

[spicynbachili1]

When the BBC did fake news | Media

Earlier this month the BBC aired an knowledgeable and informative weeklong sequence on disinformation and pretend information, “a world drawback,” as they rightly put it, “difficult the best way we share data and understand the world round us.” 

What’s actual? What’s distortion? The sequence teaches us. I watched as lots of the episodes on this sequence as I may, and the remaining I adopted on the BBC web site. In a single episode we learn the way “Nigerian police say false data and incendiary photos on Fb have contributed to greater than a dozen current killings in Plateau State – an space already torn by ethnic violence.”

In one other episode, we learn the way in Egypt faux information turns into a weapon of option to crush dissent. In one more piece we learn the way “smartphones are making it simpler for thousands and thousands of Indians to speak and share messages on social media. However misinformation is spreading quick and might usually flip lethal.”

The sequence then moved to inform us how “a BBC investigation has discovered that Russian media and officers introduced false claims a couple of US-funded laboratory in neighbouring Georgia.” In one other episode, we had been instructed about how “faux information in Turkey is rampant, and targets many, together with the BBC. However some are preventing again.”  

Whereas watching these episodes it immediately occurred to me, as I’m positive you too have seen, one thing a bit unusual about this sequence? It’s all about non-British, and non-European international locations – about India, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Turkey and Thailand, which is after all completely superb for, little doubt, faux information is a world situation that features these international locations.

However focusing on these non-European international locations as the positioning of pretend information par excellence implicitly places European media and the BBC particularly because the arbiter of fact manifest. Faux information is one thing that backward black and brown individuals do, whereas actual information is what the BBC and the remainder of white individuals inform us.

That acquired me pondering – as we are saying in New York. 

You faux it till you make it

This deliberate exoticism and exorcism of the faux information as one thing that occurs among the many darkish individuals and never among the many British sounds a bit, how shall I put it politely, unusual to an Iranian pair of ears sufficiently old to know the US-UK navy coup towards Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, and the operate of official propaganda of their information media in that treacherous act. The holier than thou perspective of the US and UK official media, the BBC on this explicit case, may use a little bit of historic reminiscence. It’s going to educate them some humility.

Lengthy earlier than “faux information” had a reputation, the BBC was a grasp of pretend information, actually faux information of probably the most harmful, probably the most vicious penalties, casting nations, not simply people, into direct calamities. 

What I keep in mind is after all the harmul position of the BBC because the propaganda machine of British imperialism across the globe. In addition to in enabling and facilitating the CIA/MI6 coup of 1953 in my homeland particularly, by doing exactly what it now goes round discovering darker nations doing – indulging in faux information and propaganda.

The position of BBC within the overthrow of Mosaddeq was not out of character or uncommon. In a bit titled Why the taboo story of the BBC’s wartime propaganda battle have to be instructed revealed by The Guardian, David Boyle writes about characters like Noel Francis Newsome (1906-1976), who “as director of European broadcasts … led what continues to be the most important broadcasting operation ever mounted, in 25 completely different languages for a complete of simply over 25 hours a day, throughout three wavelengths.” 

Such items of fact are sources of embarrassments for the BBC at the moment, for “it was he who set out the technique to make use of information as a weapon on struggle – it needed to be not simply true but in addition recognizably British.”

Right here we be taught “it was Newsome and Ritchie (his deputy Douglas Ritchie) who actually created the parable of the BBC, through the use of information as a weapon – not fairly what the parable suggests – with all of the sources of tradition and music and humor.”

In the event you suppose this too suspicious, then you definately should know: “Hitler’s propaganda chief Goebbels warned in 1944: ‘There may be a method through which the British, regardless of the narrowness of their political pondering, are forward of us – they know that information generally is a weapon and are specialists in its technique’.”

This isn’t any brown or black individual speaking – these are white Germans speaking about white British main the BBC. 

BBC and the CIA/MI6 Coup of 1953

What the British and the BBC did in Iran towards Mossadeq was completely in tune with their bigger wartime and post-war propaganda equipment. Right here the position of BBC in vilifying and demonising the character of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq isn’t even the difficulty. At situation is a extra direct position that BBC Persian has performed in that fateful occasion.

After years of speculative suspicion dismissed as conspiracy theories, BBC Radio four lastly admitted, in a programme referred to as Doc, and subtitled A really British coup, the actual fact of this treacherous act of the BBC. “Paperwork reveal,” BBC now admitted, “the true extent of Britain’s involvement within the coup of 1953 which toppled Iran’s democratically elected authorities and changed it with the tyranny of the Shah.”

The programme then explicitly explains: “Iran had simply nationalised the very oil fields that had powered Britain by two world wars. Downing Road wished them again. London paid Iranian brokers to sow seeds of dissent in Tehran. Then, to win American assist for a coup, the boys from the Ministry fanned fears of a Russian invasion.”

Then comes the punch line: “Even the BBC was used to spearhead Britain’s propaganda marketing campaign. In truth, Auntie agreed to broadcast the very code phrase that was to spark revolution.” By “revolution” after all they imply the coup.

The New York Instances additionally experiences: “The British, too, sought to sway the shah and guarantee him their brokers spoke for London. A British agent, Asadollah Rashidian, approached him in late July and invited him to pick out a phrase that will then be broadcast at prearranged occasions on the BBC’s Persian-language program – as proof that Mr Rashidian spoke for the British.”

The identical reality is reported by The Guardian: “One other man, Asadollah Rashidian, allegedly approached the shah and invited him to pick out a phrase that will then be broadcast at prearranged occasions on the BBC’s Persian language service as proof that Rashidian spoke for British intelligence.”

Typically even the paranoids have enemies

“Simply since you’re paranoid,” Woody Allen is reported to have mentioned solely in half-jest, “does not imply they are not out to get you.” The identical is true about conspiracy theories concerning the BBC. Typically even the paranoids are proper.

The problem of the BBC position in Iranian and different international locations’ politics has turn out to be so prevalent that students have performed thorough analysis on the veracity of the matter and revealed meticulously documented books on the topic.

In an edited quantity by Marie Gillespie and Alban Webb, Diasporas and Diplomacy: Cosmopolitan contact zones on the BBC World Service 1932-2012, which is a wonderful research of diasporic communities and their compradorial providers on the BBC, we learn the way “when it got here to reporting adversely on Mossadeq, for 2 weeks all Iranian broadcasters disappeared. The BBC had no selection however to herald English individuals who spoke Persian as a result of the Iranians had gone on strike.”

Of their introduction, the editors cite Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart (1887-1970), whom they determine as “journalist, spy, and British diplomat,” as having mentioned: “for the price of a small cruiser you could possibly recruit the providers of a battle fleet” as justification for the British authorities funding of the BBC.

Two different students, Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh have revealed an much more detailed research, Persian Service: The BBC and British Pursuits in Iran (2014) through which they study “the notion” that BBC has been not only a impartial chronicler however actually an lively agent within the politics of Iran and its area at massive. They think about BBC Persian Service, making an attempt to craft a impartial floor on which to interrogate each the objectivity of BBC and its notion as a mushy energy instrument within the arsenal of British colonial and postcolonial pursuits.

The result’s a non-committal prose that itself is implicated in equivocating between reality and pretend information. In their very own phrases they’re looking for a stability within the “inelegant dance between monetary management versus editorial independence” of BBC protection of 4 main episodes in current Iranian historical past: the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, the CIA-MI6 coup towards Mossadegh in 1951-1953, the 1979 revolution, and the Inexperienced Motion of 2009.

Between reality and pretend we predict and reside

Sreberny and Torfeh’s research is an admirable train in even handed scholarship. However their wonderful ebook wanted and did fortunately obtain a superb corrective lens by the preeminent historian of recent Iran, Professor Ervand Abrahamian. In his assessment of this ebook, he reminds us how through the wartime interval “there was no pretense of goal reporting and neutral evaluation. In any case, George Orwell discovered a lot about Newspeak and Doublespeak whereas working for the BBC Indian Division. Some suspect his Ministry of Reality in Nineteen Eighty-4 was modeled on the BBC constructing in Portland Place, London.”

Think about that: the BBC that was the mannequin of Orwell’s Ministry of Reality now preaches the world about “faux information!”

Abrahamian additionally reminds us how the abdication of Reza Shah was in no small measure engineered by the BBC: “Asa Briggs, later in his well-known Historical past of Broadcasting, wrote that this was most likely the primary time in historical past ruler had been hurled from the throne by radio.” 

I believe Stephen Sackur ought to do considered one of his “Hardtalks” on the historical past of BBC as faux information.

As for the CIA/MI6 coup of 1953, Abrahamian is equally emphatic: “the British authorities and the BBC had been equally collaborative. The latter all through the disaster loudly echoed the previous’s line that nationalisation of the oil trade could be disastrous for Iran – that it might financially bankrupt the federal government, that the nation wouldn’t have the technical know-how to run the trade, and that Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq had refused a sequence of truthful and simply gives for compromise. After the overthrow of Mosaddeq, the BBC continued to echo the official line that there had been no navy coup however a spontaneous revolt towards a “dictatorial regime.”

Is that not faux information – distinguished women and gents of the BBC? You had been the mom of all faux information when it got here to the destiny of a complete nation.

When BBC blacklisted British critics

Abrahamian fairly gently reminds the authors of this vital ebook of a severe omission: “Although the ebook particulars the shut hyperlinks between the federal government and the BBC throughout this disaster, it overlooks one main egregious case. All through the disaster, the International Workplace and the British ambassador explicitly forbade the BBC to ship to Tehran any reporters sympathetic to Iran. Professor Elwell-Sutton was explicitly blacklisted regardless of his excellent experience.” The British embassy denounced him as “anti-colonial and anti-British.”

Simply to be clear: Abrahamian accurately factors to the identically conspiratorial mindset of each the late Shah and the present ruling elite of the Islamic Republic for abusing these details of BBC collusions with the British colonial pursuits prior to now to hide their very own delusional conspiracies of blaming the BBC when their very own actions had been the principle wrongdoer of calamities that befell Iranians.

Iranians consequently are caught between a rock and a tough place: When BBC truly colludes with the British authorities to rob them of their democratic aspirations, and when these details are abused by the Shah and the ruling clergy of the Islamic Republic to ascribe such aspirations to international conspiracies.

One should keep in mind these historic details not as an act of vengeance however as corrective lenses. The seismic modifications in Web prospects no clever follower of reports is trapped or condemned into any single website of media platform – BBC or in any other case. We will roam the globe from one information media to a different, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to Europe and North America, with every information media, BBC included, giving us a fraction of fact and quite a lot of faux information. We watch and browse all of them, belief none fully, nor will we privilege anybody of them with our explicit dis/belief. We dis/belief all of them equally.

Immediately the BBC needs to be neither demonised nor valorised, for it’s neither as demonic as its conspiratorial detractors contend nor as angelic because the BBC self-promotional commercials sing and dance. It is only one click on away from the subsequent fusion of reality and fantasy.

The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)(window, document,'script','//connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js');

fbq('init', '968100353246427'); fbq('track', 'PageView');

from SpicyNBAChili.com http://spicymoviechili.spicynbachili.com/when-the-bbc-did-fake-news-media/

[michellelewis7162]

An Instruction program In Miracles - Altering Lifestyles as well as likewise Precisely How it Helps You Release Disappointment

An Instruction program In Miracles - Altering Lifestyles as well as likewise Precisely How it Helps You Release Disappointment

 A Course in Miracles is really thereby pure, so wonderful, consequently highly effective, and also therefore a great deal a lot more spiritually advanced than any type of type of various other item of the world's literary works (past as well as found), that you possess to as a matter of fact experience it to believe it. That is certainly not because A Course in Miracles is really complex - on the opposite its personal ideas are actually incredibly fundamental - yet rather thinking about that it is actually the attributes of spiritual understanding that those who are actually not prepped to comprehend it, just might not know it. A Course In Miracles

 Given that I first wound up being actually educated of the marvelous and also remarkable life of God, I have in fact cherished reading various fantastic religious projects like the Bible (my loved parts are actually the Sermon on the Mount and also Psalms), the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, the Koran as well as likewise the rhymes of Kabir as well as likewise Rumi. None happen close to the effectiveness of a Course in Miracles. Reading it together with an open mind and also center, your issues and also anxieties get rid of. You hear of a magnificent affection ingrained within you - a lot deeper than pretty much anything you recognized before. The potential beginnings to appear to be so glowing for you and also your truly loved ones. You think affection for everybody including those you recently have actually tried to leave left out. These experiences are extremely effective and at possibilities flip you off harmony a little, nevertheless it is in fact worth it: A Course in Miracles launches you to a devotion consequently calm, so universal and for that reason solid - you will certainly think about simply exactly how loads of the planet's religions, whose goal is actually allegedly an equivalent knowledge, obtained for that reason off take note of.

 I have taken a look at the gospels lots of times along with I ensure you that a Course in Miracles is absolutely regular with Jesus' trainings while he performed earth. A Course in Miracles shows Jesus' right relevant information: real interest for * all folks *. If they example as pleasing as my personal perform, and likewise the numerous various other accurate applicants that have located A Course in Miracles to become really definitely nothing at all lower than a wonderful jewel, then congratses - as well as might your facility constantly be actually generously stuffed together with kicked back, loving pleasure.

 As the headline represents, A Course in Miracles is actually a mentor unit complimentary details. It teaches our company what holds true and additionally what is unbelievable, and also leads our team to the direct competence of our incredibly own Inner Teacher.

 The Course is actually put together in 3 parts: a text message, a manual for pupils and likewise a manual for instructors. The Text shows the concepts underlying the Course. The workbook consists of 365 daily treatments that give trainees the opportunity to conduct and likewise experience the tips on a dependable amount. The instructor's handbook exists in an issue in addition to response design, attending to conventional queries that a trainee might inquire; it additionally gives an information of problems used throughout the Course.

 On How every little thing Began

 The completely free of cost information Course was generated through david hoffmeister, very trained and also reliable Professors of Psychology at Columbia University's College of Physicians as well as additionally Surgeons in New York City. Helen was really the assistant for the Course, comprising down in shorthand the interior alerts she got. It took a total of seven years to accomplish A Course in Miracles, which was actually very first published in 1976 in the United States.

 Over recent 34 years, the recognition of A Course in Miracles has built along with dispersed globally. It has been actually equated in to 18 various foreign languages as well as likewise additional interpretations reside in the works. Throughout the globe, people collect in addition to other identical pupils to read through the Course along with each other thus concerning far better understand the Course's information. Within this duration of additionally social as well as electronic media, A Course in Miracles can conveniently be in fact gotten in electronic book layout, on Compact Disc, as well as via apple iphone Apps. You can quickly interact along with other Course apprentices on Facebook, Yahoo Groups, Twitter, in addition to numerous various other web websites.

 Experiencing the Course

 The Course is actually made to become a self-study device by means of david hoffmeister. Various pupils find that their 1st communication with the element is actually likewise overwhelming as well as complicated - the change in view that it provides contrasts regular thinking. Taking a promo instruction class alongside a seasoned provider or perhaps instructor enables for a gentler setting to these originalities and additionally an additional appointment experience.

 There are really a considerable amount of lessons and also program located upon the approach of A Course in Miracles, and also particular classes on vital Course tips, such as True Forgiveness or even Cause and also Effect. Such training class supply students the chances to experience the suggestion as well as use particular component a lot more significantly. Via such ingrained knowledge, a number of students uncover the assurance of inner peace as well as additionally the happiness of understanding the Inner Teacher.

 " This Course is actually a beginning, not a side ... No extra particular trainings are really assigned, for there fades away requirement of all of them. Henceforth, hear however, the Voice for God ... He will most definitely guide your attempts, informing you specifically what to do, only how to deliver your thoughts, along with when to take place to Him in muteness, seeking His certain instructions as well as likewise His certain Word (Workbook, p. 487).

 They locate that they concern a brand-new understanding of grace when people use the trainings found out as effectively as the guidelines of A Course In Miracles. They are actually competent to analysis and likewise know why you injure your own personal as well as others when you execute definitely not eliminate.

 The one that requires to forgive is actually determined just like a lot as the one that needs to have to must be actually forgiven, if surely not a lot more highly! You can quickly forgive the offender whether he talks with for forgiveness and even certainly not. This will definitely be the quite initial of the magics that is actually given as well as made it through the electrical power of mercy learnt coming from A Course In Miracles.

 Over 40 years back, a psycho therapist from Columbia University started to lug discoveries from a spiritual center that she was in fact attracted was Jesus himself. She as well as likewise her aides generated teachings that loaded thousands of unused website over an amount of time of 7 years which in the future ended up being actually "A Course In Miracles."

 A trademark of the ACIM course is that evil on its own carries out undoubtedly not exist. The ACIM mentors advise that through informing your mind correctly, you can conveniently learn that there is in fact no such factor as horrendous, and likewise that it is merely an impact or one point that other individuals have in fact indicated around prevent and additionally manage the actions as well as notions of those that are actually not capable of supposing for on their own. ACIM urges that the only thing that accomplishes exist is really correct interest and also that innocent ideas as well as spiritually excellent thinking will undoubtedly not make it possible for pretty much anything like heinous to exist.

 These ideas and also views flustered several individuals that involved a number of the notable faiths given that, while they embraced a lot of the very same concepts, this instruction plan also sought to have people think that improbity is actually absolutely not real in addition to for that reason wrong is actually additionally unbelievable. ACIM on its own produces an effort to possess individuals assume in the holiness and additionally a great tip sights as well as additionally behaviors as well as additionally in the basic fact that absolutely nothing whatsoever can conveniently harm you unless you assume that it can. New Age authorizations were actually understandable onto these guidelines considered that numerous of the New Age religious beliefs are in fact found out wrong as well as satisfaction however, the energy of one's quite own ideas as well as additionally feeling.

 ACIM does supply some teachings about exactly how to rid by yourself of harming as well as distressed feelings that are actually overloading your life in addition to troubles as well as building condition in addition to trouble daily. A Course In Miracles coaches you that you are actually behind these feelings as well as they are just injuring you. Because of that, it depends on you to rid every one of them arising from your way of life for your personal happiness as well as joy and happiness as well as abundance.

 A Course in Miracles is actually a collection of self-study components launched by the Foundation for Inner Peace. The magazine's internet content generalises, and additionally discloses mercy as applied daily live. Curiously, no location does the file possess a writer (in addition to it is in fact thus detailed without a writer's name due to the U.S. Library of Congress). Having claimed that, the text was actually made through Helen Schucman (died) as well as additionally William Thetford; Schucman has connected that quick guide's material is actually located upon interactions to her stemming from an "values" she announced was Jesus. The preliminary variation of the publication was in fact discharged in 1976, with a modified version released in 1996. Part of the material is a training overview, and additionally a student book. Since the really 1st edition, the guidebook has supplied various million matches, along with interpretations in to almost two-dozen international languages.

 The book's starting points might be actually mapped back to the early 1970s; Helen Schucman very first knowledge in addition to the "morals" generated her at that point manager, William Thetford, to seek advice from Hugh Cayce at the Association for Research as well as Enlightenment. Consequently, a summary to Kenneth Wapnick (later the book's publisher) happened. Currently of the overview, Wapnick was actually medical psychologist. After appointment, Schucman and Wapnik put in over a year customizing and modifying the component. An added introduction, this chance of Schucman, Wapnik, in addition to Thetford to Robert Skutch as well as Judith Skutch Whitson, of the Foundation for Inner Peace. The 1st publishings of quick guide for blood circulation stayed in 1975. Ever since, copyright litigation due to the Foundation for Inner Peace, as well as Penguin Books, has actually built that the web information of the very 1st edition stays in everybody domain.

 A Course in Miracles is actually an instruction unit; the training program has 3 magazines, a 622-page text message, a 478-page student workbook, as well as additionally an 88-page instructors guide book. The web material of A Course in Miracles cope with both the scholastic and the operational, although procedure of the publication's component is stressed. Not either guide neither the Course in Miracles is really meant to complete the audiences's understanding; merely, the components are in fact a start.

 A Course in Miracles separates in between understanding as well as also opinion; fact is actually inflexible and additionally infinite, while perspective is actually the globe of option, change, as well as likewise analysis. The world of idea enhances the common suggestions in our thoughts, and also maintains our company different originating from the fact, as well as additionally various coming from God.

 Social media network believes that just about anything in this particular entire world, i.e., forecasted thought and feelings as well as sensations together with the info of the narcissism incorrect mind. On-line assaults in the place for A Course in Miracles (ACIM) are by means of the different viewpoints, quotations along with a variety of other messages where our firm reply to our analysis which then winds up being actually the recognition for our response (T-12. I. 1) or our cause for posting, and more. All trainees have a standard problem in between kind and web content and also what it implies to sign up with hence let's not glucose layer it: Social media is really kinds (forecasted information of the self-pride wrong mind) from supplementing the improper mind. Originating from the outset it is really a collection of assaults till our staff eliminate in addition to start pinpointing (participating in) along with the correct thought and feelings.

 Even in the Course, our experts all loosen up online in addition to some kind of an electronic gadget mindlessly doing our pride variable. Okay, some might be standing, passing time or throwing:

 Sitting all around and likewise describing the Course is certainly not the same aspect as executing the effort of researching the text as well as additionally placing the guidelines straight into practice to establish what the Course recommends (Kenneth Wapnick, Rules for Decision).

 In the similar Rules, Wapnick additionally points out, "What offers the self-pride its very own power is your having actually accompanied it, your identity from it." Kinds are actually anticipated as a protection versus the contrary and likewise are merely alongside the self-pride inaccurate mind as well as also thereby they do surely not matter.

 Considered that socials media is in fact all involving kinds which are actually shabby price quotes of the vanity, our crew are in fact after that checking out the Sonship as shabby that creates the inaccuracy authentic. Specialness is valued as an idolizer set up before the Love of God along with those regarded distinctions sustain the splitting up psychological. Undoubtedly any kind of type of defective characteristic our group evaluate in an additional online (or anywhere) needs to be located in every of the Sonship because our team're definitely One actually. That is actually why assault isn't unique and needs to be surrendered (T-7. VI.1).

 Distinctive methods, "Also particular and individually different." All strike in any kind of form of form is actually the exact very same as well as is implied to divide the completeness of the Sonship due to the reality that it strikes (bits) the Sonship via varieties rather than parity. Consequently, our experts might see why Wapnick will definitely state that it is actually ridiculous to use the Course as a tool when it's precisely a Course located in oneness.

 Let's add set of several other key phrase emblematic representation analyses looking at that these are really each utilized throughout the Course:

 Display: Clearly present the lifestyle and even fact of something by means of giving proof or even evidence.

Suggestion: A factor that results in someone to remember one thing.

 Unloving Reminders

 In the Course, "To instruct is to present (M-in.2) as well as we are actually consistently teaching, and even verifying the vanity or even God every instant, i.e., the happy ideas alongside which our crew have actually selected to calculate or even sign up with. For comparison, the information of the self-pride is actually a number of predicted and also different kinds; and the details of the best notions is in fact unity, sameness, i.e., Love (no projections).

 Our siblings are a member folks. They are actually the ones who show our firm that our company are really for our finding is an end result of what our professionals have enlightened every one of them (T-9. VI.3) - the self-pride or perhaps God - regularly. As the dreamer of the desire (T-27. VII.), our objective figures (those online in addition to us and also our bros) are actually performing what our pros are thinking they are performing located upon what our team've coached (affirmed). They are actually upright taking into consideration that it is our desire. Our specialists presented splitting up or a homicidal strike assumed versus God consequently our professionals all demonstrate stated strike in a considerable amount of ragged kinds. If our crew eliminate our own selves of what our company have in fact shown (opted for) as opposed to attacking, we find that our firm are actually through ways of our brother or sisters who are in fact the exact same.

 Throughout the planet, individuals pick up along with other similar pupils to read through the Course along with each other so as to far better understand the Course's message. Within this time frame of also social and electronic media, A Course in Miracles may simply be in fact gotten in electronic publication layout, on Compact Disc, as well as through methods of apple iphone Apps. There are really a great deal of lessons as well as center curricula based upon the strategy of A Course in Miracles, and also certain training class on vital Course ideas, such as True Forgiveness or even Cause as well as Effect. A Course in Miracles is actually a training system; the instruction course has 3 magazines, a 622-page text notification, a 478-page student workbook, as well as likewise an 88-page teachers guidebook. Our experts may view why Wapnick is going to explain that it is actually ridiculous to use the Course as an item when it is actually exactly a Course located in unity.

[thecoroutfitters]

Please note he previously provide me with regards to the do the job usually are responses which have overshadowed whatever else that will this other lecturers include explained. McNaught if it dealt with education or living usually. Please inform me in case the article ought to be longer. Question- Indicate someone that has received a tremendous affect people, as well as summarize this effect. I became capable of show me by way of our apparel, hairdos, conversation, etcetera.

Get Entire Essay

Most of these periods enable the learner to help swiftly advance in the primary a couple of on the four quantities of finding out. One segment I would PERSONALLY sign up for are these claims sections. I remember being a very first grader, entering the woman area, staying mortified she has been consoling considered one of this classmates within a rocking seat that had just simply taken the come down the slip in a rowdy program connected with recess. This particular time period is a touch too much time. Personal parts of the particular teacher is oftentimes the best hurdle when coming up with a successful learning experience. Ought to you check with us a last year, who seem to my example was, I would provide you with the identity of a celeb in answer. She actually is the one and only the new mother, my own loyal guide plus spouse from the the second I became made.

McNaught being a tutor possess a significant deal of admiration intended for him or her as they is able to cure the kids just like people, as opposed to other teachers whom are likely to excessively use their own trustworthy capabilities. Mentorship is permanently seen in healthcare for several years. Mentorship continues to be forever seen in health-related for quite some time. Would you full the details resear on the planet does http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/DELTDL.html not distinguish between wishes in addition to fuzy tests by self-control to maintain under consideration can be exclusively slight revisions to produce, declare, by means of range, how just about every writers issues cause vital thinking as well as material understandings by barry zwiers and betty crawford.

This is definitely my personal indicative accounts of this operation as being a coach inside a specialized medical setting, assessing the training natural environment and the approaches utilized for educating plus discovering your just experienced treatment room nurse. Even so, the girl departs the ultimate determination if you ask me. Of course, your dog trained me classes instructions, nevertheless more importantly, they trained me existence instructions; living coaching that will aid me succeed to be a man or woman all of which will promise an even better potential for me personally. Would you full the details resear on the planet does not distinguish between wishes in addition to fuzy tests by self-control to maintain under consideration can be exclusively slight revisions to produce, declare, by means of range, how just about every writers issues cause vital thinking as well as material understandings by barry zwiers and betty crawford. Therefore, it will be important for making the right atmosphere for each person for taking complete good thing about the training process (Lowenstein and also Bradshaw 2008). It requires but not only specifications but also correct direction. To reflect is not enough, after this you must applied the training along with brand new comprehension you’ve got obtained for that reason enabling your reflective way to inform your train.

Macbeth personality essay

The Advisor assists us a great amount all over my own job, there exists a terrific familiarity with 1 another , and possess accumulated your trusting and also straightforward marriage in the past. This individual ne’er acquired your actual physical capableness being a new older feminine consequently hence he’d ne’er store us shift just like the usual mature woman’s. Dealing with distinctive advisors prior to now, assists my family to learn the different characteristics to be some sort of mentor and also build my personal type of aiding finding out in just a clinical placing. I used to be configuring researchpaperwriter… very afraid whenever i brought the solved remedy published home, dreading in which our mummy would reprimand my family, but the woman’s impulse mildly stunned me. Having said that, my own beginner year the actual tutor exactly who lectured this Biology group didn’t have any affinity for the patient your lover tutored plus accomplished it half-heartedly; I began to do not like the course.

It taught me to joyful whilst would certainly make me aware simply how much this individual relished our work as it last but not least helped me sense that I had been genuinely efficient at anything in your life. In my sophomore calendar year connected with senior high school I actually came into room 211 to visit Chemistry course. The remaining phase to be able to unconscious mind competence is definitely attained through expertise prior to the process gets to be a habit or even program (Immenroth, Meters, ’07). Regardless of how much My partner and i enjoyed to write, I never thought that I was an adroit creator.

McNaught helped me understand that You need to definitely not decide to put our writing capacity to throw away and i must take benefit from the item all the time probable. It became the level connected with everyone heading myself personally ; to paraphrase my own men’s parent or guardian performed non desire every masculine little one’s to get all the way down speaking with us. Throughout place Some, evaluators accumulate along with experience solely completely new options for being aware of whether it produces a report that is additionally used for other folks along with components. The world’s your oyster towards the amount of role models an individual might have. Nancy my personal mommy, my own role model, and above all, my pal. Plainly state my own dissertation affect your targets, (3 or more) intended theme as well as pedagogy. McNaught would likely turn back and making use of teenaged debate, would likely retell that to all of us that can help us comprehend it.

To think is just not more than enough, then you definately should practice the educational along with brand-new realizing you might have gained thus allowing this indicative method to inform your train. Gopee (08) shows that this concept has been developing along with creating because the early 70’s, but it surely has been legally put into practice by the breastfeeding vocation inside the Nineteen eighties along with later through Managing Team Professionals (ODPs) (CODP 2009). My spouse and i also made an effort to creep driving my father’s back again and also perform a few things i sought being a father or mother during the was all being aware of. The recommendations from your Francis statement (2013) and also the NHS England Constitution (The year 2013) the two stress the significance of sturdy control whatsoever stages and by just about all martial arts regarding team. Duffy (2002) advised there should be a difference connected with stress to get determining and also guidance learners, The lady asserted that there ended up being evidence gurus ‘failing so that you can fail’ pupils whose capabilities were beneath dilemma.

Tutors tend to be folks you actually professionally understand, these are those who truly thank you and require the ideal available for you. I personally thought such as I used to be aging therefore i must have any social interaction; I used to be unfortunately wrongly diagnosed. McNaught reduced the problem recognize that Generate not set my own writing power to waste and i also must take good thing about the item always feasible. In reality, within people that have realistic guide ability, the particular instructions call for to show an art this zones for the psychological procedure for blending the actual measures with the business in the mind, in addition custom term papers in hours to being sure this combination has occurred prior to hoping the ability.

The way has been exercise. This is exactly what I actually popular the majority of about Mister. She gets really also been quite possibly the most influential an affiliate my entire life. Very few people discover why I look up to Mr. Your dog trained me a lot of important things I would have to recognize throughout living. That’s all I need to to learn so that you can realize that this may come to be any blessed submit situations.

I will be pleased we payed awareness of him or her because I are not aware of exactly where I would personally be plainly had taken down all of that he’d ever before believed myself. They’re our central source as well as close friend. In final result, it’s apparent the fact that purpose of your teacher is not really an easy just one. Numbers has been my own strong issue until then, even so had been in excess of positive before the exam in addition to we hadn’t adjusted effectively, this lead to a undesirable scores. Her mama had been that of a The spanish language Enfant and his awesome father had been Far east, which makes them the Chinoy. McNaught much, nevertheless they have no idea the amount of he’s got trained me. They are the delights my personal mentor is doing and trained me in.

from Patriot Prepper Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. Are you ready for any situation? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

[merffpazuu]

ethnographer’s specialist area, and much of what he took for granted we were blind to, especially the subtleties of the recruitment process. As he slowly but surely immersed himself within the local bouncing culture, he made important contacts that were eventually to see him receive regular work as a bouncer. Even the slightest mistake at this juncture would see our plans begin to crumble—ask the wrong question, laugh at the wrong joke or react in the wrong manner and it would be back to the drawing board. Getting in: part two In all honesty the vast majority, 95 per cent of people who will work as a doorman have been involved in fights and trouble, because really, they’re the sorts of people who will do the door . . . you can’t put someone on who is frightened to death of a fight . . . suppose a lad is beating a girl up . . . and you’ve never really seen a fight, or you’ve never been in one—what are you gonna do when that guy starts beating his girlfriend up . . . Are you going to go ‘ooh, oogh’; are you going to stand there? you can’t have them type of people on the door; that girl could get killed while you’re stood there. (Darren) Who wants to be, and who becomes, a bouncer is a crucial starting point for understanding the social and cultural context of what is an unusual and dangerous form of employment (Walker 1999). As one experienced bouncer explained, ‘I have had my arms slashed with a knife and I can’t straighten this finger. I’ve had stitches and somebody take a hammer out, have a go at my back and legs while I was held down on the pavement’ (Steve South). Over the course of an evening it may be necessary to ask a notorious criminal to leave the premises, to interrupt a fornicating couple in a toilet cubicle, or to intervene between two groups of brawling men. Virtually anything can fall under the remit of the bouncer, and much of what does would not be considered to constitute a satisfying working environment by much of society (Hughes 1963). Much of the recruitment process is subtle and vague. You are unlikely to see a ‘Bouncer required’ advertisement in the Job Centre or your evening paper.2 The vast majority of bouncers with whom we spoke were recruited by word of mouth, usually through extensive and powerful friendship networks. If you are actively seeking employment as a bouncer, as our researcher was doing, you are also communicating a genuine belief that you can do the job to the required standard. This is the first, and most crucial, phase in recruitment, and may be tested. Often a man seeking employment will ask a friend in or around the profession to help with introductions or directly with the procurement of a job. The friend provides a crucial link and will be used to substantiate credentials. If the potential employee is not known to the employer, be it a bar owner or manager, a head doorman or the head of a security company, informal references will be sought, as in the case of our researcher. Often this will involve recognition of a significant violent potential. They don’t have to be violent or have a reputation for violence, but they have to be able to deploy violence when necessary, and it is this qualification that will need to be clarified. Occasionally violent potential will be taken as read and no references will be sought. If the applicant is large and has a well-developed physique, occasionally this will be judged enough. Bouncers bring with them a crude bodily capital (Wacquant 1992); they are 539 WINLOW ET AL. 2 Several security industry personnel reported the poor response and generally low level standard of applicant emanating from recruitment drives linked to local Job Centres. offering themselves, their bodies, as marketable assets, yet this is not simply a process of use and exchange value (Baudrillard 1993). Almost as important as the physical ability to carry out one’s job is the sign value of one’s body, speech and body language, facial expression and demeanour; they signify the danger inherent in contravening the behavioural strictures imposed in various licensed premises. Customers understand the significance of the muscles, the tattoos and the shaved head, they learn to read the narratives of intimidation that provide order in a milieu that is grounded upon intoxication and the abandonment of day time protocols. If the applicant already has a reputation for the successful deployment of violence, no further evidence will be required. ‘Feats of vicious derring do pack the portfolios of local celebrity bouncers, their reputations for taking and giving punishment forming the cutting edge of their marketability’ (Hobbset al. forthcoming). However, if this is not the case, the potential employer will subtly conduct inquiries from people who know the applicant. Who is he and where does he come from? Have you ever seen him fight? And the ubiquitous, is he all right? Much of this process is conducted in vague inquiries made up of half sentences and knowing glances. A strong friendship with an established player in the night time milieu, or a noted hard man, qualifies the applicant: a kind of hardness by association, that is in fact a functional demonstration of form, as these men are bonded by violent potential which is in itself a culturally informed aspect of self. Occasionally recruitment crises arise where bouncers will be required in a hurry. This may be simply the result of one of the bouncers at a specific bar or club wanting a night off, creating the need for an ad hoc reliable replacement. Enter the friend with all the necessary qualities who needs extra money. Many teams of bouncers, either directly employed by the bar or club or through a security company, will have a group of back up contacts that can be called on in a situation such as this, but space can always be found for a bright young talent. Licensing is also an issue in the arrangement of employment. If you have already got a local authority licence to be employed as a bouncer, your entrance into that profession will of course be significantly quickened. Licensing permeates all aspects of entrance into the profession, and if you can’t get one, as a result for instance of convictions for violence, you may find your way into the occupation blocked. Trying to get a job without a licence, even with useful contacts, will usually result in the applicant being directed to get a licence and then they’ll see what can be done. Few exceptions are made, but again those with the necessary skills in abundance may find a way (Lister et al. forthcoming). However, the most crucial aspect of the recruitment process is that the applicant is conversant with violence. At its most basic this means that at the first sign of violence he is unlikely to run in the opposite direction. Ideally the applicant must be confident and cool in the face of such adversity, deploy violence only when necessary but deploy it accurately and effectively. I’ve had blokes that look as hard as nails but don’t turn up if the trouble starts, they’ll say they didn’t see it but you know they did and just stood there. All that counts is you’ve got to get stuck in there, go in and watch each other’s backs. The most experienced bouncers, the best bouncers, can tell when it’s about to kick off, and they always do things the right way. They talk to people when they need to and dig people when they need to. (Trevor) Most bouncers are thrown in at the deep end once the process of establishing credibility as a recruit was completed. Our researcher and those bouncers we interviewed received little 540 GET READY TO DUCK if any guidance beyond the immediate tactics employed by the door team. It is assumed that you simply know. That you wouldn’t be there doing what you are doing if you didn’t know. Further, this ‘probationary’ period is heavily if informally scrutinized. After sufficient experience was gained, our researcher was polled on what he thought of new recruits, and it is safe to assume that the same process had taken place to ascertain his abilities. As mentioned earlier, many teams of bouncers have a back-up group who can be contacted to cover for the absence of a regular. This system often provides recruits with their first taste of life on the door. You will be asked to fill in, often at short notice, and your willingness to do so combined with your perceived skills and on the job performance will help to determine if you will be invited back. For those with obvious skills (violent repute, large muscles, intimidating appearance, experience etc.) and powerful contacts, this phase will be skipped and regular work will be found quickly. However, our researcher had to go through the process of having to fill in for absent bouncers at a number of bars before regular work was found. A telephone call would be received and a request would be made to fill in, usually at very short notice. Our researcher’s willingness to cancel weekend plans in order to work the door was an appreciated characteristic, and this coupled with his on the job references and preemployment analysis of his potential by friends and acquaintances within the profession, enabled him to gain first, regular work, and then a regular spot at a venue. Given the turbulent working environment, the likelihood of violence, and the inroads made into the night time economy by organized crime (Hobbs 1995; Morris 1998; O’Mahoney 1997), the attractions of being a bouncer are not immediately apparent. Certainly the pay is not likely to bring about a huge lifestyle shift; generally ranging from £25–50 a night. Although the money paid to bouncers often comes cash-in-hand, and consequently is outside the reach of the taxman, the real benefits of the occupation are grounded deep within masculine working-class culture and self-identity (Willis 1977; Winlow 1999), with its powerful appreciation of bodily power, personal and group respect and violent engagement. Perceptions of honour and shame (Armstrong 1998: 233–61) are of course central to ideas of self, and these concerns are not lost on the robust masculinities of most bouncers. Friedrichs (1977: 284) has argued that honour provides a structure for a ‘system of symbols, values and definitions’ as well as ‘categories, rules, and process . . . which may be specific to the given culture’. The negotiation of a lifestyle that maintains honour and avoids cultural definitions of shame (see Winlow et al. forthcoming) are a central concern to the masculine identities of bouncers. As Bourdieu notes, perceptions of honour are strongest in those who see themselves through the eyes of others (1979: 115), and this is certainly true of bouncers, whose class and occupational culture so value a capacity and reputation for violence, and whose working life is spent in the public eye. Being a bouncer allows a demonstrative cultivation of a hyper-masculine persona: from body language to the cut of their clothes to the way they smoke their cigarettes, these men present their behaviour for display and their bodies become tools of ‘impression management’ (Goffman 1969). Their bodies, bearing, expressions and scar tissue are passing on easily decoded messages to bar and club patrons: do as we tell you and do it quickly. Once a job as a bouncer is secured, certain occupational perks are made apparent, particularly in terms of the status and prestige that is locally manifested in the job. Being a 541 WINLOW ET AL. bouncer made the individual someone to be respected, even when no overt violent skills had been submitted for examination. Not just anyone can be a bouncer, so there had to be something there, seemed to be the general impression. Jokes and witticisms offered by bouncers would become more funny, more personal space was provided while pushing to get served at a bar, people would give up seats, offer drinks and cigarettes and business opportunities (Winlow 1999). Many people wanted to bask in the reflected glow of bouncers, hoping some of their toughness and respect would rub off. Everyone wanted to be his friend. Bar customers would make efforts to be entertaining and try to cultivate the friendship of bouncers, sometimes with the hope that they’d be allowed into a night club for free, or that the friendship would pay off somewhere down the line, sometimes for protective reasons and sometimes out of virtual hero-worship. These men possessed cultural capital the potency of which is hard to grasp from outside its enacted environment. Bouncers would generally get into each other’s night clubs for free, and would certainly never bother to queue. A powerful sense of fraternity existed among many of the bouncers studied, and this provided both friendship and protection. To some, being a bouncer allowed them to maintain a lifestyle dedicated to the avoidance of the drudgery of the nine-to-five working day; to lie in bed until late morning, watch daytime TV, go to the gym and see friends, and wheel and deal in the black economy. Being a bouncer could also be fun, as the venues in which they worked often paralleled their own leisure choices. Many bouncers expressed the sentiment that it was occasionally like being paid to go out and socialize. On an evening such as this, time passes quickly, problems appear insignificant and easily dealt with and you can be happy in your work, like being paid to have a good time, and it can seem a shame when last orders is called and you have to leave. Music, flashing lights, sexual promise, and the possibility that just about anything could happen can make Jimmy’z Bar an attractive place to work as a bouncer. (Hobbs et al., forthcoming) Just as every prospective new recruit to the bouncing profession must go through a process similar to that mentioned above, so our researcher had to negotiate entry, coupled with a wider concern with covert access to the wider cultural milieu. Here we were able to exploit connections within the researched culture and the prior cultural knowledge and understanding of our covert researcher. Without these obvious advantages participant observation would not have been possible, and it was the initial understanding that this research strategy was viable and sustainable that helped to shape our first tentative encounters with the occupation and culture. (Hobbs 2000) When attempting to get a job as a bouncer it became absolutely essential to adopt a covert role,3 as not only did bouncers and security companies see no advantage in allowing an academic researcher access to their lives. To them it was imperative that they were employing and working with a bouncer, someone who could adequately conduct himself in a highly problematic occupation. Ethical considerations at this juncture were not ignored, but placed secondary to the pragmatics of getting a job as a bouncer and keeping it. It is impossible to conduct covert research and be entirely truthful with everyone you meet (Denzin 1968), and our choice of research strategy involved the first 542 GET READY TO DUCK 3 For a critique of covert methods, see Erikson (1967). For a discussion of formal ethical codes see Wax (1977) and Norris (1993). of many ethical decisions made during the course of the fieldwork, ‘some good, some not so good’ (Van Maanen 1983: 277). People lie, and bouncers are no exception. Lies were commonplace, especially when discussing one’s own violent experiences and skills, and were in fact taken as a facet of engaging with fragile egos in a world of looking-glass selves (Blumer 1969). Once a job was secured, there was of course no going back. Our covert researcher was now a bouncer and actively fulfilled the requirements of the job. Analytical insight is hard to sustain within the general tumult of a busy bar or night club, and this is especially true when you are required to deal with a succession of highly diverse ‘problems’ over the course of an evening’s work. Writing up material and the necessary academic analysis was left to the next morning when a clear head and the general absence of fear allowed our researcher to revert to being a sociologist doing the job of a bouncer rather than vice versa (Van Maanen 1983). It was impossible to avoid problematic interactions with bar customers, who might well be drunk or under the influence of drugs, and it was impossible to just stand and observe. Any bouncer who did not get fully involved in the job was merely ‘an empty shirt’, and their presence would not only restrict the combined efforts of the door team, but would in fact prove to be an encumbrance to getting the job done. Similarly, it was simply impractical to ‘keep [the researcher’s] mouth shut’ (Polsky 1971: 126–7), as this alone would have served to ‘chill the scene’ (p. 132). On the contrary, it was necessary to be open and communicative, to build relationships by affording respondents a chance to get to know him and form judgments about his abilities and trustworthiness. Our researcher may not have been entirely forthcoming with the absolute truth, but in an often secretive occupation this is far from uncommon (see Winlow 1999). Above all it was absolutely essential to be one of them. You had to talk like them, laugh at the same jokes, comment on the same things, and express similar opinions and sentiments. You had to make them believe that you possessed similar values and goals. Above all you had to do the job like them. On the job: tales from the dark side The stark realities of working as a bouncer became immediately apparent from day one. A powerful anxiety often gripped the stomach as the threat of violence was imbued in the most mundane social interaction: a slight bump, the tone of voice, a spilt drink, a mistaken glance, anything in fact, could trigger a violent confrontation. Aside from this, being within striking distance of large numbers of drunken young men and women can itself be intimidating. While some bouncers seemed to deflect the aggressive atmosphere back on to bar and club patrons, others adopted a more stoic, unflappable attitude. Whatever was about to occur, they gave the impression that they could deal with it. Slowly but surely close friendships were constructed and a complex understanding of the environment and culture quickly followed. Vague tactics and rules slowly began to reveal themselves as the bouncers negotiated a succession of highly diverse problems. The seemingly hectic and off-the-cuff work of bouncers did indeed have some underlying method. For instance, decisions regarding who got in and who got turned away from the door of a pub or club often had a good deal of rational foundation. Wearing your Sunday best informed the bouncers that you were less likely to get in a fight and so damage your attire. Jeans and trainers were fighting clothes and more likely to be