#but in the books it is exclusively politics as a result of power

[serenfire]

attention, anyone who cares about the witcher s3's character's motivations with regards to the books but who hasn't then read time of contempt, here is a post for you!

here's some interesting differences between the book and show characters, especially in ep 5 (spoilers for the witcher s3 so far and the books):

since yennefer does not have her s2 beef w aretuza subplot, none of the mages are her direct enemies, and she is a member of the lower circle of leadership within the brotherhood, called the council, with philippa and 3 others who are not in the show. she is also not the one who calls the conclave; she finds out about it while bringing ciri to aretuza, and attends with geralt so that they can draw out the mage who is backing rience. in the book, they're trying to convinced everyone that ciri died at cintra, and haven't been together since then to keep up the illusion, so going to aretuza together will draw out the mage who knows ciri exists and is trying to kill her

vilgefortz is, firstly, the hero of sodden in the books. he's the war hero against nilfgaard, and one of the leaders of the brotherhood. he's also (spoilers for probably the second half of s3) working for nilfgaard now, and not in the way that s1 portrays where he kills his comrade on the battlefield after the battle's over, but in an "even the hero of sodden who singlehandedly saved the north from nilfgaard wants power enough to ally with his enemy" way.

he is the leader of the chapter, which is the highest circle of leadership of the brotherhood. tissaia and francesca findabair are also members, as well as artaud terranova (guy who falls over the champagne glass table in ep 5). in ep 5 he recounts his backstory to geralt, some of it word-for-word, except for an important part: as part of his backstory, he fell in love with an unnamed mage before becoming a sorcerer, and after breaking up with her, decided he should pursue magic. he and tissaia are not together! i cannot stress this enough, in the books the mages are powered by their individual searches for power, and love does not tie them together! it's what sets yen apart: she's one of the only ones willing to sacrifice for another.

FRANCESCA FINDABAIR. member of the chapter/high ranked aretuza member, in the book shows up to the conclave party early, stirring up the northern vs nilfgaardian sentiments by being there. wild that she hasn't appeared there in the show yet. her motives in the show are WHACK. in the books she did not have a baby and did not say she wants to genocide the humans (although that is propaganda against her): she leads the scoia'tael to fight for nonhuman freedom and allies herself with nilfgaard to continue to fight the north, and she will receive a free land for the elves (dol blathanna) in return for the scoia'tael being branded as war criminals and outlawed. in the books she is the catch-22 of stuck between a rock and a hard place: allying with imperialism will save her people but gut her guerilla soldiers who fought for it.

philippa eilhart is so far the best-written character this season (to me) because she is one of the only characters who everyone knows is seeking for power (in the book she's referred to as the one who's really on the redanian throne, backed by dijkstra) and she, directly, says that she's looking to keep power in the north. in the books, most if not every mage's motivations are for power, whether in a king's court or by allying with nilfgaard, and the imperial machinations are what the politics in the books are about, so having a character not be preoccupied with interpersonal reasons and instead directly embody this is refreshing!

however! in the books philippa's position is anti-nilfgaardian invasion, not anti-brotherhood. she's pitted against vilgefortz, who's allied with nilfgaard, instead of against him because he's a leader of the brotherhood. the brotherhood as an institution isn't interrogated as a state (unlike the northern kingdoms and nilfgaard), and her specific grievances against other court mages have to do with the fact that almost every kingdom is goading nilfgaard to attack so they can attack back and vie for power. she's also got redania on a lockdown by killing vizimir right before the conclave party and i don't know how this will play out in the show considering radovid exists as well

also in the books radovid is vizimir's son who ascends to the throne after philippa and dijkstra kill vizimir, and (in the games) he makes it his life mission to kill philippa. he does not physically show up in time of contempt and adding him into the show as vizimir's brother 1) crunches the timeline down to a period of time that makes a bit more sense than the books and 2) allows the show to make up the funniest fucking subplot with jaskier. oh my god none of that happened in the books but wouldn't it have been hilarious. jaskier hooking up with the sweet and sensitive younger prince who's a fan of his music and then smash cut to twelve hours later and he's the fucking king of redania. the comedy potential is unmatched

[biblioflyer]

Bad Dune Takes are the Mind Killer

I'm going to type up some more robust thoughts on Dune part 2, but I've seen some subtle bad ideas circulating that are drawn from shallow readings of either the films or the books or both.

First off, anyone who swallows the Bene Gesserit propaganda about their eugenics program needs to be pushed back on. They are NOT sorting humans from animals. The function of the Gom Jabar test (I will look up the proper spelling later and edit it in), doesn't even really seem to have anything to do with the metaphysics of the setting so much as its testing for self discipline. This is something that is nature AND nurture.

The dirty truth of the matter is that no one is a true Tabula Rasa, we do inherit some tendencies genetically, but barring a serious developmental disorder, those are tendencies. Tendencies can be ameliorated, if not even outright disappear in the noise of lived experience and explicit education.

If Feyd Ruatha can pass the Gom Jabar, you know its not actually testing for merit, its testing for a specific set of traits that the Bene Gesserit find useful.

Those traits are part of the ingredients they are seeking for the Kwisatch Haderach (yes, I know, I'll edit it later) but here's the kicker!

Major book spoilers ahead

While this is probably not exclusively the Bene Gesserit's fault, all of these secret societies, all of this obsession with bloodlines, and perfection is a time bomb. Paul is not a white savior. Paul is a labradoodle. He is an incredible endgame of generations of effort but he's a symptom of a broader problem that he himself vaguely glimpses and his son, Leto II, sees in all its terrible truth: the Bene Gesserit and their ilk are reserving autonomy for themselves, perhaps even at the genetic level, and trying to breed complacency into "the commons." The ones they regard as "animals" unfit for and incapable of self direction. People who are only fit to be ruled.

Sound familiar?

Its feudalistic "divine right of kings" merged with eugenics.

AKA fascism.

Paul and Leto II become despicable tyrants and authorial fiat would seem to indicate they are trapped by a sort of accelerationist framing of the problem. The end result of the millennia of power brokering in the background by all of these secretive societies and open monarchism is a humanity that is doomed. One way or another, it will be snuffed out. Whether by a total war, plague, or collapse of civilization.

This is why I say that the Bene Gesserit endgame is labradoodles. Pretty? Yes. Companionable? Sure. But like many, many, many designer breeds very, very lacking in genetic diversity.

This is what selective breeding gets you. Its why Leto II foresees the need to provoke a "Great Scattering." To ensure humanity exists in so many places, in so many different genetic and cultural forms that it cannot be subjugated by even the most charismatic and supernaturally powerful tyrant - not even by himself - and incapable of being extinguished by any plague or natural disaster. Because consolidation into too narrow and tight of a socio-cultural-political footprint means when (not if) that civilization screws up epically, it brings everyone down with it.

So if Roddenberry believed in the end of history, as expressed by the Federation: a society that is not incapable of error but IS capable of introspection and correction in the wake of error such that it is extremely unlikely to collapse from its own errors and contradictions. Then Herbert seems to be positing that history has no end. It will be one damn thing after another for all time and his implicit solution is that we desperately need diversity: genetic diversity and cultural diversity otherwise a self anointed superior sect of schemers and intriguers will get us all killed in the end by making us docile and homogeneous in order to make us more useful: to them.

Herbert also is suggesting that events like the Fremen Jihad is a likely bit of blowback from such consolidation. That human beings (the very same the Bene Gesserit regard as animals) naturally crave autonomy, dignity, and the essentials of life and if you press these things, the result will be a socio-political nuclear explosion.

I don't know if Herbert was an accelerationist. But it doesn't really matter because this leads me to the second bad take:

The Jihad and the Golden Path are not good, actually. Authorial Fiat dictate that they are necessary because authorial fiat dictates that human civilization in Dune has become so consolidated and bent to the whims of shadowy schemers that any attempt to wrest control away and return it to "normal" people, if indeed that is even possible given the technologies and superhumans running around, will result in such disorder and chaos that it be, functionally, genocide even if it is not genocide in intent.

The Jihad itself is also a consequence of the Great Man relying on people who only see a sliver of the overall project and interpret it through their own prism. That prism being one of anger, resentment, and a desire to see others conform to their worldview in order to ensure they are never again under anyone's boot.

Authorial fiat dictates that by the time Paul is born, there's no way back. No way to unwind all of this mess. The systems and structures are too complex, too interdependent. The Bene Gesserit, the Face Dancers, and everyone else I'm forgetting have too many contingency plans to fall back on. Not even a psychic can pull the Jenga pieces of civilization out delicately enough to restack them without the whole thing coming apart, not if he has to rely on millions of people with an axe to grind against the civilization he's trying to reform, a civilization that spent millennia trying to subjugate the Fremen or drive them into extinction.

But I maintain accelerationism is bad. You're not psychic. I'm not psychic. There's no Kwisatch Haderach lurking in the background to see what comes next. If you burn it all down, there might be a flourishing of dignity and freedom on the other side or it might be extinction because some other "cabal" will just take over and do the same things only meaner and dumber.

So if not accelerationism then what?

Federationism.

Introspection always. Seeking reform and equity before the power structures get too entrenched that gambling on a Great Scattering following in the wake of genocidal messiahs start seems like a good idea.

I'm not dunking on Dune to build a motte and bailey around Star Trek. I love Dune, but people tend to fixate on icky parts and call them good, when the whole point was don't let society get so bad you need to cross your fingers and hope the God Emperor is secretly an enlightened genocidal tyrant who is waiting for you to get restive enough to strike him down as part of some harebrained scheme to generate so much historical trauma it inoculates humanity against tyranny for all time.

Which of course, is a false premise. Herbert may or may not have known this in the mid-20th century, but we live in a world where 5-6 generations later, everything we were supposed to learn from and never repeat about tyranny, fascism, eugenics, and being disinterested in how and why there came to be fighters in difficult to pronounce faraway lands who seem to be rather upset with us, is now a thing that has to be taught and can be disputed and debated.

[aleksanderscult]

People accuse the Darkling of...

⚠️TW!: Genocide, sexual assault and abuse⚠️

People accuse the Darkling of lacking empathy.

Well that's what immortality does to you, my friend. The human brain is not designed for this kind of thing. It's miraculous that he wasn't insane by the start of "Shadow and Bone".

He also willingly stopped feeling emotions because they distracted him from his goal.

Furthermore, he was raised by a mother that kept telling him to never believe in love and always tried to isolate him from people he could bond with.

And I don't think you call someone "unfeeling" when he seems concerned about what will happen to Ravka and the Grisha or when you remember his reaction to his mother's fall or when he saw the woman he loved lose her entire soul, her very being right in front of him. The man could feel. But his emotions were buried deep within.

People accuse the Darkling of being a murderer.

Yes, he was, I agree.

But so was Alina, so was Mal, so was Nikolai. Everybody killed people.

"But Nikolai didn't kill out of evilness"

Neither did the Darkling. He didn't do it because he enjoyed it, he wasn't a sadist. He killed because he was fighting a war. At times of peace (if there was any in Ravka) he didn't go around shooting people out of boredom.

People accuse the Darkling of lying to Alina.

He lied to Alina because she was a new and, apparently, naïve person that he couldn't just trust from day one. He was the leader of an army that was already in danger of being hunted down if the King changed his mind. Why should he trust her? Why should he tell her his secrets? Is she his lieutenant? Is she part of the royal council? No, I don't think so.

"He lied to her about who he is!"

Isn't that the same lie he was telling to literally everyone for 400 years? You say it like he did it because he had something personal against her. It really shows how clueless all of you are for the matters of politics and ruling. Read a book ffs.

People accuse the Darkling of committing genocide.

He didn't. He was actually a victim of one.

I can't believe this accusation even exists

People accuse the Darkling of being a sexually creep towards Alina.

Aside from the fact that neither I nor the author herself consider him as one, are we talking about those moments where they already were enemies? Do you know what an "enemies-to-lovers" trope is? Do you know that in this kind of trope attraction and aversion are the primary ingredients?

Or the fact that, in the Grishaverse, the very rules of consent are different. How can you or anyone put modern laws into a fantastical universe where people with magical powers exist and things are run differently? Each universe has its own setting, structure and rules. Why are you putting your contemporary ideals and ethics there? What are they even doing there in the first place?

People accuse the Darkling of being manipulative towards Alina.

If you accuse him as such, could you please DM me the passages from the book where he did that? Because even I can't find them.

And I'm talking about before his big reveal as the "villain". Because after that, those moments are again taken as the actions of an enemies-to-lovers trope.

But where he was manipulative before that?

Good luck trying to figure out the impossibly ambiguous scenes where Leigh tried to paint him as one in S&B and failed.

People accuse the Darkling of being power-hungry

I agree, he sought power. But as far as we know he never wanted power exclusively for himself. In RoW it was revealed that even the Fold was the result of him trying to stop the wars:

Wars ended and began again—and again and again. Grisha were not accepted; they were resented in Ravka and hunted abroad. Men fought them with swords, then guns, then worse. There was no end to it, and so he had sought an end. Power that could not be questioned. Might that could not be reckoned with. The result had been the Fold.

The amplifiers? To control the Fold and stop the wars.

The nichevo'ya? Used them to lower the losses of his army.

The throne? Unlike his predecessor, he seemed to be involved in paperwork, listening to his advisors, feeding his army and trying to deal with all the deserters from that army.

"You try to defend him and his actions!!"

Actually we're trying to protect him from your stupidity and inability to read between the lines and past the narrative. And the Darkling has become totally evil in the eyes of this fandom because:

A) the narrative really did him dirty. Always talking about his atrocities and villainous actions.

B) the fandom is really clueless and stupid about the ways of leadership and ruling and I will die on this hill. You have NO idea how treason must be handled, or political intrigues are working and it shows from the very first second you open your mouth. "The Darkling scarred Genya!" Welcome to the world of "treason is met with consequences". "The Darkling lied to Alina!" Welcome to the world of politics.

Also, it's the double standards that kill us. You forgive Kaz for killing people for money but spit on the Darkling for doing it for a selfless purpose. You love Nikolai for trying to usurp the throne, but hate the Darkling for doing the same when he did it to bring a change to Ravka.

The Darkling was an anti-villain. Anti-villains are characters with a noble, sympathetic goal but the means to achieve it is through violence. And these characters are meant to stir sympathy towards the reader and are, almost always, tragic characters.

Now whether someone forgives his actions or excuse his character is always up to the reader.

But let's not pretend like the heroes did better. Or the fact that you probably wanted him to act like a forgiving, kind-hearted fairy godmother after one thousand years full of shit to the point that he broke, said enough and stood up against the violence and atrocities his people were suffering from. He decided to fight fire with fire and I find that understandable, just like the majority of his supporters in this fandom.

[fanfic-obsessed]

Tug of War

Ok everyone,  here is another weird one.  Let’s get some house keeping out of the way first. 

This is set mid clone wars, where Palpatine does not quite have enough support to change the republic into an empire. 

For this, either there are no chips (and no order 66), or Palpatine does not want to activate the chips until the appointed hour, when his Empire is truly ready. Either way the clones side, pretty much exclusively with Jedi. 

This is very much an AU idea, with little connection to canon. 

Now the base of this is that Jedi finds out that Palpatine is the Sith Lord, however the twist is that (because Palpatine has been in charge of the laws for over a decade, plus the work of the other Sith before him) being a Sith Lord is not actually illegal. In addition Palpatine has been exceedingly careful about his conduct and contact with the separatists. Nothing he has done is illegal (practically nothing is illegal for him, due to his position as Supreme Chancellor, not even treason). Finally most of the galaxy, including most of the senate consider the Sith/Jedi split religious differences (Also from generations of careful Sith propaganda).

I want it clear that this take is not correct. Sith are evil, Palpatine very much included. It is only the result of centuries of work that ensured that this even happened.

All of this means that the Jedi very much are not able to oust Palpatine legally, and killing him would see the entire Order being classified as a terrorist organization, which is an automatic execution order for every member regardless of age.  

Now for twist number two. Due to the fact the Jedi were the founders of the Republic, declaring them traitors (an actual attempt to kill the Chancellor being the only exception,due to the Ruusan Reformation treaty) would destroy the Republic. And not in the way it will eventually become an empire kind of way. Instead whatever the power base (political and otherwise) the republic laws are built on, it is intrinsically tied to the Jedi Order’s existence. 

Look I am not sure how exactly it would work but work with me here.  Also this entire idea is meant to poke fun at the idea that laws are anything more immutable than a social contract we all agree to follow. 

All this means that until Palpatine is ready for his Empire to Rise, he cannot destroy the Jedi Order.  And he is found out to be a Sith just a little too early for that to happen. 

So now we have the Jedi on side, unable to eject the overt Sith in the Senate (also not able to leave due to their ties to the Republic).  On the Other Side we have an actual Sith running the government  but unable to kill the Jedi until he is fully ready to launch his empire.  Both still have to deal with a Senate that on a fundamental level does not understand goals, the methods, or the beliefs of either group (Jedi or Sith). 

And they still have to work together.  They still have to make plans and fight a war and deal with the Senate. Palpatine's entire schtick means that he has to keep up appearances, particularly since the Jedi have outright, and publicly, stated to him that the moment he is not the supreme chancellor (and thus it is no longer terrorism and treason to kill him) they are going kill him for being a Sith.  

Following this declaration there was a brief but intense debate in the Senate regarding this declaration and if it counted as threatening a government official/head of government.  It was eventually decided that the clarifying statement that they would only kill him when he was no longer in office meant that it was acceptable, since the Jedi are allowed to kill Sith (that is one of the oldest laws on the books, it fall in the ‘cannot change without destabilizing the Republic’), they just can’t kill a Sith that is also the Supreme Chancellor.  Unfortunately it was also decided that the Jedi, or Jedi allies, could not have any part of removing Palpatine from office; due to the declaration. 

So there is a small amount of ‘race to the finish line’ where the Jedi are still very much trying to end the war and/or maneuver Palpatine out of his position of power, so they can eliminate the Sith.  And Palpatine is working to extend the war, and thus his power, until he had the support needed to unveil his empire (he was set back quite a bit by the revelation that he is a Sith, enough people become suspicious of his motives that he can’t just declare an Empire) so that he could then kill the Jedi. 

The Jedi have an advantage in that there are 10,000 of them and they can trust each other and work together.  Palpatine is not able to trust anyone with his plans, not even his minions or other Sith since they all plan to betray each other. 

Palpatine has an advantage in that he, and his minions, will do things that no being with morals ever could. Not that being restricted by morals is a bad thing, but it does mean that Palpatine can take any action he wants to advance his plans with little concern with collateral damage. There are some days, particularly when that same collateral damage spends hours telling the Jedi that saved them exactly why the Jedi Order are baby stealing monsters, where various Jedi are slightly jealous of Palpatine’s lack of morals. 

Even weirder are the times when both the Sith and the Jedi agree on something, or their short term goals align. Neither group ever forgets that they are enemies who ultimately want to eliminate the other, but there are some days where Adi Gallia has been dealing with idiots in the Senate all day and wants to drink with possibly the only other Force user who deals with the same volume of Senate idiots in one day (look, Palpatine may capitalize on the fundamental misunderstanding the galaxy at large-and the Senate in particular-has about Force use and the difference between Sith and Jedi, but even he is going internally ‘I am trying to subjugate all of you and the Jedi are trying to stop me from subjugating all of you. These goals are not the same.’-I personally head canon that Palpatine is self aware enough to know that he is objectively evil, and is quite proud of that. I just want my bad guy to be an unrepentant ass, be aware that he is an unrepentant ass, and not feel any kind of guilt about that- ). Or every so often for the first year after the reveal Palpatine invites Obi Wan Kenobi to drink with him because Anakin has done something so ridiculous again (while trying to save Pame from something she had already taken care of) that it has managed to accidentally derail six of Palpatine's plots,  endanger two Jedi missions, injured no less than 50 troopers across three battalions, and almost took out the economy of a mid rim world.  Obi Wan goes because after the reveal Palpatine stopped trying to kill him personally (though he still go caught up in the occasional plot), and the Sith has surprisingly good taste in liquor (It should be noted that most of the friendly interactions with Palpatine seem to include heavy drinking and commiserating).  Or Mace Windu catching Palpatine’s eyes from across the Rotunda or some foolish gathering as some being is blathering on and they have just a moment of understanding and commiseration pass between them. 

It is only for the first year because that is when Anakin finally stops hanging around with Palpatine. Anakin also did not have a great grasp of the difference between Sith and Jedi and had bought fully into ‘Palpatine is my friend’.  Then one day they were talking about various Sith and Palpatine made the mistake of sharing a bit too much about drawing power from being in pain, and his (Palpatine’s) plans for the Vader suit.  He never said that the suit was for Anakin, but he was just a bit too gleeful in describing causing another being pain and it freaked Anakin out. 

After the reveal and this holding pattern there is at least one scene where Dooku pouts because Palpatine can drink with Jedi, but Dooku cannot have Tea with Jedi any longer. And it is not because Dooku is a Sith and only partially due to the fact that Dooku is the head of Separatists (thus the enemy). No the real reason that Dooku can not have tea with he Jedi any longer is because Jocasta Nu was told at the beginning of the war that Dooku had removed information from her archives and he knows that no one, not even Yoda, would keep his location a secret from her and risk her wrath. 

He had felt her wrath in the Force as soon as she was told, and that wrath had lingered. Very occasionally Palpatine considers trying to lure her to his side by telling her where she can find Dooku, but figures that she would usurp him and rule the galaxy with an iron fist within a standard week. 

And Palpatine had put far too much work into everything to be a minion again.

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 52 – The Gods Are Bastards Volume Three by D. D. Webb

Okay this is properly a review for Books 8, 9, and 10 of the gargantuan serial – which I’ll freely admit I read more than a month ago in one week-long fugue along with all the books before them and the next few after. Which is to say I really shouldn’t have waited this long to write this review, and my apologies for all the vagueness and inaccuracies that are going to result. Which is a pity, because this is the best volume of the serial I’ve read and it isn’t even particularly close.

The serial continues the story of a Dungeons & Dragons-esque generic fantasy world advanced a couple hundred years and in the throes of a magical industrial revolution. The story theoretically stars the now-sophomore class of almost comically privileged and powerful students at what’s basically Adventurer University, but compared to the previous volumes they get barely any screentime in this one. Instead you get the Bishop of the god of thieves, the Archpope of the Universal Church, their respective pet openly-plotting-and-near-mutinous adventuring parties, political intrigue in the goddess of war, and a huntsman we’ve never met before learning the secrets of creation and also that his god was always just kind of a dick. It’s great! Also, to reiterate, the students get barely any screentime!

Really I kind of get the sense that I’m a deeply atypical fantasy reader, in that I find 90% of both involved romance plots and drawn out action scenes deeply tedious and basically the price you pay to get at the good parts of the story. In this case the good part is incredibly byzantine and too-complicated-by-half political shadowboxing carried out by proxies only barely kept on their masters’ leashes. Also several thousand words of pure exposition about the deep lore of the setting delivered by a malfunctioning AI.

Because yes, the big massive reveal of the volume is that the elder gods who were overthrown millennia before the story began had actually pulled a Lord of Light. The world runs on generic fantasy tropes because it was created by powermad demiurges who were also specifically insufferable 20th/21st century earth fantasy nerds. The different types of magic were just the results of them folding and rewriting physics, the fact that mortals can only access four is down to the vast majority getting wrecked when their creators died in the Titanomachy. Gnomes are an apparently successful attempt to perfect humanoid life.

This is, first and foremost, an absolutely hilarious bit of worldbuilding. Like, I actually burst out laughing. Knowing that orcs existed because the elder gods were big Tolkein and Warcraft fans may have permanently damaged my ability to take the setting seriously on its on terms but like, honestly? Probably worth it. Also just an excellent excuse for any shotcuts of contradictions in the worldbuilding and for all the kind of lazy fantasy worldbuilding tropes.

While it hasn’t happened yet, I hold out some hope that the increased pivot to the divine and Deep Lore means the serial will start to live up to its title and foreground the gods and their bastardry more – as I’ve said before, a narrative where the literal lords of creation are present but only because they just show up sometimes to descend to earth and make the protagonists lives easier is just boring. Which is why Archpope Justinian, the scheming mastermind who wants to overthrow heaven and earth and works exclusively through needlessly convoluted schemes that don’t stop a single person from knowing he’s to blame. I’m sorry but ‘somehow brainwashed the gods into making him their high priest so he can use the resources of their church as his personal power base’ is such a great bit. Also he’s opposed by literally every major POV so of course I need to root for him. (Honorary mention to Basra Syrinx, who is literally just The Worst in an incredibly entertaining way)

[delta-queerdrant]

too much television watchin' got me chasin' dreams (Initiations, s2 e2)

I had a wild and extremely distracting August, but I am back, with no shortage of episodes in the hopper in need of my lovingly critical attention.

This time it's "Initiations"! Prior to now, we've only had two Chakotay episodes - "State of Flux," which introduces the Seska of it all, and "Cathexis," in which the poor guy spends the entire episode in a coma. So "Initiations" is a welcome, if flawed, opportunity to spend some more time with a generally underutilized and mishandled character.

There's a lot to like about this episode! It's not overly sentimental - instead, we get the kind of tense, understated cultural exchange that Star Trek is known for. Aron Eisenberg gives a sympathetic performance as the young Kazon-Ogla, and Chakotay brings a plausible mix of calculation and exasperation, as well as warmth, to their interactions.

While I have, ah, GRAVE issues with the Kazon, I was surprised and a bit pleased to see that their social structure is portrayed as culturally contingent and not biologically essential.

Buuuut yeah, let's talk about the racism of this show.

About halfway through Season 2, it became impossible to ignore that the STV co-creators were attempting a painfully on-the-nose race parable with the Kazon. I did some digging and, sure enough, the creators are on record explaining that the Kazon were inspired by "the Crips and the Bloods." To quote Jeri Taylor more fully, "We felt with the Kazon we needed to address the tenor of our times and what […] was happening in our cities and recognizing a source of danger and social unrest. We wanted to do that metaphorically."

👀

Even looking back from the rocky terrain of 2023, it's a bit baffling to contemplate how shameless white SF creators were in the nineties. They decided to use their goofy science fiction television show to exercise their white Boomer "war on crime" anxieties and they were proud of it! They wrote about their creative process in books. They used "Crips" and "Bloods" as stand-ins for the Kazon sects in their working notes. They gave them those goddamn wigs.

With all this in mind, it's hard not to watch this episode and hear "Gangsta's Paradise" in the background, a la Michelle Pfeiffer. Star Trek "races" have always been steeped in racist caricature, but it's egregious here, and as much as this episode attempts kindly, slightly condescending cultural relativism, it can't escape its own white gaze.

The result is shitty science fiction. We know, from US history and the history of other slave and colonizer states, that self-emancipated people do not uniformly descend into anarchic factionism as soon as they find freedom. The challenges of the postcolonial/post-emancipation state aren't the dangers of too! much! power!, but of material deprivation, cultural loss, generational trauma, and the reemergence of old forms of systemic oppression under new guises.

It's unfortunate, because we do need science fiction about post-emancipation and postcolonial futures. The Kazon's distaste toward "uniforms" is the one compelling aspect of their culture - I want more of that, and some acknowledgement of what their freedom means to them. Where are the Kazon philosophers? Where are the teachers and poets? Where are the visionary freedom fighters - they only revolted 26 years ago! Where the FUCK are the women? Voyager's creators had every opportunity to investigate these questions and, if nothing else, flesh out the story they wanted to tell. Are the Kazon rival polities (fighting over what?), organized criminals operating in some larger economic context, or something else entirely? Asking these extremely basic questions might have enabled them to decouple political questions from racial stereotypes.

It's notable that the Voyager casting director, perhaps losing their nerve, seems to have cast exclusively white actors for Kazon roles (compare to the at least somewhat multiracial Klingons). I wouldn't wish these roles on any Black actor, but the resulting character designs can't help but read as brownface.

My purpose in this cultural criticism is not just a takedown of a 30-year-old television show (though it's a satisfying takedown), but that (a) our culture is steeped in this stuff and (b) glaringly obvious anti-Black racism was treated as invisible by the white mainstream and (c) they could have done better. Most obviously, they could have had BIPOC writers in the writing room, but let's be clear, white writers should have known better. To my knowledge we still don't have antiracist Star Trek, but "less egregiously racist Star Trek" was within grasp in 1995 and these folks just couldn't be bothered.

Deeply flawed premise, decent execution. 2/5 uniforms that may yet decorate my walls.

[thetwistedrope]

Starting after World War I, the dismantling of indigenous Palestinian society was set in motion by the large - scale immigration of European Jewish settlers supported by the newly established British Mandate authorities, who helped them build the autonomous structure of a Zionist para - state. Additionally, a separate Jewish - controlled sector of the economy was created through the exclusion of Arab labor from Jewish - owned firms under the slogan of “ Avoda ivrit ,” Hebrew labor, and the injection of truly massive amounts of capital from abroad. 16 By the middle of the 1930s, although Jews were still a minority of the population, this largely autonomous sector was bigger than the Arab - owned part of the economy.

The indigenous population was further diminished by the crushing repression of the Great 1936 – 39 Arab Revolt against British rule, during which 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled, 17 as the British employed a hundred thousand troops and air power to master Palestinian resistance. Meanwhile, a massive wave of Jewish immigration as a result of persecution by the Nazi regime in Germany raised the Jewish population in Palestine from just 18 percent of the total in 1932 to over 31 percent in 1939. This provided the demographic critical mass and military manpower that were necessary for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. The expulsion then of over half the Arab population of the country, first by Zionist militias and then by the Israeli army, completed the military and political triumph of Zionism.

Such radical social engineering at the expense of the indigenous population is the way of all colonial settler movements. In Palestine, it was a necessary precondition for transforming most of an overwhelmingly Arab country into a predominantly Jewish state. As this book will argue, the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.

-Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine

[donnerpartyofone]

As a casual bystander, I see a lot of dialog about the economic aspects of AI art, and comparatively little about its actual artistic value--that is, what happens when the viewer consumes it. AI imagery can have a fun, surprising impact that I would compare superficially with broken english; someone who doesn't have mastery over the conventions of a language may come up with excitingly unusual expressions that would never occur to a native speaker. When I see AI art it seems like a lot of the action comes from looking at the prompt and looking at the image and kind of measuring the distance between them, trying to imagine the program's "thought process" if I can call it that. Sometimes these things have an interesting aesthetic too, but it's hard for me to tell where that comes from or how controllable it is (and I mean the real visual effect of the thing, not like "Oh I see, the prompt included 'comic book style'" or something). But the key difference between AI art and human art seems to be the physical presence of the person. I'm not even trying to be sentimental or something, I just mean when I look at most sculptures/paintings/drawings/installations/textiles/etc, I sense the person who made them. I get an idea about the physical energy and discipline and difficulty that went into the creation of the object, and I also get a feeling about what the artist meant by what they did. As a result of who they are and what they have experienced, they developed something that they wanted to say so badly that they were willing to undergo a major trial to say it in a highly specific way.

To be fair intentionality is really slippery and hard to prove unless the individual artist has been very explicit (and even then you can't always trust them, or you can decide their intention isn't as important as your interpretation), but to some degree the viewer is always helplessly projecting something about themselves onto the art and/or their personal construction of who the artist is. You look at art and you estimate what kind of experience that artist seems to have had, and your emotional and interpretive responses to the art naturally draw on your own feelings and memories. That whole part seems to be missing from AI art; of course there's the human composing the prompts, so there's a trace of psychology in that, but the actual creation of the work (as far as I can tell) is done by a program that is not reflecting on its own history, or the personal sacrifices that it made to build its skillset, or its feelings about its own social/political/historical context. Basically there is nothing the program is wrestling with, that the viewer might relate or react to.

Of course art is always a rorschach test on some level, and there is no law that says you have to view works of art as records of biographical fact. Actually there's a whole aspect of art history writing that totally rejects personal and psychological suppositions about art. One of my college advisors loved me when he saw my writing potential, and then completely turned on me when he realized that I was only interested in (or only capable of) a psychoanalytic style of interpretation (my thesis was on a selection of Crumb comics where the artist or his stand-in rides on or inside of powerful female bodies, driving them like tanks or jets, which I thought suggested fear, awe, and jealousy, not just garden variety misogyny). He was a pure historian; you were only allowed to do purely material investigations of the art object, and you could only talk about its larger historical context. He had done some big project on a famous painting cycle with an exclusive focus on the state of industrial paint production at the time of the work. In one of my first classes with him we all went to a museum where everyone was assigned a short essay on one piece there, and the rule was you could ONLY do a formal description, there could be NO interpretation. I wish I could think of the name of it, but my piece was just a clear plastic tube that was stuffed full of rubbish. Coming up with a compelling description of this thing was borderline impossible, I basically just had to list as many pieces of garbage as I could identify--which sounds sort of poetic and funny now, but I'm sure it wasn't when I wrote it. I don't know how much I learned from doing that, but I thought about this professor when I saw the Warhol Diaries docuseries recently. There's a late episode where they talk about Warhol's famous statements about wanting to be a machine and insisting that his art has no personal meaning, and a bunch of experts argue convincingly that his work is actually loaded with personal material, anxiety, longing, shame, etc--it's encoded with the things that Warhol was too afraid to say out loud in a literal way. One particular collector finds all of this totally repulsive and unnecessary, as if it's just a stain on the formal quality of Warhol's output. His way of seeing things is totally valid and not uncommon, but it's curious that he gets so angry when people see Warhol himself in the work. Now I wonder if and how this lens could apply to looking at AI art. Is it possible to do that same kind of purely formal analysis if you don't have an intimate understanding of the AI's mechanics? If it's not possible, and it's still IMpossible to view AI art the same sympathetic way we view human-produced art, what is left?

My question is not rhetorical, and I'm not saying that AI art can't be art because of the absence of human psychology; I don't know if I'm ready to make that conclusion. I think I'm saying that if AI art IS art, then consuming and appreciating it requires a really different philosophy than what most of us are used to using. It might even require a different definition of what makes something art. Maybe AI can produce art, but not art as we have known it. Are we sort of looking at AI art the way we look at shapes formed by clouds? That one looks like a heart. That one looks like a bunny. That one looks like a guy, but he's got too many fingers. My analogy is not perfect because there IS someone whose input inspires the shapes, but there is a similar entropic quality to what shapes are actually produced and why. If there is a God up there molding clouds into familiar shapes, then His thought process is probably beyond our comprehension. Our perception of familiar shapes may be pure projection.

[ghoul-haunted]

Hey! If you have the time/inclination, could you recommend some books on the social history of the Roman Republic? I mean, books that don’t focus on Senate politics or specific figures like Caesar, Brutus, Antony, so on (not that I hate them, just read a lot of biographies already lol). But, you know, on regular life, adminstration, infrastructure, art, culture. Thx in advance.

OOF uh. maybe??

I'm pretty much exclusively into specific historical figures and the politics of the late republic, so I'm not the person to ask for this kind of rec list. like. I read some books on roman households but it was so that I could justify saying that Crassus and Pompey were in a functional political marriage if you treat the body of Rome as a house, and retained none of what I read after I got done with that thought :/

as a result, this rec list might be. slightly to the left of what you were asking after, like jstor might be able to help you out more than I can with this, but here we go!

The Manhandling of Maecenas: Senecan Abstractions of Masculinity, Margaret Graver

The Construction of Etruscan 'Otherness' in Latin Literature, Maria Beatrice Bittarello

Masculinity, Appearance, and Sexuality: Dandies in Roman Antiquity, Kelly Olson

Roman Identity: Between Ideal and Performance

Statues in Roman Society: Representation and Response, Peter Stewart

Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture, Harriet Flower

Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic, Joseph Farrell and Damien P. Nelis

Empire and Memory: the representation of the Roman Republic in imperial culture, Alain M. Gowing

Inconsistency in Roman Epic, James J. O'Hara

Freed Slaves and Roman Imperial Culture, Social Integration and the Transformations of Values, Rose MacLean

[northernolddragon]

you prefer nilfgaard winning the war or kingdoms of north?

Hello. Dear anonymous, very generous with questions. Thank you.

I guess my answer will be very obvious. Even given the equally strong position of the Northern Kingdoms, they have an unlikely chance against the advantages of Nilfgaard. The Nilfgaard Empire has a stable progressive development structure in all areas, including the army, the economy, the sphere of trade, the discipline of government, since its ruler has applied all his talents - tactical and strategic abilities, intellectual development, distinguished by sharpness and commendable firmness to his own goals - to the rays of the Golden Sun devoured the territories and made them their provinces and vassal states. I will not now raise the moments of history, where the Empire suffered its defeats. They are too minor in contrast to her victories. It's worth recognizing the strength of this Organization with its personnel, who were present at Emhyr, not excluding help from them. I am talking specifically about the governors loyal to him, close advisers who lead the armies and lead the Emperor to his full title. White flames danced on the mounds of their enemies. And I think, he ready to continue.

While reading the books, regardless of the cruel sequence of events, of course, I couldn't help, but note the skillful leadership of his own subordinates and loyal subjects and the consequence of power and order under the leadership of Emhyr var Emreis. Powers that be. Developed, unbending and exclusively looking to the future, the Empire, where the area of ​​​​influence is expanding in scale. Hegemony could find a negative response - I don’t think, it’s reasonable to make Nilfgaard belong to a negative regime. It's worth considering this situation from some scientific point of view, associating the Empire with a large representative of the animal world, where in the survival ecosystem, in natural selection, a strong creature devours a smaller animal. The struggle for survival is present in its cyclicity. Emhyr acts according to the same strategy, more reasonable, in fact, since he, like Caesar, evaluates his capabilities - a strong, mentally savvy ruler - if not him, then they will rather absorb him. Do you think there is another way? Every policy of war, no matter how cruel, is accompanied by survival. One of the basics. And just because the Emperor of Nilfgaard fought his way to universal power in fierce battles doesn't make him a bad ruler or a less important political figure. The form of survival takes place in a cruel way, alas. Decisions for which the enemies will rush to the head in a wreath, and the people will be considered a tyrant. And so I admire this character and how he has developed into a strong personality, reasonably different from most rulers. However, he showed himself back in the days of Dany and Urcheon of Erlenwald. This is the way of a powerful state. Together with Emhyr. And it's not paved with a soft blanket of velvet roses from the Principality of Toussaint.

As much as I dislike the Northern Kingdoms, one way or another, the outcome of the war is in the superiority of development. The Nilfgaard Empire took over most of the territories. They have a disciplined army in decent numbers. A ruler that has proven his competence and ability to progress his own decisions and their execution. The system of politics and power in a tight grip (how symbolic). In my personal opinion, the threads of judgments lead to one result.

It's worth noting the statement of the barber about Nilfgaard: "Why not. The nilfgaardians are a modern society. None there believe in vampires anymore..."

[sercezgazety]

20 questions for fic writers

Tagged by @zyrafowe-sny, thank you!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

21 at this point (and I’m sure glad you’re not asking about older platforms because uhhhh. My FFN era was terrifying)

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

257,205. Huh.

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Welp, Re-Animator, currently. But the majority of my works is a result of a powerful The Owl House obsession, and I do have another TOH fic in the making. Star Trek, though it’s really odd how little Trek fic there is on my account – I guess that’s because most of my hyperfixation went into the papers I published on the franchise.

Terra Ignota my beloved, but the books are so incredibly well-written, I get scared whenever I want to write anything about those characters. Everything I do is going to suck in comparison (and the one fic I did write indeed sucks balls). I had some flings with Sonic (kek), Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and before that, Phineas and Ferb. In the pre-AO3 era, The Penguins of Madagscar (a fic after which I stopped writing for almost a decade), Discworld, Kick-Ass (my first English-language fic; what a trainwreck), Invader Zim, Storm Hawks (oh boy), Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Sherlock Holmes (the original, ACD one), Teen Titans, and some insane amounts of insanely bad, angsty Xiaolin Showdown fics with insane ships and insanely bad characterization. Look, I was 15. I’m pretty sure there was even more, and I can only be grateful that I don’t remember.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Oddly enough, Inhale, Hold, Exhale with over 1,1k, even though it was just an ultimate traumadump. Then, A Silver Platter (992), A Comparative Study in Redemption Arcs (789), The Matter at Hand (778), and The Deal (718).

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I do! First, they make me happy and I’m grateful for them. But it’s also just a polite thing to do, and honestly? when I want to comment under a fic and I see OP doesn’t respond to comments, sometimes I shrug and decide kudos will suffice (not proud of myself for doing that, but oh well).

There were some comments I left unanswered, but those were from people I know IRL and I answered them somewhere else, or they were hate comments. Aaaand some comments I left unanswered back when I didn’t know it was possible to answer on AO3, and now answering them would be too awkward.

6. What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

I write almost exclusively angst, so it’s more of a question about the specific flavor. I guess the biggest number of characters suffer miserably in a very mundane way in A Potter’s Field. In The Deal, the main character suffers in a very mundane way to such an extent, he willingly chooses to be possessed just to feel useful, so there’s that. Both stories have been bookmarked by people with notes such as “jesus fucking christ dude” or just “JESUS CHRIST,” and thus, I consider my mission accomplished and people's days ruined.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

The Red Crayon. Even I couldn’t write angst about Doofenshmirtz and Perry the Platypus. Like, come on.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

YEAH BABEY. And I don’t mean the ‘I liked the fic, but there’s this thing I disagree with’ kind of comments, I mean the ‘this fic is terrible, have you ever watched the show?’ type of comments. The first time I got one like this, I was crying hysterically for two days.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Not sure? This year, I did write some sex scenes or almost-sex-scenes, but the thing is, they were about everything but sex. And one of them was very, very awkward.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

Nnnope, and I hate those. But at one point, when I was very much into French Revolution, I had some grand plans for a Doctor Who fanfic in which Ten would meet Robespierre and realize he was a good guy.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don’t think so? I had my fanart and my photos stolen, yeah, but not fanfic.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope, though there was one person who asked if they could do that (I think they lost interest/didn’t have the time).

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yeah, back in middle school me and my friend ran a blog nobody read, and it was about two Discworld OCs. It was horrible.

14. What's your all-time favourite ship?

Spones (Spock/Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy). I will go down with it. I’m married to it. I’ve been happily married to it for half of my lifetime (and the entirety of my adult life).

I like other ships in other fandoms, especially the ones with a similar dynamic. Spones, though, is the archetype.

15. What's a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

A Star Trek fic about Spock being unable to fully process the death of his pet sehlat, and that fact influencing his approach to animals in the years to come. I’m quite happy with what I have – for instance, there are five pages of Spock and McCoy arguing over the factors that make animals cute, with Spock being super scientific and judgemental, and McCoy having a gotcha! moment when Spock says axolotls are not cute.

I started writing it when I learned about my beloved cat’s diabetis. Then he died, I had a massive depressive episode, and now it’s been almost two years and I still cry because I miss him and he deserved so much better. And perhaps I would be able to finish the fic, given that half of my fics are traumadumps anyway, but I have no idea how this thing is even supposed to end.

16. What are your writing strengths?

POV and characters not knowing things that the audience knows

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Getting to the point. Or, like, having any point.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

Erm. Everything I write is in another language. English is not my native language, I never had private lessons, I still don’t understand how the tenses or the punctuation work. But in case of Luz and Camila, I do tend to use Spanish words or expressions from time to time.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Okay, so back when I was 7, I had no idea fanfic existed or that you could just use the names and locations somebody else created, so I was writing stuff that was very much the terf-created wizard boy and very much Lord of the Rings, but like. With different names. The headmaster of the magical school was named fucking Ambli Dimbli. The first fanfic that I knew that was a fanfic, though, was for Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

20. Favourite fic you've ever written?

The Matter at Hand. It’s not my most popular fic, it doesn’t have my favorite TOH character in it, but it’s about politics and scapegoating, and it has puns in it. And I’m really proud of how everyone in this story sucks. I like it when characters suck.

[talenlee]

Wreck It Ralph Is About Trans Women In Sport

Hey, did you already listen to the Wreck It Ralph episode of The Disney Animated Canonball, a podcast where I, Talen Lee (he him) and not-appearing-in-this-post Fox Lee (she her), watched all of the Disney Animated Canon movies? If no, then keep going and you should maybe check it out later because it was a big project, watching and podcasting about 54 movies, of which upwards of five were movies I think are any good, and that there, that’s Disney magic, baybee, but if you have then this is going to sound like a rerun.

In case you don’t remember, Wreck It Ralph is an awful film.

There’s this girl in the story named Vanellope. She’s a girl who doesn’t present like the other girls in the game. She doesn’t have access to the ame resources as they do. They have a special slur for her, a glitch. She does not interact with reality the same way they do, and she is, very importantly, made wrong. There is something in her code, something about the way she was created, that indicates she shouldn’t exist, and she certainly cannot be a racer. The most dreadful thing in the world, the power structure says, is if she were to be a racer, and worse still if she wins. If she wins, it would destroy the world, they say, but it turns out that if she does it, it’s actually worse, because her winning shows that all the fears they had about her being illegitimate are just wrong, and the result upends the power structure and dissolves an illegitimate authority asserting itself as the arbiter of what is fair and correct.

And then she gets to be a princess.

At its heart, this narrative is the same basic narrative of the trans women in sports, which is the same as the narrative of almost all times that a dominant power wants to determine who does or does not get to count as ‘fair play’ in a sport. Sport is not a politically neutral experience, it’s fundamentally going to reflect the culture and values of the communities that it includes. Consider how many sports are built in such a way as to isolate around people with different abilities, whether those abilities impose extra challenges or grant extra advantages. The rhetoric is all the same.

It’s not fair.

She’s built wrong.

What if someone gets hurt.

These are all dumb arguments, disingenous in the extreme and I honestly do not have the inclination to address them. No, sports are not fair. The entire point of sports tournaments is to commit an elaborate sorting mechanism to find the person who can do the best version of a thing on the best day and the resultant algorithm is not a fair one. It’s explicitly unfair because of who it’s choosing to include and how they get to be included.

There’s a lot to be said about this stuff as it relates to cricket, but not by me. It’s Beyond A Boundary again, a book by CLR James about how his relationship to cricket reflected perfectly his relationship to colonial politics. The ways there were to be a good player of the game existed orthogonally to the ways you could be included in the best teams that played the game. There was a diagram of competing lines, where the darker your skin, the more skilled you had to be that you might get recruited. And when pressed on the reasons for this, you’d often get some things that might sound familiar.

Maybe it’s because these people have an unfair advantage and it dilutes the purity of the sport. Maybe it’s because they don’t really know how to play right. Maybe it’s because their presence on the field is dangerous to other players. Maybe it’s because their presence is dangerous to themselves. There’s always some reason, some reasonable cause, for these exclusions. There’s always some idea about why it’s okay for their accomplishments to not count.

These exclusionary rules and boundaries bring us back to the way that, once again, seeing the lines of the magic circle is itself an act of political privilege. If you can perceive the game as completely isolated from your material considerations then it’s only through a sort of shared, desperate and absolute devotion to doing so, and the fiction that politics are not related is part of the fiction of that game.

You might wonder why Disney of all people would construct this kind of story, focusing on such an intense and timely issue, when it’s not like Disney are the kind of company that wants to say anything meaningful about trans people in the first place. And of course, the answer there is of course it’s not.

It’s not that the idea is explicitly about trans women in sports; it’s that it takes the narrative of trans women in sports, and then tells you that story, removing trans women from it entirely. This is a recurrent thread in media, that wants to take the stories of marginalised people and restructure and process them so that they can instead be used to uplift the stories of the oppressor centre. Even in the context of Wreck-It Ralph, you have this story about Vanellope, which is nonetheless, for some reason, requires the centering of Ralph to make the story happen at all; Ralph is not a meaningful addition to her story, her story can happen entirely without him, but all this story has to be reprocessed, consumed and digested into a form where it can be the story, somehow, of an unrelated 50 year old dude who doesn’t really care about videogames.

It’s an idea that sticks with me because it’s the same structure as a queer narrative, that you’ll see repeated over and over again that just wants to not involve any queer people because, you know, icky. It is the invocation of trans women’s stories without involving trans women, a desire for their struggles without their identities, for fear you might feel sympathy for them and see the very reasonable ways in which their stories are unfair.

You might have to understand them, then.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Media

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil’s Runoff Election Will Have Enormous Effects on the Global Climate Crisis, Says Noam Chomksy

Brazil is now headed toward a rocky presidential runoff vote on October 30, after its October 2 election produced no clear winner between far right populist president Jair Bolsonaro — an outspoken admirer of the brutal military dictatorship that came to power in 1964 by deposing a democratically elected president and lasted until 1985 — and Bolsonaro’s leftist challenger, Lula.

This is a tightly contested election, but polls are giving Lula a clear edge as he has received the endorsement of both the third and fourth finishers. Meanwhile Bolsonaro has indicated on numerous occasions in the past that he will not accept the election result if he loses.

The election will determine the future of Latin America’s powerhouse — a country with the 12th largest economy in the world that is rich in a variety of natural resources and home to the world’s biggest rainforest, the Amazon. Brazil is also a country of extreme inequality, awash in corruption and violence.

What is at stake in the runoff election, both for Brazil and the world at large, is brilliantly elucidated by Noam Chomsky in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows. Chomsky is presently in Brazil and has been following very closely both the election campaigns as well as overall developments in the country.

Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the greatest public intellectuals alive, the founder of modern linguistics and one of the most cited scholars in the history of the world. He is institute professor and professor of linguistics emeritus at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. He has published more than 150 books in linguistics, politics and current affair, history and political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and global affairs.

Continue reading.

Brought by @sataniccapitalist. Thanks!

[maggiecheungs]

speaking of the joys of metafiction, i’m currently re-reading fumiko enchi’s 1965 novel a tale of false fortunes (namamiko monogatari), and it’s so deliciously layered—a precarious bundle of narratives built upon multiple incredibly tenuous sources, tied together by a thread of unreliable narration.

in the introduction, fumiko enchi states that the novel is as an attempt to describe/retell a classical text she claims to have read when she was a child, entirely through her own memory. this book never belonged to her—she borrowed it from the library of a prominent academic—and as an adult she was never able to find any trace of it anywhere else. futhermore, the manuscript she claims to have read was not the orginial; it was probably a copy made several centuries later, and it is apparently impossible to tell the original date of authorship, and whether or not it was intended to be fiction. enchi’s novel switches almost seamlessly back and forth the ‘recollected’ passages and her own commentary on them, thus blurring the line between the 'original' text and her own interpretations.

but that’s not all! this text she is describing (a tale of false fortunes) is a retelling of some of the events described in, and clearly a textual response to, the 11th century japanese classic history text eiga monogatari/a tale of flowering fortunes, which describes the political ascendency of fujiwara no michinaga. this time period can be fairly among historians—not because there’s a lack of sources, but because the sources we have are all so intimately connected to the political figures and powers of the day (which tends to be a problem with most historical sources, alas). essentially, the contemporary historiographical texts that we have are all committed to telling certain, selective narratives. which is to say that eiga monogatari (which was written about events that occurred during the author’s own adulthood, no less!) is very biased.

to add even another layer of intertextual confusion to it all, eiga monogatari itself is something of a composite text—the main author is generally assumed to be akazome emon, a lady-in-waiting to michinaga’s daughter empress shoshi, but there is still some uncertainty as to the extent to which authorship can be attributed to her. this is in large part because emon essentially plagiarised* other first-hand accounts of the events she describes. for example, there’s a section of eiga monogatari which is just copied without alterations or attribution from the diary of murasaki shikibu. so enchi’s book is allegedly based on a classical text, which is based on a different classical text, which in turn is stitched together from a bunch more other texts. it completely destroys any notion we might have had of an ‘original’ or ‘true’ narrative.

and to top it all off, the novel is almost as impossible to find in english as its alleged predecssor was to find in japanese. in fact (despite being a work of fiction by a prominent novelist) the english translation was published by the university of hawai’i press, an academic publisher who exclusively prints nonfiction and has printed a lot of translations of classical japanese historical writings. the publisher lends the narrative an air of credence; if you didn’t know better, you might think that enchi’s text was rooted in real life and literary history.

so in the end, the finished result is a gloriously metafictive romp through the liminal space between fact and fiction, history and memory, originality and replicas. it’s turtles all the way down, and it’s brilliant.

*a word with heavy connotations that might not apply in the same way in this specific historical context, which I won’t go into here

[farchanter]

Eric Foner: The Fiery Trial

The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.

One of the things I find so fascinating about Abraham Lincoln, and particularly the study of Abraham Lincoln, is that our perception of him has changed as the years have gone on.

The childhood, storybook-like version of Lincoln— that he was a singularly enlightened man, free of sin, a Messiah-like figure who dragged a country away from slavery and prejudice— does not pass muster. Neither, however, does the cynical interpretation that is regrettably popular today— that Lincoln was solely and exclusively concerned with the welfare of the United States as a nation for white Americans, and that abolishing slavery was practically an accident.

Instead, we find ourselves today at a new conception of Lincoln, and The Fiery Trial is a vanguard of that idea: Lincoln (always opposed to slavery) found his views on slavery, race, and multicultural America shaped throughout his life and particularly throughout his presidency by the ideas of radical abolitionists and by the extraordinary sacrifices of Black Americans.

The story of Lincoln, then, is the story of growth.

It is the story of overcoming personal prejudice to achieve something great and lasting. It is, in my mind, my powerful than the simple story of the pseudomythological Abraham Lincoln.

An ugly truth of Lincoln scholarship is that the discovery of new material has slowed dramatically. We'll occasionally find that he checked out a book from the Library of Congress which we didn't know he had previously checked out, but the idea that there's some vast treasure trove of personal writing— from an intensely private man who kept no journal— seems less and less likely with each passing year. Instead, modern Lincoln books achieve success by looking at the "elephant in the dark" of the Lincoln story from a different angle than anyone else has looked at it before.

I'm really captivated by this idea that two different people can look at this same man and read his same words and come to completely different images of him. For instance, Foner and The Fiery Trial view Lincoln's selection of ambitious former competitors to his cabinet as a disaster and a key reason why the initial phases of the war dragged. By comparison, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Team of Rivals view the choice of the, uh, team of rivals as a political masterstroke and a key reason why the war was won. These contrasting views and disagreements are a big part of the reason I'll pick up new books about the most-studied man in American history.

Truth be told, I struggled to engage with The Fiery Trial. Part of that, I think, is a result of the book's success. The Fiery Trial really has transformed the popular consensus about Lincoln and race, and that purchase means I've already become familiar with many of the more dramatic conclusions outlined here. For example, The Fiery Trial is a specific source for the excellent series Lincoln's Dilemma, and Foner even serves as one of the talking-head historians interviewed.

That being said, there were some new revelations here, especially towards the end— toward's the conclusion of Lincoln's transformation, for which he was ultimately murdered. The biggest and most exciting to me concerned Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction, a hot topic among those concerned with Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction and the betrayal of Black Americans. Foner highlights Lincoln's final cabinet meeting— literally the day Lincoln was shot. At this meeting, just days after publicly acknowledging a Black right to vote, Lincoln acknowledges that his announced lenient Reconstruction plan already underway may not be adequate. At this meeting, he suggests that more will need to be done for the sake of Black Americans, that they deserve a greater stake in the new America.

We'll never find out what he meant. We'll never find out, exactly, how far Lincoln's growth and trajectory would carry him. That permanent mystery is why the Reconstruction Era is such a tragedy.

[longwindedbore]

‘…eternal punishment did not appear in official [Christian] creeds until the pseudo-Athanasian Creed in the late 5th century, when all admit that endless hell's popularity was on the rise.’

‘…the early 5th century statements of St. Augustine of Hippo, a most formidable advocate of the endless hell view, who admitted that "very many" Christians saw hell as correctional and temporary…’

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Gee, not mentioned in my 36 in Christianity in ANY bible *study* or included as filler in ANY endless boring Sunday Sermon.

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What in the 5th Century could have changed hundreds of years of Church doctrine?

Perhaps a Driving Need for Money?

Transforming the Church as a Cultural Institution from an ‘improve this world with Charitable Acts’ loose collective to a State sponsored Oppressor to a 1,500 year-old hierarchical Corporation shilling After-Life Insurance Policies.

A Corporation which extracts ‘handling fees’ from any donations it receives to the Charities it sets up?

A Corporation which is a CHIEF CAUSE of the failure of every European or European-descendent society the Cult has contaminated to Institute Jesus’ commission to provide food, clean water, clothing to the needy. Let alone Jesus requirements to welcome the Stranger or care for all the Sick and imprisoned as dictated in Scripture.

Only after becoming Secular Societies have European countries instituted what Jesus directed in Scripture. The more secular the more Jesus vision is accomplished.

Could the FAILURE to institute national cultures of inclusion and charitable behavior stem as a direct result of the late Antiquity Church’s elevation from hundreds of sects congregating in private homes ~ from being one among hundreds of religions in the Empire ~ to becoming the one official State religion of the Roman Empire?

Now responsible for maintaining the official Roman Temples they were granted and now required to use for worship?

Purchasing the exclusive sacramental vestments used by the Roman pagan priests and still used by Catholic and High Anglican clergy?

Not to mention the cost of a professional clergy instead of lay ministers with regular jobs. Plus the cost of each Church rectory’s liquor bill that invariably accompanies a professional clergy?

Rebranding the “Great Commission” from the six mandatory Acts of Charity to ‘Belief’ and ‘Baptism’.

Because Charity has money going ‘out’ but Baptism and Belief brings ‘in’ more parishioners with their money?

Hence the post-Fifth Century Church(es) on-going need(s) to reduce competition - the Michael Corolone way?

The late Antiquity elevated-to-official Church position gave them the political power to lethally wipeout all pagan sects as well as every other pre-Dark Ages Christian denominations? Something pagan Rome never contemplated.

All *Roman* oppression of Christians was by the official Christian Churches of the Roman Empire not by the Pagan Roman Empire.

Later in the Middle Ages the last two Crusades never left Europe for the Holly Land. They didn’t because they were Catholic vs Greek Orthodox [Crusade #4] and Catholic vs French Cathar Christianity [#5].

Did your USA History text books mention…

In the first years of the 1600s the 30 Years War on the Continent and the English Civil War involved every non-pacifist Christian sect murdering every other Christian sect?

Catholic vs Protestant;

Protestant Denomination vs Protestant Denomination with or without Catholic alliances.

Employment of Islamic mercenaries fighting alongside Christians of one denomination killing Christians of other denominations?

That some on the losing sides ~ murderous bigoted denominations as well as non-participating pascifist denominations ~ fled to British North America beginning in the 1620s.

Or did your *USA history* text books imply/state that all these illegal immigrants were *refugees* all oppressed and just seeking safety? Sort of Adams and Eves awakening in a virtually empty new Garden?

Did Y’do know that part of the English Civil War was named the ‘Puritan Revolution’ which established a 15 year terroristic Theocratic Republic with the same heartwarming humanistic policies as the Theocratic Republic the Taliban has set up in Afghanistan?

The Puritans ruled England and instituted the first Irish Genocide.

When they were overthrown the survivors fled to North America.

Just in time to murder the Pequot Tribe who you may remember from our venerated First Thanksgiving.

Churches in the US and even Canada haven’t yet stopped killing any indigenous who won’t convert.

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This ENDLESSLY fomented TERRORISTIC DOGMA of Eternal Damnation beloved by the Evangelical and Catholic sects is a significant factor in the driving of this country back to the 1600s if not to the Dark Ages.

The Evangelicals Damnation-Centric cults depend on the use of the Public air-waves and Regan’s illegal abnegation of the Fairness-in-Broadcasting Act to ramp up their messages of hatred from an hour a week to 24/7.

Lets cut them off of the Public airwaves.