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justmenoworries · 4 years

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Not Up For Interpretation - An Essay On Nonbinary - Erasure

(Trigger Warning: Misgendering, Transphobia, Nonbinary-phobia)

If you’ve been following me for a while, you probably know this was a long time coming. I’ve made several posts about my frustrations concerning this topic and how much it hurt me just how socially accepted erasing an entire identity still is. While representation marches on and things have become better for nonbinary people as a whole, we still battle with a lot of prejudice - both intentional and unintentional.

In this essay, I want to discuss just how our identities are being erased almost daily, why that is harmful and hurtful and what we all can do to change that.

Chapters:

What does Non-binary mean?

Nonbinary- representation in media

So what’s the problem?

How do we fix it?

1. What Does Non-binary Mean?

Non-binary is actually an umbrella term. It includes pretty much every gender-identity that’s neither one or the other so to speak, for example, agender.

Agender means feeling detachment from the gender spectrum in general. If you’re agender, you most likely feel a distance to the concept of gender as a whole, that it doesn’t define you as a person.

There are many identities that classify under non-binary: There’s gender-fluid (you feel you have a gender, but it’s not one gender specifically and can change), demi-gender (identifying as a gender partially, but not completely) and many others.

Sometimes, multiple non-binary identities can mix and match.

Most non-binary people use they/them pronouns, but like with so many things, it varies.

Some nonbinary-people (like me) go by two pairs of pronouns. I go by both she/her and they/them, because it’s what feels most comfortable at the moment. But who knows, maybe in the future I’ll switch to they/them exclusively or expand to he/him.

There is no one defining non-binary experience. Nb-people are just as varied and different as binary people, who go by one specific gender.

There are non-binary people who choose to go solely by she/her or he/him and that’s okay too. It doesn’t make them any more or less non-binary and their identity is still valid.

If your head’s buzzing a bit by now: That’s okay. It’s a complicated topic and no one expects you to understand all of it in one chapter of one essay.

Just know this: If a person identifies as non-binary, you should respect their decision and use the pronouns they go with.

It’s extremely hurtful to refer to someone who already told you that they use they/them pronouns with she/her or he/him, or use they/them to refer to a person who uses she/her.

Think about it like using a trans-person’s deadname: It’s rude, it’s harmful and it shows complete disrespect for the person.

Non-binary people have existed for a very long time. The concept isn’t new. The idea that there are only two genders, with every other identity being an aberration to the norm, is largely a western idea, spread through colonialism.

The Native American people use “Two-Spirit” to describe someone who identifies neither as a man nor a woman. The term itself is relatively new, but the concept of a third gender is deeply rooted in many Native American cultures.

(Author’s Note: If you are not Native American, please do not use it. That’s cultural appropriation.)

In India, the existence of a third gender has always been acknowledged and there are many terms specifically for people who don’t identify with the gender that was assigned to them at birth.

If you’re interested in learning more about non-binary history and non-binary identities around the world, I’d recommend visiting these websites:

https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/History_of_nonbinary_gender

https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Gender-variant_identities_worldwide

https://thetempest.co/2020/02/01/history/the-history-of-nonbinary-genders-is-longer-than-you-think/

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/gender-variance-around-the-world

Also, maybe consider giving this book a try:

Nonbinary Gender Identities: History, Culture, Resources by Charlie Mcnabb

2. Non-binary Representation In Media

The representation of non-binary people in mainstream media hasn’t been... great, to put it mildly.

Representation, as we all know, is important.

Not only does it give minorities a chance to see themselves in media and feel heard and acknowledged. It also normalizes them.

For example, seeing a black Disney-princess was a huge deal for many black little girls, because they could finally say there was someone there who looked like them. They could see that being white wasn’t a necessity to be a Disney princess.

Seeing a canonically LGBT+ character in a children’s show teaches kids that love is love, no matter what gender you’re attracted to. At the same time, older LGBT+ viewers will see themselves validated and heard in a movie that features on-screen LGBT+ heroes.

There’s been some huge steps in the right direction in the last few years representation-wise.

Not only do we have more LGBT+ protagonists and characters in general, we’ve also begun to question and call out harmful or bigoted portrayals of the community in media, such as “Bury Your Gays” or the “Depraved Homosexual”.

With that being said: Let’s take a look at how Non-binary representation holds up in comparison, shall we?

This is Double Trouble, from the children’s show “She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power”.

They identify as non-binary and use they/them pronouns. They’re also a slimy, duplicitous lizard-person who can change their shape at will.

Um, yeah.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Did I mention they’re also the only non-binary character in the entire show? And that they’re working with a genocidal dictator in most of the episodes they’re in?

Yikes.

Let’s look at another example.

These three (in order of appearance) are Stevonnie, Smoky Quartz and Shep. Three characters appearing in the kid’s show “Steven Universe” and it’s epilogue series “Steven Universe: Future”.

All of them identify as non-binary and use they/them as pronouns.

Stevonnie and Smoky Quartz are the result of a boy and a girl being fused together through weird alien magic.

Shep is a regular human, but they only appeared in one episode. In an epilogue series that only hardcore fans actually watched.

Well, I mean...

One out of three isn’t that bad, right?

Maybe we should pick an example from a series for older viewers.

Say hello to Doppelganger, a non-binary superhuman who goes by they/them, from the Amazon-series “The Boys”.

They’re working for a corrupt superhero-agency and use their power of shape-shifting to trick people who pose a threat to said agency into having sex with them. And then blackmail those people with footage of said sex.

....

Do I even need to say it?

If you’ve paid attention during the listing of these examples, you might have noticed a theme.

Namely that characters canonically identifying as non-binary are either

supernatural in some way, shape or form,

barely have a presence in the piece of media they’re in,

both.

Blink-and-you-miss-it-manner of representation aside, the majority of these characters fall squarely under what we call “Othering”.

“Othering” describes the practice of portraying minorities as supernatural creatures or otherwise inhuman. Or to say it bluntly: As “The Other”.

“Othering” is a pretty heinous method. Not only does it portray minorities as inherently abnormal and “different in a bad way”. It also goes directly against what representation is actually for: Normalizing.

As a general rule of thumb: If your piece of media has humans in it, but the only representation of non-white, non-straight people are explicitly inhuman... yeah, that’s bad.

So is there absolutely no positive representation for us out there?

Not quite.

As rare as human non-binary characters in media are to find, they do exist.

Here we have Bloodhound! A non-binary human hunter who uses they/them pronouns, from the game “Apex Legends”.

It’s been confirmed by the devs and the voice actress that they’re non-binary.

Nice!

These are Frisk (bottom) and Chara (top) from the game “Undertale”. While their exact gender identity hasn’t been disclosed, they both canonically use they/them pronouns, so it’s somewhere on the non-binary spectrum.

Two human children who act as the protagonist (Frisk) and antagonist (Chara), depending on how you play the game. (Interpretations vary on the antagonist/protagonist-thing, to say the least.)

Cool!

......

And, yep, that’s it.

As my little demonstration here showed, non-binary representation in media is rare. Good non-binary representation is even rarer.

Which is why those small examples of genuinely good representation are so important to the Non-binary community!

It’s hard enough to have to prove you exist. It’s even harder to prove your existence is not abnormal or unnatural.

If you’d like to further educate yourself on representation, it’s impact on society and why it matters, perhaps take a second to read through these articles:

https://www.criticalhit.net/opinion/representation-media-matters/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/why-on-screen-representation-matters-according-to-these-teens

https://jperkel.github.io/sciwridiversity2020/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2019/05/22/why-is-equal-representation-in-media-important/?sh=25f2ccc92a84

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/why-representation-the-media-matters

3. So What’s The Problem?

The problem, as is the case with so many things in the world, is prejudice.

Actually, that’s not true.

There’s not a problem, there are multiple problems. And their names are prejudice, ignorance and bigotry.

Remember how I said human non-binary representation is rare?

Yeah, very often media-fans don’t help.

Let’s take for example, the aforementioned Frisk and Chara from “Undertale”.

Despite the game explicitly using they/them to refer to both characters multiple times, the majority of players somehow got it into their heads that Frisk’s and Chara’s gender was “up for interpretation”.

There is a huge amount of fan art straight-up misgendering both characters and portraying them as binary and using only he/him or she/her pronouns.

The most egregious examples are two massively popular fan-animated web shows: “Glitchtale”, by Camila Cuevas and “Underverse” by Jael Peñaloza.

Both series are very beloved by the Undertale-fanbase and even outside of it. Meaning for many people, those two shows might be their first introduction to “Undertale” and it’s two non-binary human characters.

Take a wild guess what both Camila and Jael did with Frisk and Chara.

Underverse, X-Tale IV:

(Transcript: “Frisk lied to me in the worst possible way... I... I will never forgive him.”)

Underverse, X-Tale V:

(Transcript: “I-It’s Chara... and it’s a BOY.”)

Glitchtale, My Promise:

(Transcript: (Referring to Frisk) “I’m not scared of an angry boy anymore.”)

Glitchtale, Game Over Part 1:

(Transcript: (Referring to Chara) “It’s ok little boy.”)

This... this isn’t okay.

Not only do both of these pieces of fan-art misgender two non-binary characters, the creators knew beforehand that Frisk and Chara use they/them-pronouns, but made the conscious choice to ignore that.

To be fair, in a video discussing “Underverse”, Jael said that only X-Tale Frisk and Chara, the characters you see in the Underverse-examples above, are male, while the characters Frisk and Chara from the main game remained non-binary and used they/them (time-stamp 10:34).

Still, that doesn’t erase the fact that Jael made up alternate versions of two non-binary characters specifically to turn them male. Or that, while addressing the issue, Jael was incredibly dismissive and even mocked the people who felt hurt by her turning two non-binary characters male. Jael also went on to make a fairly non-binary-phobic joke in the video, in which she equated gender identities beyond male and female to identifying as an object.

Jael (translated): “I don’t care if people say the original Frisk and Chara are male, female, helicopters, chairs, dogs or cats, buildings, clouds...”

That’s actually a very common joke among transphobes, if not to say the transphobe-joke:

“Oh, you identify as X? Well then I identify as an attack helicopter!”

If you’re trans, chances are you’ve heard this one, or a variation of it, a million times before.

I certainly have.

I didn’t laugh then and I’m not laughing now.

(Author’s note: I might be angry at both of them for what they did, but I do not, under any circumstances, support the harassment of creators. If you’re thinking about sending either Jael or Camila hate-mail - don’t. It won’t help.)

Jael’s reaction is sadly common in the Undertale fandom. Anyone speaking up against Chara’s and Frisk’s identity being erased is immediately bludgeoned with the “up for interpretation”-argument, despite that not once being the case in the game.

And even with people who do it right and portray Frisk and Chara as they/them, you’ll have dozens of commenters swarming the work with sentences among the lines of “Oh but I think Frisk is a boy/girl! And Chara is a girl/boy!”

By the way, this kind of thing only happens to Frisk and Chara.

Every other character in “Undertale” is referred to and portrayed with their proper pronouns of she/her or he/him.

But not the characters who go by they/them.

Their gender is “up for interpretation”.

Because obviously, their identity couldn’t possibly be canonically non-binary.

Sadly, Frisk and Chara are not alone in this.

Remember Bloodhound?

And how I said they’d been confirmed as non-binary and using they/them pronouns by both the creators and the voice actress?

It seems for many players, that too translated to “up for interpretation”.

(Transcript: “does it matter what they call him? He, her, it, they toaster oven, it doesn’t matter”)

(Transcript: “I’m like 90 % sure Bloodhound is a dude because he could just sound like a girl and by their age that I’m assuming looks around 10-12 because I’ve known many males who have sounded like a female when they were younger”)

(Transcript: “I don’t care it will always be a He. F*ck that non-binary bullsh*t.”)

(Transcript: “Bloodhound is clearly female.”)

(Transcript: “I’m not calling a video game character they/them”)

(Transcript: “exactly. The face was never fully shown neither was the gender so I’d say it means that the player is Bloodhound. So it’s your gender and you refer to “him” as yourself. It’s like a self insertion in my eyes.”)

So, let me get this straight:

If a character, even a player character, uses she/her or he/him, you can accept it, no questions asked.

But when a character uses they/them, suddenly their identity and gender are “up for interpretation”?

This attitude is also widely prevalent in real life.

Many languages only include pronouns for men and women, with no third option available. Non-binary people are often forced to make up their own terms, because their language doesn’t provide one.

Non-binary people often don’t fit within other people’s ideas of gender, so they get excluded altogether. Worse, non-binary people are often the victims of misgendering, denial of their identity or even straight-up violence when coming out.

People will often tell us that we look like a certain gender, so we should only use one set of gendered pronouns. Never mind that that’s not what we want. Never mind that that’s not who we are.

Non-binary people are also largely omitted from legal documentation and studies. We cannot identify as non-binary at our workplace, because using they/them pronouns is considered “unprofessional”. We don’t have our own bathrooms like men and women do. Our gender is seen as less valid than male and female, so even that basic thing is denied to us. I’ve had to use the women’s restroom my entire life, because if I go into a male restroom, I’ll be yelled at or made fun off or simply get told I took the wrong door. It’s extremely uncomfortable for me and I wish I didn’t have to do it.

And since non-binary people aren’t seen as “real transgender-people”, we often don’t receive the medical care we need. This often renders us unable to feel good within our bodies, because the treatment and help we get is wildly inadequate.

It’s especially horrible for intersex people (people who are born with sex characteristics that don’t fit solely into the male/female category) who are often forced to change their bodies to fit within the male/female gender binary.

And you better believe each of those problems is increased ten-fold for non-binary people of color.

We are ignored and dismissed as “confused”, because of who we are.

Representation is a way for Non-binary people to show the world they exist, that they’re here and that they too have stories to tell.

But how can we, when every character that represents us is either othered, barely there or gets taken away from us?

We are not “up for interpretation”.

Neither are the characters in media who share our identity.

And it’s time to stop pretending we ever were.

For more information about Non-Binary Erasure and how harmful it is, you can check out these articles:

https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/08/common-non-binary-erasure/

https://www.dailydot.com/irl/nonbinary-people-racism/

https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Nonbinary_erasure

https://traj.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/traj.422/

https://medium.com/an-injustice/everyday-acts-of-non-binary-erasure-49ee970654fb

https://medium.com/national-center-for-institutional-diversity/the-invisible-labor-of-liberating-non-binary-identities-in-higher-education-3f75315870ec

https://musingsofanacademicasexual.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/dear-sirmadam-a-commentary-on-non-binary-erasure/

4. How Do We Fix It?

Well, first things first: Stop acting like we don’t exist.

And kindly stop other people from doing it too.

We are a part of the LGBT+ community and we deserve to be acknowledged, no matter what our pronouns are.

Address non-binary people with the right pronouns. Don’t argue with them about their identity, don’t comment on how much you think they look like a boy or a girl. Just accept them and be respectful.

If a non-binary person tells you they have two sets of pronouns, for example he/him and they/them, don’t just use one set of pronouns. That can come off as disingenuous. Alternate between the pronouns, don’t leave one or the other out. It’ll probably be hard at first, but if you keep it up, you’ll get used to it pretty quickly.

If you’re witnessing someone harass a non-binary person over their identity, step in and help them.

And please, don’t partake in non-binary erasure in media fandoms.

Don’t misgender non-binary characters, don’t “speculate” on what you think their gender might be. You already know their gender and it’s non-binary. It costs exactly 0 $ to be a decent human being and accept that.

Support Non-Binary people by educating yourself about them and helping to normalize and integrate their identity.

In fact, here’s a list of petitions, organizations and articles who will help you do just that:

https://www.change.org/p/collegeboard-let-students-use-their-preferred-name-on-collegeboard-9abad81a-0fdf-435c-8fca-fe24a5df6cc7?source_location=topic_page

6 Ways to Support Your Non-Binary Child

7 Non-Negotiables for Supporting Trans & Non-Binary Students in Your Classroom

If Your Partner Just Came Out As Non-Binary, Here’s How To Support Them

How to Support Your Non-Binary Employees, Colleagues and Friends

Ko-fi page for the Nonbinary Wiki

The Sylvia Rivera Project, an organization who aims to give low-income and non-white transgender, intersex and non-binary people a voice

The Anti Violence Project “empowers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and HIV-affected communities and allies to end all forms of violence through organizing and education, and supports survivors through counseling and advocacy."

The Trans Lifeline, a hotline for transgender people by transgender people

Tl:DR: Non-Binary representation is important. Non-Binary people still suffer from society at large not acknowledging our existence and forcing us to conform. Don’t be part of that problem by taking away what little representation we have. Educate yourself and do better instead. We deserve to be seen and heard.

#non-binary #agender #demigender #gender identity #essay #erasure #lgbt representation #misgendering #undertale #she ra spop #apex bloodhound #doppelganger #steven universe

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maxwell-grant · 3 years

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Charlie Chan. Who is fascinating, because he was created explictly to be an anti-Yellow Peril character. Unlike most Chinese characters of the time, he's both intelligent, physically capable, and unambiguously heroic. In the novels, he's simultaneously proud of being Chinese AND proud of being an American citizen. He gives orders and instructions to white people, and the narrative treats this as perfectly normal and acceptable. There's a bit in the first book, when an attempt to trap the..(1/2)

(cont'd)There's a bit in the first book where an attempt to trap the protagonist fails, because a message supposedly from Charlie clearly isn't because Charlie's English isn't broken, it's like poetry. Etc. The movies made him more stereotypical, & played by white actors in yellowface, but still, he's a heroic Chinese man, who is as capable and patriotic as any white man. Nowadays, he's thought of as racist caricature. Which he is, but still, it makes one think.

I'm not nearly as acquainted with Charlie Chan as you are (and I definitely suspected he was less racist in the original books because that's nearly always the norm when it comes to pulp characters) but yeah, that "Which he is" is forever going to be the most unfortunate and saddest part of it all when it comes to Charlie Chan. For all the virtues that can be bestowed on Charlie Chan, for everything great that the character had going for him and inspired, the fact that the least offensive image of the character I could find to put here for illustration's sake is from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon kinda exemplifies the big elephant in the room when it comes to Charlie.

Charlie Chan is a great example of two things: One is the way progress is never a fixed quantity and often what was progressive and forward-thinking in it's time can become something outdated and backwards and downright offensive given enough time, and the 2nd is my constant stressing that this is all the more incentive to reclaim the pulps and either highlight or fix aspects of them, instead of dismissing every aspect of them based on the preconception that everything about it's history is unforgivably bigoted and must be handled with the nuance of a sledgehammer.

I stress time and time again the need to highlight and understand the prejudices that went into pulps, because either ignoring them or wielding them as a weapon to attack them does no favors to anyone. The pulps weren't exceptionally bigoted - look at literally any medium in it's time period and you'll find bigotry and prejudice and hatred - and they were exceptional in the number of POC heroes and heroines. Pulps were a medium of experimentation and cheap entertainment that gave way to much, much more varied kinds of protagonists than were permitted in films, serials, novels, comics and radio serials of the day. Imagine if no one was allowed to bring up and discuss superheroes without mentioning the Superman Slap-a-Jap posters or the Captain Marvel story so horrifingly racist it was recounted by an American ambassador after it deeply offended a friend's son and a major influence on the 1950s anti-comic trials. "Pulp fiction had deeply, unforgivingly racist depictions that deserve intense scrutiny and cannot be ignored" and "Pulp fiction was significantly ahead of every other medium at the time in regards to authors and editors striving to publish stories about heroic POCs, this cannot be dismissed and is something that needs to be perpetuated" are not exclusive facts. "A product of it's time" is not an excuse and never was, but it's a fact nevertheless.

Every time someone speaks favorably of Charlie Chan in any capacity, they have to start with a long preface of everything positive that the character had going for him. Yes, he's a deliberate subversion of the Yellow Peril, he's a heroic protagonist, he's plump and good-natured and humorous but far from a joke, he's friendly and pleasant and well-educated and wise, he's a good dad and family man and a terrifically sharp detective who's so good at his job he gets called to solve crimes all over the world, and none of these traits are apparent to people who have to google the character and repeteadly see a white man in awful make-up into every single image of the character, who watch the movies and cringe at the broken English. It's hardly relevant in the face of all the Asian-American critics who acknowledge the character's virtues but rightfully point out that this fortune-cookie spouting caricature, acting subservient to whites and whose virtues are based around his proximity to a white American ideal, doesn't represent them and they shouldn't pretend it does.

Which isn't to say that to like Charlie Chan is "wrong", a lot of East Asians love Charlie and the character's obviously got fans in Asian Americans. It's a complicated subject and I obviously cannot begin to vouch in a subject so heavily based around perceptions I cannot experience. And I deeply detest the idea of speaking for others on their particular experiences on this kind of matter, which is something Americans do a lot everytime they talk about representation in media.

So instead, I'm going to tackle this on a roundabout manner by going on an unrelated tangent to bring up an example of representation that isn't quite representative of what it's supposed to be, has a lot of issues that have been dissected by critics among the people it was supposed to represent, and none of that stopped the character from being popular and beloved and from being claimed anyway. And it's a Brazilian fighting game character, which means it's completely within my ballpark.

Yeah, obviously Blanka doesn't look like anyone who lives in Brazil (whatever resemblance he bears to redheaded jungle protectors of Brazilian folklore is purely accidental). Obviously neither Jimmy nor Blanka are Brazilian names or even exist in the Portuguese lexicon. Obviously there are issues in Street Fighter's approach to representation across the board, sure, and I'd actually say Laura is much worse than Blanka in that regard (again, my opinion, obviously not universal), but the fact remains that Blanka is and has always been pretty controversial. Obviously there's Brazilians who took offense to Blanka and they weren't wrong to do so, and I obviously do not speak for everyone here, that goes without saying.

Obviously the idea that Brazil's major representative in a global cast of characters, the first big name Brazilian character in videogames, is going to be a freakish jungle monster who roars and bites faces has problems, as is the fact that all the others get to be regular people representing fighting styles from their countries while Blanka doesn't. None of the Brazilian SF characters represent Capoeira, which is kinda shitty to be honest. And there's a whole stereotype of Brazil as a backwards land of beasts and savages that Blanka's creation played into. There's no shortage of ground to criticize Blanka's representation and Ono actually apologized in an interview once, but then he learned one teensy little thing:

Street Fighter is very popular on Brazil. Would you like to leave a message to the fans from there?

"Ono: Yes, I'm aware. At the time of Street Fighter II a lot of the arcade machines produced went there, so I knew we had lots of fans there. A message to Brazilians, well, I'd like to apologize. I know Blanka's a weird character and I don't want any Brazilian to feel uncomfortable with that.

When Blanka was conceived, we knew there were forests in Brazil, and so we thought he could look like that. I was actually kinda nervous knowing I'd meet Brazilian journalists. Still, this is the first Street Fighter in ten years, so we'd like all fans to play, including Brazilians, which are many.

Thanks. Well, but you should know that Brazilians love Blanka

"Ono: Ah, good! I was scared of getting beat up if I ever went to São Paulo! (laughs)"

(That's from a 2012 tv special called The Greatest Brazilian of All Time where over a million viewers voted to elect whoever they wanted, and Blanka was going to win. He was polling ahead of Aryton Senna and PELÉ, fucking Pelé, yes this happened. He wasn't even disqualified for being a cartoon character, it was an open poll, he was disqualified due to canon stating he had been born in Thailand, which I think may have been retconned since then. Again, A MILLION BRAZILLIANS voted for this contest, and Blanka was going to win.)

Blanka is great and sweet and lovable, he made the best out of the incredible shitty hands fate dealt him and became a cool and strong green man who shoots lightning and flies, a self-taught warrior who rides whales and planes to fighting tournaments, and he loves his mom and friends and kicks ass and after he's done he dances in joy and gives the kids of his village piggyback rides, and Brazil loves him. He doesn't represent any existing person or fighting style, he's rooted in a negative stereotype and incorrect assumptions, he's not even really Brazilian, and he's our boy and nobody can take him away from us.

No criticism of Blanka, no matter how in-depth or even right it is, is ever going to affect that, because regardless of what was wrong or misguided and offensive about him, we claimed him and loved him so throughly that Capcom kept playing up Brazilian representation in every subsequent game post Alpha, and because of Blanka's impact and reception in such a big game, Brazilian characters have become a staple of fighting games, and that's how we got much more diverse representatives in those games. Fighting games have more Brazilian representation than LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE on media not produced here. It started as BAD representation, with way less thought put into it than Charlie Chan, and it still mattered to a lot of Brazilians who reclaimed it and made it better than it was ever intended to be, and as a response to it, it gradually became better.

Progress is not a fixed quantity, it's an uphill battle, and it's not unwinnable. Everything's gotta start somewhere.

The Good Asian is a ongoing comic that I think does the best job I've seen yet of handling an Asian American detective protagonist, which is not really a high bar in the first place, and more to the point, The Good Asian illustrates the 2nd part: the reclaiming. The Good Asian deals a lot with the realities that a 1930s Asian-American detective would run into, the strained circumstances and relationships between said character and the world around him, because it's born from an author who took a look at Charlie Chan and Mr Moto and the like and recognized the potential in those stories that could not be fulfilled in it's time period by the people writing said stories.

The Good Asian pays little reverence to Charlie Chan, but it acknowledges that it cannot exist without Charlie Chan, and it reclaims the Charlie Chan premise at the hands of someone more adequately equipped to tell a gripping story that goes places none of Charlie's contemporaries would ever go. Regardless of how good or bad of representation Charlie Chan was, Charlie Chan mattered and was beloved and inspired a better example for others to improve on or rebel against.

I desperately wish that I could google Charlie Chan without having to look at a guy in yellowface, and the ONLY way that's going to happen is if the character ever gets meaningfully brought back and reclaimed for good by people who can meaningfully tackle the character and present him as he should have always been presented.

And then, I imagine it would be a lot easier to show people on how swell Charlie really is. A true, positive role model and hero, who no longer has to look like a gross cartoon to be able to exist at all. Who can finally be what he was always meant to be, and always was deep down.

#replies tag #pulp heroes #pulp fiction #charlie chan #detective fiction #the good asian #street fighter #blanka

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scripttorture · 4 years

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My setting is a fantasy historical setting set roughly around the late 1800s to early 1900s that focuses on a fantasy species currently subjugated by humanity. They're generally forced to serve on the front lines of an ongoing war, in part because they're seen as "not people" and "repairable". A major antagonist is a human member of the military who is officially supposed to be treating their injuries but who has the blanket approval of the government to do what he feels is best. (medical 1/2)

As a result, he often purposefully lets soldiers die or lie there in agony if he feels they've been disrespectful or disobedient to him- death is not permanent for this species, so he isn't really wasting soldiers. His motivations are both to have a more "obedient" army and some degree of bigotry from being raised with the idea that these beings' lives don't matter. (medical 2/3) Would the withholding of medical treatment by a government official be torture if it were motivated by similar motives to most torturers (ie political difference, belonging to a specific group, wanting obedience/information)? Do you have any advice on this setting or story? Thanks in advance! (medical 3/3)

I think that this fits with a lot of the general pattern of how torture occurs but- My instinct is that the legal definition probably matters less in this case.

In terms of the time period I think this is before our world had international laws against torture. It’s before this sort of thing was codified in a standardised fashion. This doesn’t change the effects but it does change things like- what a culture views as torture.

In our terms? Yes I think this meets the legal definition of torture. It’s conducted by a government official who has power over/responsibility for, these victims. He knows his actions are causing pain. And he’s doing it to punish them, individually and collectively, which is one of the possible motivations listed in anti-torture law.

That means that it’s likely the research I talk about is relevant to what you’re writing.

But we shouldn’t ignore cultural views of particular practices. By which I mean that commonly held unethical views impact your world building and characters.

This pattern of individual and collective punishment was common in most armies historically and is still used today. Forced exercise as punishment has led to deaths in UK army training facilities and (prosecuted as such or not) this is torture. Whippings, beatings, stress positions and starvation have all been used historically to ‘punish’ members of the military. In fact much of today’s clean torture might come from European military punishments.

(Side note, the origin of any one particular torture is incredibly hard to trace and since they are simplistic it’s likely they don’t have one standard point of origin.)

As general advice- I think it’s worth considering what these subjugated people get from being part of the army.

There have been a lot of historical cases where subjugated people and second class citizens were an integral part of a country’s armed forces. But if violence and threats are the only ‘reasons’ for participation then the results are unlikely to be positive.

If you’re aiming for a system with a reasonable ‘success’ rate (we are taking success to be a non-human who is an obedient part of this army and makes a reasonable effort to fulfil most of their duties) then I think there should be some kind of benefit to the soldiers themselves.

It doesn’t have to be a big positive and you can use it to highlight just how shit their general situation is.

I’ve got a broadly similar scenario in one of my stories: with a fantasy sub-class that’s strongly associated with the armed forces.

The reasoning that I came up with was that life was genuinely better for them as part of the military. They were systematically barred from ordinary jobs and housing, the other main employment option open to them was a particularly dangerous form of mining and without some sort of patron they were routinely attacked and harassed. The military consistently provided shelter, food and a higher degree of comfort/security then the other options open to them.

In contrast to the mines, where their kind routinely went unfed and were typically dumped on the street when too injured to work, the military looked like a ‘good’ option. Not so much ‘positive’ as ‘better then the typical alternatives’.

I’d encourage you to think of similar back-handed ‘benefits’ in your story. Better food, better pay, perks that benefit their family, something that gives an understandable reason for these people to stick around.

I’d caution against trying to make it completely impossible for them to escape or refuse orders because that’s never the case in reality and doing that makes these people… well less human, less relatable.

For analogous situations in real military organisations you might want to look up the British Empire’s sepoys and the role of black soldiers such as Thomas-Alexandre Dumas* and the men who served under him in European armies.

In the sort of environment you’re building up I think that a lot of these supernatural people would know about what this doctor is like. They might not know the specifics of what he does, but the rumour mill is likely to make it clear he does something bad.

This doesn’t mean that characters will always be able to avoid him and it doesn’t mean every character would hear the rumours. But people in these situations, where an abusive figure is in an entrenched position of power, do try to warn each other.

It’s common for people in these situations to try and help each other and try to resist. The methods available to them are often small and sometimes ineffective but I think it’s important to try and capture the attempt.

One of the things I’ve noticed in fiction that uses abusive situations with this kind of hierarchy is that there’s a tendency to ignore any action that isn’t obvious and violent. You occasionally write about the victims attacking abusers or enablers and we write about escape attempts. But we generally ignore other smaller acts. Sabotaging equipment or plans, victims educating each other, helping each other, prayer, ‘magic’, keeping illegal traditions alive.

I think cutting out these smaller acts can flatten the portrayal of victims. It presents a false binary of responses: passive acceptance or violent resistance. And that makes resistance appear much rarer then it is in reality.

In situations like the one you describe survival and self expression can be forms of resistance.

If you’re not writing about a real world group of people then I think concerted historical research in that area is less important. By which I mean: if you’re showing a fictional group then you want to capture the kind of responses that happen in this situation rather then say specific aspects of Cuban culture and history.

I’ve found reading about the history of black resistance to slavery in the new world a really good starting point for understanding… well how people respond in systematically awful abusive situations. That’s partly because it is really well studied and recorded. (And also available in a variety of languages). I’m not sure what to recommend as a good starting point though. James’ The Black Jacobins is traditional, I also liked Barcias’ West African Warfare in Brazil and Cuba but it’s been a while since I read it and the focus was violent resistance.

People keep their humanity even in terrible environments and I think it’s important to try and capture that.

For the doctor himself there are two sources I’d suggest looking at. The first (somewhat inevitably) is the appendices of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth where he describes two torturers he treated for mental health problems. The second is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

I’m suggesting that as well because of the examples it gives of doctors who were definitely not acting in the best interests of their patients. The focus of the book is the origin of the HeLa cell line, the standard cell line in all medical testing. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that Henrietta Lacks’ cells changed medicine and the production of pharmaceuticals forever. Research on these cancer cells has done immeasurable good.

They were also taken from a dying black woman in America without her consent. People have made billions off of these cells while the Lacks family never received a penny.

And doctors have done indefensibly dangerous things with them.

I think having a look at both will help you find a way to frame this doctor’s personality and the way he justifies his actions. Because while he is a torturer there are more discussions of that in a policing or military context then there are in a medical one.

I’ve found that discussions of doctors as torturers tend towards a different set of tropes. They’re more likely to assume that the abuse is an experiment, without questioning whether the record keeping, accounting for variables etc is strict enough to yield meaningful results. They also tend to portray the torturer as ‘charming’. And there can be significant ableist ideas (anti-disability and anti mental illness prejudice) built into the story.

The kind of situation you’ve outlined is already pretty realistic in a lot of respects: this is the kind of situation where you see doctors acting as torturers.

But it’s also not how authors tend to approach writing doctors as torturers. Which means I’m not sure what to add. I think you’ve already avoided most of the usual traps by virtue of how you’ve constructed the setting.

Overall I think this a pretty solid idea. It has enough similarities to real world historical situations that it feels ‘real’. And there are plenty of sources to draw from. It brings in fantasy elements in a way that I think is really interesting, almost playing out generational trauma within the same generation. And it feels like an original situation. I don’t often see doctors used in this way or the combination of period and fantasy elements you’re proposing.

I think it’s going to be a very interesting story and I wish you the best of luck. :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

*No not that Dumas, his dad. The other one.

#writing advice #tw torture #tw medical abuse #tw slavery #fantasy ask #historical fiction #writing victims #writing torturers #writing survivors #doctors and torture #collective punishment #military torture #military punishments #coercion #resistance #medical abuse

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weaselbeaselpants · 4 years

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That Krispy Cat: A Warning, part 3

The last of the images cause I don’t want this bitch on my computer anymore.

Knowing tumblr I kept the images hidden JUUUUST in case no one reads the fine print and can’t tell I’m being critical of this and gets me in trouble.

VVV ((Just in case you thought the JewishGriffon piece assured everyone that Crispy couldn’t POSSIBLY hate people of color, some of her earliest Nazi art had her character Klaus beating up Amigo Bear. She also made Amigo into a liberal strawman. )) VVV

((Dialogue to one of her TROLLARIOUS pictures that featured Amigo:

Amigo Bear: *muttering* "Your leader was a !@#$% little #@%^!@$^*!, you fascist feather duster..." General Klaus: "Fräulein, Ich vant you to cover your ears und shut your eyes as tight as you can." Crispy: "How come, General?" General Klaus: "Klaus ist about to say und do very bad sings zhat he does not vant his little Edelweiß to see or hear." Crispy: "Alrighty!" General Klaus: "WHO SAID ZHAT ABOUT DER FÜHRER? WER DIE FICK GESAGT? WHO'S ZUH SCHLEIMIG LITTLE COMMUNIST-SCHEISS SCHWANZLUTSCHER DOWN ZHERE, WHO JUST SIGNED HIS OWN DEATH VARRANT? NIEMAND?! GOTTVERDAMMT STALIN SAID IT! HERVORRAGEND! VHICH VUN OF YOU VANTS TO BE ZUH FIRST TO FIND OUT ZUH HARD VAY VHY MEIN FEINDE CALLED MIR DER BUTCHER BIRD?" ))

^^^ ((BUTOPHERARTISGOODSOYOUCAN’TCOMPLAIN

also the disc. for this pic before it was deleted had a ‘joke’ about cooking Jews in ovens. Oh and yes, that IS Hitler she’s giving that ugly ass cupcake too.))

^^^ (( - Thanks dA I never would have known I had a notifications unless eclipse blah -

This is one of her rants about how #Triggered she is that Starlight be compared to the Nazis when she runs a communist cult. Because A) that’s the real problem here and B) I too get upset when people say my OC is based on Jeffrey Dahmer when he’s so CLEARLY based on Ed Gein, Bwwwaaaah D> D> D> !)) ^^^

VVV ((Ugly art of her friend’s awful OCs.)) ^^^

VVV ((Crispy showing off why no one wants to be a patriot in our country.)) VVV

((FYI, Crisp, that attitude will make the Hamilton fans stronger so just keep that SJW-flinging coming you little SJW.

WHAT?! Social Justice is a broad term and as Crispy’s plainly demonstrated, you can circle it around and make a majority-class sound like the real underprivledged if you have enough fancy frou frou know-how and furries. Also, if a Social Justice Warrior constitutes someone who takes their cause soooo seriously that they’re annoying/petting/cruel/stupid about it....idk I think Crispy qualified.))

^^^ ((Crispy and her friend muse about what other races occupy the world of MLP in her headcanon. This, more than any other dA disc. and picture shows you her brand of “Segregationist-Nationalism is OKAY” thinking, cuz the art of these different races isn’t super offensive or cruel and neither are the characters. BUT if you scratch under the surface you’ll find that Crispy really likes these different people staying in their place and not in “someone else’s” country.

THEN, this same kind of thinking is used to convince you any mix of cultures is just cultural appropriation, again acting like she and her Nazi-stans are the only ones standing up to actual bigotry.)) VVV

^^^ ((Crispy makes the world a worse place by bringing up actual decent points; like how Americans dress Thanksgiving up as progressive and for the natives when we all know that’s not true...all to better her worldview.

fyi, GET OUT whenever you see a selfproclaimed Nazi fawn over Native Americans, because: Nazi Germany had a deep fascination with American Indians and used their struggles about their land being taken away from them to justify their eugenic genocide.)) ^^^

^^^ (( Crispy laughing it up on Furaffinity how she couldn’t be banned from her Furaffinity and then mysteriously never using her site there wowie.)) ^^^

^^^ (( Crispy complaining about SOPA cause her freedom of speech and blahblahblah.

Freedom of Speech is important. Unfortunately what people like Crispy don’t understand or care for is there’s no freedom of consequence. )) vvv

VVV ((LOL Joseph Mengele was such a stinkah let’s tell blithe jokes about him. At least WE AREN’T LIKE HIM!!!)) VVVV

VVV ((Early onset eugenic BS from her Spyro stuff that would be easy to miss if you didn’t know what this woman was talking about)) VVV

((Crispy admitting she thinks gays are pointless cuz they don’t reproduce but apparently loves them anyway. Also big shock Crispy’s seen Hetalia.)) VVV

VVV ((Crispy probably wanting Weeaboos to attack her cuz aren’t Japan’s animations so laaaaaaazy?!!?!? GUUdd think’ I’m a naziaboo! Germany’s never made any shitty animation evah. You know what, I lied. She doesn’t deserve Hetalia. She just doesn’t.)) VVVV

VVV ((Crispy dragging Brazil down with her as the apparent “Best South American Country”. Yikes.)) VVV

VVV ((More “it’s trolling ergo it’s not harmful” shit. Bulgarians probably do deserve their own Care Bears, but they certainly don’t want yours Crispy.)) VVV

VVV ((Disc. for her Richard Spencer bear art)) VVV

------

I know, I know...this isn’t what you wanted to read today, guys. I know it’s offensive and I’m sorry if it made you ill. I also know I’m putting my own blog under fire by showing these images here but I think that should say something about dA’s bad policies that this art gets a filter slapped on it and nothing more when the artist is blatantly pro-fascist.

Crispy resonates with me so much - and no it’s not cause I DARED to be “triggered”.

It’s because, for one, she was talented. I MEAN I HAVE EYES! That’s some nicely drawn digital stuff I’m not gonna deny. She had some cool rewrites and sequel ideas that, had it come from someone else I would have eaten up and faved to hell and back onceupona2012. But I didn’t, where a ton of MLP and furry fans did because they undervalued their own talents and would say “well it’s pretty who cares about the message?”

Unlike so many commercial+published artists, it’s REALLY hard to separate the art from the artist here because the artist is so connected and a part of her art and storytelling. If you fav her art, even if you didn’t like her, that was telling Crispy she’d won. It’s so defeating to have other artists say their gonna ignore their gut for the sake of prettypretty-Don-Bluth style art. And yes, that stigma DOES affect my view on 2D purists btw.

Crispy was so holier than thou’, and that attitude also was appealing to dA folks, not to mention her knowledge of art history by the time she dropped off the radar. Crispy was the kind of person who’d make long, detailed, justified rants against the design and color choices in Hazbin Hotel and then a bunch of antis would eat her redesigns up only to learn the awful truth later and embarrass themselves cuz they were so taken up by the craft they didn’t know they were reblogging a fucking Nazi.

Not to underplay Viv’s wrongdoings of course, but I’m sorry; the two aren’t comparable on the problematic artist meter. THAT’S HOW BAD CRISPY WAS.

If this somehow was just a faze and she’s come to her senses or doesn’t really think this shite she preaches...I don’t care. She said some vile shit and fuck no I’m not forgiving her. It’s like KenDraw or Shadman. You’ve changed your life around and realized you’ve done/drawn nasty shit that’s done real harm? Cool....I’m still not talking or ever promoting you, ya dingbat. You ain’t no Roman Polanski or Doug Tennaple. You’re a singular internet artist and any support of the project has to go to you - and you suck!

ThisCrispyKat was a wakeup call that showed me these people not only still exist but will be allowed to get away with it. I was very touchy bout this kind of thing back in the day. Fuck, I STILL AM TOUCHY. The rabbit holes I found thanks to Crispy opened up to reveal communities where people think my hair color’s going extinct. People would detail how much they wanted to rape me - a natural blonde - and kill my friends and family for not looking like me. That they want to jerk off in my naturally curly hair and see me in glowy German princess gowns preparing them dinner.

Crispy and other Nazistans would look at me; a blond-haired blue eyed Polish/German American woman and think I need to be “fixed” because I DARE to repeat propaganda that the Nazis were bad. They’d call me a traitor for thinking that celebrating the Nazi party ISN’T German pride.

HOW DARE YOU TELL ME THAT’S GERMAN PRIDE! I’LL SHOW YOU GERMAN PRIDE YOU EGOSTROKING-LIMPDICKED ATTENTION WHORES.

People like Crispy make it 1000x harder to actually show interest in German things. Because I AM interested in German shit btw.

Like for real: it’s a country I’d love to visit one day (at least the black forest, which is where my mom’s fam comes from). I love German art and German fairytales slap. I really do want to explore my heritage through art and stuff.

But guess what? Much as Crispy would argue to the contrary I DO know my WWII history and beyond and FUCK YOU if you honestly think jerking it to cuddly Nazi-furs is empowering or just “showing your interest in history”. Take your own advice and read a god-damn book.

TL;DR: I DO NOT have to be proud of Nazis to enjoy German culture and if you think otherwise, FUCK YOU. It’s a slap in the face to everyone even if you are ‘just trolling’ and it in no way values actual German’s feeling on the matter. It’s annoying how people undervalue real people just for the sake of fan art.

The Nazis were evil. They were racist, eugenic-genocidal idiots who killed over six million Jewish people, Romani, Slavs, Jehovahs Witnesses, disabled people, Poles, homosexuals and prisoners of war. They would have killed my dad’s side of the family if they were in Poland at the time. They made bullshit tanks that killed the people making them and didn’t work on the battlefield. Their leader was a fat, farting one-testicaled bastard who preferred animals to people.

They ruined everything for everyone and then took the easy way out, leaving the Germans that were left in the hands of the also-genocidal Soviets and Americans. Germany is still paying their war debts and now, 70-80 years later everyone else wants to laugh off this dark period of history with memes and forget what they did, and as such, are forgetting the victims of the genocide.

I have 0 tolerance for Nazi things for the sake of HUMANITY, let alone the individual groups they target. I don’t have to have German ancestry or know a single Jewish person to tell you any of this. It’s fucking history.

Eat shit.

#tw: nazi #tw: neonazi #tw: swastika #tw: antisemitism #cultural appropriation #kimba the white lion #thiscrispykat #altright #classic spyro #My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #balto #animals of farthing wood

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redbeardace · 5 years

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The Equality Act

What is the Equality Act?

If you’ve paid attention to politics (in the US) over the past few weeks, the Equality Act has been name-checked quite frequently. It was listed as a Day One priority of virtually every major Democratic presidential candidate at a recent town hall. It was brought up in response to a recent pair of Supreme Court employment discrimination cases, one involving a gay man, the other involving a trans woman, both of whom were fired after coming out. But what is it?

The Equality Act is an update to a number of federal anti-discrimination laws, primarily the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This act explicitly provides anti-discrimination protection on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. You can read the full text of it here, but if you don’t feel like it, the basic summary is that it’s mostly a Find-And-Replace job, substituting “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)” for the word “sex” in existing anti-discrimination laws.

Why is the Equality Act important?

Right now, across the entire US, it is illegal for someone to be fired due to their sexual orientation or gender identity. In many states, there is a specific state law prohibiting this form of discrimination. However, in the rest of the states, where there isn’t an explicitly state law, it’s prohibited because of an interpretation of the word “sex” in existing anti-discrimination laws.

These existing laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. For a plain, simple example, that means that you can’t reject a qualified candidate for a job, simply because she’s a woman. Sex cannot be the deciding factor.

And that’s where the interpretation comes in. Over the years, guidance of federal agencies and findings in court cases have held that this protection on the basis of sex extends to sexual orientation and gender identity. Let me tell a quick pair of stories to illustrate:

1: You have a hardworking, recently promoted employee named Alex. One Monday morning, Alex comes into the office, sporting a shiny new ring. Intrigued, you ask about it. “I got married to Elizabeth on Saturday!”, comes the excited reply. You congratulate Alex and wish him a happy life.

2. You have a hardworking, recently promoted employee named Alex. One Monday morning, Alex comes into the office, sporting a shiny new ring. Intrigued, you ask about it. “I got married to Elizabeth on Saturday!”, comes the excited reply. You fire Alex and throw the contents of her desk on the street.

In this scenario, the only difference between Alex and Alex is their sex. Their sexual orientation is effectively irrelevant. You fired Alexandra for doing something you would have been fine with Alexander doing, therefore you have illegally discriminated against Alexandra on the basis of sex.

Or so says the interpretation.

The thing about an interpretation of this kind is that it’s fragile. It’s great when you have LGBTQ-friendly people at the wheel. But all it takes is one fascist dictator wannabe to tell the federal agencies to change their mind. All it takes is five people in black robes with a lean to the right to say “Nah, I think it means this”.

And that’s where we are today.

The court cases heard last month will be decided next June, and there is a very real possibility that the Supreme Court will reject the interpretation that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected on the basis of sex. If that happens, it will immediately become legal to fire people or refuse housing or kick someone off a bus for being gay or being trans in more than half of the states in this country.

So that’s bad.

The Equality Act, by explicitly including protection for sexual orientation and gender identity, will make it clear that kind of discrimination is illegal. It won’t be open to interpretation, and will be far more resistant to the direction of the wind in DC.

What else should I know about the Equality Act?

It explicitly provides protection for intersex people. When I did a survey of state-level anti-discrimination laws earlier this year, I found that intersex people were largely ignored. That leaves them in legal limbo land where maybe they’re protected and maybe not. The Equality Act includes “sex characteristics, including intersex traits” under the definition of “sex”, and would thereby unambiguously include that in all of the protections provided. However, while the Equality Act is a step in the right direction, but it does not address specific intersex issues.

It covers the “perception or belief, even if inaccurate” case, which plugs some potential loopholes in protection.

It is worded vaguely enough to protect agender and non-binary people, but it does not explicitly mention them.

Unfortunately, sexual orientation is defined as a specific, enumerated list: “homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality”. Asexual and pansexual, etc., are not included. This is a common failure of many anti-discrimination laws. I doubt it’s born of malice. Instead, it’s a combination of ignorance and inertia. So many existing laws define it this way, it’s easy to copy and paste without thinking. I prefer the language in New York City’s ordinance: “A continuum of sexual orientation exists and includes, but is not limited to, heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, asexuality and pansexuality.”

There is no mention of romantic or affectional orientation in the Equality Act. This strikes me as a huge hole. Not only does this mean it completely leave out protection for aromantic people, it opens a loophole for discrimination based on romantic orientation of all types.

Nothing in the Equality Act tries to fix unnecessarily gendered language that exists in the law. That would be a far more involved undertaking.

So where does the Equality Act stand?

The Equality Act has been passed in the House of Representatives, where it was a priority of the Democratic majority there. After passage, it was sent to the Senate, where it will die, because the Republican majority there wants nothing to do with it. And the President wouldn’t have signed it anyway. There is no chance in hell that it will be passed before 2021, and even that would require Democrats holding the House, taking the Senate, and getting the White House.

So, you see, that’s a bit of a problem. The Supreme Court’s ruling on these cases will come out in June 2020...

What you can do about it!

VOTE.

And vote for the Democrat where applicable. Republicans are actively opposed to this issue. You have seen what happens when Republicans have control over the government and it is up to you to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Yeah, sure, Democrats aren’t perfect, but they’re a hell of a lot better than this fascist clown show and homophobic sidekick we have now, so vote Democrat and then keep the pressure on to force them to get better. (And while you’re at it, push them for Ranked Choice Voting so we can maybe get rid of the two party stranglehold...)

Find out about your local anti-discrimination laws. Local anti-discrimination laws won’t be overturned by the court decision in these cases. So, if your state or city does not already have LGBTQ protections in its anti-discrimination laws (or doesn’t even have any anti-discrimination laws at all) band together and make noise. Get them to pass one.

Tell everyone you can about this. Be loud. Silence will let them get away with it.

Fight back. If it all goes to hell in your state next June, boycott any business that fires someone for being trans, picket any apartment complex who evicts a gay couple. Broadcast their bigotry, shame them publicly. Make noise.

Reach out to your lawmakers and tell them that you support the Equality Act and think it needs to be improved and passed. And “improved” is key. Since it hasn’t passed yet, there’s still time to make it better. So tell them they need to make it better. (At the same time, don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. As it stands today, it’s a vast improvement over existing law, so work to get the Equality Act passed, even if they don’t fix it.)

But Wait... There’s More!

Another interesting (and unexpected) side story related to this which came up after I’d written most of this post is that ratification of the ERA is now within reach, thanks to Virginia going fully blue. While it’s very likely that VA will vote to ratify in one of their first actions in January, there’s some haziness about whether or not it will count. That means it will be a fascinating backdrop for the presidential election, with one side fully supporting ratification, maybe even with a woman carrying the flag for the second time in a row, and the other side being forced to explain why they don’t think women are equal, while they run a disgusting misogynist and/or someone who refuses to even eat with women. Popcorn time!

But... What’s the ERA, you ask? That’s a fair question, because it hasn’t been talked about much since it was killed by a pack of anti-feminists back in the 70s. It’s the Equal Rights Amendment, a constitutional amendment that reads “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

The haziness surrounding ratification is twofold: First, the original congressional language had a deadline, which has long since passed. Second, some states which ratified it early on have since rescinded their ratification. Proponents of ratification will note that the original deadline was extended once, and can be extended again, if needed, and beyond that, a deadline may not even be valid. As for rescinding the ratification, it’s not clear whether or not a state can even do that. At any rate, it’s bound to head to court and make a lot of noise along the way.

As you may have noticed, the language is very similar to the vague meaning of “sex” that the Equality Act is trying to fix. Will the ERA protect gender identity and sexual orientation? That’s unclear. It’s open to the same interpretation and court opinions that come up in the Civil Rights Act. In fact, the Supreme Court decision in those cases I mentioned above, whichever way it goes, will probably be the precedent at work, should the ERA actually get ratified and take effect.

So you know what that means, right?

Once the ERA is ratified, we're going to need the ERA 2 to explicitly include what the original ERA leaves out.

We have a lot of work to do. Time to get busy.

#equality #equality act #era #equal rights amendment

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arcticdementor · 5 years

Link

Well, it’s about to happen all over again. I’ve been wondering how soon a certain marriage of convenience in contemporary cultural politics would come messily apart, and now we’ve seen one of the typical warning signs of that impending breach. Those of my readers who are concerned about environmental issues—actually concerned, that is, and not simply using the environment as a convenient opportunity for class-conscious virtue signaling—may want to brace themselves for a shock.

The sign I have in mind is a recent flurry of articles in the leftward end of the mainstream media decrying the dangers of ecofascism. Ecofascism? That’s the term used for, and also generally by, that tiny subset of our society’s fascist fringe which likes to combine environmental concerns with the racial bigotries and authoritarian political daydreams more standard on that end of modern extremism. If you’ve never heard of it before, there’s good reason for that, but a significant section of the mainstream media seems to have taken quite an interest in making sure that you hear about it now.

…

The first thing I’d like to point out to my readers here is that, as already noted, ecofascism is a fringe of a fringe. In terms of numbers and cultural influence, it ranks well below the Flat Earth Society or the people who believe in all sincerity that Elvis Presley is a god. It’s one of those minute and self-marginalizing sub-sub-subcultures that a certain number of people find or make in order to act out their antinomian fantasies in comfortable obscurity, and enjoy the modest joys of being the biggest paramecium in a very, very small pond. It’s fair to say, in fact, that the chance that ecofascism will become a significant political or cultural force in your lifetime, dear reader, is right up there with the chance that the United Church of Bacon will become a major world religion.

So why is this submicroscopic fringe ideology suddenly on the receiving end of so many faux-worried essays in important liberal newspapers and magazines, and in the corresponding end of social media and the public blogosphere? The reason, I’d argue, has to do with something else that’s been finally receiving its own share of media attention.

…

That is to say, counting up all its direct and indirect energy costs, this one conference had a carbon footprint rivaling the annual output of some Third World countries—and you guessed it, the point of the conference was to talk about the menace of anthropogenic climate change.

…

At this point, in fact, one of the current heartthrobs of climate change activism, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, refuses to fly anywhere because of commercial air travel’s gargantuan carbon footprint. Sensibly enough, she travels through Europe by train, and her rich friends have lent her a sailboat to take her across the Atlantic for her upcoming North American tour. This would be bad enough if Thunberg was an ordinary citizen trying to raise awareness of anthropogenic climate change, but she’s not—she’s the darling of the Davos set, a child of privilege who’s managed to parlay the normal adolescent craving for attention into a sizable cultural presence. Every time she takes the train, she adds to the number of people who look at the attendees at the Sicily conference mentioned above and say, “So what about your carbon footprint?”

That, in turn, is fatal to climate change activism as currently constituted. For years now, since that brief period when I was a very minor star in the peak oil movement, I’ve noted a curious dynamic in the climate change-centered end of environmentalism. Almost always, the people I met at peak oil events who were concerned about peak oil and the fate of industrial society more generally, rather than climate change or such other mediacentric causes as the plight of large cute animals, were ready and willing to make extensive changes in their own lives, in addition to whatever political activism they might engage in. Almost always, the people I met who were exclusively concerned with anthropogenic climate change were not.

…

To some extent this is common or garden variety hypocrisy, heavily larded with the odd conviction—on loan from the less honest end of liberal Christianity—that if you feel really bad about your sins, God will ignore the fact that you keep on committing them. Still, there’s more to it than that. Some of what else is going on came to the surface a few years ago in Washington State when a group of environmental activists launched an initiative that would have slapped a fee on carbon. As such things go, it was a well-designed initiative, and one of the best things about it was that it was revenue-neutral: that is, the money taken in by the carbon fee flowed right back out through direct payments to citizens, so that rising energy prices due to the carbon fee wouldn’t clobber the economy or hurt the poor.

That, in turn, made it unacceptable to the Democratic Party in Washington State, and they refused to back the initiative, dooming it to defeat. Shortly thereafter they floated their own carbon fee initiative, which was anything but revenue neutral. Rather, it was set up to funnel all the money from the carbon fee into a slush fund managed by a board the public wouldn’t get to elect, which would hand out the funds to support an assortment of social justice causes that were also helpfully sheltered from public oversight. Unsurprisingly, the second initiative also lost heavily—few Washington State voters were willing to trust their breathtakingly corrupt political establishment with yet another massive source of graft at public expense.

…

If you haven’t heard of these followup studies, dear reader, there’s good reason for that. They argued unconvincingly that everything would be just fine if only the nations of the world handed over control of the global economy to an unelected cadre of experts, under whom the institutions of democratic governance would be turned into powerless debating societies while the decisions that mattered would be made by corporate-bureaucratic committees conveniently sheltered from public oversight. (If this seems familiar to those of my readers who endure EU rule just now, there’s a reason for that: the state of affairs just described has been the wet dream of Europe’s privileged classes and their tame intellectuals for quite a few decades now.) That’s the usually unmentioned reason why The Limits to Growth fielded the savage resistance it did: a good many people in 1972 recognized it as a stalking horse for a political agenda.

…

In the same way, the mere fact that certain people are trying to use climate change as a stalking horse for unrelated political agendas doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to dump trillions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or that doing so won’t cause epic disruptions to an already unstable global climate. Mind you, anthropogenic climate change isn’t the end of the world, not by a long shot; the Earth has been through sudden temperature shifts many times before in its long history, some of them due to large-scale releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—that’s one of the things really massive volcanic episodes can do, for example.

Attempts to dress up climate change in the borrowed finery of the Book of Revelations—sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia!—have more to do with our culture’s apocalyptic obsessions, and with the desires of ambitious people to scare others into signing on to their agenda, than with the realities of anthropogenic climate change. That said, we can expect a good solid helping of coastal flooding, weather-related disasters, crop failures, and other entertainments, which will take an increasingly severe economic toll as the years go on, and help drive the declines in population and economic output mentioned a few paragraphs back. Yes, this is one of the things The Limits to Growth was talking about when it predicted the long slow arc of decline ahead of us.

The problem faced by the people who have been pushing climate change activism is that their political enemies have found a very effective way to counter them: they can point out that the people who babble by the hour about the apocalyptic future we face due to anthropogenic climate change don’t take their own claims seriously enough to walk their talk. Thus the attendees at the environmental conference on Sicily mentioned earlier can no longer count on having their planet and eating it too—or, more to the point, they can’t count on doing so while still convincing anyone that they ought to be taken seriously. This is hard on certain delicate egos, and it also makes it hard to keep pursuing the agenda mentioned above while continuing to lead absurdly extravagant lifestyles propped up by stunning levels of energy and resource waste.

There’s a simple solution to that difficulty, though: the celebrities, their pet intellectuals, and the interests behind them can drop environmentalism like a hot rock.

That’s what happened, after all, in the early 1980s. Environmentalism up until that point had a huge cultural presence, supported by government-funded advertising campaigns—some of my readers, certainly, are old enough to recall Woodsy Owl and his iconic slogan, “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!”—and also supported by a galaxy of celebrities who mouthed pious sentiments about nature. Then, bam! Ronald Reagan was in, Woodsy Owl was out, John-Boy Walton and John Denver gave way to Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko and “material girl” Madonna, and the Sierra Club and the Friends of the Earth had corporate executives on their boards of directors, and did everything they could think of to deep-six the effective organizing tactics that got the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a galaxy of other environmental reforms enacted into law.

…

I think we’re about to see the same thing happen to climate change activism, and one of the symptoms of the approaching swerve is the sudden flurry of mass media publicity being given right now to the tiny fringe phenomenon of ecofascism. Over the months ahead, I expect to see many more stories along the same lines all over the leftward end of the media and its associated blogosphere, insisting in increasingly shrill terms that anyone who pays too much attention to the environment—and in particular, anyone who expects celebrity climate change activists to modify their lifestyles to match their loudly proclaimed ideals—is probably an ecofascist. In fact, I would be very surprised if we don’t see a series of earnest articles in the media claiming that believing in ecological limits is racist; such claims are already being made in the blogosphere, and their adoption by the mainstream left is, I suspect, merely a matter of time.

#john michael greer #ecosophia.net #environmentalism #greta thunberg #ecofascism #green nude eel #puritans gonna puritan #the limits to growth #climate change

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knightofwalpvrgis · 6 years

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Here’s my much more controversial take on the nature of Harry Potter criticism (hatred), and how it’s come to affect the Fantastic Beasts series.

As I’ve said, I noticed something particularly forced about the nature of the negativity surrounding FB1 back in 2016 - forced hit-pieces that criticize the film but apparently barely comprehended it...regurgitations of the plot not accurately depicting the film at all, showing a lack of attention and active listening among certain audience members. It was insulting, and people kept on looking for excuses to consider the film a disappointment despite the good reviews from the audience and fans, and the good box office performance, not to mention the esteemed accolades from the Academy and BAFTA.

The criticism for FB2 seems motivated by personal feelings based on certain plot points, the same lack of active listening and a determination to blame the film for your lack of superficial enjoyment or comprehension, and determined negativity in the face of completely unwarranted controversy and a bro-y, anti-intelligent rejection of the complexity and thematic maturity of the story. And the latter part is something Harry Potter has always struggled with.

People don’t like dark, thoughtful films in the US. Everything either has to have tons of action and/or tons of humor. Blockbuster four-quadrants even in the eyes of critics, “shouldn’t take themselves too seriously”...and when they do, that’s grounds for panning? For vicious insults? And insinuations that, in fact, it isn’t the film that’s too cerebral for them. It’s the audience that is too cerebral for the film.

But dare you express this sentiment, and you’re simply met with exclamations of “pretentiousness!” and arrogance...which is, of course, ironic and hypocritical.

My point is, I don’t want to see Rowling sell out. Of course there’s allowed to be difference in opinion and we should consider the flaws of every piece, but the Fantastic Beasts films arrived with a seething, unwarranted, determined underbelly of hatred to begin with, and that makes it hard to stomach some of the “criticism” it’s faced and consider it legitimate or professional. Alongside the usual absurd, meaningless imputations of “greed” (yes, every film is essentially a “cash grab”...stop using that buzzword guys, it means nothing) the biggest, most ridiculous criticism I see comes from people who really don’t want to let their condescension of this series go. They still want to treat it like it’s a lighthearted kids series despite that fact that 1) it’s not 2) it hasn’t been for kids in quite a while, for the majority of its run, and has always been quite dark and 3) Fantastic Beasts 1, to prove this, played to an audience of 65% over 25 year olds. FB2 played to an audience of nearly 70% over 25 year olds. And there’s minimal marketing to kids, yet people keep acting like it’s a franchise for kids.

That box office breakdown? The Nicholas Barber and Dani Di Placido reviews who’s entire critique revolves around “it’s too dark for a kids film!”, that go back to Harry Potter era when, film after film, people complained in reviews that it “was darker than any children’s film had the right to be”...the Dana Schwartz tweets and articles that indicate the perfect problem that these types of audiences face as the Fantastic Beasts series progresses...there are adults at the center of these films. They’re actually dark. They’re not child friendly. They’re hardly even marketed as a family film and they play at the box office like adult blockbusters, and in a sense, they are adult fantasies, and that sensibility stretches back to the Harry Potter series.

People like Dana Schwartz LOVE to write articles about how “Harry Potter is only good for small-scale escapism”, and this, in my opinion, is indicative of the problem facing audiences now...they’re forced to realize that in their determination to believe Harry Potter is lighthearted and for kids, they’ve ignored the fact that it is neither lighthearted NOR appropriate for young children. It was a series for teens and this new series is an extension from that original audience. Audiences have spent so long being enchanted by the Harry Potter series for very superficial reasons that have almost nothing to do with the characters or the plot. But they won’t ever admit to that. In their determination to see HP as cozy and quaint and child-friendly, they’ve mentally edited out, censored, and sanitized everything that makes the original series dark and adult...creating a warped, rose-tinted, shallow, conflict-less version of the original story that barely resembles the story. It resembles the version of the story that’s most friendly to their belief that it’s for kids. But, AGAIN, it’s not.

And so we get these warped, confused reactions to the Fantastic Beasts series full of people who are incapable of following a novelistic plot like they did while “reading” (but mostly only watching, and not fully comprehending) the original series. Expectations going into these movies are for lighthearted and kid-friendly content that these films don’t deliver...because Rowling doesn’t write lighthearted and kid-friendly content, for the most part. You have a maddening variety of reactions that mostly consist of: people who selectively attend to the few bits and sequences of lightheartedness and mild humor to keep that rose-tinted, child-friendly view in tact, coming out with a vastly incomplete and inadequate understanding of the plot. Then you have the same people who insist the film is “tonally jumbled” because they expected lightheartedness, and instead got thematic heaviness, darkness, violence, and melancholy, which interferes with their expectations and wants. Then you have the people that complain that the series is “too grimdark”. And because of the thematic riskiness and adult nature of the material, you have people attacking Rowling for being “problematic”, viciously attempting to outsmart her and make her look stupid, and arrogant, inaccurate interpretations of her stories to try to fit a pre-determined criticism.

All in all, I cringe at the idea of the GA and certain critics forcing something like Rowling’s Wizarding World into the space of WB’s new DC franchise. These stories have such depth, detail, and intelligence that people refuse to acknowledge and credit them with, and frankly, Rowling deserves way better than that. I think Rowling should pull this brand away and keep it in literature. Do the theme parks even need to stay open? Force people to read a book. Call off the merchandising, the video games, the films, just write books. Write Fantastic Beasts as a novel series and don’t even allow WB or anyone else to adapt it into films, because the blockbuster GA and the armchair critics should be forced to form another pathway in their brains, and actually invest in a novel. Instead of distracting themselves with silly excuses and endeavors, and reasons to characterize Harry Potter and further Rowling stories as blockbuster schlop along the lines of a superhero series.

To the silly, condescending assholes saying this franchise takes itself too seriously: it’s a series based off of Rowling’s experiences with death, poverty, depression, and abuse, and all of her written works deal with analogues and themes that she feels passionately about. She’s not a corporate filmmaker like George Lucas. And she shouldn’t put up with the abuse, the ignorance, the determined hatred, and the condescension for one second. This is an urban fantasy story about WW2. I suppose Rowling was mistaken for thinking that an audience that still believes her work to be for kids would ever stomach that.

TLDR; I’m aware of the main criticism regarding the film and it’s plot, but my issue came from the over-inflated negativity that’s come at this film for a rather small reason. Because even negative reviewers of the film said that the film was well made. And so my issue lies here: The film, in terms of direction, cinematography, design, acting, score, theme, and world-building has been praised consistently by esteemed critics. And yet we’re calling the film “the worst film of the year”, wishing the franchise ruin, and determinedly construing BO numbers negatively and giving it bad publicity for reasons like 1) “I hate Johnny Depp/J.K. Rowling/David Yates” 2) “I don’t like that the story went this way and did this with these characters” 3) “it was boring/convoluted/too plot-heavy” 4) “it’s too dark”

One of the most egregious RT certified examples:

“The film acted as a kind of reverse-Mirror of Erised - showing me exactly everything that I didn’t want”

-The Mary Sue

These aren’t objective criticisms. Since when do personal expectations and feelings about the direction of the narrative constitute as objective film criticism to decide the word-of-mouth and general publicity surrounding a film?! Even when most concede the film is well made, it’s still being trashed by some, even by the same people who concede this, because...it’s boring and “too much happens”? There are MANY films that are worse made that have just as overstuffed and convoluted a plot that haven’t gotten the bad publicity that this film has because of nothing but franchise good-will.

My stipulation is that a vocal minority of people are being melodramatic and over-inflating their negative reviews because of personal feelings regarding the story and “canon”, just as some are trying to find excuses to avoid crediting the story with the maturity it deserves to be credited with, in the face of an even darker and more aggressively political film.

Does Rowling’s voice, her themes, and her style need emphasizing? I’d encourage people to read everything she’s written to realize that Rowling is not a dewy-eyed, lighthearted woman, if Harry Potter wasn’t dark enough to display that to begin with: in her writing, Rowling is obsessed with exploring themes of death, life, trauma, political corruption, and bigotry. She’s fascinated by the facets of life that are mundane and often ugly, outcasted, or weird. And she loves subversion, twists on tones, archetypes, and genres. She often ruminates, in all of her work, on the dark underbelly of society and human nature, and focuses on our tendency for irrational and despicable violence, self-hatred, discrimination, corruption and power-lust, sadomasochism, murder, torture, rape, you name it. It’s a recurring theme. Harry sacrifices himself to death after the murder, maiming, and torture of his loved ones at the hands of incredibly sadistic and depraved fascist villains who aren’t above killing and harming children, to protect his compatriots and loved ones. Kyrstal Weedon kills herself with her mother’s drugs after being raped by her mother’s drug dealer and tangentially causing the death of her brother after running away from her drug dealing prostitute mother to conceive a child with a teenage boy. Cormoran Strike investigates crimes pertaining to all manner of human evils, including authors that ruminate on pedophilia, bestiality, and necrophilia, people with amputation fetishes, sexual attraction to murder and abuse, and the Fantastic Beasts series has started a running theme of infant murder and death, vicious abuse, and morally gray acts of violence, some of it righteous and vengeful. Can you think of the last film that killed a baby (or two) in any way? The only film I can think of is the Hard R Darren Aronofsky Thriller, Mother! “But Harry Potter is so lighthearted and fun!”

People need to stop so violently and inaccurately mischaracterizing Rowling’s work as lighthearted simply because they have nostalgic attachment to some of the superficial elements of her original series. Unfortunately, some people don’t like Harry Potter for the story and that’s why they don’t see it as the often dark, horrific, complex, and melancholic story that it ultimately is. And that surface-level plane of attachment can’t sustain any sort of long term interest in further Wizarding World stories, unfortunately. That is why the Fantastic Beasts stories are being treated the way they are. Your superficial, childish interest in only Hogwarts Houses and Quidditch isn’t very substantive, and can’t sustain your interest in something that’s incredibly plot heavy! Rowling is known for giving the reader more. That’s why her books are known for being very long. And that’s why the only major criticism this film is dealing with is - “the story is too convoluted and overstuffed”.

#fantastic beasts #harry potter #fantastic beasts and where to find them #newt scamander #newtina #grindelwald #crimes of grindelwald #fbawtft #fbtcog

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evilelitest2 · 5 years

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Regardless of how people feel about Zoe Quinn is beside the point. Eileen Holowka had said, BEGGED, people not to weaponize her brother's death to go at Zoe Quinn. And what are the gamergaters doing? Weaponizing her brother's death and then they started harassing his fucking sister. Gamergaters like fucking Spidergirl are vultures.

Vultures is a good term, because from the start they had an alternative goal in mind. THese people have been hating Zoe Quinn for 5-7 years prior to this, so when she accused Alec Holowka they immediately assumed she was at fault*. So I keep seeing comments like “OMG Alec is being accused without any evidence and people are engaged in a witch hunt”...while they have spent years accusing Zoe Quinn of stuff without evidence while acting like a hate mob. Because and this is critical, they don’t actually care about Alec Holowka, in fact if he had said anything bad about Gamergate, they would be calling for his suicide

you can tell this when people like @thespectacularspider-girl write about the event, because in their writing there is very little in terms of sympathy or any real attempt to understand the issue in nuance (which is also why they are very little in terms of sources), because they don’t actually care about the actors involved. What they care about, what they have always cared about, is promoting an anti progressive agenda in gaming and using Gamergate was a recruiting tool for Alt-Right causes. @thespectacularspider-girl and their ilk are using Alec Holowka’s suicide as a tool to push bigotry and intolerance in the gaming space, and don’t actually care about his or his family’s wishes, hence why they are ignoring his sisters (and apparently his) wishes that Zoe Quinn be left alone. Because like any hate mob, hurting the victim is the goal, everything else is just an excuse

It is exactly like when Gamergate started, they talked a big game about Ethics in Games Journalism, but they clearly didn’t actually care about ethics in games journalism, fixating not on the numerous major moral problems in the journalistic world but instead focusing on....Nathan Greyson mentioning that Zoe Quinn made a game...

If they actually gave a damn about games journalism, they wouldn’t stick to the singular issue of Zoe Quinn and move on, but they always center it about her (literally who?) because the goal has always been sexism and misdirected rage. In fact if you ever go unto Gamergate forums and blogs, they unsurprisingly don’t talk about journalism much at all, instead wasting their energy talking about SJWs and spreading racist conspiracy theories.

And actual group dedicated to fighting corruption in games journalism would focus their hatred on the massive fucking companies who use money to influence journalists reviews, not on an indie dev who released a free game that one time...

This pattern also comes out with their support of Trump, @thespectacularspider-girl talks a big game about how much she loves gaming, and yet they threw their support behind a man who has been blaming video games for mass shootings and outlawed net neutrality. Because supporting gaming isn’t the goal, if it was they would be targeting their wrath at EA and Activation, the goal has always been intolerance. They don’t care about gaming, they don’t care about journalism, they don’t care about suicide, mental health, sexual harassment or standards of innocence, hurting people is the goal.

*I just want to make this clear, even if we could prove that Zoe Quinn was a bad person, that doesn’t actually mean that her accusations are wrong, a bad person can still be a victim of sexual harassment.

#ask evilelitest #Gamergate #@thespectacularspider-girl #Sexism #Hate mob #Alec Holowka #Zoe Quinn

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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It Might Be Unethical or Even Illegal, but Not if You’re the President https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/us/politics/trump-g7-ethics.html

As Inquiry Widens, McConnell Is Said to See Impeachment Trial as Inevitable

By Carl Hulse | Published Oct. 18, 2019 Updated 9:31 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 18, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — It was only a few weeks ago that the top Senate Republican was hinting that his chamber would make short work of impeachment.

But this week, Senator Mitch McConnell sat his colleagues down over lunch in the Capitol and warned them to prepare for an extended impeachment trial of President Trump.

According to people who were there, he came equipped with a PowerPoint presentation, complete with quotes from the Constitution, as he schooled fellow senators on the intricacies of a process he portrayed as all but inevitable.

Few Republicans are inclined to convict Mr. Trump on charges that he abused his power to enlist Ukraine in an effort to smear his political rivals. Instead, Mr. McConnell sees the proceedings as necessary to protect a half a dozen moderates in states like Maine, Colorado and North Carolina who face re-election next year and must show voters they are giving the House impeachment charges a serious review.

It’s people like Senator Susan Collins of Maine who will be under immense political pressure as they decide the president’s fate.

“To overturn an election, to decide whether or not to convict a president is about as serious as it gets,” Ms. Collins said.

Mr. McConnell is walking a careful line of his own in managing the fast-moving impeachment process. On Friday, the senator wrote a scathing op-ed criticizing the president’s decision to pull back troops from northern Syria, calling it a “grave strategic mistake.” But Mr. McConnell views it as his role to protect a president of his own party from impeachment and in a recent fund-raising video, he vowed to stop it.

The mood among Republicans on Capitol Hill has shifted from indignant to anxious as a parade of administration witnesses has submitted to closed-door questioning by impeachment investigators and corroborated central elements of the whistle-blower complaint that sparked the inquiry.

They grew more worried still on Thursday, after Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, undercut the president’s defense by saying that Mr. Trump had indeed withheld security aid from Ukraine in order to spur an investigation of his political rivals. Mr. Mulvaney later backtracked, but the damage was done.

“I couldn’t believe it — I was very surprised that he said that,” said Representative Francis Rooney, Republican of Florida, who mocked Mr. Mulvaney’s attempts to take back comments that had been broadcast live from the White House briefing room.

“It’s not an Etch A Sketch,” Mr. Rooney said, miming the tipping movement that erases the toy drawing board. “There were a lot of Republicans looking at that headline yesterday when it came up, I certainly was.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski — an Alaskan Republican who is seen as potentially open to removing Mr. Trump from office — told reporters that a president should never engage in the kinds of actions that Mr. Mulvaney appeared to acknowledge.

“You don’t hold up foreign aid that we had previously appropriated for a political initiative,” she said. “Period.”

Still, Republicans said they did not detect a significant shift that would pose a serious threat to the president in the Senate. It would require 20 Republicans to side with Democrats in convicting Mr. Trump, and few observers believe that will happen.

Mr. McConnell, his allies said, regards the impeachment fight in much the same way as he did the struggle last year to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, in which he was primarily concerned with protecting his Senate majority by insulating vulnerable incumbents. Then, as now, they said, Mr. McConnell is focused on keeping Republicans as united as possible, while allowing those with reservations about Mr. Trump’s conduct and their own political considerations to justify their decision to their constituents.

“I think he will play it straight,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a close McConnell ally, who noted his party’s narrow voting margin. “I don’t think he has any alternative. When you are operating with 53 you have thin margins and you can’t jam anybody or you end up with undesirable consequences.”

Mr. McConnell has told colleagues he expects the House to impeach Mr. Trump quickly, possibly by Thanksgiving, an educated hunch based on the pace of the inquiry so far and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to keep the inquiry narrowly focused on Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. He plans to move swiftly too, he told colleagues, using the approach of Christmas to force the Senate to complete its work before the beginning of 2020.

Yet an impeachment trial is a spectacle that is by its nature unpredictable, and most of the senators who will act as jurors were not around for the last one, of Bill Clinton in 1999. Mr. McConnell reminded senators that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. would preside over the trial, and would have wide latitude in handling motions that might be made, including any motion to dismiss the charges that Republicans might try to put forward to short circuit the process.

Mr. McConnell’s declaration that the Senate would move forward was in part designed to show he had no choice, an effort to deflect criticism from conservatives outraged that the Senate would even consider impeachment.

On Wednesday, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, pushed for Senate Republicans to write a letter to Ms. Pelosi declaring that they would not remove the president. But some senators raised objections, worrying that some of their colleagues would not want to sign on, a result that would expose disunity among Republicans. Mr. Graham’s colleagues said they believe they staved off the letter, which they viewed as a mistake.

Mr. McConnell has made it clear that he plans to sit down with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, to see if they can find a mutually acceptable way to move forward as Democrats and Republicans did in 1999 when they unanimously agreed on the framework for the impeachment trial. The Senate is much more polarized now, though Mr. Schumer this week held out hope.

“We have to do this trial in a fair and bipartisan way and I hope that Leader McConnell would obey those strictures,” Mr. Schumer said. In the battle for Senate control, Democrats have their own political risks to consider since impeachment could prompt a backlash against some of their candidates if enough voters conclude that the president was pursued unfairly.

Just 15 senators remain in office from the time Mr. Clinton was put on trial. Mr. McConnell warned them of the weight of the trial, where they can be required to be on the floor all afternoon six days a week without speaking — a major challenge for senators who relish their chances to be heard.

“It will mean day after day sitting in chamber, listening to the two sides, writing questions for them to answer that go through the chief justice,” said Ms. Collins, one of the Republicans who voted to acquit Mr. Clinton 20 years ago. “Members who have not been through this before will find it is a great deal of work.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

*********

The Crisis of the Republican Party

The G.O.P. will not be able to postpone a reckoning on Donald Trump’s presidency for much longer.

By The Editorial Board | Published October 18, 2019 | New York Times | Posted October 18, 2019 |

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

In the summer of 1950, outraged by Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist inquisition, Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican senator from Maine, stood to warn her party that its own behavior was threatening the integrity of the American republic. “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear,” she said. “I doubt if the Republican Party could — simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely, we Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory.”

Senator Smith surely knew her “Declaration of Conscience” would not carry the day. Her appeal to the better angels of her party was not made in the expectation of an immediate change; sometimes the point is just to get people to look up. In the end, four more years passed before the bulk of the Republican Party looked up and turned on Senator McCarthy — four years of public show trials and thought policing that pushed the country so hard to the right that the effects lasted decades. The problem with politicians who abuse power isn’t that they don’t get results. It’s that the results come at a high cost to the Republic — and to the reputations of those who lack the courage or wisdom to resist.

The Republican Party is again confronting a crisis of conscience, one that has been gathering force ever since Donald Trump captured the party’s nomination in 2016. Afraid of his political influence, and delighted with his largely conservative agenda, party leaders have compromised again and again, swallowing their criticisms and tacitly if not openly endorsing presidential behavior they would have excoriated in a Democrat. Compromise by compromise, Donald Trump has hammered away at what Republicans once saw as foundational virtues: decency, honesty, responsibility. He has asked them to substitute loyalty to him for their patriotism itself.

Mr. Trump privately pressed Ukraine to serve his political interests by investigating a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, as well as by looking into a long-debunked conspiracy theory about Democratic National Committee emails that were stolen by the Russians. Mr. Trump publicly made a similar request of China. His chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said publicly on Thursday that the administration threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine if it did not help “find” the D.N.C. servers.

These attempts to enlist foreign interference in American electoral democracy are an assault not only on our system of government but also on the integrity of the Republican Party. Republicans need to emulate the moral clarity of Margaret Chase Smith and recognize that they have a particular responsibility to condemn the president’s behavior and to reject his tactics.

Some have already done so. On Friday, John Kasich, the former Ohio governor, said that Mr. Mulvaney’s comments convinced him that the impeachment inquiry should move forward. Representative Justin Amash of Michigan had already called for impeachment, though he felt it necessary to leave the party as a consequence.

There was a time when Republicans like Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said that soliciting foreign election assistance would be improper. But most congressional Republicans have taken to avoiding such questions as the evidence against Mr. Trump has piled up. Mr. Trump still feels so well-protected by his party that he has just named his own golf resort as the site for the next Group of 7 summit in 2020, a brazen act of self-dealing.

Yet Republicans will not be able to postpone a reckoning with Trumpism for much longer. The investigation by House Democrats appears likely to result in a vote for impeachment, despite efforts by the White House to obstruct the inquiry. That will force Senate Republicans to choose. Will they commit themselves and their party wholly to Mr. Trump, embracing even his most anti-democratic actions, or will they take the first step toward separating themselves from him and restoring confidence in the rule of law?

Thus far in office, Mr. Trump has acted against the national interest by maintaining his financial interests in his company and using the presidential podium to promote it; obstructed legitimate investigations into his conduct by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and Congress; attacked the free press; given encouragement to white nationalists; established a de facto religious test for immigrants; undermined foreign alliances and emboldened American rivals; demanded personal loyalty from subordinates sworn to do their duty to the Constitution; and sent his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, around the world to conduct what could most charitably be described as shadow foreign policy with Mr. Trump’s personal benefit as its lodestar.

Some Republicans have clearly believed that they could control the president by staying close to him and talking him out of his worst ideas. Ask Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who has spent the last two years prostrating himself before Mr. Trump in the hope of achieving his political goals, including protecting the Kurds — how that worked out. Mr. Graham isn’t alone, of course; there is a long list of politicians who have debased themselves to please Mr. Trump, only to be abandoned by him like a sack of rotten fruit in the end. That’s the way of all autocrats; they eventually turn on everyone save perhaps their own relatives, because no one can live up to their demands for fealty.

The Constitution’s framers envisioned America’s political leaders as bound by a devotion to country above all else. That’s why all elected officials take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. By protecting Donald Trump at all costs from all consequences, the Republicans risk violating that sacred oath.

Senator Smith’s question once again hangs over the Republican Party: Surely they are not so desperate for short-term victory as to tolerate this behavior? We’ll soon find out.

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Mulvaney, as Clouseau, Solves Mystery!

The acting chief of staff’s admission changes everything.

By Bret Stephen's, Opinion Columnist | Published Oct. 18, 2019, 8:45 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 18, 2019 |

John Maynard Keynes may not have been the one who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” But the line, often attributed to him, remains a good one. And it captures my shifting view of the impeachment inquiry.

That view shifted again this week with Mick Mulvaney’s hallucinatory press conference on Thursday, in which he appeared to admit a version of the quid pro quo the president and his minions have spent the past few weeks fervently denying. “Did he also mention to me in passing the corruption related to the D.N.C. server?” the acting chief of staff said of the president. “Absolutely. No question about that.”

He added: “That’s why we held up the money.”

Mulvaney clarified his comments — which is to say, contradicted himself — a few hours later, insisting in a carefully scripted statement, “There never was any condition on the flow of the aid related to the matter of the D.N.C. server.” For this, he offered as proof “the fact that the aid money was delivered without any action on the part of the Ukrainians regarding the server.”

True. Except, as everyone knows, the money was released only after several infuriated lawmakers, including Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, pushed the administration to deliver the aid without ever being told the real story of why it had been delayed in the first place.

In other words, a White House that initially insisted it had nothing to hide was, in fact, hiding something. It then claimed that it didn’t intend to do what it clearly intended to do, based on the fact that it didn’t get away with doing it. Next, it compounded the prevarication by admitting to its intentions, and insisting there was nothing wrong with them. And, finally, it reverted to denying those intentions altogether.

What kind of fool is Mulvaney, to take the rest of us for such fools?

Mulvaney’s Inspector Clouseau routine follows a week of disclosures about the extent to which U.S. policy toward Ukraine became the province of Rudy Giuliani to the exclusion of the State Department and National Security Council. Giuliani, in turn, was paid $500,000 by the company of a shady business associate who was helping him dig for political dirt in Ukraine. That associate and his partner were recently pulled from a flight on one-way tickets and arrested on charges of campaign-finance violations connected to the ouster of the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. No wonder John Bolton described this shadow foreign policy as a “drug deal.”

Donald Trump’s inveterate defenders insist that the president is entitled to conduct foreign policy any way he wants, and delegate authority to whomever he pleases. That just isn’t true.

No president has the right, ever, to use the powers of his office to enrich himself, which is what Trump appears to be doing by designating his Florida golf resort as the site of the next G7 meeting. No president has the automatic right to impound congressionally appropriated funds, above all for nakedly political ends. No president may delegate foreign policy to anyone who abuses that trust for personal profit. No president should derail the career of a foreign-service officer because she would not violate the trust of her office to enable his political vendettas.

And no president should lie so wantonly about his public conduct or enlist the officers of government in the concealment of that conduct. This has been the story of the Trump administration from its first day.

For Democrats, the question is whether impeachment is the right response to indisputably outrageous acts. I’ve previously been skeptical for several reasons, not least that a party-line vote in the House would simultaneously diminish the stigma of impeachment while boosting the president’s re-election chances. And I was particularly skeptical if the entire case against Trump rested on that one phone call.

Now it’s clear that it doesn’t. Whatever the political calculus, the impeachment inquiry needs to press on, aggressively.

As for Republicans, a question they might usefully ask themselves is whether the standard of behavior they now either accept or embrace in this president is one they are prepared to condone in a Democratic administration. All of their casuistry in Trump’s defense today may, and probably will, be used against them in the future. The wretched bargain that partisans inevitably make with demagogues on their side is that they inspire, and license, the demagoguery of the other.

A suggestion for Nancy Pelosi: Offer the House a vote on censure, neither as a substitute for the impeachment inquiry nor for impeachment itself, but as an opportunity for members to go on record as to how they judge the president. It would give at least a few Republicans, for whom an impeachment vote is a political bridge too far, an opportunity to save a piece of their souls. History will judge the rest.

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It Might Be Unethical or Even Illegal, but Not if You’re the President

By Eric Lipton | Published Oct. 18, 2019, 8:14 PM ET | New York Times |

WASHINGTON — The rules are clear for nearly everyone who works in the executive branch: Officials are prohibited from playing even a minor role in a decision that directly creates a financial benefit for the employee or the employee’s immediate family.

But those rules do not apply to the president and vice president, the only executive branch officials who are exempt from a criminal statute and a separate ethics regulation that govern conflicts of interest.

That exemption is the reason President Trump could legally play a role in the selection of the Trump National Doral resort near Miami as the site of next year’s summit meeting of the Group of 7. If anyone in the executive branch other than Mr. Trump or Vice President Mike Pence tried the same thing, they would likely have been blocked by government lawyers, faced an ethics investigation and perhaps become the subject of a criminal inquiry, federal ethics lawyers from both parties said Friday.

Violating the law, which dates to 1962, is a felony punishable with a prison sentence of up to five years.

”Suggesting that your own business be used for an expensive government event over which you have control would violate the prohibitions,” said Trevor Potter, a Republican and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.

Steven L. Schooner, who served as the administrator for procurement law in the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, said Mr. Trump’s actions — if he were not exempt — would have “at least lead to a referral to the Justice Department.”

Besides this conflict-of-interest law, picking the 643-room Doral resort near Miami for an event that will generate hotel room reservations and other related sales worth millions of dollars raises questions about whether other constraints might apply to the situation, the legal experts said. Those include federal competitive bidding requirements and provisions in the Constitution that ban even the president from taking certain kinds of payments from foreign governments and the federal government.

It also highlights how Mr. Trump has often swept aside the ethical standard he set for himself as he was preparing to take office in early 2017.

Nine days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, one of his lawyers, Sheri A. Dillon, released a document detailing how Mr. Trump would avoid conflicts of interest after he was sworn in, even if he was not prohibited under law from taking actions that would benefit his family financially.

“President-Elect Trump, as well as Don, Eric, and Alan are committed to ensuring that the activities of The Trump Organization are beyond reproach, and that the Organization avoids even the appearance of a conflict of interest, including through any advantage derived from the Office of the Presidency,” Ms. Dillon wrote in the six-page document, referring to Mr. Trump’s two oldest sons and Alan Garten, the chief legal officer at Trump Organization.

But that same day, Mr. Trump made clear he was aware that he had a legal exemption that provided him considerable flexibility to decide for himself what would be permissible.

“I have a no-conflict-of-interest provision as president,” Mr. Trump said. “It was many, many years old, this is for presidents. Because they don’t want presidents getting — I understand they don’t want presidents getting tangled up in minutia; they want a president to run the country. So I could actually run my business, I could actually run my business and run government at the same time.”

Bobby R. Burchfield, a lawyer who serves a the ethics adviser to the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust — which technically owns the family hotels and other properties that are now managed by his sons — said on Friday he is examining the matter.

“We are looking at the situation” he said. “The President, the Trump Organization and I are committed to ensuring that this is done in compliance with the ethics standards.”

Mr. Trump himself, in late August, at the end of the G7 summit in France, first confirmed publicly that the Trump family resort in Doral, Fla., was being considered for the June 2020 gathering.

“Having it at that particular place, because of the way it’s set up, each country can have their own villa, or their own bungalow,” Mr. Trump said in August, before continuing later in his remarks that “I think it just works out well.”

The acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said on Thursday that Mr. Trump was the first to recommend the Doral resort as a site for the G7.

“We were back in the dining room and I was going over it with a couple of our advance team,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “We had the list, and he goes, ‘What about Doral?’ And it was like, ‘That’s not the craziest idea. It makes perfect sense.’ “

These statements alone would likely be enough to create a conflict-of-interest problem for Mr. Trump if he were not president, ethics and procurement lawyers said.

“If this was the secretary of commerce who had the power to decide where an event like this would be held and he or she decides it should be held at a property he or she owns, and would generate income, that probably would be a conflict of interest” said Jan W. Baran, who served during President George Bush’s tenure on a presidential commission that studied federal ethics laws, and also previously served as general counsel at the Republican National Committee.

It is a violation of the law if an executive branch employee “participates personally,” in a “decision, approval, disapproval, recommendation, the rendering of advice, investigation, or otherwise,” in a matter that directly financially impacts a company owned by that employee’s spouse, children “or an organization that he is serving as officer, director, trustee, general partner,” the statue says.

A separate federal Standards of Conduct regulation issued by the Office of Government Ethics in 1992 says that ”employees shall not use public office for private gain,” although again these rules do not apply to the president.

The president and vice president are exempt, Mr. Baran said, because Congress generally cannot pass restrictions that apply to them as the president cannot be forced to recuse himself and delegate his constitutional powers to someone else.

Every president over the past four decades — with the exception of Mr. Trump — has placed his personal investments and assets in a blind trust while in the White House, or has sold everything and held cash equivalents, to avoid any potential conflicts, even though there has been no requirement to do this under the law.

Mr. Mulvaney on Thursday defended the approach the White House took in selecting the Doral, saying that a dozen locations were evaluated, which suggests that federal contracting rules might have been honored. But Mr. Mulvaney would not disclose the other locations or the process used to evaluate them.

He said the Doral would be the least expensive, because the Trump family will offer the hotel “at cost,” meaning it will not profit from the event.

Separately, the Trump Organization has vowed to “identify and donate profits derived from foreign government patrons” to the Treasury.

But a Trump Organization spokesman on Friday declined to explain how the company is going to determine what “at cost” means or how it will calculate what part of a hotel bill paid by a foreign government official is considered profit.

Mr. Schooner said the Doral, during the off-season in June when it is hot and muggy in Florida, has a low vacancy rate. So even if otherwise empty rooms are sold at a discount, it is still a major financial benefit to the company, as would be the global publicity from an event like the G7 meeting.

“The leaders of the free world walking around in someone’s resort: That is priceless advertising,” he said.

At least three different lawsuits are pending in federal court that are testing if Mr. Trump is violating the Constitution’s emoluments clauses by continuing to own, through a trust, the collection of hotels, golf courses and resorts that at times are taking payments from foreign government officials and the United States government.

After a series of decisions both for and against the president, a case brought by the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia will be heard by the full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. It alleges that the Trump International Hotel in Washington has illegally siphoned off business from hotels and convention centers in which the local governments have a financial interest.

Democrats in Congress who filed one of these cases will now revise the lawsuit to include the plan by Mr. Trump to have the G7 meeting at the Doral.

“He is certainly digging deeper in his failing defense by violating the Constitution in plain sight, in real time,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that involves more than 200 House and Senate Democrats. “It is really absolutely striking.”

Steve Eder contributed reporting from New York

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groundramon · 6 years

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I don’t really know how to word this without immediately knowing that tumblr could accuse me of a fuckton of different buzzwords, but I’m going to try to anyways - and hopefully if any hyper-woke people find me, they’ll tell me how I should better word myself in the future instead of immediately calling me an abuse apologist or some shit.

But anyways, here’s a hot take - people of minority groups can be abusers. Sometimes, they can abuse people for their minority status. Sometimes, people lie about sexual assault. Sometimes, people use their mental health or identity or race or whatever as an excuse for being a despicable human being. How do I know? Because I’ve had it happen to me, over and over and over.

I am: a trans, LGBT+, mentally disabled + ill, DFAB person. I am also: a white, able-bodied fuckboy who lives in California, one of the most progressive states in the country, even in its conservative areas. I am on both sides of the spectrum, and the times when I see minority statuses being abused are usually from the groups that I’m a minority of.

For example, I was harassed (and arguably sexually abused, however because I couldn’t find those comments that could’ve made him face legal consequences for all he’s done, I struggle to say that this is the case - additionally, I was never his target, just my art) by an autistic man online when I was younger. It’s the reason why I can’t interact with the HT/TY/D fandom and why I won’t be seeing the third movie (keep in mind this happened right before the second movie, and I went to see that one because it legitimately interested me - this one seems heterosexual AND reminds me of my abuser’s dragon OC, which he guilt tripped me into drawing for him as his form of porn). He ruined an entire franchise for me because he harassed me so badly. He guilt tripped me in about how hard it was being autistic (and threw in some comments about how teens think they have it “so hard with their anxiety and depression” when “they really have no idea”, to a teenager struggling with identifying anxiety and depression - i didn’t believe that bullcrap but I did fall for his autism sob story) and convinced me to do art trades with him which were just redraws of my own stuff, and he’d repeatedly spam me and yell at me and guilt trip me to finish his work if I so much as read his note without responding. He drained my motivation for DeviantArt along with my love of a franchise. This man was also a serial harasser/spammer, he did this to MANY people, including other minors. I wasn’t a specific target - honestly, I think I was pretty low on his priority list, considering he only tried to come back a few times. The kicker? I’m pretty sure I’m autistic, even though I had no idea back then. At least, I sure do have a lot of symptoms of autism now that I look back.

Not good enough for you? Okay. How about the fact that a relative of mine tried to convince my aunt that she (my aunt, not the relative) was sexually abused by my paternal grandfather as a child, sending my aunt into a mental breakdown because she couldn’t remember anything like that and had no idea? My aunt is the weak link in our family, she’s adopted and felt othered for it, and lived away from the rest of our family for a long time. She recently started getting involved and just happened to be attacked by a known financial and mental abuser in our extended family right when she started getting back involved. I’m thankful that my dad and my uncles were able to help her get a better picture of her father. Keep in mind that I don’t have a positive image of my paternal grandfather, because he smoked and gave my dad + uncle health problems due to it - and I personally consider that an accidental form of child abuse, in a way. But he was NOT a fucking incestual pedophile. It infuriated me to hear that, despite never meeting him, and having a negative overall impression of him.

How about another? My step-step-grandmother (long story) has accused my deceased uncle of being a money-hungry monster and stealing all of her rightful money after his father/her husband died. We’re in a court case to get the inheritance we deserve from her now, but she only ever brought this up AFTER he passed away. When informed about his dead, she bitched about how he made her loose money, and how she was struggling despite using up all of my mom’s inheritance (from her step-father AND her mother). Because you know, that’s what you do when someone dies. My uncle was the only uncle on my mom’s side to make it to my birthdays, his family gave my mom and I a place to stay when we ended up stranded down south due to a bad head injury my dad got (also long story) and we didn’t have time to make it back home and we didn’t want to just leave my dad there. My uncle was probably the nicest, kindest family member I had. His funeral was the first funeral I went to, and there were TONS of people. He was a Christian man who lived by true Christian values, and plenty of people testified this at his funeral. People I’d never even met before. This old woman accused him of stealing her money (where did it go?? his wife is fucking broke now that he’s gone!), never caring enough to visit her, ect. This old woman, who never even responded to my birthday invitations let alone came, who never made any attempt to make a mutual outreach to us. She expected us to do all the work, and when we decided it wasn’t worth her ignoring and rejecting, we stopped. And then she accused us of abandoning her. This is an old woman, but she’s still an evil person - or an evil person who is now just a shell of evil, unable to even remember a time when she didn’t believe these lies that she told herself.

And don’t get me started on how this applies to ace discourse. Heaven forbid I compare the ace/aro experience to another LGBT experience! It’s only okay if I compare it to the straight experience (which i do btw, because i KNOW we benefit from homophobia unless we’re also sga) even though it has 99% more in common with the LGBP experience than the straight experience. This isn’t an inclusionist vs exclusionist thing - this is just COMPARISONS. It’s like saying murkrow looks like a crow - like yeah, no shit sherlock!! doesn’t mean murkrow is just the same as a real life fucking crow!!! And god, haven forbid you talk about real aphobia and how it affects real aspec people. Immediately every allo in the area will jump on you about how that’s just misogyny and rape culture and blah blah blah. Then what about when it happens to men? What about when it happens to nonbinary people? What about when it has literally nothing to do with gender or being forced to have sex, and is just a constant feeling of being othered and excluded? Forgotten and not believed? Constantly doubted that your experience is real? And then to be told that the very bigotry you suffered was just a part of a bigger issue, instead of specifically about a part of your identity....bullshit. There IS overlap in certain social issues. Race affects how homophobia and transphobia affects a person deeply. Same with misogyny and race. So of course there’s overlap. But to say that aphobia doesn’t exist, I’m sorry - I don’t say this lightly, but that’s unconscious gaslighting. (there is no better term than that - believe me, I looked. My point is that I don’t believe it’s intentional, but LGBP people, trans or not - you NEED to stop doing this. You ARE unconciously gaslighting aces and aros. This is not anecdotal, there are statistics and you refuse to believe them, despite pointing at just as credible statistics to prove your own points. You say we can’t use anecdotal evidence, but then go on to use it yourself. Intentional or not, you need to quit it.)

I really don’t want to talk about how race and this stuff intertwine because I really don’t have any experience with that as a white person. All I know is that groups of POC can be bigoted towards other groups of POC, and they can even be bigoted towards people of their own race.

Which leads me to the most important part of this post: The fact that minorities can abuse majority groups, even if its on the basis of their minority group, does NOT mean that minority groups are not oppressed.

Just because a few women lie about being raped, doesn’t mean that all women who say they were raped are lying. Just because an autistic person abused me, doesn’t mean that all autistic/mentally disabled people and mentally ill people are scary. Just because aphobia is real doesn’t mean that non-SGA aces and aros don’t benefit from homophobia to a certain degree. Just because homophobia kills doesn’t mean that aphobia isn’t just as real. Just because the LGBT community has a habit of gaslighting victims of aphobia doesn’t mean that the LGBT community oppresses the aspec community. Just because POC can discriminate against or even hold systemic power over another POC doesn’t mean that they aren’t both oppressed by white people.

Abuse is not oppression. Oppression is a repeated, prolonged offense of cruel and unjust control. None of my anecdotals “prove” that oppression for these groups isn’t real. Because I’m part of these groups, and it’s my opinion that it IS real. But my anecdotals are also still valid. It is not problematic to point out when someone uses their minority status to abuse and manipulate others. It is not problematic to call bigoted, cruel mentally disabled people problematic for being manipulative and abusive. Their disability is not an excuse. Their identity is not an excuse. Their experience may be a reason, but not an excuse. But neither is your experience. Let people talk about their individual experiences AND the wider issues of oppression as a whole. They don’t have to be opposite faces of the same coin, and it’s sad that we act like they do.

#stormy speaks #also i would just like to point out that ive never been abused by a person of color for their minority but i have by like every other group #just wanted to point that out incase anyone missed it #just. just sayin! just sayin @ racists!

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pointsofpride · 6 years

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I’m blurring this person’s name and icon, because I am not inviting a “””debate””” with them. I’ve encountered this person’s exclusionism before, and pointed out how fucked up it is, but I’m going to go off on it again, because here it’s cropped up again, and it’s still just... so fucked up. First off, fuck you for thinking that dressing up exclusionism in “civility” actually makes it any amount of civil, because a dagger in the back isn’t any more okay, just because you didn’t stab with aggression. I’m really tired of seeing people who absolutely should know better than this saying these kinds of things. So get ready for another post explaining how exclusionism flies in the face of our community’s history, basic compassion for others, and general sense.

“i believe we shouldn’t allow cishet aces within the LGBT community”

First point of order, there is no “allow” involved in this. Aces, right now, are a part of the community. You can’t say “I think I’ll let you sake a seat at this table” to somebody who’s already been sitting in a chair the whole time. Secondly, “cishet ace” is a self-contradicting phrase. You can not be a heterosexual asexual. You can be a cis ace. You can be a heteroromantic ace. But asexuality is not a kind of heterosexuality. It is a separate sexual identity.

And the term “cishet” was itself coined specifically to define those whith unconditional and unquestioned access to privilege and social acceptance for their identities. That does not apply to aces and never has.

“BUT i would encourage more recognition to the ace/aro community as well as proper sourcing on issues ace/aro people face that isn’t literally stealing from other people’s struggles”

You don’t encourage recognition of the a-spec community. You very directly don’t do that in any amount or way. If you think they’re “stealing from other people’s struggles”. Fucking christ, do you hear yourself? If somebody gets punched in the face and then somebody else says they got punched in the gut, would you tell them to stop “stealing from other people’s struggles”? I should hope the fuck you wouldn’t because that would be total nonsense with absolute lack of awareness. Aces aren’t stealing anything from anybody by just fucking Telling You what they deal with. And you’re probably referring to the fact that exclusionists reuse biphobic and transphobic rhetoric. Which is just. Mind boggling that you can recognize that’s what’s happening and then pin it on a-specs, as if them pointing out how fucked up it is is somehow the problem. Look... I'm not cis, and I'm not het. My whole identity is, at minimum, 3 kinds of queer, and I could expound on my identity. But right off the bat, I’m going to tell you I am ace. And you do not care about any part of me. When I hear people say "cishet aces don't belong at pride" the only thing I hear is "I don't care about your identity; I'm just going to pick and choose what parts of you I say are worthwhile; I don't accept your aceness, and I I don't actually care about you". Because you don’t care about anything I have to say. You don’t care, because I’m ace. You don’t get to dissect me and tell me what I experience or what part of me is queer. When I tell you that I’m ace, you immediately, in your mind, discredit me. But, like I said, I’m not either half of “cishet” (not only because my aceness makes me not heterosexual). You had better not think for a fucking second that you are doing me any favours by keeping out the """cishets""". Don't you fucking dare pretend you're speaking on my behalf or that you care about me. I'm pan, I'm agender, and hell, I prefer femine pronouns, even though I’m agender. I'm queer as FUCK, and I'm also ace. And that is IMPORTANT to me. It IS a part of what makes me queer. If you don't accept all aces, you DO NOT accept me, because my aceness is a part of the whole package of queer that I am. You are not allowed to dissect my identity and throw away what you don't like. All aces belong. It is so immensely disrespectful to try to use my identity against other aces by ignoring MY aceness because the rest of me is "queer enough". Just. Fuck you. If you think “cishet” aces should be removed from the community, then FUCK you. Also, it is incredible that somebody has to point out how fucked up it is that you won’t count first-hand accounts as a “proper source”. Do you fucking REALIZE how little information there is on asexuality? It’s not grass, you can’t just go outside and pick up a fistful. But the studies on LGBT+ issues that take aces into account also get dismissed. Everything aces have given, no matter how direct or nuanced or straightforward or detailed or academic or anecdotal has ever been sufficient for you. It doesn’t matter to you what anybody has to say about oppression that aces face, because you will always actively try to rationalize a reason why it isn’t a “proper source” of evidence.

“i don’t believe ace/aros are oppressed because by definition, they just dont experience it.”

The definitions of “asexual” and “aromantic” are not “a person who is not oppressed”, what the hellfuck is wrong with you? Aces keep TELLING YOU they face forms of oppression, and you just tell them it isn’t true, to their faces. How do you rationalize that?

“however there is some actual stigma they deal with, and denying it is unnacceptable.”

GOLLY, REALLY? IS THAT SO, OH ARBITER OF SOCIAL STIGMA? THANK YOU FOR APPROVING ACES CLAIMS OF AT LEAST THAT MUCH.

You can not pretend like you care about aces and prove you don’t with everything else you say and expect to get a gold star sticker for seeming like you give a fuck.

“the issue is that the LGBT community is treated like a club and not a place of solidarity for people who experienced oppression for their sexuality and gender identity and that needs to be addressed.”

JESUS FUCKING LOUISUS, NO ACES ARE TREATING IT LIKE A “CLUB”. The fuck kind of infantilizing accusation is that? WHAT the FUCK.

You think aces don’t need suicide prevention resources? You think the historical and current pathologization of asexuality doesn’t happen? You think no ace person has ever been hurt for their sexuality? You think aces don’t get kicked out by conservative, bigoted parents for being “deviant”? You think no people ever will think ill enough of aces to harm them? You think aces never are victims of corrective rape, because they “won’t put out”? You think aces don’t deal with any forms of oppression or abuse? Nothing at all? ‘Cause you have absolutely no sense of what society does. Bigots really don’t tend to differentiate their bigotry. If a heavily conservative christian person knows you aren’t straight and cis, that’s all they need to know to loathe you and want you hurt. You just. Don’t get it.

I’m super fucking queer, and I have been on the receiving end of a whole lot of hate in my life for being agender, and for being pan. I know what oppression is, you fuck. Don’t think I defend aces without any knowledge of what the whole community deals with. Don’t think I defend aces without knowing what oppression is. I’ve been the victim of it, sometimes with dangerous and violent severity. But do you know what the MOST aggressive hate I have EVER received for any part of my identity has been for? Take a wild fucking stab in the dark. It’s the reason why I'm defensive of other aces. You have no fucking clue how hated aces are. None. At all. You refuse to think maybe they’re actually oppressed. Even when they tell you. Aces, whether or not they are heteromantic, are very much not a part of the social class in a privileged position that is Straight™. Aces face oppression, and you are not capable of denying that fact except to your own mind, which is all you do.

And I’m CERTAIN you’d find an excuse to deny what I tell you. Also, if you think that social stigma isn’t a part of why the community exists, you don’t know why it exists. It isn’t solely about equal marriage. Because a lot of the time, people will go “you’ve got gay marriage, how are you oppressed?”. The community exists to affect social change and bring awareness. Aces are a part of that.

“cishet ace/aros will never understand the oppression that gay, bi, lesbian and trans people deal with”

Cishet a-specs do not exist. A-specs, by definition, are not cishet.

And heteroromantic aces and heterosexual aros very much UNDERSTAND the oppression that the other members of the community deal with. You act like aces are all children with no sense of comprehension.

“and that needs to be told to them without the aggressive “you guys are fucking idiots for thinking you’re one of us”.”

It’s no different. It’s insensitive and defies the reality of the situation either way.

“something i think a lot of exclusionists forget was that aces/aros were encouraged to be apart of this community for a decade.”

They ARE a part of this community, and if you fucking god damn KNEW your queer history, you’d know that the only thing recent about a-specs in the community is awareness of them. They’ve been here the entire time. They’ve always been in the community. It’s only widespread awareness that’s new.

“its less that they forced themselves in and that LGBT”

Because, guess what, they didn’t. Because they already were in it.

“people legitimately believed they were one of us”

They did. There was a reason. And still do, because that reason is that they are. The overwhelming majority of the community knows this. Right now. Currently. Your opinion on this is so extremely in the minority of the community.

“due to being misinformed and not well educated about it.”

Oh my GOD the irony of you. Here. Have some stuff to stop you from forming a kugelblitz of ironic density: x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x If any of those links die in the future, whatever. As of now, that’s a whole lot of evidence you’re being bigoted. In exactly the same way that there are transphobic and biphobic and panphobic members of the community, when they obviously should know better... In exactly the same way those people try to kick me out of the community, because I’m agender, and because I’m pan, you’ve got the same problem of bigotry they have toward me, and it’s toward me again. You really should know better. MOST of the community knows better than this. By far, the community, as a whole, knows that aces are a part of it. There are exclusionists, but they represent extremely few. You don’t get to say people are “misinformed and not well educated” in the same breath you state you want to take aces our of the community, because you think they’re “not oppressed”. You can’t call people uneducated when you demonstrate a direct lack of education on what you’re talking about. But nothing anybody gives you will get you to consider “hey, maybe there’s a reason that most of the community accepts aces” and “maybe there’s an underlying reason why the correlation to terf and biphobic ideology keeps getting pointed out” or “ I am TELLING YOU this AS A PAN AND AGENDER PERSON, you are recycling rhetoric used against me. And what’s worse, you’re using it against me AGAIN, because I also happen to be ace.

Aces are not “co-opting” bi or trans struggles. You’re Just an asshole doing exactly the same thing other assholes are doing to other members of the community. All aces belong. I am SO. Sick of exclusionists thinking they’re being courtious or civil, no matter how they dress up their willing ignorance and unawareness of our own community’s actual history, and the oppression they deny the existence of. You’re also the kind of person who thinks the community suddenly sprang up out of nowhere after Stonewall, which, I mean... is a benighted notion on its own that ignores the entirety of our much more involved and extensive history, but even still, you are not, to any degree, supporting the spirit that Stormé DeLarverie and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and Miss Major stood for. Not even a little bit. And again, Stonewall was what started the Pride event; not what started the community. They are Different Things. Stop saying things that imply aces are automatically outsiders trying to wedge themselves into the community, when you are the ones trying to remove people who are members of the community. Signed, a member of the community who’s “””queer enough””” to tell you how fucked up your opinion is. Hopefully you’ll listen to an agender, pan person, because you sure as fuck won’t listen to anything any other cis and heteroromantic ace, or heterosexual aro person says about the issue.

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eovinmygod · 7 years

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From www.newstatesman.com By Mehdi Hasan

As a Muslim, I struggle with the idea of homosexuality – but I oppose homophobia

I've made homophobic remarks in the past, writes Mehdi Hasan, but now I’ve grown up — and reconciled my Islamic beliefs with my attitude to gay rights.

’Tis the season of apologies – specifically, grovelling apologies by some of our finest academic brains for homophobic remarks they’ve made in public. The Cambridge University theologian Dr Tim Winter, one of the UK’s leading Islamic scholars, apologised on 2 May after footage emerged showing him calling homosexuality the “ultimate inversion” and an “inexplicable aberration”. “The YouTube clip is at least 15 years old, and does not in any way represent my present views . . . we all have our youthful enthusiasms, and we all move on.”

The Harvard historian Professor Niall Ferguson apologised “unreservedly” on 4 May for “stupid” and “insensitive” comments in which he claimed that the economist John Maynard Keynes hadn’t cared about “the long run” because he was gay and had no intention of having any children.

Dare I add my non-academic, non-intellectual voice to the mix? I want to issue my own apology. Because I’ve made some pretty inappropriate comments in the past, too.

You may or may not be surprised to learn that, as a teenager, I was one of those wannabe-macho kids who crudely deployed “gay” as a mark of abuse; you will probably be shocked to discover that shamefully, even in my twenties, I was still making the odd disparaging remark about homosexuality.

It’s now 2013 and I’m 33 years old. My own “youthful enthusiasm” is thankfully, if belatedly, behind me.

What happened? Well, for a start, I grew up. Bigotry and demonisation of difference are usually the hallmark of immature and childish minds. But, if I’m honest, something else happened, too: I acquired a more nuanced understanding of my Islamic faith, a better appreciation of its morals, values and capacity for tolerance.

Before we go any further, a bit of background – I was attacked heavily a few weeks ago by some of my co-religionists for suggesting in these pages that too many Muslims in this country have a “Jewish problem” and that we blithely “ignore the rampant anti-Semitism in our own backyard”.

I hope I won’t provoke the same shrieks of outrage and denial when I say that many Muslims also have a problem, if not with homosexuals, then with homosexuality. In fact, a 2009 poll by Gallup found that British Muslims have zero tolerance towards homosexuality. “None of the 500 British Muslims interviewed believed that homosexual acts were morally acceptable,” the Guardian reported in May that year.

Some more background. Orthodox Islam, like orthodox interpretations of the other Abrahamic faiths, views homosexuality as sinful and usually defines marriage as only ever a heterosexual union.

This isn’t to say that there is no debate on the subject. In April, the Washington Post profiled Daayiee Abdullah, who is believed to be the only publicly gay imam in the west. “[I]f you have any same-sex marriages,” the Post quotes him as saying, “I’m available.” Meanwhile, the gay Muslim scholar Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, who teaches Islamic studies at Emory University in the United States, says that notions such as “gay” or “lesbian” are not mentioned in the Quran. He blames Islam’s hostility towards homosexuality on a misreading of the texts by ultra-conservative mullahs.

And, in his 2011 book Reading the Quran, the British Muslim intellectual and writer Ziauddin Sardar argues that “there is absolutely no evidence that the Prophet punished anyone for homosexuality”. Sardar says “the demonisation of homosexuality in Muslim history is based largely on fabricated traditions and the unreconstituted prejudice harboured by most Muslim societies”. He highlights verse 31 of chapter 24 of the Quran, in which “we come across ‘men who have no sexual desire’ who can witness the ‘charms’ of women”. I must add here that Abdullah, Kugle and Sardar are in a tiny minority, as are the members of gay Muslim groups such as Imaan. Most mainstream Muslim scholars – even self-identified progressives and moderates such as Imam Hamza Yusuf in the United States and Professor Tariq Ramadan in the UK – consider homosexuality to be a grave sin. The Quran, after all, explicitly condemns the people of Lot for “approach[ing] males” (26:165) and for “lust[ing] on men in preference to women” (7:81), and describes marriage as an institution that is gender-based and procreative.

What about me? Where do I stand on this? For years I’ve been reluctant to answer questions on the subject. I was afraid of the “homophobe” tag. I didn’t want my gay friends and colleagues to look at me with horror, suspicion or disdain.

So let me be clear: yes, I’m a progressive who supports a secular society in which you don’t impose your faith on others – and in which the government, no matter how big or small, must always stay out of the bedroom. But I am also (to Richard Dawkins’s continuing disappointment) a believing Muslim. And, as a result, I really do struggle with this issue of homosexuality. As a supporter of secularism, I am willing to accept same-sex weddings in a state-sanctioned register office, on grounds of equity. As a believer in Islam, however, I insist that no mosque be forced to hold one against its wishes.

If you’re gay, that doesn’t mean I want to discriminate against you, belittle or bully you, abuse or offend you. Not at all. I don’t want to go back to the dark days of criminalisation and the imprisonment of gay men and women; of Section 28 and legalised discrimination. I’m disgusted by the violent repression and persecution of gay people across the Muslim-majority world.

I cringe as I watch footage of the buffoonish Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claiming: “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals . . . we do not have this phenomenon.” I feel sick to my stomach when I read accounts of how, in the late 1990s, the Taliban in Afghanistan buried gay men alive and then toppled brick walls on top of them.

Nor is this an issue only in the Middle East and south Asia. In March, a Muslim caller to a radio station in New York stunned the host after suggesting, live on air, that gay Americans should be beheaded in line with “sharia law”. Here in the UK, in February, Muslim MPs who voted in favour of the same-sex marriage bill – such as the shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan – faced death threats and accusations of apostasy from a handful of Muslim extremists. And last year, a homophobic campaign launched by puffed-up Islamist gangs in east London featured ludicrous and offensive stickers declaring the area a “gay-free zone”.

I know it might be hard to believe, but Islam is not a religion of violence, hate or intolerance – despite the best efforts of a minority of reactionaries and radicals to argue (and behave) otherwise. Out of the 114 chapters of the Quran, 113 begin by introducing the God of Islam as a God of mercy and compassion. The Prophet Muhammad himself is referred to as “a mercy for all creation”. This mercy applies to everyone, whether heterosexual or homosexual. As Tariq Ramadan has put it: “I may disagree with what you are doing because it’s not in accordance with my belief but I respect who are you are.” He rightly notes that this is “a question of respect and mutual understanding”.

I should also point out here that most British Muslims oppose the persecution of homosexuals. A 2011 poll for the think tank Demos found that fewer than one in four British Muslims disagreed with the statement “I am proud of how Britain treats gay people”.

There is much to be proud of, but still much to be done. Homophobic bullying is rife in our schools. Nine out of ten gay or lesbian teenagers report being bullied at school over their sexual orientation. LGBT teens are two to three times more likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual peers.

Despite the recent slight fall in “sexual orientation hate crimes”, in 2012 there were still 4,252 such crimes in England and Wales, four out of every five of which involved “violence against the person”. In March, for instance, a man was jailed for killing a gay teenager by setting him on fire; the killer scrawled homophobic insults across 18-year-old Steven Simpson’s face, forearm and stomach.

Regular readers will know that I spend much of my time speaking out against Islamophobic bigotry: from the crude stereotyping of Muslims in the media and discrimination against Muslims in the workplace to attacks on Muslim homes, businesses and places of worship.

The truth is that Islamophobia and homophobia have much in common: they are both, in the words of the (gay) journalist Patrick Strudwick, “at least partly fuelled by fear. Fear of the unknown . . .” Muslims and gay people alike are victims of this fear – especially when it translates into hate speech or physical attacks. We need to stand side by side against the bigots and hate-mongers, whether of the Islamist or the far-right variety, rather than turn on one another or allow ourselves to be pitted against each other, “Muslims v gays”.

We must avoid stereotyping and demonising each other at all costs. “The biggest question we have as a society,” says a Muslim MP who prefers to remain anonymous, “is how we accommodate difference.”

Remember also that negative attitudes to homosexuality are not the exclusive preserve of Muslims. In 2010, the British Social Attitudes survey showed that 36 per cent of the public regarded same-sex relations as “always” or “mostly wrong”.

A Muslim MP who voted in favour of the same-sex marriage bill tells me that most of the letters of protest that they received in response were from evangelical Christians, not Muslims. And, of course, it wasn’t a Muslim who took the life of poor Steven Simpson.

Yet ultimately I didn’t set out to write this piece to try to bridge the gap between Islam and homosexuality. I am not a theologian. Nor am I writing this in response to the ongoing parliamentary debate about the pros and cons of same-sex marriage. I am not a politician.

I am writing this because I want to live in a society in which all minorities – Jews, Muslims, gay people and others – are protected from violence and abuse, from demonisation and discrimination. And because I want to apologise for any hurt or offence that I may have caused to my gay brothers and lesbian sisters.

And yes, whatever our differences – straight or gay, religious or atheist, male or female – we are all brothers and sisters. As the great Muslim leader of the 7th century and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, Ali ibn Abi Talib, once declared: “Remember that people are of two kinds; they are either your brothers in religion or your brothers in mankind.”

Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the political director of the Huffington Post UK, where this article is crossposted

Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the co-author of Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader. He was the New Statesman's senior editor (politics) from 2009-12.

#homosexuality #society #religion #tolerance #love #lgbt #homophobia #love is love #gay rights #muslim

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leviathangourmet · 6 years

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There was a time when Das Kapital was my bible. It sits on one of the bookshelves that line my living room, alongside other artifacts from my youthful foray into Marxism. The front cover is worn, the pages slightly frayed. For years, I returned to those words, chewing slow on arguments unspooled in archaic prose about labour-power and the appropriation of surplus-value. I was certain I’d found the key to understanding the modern world; a truth so pure it would end the oppression of man by man.

I’ve thought often about that sense of certainty in the years since. I turn the memories over in my mind, amazed at my erstwhile fervency. The sense that I, a teenager and later a young man, had found the answer to what ails the world in a text of political economy published in 1867….That hubris, in retrospect, is shocking.

Although I would have protested the idea then, it’s become clear to me that my former sense of conviction was a secularized form of faith. My pretense to holding an atheistic worldview coldly ruled by reason was just that: a pretense. Marx may have been correct that religion is the opiate of the masses, but he failed to envision what his materialist conception of history would become to his followers in a secularized world. On an unconscious level, my ideology was fundamentally theistic, my nominal rejection of the supernatural notwithstanding.

The link between religion and Marxism (or, more recently, identity politics) has been remarked upon by many writers, including here in Quillette. Nevertheless, I continue to be struck by how many intelligent and empathetic young people, often on the tail end of a gradual, multi-generational rejection of God, become congregants of the radical left.

I’ll use Christianity and Marxism to illustrate the point, but it holds for other religions and ideologies as well. Jesus steps onto the world stage to bring forth the word of God, before sacrificing himself for the sins of mankind. Marx rises from obscurity after revealing the unfolding logic of history and—by extension—the end point in the social organization of man. The apostles, the closest followers of Christ, dedicate themselves to interpreting and spreading his word. The post-Marx Marxists do the same, although the most revered figures vary depending on geography and personal preference. For some, it’s butchers such as Stalin and Mao; for me, it was Lenin and Trotsky, the architects of the October Revolution of 1917. Perhaps most on the nose: The Czech-Austrian communist theoretician Karl Kautsky, the most well-known follower of Marx and Engels in the immediate aftermath of their deaths, was affectionately called “the pope of Marxism.”

The Old Testament is replaced by Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto, and the New Testament by Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, or Mao’s On Guerilla Warfare, or Lenin’s April Theses. Parsing these texts becomes an obsession for generations of true believers. The rapture, that bloody apocalyptic end of days, is replaced with revolution. And like fundamentalist Christians, many Marxists look forward to it, including the death and terror it would bring. Finally, communism marks the manifestation of heaven on earth. Despite the pretension to atheism, Marxism provides a secularized Christian eschatology, rooted in an unconscious Manichaean millenarianism.

The late British-American essayist Christopher Hitchens was a reformed Marxist. In his 2007 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he likened his youthful political convictions to religious faith thusly:

When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith, but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical and dialectical materialism was not an absolute, and it did not have any supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had its martyrs and saints and doctrinaires and (after a while) its mutually excommunicating rival papacies. It also had its schisms and inquisitions and heresy hunts. I was a member of a dissident sect, which admired Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, and I can say definitely that we also had our prophets…Those of us who had a sort of rational alternative for religion had reached a terminus which was comparably dogmatic.

As I can attest, there is a certain comfort that accompanies this mindset, which I suspect is similar to what religious true believers feel. It also gives one a sense of purpose, for I was a missionary on the hunt for converts. There were times I travelled hundreds of kilometres to participate in demonstrations that had little, if any, connection to my life, except for the hope that one day, perhaps even after my death, my efforts would help usher in the prophesized utopia. There were moments my comrades and I would even acknowledge and poke fun at this aspect of our activism: During a campaign that involved canvassing poor neighbourhoods in a major U.S. city, knocking on door after door, we began referring to ourselves as the Jehovah’s Witnesses of the revolution.

One of the most evident problems with faith-based (or ersatz-faith-based) worldviews is that they arm adherents with a sense of certitude that is corrosive to discourse. It leaves them utterly certain that they occupy the moral high ground on every issue, and so the facts must be on their side. And if the facts prove uncooperative, they are either ignored, distorted, or simply erased. This is something the much-maligned French philosopher Michel Foucault understoodquite well, notwithstanding all of the criticism to which he has been subject:

The polemicist…proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth, but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak, but of abolishing him as interlocutor from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth, but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning.

There’s an episode from my own past that illustrates this general principle nicely. I’m young and arguing with my stepfather about politics. In Canada, where we live, our nation’s treatment of Indigenous peoples is a shameful stain on our history. The Indigenous population remains marginalized, their communities being often poor and isolated. We were discussing what needed to be done to remedy this. My stepfather argued that there is only so much the government can do to improve the lot of any group, and that states should create the conditions in which people can lift themselves up, before getting out of the way entirely. It’s a perfectly reasonable position, one I’m sympathetic to now. But at the time, I was having none of it. Not only was he on the wrong side of the issue, he was on the wrong side of history. Frustrated and angry after a lengthy, emotional exchange, I called him a racist, practically spitting the word at him. In fact, my stepfather is nothing of the sort. I’ve never heard him utter an unkind word, let alone one that betrayed an attitude of bigotry. This wasn’t a case of him denying historical wrongs. He simply disagreed what steps could best be taken to address a problem we both recognized as real. Thinking back on the encounter still makes me feel ashamed.

For many of us, such one-off encounters have become a regular—sometimes even daily—form of “debate,” especially on social media, whose dynamics encourage rhetorical stakes-raising. The idea that two people acting in good faith can look at the same set of facts and reach different conclusions has gone from unspoken assumption to exotic claim. People aren’t just wrong on this or that issue: They’re morally flawed. They don’t have bad politics: They’re bad people. On Twitter, you actually find college professors and politicians using Nazi analogies to attack people who disagree with them on mundane points of policy.

My job as a journalist requires me to spend a fair amount of time on Twitter, which I find draining and toxic. My feed is a curated list of North American politicos and reporters, which gives me a front row seat on the outrage mobs. I’ve concluded that many of the most active and influential culture warriors—the ones in the front pews praying the loudest, and the most ecstatically—are mentally unwell.

The Covington Catholic student controversy at the Lincoln Memorial offered an extreme example—perhaps even a wake-up call. People are no longer seen as individuals, but rather stand-ins for group identity. Nick Sandmann, the 16-year-old boy at the centre of things, was depicted as the very distillation of white supremacist, patriarchal evil. Making a single individual, let alone a child, the proxy for centuries of oppression isn’t social justice. It’s insanity. One was reminded of a Christian mob in ancient times that had found a heretic to sacrifice—or a similar mob in modern Pakistan that had seized some poor sod accused of mocking the Prophet Mohammed or desecrating a Koran.

One of the best descriptions of the ideologically possessed mind comes to us from Hungarian-British author Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). In The God that Failed, a 1949 collection of essays written by ex-communists detailing their conversion to, and disillusionment from, Marxism, Koestler wrote:

Something had clicked in my brain, which shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had ‘seen the light’ is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows…The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into a pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past.

What is needed in the face of such ideological certainty is a phase shift to a more modest intellectual approach. When I look back on my time as a Marxist, I’m struck by how little doubt I experienced. The world is an unbelievably complex place composed of infinite shades of grey. And anyone who thinks they have it all figured out should be mistrusted on principle.

These days, when I see that copy of Das Kapital on my shelf, my mind turns not to its author, but to Socrates. For during my years as a Marxist, I lost touch with the philosopher’s greatest insight: “I neither know nor think I know.” Socrates was the smartest man in Athens because he recognized his ignorance. It is perhaps the oldest lesson that philosophy has to teach us, yet so many of us have forgotten it.

This is not a call for epistemological nihilism. I am not advocating a bottomless appeal to subjectivity that destroys the very idea of truth. Meaning and knowledge, not just aesthetic preference, are possible; and it is incumbent upon us to strive for them. But we must also remember that people of good faith can be divided by politics and religion. Your favorite pundit or political theorist is just that—a pundit or political theorist, not a Moses, Mohammed or Jesus. And there is no one ideology that will lead us to an imagined promised land.

#marxism #social justice #progressivism #quillette #article #karl marx

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corbinite · 7 years

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I think it's time the majority moves away from the model of bigotry as an us-vs-them mentality and towards one of power. I as a gay man do not really have the power to rally together with other gay people to oppress straight people. I just don't, if I tried to introduce new laws or practices which treated straight people as lesser I wouldn't get anywhere, or I'd be severely punished even depending on the course. But if you look at who is in our leadership positions and has all the money, it's largely straight people. I'm not saying that all straight people will actively use power against us but they can is the point, if straight people as a class decided they wanted to they could treat us however they want because ultimately that's where the power lies. That doesn't look like homophobia and heterophobia existing in an us-vs-them dynamic, it's pretty unidirectional. Then you look at actual acts of discrimination. The biggest examples of "heterophobia" anyone can come up with is the safe spaces we've come up for oursleves. Our online communities and our friendships and our clubs. We get called discriminatory against straight people for trying to finally find people who understand us, who understand what we've experienced with homophobia, and we try to do it away from straight people because honestly it's just too much of a risk to try to find those connections otherwise. There's a risk of harassment, and even in straight circles where people say they're accepting there's enough microaggressions that we just can't open up to the same degree as in our gay circles, so being around just other people like us is freeing for once. And... if you really look at it... most of the world is a safe space for straight people. Tv is vastly straight, there's a clear one homo limit in most shows and if you go over it the straight class as a net throws a fit. You always know you can see yourself and almost exclusively yourself when you turn on the tv and based on the pushback against diverse media you seem to like it that way. And at work or in open conversation or with your friends, there's a very high chance that as far as you know it's all straight people (now it's likely that there are multiple non-straight people in any said group but you are likely unaware so it doesn't detract from this experience you have of being in a sea of other straight people like you). You're able to talk about love and sex, maybe not super explicitly but you can bring it up and expect support with zero reservations or discomfort in getting the support, just unbridled participation from your peers who can relate but we never got that, we never got to talk about it and have people fully relate. So we seek out communities of each other so we can emotionally support each other through oppression in ways that straight people quite frankly can't. The other example people love to bring up is when we oppose the so called "freedom" to discriminate against us, that's called heterophobia or a war on religion. I'm going to be frank, it's bullshit. Freedom does not mean the legal or ethical right to mistreat others without consequences. And us protecting ourselves is not "heterophobia" it just isn't, we just want to be protected from mistreatment. Those examples along with the occasional case of a gay person venting frustrations about being mistreated are the best examples of "heterophobia" anyone can come up with. Contrast that with being disowned, being fired, being evicted, being harassed on the street for holding hands, being beaten or killed or raped, being subjected to psychological and sexual abuses as a quack "therapy", being told your whole life that you're a sinner, having people wince at any form of love that resembles yours, never seeing yourself reflected, never being shown or told that it's okay to be this way, growing up thinking you're so gross because you had no model to know it's okay, getting constant subliminal signs that you're gross, that's what gay people have to deal with. Actual acts of discrimination clearly are very unidirectional. Now, let's bring prejudice into the equation. Look at people's actual feelings. Now, gay people certainly can experience a bit of what some would call "tribalism". The way we grow up rejected from straight society that taught us to feel disgust towards ourselves causes a lot of bitterness and it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that sometimes yes we do resent straight people overall for it. Ultimately though that's a reflex that was taught to us by the treatment we got, developed as a defense mechanism to stay sane through our experience. Rather than being heterophobia, any sort of discrimination or true actions taken against straight people, it's all ultimately of a vastly different nature than homophobia. Homophobia however, it's pretty much universal within our society. It's taught to everyone to some degree. Everyone including us gay people. We don't feel true heterophobia but we certainly feel homophobia ourselves. Because picking up at least bits of it is inevitable unless you grow up under a rock and with a perfect family (under a rock because studies have shown that your environment away from home actually has a larger effect on the person you become than how your parents raise you). But no one grows up totally disconnected from the world, no one is an island, we're all contantly learning from each other and transferring ideas including subtle and subconscious attitudes, and that certainly includes bigotry. Even the prejudicial feelings themselves about sexuality are largely unidirectional: always pointed towards non-straight people even within those of us who are the targets. You see, the idea that bigotry is this simple us-vs-them tribalism, it just doesn't check out. It's an attractive notion, I certainly believed in it while I was still in denial of my sexuality and what I had socially were my racial and gender privileges. It's far easier on the conscience to see it that way because it requires nothing of you but to ignore the problem and say it'll go away if we don't feed it with attention. But it just doesn't work that way. Everyone has some level of homophobia. Everyone acts it out in some subtle way at least once in a while. It's inevitable. And I'm going to say: it's okay to notice it in yourself. It's okay to find that you are in fact somewhat bigoted, because you don't live in a bubble and you're not perfect. And the only way we'll progress in our societies is if we look at ourselves and think: are my subconscious attitudes and actions playing right into a power dynamic? Did I inherit a long history and tradition of bigotry? Just try to be a mindful person, being aware of yourself in life is a severely neglected skill in our society, even outside these axes of oppression it's so neglected. No one wants to think they're a bad person so they shield themselves from reflecting on their actions. I did that to an unhealthy degree at one point and I do still sometimes fall back into it because I'm far from perfect. I really was not a mindful person overall in life and it impacted myself and those around me. But I'm trying to be better at it, and I hope other people can too. And if you are a loved one, whatever your relationship to me is or how well you know me, I hope you'll read this and look into yourself for the ways you can be better at removing yourself from bigotry, and even actively challenging it both within yourself and out in the world. Please, for me.

#mine #corbinite gets real #i posted it on facebook first which is why it has the emotional appeal at the end #since most of the people i know on facebook are straight and not as well versed on power dynamics

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pelikinesis · 5 years

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They taught me how to write. BIG mistake (verily and forsooth, I am high).

Maybe because there are people out there who want to believe, that beings who appear to be monstrous, beings for whom all observable characteristics of their physical forms activate responses of disgust and fear, individuals who can be kinder and more knowable than the majority of their kind, people who can be a source of safety rather than danger, of joy rather than suffering. Maybe that’s the closest that their sense of self-preservation will allow their hearts to get to that amplitude?

Or maybe because monsters and aliens and demons, etc. are hot? Did you ever think about that?

Okokoakokyokokokayokokyaokokokyaokokyaokyaok but. But. BUT. BUT.

Wait no I’m forgetting it no I remember yes okso can you remember like the dumbest thought you’ve ever had? The most mundane surprise or sensible chuckle or blandest slice of cheesecake you’ve ever had, you know some real good shit that falls into the continuum between first world problems and a damned good day. Or just like, the worst pun you’ve come up with. That one time you actually stopped and smelled the roses instead of continuing with your policy of ignoring all cliché advice or just assuming said cliche advice is not worth doing at least as far as you’re concerned.

That mundane thing, that experience of remembering the reference to the movie Shrek that happened within the movie I Am Legend, for no reason, while stepping into the elevator for the parking lot of the shopping plaza off Main Street you used to go to in high school, that memory, that moment of experience which cooled down and air dried to become that memory, and also this whole fucking ping pong match of rocket-boosted travesties against the noble effort of articulating coherent thoughts as sapient beings in order to externalize the internal phenomena into a shared reality woven by our interactions with others of our species.

All that stuff happened, and could potentially happen again and again every freaking time someone reads this, or arrives here anyways through completely different means unassociated with this piece of writing and this act of writing and your experience of reading (except you aren’t but others are unless none of them did), as a result of the process that formed the known freaking Universe with stars and comets and Mars and Venus and Pluto and black holes and supernovae and the skeletons of all those dogs and chimpanzees some of the first unmanned but not un-animal’d space probes contained, and that one birthday balloon that the laws of probability dictate must either have existed, must inevitably exist, or currently exists right now, which floated away from the hand of its birthday girl and up into the sky and got blown even upperwards (which is a perfectly cromulent word) by a freak gust of wind into space, that ballo either is or will be up in space as well, and all that 99% of existence which is extraterrestrial in nature and astronomical in scope. Alllllllll that.

And all that was created in the same event and continues as the same process which were necessary for this piece of writing to exist, and for you to be born and educated in order for any of that to matter (as far as you’re concerned, also, hi. How ya doin’? I hope you’re living and loving [originally I misspelled ‘living’ and decided to keep the typo in] in a world that’s gained more than it has lost than the one I’m writing this from. I’m afraid it won’t be. Remember to stay hydrated, and time out of your day to do a little something for yourself, if you can afford to. Everything stops sounding cheesy once you remember how ephemeral our existences are. Don’t be afraid to like and be moved by things. Unless the thing is bigotry or fascism or whatever sociopolitical poison is fuelling and amplifying the ills of your time. Something like Trumpanomics, or neoneoneoliberalism, or Let’s Continue Never Progressing Past Societies With Egregious Wealth Disparities, Political Corruption, Concentration Camps, and Genocide Denial, Because That Sounds Hard And Like We’d Have to Work On Our Enormous Collective Flaws In Part By Shining A Spotlight On Those Responsible As Well As The Systems That Perpetuate and Incentivize Them. Be moved in the opposite direction of those, because they suck. I really hope you don’t have to deal with any of that over when you’re from. Anyways, I hope you feel a little braver after reading this. I have no idea why you would, it’s not like I began writing this thinking “I feel like trying to inspire the HELL out of some kid taking a Early 21st Century Literature Class right now” because I am reasonably confident, at the time of this writing, that no one else EVER has had that thought, and if I’m wrong, then clearly I’m too committed to my own particular latitude of willful ignorance and desperate sense of self-importance to entertain that alternative possibility, but I have to say, this feels pretty good. Maybe because being high feels good. But not too high. But WHY does being high feel so good? Well, it does to me. I have a lot of friends who do not share that opinion. I guess it’s like asking why some people think celery tastes good, when they’re wrong.) And if nothing else, this is still easier to read and understand than 99% of books and articles written by philosophical scholars, even if it’s not as profound. But if this isn’t profound but what they say is profound then what is profundity and why do I need to pretend to like it?

As for why I just took a teensy hit from my vape pen (HAHAHHAA yeah, suck it, nerds and students of the future! I, Marc Cid, who is clearly a revered and iconic author of the new millennium [unless the millennium beginning in the year 2000 AD is no longer considered the new millennium in which case wow holy shit, what year is it over there? I’m impressed that you’ve managed to translate what to you is our equivalent of Ye Olde Englishe, unless you didn’t, in which case this looks like a bunch of gibberish and your finest paleolinguistic scholars have all been staring at this fossil of a text file all like “Ah yes, the fabled shibboleth of The Mad Poet, Marc--I mean, of the Incredibly Mildly Pleasant, Profound, and Manbun-sporting Poet, Marc Cid. For centuries, scholars of yore thought it lost to the sands of time, in the wake of the great InternetQuake of the year 2030, predicted by him in the very fabled shibboleth of which I am currently gawking at in a museum in the future but I can’t read that this is totally going to happen at a period in time far beyond its writing.

...Okay, that one got away from me and it would take soooooooo much effort to try to wrestle it back. If it really bothers you, then YOU can finish it, I don’t even care. Hey, English professors in the future! Yeah, I’m talking to you. Make this an assignment for your students, that they have to finish that last paragraph. In the English of my time!!! Or whatever other contemporary languages, that wouldn’t be fair to people from other places that don’t speak what I supposed I’d have to describe as “Future English” because even though I’m predicting all of this with absolute confidence it will happen, I can’t predict the exact name of “Future English.” Well, I don’t mind taking a guess, or three. Okay here goes, 1-2-3: I think Future English will be called Quenya, Sindarin, or It’s Not Delivery, It’s DiGiorno.

#highblogging #nobody should read this ever #anime was a mistake #Cukoloris #gibbous #Dr. Robert Liston

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