#and then harp about millions of years of progress

[babsbabbles]

Modern atheistic scientists: There was nothing and then there was. The universe is younger than we thought actually. Life is so unlikely to have evolved, it is considered an impossible occurance. The reason we should preserve life and biodiversity is because every living thing has inherent value simply by being alive. Humanity may be more unique than we expected.

Bible-believing christians:

[wartakes]

The Obligatory Election Essay (OLD ESSAY)

The following essay was originally posted on November 8th, 2020 (shortly after the 2020 Presidential Election was held). This one honestly didn't have much to do with any of my usual topics but was me being somewhat tipsy and waxing philosophic about politics. Not my best one. But here you go. (Full essay below the cut).

This is probably going to be shorter than most of the pieces I plan to write for here. I wasn’t actually going to have this be my second essay for the site. I hadn’t actually written anything for the 2020 election. I think that was partially because I had no idea how it was going to go, the thought of it stressed me out, and I also didn’t want to jinx anything or tempt hubris by making predictions. I’ve been focused on just surviving the election itself before doing anything else, stocking up on food and alcohol and waiting out the storm in my room the last few days.

Now it appears Joe Biden will in fact be the next President of the United States. There are still ways Trump and his supporters could try and rat-fuck this situation, so we’ll see if he goes out with a bang or a whimper in terms of his reaction to all this – and if the chuds and the fashies limp away for now or cause trouble. But currently, it appears that Biden has solidly won.

I won’t get into my personal feelings on Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democratic Party as a whole in this piece. Needless to say, my feelings are a mixed bag and predominately negative. That being said, I still think beating Trump is a good thing and anyone who somehow thinks this is a loss for leftism and that a Biden Presidency is just as bad as a Trump one really needs to log off for a bit and take a breather and reassess things. Yes, we still have a lot of work to do. Yes, we need to keep organizing. Yes, it will be a hard and long process. But for now, I’ll take this victory – and it is in fact a victory. It shows that things are not destined to always get worse.

Sure, this election has its discouraging parts. Like the fact that, even though Biden still won by a healthy margin, over 70 million people – more than who voted for Barrack Obama in his landslide 2008 victory against John McCain – still voted for Trump despite everything he’s done in the last four years. Or the fact there are now QAnon believers who will be sitting in Congress.

But there were good things for the left as well. Out of the 29 candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America this election cycle, 21 won their races – including two sitting Members of Congress and two new candidates. A number of progressive ballot measures also passed, such as the $15 minimum wage in Florida.  This all happened despite a Democratic party who consistently wishes to write off the left wing – and that looks like it won’t be changing any time soon. While there is good reason to be discouraged about certain outcomes, we also have a lot to be happy about, celebrate, and motivate us to further action going forward.

All that being said, this is supposed to be a blog about foreign policy and national security so now I should actually get to that part instead of still rambling about domestic politics.

As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had said before the results of the election were finally called, no matter what the outcome was we were going to need to keep organizing and making our voices heard and power known – not just for future elections, but for other important causes and struggles. This is all very true, and to that I’m taking the chance to tack on my rallying cry of  “please don’t forget to work on foreign policy and national security too!”

I wasn’t actually expecting to harp on this point again so soon after my initial essay setting the stage for this blog, so I apologize if this sounds repetitive. But, this is going to be a repetitive point anyway throughout all my writing here, and I felt I was squandering an opportunity if I didn’t make the most of these events while they were still fresh in people’s minds.

Leftists are already thinking about the future and what we’ll need to do to strengthen the movement and make this country and the world a better place. That inclusion of “the world” is not just a throwaway line. If this election made one thing obvious, it’s that the rest of the world was hanging on it even more than they usually do during a U.S. Presidential race. There was and still is real fear about what comes next here in America and how it may affect people where they live too. Both for good and for ill, we’ve seen how events in the United States can ripple around the world. For ill, in how an off the cuff Trump tweet or comment can cause crises, and for good when we saw how movements like Black Lives Matter spread across the globe.

As leftists continue to fight for real change for the better in this country, they need to learn more about the rest of the world and how our actions impact it. This will need to go beyond the ways those who do think about this conceptualize it – usually along the lines of solidarity with movements and activists in other countries. Leftists will also need to learn about and better understand diplomacy, statecraft, intelligence, and even war – all things that we will still need to deal with if we ever really hope to govern someday, as they’re not going away.

National security and war subjects in particular leftists will need to need to become more knowledgeable on going forward. These have been realms that have typically been dominated by groups such as tankies, campists, and disarmament proponents – which I’ve already ranted about before so I’ll leave alone for now. I understand why many leftists either lack knowledge in this area, are uncomfortable with it, or both. But that has to change. When I spoke of the people around the world, worried about the outcome of the election, I wasn’t speaking just about those who were afraid of what might happen to them, but what may not happen. There are also marginalized groups fighting against oppression, or smaller states at risk from larger, aggressive, authoritarian neighbors. If we are going to be good leftists in a situation where we can actually govern, we will need to know how to wield all the levers of power and that will include war.

Likewise, leftists need to better understand the military and its service members. Like with war in general, I understand why many leftists often take a hostile attitude towards the military and its personnel, given some of the actions of the military in the past. But leftists need to understand how important it is to bring servicemen and women into the fold as they have done with other groups. We need to understand the challenges and struggles that military personnel face, like how they are recruited to begin with and how they are treated. We need to understand how valuable their perspectives and skills are, and how important engaging with them will be for reshaping and rebuilding both the country and the military to be better and more just in the future. Keep in mind, many more servicemen and women are sympathetic to the causes we fight for than you think. After all, Bernie Sanders beat every other candidate for President – including Donald Trump – in political donations from active duty troops during the primaries. The military is something we will still need if ever elect our theoretical President Leftist. We need to put in the work now to understand it and its service members and start to change it for the better.

Alright, its late on Saturday night, I’ve had a bit to drink, and I’m tired, so I’m gonna cut things off here. I promise the next one of these will be a more in-depth analysis of something different, but I just wanted to get these thoughts off my chest while everything was still fresh. Aside from posting this essay, I’m spending the rest of the weekend tuning out from politics and giving myself time and space to be happy. I highly suggest the rest of you do the same thing.

[hardpacker]

on Irish America

i began this post following the death of the queen, but it's since expanded. i do harp (ha ha) on the same points throughout and comment on some texts.

as always, analysis is ongoing. here's a list of what I'm currently reading.

It's the most privileged classes who weep and mourn the loss of one of their own regardless of nationality. The capitalist classes are borderless. They can and will construct borders by which they themselves aren't limited. They want the same things through the same means. They will pay lip service for the sake of civility even when (like Sinn Fein) their party claims to be one of staunch republicanism founded in a history of revolutionary socialism, trade unionism, class consciousness… specifically Marxism in the case of James Connolly. Attempting to honour his so-called martyrdom by severing that grotesque punishment from his political aims would only be a sham of aesthetics only. Severing him from his birth in Scotland, his unsteady employment and frequent unemployment, his time living in America, his criticisms of the Irish landlord and his solidarity with Irish Americans, is to use him as a quotable portrait-- not a living, labouring human being.

time for a bit of scrutiny:

originally, i was first piqued by someone "observing" in this way: "irish people & people of irish heritage pretending to be a type of irish person that hasn't existed for 30 years."

i think it's very weird to sum this up as a type of "clout-chasing," or whatever, that Irish people/people of Irish descent celebrate the death of a monarch and symbol and (right up until her death) a lobbyist of ruthless imperialism. if anyone's "pretending" about mocking the queen's death… well it honestly doesn't matter at fucking all, because the “pretending” in question here begins and ends with posts.

For every supposed opportunistic celebration, the harsh reality is that’s not just the Irish Of American Experience. There's people in mainland Ireland who yes— may opportunistically celebrate for a laugh and then carry on not giving a fuck, and that, as in America, is to the detriment of the rest. There are conservatives in Ireland who suck as much shit as your most annoying Irish American neighbour, but trying to justify your complaint by couching it in a respect for "authenticity"— and an authenticity or a “tradition” being considered long-dead— is to flirt with nationalism as with fascism. You don't know. You don't have the full picture. I'm not comfortable calling any peoples/group "dead," lost to history and not an extant spirit or movement. It's not true, and that crafting this particular truth would be so precious to someone is to me untrustworthy.

Today, the United States accounts (officially) for over 43 million Irish Americans, with numerous US citizens claiming an ancestral link with Ireland. The 1980 and 1990 censuses showed that over 43 million US citizens (19% of the total population) defined themselves as being Irish-American. However, these statistics obscure a great shallowness of interest for the vast majority and, as Dumbrell notes, “there is no cohesive ‘shamrock vote’ in the US.” This headline figure also ignores the fact that not all of these 43 million people come from an Irish Catholic background and that the large numbers of Scots-Irish with a Protestant ancestry complicates the political profile of this group to a significant extent.

This is true and it isn't, right? There aren't very conclusive or standardised reports on this, but overall Irish Americans vote "liberal." (I have to assume that's far to the right of me, personally.) Recent diaspora are noted as being more progressive and more othered in Irish communities in America, and what should this suggest to me? That Ireland is more progressive? Whether or not Ireland is more or less conservative, its conservative policies over decades have lead to further diaspora. I would also say younger Irish Americans are more progressive, too. That tends to be the case until we die prematurely.

In 2004, Ireland held a referendum, with a majority successfully voting to limit the right of Irish citizenship "to individuals born on the island of Ireland to the children of Irish citizens. It was approved by referendum on 11 June 2004 and signed into law on 24 June of the same year." (more)

This was of course a post-9/11, post-Celtic Tiger, post-Good Friday, racist and xenophobic fearmongering by the centre-right and conservative-liberal parties, inflating the incorrect notion that the country's workforce was being flooded by undocumented immigrants seeking to game the system by giving birth in Irish hospitals to secure their stay. Not only is this hypocritical and the numbers themselves incorrect, it is, more importantly, fundamentally racist and horrifically cruel. It's cruel to the Irish people, to the Irish diaspora, and to all people seeking a home. The country of Ireland relies heavily on its immigrant population while its own population has been cut in half.

Despite (or more appropriately, because of) centuries and centuries of ongoing subjugation, (white) Irish people are considered automatic citizens of the UK. They have at least the legal, though not social, ability to move freely, vote, and stand for public office. Irish names are still discriminated against. Irish is a discrete ethnicity on the UK census.

If the Irish people are capable of organising around socialist ideals and mobilising in a block, why is there a monarchy at all? Why are the 6 counties still held hostage? Why is brutal racism by citizens and Gardaí still permitted? Why is Shannon a pit stop for the American military as it moves weapons and POWs? Why does Ireland not only permit but also forgive abuse on its soil by foreign monopolies? Or could it be that there is no monolith in Ireland either, and that the movements encouraging social and political change are at all times up against powerful suppression, and drowned out under more sensationalised events in the 24hr news cycle? By now you must know Gil Scott-Heron's poem-song, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Many in Ireland fix their disdain, and rightfully so, to the Irish Americans who assimilated into the police force. What seems missing from this is that the Gardaí is comprised of Irish police. Policing was brought into Ireland by a colonising force, sure, the same happened in America. And Irish citizens were involved with the slave trade before any Irish-American. Police are a blight everywhere. But the existence of policing and the social structure that engenders enlistment stems from colonisation and enforced division and obscuring and parceling out history favourable to the "victors".

I hate saying this, because it really sounds like a race to the bottom and I don't mean that. I don't want to cause division or point fingers or flatten our negative traits into a firm image of the Irish people as a whole. What I mean is the opposite and I insist on moving past divisions to find the commonality that does, achingly, call to our spirit.

Like all history, it's numerous and many-faced, it's something to build from, to usefully contextualise and learn from for the future. And if our problems do span our geographic position, then we ALL must continue learning and find our solidarity in that process instead. Never will I downplay the incredible importance of Irish socialist organisations like the Connolly Youth Movement or People Before Profit, and more. They're extremely important and the fact they exist at all gives me hope for a future not so distant. I mean to insist that similar mobilising has occurred, is occurring, and will occur again in America with Irish Americans in front or in the ranks.

Jersey residents join Irish protest

FEBRUARY 21, 1985 WASHINGTON (AP)

Hundreds of New Jersey residents joined other Irish-Americans yesterday in a peaceful but noisy demonstration near the Capitol to protest the visit of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The crowd, estimated by one police officer at about 2,000 people, listened to remarks by several members of Congress and chanted lustily against Mrs. Thatcher, who was delivering a speech to senators and representatives in the Capitol about 200 yards away.

"We want to have her know we're here and are against her policies in Northern Ireland," said John Tracey, 68, a retired trucking company employee from Demarest, N.J., who climbed off one of three chartered buses that arrived from. North Jersey. The protesters spent part of the afternoon visiting members of Congress who have supported their positions on various issues. They were most vocal in their praise of Rep. James Florio, D-N.J., who earlier this month circulated a "Dear Colleague" letter to other lawmakers, urging the House Foreign Affairs Committee to hold hearings on the conflict in Northern Ireland.

"Quite frankly, there hasn't been an American position on this," Florio said later. "The State Department has hidden from taking a position on this very important question." Before breaking up to visit the lawmakers, the demonstrators who gathered down a driveway from the east side of the Capitol were eyed by groups of police officers and a circling police helicopter that buzzed noisily overhead, forcing some of the speakers to shout. Some of the demonstrators carried placards, such as one reading, "Strip Search Maggie - She's the Terrorist."

One of the leaders of the New Jersey contingent is James V. Burke, a guidance counselor in the East Brunswick, N.J., public school system. Burke is president of the Central Jersey chapter of the Irish-American Unity Conference, a 2-year-old national group that has been trying to unite Irish social and political organizations on the question of Northern Ireland. "We're making great strides in New Jersey," said the 44-year-old Sayreville, N.J., resident.

"We've got about 3,000 members in New Jersey, but we're growing." Burke said Irish-American unity on the issue of Northern Ireland had been hurt in the last election by the support the Catholic Church gave President Reagan because of the abortion issue. "Ronald Reagan is the most pro-British, anti-Irish president we've ever had," Burke said. "The people were torn between the Catholic Church telling them to vote for Ronald Reagan on that issue and their support for the Democratic Party, which is our greatest friend."

I put this here to show that there is power in the mobilising of Irish Americans, but also that there is a basis for them to learn from and apply to other struggles. The foundation is there. It is easy to explain. It is hard to break the cognitive dissonance of being Irish in America. The desperation and poison of capitalism is hard to break even when its promises are flimsy. I do have a lot of disgust and a feeling of alienation from older, conservative Irish Americans, and I watched that heel-turn occur with whiplash in my own family, so I know a bit of how it's done. It's mournful. I won't stay there in that place though. I know myself.

James Connolly

To Irish Wage Workers in America

(1908)

We Irish Workers are then not under the necessity of considering ourselves as bound by tradition to the Democratic Party; political parties are not formed by traditions, but by interests. Where then do our interests lie? Certainly not in the Republican Party – that is the party of our employers, and as our employers we know do not allow their actions to be governed by our interests we are certainly not under any moral obligation to shape our political activity to suit the interests of our employers.

Where then? To answer that question properly we must ask ourselves why are we Irish here at all in this country, instead of in Ireland. Certainly we have no complaint to make against our native land, and we for the most part did not come here for pleasure. We came here because we found that Ireland was private property, that a small class had taken possession of its resources – its land, its lakes, its rivers, its mountains, its bogs, its towns and its cities, its railways, its factories, and its fisheries. In short, that a small class owned Ireland and that the remainder of the population were the bond slaves of these proprietors.

We came here because we found that the government of the country was in the hands of those proprietors and their friends, and that army and navy and police were the agents of the government in executing the will of those proprietors, and for driving us back to our chains whenever we rose in revolt against oppression. And as we learned that since that government was backed and maintained by the might of a nation other than our own, and more numerous than us, we could not hope to overthrow that government and free our means of living from the grasp of those proprietors, we fled from that land of ours and came to the United States.

You can search and uncover copious writing about the names and histories of Irish American socialists and their organisations. When you do, the heavy hand of the Catholic church emerges, working tirelessly to counter and suppress and dissolve these organisations by provoking shame and division in the same way the Vatican joined forces with the CIA to disarm the working people of all their education and achievements in communist Poland.

Religion and spirituality aren't antithetical to socialism at all. but. hierarchical institutions will do whatever they can to preserve their interests. capitalism wins by depriving a person of their basic needs unless they perform the correct tasks, produce the correct product, creating meritocracy completely inorganic and contrary to what i do believe are our most basic, more community-minded impulses. it is done over and over and over so religious institutions, just like in Ireland, become a stand-in for culture. religion can be reshaped by social forces, but the role of religion can also be shaped by capital, and there are armies to defend capital.

James Connolly, July the 12th (1913)

But they are told

“all this persecution was ended when William of Orange, and our immortal forefathers overthrew the Pope and Popery at the Boyne. Then began the era of civil and religious liberty.”

So runs the legend implicitly believed in Ulster. Yet it is far, very far, from the truth. In 1686 certain continental powers joined together in a league, known in history as the league of Augsburg, for the purpose of curbing the arrogant power of France. These powers were impartially Protestant and Catholic, including the Emperor of Germany, the King of Spain, William, Prince of Orange, and the Pope. The latter had but a small army, but possessed a good treasury and great influence. A few years before a French army had marched upon Rome to avenge a slight insult offered to France, and His Holiness was more than anxious to curb the Catholic power that had dared to violate the centre of Catholicity. Hence his alliance with William, Prince of Orange. King James II, of England, being insecure upon his throne, sought alliance with the French monarch. When, therefore, the war took place in Ireland, King William fought, aided by the arms, men, and treasures of his allies in the League of Augsburg, and part of his expenses at the Battle of the Boyne was paid for by His Holiness, the Pope. Moreover, when news of King William’s victory reached Rome, a Te Deum was sung in celebration of his victory over the Irish adherents of King James and King Louis. Therefore, on Saturday the Orangemen of Ulster, led by King Carson, will be celebrating the same victory as the Pope celebrated 223 years ago.

(more) (on) (this)

In a 1907 speech, New York City mayor and Democrat George B. McClellan Jr reportedly declared that ‘There are Russian socialists and Jewish socialists and German socialists! But, thank God! There are no Irish socialists!’ Connolly answered McClellan’s challenge on the pages of The Harp, the ISF monthly published between 1908 and 1910. He urged Irish-Americans to shun their historical ties to the Democratic Party and its ‘invertebrate Irish middle class politicians’ who brandished their ancestry only on election day.

Emigration failed to free Irishmen from imperialist exploitation, Connolly argued—Irish longshoremen on the docks in New York still worked for British shipping magnates with offices on nearby Wall Street. He implored his readers to reject their ‘aggressive insularity’ and organise with ‘that Polack, whose advent in the workshop you are taught to view with such disfavor’.

Connolly returned to Ireland in 1910, but his blend of socialism and Irish separatism reverberated with [Elizabeth Gurley] Flynn as she recruited for the Wobblies.

from The girl orator of the Bowery: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Ireland and the Industrial Workers of the World

Let me repeat: in regard to "pretending to be a type of Irish person who hasn't existed in 30 years," i don't have any confidence in accepting the supposed extinction of A Type Of Person.

To me, culture, just as faith and just as work or hobbies, is a practise. It’s a dialogue that doesn't end. It's study and implementation. It frames actions, it grounds experiences, I am in conversation with it, it is itself a language when language fails.

For people who view their Irish heritage as something other than the "obvious" "very American" "mixture" (I do think it's their right to describe it in this way, if they don't find it relevant to their experiences) I do think there is a very confusing sense of shame for much of the Irish diaspora— white, and nonwhite, depending— that mainland Irish can quite literally capitalise on, both in a form of social currency and while structuring laws around a) who does and doesn’t count for citizenship, and b) making sure enough companies cater to the diaspora’s desire for return. Genealogy is an entire industry now, with the LDS' properties taking up space in Dublin while libraries that offer these same services remain under-funded and under-staffed and must literally compete with them in the Dál.

When citizenship is based upon a linear and quantifiable provenance, you leave out a vast amount of people who have been forcibly, violently severed from that. And your disdain for an older, more conservative, more "traditional" population who may have more access to documents and "traditional" trappings, in turn BECOMES the image of the Irish American you fixate upon. You are engaging in a cooperative act.

Writing in the Dublin Inquirer, Emma Dabiri, an Afro-Irish scholar, responds to the following question:

I’m not from Ireland but I live in Dublin and I’ve lived here for several years now. I’ve been wondering whether I should start to assimilate by using Dublin slang and letting myself grow an accent or not? I feel like I should be trying to fit in, and I really like it, and it feels natural to start to talk like everybody around me. But if I started doing that wouldn’t people think I was joking? Especially people I know who are used to my original accent. Any advice?

Such an interesting question. Our voices and accents are a fundamental part of our identities. They are crucial markers of belonging, of how we are perceived, and of whether we are included or not.

The self-awareness that emerges when you understand how different your accent is from those around you can be likened to a form of double consciousness, leading you to overthink and over-analyse every word in a way that thwarts ordinary communication. Or is that just me?

So … what to do? I think the concept of code-switching might be helpful.

Code-switching is simply a matter of modulating your accent or vocabulary to meet the needs of the situation. People from minority or marginalized groups do it all the time. An Economist article on the phenomenon, explains that “Language is a proxy for identity, and so code-switching is an apt metaphor for handling more than one identity.”

When I was growing up there was certainly a stigma attached to this kind of thing. The perception being that it was “inauthentic” or “fake”, that you were trying to “be something you were not”, but code-switching is very different from “putting on an accent”.

It is using a voice ostensibly your own, but adapting it accordingly, and it is a survival technique for people navigating racial, national and class lines. In a society that was as homogenous as Ireland was in the 1990s I can understand why the use of different accents might have been viewed as suspicious.

[...]

My advice to you would be g’wan, use the slang, you’ve probably already picked up the accent more then you know. But at the same time don’t feel that you only have recourse to one accent that now becomes your “authentic voice”.

2018

In response to another question, which brings up the time Traveler actor John Connors tweeted in response to the smashing of a Lidl,

“Put it this way, if I see any young ones or young fellas robbing a few loafs from a big corporation I will not be calling @gardainfo. These c***s are robbing all of us everyday”,

Dabiri includes,

I think the incident you refer to with John demonstrates the ugly reality that lies just beneath the surface of civility. It is something I’ve experienced many times myself. Everyone is polite and progressive until something happens where the truth of how Travellers or black people are really perceived, is quickly revealed.

Emma Dabiri was also one of the participants in the conference Where Do We Go From Here? Revisiting Black Irish Relations and Responding to a Transnational Moment, part of the Black, Brown & Green Voices report, by Myriam Nyhan Grey.

Mainland Irish will say they're the only/one of the only countries in the world whose population is lower now than it was at the turn of the century. This is a horrific reality. But mourning that reality, and embracing what that reality looks like today in the form of descendants, don't always merge. This continues even as Ireland continues to produce MORE diaspora! It’s never stopped, not even once! The country overall is experiencing a shocking and easily addressed housing crisis, cost of living crisis, addiction and mental health crisis as a result, gutted and scammed by tech companies like Apple and Airbnb, which has resulted in Dublin now being one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live.

When your people are starving and you point fingers at the diaspora, many of whom are also starving... well it should be more embarrassing than it is.

If the conditions are the same as always, at home and in America, what exactly divides the fundamental struggle aside from lack of reach/solidarity? If the problem is that Irish Americans have been separated from "the struggle" for too long and now don't recognise their own hand in it, might the same be said for not only the upper classes in Irish society but also working-class conservatives?

Flynn reminded her audiences that they were not strangers to labour struggles in their motherlands, and they must redefine ‘Americanism’ to meet their demands for economic justice and reflect their growing presence in American society. After the foundation of the ISF, she travelled to Wobbly strongholds in western states, organising in Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington. By 1912 the IWW had gained traction in eastern cities such as Lawrence, Massachusetts, and captivated the mainstream press with its ‘revolutionary tactics’.

What America and the UK have done to the island of Ireland as occupied territory is THE SAME as what was/is done to Irish diaspora. If it was any different, they wouldn't be in-- or would have very different reasons to be in-- America or Canada (commonwealth of the UK, remember.) Or Australia. Or whatever.

What is your "real" Irishness?

Is it about history? Well, we share much of that and all its traumas— and remember, “history” is not an objective concept. The “forward” march of time is a very capitalist and Protestant concept. There is no cutoff point, because the diaspora population continues to grow. Diaspora arrives at different times and those times shape their politics and actions. Is it about language? Not every Irish person speaks the language and many Irish people abroad study the language. Is it about values? How unified are those, and whose voice counts most? If we aren’t unified in a particular cause or set of values, whose responsibility is it to spread accessible information about that cause, other than all of us together? Is it about keeping up with the trends? Do all people across all classes, ages, ethnicities keep up with trends? Are trends really where we form identity? Is it about political action? Not only can learning about history and current events be done from afar, the diaspora can campaign and canvas for radical political changes on Irish soil with you. (The Irish government, for better or worse, allows conservative American politicians to advertise in Ireland-- even in Irish!-- so that Irish families will in turn request their American children vote in favour.) If it's about what you looked like and who raised you: that's a bit slippery, isn't it?

If they don't shirk their cultural ties, it's the responsibility of the diaspora to be an expert and a historian on themselves, whereas the responsibility of the citizen may simply be to exist.

While I don't consider NI as "diaspora," i do think the imposed separation modifies their experience such that it does apply in some instances. I see ROI mocking NI for their accents, their lack of access to the Irish language, lack of access to what's considered essential or "pure" Irish experiences, their poorness and living conditions, and many even shrug at the idea of integration... and, much the same or worse is done to GRT communities. If the news tells me partition isn't a going concern, that partition is a fact of life and to get over it, should I believe it? Of course not. Should I trust only voting as political action? Of course not. But numbers are a quick and easy point. Anything else requires work and familiarity to find.

Divisions like these are simply another type of sectarianism. The location is closer to "home" and the militarised coloniser looms much larger and more visible in public view and in the mind, yes, that is a key difference. For all the material support Irish Americans supplied, the Troubles did not take place on American soil. but for a country so proud of their revolutionary history, Ireland is still divided among its population, and divided in the north, and subject to capitalist design.

In "The End Of the Affair: Irish Migration, 9/11 and the Evolution of Irish-America" (2007) author and conflict analyst Feargal Cochrane characterises the Irish people's disdain for Irish Americans as being predicated on which administration is in power at the time-- which at the time of writing, was the Bush administration, incurring fights among more conservative Irish American visitors, and allegedly incurring few fights among more progressive (or perhaps just disinclined to political discussion) Irish American visitors.

The use of Shannon airport by US planes increased significantly between 2004 and 2005 with an expectation that more than 1000 US military planes would fly through Irish airspace on their way to or from Iraq in 2005. Apart from the issue of Irish neutrality, none of the US military personnel who have landed at Shannon airport have been subject to any inspection by the Irish security services.

It has been alleged by a number of Irish human rights activists and leading political figures that Ireland was being used as part of the Bush administration’s covert “extraordinary renditions” program. It has been claimed that under this scheme, individuals have been kidnapped by US intelligence services and smuggled around the world in unmarked aircraft for questioning/torture by US intelligence operatives and then moved on to Guantanamo Bay. Former Labour Party leader Ruairi Quinn commented that the use of Shannon airport by the US military, without any inspections being made of US aircraft by the Irish police, was extraordinary, “considering the evidence that exists indicating that people have been illegally kidnapped and transported through Ireland to destinations unknown for torture.”

Whether or not these complaints were really made in such higher numbers, it's hard to know if they're reaching the people who need to hear them. Social shaming only works if it's employed with a clear target. We should also, and maybe always consider: of the Irish American population, who among them has the wherewithal to travel to Ireland? Which part of the population can afford the money and time? Who is missing?

As long as Irish men, women and children are tortured, brutalized and murdered by the British army of occupation, it's not enough for their kinsmen in this country to drink green beer one day a year and tell the world that they're proud to be Irish. It is the responsibility of every man, woman and child of Irish descent to do all in their power to alleviate the sufferings of the nationalist population of the north by working for peace, justice and unity in all Ireland. The struggle for freedom and justice, and against tyranny and oppression - this is the true meaning of our Irish heritage. James V. Burke, 1985

My connection is severed, in my opinion, much less due to geographic barriers as familial ones. If my family wasn't abusive, my connection wouldn't be severed and the work wouldn't fall on me alone, I would have the benefit of community and its stories/histories. If I were wealthy and without debt, and had the time for travel, if I weren't trans, if I weren't disabled, I would be able to move around more freely regardless of citizenship status.

I feel this ugly need to prove myself. Because that's what it's about, isn't it? The proof, the recognised trappings. Despite how shit-awful my family is, they for whatever reason didn't let the fire die. We ate dinner under a portrait of the seven signatories and some of the earliest things I learned about weren't personal on an intimate level, but personal as in political-- the presence and importance of the language, the socialist fight for freedom, the troubles, the economy and the fickle stiltedness of the Celtic tiger and commodification of identity, the continued violence in Northern Ireland, the importance of allyship with Cuba and Palestine, solidarity with Indigenous peoples in America, Canada, Australia, Caribbean, and beyond. ourt visual arts and films were a fixture. And... I saw my family walk these connections back as their relationships to one another became more and more fraught and no outside help was sought or available. Mired in addiction and illness with no social supports, a type of justified bitterness toward the lack might become a reactionary isolationism. It's important to identify the difference and where it begins. But I'm not sure children should play teachers in these conditions.

The work of suppressing a person, stripping away their identity and family and community, dissolving and subsuming them, beating a person down to pulp and fatiguing them only to tantalise them with the brutal escapism of production of capital, climbing the ladder or scheming against your fellows so they do the work and you profit, the capital that justifies the construct of White Supremacy... that is an ongoing escapade.

In Tiffanie Patricia Sesko's insightful and personal thesis, "Culture and Mental Health: Considering the Role of the Complex Cultural-History in Irish-American Population" she describes various approaches to and theories of psychology and of therapy, with the hope of applying them to the development of treatment processes most helpful to the Irish (at home and abroad)

According to the United States Census, as of 2013, 34.5 million Americans list their heritage as Irish or partially Irish. That number is seven times larger than the entire Irish population (United States Census, 2013). What I found most intriguing about this is that based on my experience as someone with close relatives still living in Ireland, is how profound this statistic may be on Americans as the Irish are known to be loyal to old traditions McGoldrick, 1996). I asked myself, “What does this mean for Americans?” “What does this mean for Irish immigrants and their children?” “What about Immigrants and their American born children?” I feel it is important to understand how to help the Irish as Irish, not just Caucasian-Americans when depression, anxiety, alcohol and substance abuse, and other mental illnesses such as schizophrenia for example, are being treated. The therapist must be aware of religious and spiritual beliefs as well as the possible reasons families hold on to traditions that may seem to be a hinder to positive well-being.

[...]

Aside from anthropological views on culture and mental health, there have been sociological studies of mental illness analyzing frameworks of epochs; periods of time in history.

In “Modernity Theories and Mental Illness: A Comparative Study of Selected Sociological Theorists”, Yawo Bessa, (2012) used four perspectives to explain how culture affects mental illness in societies; structural strain theory, anomy theory, the social stressor theory, and the labeling theory.

[...]

Karl Marx’s conflict theory (argues that the history of humanity is the history of class struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. In greater detail, this means the oppressor owns channels of production and is economically, politically, and socially advantaged to the oppressed (Bessa, 2012). The perception of gender difference can be used in conflict theory as it would guide sociologists in understanding why women suffer mental illness more than their male counterparts. Bessa discusses studies in gender difference and power that highlight the phenomenon of male dominance; the dominant and the dominated, like the oppressors and the oppressed. Marx’s theory suggests the dominated and the oppressed will suffer from greater mental health problems as these groups do not have the tendency to vent their dissatisfaction to the dominant group (2012).

The paper's assertions would strengthen with a broader interest in gender variance rather than just cisgender men and women-- and since it's Irish-specific, this would be especially beneficial considering prominent TERFs in Ireland and the UK, but more important than them, the (possibly anecdotally to my own experience but I doubt it's restricted to that) high numbers of extant and future transgender Irish people. There's also the incredibly high numbers of autistic and schizophrenic Irish people in Ireland and the diaspora. It's even more important because if mental health is SUCH a marginalising experience for Irish people, and neurodivergence-- or even just a divergence from what's termed "consensus reality." I do believe a divergence from consensus reality and living between worlds is a longstanding Irish experience, enough to have necessitated the systems therapy of The Fifth Province.

To discuss "consensus" or "consensual reality," i'd like to shift to the focus of Erick Fabris' comprehensive 2012 thesis, "Experiences Labelled Psychotic: A Settler’s Autoethnography Beyond Psychosic Narrative" which was aided by the support and cooperation of First Nations peoples.

Perhaps it is most important to relate my experience to others. Let me start with a quote from Toronto author Shelagh Lynne Supeene’s autobiographical book, As For the Sky, Falling (1990). In this book she tries to explain the experience of her presumed illness in such a way as to remember her actual experience, whether or not this is contradictory or impossible.

Within a few months several other things happened too. I began to hear a ringing sound almost all the time. It sounded like a phone ringing, and sometimes it was really loud. The air shone, often golden, semi-solid, like clear jelly, and seemed to offer the same resistance to movement that water does when you walk through it. Other things glowed–people’s faces, objects– very pretty, but distracting […]. (Supeene, 1990)

This description immediately moves me, my heart, and my thoughts. It moves my nerves, my hands, as if anticipating something. I remember aspects of this textual recollection. It moves me as a person to think beyond the explanations I have been given for this experience. I remember the wonder of seeing “shining” air, years ago. It moves me to write, because these are the wonders we should all share. But then a barrier arises: how is this text understood by people without that experience? How is it understood in sanist texts? Does it provide an example of experiences for the sanitization of psychiatric work? Does it participate somehow in the psychiatrization the author abhors? Is it romanticized as somehow too wonderful or too bizarre an experience?

Supeene is relating through her body, and memories, as they occurred in a certain place. That place, as I will argue, is not only a location; it is a memory. Memory relates to the social, cultural, and political world. Rather than use disability theory alone, or feminist theory, to consider memory, I use anticolonial theory as a settler. This helps me address the source of interlocking oppressions in the place I live. Thus, a temporal grounding bridges my dominant status and my failed status of “incapacity.” This grounding begins in texts through an exchange between colonizer and colonized, which I read in the anticolonial work of Dr. Njoki Wane (2008) and Dr. George Dei (2010). Through privileging local and inter-local knowledge in a conception of narrative education, Wane and Dei theorize Indigenous thought without turning to universalities that would imply metaphysical orientations (personal communication, October 27, 2009). Thus the question of story, history, and place is central to Indigenous anticolonial thought without it being “essential.”

Later in the paper, a crucial point ties back to the lack of and importance of language or communicative abilities/techniques Sesko is also exploring,

Language, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1986) reminds us, is a formidable tool of colonization and decolonization. As a White male who questions his power, I will to recognize my place amongst people who have been colonized, among people of other genders, among queer and disabled folk. However, I am disturbed by sanism, and therefore disturb allies or supporters who do not recognize their own sanism, even if I cannot help them properly denote it in their own cultural languages. Madness discourses (e.g., talk about madness as a phenomenon), including psychotherapeutic theories, arise in White male straight power structures insofar as the term “mad” arises in Anglophone culture (and before in Latin, in the term “mu,” meaning to “change”). Thus race and madness are intertwined as constructions from the start, and all therapeutic or otherwise corrective ideas partake of making the “problem” appear (e.g., occur).

These excerpts on illness also tie into something I've tried to describe, which is the making of and toll of suppression through lack of access to material support;

As Flynn later remarked, ‘then came the grand finale—no money’.

Flynn regarded the Paterson strike as a failure, echoing many who witnessed the Dublin Lockout. It ended on 29 July 1913, with a shop-by-shop settlement restricting negotiations to the individual mills. In a speech to the New York Civic Club Forum the following January, Flynn described ‘English-speaking conservative elements’ in the strike committee as a ‘complicating factor’ who strained finances and morale.

On the Dublin Lockout, Flynn commented:

‘In Ireland today there is a wonderful strike going on and they are standing it beautifully. Why? Because they have had half a million dollars since the thirty-first of August (five months) given into the relief fund, and every man that goes on the picket line has food in his stomach and some kind of decent clothes on his back.’ She contrasted this with the ‘tragedy of the Paterson strike’, a ‘solid phalanx being cut up into 300 pieces’.

Pretending like everyone is completely fine with whiteness and with capitalism obfuscating struggle and personhood is just false. There is so rarely an instant and passive, tacit acceptance of invisibility and disenfranchisement particularly by the youngest populations, while the older dominate their choices and curb their futures. The biggest problem for the Irish diaspora isn't only the breakdown of culture and access to the rungs of the ladder, it's that the traumatic process of doing so is accepted as a symptom of living, and at this point, removed from its inception, the language for that insidious process doesn't exist in common parlance. And to name it and work against it with others in much much more marginal positions, while living inside it, is to be quite radical indeed.

I found it interesting that McGoldrick revealed some test results on pain and ethnicity that is quite characteristic of my own Irish family, stating the Irish have a very high tolerance for it, and because of this, have trouble describing it. Therefore, the Irish will be much less likely to seek medical help. This is the case even when they or their children need medical help; it is very difficult to communicate this which has negative effects on overall health as “the mind and body are inseparable” (Sathcher, 2000). Perhaps the Irishman is known for a heavy use of avoidance coping or denial of hardship. It would benefit the therapist to become familiar with McGoldrick’s position on Irish denial. “The Irish are not fond of the truth because they often fear it will reveal how bad they are” (McGoldrick, 1996).

In McGoldrick, Giordano, and Garcia-Preto’s Ethnicity and Family Therapy (2005), the Irish are portrayed much like they are in Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics in terms of how colonization, extreme poverty, mythology and religion, and economic change molded a culture. McGoldrick goes into detail about how these factors effected communication and conflict, use of humor and alcohol, family patterns in Ireland, and for Irish-American families in therapy. McGoldrick writes about the paradoxes of the Irish; the pragmatic dreamers, the loyal yet fickle, the deniers yet fearers of shame. A culture of people who have given up a greater proportion (of single women and) immigrants to the United States than any other country in the world. Despite their power in numbers, Irish immigrants remained invisible to society at large (McGoldrick, 2005). In the United States, just as in Ireland, the Catholic Church was the primary unifier.

The Irish who have attained whiteness found permission and safety there, a privilege that will never exist for non-white Irish. But the attainment of it came at great expense and we need to remember this, the arbitrary nature of the construction of race, the court cases and laws that defined it in real time.

COLONISATION is not a hard stop. ASSIMILATION becomes necessity when the alternative is policed and tortured, but this is not to say assimilation is "good" or can't be undone. It's unsafe, but not impossible. Assimilation offered a cruel and reactionary safety to the detriment of all else. Assimilation is the coaxing tactic of colonisation, and colonisation is enforced all the time. it's given new, prettier or more absolving names. gentrification is colonisation. appropriation is colonisation especially when it's infused into some larger practise (see: crystals and sage with white witchiness) that it's barely named or recognised except by the group it's taken from, obscuring its lineage. Capitalism, or America as an imperial structure, is a parasite that simultaneously adopts or even "celebrate" what is dear to oppressed groups, without permission, without care, disseminating it into a kind of cultural ether, which at the same time eradicates it.

We can't be caught placing undue trust in the violating force.

I don’t illustrate the following with the view that they're mirror, 1:1 experiences at all. The point instead is that there is a divergence in these experiences and the divergence should be as provoking as any commonality, because it calls into question the "righteousness," the "sense-making" of supposed divisions— it should provoke a vengeful compassion to stamp out the ideologies that created the divisions. We can draw upon the marginalised maritime provinces of Canada and the further-marginalised First Nations people there. We can draw upon the marginalised area of Appalachia and the further-marginalised Native people who live there. Look at these enclaves of robust Irish/Ulster/Scottish history— music, language, intangible culture, religion— and the way they're mined for resources and left to languish in completely manufactured poverty and drug epidemic. The poor are, when convenient, either vilified for their conservatism or valourised for their "traditions." And this is not new. The gutting and gerrymandering of resource-rich, diverse areas is the US and in Ireland, particularly the North. Southwest Asia and Northern Africa and the entire world is destablised and left for dead. This is how Irish and Native and Black people have been treated repeatedly throughout history, and it should be one that is discussed more especially in trying to build solidarity and allyship across much more dissimilar experiences as well.

The construction of race, of Whiteness and Non, and the legal mandates and court cases that constructed new ideas of race in real time, should be of major concern. This is happening again due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, where the entire population of Russia (which is quite diverse, of course) is being othered as a warmongering people through an orientalist lens in the media at the very same time that other Central/Eastern European countries are showing just how little they care about non-white immigrants, trans people, and build their militias of white nationalists lauded all throughout Western media. This is all while conveniently diverting attention away from the US' bloodlusting hands in it. We are ground down by its cogs, juicing us for whatever we're worth and then replaced.

Race— or rather, white supremacy— is so precious and fragile a thing that it needs unbelievable violence and cruelty, entire armies and systems to protect it. Land Back, as a movement, should matter very much to all Irish people the same way so many Irish people take up Palestine as a call to action, drawing on historic similarities that also don't outshine cultural/ethnic/religious differences compounding the devastation of Palestine. Remember that it was the Choctaw who sent money to Ireland during An Gorta Mór. And we do see Irish people jump to fund indigenous causes and strike or boycott in protest of apartheid goods.

Deprivation of connection to land is troubling but a connection to land isn't necessary to be. Consider just how many people lose their ancestral lands and how catastrophically disturbing that is, the means of separation so traumatising that it ripples through generations. And yet despite all suppression, many don't stop being themselves, or forge connections much later in life, even generations later, because it must be done. Consider mixed people, with more or less connection to some aspect of their culture/ethnicity over another, may participate in one more or less or not even know until they know. This even came up very recently in Jacqueline Keeler's dehumanising interrogation of Sacheen Littlefeather's indigeneity (following a list she compiled of "pretendians") following her death.

Palestinians don't stop being Palestinian when their land is stolen by a terrorising and heartless colonial force. Jewish people don't stop being Jewish when driven from their homes, when they're anti-zionist/not centering Israel in their Jewishness. Whether Kurds, natives/first nations or black South Africans or the African diaspora, loss of connection is a harsh and horrific process and its methods don't originate with the people themselves but from the bloodthirsty oppressors seeking resources and self-preservation. But to say you must have a documented connection to land, or be of some blood percentage to claim heritage, is dangerous and relies on the oppressor to negotiate and honour whatever rights of the oppressed the oppressor has penciled for them.

Allow me to share a disturbing excerpt from Armin Langer's bold paper, "Irish Nationalism as an Inspiration for American Zionists in the Early Twentieth Century: As Exemplified by Boston Lawyer Louis D. Brandeis’s Speeches and Writings" from 2021,

Irish Americans were greatly interested in the struggles for statehood in Ireland. In fact, Irish nationalism may have been stronger in America than in Ireland itself, as a national consciousness increased among these immigrant groups after arriving in the multiethnic US. For example, Oscar Wilde was perceived as an Englishman in England but as Irish on his 1882 lecture tour in Canada and the US; it was in North America that Wilde rediscovered his Irishness (Mendelsohn 1993, 132-133). Despite the similarities between the Irish and Jewish nationalist movements, there was a key difference: Jewish immigrants to the US did not come from Palestine like the Irish did from Ireland.

Most American Jews had never even been to the Middle East, nor had their ancestors going several generations back. Nevertheless, patterns of Jewish support for the creation of a Jewish society in Palestine were comparable to Irish Americans’ campaigning for an independent Irish state. The representatives of these national movements were aware of their similarities and they repeatedly pointed to each other as a source of legitimation (133). Some major Zionist leaders in the first decades of the twentieth century expressed their sympathies with the Irish cause. In the United States, there was one Zionist leader who was especially noted for repeatedly referring to the Irish experience and its struggles in his speeches and articles and for connecting the Jewish and Zionist narrative to that of Irish nationalism. This person was Louis D. Brandeis (Kibler 2015, 42).

[...]

Brandeis ended his talk “The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It” with the words “Organize, Organize, Organize” (24). He urged American Zionists to organize despite their differences, “until every Jew in America must stand up and be counted–counted with us” (ibidem). According to Jewish studies scholar Frances Malino, it was nineteenth-century Irish leader Daniel O’Connell – who campaigned for the Catholic’s right to representation in the British parliament – who inspired Brandeis for this motto with his saying, “agitate, agitate, agitate!” (Russell 2019, 7).

This paper's abstract goes so far as to include, "An article on this particular aspect of the intersection of Irish and Jewish history might be especially helpful since today the Irish independence movement is usually compared to the Palestinian resistance movement rather than to early Zionism."

This paper portrays a notable American Zionist who wrongly appropriated a prominent and, to a point, radical abolitionist from Irish history, and we might interpret this as the author suggesting it has legs in the same way other Zionists have appropriated the Land Back movement to pretend at commonality between their entitlement and the rights of Native peoples. I would assume that this appropriation shouldn't diminish from the fact that the people of Ireland, including many young Irish Americans, strongly support Palestine's liberation and sovereignty, and view the Irish struggle through the particular lens of indigineity versus oppressive forces, and NOT in allyship with that oppressive force. It should also be noted that Daniel O'Connell quickly lost favour during the famine period when rather than fighting for Ireland's independence, he attempted to make deals trying to ensure Irish representation in Westminster, the same way some consider Michael Collins a traitor for his agreement to partition rather than strike out for full independence.

When Angela Davis met Bernadette Devlin

As abolitionists in Britain, we often see America — specifically the Black radical tradition in America — as the home of abolition. This is for good reason; with revolutionaries such as W.E.B. Du Bois, George Jackson and Angela Davis, Black Americans have been pioneering abolition for centuries. However, an abolitionist tradition is much closer than many of us realise. If we were only to look to the North of Ireland — or occupied six counties — we would find a long, popular struggle against the oppressive forces of prisons and policing.

Policing in Ireland was a colonial invention to suppress anti-British dissent, and it has functioned that way ever since. After the partition of Ireland in 1920, Irish Catholics in the North of Ireland faced brutal and unrelenting state violence for their very existence. Gerrymandered into squalid ghettos, terrorised by police and segregated from society, any attempt to agitate for basic civil rights was ruthlessly suppressed.

‘When we break the law, we go to jail. When the government breaks the law, the government changes the law.’

Bernadette Devlin would later become friends with the revolutionary abolitionist Angela Davis after Devlin visited Davis in prison in 1971. In future, Davis would be a leading voice in the struggle to free Bernadette Devlin’s daughter, Róisín McAliskey, from prison. Speaking at a rally protesting McAliskey’s detention, Angela Davis condemned the ‘terrible treatment of Róisín McAliskey by her British captors… Róisín must be freed, and Northern Ireland released from the shackles of British imperialism!’

No one is more aware of the violence of policing and prisons than oppressed communities across the world, and no one is more imaginative in their resistance. It’s time we learnt from their example. Let’s liberate our communities like Bogside residents liberated Derry. Here’s to an abolitionist United Ireland and a Free Derry World.

Whiteness, in hand with capitalism and neoliberalism; America, which above all else has profited immensely (unfathomably) from these demoralising and destructive practices; Ireland, which in turn encourages landlordling and profiteering such that instead of foreign colonising powers, Ireland's own government has destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens and kept immigrants in punitive and often life-ending "temporary" housing with a gardaí that targets nonwhite people and members of the Traveler community; is not passive. These coercive forces don't occur as a natural byproduct, and they are not unique to a particular country. Wealth and power stand in place of culture and contrary to it. Wealth and power will shift culture not as natural evolution rooted through time and practitioners but purely at its whim, to its ends. And this should be all the more reason to reject it.

I don't think it's fair to claim that once the parasitism of capitalism has taken root and sapped you of whatever made you feel whole and connected, but now has rendered you disaffected and aimless, that it manifests the exact same way even for all white people-- and, or especially, is something that at a certain point no longer needs or can accomplish dismantling globally and inwardly. The destruction can’t be changed retroactively, no. but acknowledging the wrongness and what it rotted out of us isn’t unimportant. For the Irish “at home” and abroad, there are so many things we can share together that aren't affixed to land. we can make a "home" wherever we are, and to entertain otherwise will require drastic new policies in Ireland-- because without them, it is, again, flirting with notions of blood and soil.

Patrick Pearse, a divisive figure in Irish revolutionary history, who often leaned on turns of phrase and archaic imploring that might be familiar to those familiar with fascism-- for example, that Irishmen had lost and needed to reclaim their "manhood"-- welcoming WWI in 1915:

It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.

from HistoryIreland

Much of this started with the strong emphasis on patriotism, which also permeated the curriculum presented to his pupils at St Enda’s. In the school prospectus of 1908 their duties were clearly spelled out: ‘It will be attempted to inculcate in the pupils the desire to spend their lives working hard and zealously for their fatherland and, if it should ever be necessary, to die for it’. Pearse felt that what he saw as a feminised society should recover the ideals of courage, strength and heroism. Through war, he argued, it was possible ‘to restore manhood to a race that has been deprived of it’. In this the shedding of blood was even considered a good thing:

‘I should like to see any and every body of Irish citizens armed. We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing.’

and James Connolly’s reaction to Pearse’s celebration in 1915:

No, we do not think the old heart of the earth needs to be warmed with the red wine of millions of lives. We think anyone who does is a blithering idiot. We are sick of such teaching, and the world is sick of such teaching.

In 2001, in the magazine named after her, a writer describes the failings of Mother Jones' as thus:

Her agenda was also limited, even by the standards of her time. Mother Jones opposed giving the vote to women — or, to be more precise, she believed that suffrage was a false issue, a bourgeois diversion from the real problem of worker exploitation. She argued that only powerful organizations of workers — industrial unions — could bring justice. And while she helped organize women in various trades, she believed that working-class women were better off in the home than having their labor exploited.

Years later in 2019, in the NYT, another writer describes the movement as having failed Black American women in part by prioritising a middle class and white womanhood:

While middle-class white women celebrated with ticker tape parades, black women in the former Confederacy were being defrauded by voting registrars or were driven away from registration offices under threat of violence. When the black suffragist and civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell petitioned her white sisters for help, they responded that the disenfranchisement of black women was a race problem — not a gender problem — and beyond the movement’s writ.

Participation or maintaining of culture is not a passive act for anyone but the white people who lose themself in its blank emptiness for the sake of what it promises. The promises, of course, aren't empty: whiteness when asserted is clearly rewarded, and when stepping out of the void to confront it, it retaliates through violence. Whiteness wasn't/isn't created without intention and it is fraught and strictly, confusingly maintained from the top down. Governments are not passive and capitalism is not representative of a people-- a culture's-- needs.

Culture is/can be different from ethnicity. Culture is something imbued, and in that way, something to actively support or actively resist and examine and reflect on and critique, or at least be mindful of-- especially because many more (if not most) people can't choose to slide blithely through it unseen. Colonisation doesn't take place in one fell swoop, and its motivations are upheld at the expense of our world, and it benefits from meticulously and violently separating people from their own selves and one another.

Edward Said and James Connolly both warned how nativism and uncritical nationalism are failures of the liberatory cause. Connolly said that Ireland while home of the Irish is also allied with and home to anyone of any race. Him and Jim Larkin came to the US to speak to working class Irish Americans about this, about the importance of solidarity across these imagined divisions. For white Americans, and especially the Irish in this case, it should give you even more perspective. It SHOULD be thought less as a given more as a choice one makes to participate in and make sacrifices to a terrifying myth of a "white monoculture." Irishness can't just be something emphasised as a convenient barrier between yourself and the diaspora to absolve you of your participation in these machinations.

Irish America and Race

But that’s not the whole story. Irish America isn’t one mindset, and is far more textured and layered than that. It was an Irish priest in San Francisco, Father Eugene Boyle, who was the first to open his doors to the Black Panther free breakfast program when it began in 1969. According to the Black Panther newspaper he allowed his Sacred Heart parish hall to be used for Panther political meetings, and appeared as a character witness for Black radical leader Bobby Seale when he was on trial for murder.

Representatives of the U.S. Black Lives Matter movement have for years spoken at Bloody Sunday commemorations in Derry.

This alliance has a long tradition, from former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass visiting Ireland in the 1840s and striking common cause with Daniel O’Connell, to radical black leader Marcus Garvey’s support for Sinn Féin and hunger striker Terence MacSwiney in the 1920s, to the artistic connections between the Gaelic revival of the early 1900s and the Harlem Renaissance 20 years later.

Irish-Americans have long legacies of anti-racism in the U.S. and in Ireland to draw and, and learn from. These traditions go beyond the simplistic stereotype of the racist Irish American cop, but there are reasons why those stereotypes exists, and why accusations persist of double standards about opposing discrimination on both sides of the Atlantic.

Now’s an opportunity for Irish American organizations and individuals to stand publicly on the side of justice, against police brutality, and against structural discrimination. Just like they have for many years when it comes to Ireland.

For myself, the things I've been taught about the past and present (intentionally and not) and the things I've learned and examined on my own, the core emotional responses to more intangible cultural touchstones is literally not something I'm willing or at all able to forget. Even many of my illnesses and many abuses I've taken and affinities feel overwhelmingly real when examined through a wider lens like this-- what created this, and what do I do with that? I find meaning and understanding there, political meaning and action, praxis, fraternity, not separation. I don't believe time is a forward march toward some end and I don't view culture as a hapless victim to the march, either.

Capitalism protects itself and shifts the goalpost on culture, the role of religion, even ethnicity when it can benefit from doing so. Rather, I want to remember the cruelty, and what it has come to define, and what becomes of people as a result, and what can be different. It reframes my suffering but it also gives me room for more than that. I reorient myself through understanding this.

If culture in a colonised country has any purpose at all, maybe it should be the lawless medium through which people strive to understand each other and their needs and what prevents them from satisfaction. Ideally unattached to larger machines but emboldened by their presence. "Self-determination" stands in opposition to the thing necessitating it.

I don't want to take it for granted. To the best of my ability I do refuse these methods of and reject the hollow promises of assimilationism. I adamantly refuse to be united only through the absolute worst things about our governments, because if that is so, then there are few differences between Ireland and the UK as well.

In a 2013 article for the Irish Times, the author describes the then-new exhibition (presented as a dual and traveling exhibit in the northeast US and in Ireland) about the influence and scope of James Connolly's time living in America,

A champion in particular of the rights of foreign-born workers, Connolly was scathing of American individualism in his writings and wrote angrily about how the country’s capitalist leanings benefited only a minority. The shockingly poor working conditions and living standards of workers were mirrored in Ireland and the US during the first decade of the 20th century.

Believing that the American Dream and its offer of equal opportunities for all was illusory, he described the Statue of Liberty in the Harp in scornful terms:

"It is placed on a pedestal out of the reach of the multitudes; it can only be approached by those who have the money to pay the expense; it has a lamp to enlighten the world, but the lamp is never lit, and it smiles upon us as we approach America, but when we are once in the country, we never see anything but its back."

And concludes with a quote that fortunately doesn't quite mitigate the effect,

“We are not suggesting that the American labour movement influenced what was happening in Dublin, or that the Irish in the United States dominated labour leadership, or that James Connolly engineered any part of it,” said Wolf. “What we want to consider is how much these movements were fluid and interactive, how they reflected the worldwide plight of poor working people, how . . . information between labour agitators was flying freely back and forth across the Atlantic. We want to make it clear that Ireland was not isolated, and that the Lockout did not happen in a vacuum.”

To close,

Frankly, it's weird to be completely fine with and substantiate ones own position as an "authentic" Irish person by way of the geographical, generational, and intangible mental border between mainland and diaspora… And then turn around and feel somehow different about the border between ROI and NI citizens on the same terrain.

Coercive forces don't occur as a natural byproduct, and they are not unique to a particular country. Wealth and power needs no culture and even stands in place of culture and contrary to it. Wealth and power will shift culture not as natural evolution rooted through time and practitioners but purely at its whim, to its ends. And this should be all the more reason to reject it. I do think Irishness takes some work, if the problems we have are a fracturing of memory then it takes the sharing of memory and cultural practitioners, and even the language requires a reorienting of the self within the world. And I won't deny that Ireland feels like home in a way that transcends reason. "Feels" is too small a word for how it moves through me. And language can be carried with us anywhere, if we try.

When prioritising a connection to land, it is seemingly easy for more privileged people to turn to ethnonationalism and invent ways to tell the difference between pure ethnicities and not-- valourising purity and tradition such that genocide or extinction becomes permissible.

And for that reason, I'm not interested in having my Irishness litigated by people who ultimately are only interested in their own Irishness as an enforcement of borders.

[epistolizer]

Pulpit Ideologues Jacked Out Of Shape Departing Congregants Flee Political Indoctrination

A Gospel Coalition podcast was titled “Why You Should Avoid Political Idols When Engaging The World Today”.

In addressing the issue of “dechurching”, it was pointed out that, following COVID, nearly 40 million people that had once attended church were likely not going back.

It is believed that a significant number came to this decision have done so over political reasons.

Ironic, then, to turn to pastor, theologian, and missiologist Dr. David Platt to address this topic.

It is assumed that this ideological alienation is solely the fault of hardline pastors on the Religious Right harping on behalf of policies found nowhere in the pages of Scripture or in a manner not characterized by a kindness once referred to as Christian charity.

But in regard to the phenomena taking place at the congregation pastored by David Platt, McClean Bible Church, over the course of the past several years, droves have departed over his own creeping variety of authoritarianism skewing noticeably towards the Evangelical left in terms of the secondary matters he has involved himself with during the course of his public ministry.

One should not come to the incorrect conclusion that Dr. Platt is the kind of pulpit exegete that explicitly emphasizes Biblical doctrine to the exclusion of all other concerns.

In 2020, Platt took to the streets in a march with a cadre of other leftwing religionists not only supportive of Black Lives Matter and condemnatory of police brutality but where the typical banalities regarding White guilt and pleas for collective forgiveness were also articulated.

Yet interestingly nary a word was invoked regarding the Biblical injunction of “Thou shalt not steal” in light of the looting that took place in connection with the protest movements to which minor celebrities such as David Platt were willing to lend their notoriety in the hopes of being noticed as progressively trendy.

Platt's pandering did not end there in what one could argue was a questionable use of his free time.

This subversive ideology has come to color much of what Platt teaches in his role as pastor and minister.

For example, a Youtube video posted by The Dissenter is titled “David Platt's Worst Woke Statements Ever”, a number of these articulating even from behind the pulpit that particular homilist's understanding of social justice.

Platt now complains about those leaving his congregation.

Yet he is in a video dictating that, if you don't agree with his position on these ancillary cultural and social matters, McClean Bible Church might not be the church for you.

So why is one obligated to remain in a church where you are blamed for many of the world's problems simply as a result of how you came prepackaged into this world rather than over anything you actually did?

Seems to me one would simply be doing nothing more than what the pastor asked you to do in the first place if one left the congregation and never came back.

By Frederick Meekins

[slashermom]

I just wanted to say that Tribulation actually wrecked me and it got me thinking if you could write the same situation but instead of the reader being in love with Bo they're in love with Vincent and how Bo would handle that.

A n o n

Your fUcking mind!!!

Tribulation (if you haven’t read it yet.)

(Also she’s a long one, buckle up.)

I always feel bad for writing so much??

——————————————————————————

Affliction

There are few things in this world that can perplex Bo Sinclair, he’s a self proclaimed know it all but you are one thing he just can’t put his finger on. Anytime you come around you give him a feeling that he couldn’t shake. He feels the need to be always around you, you sucked him in without even trying and he hates it. This suffocating feeling of want that can’t be fought off all because you chose to be with Vincent.

Bo can’t fathom this. How could Vincent compare to him? What could he give you that Bo couldn’t? He knew that it wasn’t a choice to love someone, it just happened. Because if he had the choice he would have never let you in and consume his thoughts with everything you do. But why not him? 

What made you want to be with Vincent?

Maybe it was because you knew you were too good for Bo - hell he knew that all too well - and weren’t gonna waste your time. Or was it that you still held a grudge from when he was a jackass to you when you first met, always looking for an excuse to harp on you. But in actuality, he just wanted to see you more.  Maybe it was because you thought Bo never paid attention to you, even though he did, secretly. He would always gaze at you as you cleaned the living room or made dinner, wondering how you can make the most mundane things look beautiful.

He was just so used to getting what he wanted as the years progressed, but this was different. He couldn’t fight, curse or kill his way into your heart because that hole was already filled by his long haired twin. But what wouldn’t he give to wake you beside you every morning and call you his. He swears every time he thinks about you and how’ll he’ll never get the pleasure of feeling your perfect lips against his, a chord snaps within him.

So he takes each moment he has with you and holds it dear.

One time that sticks out in particular to him is when Vincent let a victim get lose after he went off on his own to get them, but they got the jump on him and were running down the streets screaming. Luckily, Bo was there to put an end to it real quick but not before he got a nice sucker punch to face and a kick in the ribs. He came back to the house furious, yelling at Vincent about being useless and the need to be more careful. You ended up having to step in between to two of them, literally.

You stuck a boney finger is Bo’s face telling him to back off and go let off some steam else where, to come back when he was in his right mind. He huffed and puffed but couldn’t find the words to yell at you, not at you. So he left, but not before watching you turn to console Vincent. A twinge of jealousy and loathing surged in his chest, he took this opportunity to walk out the front door slamming it shut

He dug into the depths of his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter, yanking one out and shoving it between his teeth and lighting it. Mumbling and grumbling to himself about how dare you stick your fuckin’ finger in his face. Finally running out of energy he sat himself down on the steps and rubbed his forehead. Going over and over his thoughts that seemed to be traveling a million miles an hour.

Bo heard the front door open and looked over his shoulder to see you staring at him.

“If you’re coming out here to bitch, I don’t wanna hear it.” His accent became thicker as it was laced with anger and annoyance.

“I didn’t come to bitch, I came to drink.” You scoff at him before plopping yourself down next to him on the steps, nudging a bottle towards him. He stares at you for only a moment before taking the cold drink into his hands. You both stared at the lit up streets before you, enjoying the warm Louisiana air.

“He loves you, y’know that right? He only did that to make you proud, he wants to be like his big brother.” You took a leap of faith and broke the silence, hoping you weren’t pushing too many of Bo’s buttons.

“We’re twins, doll face.” He smirks at you, taking a swig of his beer before you sigh and try to explain it better.

“Well I know that! But you have always been the bigger brother-“

“And the best looking brother.” He cuts you off and you laugh at his remark. Bo stares at your alluring smile and finds himself spreading a goofy grin from behind his cigarette.

“Hey, Lester has his charm!” You protest with a grin, beginning to laugh even harder as Bo looks at you like you have six heads.

“Yeah, if you’re into roadkill and smelling like shit all hours of the day, 365 days of the year.” He retorts and watches you lean forward, laughter rolling through your body. Bo found himself chuckling too, finding your vivacious laughter contagious. You finally get a grip on yourself.

“But what I’m trying to say is, you’ve always been the leader, the first to raise hell, to shut things down and have the first, second and last word. He so desperately wants you to see him, Bo. So at the very least, can you cut him some slack? For me?” You looked him in the eyes and pleaded sincerely with the brunette. He searched your face for a moment before nodding and looking at the ground, he could do that.

For you.

The comfortable silence returned and Bo once again fell back into his thoughts, but this time they began to fill with you. He put his cigarette out on the steps and gulped down his beer but the quietness was short lived once again before you threw another question at him.

“You want me to take a look at that shiner of yours?” You motion with your bottle before you take another drink. Bo had completely forgot about the throbbing that had engulfed his socket and reached up to touch it gingerly.

“Naw, I’ll be alright.” He smiled at you which you returned. Bo held your eye contact, taking in all that you had to offer and he felt like he was looking at the future and it was bright, painfully bright. He had to tear his eyes away because if he didn’t he knew he would do something that would hurt his brother.

“Throw a bag of peas on it at least, can’t be having our charming service station attendee being worse for wear.” You joke with him as you stood up, brushing dirt off your butt and thighs “Well, I think I’m gonna head to bed. Don’t stay out here too late.” You place delicate hand on his shoulder and giving it a gentle rub before making your way back into the house.

Bo found himself holding back from grabbing your hand, from tugging you back and making you stay just a little while longer. He wanted to hear you talk more, about anything and everything. He wanted to hear you laugh more at his stupid jokes. He wanted to you to touch more than just his shoulder.

He wanted you.

But there he sat, alone. Reminiscing on the conversation you just had, thinking about if he said something different you might have stayed longer. Bo doesn’t quite know how long he looked out into empty streets but he did know that he couldn’t stand to think anymore and he wanted to rest his eyes. He dragged himself back into the house and up the stairs, heading straight for his bed but not before something catches his eye.

It’s you. Your bedroom door ajar, just enough for him to peak and see you fast asleep on the bed. You looked stunning. Your face devoid of all worries and stress, body relaxed and hair spread out across your pillow. The urge to tuck your hair behind your ear and kiss your face almost becoming overwhelming till he looked at your side and saw his twin. Vincent had an arm over your waist pulling you flush against his expansive chest, and for the first time in his adult life Bo wished to be his brother.

[rhienfic]

hello! some asks for fandom asks - 12, 13, 23, 24

Hi there! :) 

12. favorite character to write about this year 

Crowley and Baz probably get that spot this year, though I’m doing an Agatha scene right now and *chef’s kiss*

13. favorite writing song/artist/album of this year 

For Good Omens: Mile Magnificent by ofgeography, and Doom Days by Bastille 

For Snowverse: Boys of Bedlam by FullSet, The Driver by Bastille, Champion by Barnes Courtney

(Also I listen to a lot of harp folk/trad music)

23. fics you wanted to write but didn’t 

Oh man. I mean, I wanted to finish AMO, but hey, progress! I really wanted to post something for the COC, but it’s not too late? I want to finish writing the Good Omens exorcism fic that I’m in the middle of… Basically I have a lot of rough drafted scenes in a lot of different stories and I always wish to have finished them all instantly, so I can read them. 

24. favorite fic you read this year 

During this year? This never ending year?? Phew. How about a list. Even though I feel like I haven’t read nearly enough this year either. 

For Good Omens: 

Untitled Stardew Omens Fic by Atalan. 

This is the perfect comfort fic. I love it so much that I podficced it so that *I* could listen to it (I just have to finish and post the last chapter), and I never podfic anything I don’t absolutely adore, because editing takes me approximately one hundred million years. I love this fic so much, I would podfic it AGAIN. (But I’d rather not have to though.) 

The Longest Night series by charlottemadison — 

 I haven’t podficced this yet but I WANT TO. (Will the new neighbor dogs ever stfu so that I can record again in peace? So far signs point to no.) 

Pretty much anything by entanglednow -- 

there are too many for me to pick just one. Here are three small ones by them that are so! Good! Esp the last one, I think about it CONSTANTLY: 

The Deep Hidden Things — eldritch horror Aziraphale 

Going It Alone — Disposable Demon Eric 

The Ages of the World — (sad) encounter with a vampire 

Apparently back in January is when I first read Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: an Integrative Approach by Nnm.  — 

It’s one of those fanworks that is so amazingly tied to the canon, in the best possible way, that I swoon, so like, watch the show so you can read this fic, okay? 

Also this is my note on the ao3 bookmark: 

I don't know how to to tell you how good this is.

*slides closer on the bench*

*takes your hands*

*whispers* it'ssogood

*weeps a little over your knuckles*

For Carry On: 

Here is the tragic truth: I have read almost no recent Carry On fic at all. I had to take a break from the fandom last year (after six years of Intensity and stuff), and also because I’m writing a fic based in pre-CO canon, I was trying to keep it separate in my mind? Turns out it’s mostly impossible though, and I’m having fun re-engaging, so I’m looking forward to reading tons of Carry On fic sometime in the new year. Please send me recs! 

For Other: 

Rubynye’s Lord of the Rings fics, including Rosie’s Year 

Also you know what? Beethechange has a lot of really great Buzzfeed Unsolved fics. 

Thank you for the asks! :) 

[evilelitest2]

Biden and Electable, and why the Progressives shouldn’t harp on this

So the theme of this primary was “electablity”  Democrats REALLY hate Trump and the primary criteria for picking a candidate has been “who can beat Trump”.  The problem is, as FiveThirtyEight has pointed out, “Electablity” is...kinda meaningless.  It isn’t based on who polls better, or who is a better fundraiser, or who is a better campaign organizer, it is instead based on biases about what “Americans find acceptable”.  Which is likely why the most diverse primary in US history has narrowed down too....two white guys in their late 70s.  And why Elizabeth Warren ultimately couldn’t catch on (much to my annoyance) 

Its also why Sanders, who I think has a better chance of winning in the general than Biden, is getting less support than Biden, because Sanders is a Socialist and Sanders is Jewish.  So Biden, who I think is a bad campaigner,r a bad fundraiser, and all around weak candidate even ignoring my ideological issues with his policies, is widely seen as “more electable” 

   In response a lot of progressive have been saying if Biden wins, then we are handing the election to Trump, just like Hillary Clinton in 2016.

     Here is my worry.....I don’t think we should be making that argument.  Biden is in my mind, worse than Hillary Clinton, who I already disliked tremendously as a candidate, and I am not super happy about the idea of a Biden presidency.  Since my favorite candidate, Elizabeth Warren, has dropped out, I will be voting for Sanders in April.   

Here is the thing thoguh, while I think Biden is weaken against Trump than Sanders, I think Biden still has the advantage, Trump is a super unpopular president in a very weak position.  Also, the Super Tuesday turn out for Biden was massive, despite absolutely horrific voter suppression, voting went from 1.4 million voters in 2016 to 2.3 million voters in a fucking primary.  In North carolina, 17% more people voted in a primary than in the 2016 general election.  In Virginia, the turnout in this primary was the largest in the entire history of the state, even more than the 2008 general election where 1 million people came out to vote.  Remember most people don’t vote in a primary, so this is huge, and its entirely posisble that Biden (with Bloombergs money) might not just win in November, it is possible he could overwhelmingly win, and we pick up the Senate.  It is also possible that Biden fucks up and Trump wins another 4 years.  

So if progressives go around saying “Biden can’t win”....and then he wins.....it is going to delegitimize the movement.  Instead we should argue “Biden would fail to achieve these policies” as president which I think is entirely true.  

[mittensmorgul]

Today on the tnt loop, 11.21 and 11.22 (so far, we’re going through 12.03 today). But Chuck is here, and it’s fascinating to watch just how much he harps on the whole Free Will thing... From 11.22

SAM: Getting these groups to enlist and then work together, it's not gonna be easy. DEAN: Couldn't you just compel them? CHUCK: I invented free will for a reason. DEAN: So we're tying our hands on principle? CHUCK: No, you can't make an effective soldier by force. They have to choose this fight. DEAN: But they're gonna want to know they're backing a winner.

Compel, no. Persuade by manipulating the narrative, by dismissing or rendering ineffective any other play, by making it so that there doesn’t seem to be any other choice, by foisting blame off on everyone else... from 11.20:

CHUCK: Nature? Divine. Human nature – toxic. METATRON: They do like blowing stuff up. CHUCK: Yeah. And the worst part – they do it in my name. And then they come crying to me, asking me to forgive, to fix things. Never taking any responsibility. METATRON: What about your responsibility? CHUCK: I took responsibility... by leaving. At a certain point, training wheels got to come off. No one likes a helicopter parent. METATRON: What about Amara? She's your sister. CHUCK: I took responsibility for her, too. Locked her away – barely, I might add. And who let her out? METATRON: Sam and Dean Winchester. But they're trying to fix that. CHUCK: You know I love those guys, but the world would still be spinning with Demon Dean in it. But Sam couldn't have that, though, could he? And so how is Amara being out on me? METATRON: It's not. But I-you helped the Winchesters before. CHUCK: Helped them? I've saved them! I've rebuilt Castiel more times than I can remember! Look where that got me.

But it’s all a manipulation... Chuck presented his point of view as the truth, as the only way. This was his progression to winnowing everyone’s options and choices down until there was only one way out, only one solution.

DEAN: I tried to kill her. (Flashback to DEAN stabbing AMARA only for the knife to shatter.) And it didn't work. CHUCK: Maybe it didn't work because you didn't want it to work. Maybe you didn't want to kill her. SAM: You want God to kill Amara because you don't want Amara to be killed? DEAN: Yeah, maybe there's a part of me that just can't hurt her. But if she's already dead— SAM: Then she's already dead. Right. LUCIFER: Well, that got weird. SAM: Dean… We always sweat this stuff, these choices. But, for once, we have God on our side. I mean, for once, we can actually just do things his way.

To when everyone would let go of the fight and capitulate to “doing things his way.” To the point Sam was ready to take on the Mark without question. To sacrifice himself yet again.

CHUCK: Once she's been weakened, I will take the Mark back from Amara and use it to seal her away. You ready? SAM: Yeah. DEAN: Wait, what? SAM: God and I talked about this. Someone needs to bear the Mark. DEAN: Well, that should be me. I-I've had it before. I'm damaged goods. CHUCK: Exactly. You've already been tainted. I can't transfer it to you. Sam volunteered. (DEAN glances at SAM then yanks on his arm to talk with him some feet away.) DEAN: First Cas is making kamikaze side plans, and now you? You couldn't have talked to me? SAM: We did talk. DEAN: And what happens when the Mark turns you psycho, then what? SAM: You lock me up where I can't hurt anyone and you throw away the key. DEAN: Sam, no. SAM: Dean, you told me you couldn't beat Amara, that it would have to be me. Well, this is it – me.

Not because it was a real solution to their problems, but because it was the only option they believed they had left. It’s the illusion of choice at this point.

SAM (to DEAN, quietly): We talked about this. It's time to do the smart thing. DEAN: So, what am I supposed to do, just sit by and watch? SAM: No. We're both in this fight. You're leading this army. DEAN: Oh, you mean babysitting the bad guys? (SAM huffs out a laugh.) DEAN: Okay, Sam. Okay. God's plan.

Amara stopped Chuck from executing his “give Sam the Mark” plan, so Chuck went with plan B-- turn Dean into a weapon. Always one brother sacrificed, and it doesn’t seem to matter to Chuck which one it is.

Chuck: I'm sorry. For this, for everything. Amara: An apology at last. What's sorry to me? I spent millions of years crammed in that cage... alone... and afraid, wishing -- begging for death, because of you! And what was my crime, brother?! Chuck: The world needed to be born! And you wouldn't let me! Amara, you give me no choice. Amara: That's your story. Not mine. The real reason you banished me, why I couldn't be allowed to exist... you couldn't stand it. No, we were equals. We weren't great or powerful, because we stood only in relation to each other. You think you made the archangels to bring light? No. You made them to create lesser beings, to make you large, to make you Lord. It was ego! You wanted to be big! Chuck: That's true. But it isn't the whole truth. There's a value, a glory in creation... that's greater and truer than my pride or my ego. Call it grace, call it being! Whatever it is, it didn't come from my hands. It was there... waiting to be born. It just is, as you and I just were. Since you've been freed, I know that you've seen it. Felt it. Amara: It didn't have to be like this. I loved you, brother. Well... you've won again. Finish it. Kill me.

But Chuck didn’t want to kill her, he just wanted her imprisoned again so he could go on lording it over his own creation. So he could go on feeling big. Which was his issue he went to Becky for help with in 15.04:

CHUCK: Things were said. Uh… Now I’ve found myself low on, um… resources. I went to ask my sister for help, and she rejected me. ‘Cause she sucks. And now I’m just… stuck. So, I thought I’d come see you, my number-one fan. And, I don’t know, see if you can help make me feel big again. BECKY: So, you want me to… fluff you? CHUCK: I mean, no. BECKY: You do. You thought you could just come back to me, your pathetic ex, your number-one fan, and get what you’ve always gotten from me… a nice big crank on your ego. CHUCK: Well, I mean… BECKY: Well, sorry, that’s not me anymore, Chuck. I am married to an amazing man, I have two great kids, and I like myself, Chuck. For the first time in a long time, I like myself. So, I don’t need you. CHUCK: I know. You don’t need me. No one does. I’m happy for you, Becky, that you like yourself. Because… I kind of hate me right now.

Which goes a long way toward understanding the journey Amara has chosen to embark on between this point and s15, where we find her enjoying her liberation despite Chuck. In 11.22:

AMARA (over CHUCK’S choking sounds): I'd die a million times and murder you a million more before going back there! (The Mark fades away from Sam's arm and returns to Amara's shoulder.) Tell me if you won't change, why should I?

She would do anything not to be locked away again, even let all of creation (and Chuck himself, and as a result even HERSELF) perish.

AMARA: My brother will dim and fade away into nothing. But not until he sees what comes next. Not until he watches this world, everything he created, everything he loves turn to ash. Welcome to the end.

But in 14.20, this is the exact sort of tantrum that Chuck himself threw, right down to the “Welcome to the end” line. And Amara... she flat out laid it out in those exact terms from 11.22, in 15.02:

Amara: Don't. Even on Your best day, You couldn't force my hand. And this is not Your best day. In fact, I don't think You can do much of anything. Ah, a few parlor tricks, perhaps, but You can't leave this world, not without my help. And me? I'm done, Chuck. I've changed. I've adapted. I've become the better me. And You? You are still the same -- petulant, narcissistic. So... I'm leaving You here. Once, long ago, You sealed me away. Now, in a way... I'm doing the same to You. You're trapped, diminished, abandoned. So I guess You got what You've always wanted. You're on Your own.

Chuck hasn’t changed. (and even Cas has understood how nothing will ever change unless they all fight for it, in 15.06.) Amara freed herself from Chuck’s control because she chose to change and adapt. Is that what Chuck will have to do by the end? To let go of his need to feel “big,” to control the entire story? One way or another, I think so.

[bluewatsons]

Michael Goldberg, Dennis Wilson: The Beach Boy Who Went Overboard, Rolling Stone (June 7, 1984)

He was the wild one. He could never get enough of anything: drugs, women or booze. But in the end, he had nothing

Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys, 1970

It was almost midnight on Christmas day, 1983, and Dennis Wilson’s head was a bloody mess. The thirty-nine-year-old Beach Boy had been beaten up by a male friend of his estranged wife — nineteen-year-old Shawn Love Wilson — at the Santa Monica Bay Inn. Wilson had checked himself out of the detoxification unit at a local hospital and had been drinking in the area when he ran into Shawn’s friend, with whom he picked a fight. He lost that fight.

Several hours later, drunk and puffing on a cigarette, his face a ghastly gray, Wilson was vowing revenge outside St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica. “I just want to go down. there and kick his ass,” said Wilson in a gruff croak. “Call the cops. Close the place [the Santa Monica Bay Inn] down. Bust everyone.” Steve Goldberg, a close friend who had brought Dennis to the hospital, did his best to calm him down.

Inside the hospital, Chris Clark, another buddy of Wilson’s, was on the phone, trying to convince Dr. Michael Gales to readmit Wilson, an alcoholic and drug abuser, to the hospital’s detox unit, from which the Beach Boy had checked out earlier. But Gales didn’t want to have anything to do with Dennis Wilson.

“He’s just too much trouble,” Gales allegedly told Chris Clark.

“He may die, you know,” Chris Clark told Gales.

“He might have to,” the doctor allegedly replied.

Three days later, on December 28th, Dennis Carl Wilson was dead, his body pulled out of the cold, murky water of nearby Marina Del Rey. Toxicological tests showed Wilson’s blood alcohol level to be 0.26 at the time of death — more than twice the legal limit for driving. A week after his death, Dennis Wilson’s ashes were sprinkled into the Pacific.

“Dennis Wilson was the essence, the spirit of the Beach Boys,” recalled Fred Vail, a longtime business associate of the band’s. “We used to think of him as the Steve McQueen or James Dean of the group.”

For one thing, Dennis was the only Beach Boy who knew how to surf. He was also the band’s sex symbol. But while he was breaking hearts at their live performances, he wasn’t always playing on the records.

By the time the Beach Boys’ fifth hit single, “Little Deuce Coupe,” was released in 1963, Dennis was frequently being replaced in the studio by session drummer Hal Blaine.

It apparently didn’t bother Dennis that Blaine was drumming on the Beach Boys’ records. “I think as soon as the checks started rolling in, Dennis had other things,” says Blaine. “He was buying things; he was appreciating his motorcycling and hobbies and so forth. When you’re sixteen years old and you’re literally handed millions of dollars, you get crazy.”

And Dennis Wilson loved to spend money. “He was a Sixties type of person,” said Robert Levine, his personal manager. He wasn’t concerned about materialistic things. He would give away clothing, money. . . .”

Wilson was famous for letting people crash at his house — when he had one. In 1968, Charles Manson and his “family” moved into Dennis’ Sunset Boulevard home. By then, Dennis had divorced his first wife, Carole Freedman, and was participating in orgies and other debauchery under Manson’s direction. During this, period, he also tried heroin for the first time. The Manson Family spent $100,000 of his money and wrecked an uninsured $21,000 Mercedes. But rather than kick them out when things got too heavy, Wilson himself split, moving in with Gregg Jakobson, a friend and musical collaborator.

Wilson’s involvement with Manson was not atypical in at least one respect: The drummer loved to flirt with danger. In the early Seventies, he would drink a six-pack or two, smoke some grass, then get in his jeep and drive through the desert at top speed with the headlights off.

“Whatever he did,” said Chris Clark, “he did in excess.” Including sex. Dennis was a notorious womanizer; he was never able to remain faithful to one woman. “He called himself ‘the wood,'” says one friend. The wood? “Yeah,” the friend said, gesturing to his crotch.

Even his manager acknowledges Dennis’ satyriasis. “Dennis was a sex fiend, plain and simple,” said Levine. “The man used to think more with his sex organs than with his brain.”

Wilson was married five times, and had filed to divorce Shawn — the illegitimate daughter of his cousin and fellow band member, Mike Love — a month prior to his death. He is survived by four children: Jennifer Beth, by his first wife, Carole Freedman; Carl Benton and Michael Dennis, by his second wife, Barbara Carol Charren; and Gage Dennis, by his last wife, Shawn.

Wilson’s relationship with actress-model Karen Lamm was by far his craziest. Their first date was in 1974 at Mr. Chow’s, a Beverly Hills restaurant. “He reached over and grabbed my right breast and said, ‘Great tits!”‘ Lamm remembers. “I ran to the bathroom; I was so humiliated. I thought, ‘I never want to see this guy again.”‘ But Lamm and Wilson saw each other for the next six years, a period during which they were married and divorced twice. “We were so out of control,” said Lamm. “It led to a very wild existence with each other.”

Indeed. Like the day in 1975 when Wilson hit Lamm, prompting her to fetch a.38-caliber revolver from her house. She had decided to put on an act to keep Dennis in line. “You get your ass off my property and don’t come back,” said Lamm, waving the gun. Then she shot a hole through the side of their Mercedes, just missing the gas tank. Lamm says they both broke up laughing. In 1978, Dennis drove Lamm’s Ferrari down to Venice Beach and, in another fit of rage, doused the interior of the car with lighter fluid and torched it. “Then he went up to a house on Venice Boulevard and played the piano while it burned, like Nero,” recalled Steve Goldberg.

ll was not wanton destruction while Dennis and Karen Lamm were together. Dennis’ most creative period came in the mid-Seventies, when he wrote and produced a marvelous solo album titled Pacific Ocean Blue. Released in 1977, it sold a respectable 200,000 copies.

Wilson recorded about half of a follow-up album, though most of the songs were never finished. “Dennis was not what you would call a completer,” said Levine. Part of the reason may have been his use of heroin. According to sources close to the band, Dennis had started to use the drug in 1978, and during a tour of Australia that year, he was allegedly sharing his supply with Brian. At one point, the drummer checked himself into a hospital under an assumed name and cleaned up, but his overindulgences were creating problems within the Beach Boys.

Toward the end of 1978, Wilson took up with Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie. The romance began while Fleetwood Mac was recording Tusk. “Dennis walked into the studio one night and whisked me off my feet,” McVie recalled. The two went out for nearly three years, and Wilson even moved into Christine’s house in Coldwater Canyon. “It was probably the experience of a lifetime. Dennis was such a character. Half of him was like a little boy, and the other half was insane. A really split personality.”

With McVie, Dennis was both a great romantic and a drug abuser and alcoholic. He had a heart-shaped garden planted at her home in 1979, and at a surprise birthday party the following year, Dennis hired a symphony orchestra to serenade her as he sang “You Are So Beautiful.” McVie and Wilson sang and wrote songs together at the piano. They considered recording an album together, and she dedicated a song on the last Fleetwood Mac LP, Mirage, to him.

Still, along with the romance and good times came bouts of drunken destruction, when Wilson would storm through the house breaking anything within reach. “He used her place like a hospital,” said Steve Goldberg. “Then he’d call me, I’d go and pick him up, and she wouldn’t see him for a week. When he was totaled out — he wouldn’t sleep for a week — he’d go back. Over and over again. He cared about her, but his priority was having a good time.”

In 1979, the Beach Boys had had enough. Dennis was frequently missing tours, and when he did show up, he was often too messed up to play. Finally, he was kicked out of the group.

When his business affairs in disarray, the drummer hired Levine as his business manager. Within a year, Levine also became Wilson’s personal manager. “It wasn’t the easiest situation,” said Levine. “He was heavily in debt when he came to me. The whole gamut. Two years of back taxes. He owed everybody in every store money. We set up a program where it took us about two and one half years to work down the most pressing debts.” In 1980, Dennis rejoined the Beach Boys and began to tour again.

By the beginning of 1981, Wilson and McVie had split up. Dennis moved into a house in Venice Beach with his seventeen-year-old daughter Jennifer and some other friends. “Things got real bad,” said Steve Goldberg, who was also living at the house. “When he was living at Christine’s, he was doing a lot of coke. [The drinking] kind of started to ease the shakes from the coke. By the time he moved to Venice, he was carrying around a ready-mixed jug. It just progressed to a continual drink.”

Up until his death, Dennis Wilson would show up at the Venice Beach home of Garby Leon, a friend with a doctorate in music composition from Harvard. There, Dennis, Garby and sometimes Brian would hang out and make music late into the night, with Brian on Hammond organ and Dennis on grand piano or harp. During that time, Brian wrote nearly an album’s worth of material.

But, Garby Leon says, the other Beach Boys didn’t like Dennis and Brian’s new songs. In late 1981, the Wilson brothers spent a few days making demos of several songs in the studio, but money to pay for the sessions was cut off.

It was while Dennis was living in Venice that the affair with his illegitimate second cousin, Shawn Love, began. Shawn, then sixteen, recalls showing up at Dennis’ house in Venice with a mutual friend.

“What’s your name?” asked Dennis.

“Shawn,” she replied.

“What’s your dad’s name?” asked Dennis.

“Mike.”

“Mike what?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Just tell me who your dad is,” insisted Dennis.

“His name is Mike Love.”

Then, she recalled, “he started talking to me like a big brother. He said, ‘It’s not safe for you to tell everybody who your dad is.’ All of a sudden he changed the conversation. At first, some people thought he was coming on to me to get at Mike.” Soon they were living together.

Dennis did go back on the road with the Beach Boys, but it was rough for everyone. Bodyguards were needed to keep Dennis off the bottle prior to performances. When he drank, he could be boorish onstage, as well as an erratic drummer. There were raging battles between Dennis and Mike Love. Finally, restraining orders were issued to keep them apart.

Wilson used to get a kick out of hassling Love. Once, on the way to a concert date, Wilson walked up to the area on their private jet where Love was meditating, pulled open the door and threw up.

By the end of 1981, Dennis and Shawn’s relationship showed signs of strain. “He was acting like a real punk,” said Shawn. “He was drunk and high. It was embarrassing to me. One of my girlfriends told me he was trying to take another girlfriend to bed.”

Shawn was furious. “I ran up to him in the alley, and I just slugged him in the face,” she said. “I came up to him like, ‘I am going to kill you.’ We got into a full-on fight. He didn’t actually punch me, but he had me down. He dragged me by my hair.”

Despite the ongoing friction, Dennis and Shawn were married in July 1983, nearly a year after their son, Gage Dennis, was born. By the fall of 1983, there wasn’t much of a relationship left. Scrawled in crayon on the walls of their house at 6120 Trancas Canyon Road in Malibu were the phrases “No love” and “No respect.” The house was a shambles. Doors were broken. On one occasion, Shawn nearly drove her silver BMW into the front door. Less than a month before he died, Dennis smashed the windows of the same car with a baseball bat.

Dennis and Shawn separated. “I left partially because of me and Dennis not getting along because of personal things — jealousies and stuff,” said Shawn. She moved into a $150-a-week room at the Santa Monica Bay Inn, a stone’s throw from the drug connection Dennis Wilson turned to when he needed cocaine. A divorce was in the works at the time of his death. Shawn claims that they were working things out, but adds, “We probably would have been together, then apart again.”

***

In 1982, the more business-minded beach Boys — Carl Wilson, Al Jardine and Mike Love — and their manager, Tom Hulett, felt there were two big problems that had to be solved: Brian Wilson and Dennis Wilson.

Brian had ballooned to over 300 pounds. He wouldn’t bathe, he would eat and then throw up his food, and if drugs were around, he would use them. He was, as one associate put it, “extremely nonproductive as a human being.”

The task of curing Brian eventually fell, as it had once before, to psychologist Eugene Landy. Landy had once worked for a fan magazine, Teen Screen, and was later a record company A&R man before becoming therapist to the stars. In 1976, he became a celebrity for his role in getting Wilson out of the bedroom and into the recording studio. Eventually, Landy was fired when he allegedly began asking for a percentage of the Beach Boys’ income and wanted to become active in the management of the group.

Nevertheless, it was Eugene Landy whom Tom Hulett turned to. Though Hulett refused to be interviewed for this article, he told the Los Angeles Times last summer that he had Brian Wilson’s interest at heart when he enlisted Landy. “I told the other guys in the band that if we didn’t do something, Brian was going to be the next headline (death) in Billboard.”

In late October 1982, Brian Wilson was told by his accountants that he was broke and that he owed the government tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes. A week or so later, at a meeting attended by Mike, Al and Carl, plus various managers and accountants, Brian was fired. He was handed a letter dated November 5th, 1982, that read, in part: “This is to advise you that your services as an employee of Brother Records, Inc., and otherwise are hereby terminated, effective immediately.” Though it was signed by the four other Beach Boys, Shawn Wilson claims that Dennis didn’t know what he was signing, if indeed he signed it at all.

“They told him that the only way that he could be a Beach Boy again, and the only way they would release his 1982 tour disbursement money, was if he would agree to see Dr. Landy,” says Brian’s girlfriend, Carolyn Williams, who was present at the meeting. “Brian started yelling that he didn’t like Dr. Landy and that [Landy] was charging him $20,000 a month the last time. He was willing to see anybody to get the weight off, but he didn’t want to see Landy. And they said, ‘Well, no, you have to see Dr. Landy. That’s the only way.”‘

A while later, Brian was taken to Hawaii to begin a program with Eugene Landy. Brian remains under Landy’s care to this date; his fee is rumored to exceed $50,000 a month. Landy has recently become the Beach Boys’ “recording manager” and may share song writing credits (and, thus, royalties) with Brian Wilson on the next Beach Boys’ album. Because of his relationship with Brian, Landy actually told a reporter from California Magazine, “I’m the one who’s making the album.”

The three Beach Boys and their manager then apparently turned to the other problem: Dennis Wilson. “When they put Brian in the Landy program,” said Shawn, “A couple of our friends said, ‘Dennis, as soon as they have Brian done, they’re going to try to do the same thing with you.’ He said, ‘No, they’re not going to do anything.”‘

Dennis was wrong.

Mike, Carl, Al and manager Hulett had already banned Dennis from some concerts during 1983. Finally, Dennis was told he would not be allowed to tour with the band unless he went through a detox program. “Which was okay,” says Levine. “They were all interested in helping him. I was in full agreement with that.”

To hear Dennis’ Venice Beach friends tell it, the rock star was literally put out on the streets. For a month prior to his death, Dennis was without a home. He had no car and little money. He lived a nomadic life, crashing with various friends. “If Dennis had had a place to live, he might not have died,” said Garby Leon.

At least one member of Dennis Wilson’s immediate family agrees. “I feel if Dennis had had a place to stay, he might not have been down in the marina that day,” said his daughter Jennifer.

Though Bob Levine feels Wilson was fairly serious about straightening out his life, Steve Goldberg maintains he was just telling people what they wanted to hear. In late November, Dennis checked into a country club-style therapy center in Arizona. He left after two days.

Over the next month, he bounced from friend to friend. There was a scene outside an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where Wilson and Beach Boys manager Tom Hulett argued about money. Hulett reportedly pulled out a wad of bills, peeled off fifteen dollars and offered it to Wilson, who wouldn’t take it. Hulett threw it on the ground. The next day. Hulett apparently gave Wilson $100.

On Friday, December 23rd, Dennis Wilson checked into St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica. Dr. Jokichi Takamine, the doctor caring for Wilson at St. John’s, says that “he was very serious” about the program.

Wilson and Takamine spoke at length on Saturday; the doctor says he told Wilson he would be away on Sunday, Christmas Day, but would see him on Monday.

But Dennis checked himself out of St. John’s Hospital early in the evening on Christmas Day. Although Shawn had apparently agreed to come to the hospital with Gage to visit, she never made it. “He just showed up at my mom’s,” said Shawn. “He said he was really lonely and that he wanted to be with us on Christmas.”

He spent about an hour with Shawn and Gage, then left. A friend bumped into Dennis walking along the road near the Santa Monica Bay Inn. They went for a drink at a club. It was later that night that Dennis stopped by the Santa Monica Bay Inn and was beaten up by Shawn’s male friend. After being denied medical attention at St. John’s hospital, Dennis was admitted to Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital at around two a.m. He spent the night.

Wilson checked himself out at 11:30 a.m. the next day and called Steve Goldberg an hour and a half later. “He was at a beer bar two blocks down the street He wanted me to drive down and pick him up,” said Steve Goldberg. “I told him I was working on my van and said, ‘Why don’t you just walk over here?”‘ He kept calling me back. He wanted money and a ride. He ended that conversation [with the word] termination. Click. I don’t know if he was referring to the conversation, our friendship or his life.”

***

On Tuesday, December 27th, at about eight p.m., the phone rang on Bill Oster’s boat, the Emerald. Dennis wanted to visit. The old friends had been out of touch for nearly a year, but Oster was happy to hear from him and agreed to pick up the Beach Boy and the girl he was with, Colleen “Crystal” McGovern.

Wilson had met Oster, a mechanical engineer, a few years earlier when his boat, the Harmony, had been docked next to the Emerald at a Marina Del Rey slip. After Wilson lost his boat, Oster hid a key on the Emerald so Dennis could have use of the boat. Dennis had called Oster from Colleen McGovern’s house in Culver City. McGovern was a casual friend; she and Dennis had been seeing each other only for a few weeks. After talking with Oster, Dennis was excited. “He said, ‘We’re going to the boat; we’re going to have a good time. And tomorrow I’m going to go to detox,”‘ recalled McGovern.

When Oster picked the couple up, Dennis said, “Gotta get a bottle.” They stopped at a liquor store, Wilson bought a fifth of vodka and some orange juice, and they drove to the boat.

Oster, his fiancée, Brenda, McGovern and Wilson sat around in the boat’s small cabin that night, reminiscing and drinking. At one point, the conversation turned to Dennis. Oster told the Beach Boy, “It wasn’t six months ago that I said to Brenda, ‘I hope the next tune we see Dennis, it’s not at his funeral.” Wilson looked right at Oster and said, “Don’t you worry about that.”

“We talked about his alcohol rehabilitation, detox and why he didn’t want to go in,” recalled Oster. “He said, ‘They won’t let me back in the band until I do it.” He didn’t like the atmosphere [at St. John’s]. There was a place in New Mexico he was willing to try.”

Wilson was drinking heavily. “If anybody else had been drinking the way Dennis was drinking, they would have been smashed,” said Oster. “But Dennis drank like that normally. I don’t think I ever knew him sober.”

At about midnight, Dennis passed out. He slept fitfully. “Dennis was just sweating like I’d never seen him sweat,” said McGovern. “It was just dripping down his face. I was mopping his forehead constantly.”

McGovern eventually fell asleep, but was awakened an hour later by Wilson. “I could see right away he was wound up again.” Wilson made several phone calls, apparently including one to Shawn. “Dennis and I ended up staying up all night,” said McGovern. “We would sleep a few minutes, then he would wake me up again. Every once in a while he’d say, ‘Honey, what are we going to do?’ And I’d say, ‘We’re going to get some sleep.’ And he would say, ‘I can’t sleep, ‘I can’t sleep.”‘

The next morning, the foursome sat around talking. At about ten, Oster suggested that he and Wilson go rowing. “We set it up, put the oars in it,” said Oster, “and he’s wandering around. ‘I want a drink, I want a drink!’ The girls had hid the stuff. He finally found it and mixed himself another drink.”

They returned an hour later; at noon, they had turkey sandwiches. Wilson had consumed three-quarters of the bottle of vodka by this point. When he spilled a drink on his pants, Oster loaned him a pair of cutoff jeans. That’s when Dennis began diving into the slip next to the Emerald. He surfaced and handed Oster an old piece of rope.

“That was the first thing he brought up,” recalled Oster. “He kept diving down, scrounging around, bringing up junk. Why he was doing it, I don’t know.”

Wilson came out of the fifty-eight-degree water after twenty minutes; back on the dock, he was shivering and his teeth were chattering. He sat in front of a heater inside the cabin. His friends brought him towels, and after about fifteen minutes, he stopped shaking. He ate another sandwich and had another drink.

Then he made a few more dives. He found a silver frame that had held his and Karen Lamm’s wedding picture. He had thrown it off the Harmony in 1980, when they were divorced.

“He was really excited,” said McGovern. “He said, ‘Guess what I found! A chest of gold!”‘ Back on board, the Beach Boy sat around for about two and a half hours, relaxing and drinking. He finished off the fifth of vodka. He was talking about what he thought was at the bottom of the slip: a tool box, the “chest of gold,” a sack of silver dollars. “He was psyching himself up to go back in after his treasures,” said Oster. “I told him there was nothing down there. We tried halfheartedly to talk him out of going back in. There was no I talking him out of it.”

At some point, he found a bottle of wine on the boat and drank from it. Around four p.m., Dennis was ready to go back in the water. But first he walked to another houseboat on the other side of the dock in search of booze. He managed to talk a friend into giving him a partially filled fifth of vodka and had another drink.

Then he made his last dive. Oster was standing on one of the slender piers that extend between the docked boats, across the slip from the Emerald. From there, he saw air bubbles. “I saw him come up to within two feet of the surface,” said Oster. “Then I saw him swim behind my rowboat, where I couldn’t see his face or what he was doing. I think I heard him take a breath of air.”

Oster called out, “Dennis, what did you find?” There was no response.

“At that point, I saw him go straight down and back out of sight. I said to myself, ‘That sucker’s playing a game on me, he’s trying to hide.’ That was my fatal error. Because that was the last time he went down. I took a few puffs on a cigarette, waiting for him to come up. Didn’t hear or see anything. So I quietly walked around to my side of the empty slip. I didn’t see him, so I stomped on the dock and made a whole bunch of noise and said, ‘Hey, Dennis, where are you? Ha ha. I can’t find you.’ Still no response. Then I started looking. It was just clear enough that you could look under all the docks and see if there was an object under there. There were a lot of places where he could have come up and hid.”

But when Dennis didn’t surface, his friends became worried. Oster was going to dive in himself when he spotted the harbor patrol. According to the autopsy report, “The harbor patrol searched the waters for approximately thirty minutes before finding the body. The time that the body was pulled from the water was approximately 1745 hours [5:45 p.m.]. Dennis Wilson was pronounced dead three minutes later.

***

“We are not disbanding,” announced Carl Wilson at an L.A. press conference on Monday, January 9th, twelve days after Dennis Wilson’s death. “We are postponing currently scheduled dates during this period of mourning.”

Regardless of their personal feelings about Dennis, the Beach boys will continue — and at least one member thinks the band will be stronger. “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link” is how Mike Love characterized Dennis’ effect on the band during his decline. “Dennis had his problems: drugs, alcohol. . . .”

Now middle-aged men — Love is forty-three; Brian Wilson, forty-one; Al Jardine, thirty-nine; Carl Wilson, thirty-seven; and Bruce Johnston, forty — the remaining Beach Boys are caught in a bind. Their last studio LP, Keepin’ the Summer Alive, sold fewer than 200,000 copies, and the band members have reportedly been unable to hang onto their money. (Mike Love filed for bankruptcy last year.)

As a result, they must tour constantly to afford their extravagant lifestyles. So, to no one’s great surprise, the Beach Boys were performing at Harrah’s, a casino in Lake Tahoe, a little over a month after Carl’s announcement.

Renewed concert activity is not the only front the Beach Boys are now active on. A million-dollar deal with Vestron Video to make a home video, The Complete Beach Boys, has been made. Culture Club producer Steve Levine, who has recently spent time working on music with Brian in Jamaica, will produce a new Beach Boys album in London. Recently, the Beach Boys aimed up on the soundtrack to Up the Creek. A collaborative Beach Boys-Four Seasons single titled “East Meets West” has been cut, and the band is pairing up with international pop star Julio Iglesias on a remake of the Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe.”

At the late show at Tahoe, Brian Wilson did not perform. The others, backed by an eleven piece-band, including a horn section and two drummers, offered an unexceptional rerun of the Beach Boys’ oldies. With the exception of “Rock and Roll Music,” which reached Number Five on the pop charts in 1976, and a couple of tunes off Carl Wilson’s solo albums, the Beach Boys performed music that was nearly two decades old.

Toward the conclusion, the band sang a weary version of “Fun, Fun, Fun.” Conspicuously absent was any mention of Dennis Wilson. The period of mourning was apparently over.

[classyobservationwerewolf]

COVID-19 - A reality check to mankind

Unprecedented! That is the apt way to describe the situation humanity is in. What started as an ‘isolated’ problem at Wuhan in China, in a matter of 3 months, has ‘isolated’ the mankind across the globe. COVID-19 /Corona virus has afflicted more than 1.5 million people but definitely effected the entire 7.6 billion population of the earth.

We are living in a world, aspiring to have a local flight soon to Mars. We are living, thriving, to drive Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, nanotechnology, drones, internet of things, virtual reality and augmented reality into our lives. We are on our way to make artificial organs with regenerative medicine.  

COVID-19, has brought about a few “reality checks” to our lives.

What are they?

Countries across continents have shut down and imposed lockdowns. Social distancing and Isolation are the buzzwords of the world today. No air traffic, let alone road traffic. Fear, anxiety and helplessness has gripped us today. With all the progress we have made over centuries, we are struggling to handle or cope with a virus. Don’t you feel humbled?

Social Reality Check

The lockdowns have forced us to stay at home. Who have you been isolated with? Our parents, our children and our loved ones. How many of you have seen your kids or parents so closely over the years as you are now?

Have we realized how much our parents and kids need us? Am sure many of your parents and spouses are happy to have you at this lockdown. How many of you now, are cooking and feeding your family, helping your parents , spending time with them, talking to your kids, putting them to sleep? I am sure these things have brought a smile on your parents face, love in your spouse and happiness with your kids. Isn’t this a time to reflect! It needed a COVID-19 for us to wake us up from our slumber away from responsibilities towards our loved ones. Not to forget with the lockdowns, some of you are stuck away from home, away from ageing parents, spouse and kids. Lockdown has compelled upon us to recognize our Family.

Your presence in this way was vital before the lockdown, is vital now and in the future too. Your ageing parents need you to take care of them similar to how you were taken care of when you were kids. You need to instill these values and ethics in your children as were sown into you by your parents. Remember, time will repeat the cycle, so teach them the way to handle aged parents, will be peace to you when your time comes. The woman who bore your kids, your pillar of strength and your partner. She is your other half, time to reflect upon her contributions, which have made you complete. Make this your routine life going forward.

 Environmental Reality Check

 The entire world has been harping upon pollution, Global warming and climate change. How do we save the world for our children? How can the world reduce its carbon footprint? In India, we have seen Delhi lose lives due to pollution. Pollution levels reaching a level where breathing air has been worse than smoking a cigarette. Wild life extinction, marine life hazards and frequent bush fires destroying nature have become common.

Environmental risks have reached a level where even breathing has led to harmful, life threatening diseases. Humanity is facing an existential crisis due to climate change. A number of activists like Greta Thunberg, leaders and governments are working on solution to better climate change adversities. Not much progress made!

 Come COVID-19, come lockdowns and see what the world is today. We were not taking care of nature and playing with fire. Reality check! Nature is showing us not to damage our planet. It is showing us climate change; global warming and pollution are our self-inflicted ailments. Jalandhar could view the scenic Himalayas 3 days ago from 200 plus kms away. Yamuna River has never been cleaner. You can see wild life feeling alive and free at home. Pollution levels have dropped to levels never seen for years. Adversity is dawning us a light on opportunity. If our leaders and government can take the learning from here, we have solutions to pollution and global warming.

 Maybe, we should have a lockdown a day on every weekend and some holidays. We have realized the affect it has on pollution; COVID-19 is showing us. It is not very hard, if each leader and government uses this opportunity to make it a cleaner world going forward. Somehow, if we can bring in stringent restrictions like a shutdown (Lockdown), every available opportunity throughout the year, inevitably, we will reduce our carbon footprint, reduce pollution and control global warming. It is time to wake up and seize the opportunity.

 Poverty and human reality check

We have been a race, power and wealth hungry. We have been chasing wealth, careers and hunger for lavish lifestyles. It has been a rat race to the top. Our selfish desires and greed have destroyed the value of a human being. Rising Inequalities hinder economic growth of countries. How much is enough for us? Is it not time to reflect?

Come the global COVID-19 crisis and lockdown, we have seen the past few days in India, how our daily wage population and poor, have been in a worse than war like situation. We have governments trying to make things easy and provide for the needy. A number of philanthropists & NGO’s are helping at this time of need. However, will it suffice?

COVID-19 has humbled humanity, whatever you are, however wealthy, nature has caught up giving us a reality check. The virus has afflicted a number of global prime ministers, their spouses, celebrities, actors, singers, royals etc., you name it, sparing no one. Nature has been a leveler! Am sure many of you are contributing through NGO’s, government funds and various other ways to try to reach the needy with basic food necessities.

It is time we wake up and try to work towards reducing the inequalities that exist and bring the levels of poverty down. No magic wand, but little drops of water can make an ocean. Why only during the lockdown? Let us vow to ourselves that we will, every week sacrifice a little from our blessed provides to contribute to the needy and the poor. It will make a huge difference.  If each one of us begins to do this as a duty am sure we will go a long way in reducing poverty globally. We are worried about the next few months and are hoarding like there will be no more food available ever. Please, spare a teary moment for the many, who cannot buy or get access to even a meal today. I am sure, the meal you provide to them, will leave a taste, better than any dish you’ve ever had.  

 COVID-19 has truly humbled us, but it is imperative, that we take these reality checks as an opportunity to make this world a better place for our children and humanity. I am sure there are many things we always wanted to do and complained about lack of time, as we are in a rat race. This lockdown is a time to reflect, build restraint and begin to act. If we fail to do it now, then it is not lack of time, it truly will be lack of discipline and humanity in us!

[sleepleess-nights]

Genuine Moms Dish on Easy Ways to Get Pregnant Faster

Wish you had an individual infant making mentor? Allow these ladies to enable—they to realize how it's finished! Peruse on for their time-tested tips on the most proficient method to at last get pregnant faster tips following quite a while of attempting to imagine.

You'd never know it from the giggly indulges in their arms, yet a lot of guardians have attempted to consider eventually. Actually, the CDC evaluates that 6.7 million ladies in the U.S. can't get pregnant so no problem at all. By far most of guardians eventually get the infant they longed for—and adapt a lot of tips for attempting to consider en route.

Here, genuine guardians share hard-earned intelligence you can utilize right this moment to help quicken your excursion to implantation and origination.

Know Your Ovulation Symptoms

Carrie E. Carroll, 36, a workmanship chief in Arlington, Virginia, had a shrewd system set up for getting pregnant. At age 32, she went off of anti-conception medication one year before she wanted to imagine and utilized that opportunity to give her body a full check up. 

"I ate truly well—heaps of natural products, nuts, and greens—brought down my caffeine consumption, followed my ovulation, did yoga two times per week, and raced to remain fit as a fiddle," she says. Be that as it may, following a couple of long periods of attempting to get pregnant, she had little to appear for it. "I thought some way or another it is simpler to imagine in light of the fact that I got everything done right," she says. Feeling disappointed, she approached other ladies for exhortation. "One mother of four let me know 'Attempt to listen all the more near your body—it offers you hints that your period is coming and that you're ovulating.'"

Not actually sure what she should search for, Carrie invested more energy concentrating on the psyche body component of her yoga practice and homing in on how she felt with every development. "One evening half a month later I was driving home with my significant other and I felt somewhat fly in my lower midriff on one side," she says. "I realized it was not yet time for my period, as I had been following myself reliably, so it couldn't be an issue." What she felt was likely mittelschmerz, or ovulation torment, the pinging sensation a few ladies experience when an egg is discharged. Thinking it was the indication of ovulation, she and her significant other got occupied the following day. After five weeks, her hunch was affirmed: She was pregnant—with twins! "I'm so happy I figured out how to tune in to my body; else we may have missed that ideal window for origination," Carrie says.

Tidy Up Your Pre-Pregnancy Diet

Experiencing difficulty imagining can be particularly astounding if it's your second time around. Mandi Welbaum, 26, a mother blogger and editorial manager in Troy, Ohio, battled with auxiliary barrenness after she had her first kid at 17. Two years after her child's introduction to the world, her periods despite everything hadn't returned to typical yet she opposed heading off to the specialist. "I needed it to happen normally, the manner in which it did the first run through, so I began following my temperature each morning at 5:30 a.m., checking cervical bodily fluid, and recording each and every seemingly insignificant detail that felt or appeared to be unique," she says. Months went with no karma. "I arrived at where I said 'I believe we're simply expected to have one,' so I chose to get down to my prepregnancy weight for good."

That implied bringing an end to a portion of her unfortunate propensities, for example, eating oily inexpensive food a few times each week. "I required some responsibility so I began Weight Watchers," Mandi clarifies. "It didn't accommodate my way of life, however, on the grounds that I didn't care for looking into focuses." Then she found out about the MyFitnessPal versatile application, an online calorie counter that encourages you track your eating routine and exercise. "When I began utilizing it, there wasn't one day that I would neglect to enter my carbohydrate levels in the application in light of the fact that my telephone was consistently with me," she says. Following five months of chopping down parts, restricting cheap food, and making solid smoothies from milk, natural product, and ice, Mandi shed 20 pounds. Inside weeks she got pregnant with her subsequent kid. "From the start I was energized, at that point I resembled, 'Poo, I simply lost this weight and now I need to recover it!'" she says with a giggle.

Get in a normal exercise schedule

Eating right and practicing consistently are savvy moves for each eventual mother. Yet, for ladies who have a typical condition that influences propagation, getting into ideal shape can be the looked for after key to fruitfulness. That is the thing that helped Christy Grimste, 34, of Washington, D.C., get pregnant in the wake of being determined to have polycystic ovary disorder (PCOS) in her late twenties.

Ladies with PCOS—that is about 10 percent of U.S. ladies of childbearing age—have raised degrees of male hormones, which make their cycles sporadic and produce sores on their ovaries. For Christy's situation, that prompted two years of attempting to consider without progress. "I attempted the medications Clomid and Metformin that treat PCOS-related barrenness, yet neither of those worked, so our subsequent stage would have been IVF," she says. Before that procedure could get off the ground, Christy and her significant other were sent to live in Ankara, Turkey, for her better half's activity. "I felt like my fantasies about having kids would have been run," she says. To exacerbate the situation, their vehicle didn't show up for the initial three months after they found a workable pace. "I needed to walk all over the place," Christy clarifies. "As an interruption, I downloaded a lot of inspiring tunes with a decent beat to keep me moving on the grounds that I abhor working out."

Cruising along to Bon Jovi for about an hour daily helped her shed 15 pounds, a part of it around her midriff, before her second's over month abroad. She likewise got a period without precedent for months. "I didn't feel that I expected to lose a lot of weight since I read that the main extremely enormous ladies with PCOS had issues getting pregnant," she says. At 5'2" and 130 pounds before she began her strolling schedule, Christy had an underlying weight record of 23.8. That put her close to the higher finish of the typical weight territory (18.5 to 24.9). In any case, weight record doesn't consider weight circulation, and abundance gut fat has been appeared to upset regenerative hormones. Shedding pounds in the correct spots appeared to do the stunt for Christy. "The extremely one month from now we were pregnant," she says.

Locate Your Ideal Body Weight

Being at the far edge of the weight range—excessively slender—can likewise block origination. Melissa Pheterson, 34, an independent columnist in Rochester, New York, got hitched five years prior and put on a touch of weight after the wedding, the same number of ladies do. "I put myself on a quite severe eating regimen," she says. "Rather than having frozen yogurt and entire milk, I was eating low-fat stuff like sorbet, skim milk, and jerky." She was additionally practicing every day, either running or doing high-affect exercises at the rec center.

The routine functioned admirably—excessively well. "My solid weight is 115 to 120, yet I propped up to under 100 pounds," Melissa concedes. She didn't understand exactly how undesirable she was until she visited a nutritionist. "She let me know, 'Except if you find a way to restore the weight, you're not going to have the option to begin a family, perhaps not currently, perhaps not ever,'" Melissa recollects. "It frightened me into taking her recommendation." She started a feast plan that was the stuff of dreams for most ladies: three dinners every day in addition to dessert, for example, full-fat frozen yogurt or pudding—in any event once per day, snacks like nuts and granola, and bunches of juice and entire milk. At the rec center, she downshifted to bring down effect exercises like Pilates. "Being less worried about my eating routine more likely than not helped, in light of the fact that inside a quarter of a year in the wake of rolling out these improvements, I at long last imagined," she says.

Increment Your Fertility with Food

Amy Reiley, 39, definitely realized that spicing up a supper with love potion nourishments makes perfect conditions for reproduction. She truly composed the book on it! Be that as it may, when the Los Angeles-based writer of Fork Me, Spoon Me: The Sensual Cookbook attempted to place a bun in her stove at age 36, she was unable to locate any reasonable formula for progress.

"Following a time of trying and two months of staggeringly costly tests, an authority let me know and my accomplice, 'You both look fine—I can't give you an explanation it's not occurring or any counsel,'" Amy clarifies. As opposed to harp on her dissatisfaction over an equivocal finding, she devoted herself completely to her work. That happened to compose Romancing The Stove, the spin-off of her first book. Fortunate for her person, she enrolled him as a formula analyzer. "We were eating an eating routine that would totally support sexual hormone creation," Amy says. "For instance, we attempted four distinctive watermelon servings of mixed greens, which is clever in light of the fact that watermelon is believed to be incredible for men's richness." They additionally got more ripeness boosting omega-3 unsaturated fats than expected through nourishments, for example, salmon. "Typically my accomplice doesn't eat any fish whatsoever yet I could slip some for the sake of chipping away at the book," she says. Amy additionally inspected extensive measures of fennel, which is stuffed with ripeness well disposed plant estrogens. Soon after completing formula testing, she discovered she was pregnant.

Amy credits the meals with powering her drive as well as restoring her relationship. "In the wake of going after for such a long time, my accomplice and I had arrived at the point that we weren't appreciating each other any longer in a sentimental or sexual manner by any means," says Amy. "It was so brilliant to be back in that place with one another, regardless of whether we wouldn't have had a child."

Swap Processed Foods Before Pregnancy

Detroit mother Lee Padgett, 43, battled with barrenness identified with endometriosis for a long time, beginning at age 30. "Richness specialists had told my significant other and me that they couldn't imagine anything better than to take our cash however we could never be pregnant," she says. So she and her significant other said bye-bye to conception prevention and hi to a phenomenal opening for work in Germany. In a flash she found that the European way to deal with supper time was an aid for her body.

"My gut constantly troubled me in the States, however the nourishment was so a lot fresher and less prepared in Germany that I didn't have issues there," she says. She didn't need to remove indulgences suc

[fogmongers]

                                      F  E  L  I  C  E      Q  U  I  V  E  Y .                      psychology major / music minor.                       housemate to sabrina.                          sorority girl.        harpist.        cheerleader.        fencer.        sociopath?

the child of a former model and failed tennis player turned gold digger--- a backwards and complicated woman named louise whom felice doesn’t talk about very much but whom i’m going to get into later. 

louise is currently married to a rich parisian art collector, put on the map for making a few paintings along the lines of rothko that sold for over a million us dollars back in the day because his family knew the right people to get him exposure and hype. they’ve been together on and off for most of felice’s life, with brief spells of breaking up for a few years when louise got bored of him and tried to find a better model. felice has been jerked back and forth between schooling in france and bellingham without much regard, and it’s definitely impacted her social skills, inflated sense of uniqueness, and ability to get attached to people.

she picked up several prestigious hobbies, but the only two that remotely stuck were fencing and playing the harp --- a hamfisted parable for her core nature of yearning for peace but projecting strife; dont @ me. against her mother’s insistence, she never committed her full attention to one or the other, meaning she was never good enough at either to make it professionally. And now that she’s in her twenties, she never will be, since they’re both highly competitive high society fields that require classical training from early childhood to get a foot in the door.

she takes pride in not following her mother’s insistence to become the best at either hobby, but the pressure to compete with everyone around her seeped into other parts of her personality. She has a very insidious, underlying compulsion to outdo others---especially other girls--- in fields of social power/popularity, grades, romance. And she’s prone to sabotaging others to make sure she looks better by comparison.

PERSONALITY WISE:

hangs out with privileged friend groups--- the beautiful people who are rich and athletic enough to succeed in life and romance without needing to develop any kind of personality. for doing the bare minimum of critical thinking and occasionally reading books that aren’t related to schoolwork, she’s usually seen by her social circles as being witty, cultured and interesting. she’s characterized as being the clever snarker on the basis of her using normie stock reactions like “you have I S S U E S...” or “thanks for THAT mental image.” and she’s used to people laughing either because she’s pretty or because their humor is just as uninspired. she’s VERY inclined to being the big fish in a small pond and came to rainier expecting it to be more underwhelming than an ivy league school.

she’s the girl who kept a close, suspicious eye on max bronte and found out that sid was squatting in the sorority house, and left a trail of evidence to expose him and an anonymous note to the other girls about how uncomfortable it was to have an unenrolled ex-con and a secretive liar in the house, which ultimately led to max being booted out of the sorority altogether. might have framed nikki as the person who left the note.

considered to be the great compromiser and philanthropist centrist because she’s amicable with some goths and can talk to them about the smiths or something and holds the bold progressive stance of telling the occasional frat boy stuck in 2009 that he shouldn’t call them fags. 

gets along with the girlsquads because she’s pretty good at co-opting progressive ideas and virtue signalling. has held girls’ hair back while puking and listened to problems before to provide pretty universally understood supportive ideas. kind of has a reputation as being a #fierce #independent #intersectional feminist icon. definitely intelligent and probably has one of the best gpa’s at the school, very focused on her academics, but her intelligence and perceived sense of self-worth has really messed up her ability to relate to and empathize with others.

has suspicions that she might be a sociopath, and is falling into a placebo effect and her long history of hurting people might be a result of her despair toward the situation. has never really experienced proper love so she’s never able to recognize it and definitely doesn’t know how to give it. deep down, might be trying to find camaraderie and look for someone/something to be passionate about, but her pessimism gets the better of her more often than not.

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

basic friends. a ~flirt~ who’s in it for the long game. gAL PaLs. a sorority squad.

someone who was close with her ex. (nina 👀)

other pretenders---people who are just as fake as her---who can’t put their finger on why they don’t like her. 

someone who’s she’s helped through a tough time or complimented and who is definitely wrapped right around her finger. alternatively someone who sees her as an ~angel~ strumming her harp, max/jonah style, and romanticizes her for all of her elegance and rich people interests and culture and slight french accent.

[is6621]

How Duolingo is disrupting the language learning market By: Leo Shi

I’ve always been intrigued by the language learning market because for me, I’ve only experienced learning languages very organically. In addition to my native language of English, I am also fluent in Mandarin Chinese and conversational in French. For Chinese, I grew up speaking it with my family, and besides toiling away in highschool French for three years, most, if not all of my French came from the 5 months I spent studying abroad in Paris. For me, it doesn’t seem conceivable to truly learn a language any other way besides being fully immersed in it on a day-to-day basis, which is why I find Duolingo so fascinating. Launched back in 2011, Duolingo has redefined the language learning market and is continuously pushing the envelope. Founded by Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn and his graduate student at the time, Severin Hacker, they had a vision for Duolingo to provide free, accessible education to millions worldwide. Growing up in Guatemala, von Ahn took note of how expensive it was for people to learn English, and he set out to change that with Duolingo. While Duolingo is still free to this day, it does now employ ads on both its Android and iPhone apps. For the first few years of its existence however, Duolingo actually didn’t even need ads thanks to its very clever business model of crowdsourcing where organizations such as CNN and Buzzfeed would pay Duolingo to translate their content.

While there are tons of language learning apps on the market, ranging from Memrise to Rosetta Stone, Duolingo has consistently been able to separate itself from the pack. This is because Duolingo doesn’t conform to traditional language learning methods. A big thing that Duolingo harps on is how you can learn a brand new language just by spending 5 minutes on the app everyday completing exercises. Of course, if you’d like to make it more of a priority, Duolingo allows that too, as it is completely tailored to a user’s level of proficiency and how much effort he/she wants to exert on a daily basis. Instead of approaching learning a new language as this arduous process, Duolingo markets it as something you can do on the side for fun. While it still does take countless hours to even begin sounding conversational in a new language, it doesn’t come across that way to a user who’s preoccupied by Duolingo’s interactive interface and lessons. Which brings us to user retention, probably the most important aspect for language learning apps such as Duolingo. The thought of learning a new language is often exciting so getting users to download these apps isn’t the problem, but once reality sets in and users start realizing that learning Spanish or Japanese or French wasn’t as easy as they thought it would be, they quit. Amongst the language learning market, Duolingo has been able to distinguish itself in this regard as over 30% of people who sign up to Duolingo become long-term active users. While this figure may not sound incredibly impressive, it’s important to keep in perspective that user retention is intrinsically low for the language learning market. For example, another big player in the language learning market is busuu, who only boasts a 5% rate for users who go onto become long-term active users. 

Duolingo is constantly using its data to improve the metrics and restructure the learning experience for all users. Not only are Duolingo courses heavily backed by research, but they’re almost always themed as well which helps to really engage the user. They also emphasize practicality. Unlike traditional language learning contexts where students are thrown nouns, adjectives, and verbs separately, Duolingo combines these in their lesson plans and introduces new grammatical concepts gradually so users don’t feel overwhelmed and are able to form natural, coherent phrases starting from the very beginning, instilling them with a sense of confidence to continue on. Also, anyone who’s used Duolingo extensively before can attest to how invested Duolingo keeps you with their daily streak notifications. Some days you may be busier than others, but you’ll always be willing to log onto Duolingo for a couple minutes just to keep your streak alive, which really, at the crux of it, is what learning new languages is all about, consistent practice and repetition. Even though I’ve only been back from study abroad for a few months, I already feel my level of French inevitably dropping off. I’ve incorporated Duolingo into my daily routine to make sure I don’t completely forget all my French and it’s certainly felt more enjoyable than cumbersome (currently on a 42 day streak). Something Duolingo also prides itself on are the metrics it uses to measure a user’s progress. While the lessons themselves certainly are very important and need to be developed accordingly, Duolingo invests just as much resources into measuring user’s progress as that’s what keeps them coming back to the app. Learning a new language can be overwhelming so when Duolingo says, “You are 27% fluent in French!” it’s encouraging as they are somehow able to quantify your progress. 

However, developing these metrics are no small feat. In fact, Duolingo integrates AI and machine learning within their software for this exact purpose and is hoping to leverage machine learning capabilities in other pursuits as well, such as entering the language assessment market. The Test of English as Foreign Language exam (TOEFL) represents a traditional barrier for university-entry to international students worldwide, and Duolingo is hoping to disrupt that market by using their deep-learning models and AI infrastructure to produce other language proficiency tests. Duolingo’s founder Luis von Ahn has already stated that this integration of AI/machine learning is a huge priority for them right now as they hope to continue leveraging these capabilities to effectively scale their high-quality education in the future, not just limited to an app on a digital level, but across other platforms as well.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-duolingo-uses-ai-to-disrupt-the-language-learning-market/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2016/09/23/in-the-battle-of-online-language-learning-programs-who-is-winning/#1fa489b2578b

https://www.businessinsider.com/duolingo-review-guide-learning-language-2018-1#my-level-of-study-is-currently-set-to-serious-3

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/duolingo-app-review-foreign-language

[latinalesbi]

The good trouble account doesn’t even follow the moms or boys lol so much for the family

Yes, they tag Sherri and Teri in posts. They are such users.

Anonymous said:                                                                      Cringe at some of the fans of the show I really do. On twitter for the 1st time in ages Joanna baits them. BB has gone quiet thank god. They’ve all moved on people. They got bored of writing for the moms-never really knew what to do with them s3 onwards. They wanted Maia front and center that’s evident, the spin off was their idea. The amount of new characters on their new show means money wasn’t the real issue. They’ve moved studios to cut costs. They gave up on Teri and Sherri thats the truth.

Yes, this officially makes Joanna the worst one. How she gonna tell a FAN that if she raises 30 MILLION dollars, she’ll produce the show. Bitch please. SHUT Up. She makes me so angry. They went along with whatever Freeform wanted. It’s so sad. They didn’t want the older lesbians and that’s a fact. These women weren’t sleeping around getting down with multiple women and they weren’t young things (yeah I am looking at you Bold Type and their male gaze), Freeform had no room to make a couple like Stef and Lena, front and center.

Anonymous said:                                                                      If only they had realised the storm their decision would’ve caused both Fform and the creators of the fosters. I think had they realised their new shows cloak & dagger etc would do as badly as they have they would have sanctioned a season 6. In fact I’m sure. They need the viewing figures. If the creators really wanted to go down the line of the spin off they could have run both show concurrently, that would’ve appeased every1. Like Blackish and Grownish do now Wonder if that idea ever came up?    

I think maybe you are right. Grownish came in like a hit, and that’s around the time they announced cancellation, but it’s clear now: Freeform show suck. No one wants to watch this network. The Fosters was a product of ABC F and Freeform hated it for that.

Anonymous said:                                                                      Roll my eyes at people on twitter telling us we should support this new show as The Fosters was a family and fam supports fam. Dear lord they don’t seem to get the fact that this so called family behind the scenes betrayed each other. They negotiated behind the back of Teri Sherri and the guys and left them blindsided by the decision. Bradley Peter Maia Cierra and Joanna were all complicit in that. Their ‘family’ lost their jobs whilst they not only kept theirs but no doubt got pay rises. Asses!            

Anyone who wants to sell me that shit, can go fuck themselves. What a waste of energy. This wasn’t a family, this was a job, people got fucked over, I want to see the backstabbers crash and burn.

Anonymous said:                                                                      It was the Callie show for the past two seasons. Literally everything that could happen to a person happened to her lol! They didn’t really have a use for the other characters anymore. The only reason they are bringing Cierra -Marianna on board for the new show is that they are good friends in real life. I really believe that. Can’t believe they are producers too, the former cast must have been shocked at that. It’s like a double kick in the balls.          

I agree with that and that’s why this real life friendship has an end date. It will always be Maia and guest. If production money is all she cares about then maybe it will last. However, if the limelight she seeks, then she will be disappointed.

Anonymous said:                                                                      I loved the first few seasons of The Fosters. It was so family orientated. I loved the relationship between Stef and Calli it was what I wished for if Im honest. The show became too political for me at the end, they lost a little of what made it special.

I’ve said it before, the Trump election ruined the country and specifically this show. I needed escapism, ok. Is that ok to say? This show was built on that fantasy of a life. Suddenly, everything was about Trump even though on their timeline, he hadn’t been elected. They should have left the fosters alone and made a political show elsewhere.

Anonymous said:                                                                      Thought of watching Good Trouble every week and who is Callie going to save next urgh!They’ll be lots of new young, good looking characters, lots of sex no doubt which is funny considering the moms were barely allowed to touch towards the end. The creators zoned out. They wanted this new show, probably preferred writing for the girls etc. If you read articles at the beginning of The Fosters in 2013 they were so enthused about Stef and Lena, excited to talk about their stories, its worlds apart.          

Well Bradley got divorced and clearly didn’t believe in marriage anymore. He bought himself a young boyfriend and everyone got bored of stef and lena, except the audience. Sadly. It also shows how fake they are. They are actors selling a product. Ultimately, they didn’t really care, they just thought that’s what the network wanted to hear then.

P.S. Just don’t watch troubled shows.

Anonymous said:                                                                      They harp on & boast about their social justice storylines and how this will continue when the real injustice happened on their show in front of all of us. They kept the 2 straight characters and let go the 2 older women who happened to play lesbians and their gay son. These were the characters that had the most social impact & brought the most awareness to the show at the beginning. They gave people hope and a feeling they were being listened too. It’s so sad tptb seem to have forgotten that.            

And their stupid show’s tag is going to an invade a rightfully political tag about a black activist. People looking for this will bump into white savior callie. This isn’t progressive, it’s the typical erasure that happens to lesbians.

Anonymous said:                                                                      The thing that has arisen, if that’s the right word 😂 is the huge love everyone has for Sherri and Teri and their characters Stef and Lena. They truly made a difference to people’s lives. That will never change no matter what the powers that be decide is best for themselves and their network. Maybe Callie and Marianna stories on this spinoff will be worthy but it will never compare to the real affect Teri and Sherri had on so many people. They’re loved universally and that will never go away. X  

History will tell, and no one will remember Good Trouble. No one. 

Anonymous said:                                                                      Famous in Love might not be cancelled after all now. What a joke. Could you imagine how much they are paying Bella Thorne, the ratings are shit and yet they are considering keeping it on the air yet cancel the Fosters, the highest rating show? They just want to keep Marlene King sweet no doubt, she’s got her PLL spinoff coming. It’s all trash, the network and the creators of the Fosters. In a few years time the Fosters will still be talked about, maybe then they’ll appreciate Sherri and Teri.             

It was. Thank god. Next, Bold Type and next cancel the network.

Anonymous said:                                                                      If it was a money thing why didn’t they just skim down the amount of guest characters they brought in and go back to family stories? There were so many new characters every week we couldn’t keep up & made the show feel disjointed, we didn’t have any loyalty to them. Getting rid of the boys and the moms will have saved them money, yes, they’ve moved studios too so that’s a cost cut. But then they’ve cast a load of new characters for the spin off and made the girls ep’s. Something isn’t right.             

It was not a money thing at all. They want to say that but it’s not. It was about older women and how Freeform can’t sell that. Or rather, about how they don’t know how to sell it.

Anonymous said:                                                                      Don’t worry peeps. They will realise their mistakes. The Fosters was the family. When that started to be phased out we stayed around honestly due to the connection we’d built with the characters and the those that played them. You don’t build that loyalty up overnight. They didn’t think about the fans, if they did they’d have known dumping some of the cast and picking others was a non starter. Go out on a high as the family you began with, that’s what they should have done. Everyone or no-one.             

Exactly. I think the good feelings would have remained if they hadn’t betrayed the family. Now things are tainted.

Anonymous said:                                                                      They thought we’d all continue to watch. The apathy towards us as fans is staggering. Unless they manage to generate a whole new sector of viewers which they won’t, their ratings are going to suffer hugely. They will lose so many of us. Some will be intrigued by the first ep, after that and realising the rest of the cast are really no more it will slide off. They created and had something special, this spinoff tarnished it for me.             

The thing fans aren’t really a thing to these people. The noise people make on twitter is completely just that for them, background noise. That’s why I enjoyed when someone ruffles their feathers. When truth comes close to home, they react. If Freeform knew how to create a  hit, they would have done so by now. The Fosters was successful because of the fanbase it had built from the ABCF days. Hours of politics, the law and callie. No thanks.

Anonymous said:                                                                      If their idea of family is to forsake their fellow cast then who’d want to be a part of that? Sellouts pure and simple, money over ‘family.’             

That’s it. Nothing else.

Anonymous said:                                                                      I watch the ratings for shows, it was odd to me when the decision was made. The Fosters at that point was their highest rated show both live figure and the delayed viewing. And yes most def their most stable show. Sirens had since done well. Grownish dropped, Cloak & Dagger, started well-ish but then dropped. The Bold Type has always been low and Famous in Love- terrible. Last season it always beat Shadowhunters too. That show had a big international deal to be fair. Really strange decision.           

And yet they canned Shadowhunters. If there was a show I could believe had some weird cult following online, it would be that. They didn’t care either. I don’t know what Freeform is aiming for. Race to the bottom with them.

Anonymous said:                                                                      My thinking: Teri and Sherri had the highest salaries. Fform knew the ratings were good. Thought Maia and Cierra with their social media following were popular and therefore could lead a show thus save money by getting rid of Teri and Sherri and it wouldn’t affect the ratings. They didn’t realise the demographic of audience was vast. People watched the show for a variety of reasons. They should have done some polling before making the decision, would have been clear pretty quick. Amateur network             

I don’t know. They made maia and cierra more money as producers then they would have with The Fosters. It’s almost as if those 2 were the problem with money. They were demanding so much, the network couldn’t afford to pay anyone else much. The network is trash. I will live to see it die.

[zhsummer]

Final Reflection

In today’s world, women still grapple with a society that allows religion to undermine their true identity. When religion undermines someone's ability to be themselves it can be unhealthy. The theme of religion and how it shapes a woman’s perception of who she should be regarding religious interpretation, LGBTQ issues, and Islamic Feminism is talked about throughout the course. 

To millions of people worldwide like myself, religion is something special. The words written in the Bible, Torah, or the Quran are there to serve as a guide during our lifetime. However what is written is always open to interpretation by the reader. In Under the Udala Trees, Ijeoma is the main protagonist who often fought during Bible study with her mother Adaora in regards to their conflicting interpretation of the Bible’s acceptance of sexuality. At the beginning of the novel, Ijeoma is complicit in her mother’s relentless Bible studies in which she preached that people of the same gender shall not lie with each other. “Man must not lie with man, and if man does, man will be destroyed,” (Okparanta 74). Adaora is relentless, determined to rid her daughter of the devil that possessed her by asking for God’s protection. “Protect her from the demons that are trying to send her to hell. Lead her not into temptation,” (Okparanta 72). While her mother interprets the Bible as it was written with Adam and Eve, Ijeoma questions other possibilities that were never brought up. What about the possibility of Adam and Adam or Eve and Eve? “Just because the story happens to focus on a certain Adam and Eve did not mean that all other possibilities were forbidden. Just because the Bible recorded one specific thread of events... why did that have to invalidate or discredit all other threads…,” (Okparanta 82-83). I believe that Ijeoma is correct. Why do we have to limit our acceptance to only what is written in the Bible, Torah, or Quran? In this case, the Bible only tells one story. What happens to all the others whose stories are not told? Are we supposed to take what is given to us and not decipher a more complex understanding of the text? By developing her own perception of the Bible’s text, Ijeoma is slowly finding her own interpretation of God. At the end of the book, after she married Chibundu and had Chidinma, one night Ijeoma returns home to her mother finally accepting that she cannot live as a woman married to a man she doesn't love anymore. She had finally created her own interpretation of the Bible. “The Bible is an endorsement of change. Even biblical covenants change...No longer the covenant of law, but rather the covenant of change,” (Okparanta 322). While Ijeoma struggled to find her own religious interpretation, Peri in Three Daughters of Eve also had to find her own truth.

Like Ijeoma and Adaora, Peri and her mother have different views of religion. Peri lives her life always stuck in the middle when it comes to conflicting ideas regarding her religious interpretation. She has had an overbearing religious mother, with who she shared a tense relationship and a secular, hard-drinking father with who she enjoyed a close relationship. Her childhood home being described as divided into “her zone and his zone - Dar al-Islam and Dar al-harp - the realm of submission and the realm of war,” (Shafak 20). In her home religion created a divide between her mother and brother Hakan, two religious and nationalistic family members versus her father and brother Umut, a centralist and Marxist. While attending Oxford, university is a time where young minds like Peri are able to step outside of their comfort zones and create their own identity free of what they were previously exposed to. While escaping her mother and father’s fights about religion might have been refreshing, Peri soon found herself in between her friend’s arguments about religion. Peri quickly befriended Shirin a descendant of Muslim traditions who viewed them as oppressing, opping to wear what suited her such as “...her full makeup, short black dress and high-heeled boots…” (Shafak 308). Like Shirin, in a TED Talk, Dalia Mogahed’s feminist friends asked “Why are you oppressing yourself,” (Mogahed) when she decided to wear a hijab. To them wearing a hijab was something negative. Mona, Peri’s young religious Muslim friend who is devoted to her faith decided to wear her hijab per tradition siding with Mogahed. In both stories, there were two sides with two different perceptions of how they should dress. During Peri’s time living with Shirin and Mona often fought in front of her about religion, often complicating Peri’s own perception. Shirin and Mona debated if Muslims were going through an identity crisis. Mona asking what makes them different from anyone else going through an identity crisis with Shirin responding that “There are crazies out there doing really sick stuff in the name of religion, our religion,” (Shafak 310). Because of differentiating variations of how religion should be interpreted, Peri struggled to find her own even as an adult. 

Another common topic is how religion plays into LGBTQ issues. In Under the Udala Trees which is a becoming of age novel, Ijeoma has to come to terms with being a gay African woman in a heavily religious society that is closed-minded which frowns upon the LGBTQ community. Throughout the book, Ijeoma was reprimanded for being gay by her mother, something that she could not control. The book takes place in Nigeria which has one of the most severe laws against the LGBTQ community. In 2014 Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan “...signed into law a bill criminalizing same-sex relationships and the support of such relationships, making these offenses punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. In the northern states, the punishment is death by stoning,” (Okparanta 325). Shortly after meeting Ndidi, they both went to a secret LGBTQ club where they spent time together which helped open Ijeomas eyes. There were others like her. Unfortunately, one night at the club people who were not supporters of the LGBTQ community barged in, tore the place apart, burned things, and murdered someone. While this was tragic enough, another member of the LGBTQ community was found murdered and left on a road shortly after. While trying to escape homophobia, home is where many can feel safe and be themself. Unfortunately for Ijeoma, it was the opposite. Her mother continued to be closed-minded and continued to be throughout the book in terms of LGBTQ relationships. Adaora continued preaching the Bible to Ijeoma until she moved out. She forbid Ijeoma from seeing and spending time with Amina at school after finding out she was in a relationship with her daughter. Once Amina was married off, Ijeoma met Ndidi who showed her that there were many members of the LGBTQ community, but they had to hide from the rest of the world. While Ndidi cared for Ijeoma, she feared for their safety. The toll of the fire obviously shook her so much that she convinced Ijeoma to marry a man. To Adaoras delight, Chibundu, Ijeomas friend who she shared a kiss under an orange tree when they were kids came to the store. He started to spend time with Ijeoma which ultimately led to him proposing shortly after. While religion might shape how one may decide how to react to someone's sexuality, religion also has the power to create movements that promote change and acceptance.

Both religious interpretation and LGBTQ rights relate to feminist movements. Much like both, Islamic feminism movements are just as relevant. While talking about accepting the Quran, Dalia Mogahed stated that she wrestled with it. She didn’t automatically accept her faith, the one that was passed down from her parents. She went about her life as anyone would, but then everything changed on 9/11. For the first time, Mogahed felt afraid to be a Muslim-American. Groups like ISIS used language in the Quran to promote their reasons for violence. Mogahed as a civil non-radicalized human believes that the narrative that ISIS represents is dangerous. They represent a small fraction of over 1.6 billion Muslims. Not all Muslims are terrorists. Shortly after 9/11, Lila Abu Lughod asked “Why were these female symbols being mobilized in this “War against Terrorism” in a way they were not in other conflicts?,” (Lughod 2). Muslim women were being asked to speak up because they were seen as the civilized forward thinkers compared to the terrorist who committed the heinous attacks. Abroad after the attacks, women became more liberated. Islamic women were now able to listen to music and educate their daughters without facing repercussions. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” (U.S. Government 2002). 

Religion has become an everyday part of many people's lives in ways they aren’t even aware of. While it has become a part of people's everyday lives, not everything about it is positive. In certain aspects, religion has hindered progressive ideas. It has allowed women to question their identities. Religion helps shape a woman’s perception of who she should be regarding religious interpretation, LGBTQ issues, and Islamic feminism. As women embrace their own identities, their ideas will become more progressive in the acceptance of others.