#co historical society

[detroitlib]

Painted and drawn scale design for a Walker & Co. billboard advertising the Detroit City Gas Co. that reads "Clean Carefree Comfort……Gas Heat" and shows a cat on a mat. Note on verso: This sketch is property of Walker & Co. All original subject matter is our property and until it is adopted will be legally protected for the mutual benefit of ourselves and our customers. It is submitted in confidence and must be returned to us, otherwise a charge will be made to cover the idea and the expense of production. Sketch No. 1589-E. Date 5-13-1938

[bandcampsnoop]

11/10/23.

We all know about the Oakland/San Francisco (Bay Area) music scene. But when I think of it, I think of hazy, guitar-centric pop. I don't think of meticulously crafted pop in the vein of Lawrence Arabia, Laurie Shaw or The Martial Arts.

Skyway Man "Flight of the Long Distance Healer" is just a great album. James Wallace (Oakland) writes music that reminds me of the work of Mull Historical Society and the like.

Mama Bird Recording Co. (Portland, Oregon) has just released this. It sits nicely alongside another Mama Bird artist - Matt Dorrien.

[toytulini]

thinking about my oc Bytte. and. her gender is Aro. her Aromanticism is inextricable from her gender experience.

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1847 – The American relief ship, USS Jamestown, landed supplies in Cork for An Gorta Mór victims.

More than a century ago, James Coleman published a short article, ‘Voyage of the “Jamestown”’, in the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, in which he recounted the arrival of the US warship Jamestown in Cork Harbour on Monday 12 April 1847. The vessel had departed from the Charlestown Navy Yard, Massachusetts, two weeks earlier, on 28 March, with a capacity cargo of some…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Coprophagic AI crisis

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TORONTO on Mar 22, then with LAURA POITRAS in NYC on Mar 24, then Anaheim, and more!

A key requirement for being a science fiction writer without losing your mind is the ability to distinguish between science fiction (futuristic thought experiments) and predictions. SF writers who lack this trait come to fancy themselves fortune-tellers who SEE! THE! FUTURE!

The thing is, sf writers cheat. We palm cards in order to set up pulp adventure stories that let us indulge our thought experiments. These palmed cards – say, faster-than-light drives or time-machines – are narrative devices, not scientifically grounded proposals.

Historically, the fact that some people – both writers and readers – couldn't tell the difference wasn't all that important, because people who fell prey to the sf-as-prophecy delusion didn't have the power to re-orient our society around their mistaken beliefs. But with the rise and rise of sf-obsessed tech billionaires who keep trying to invent the torment nexus, sf writers are starting to be more vocal about distinguishing between our made-up funny stories and predictions (AKA "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion"):

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html

In that spirit, I'd like to point to how one of sf's most frequently palmed cards has become a commonplace of the AI crowd. That sleight of hand is: "add enough compute and the computer will wake up." This is a shopworn cliche of sf, the idea that once a computer matches the human brain for "complexity" or "power" (or some other simple-seeming but profoundly nebulous metric), the computer will become conscious. Think of "Mike" in Heinlein's *The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress#Plot

For people inflating the current AI hype bubble, this idea that making the AI "more powerful" will correct its defects is key. Whenever an AI "hallucinates" in a way that seems to disqualify it from the high-value applications that justify the torrent of investment in the field, boosters say, "Sure, the AI isn't good enough…yet. But once we shovel an order of magnitude more training data into the hopper, we'll solve that, because (as everyone knows) making the computer 'more powerful' solves the AI problem":

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

As the lawyers say, this "cites facts not in evidence." But let's stipulate that it's true for a moment. If all we need to make the AI better is more training data, is that something we can count on? Consider the problem of "botshit," Andre Spicer and co's very useful coinage describing "inaccurate or fabricated content" shat out at scale by AIs:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4678265

"Botshit" was coined last December, but the internet is already drowning in it. Desperate people, confronted with an economy modeled on a high-speed game of musical chairs in which the opportunities for a decent livelihood grow ever scarcer, are being scammed into generating mountains of botshit in the hopes of securing the elusive "passive income":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Botshit can be produced at a scale and velocity that beggars the imagination. Consider that Amazon has had to cap the number of self-published "books" an author can submit to a mere three books per day:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/amazon-restricts-authors-from-self-publishing-more-than-three-books-a-day-after-ai-concerns

As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels. Even sources considered to be nominally high-quality, from Cnet articles to legal briefs, are contaminated with botshit:

https://theconversation.com/ai-is-creating-fake-legal-cases-and-making-its-way-into-real-courtrooms-with-disastrous-results-225080

Ironically, AI companies are setting themselves up for this problem. Google and Microsoft's full-court press for "AI powered search" imagines a future for the web in which search-engines stop returning links to web-pages, and instead summarize their content. The question is, why the fuck would anyone write the web if the only "person" who can find what they write is an AI's crawler, which ingests the writing for its own training, but has no interest in steering readers to see what you've written? If AI search ever becomes a thing, the open web will become an AI CAFO and search crawlers will increasingly end up imbibing the contents of its manure lagoon.

This problem has been a long time coming. Just over a year ago, Jathan Sadowski coined the term "Habsburg AI" to describe a model trained on the output of another model:

https://twitter.com/jathansadowski/status/1625245803211272194

There's a certain intuitive case for this being a bad idea, akin to feeding cows a slurry made of the diseased brains of other cows:

https://www.cdc.gov/prions/bse/index.html

But "The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget," a recent paper, goes beyond the ick factor of AI that is fed on botshit and delves into the mathematical consequences of AI coprophagia:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493

Co-author Ross Anderson summarizes the finding neatly: "using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects":

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2023/06/06/will-gpt-models-choke-on-their-own-exhaust/

Which is all to say: even if you accept the mystical proposition that more training data "solves" the AI problems that constitute total unsuitability for high-value applications that justify the trillions in valuation analysts are touting, that training data is going to be ever-more elusive.

What's more, while the proposition that "more training data will linearly improve the quality of AI predictions" is a mere article of faith, "training an AI on the output of another AI makes it exponentially worse" is a matter of fact.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/14/inhuman-centipede#enshittibottification

Image: Plamenart (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Double_Mobius_Strip.JPG

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[letterful]

Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, life, the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie de siècle, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Dance of Death, indeed Death itself. It is Shelley's dome of many-coloured glass, and it is also his white radiance of eternity. It is the confused teeming fullness and richness of life, Fülle des Lebens, inexhaustible multiplicity, turbulence, violence, conflict, chaos, but also it is peace, oneness with the great `I Am', harmony with the natural order, the music of the spheres, dissolution in the eternal all-containing spirit. It is the strange, the exotic, the grotesque, the mysterious, the supernatural, ruins, moonlight, enchanted castles, hunting horns, elves, giants, griffins, falling water, the old mill on the Floss, darkness and the powers of darkness, phantoms, vampires, nameless terror, the irrational, the unutterable.

Also it is the familiar, the sense of one's unique tradition, joy in the smiling aspect of everyday nature, and the accustomed sights and sounds of contented, simple, rural folk — the sane and happy wisdom of rosy-checked sons of the soil. It is the ancient, the historic, it is Gothic cathedrals, mists of antiquity, ancient roots and the old order with its unanalysable qualities, its profound but inexpressible loyalties, the impalpable, the imponderable.

Also it is the pursuit of novelty, revolutionary change, concern with the fleeting present, desire to live in the moment, rejection of knowledge, past and future, the pastoral idyll of happy innocence, joy in the passing instant, a sense of timelessness. It is nostalgia, it is reverie, it is intoxicating dreams, it is sweet melancholy and bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation, roaming in remote places, especially the East, and in remote times, especially the Middle Ages.

But also it is happy co-operation in a common creative effort, the sense of forming part of a Church, a class, a party, a tradition, a great and all-containing symmetrical hierarchy, knights and retainers, the ranks of the Church, organic social ties, mystic unity, one faith, one land, one blood, `la terre et les morts', as Barrès said, the great society of the dead and the living and the yet unborn. It is the Toryism of Scott and Southey and Wordsworth, and it is the radicalism of Shelley, Büchner and Stendhal. It is Chateaubriand's aesthetic medievalism, and it is Michelet's loathing of the Middle Ages. It is Carlyle's worship of authority, and Hugo's hatred of authority. It is extreme nature mysticism, and extreme anti-naturalist aestheticism. It is energy, force, will, youth, life, étalage du moi; it is also self-torture, self-annihilation, suicide. It is the primitive, the unsophisticated, the bosom of nature, green fields, cow-bells, murmuring brooks, the infinite blue sky.

No less, however, it is also dandyism, the desire to dress up, red waistcoats, green wigs, blue hair, which the followers of people like Gérard de Nerval wore in Paris at a certain period. It is the lobster which Nerval led about on a string in the streets of Paris. It is wild exhibitionism, eccentricity, it is the battle of Ernani, it is ennui, it is taedium vitae, it is the death of Sardanopolis, whether painted by Delacroix, or written about by Berlioz or Byron. It is the convulsion of great empires, wars, slaughter and the crashing of worlds. It is the romantic hero — the rebel, l'homme fatale, the damned soul, the Corsairs, Manfreds, Giaours, Laras, Cains, all the population of Byron's heroic poems. It is Melmoth, it is Jean Sbogar, all the outcasts and Ishmaels as well as the golden-hearted courtesans and the noble-hearted convicts of nineteenth-century fiction. It is drinking out of the human skull, it is Berlioz who said he wanted to climb Vesuvius in order to commune with a kindred soul. It is Satanic revels, cynical irony, diabolical laughter, black heroes, but also Blake's vision of God and his angels, the great Christian society, the eternal order, and `the starry heavens which can scarce express the infinite and eternal of the Christian soul'.

It is, in short, unity and multiplicity. It is fidelity to the particular, in the paintings of nature for example, and also mysterious tantalising vagueness of outline. It is beauty and ugliness. It is art for art's sake, and art as an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death.

— from Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism.

[rjzimmerman]

Frontier myth vilified the California grizzly. Science tells a new story. (Washington Post)

The grizzly, a subspecies of brown bear, has long held a place in mainstream American myth as a dangerous, even bloodthirsty creature. Its scientific name, Ursus arctos horribilis, means “the horrible bear.” But that image is being challenged by a new set of studies that combine modern biochemical analysis, historical research and Indigenous knowledge to bring the story of the California grizzly from fiction to fact.

In January, a team of experts led by University of California at Santa Barbara ecologist Alexis Mychajliw published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B about the diet of the California grizzly bear and how that influenced its extinction. The results challenge virtually every aspect of the bear’s established story.

“Pretty much everything that I thought I knew about these animals turned out to be wrong,” said Peter Alagona, an ecologist and historian at UCSB and co-author of the study.

Much of the grizzly bear’s long-standing narrative comes from stories, artwork and early photographs depicting California grizzlies as huge in size and aggressive in nature. Many of these reports, which found wide readership in newspapers elsewhere in the West and in the cities back East, were written by what Alagona calls the Californian influencers of their time.

“They were trying to get rich and famous by marketing themselves as these icons of the fading frontier,” Alagona said. “A lot of the historical sources that we have about grizzlies are actually not about grizzlies. They’re about this weird Victorian 19th-century celebrity culture.”

The team of ecologists, historians and archivists compared the image of California grizzlies from these frontier reports to harder data in the form of bear bones from museum collections all over the state.

The frontier myth had painted the California bears as larger than grizzlies elsewhere in the country, but the bone analysis revealed that they were the same size and weight, about 6 feet long and 440 pounds for the average adult.

In an even larger blow to the popular story of the vicious grizzly, the bones showed that before 1542, when the first Europeans arrived, the bears were only getting about 10 percent of their diet from preying on land animals. They were primarily herbivores, surviving on a varied diet of acorns, roots, berries, fish and occasionally larger prey such as deer.

As European-style farming and ranching began to dominate the landscape, grizzlies became more like the stories those frontier influencers were telling about them. The percentage of meat in their diet rose to about 25 percent, probably in large part because of the relative ease of catching a fenced-in cow or sheep compared to a wild elk.

Colonialism forced so many changes on the California landscape so quickly, affecting every species that the bears ate and interacted with, that the exact cause of this change will be difficult to ever fully understand.

Still, grizzlies were never as vicious or purely predatory as the stories made them out to be. The narrative of the huge killer bear instead fed a larger settler story of a landscape — and a people — that could not coexist with the settlers themselves. And that story became a disaster for more than just bears.

Although we will never have exact numbers, experts agree that hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people were living in what is now California before White settlers arrived. One frequently cited estimate puts the population at 340,000.

By 1900, that number had been slashed by more than 95 percent to around 16,000 surviving tribal members throughout the state. Eliminating the bear and the vast majority of California’s Indigenous people can be seen as parts of the same concerted effort to replace one landscape — and one set of stories — with another.

“The annihilation of the California grizzly bear was part of a much larger campaign of annihilation,” Alagona said. “I think it’s clear that what happened in California meets the legal definition of a genocide. But in a way, it was even more than that, because these were not just attempts to eliminate groups of people. These were attempts to destroy an entire world.”

[mimble-sparklepudding]

Winter Greenery OC Questions.

A little list of OC questions based on the folklore of winter greenery in Northern Europe. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all symbolic meanings, but rather just a small selection for entertainment, rather than educational, purposes.

Fir: Endurance and Hope.

Is your OC generally optimistic about the future?  Or do they tend to prepare for the worst, whilst hoping for the best? Or do they even take a generally pessimistic view of the way things will likely unfold?

Does your OC actively attempt to nurture or inspire hope in others – even when things look particularly dire? Or are they inclined to be more blunt with their assessment of a situation?

Would your OC ever fight for a lost cause on principle?  Or would they give up – or even change allegiance – in order to ensure the best outcome for themselves?

What is an example of something (or someone) to which your OC has been stubbornly loyal, through thick and thin?  Was it worth it in the end?  Could it ever have been?

How many setbacks can (or will) your OC endure before they give up on a course of action?  Or alternatively, how many times can they be let down or betrayed before they turn their back upon another person?

Holly: Protection and Luck.

Is your OC protective of those to whom they are close?  Are they ever somewhat over-protective?  Or do they prefer to let people suffer the consequences of their mistakes?  Perhaps because they see this as a useful life lesson?

Does your OC carry a lucky charm of some sort?  What makes them think it’s lucky?  Or do they not believe in luck, yet find themselves unable to part with it all the same?

Has your OC ever taken on a burden or suffered harm to protect another from suffering its consequences?  Did the person in question realise that they had done so?  What was their motivation when doing this?

What does your OC believe to be the luckiest event in their life?  Is this an accurate assessment?  Or was there actually more than simply luck at play?

Does your OC believe that they were historically let down by those who should have protected them?  If so then what has been the impact of this upon them?  If not then have they always been kept safe by others?  Has anyone ever sacrificed themselves to protect them?

Ivy: Fidelity and Loyalty.

Has your OC ever been unfaithful in a relationship?  Could they ever be tempted by the physical charms of another?  Or have they ever been surprised by how little they are tempted by others, at least once they embraced their current lover?

What inspires loyalty in your OC?  Will they follow someone purely based upon duty or rank? Or are there certain qualities towards which they are drawn?  Or perhaps there ways by which another person must prove themselves before earning their loyalty?

Has another person ever offered to leave their spouse or lover for your OC?  What was it about them that this person found so hard to resist? How did they feel about it at the time? 

Does your OC feel any abiding connection to their place of birth?  Has this ever been challenged by conflicting loyalties?  How are they viewed by those currently living in their society of origin?

Does your OC remain steadfastly loyal to those who have helped them on their journey?  Or are they quick to dispense with those who are no longer of use to them?

Mistletoe: Peace and Friendship.

Who was your OC’s first friend?  What drew them to each other?  Were they expecting to get along? Or was it a surprise to them both?

Does your OC find it easy to make friends?   What barriers are there to them doing so?  Has this changed over time?

Do other people experience your OC as having a “peaceful” energy? Or are they inclined to restlessness - or even fractiousness?  Do others find them relaxing company?

To what extent does your OC believe in the perfectibility of mankind?  Do they believe that they are playing a part, no matter how small, in ushering in a new utopian age of co-operation and peace?  Or do they consider that people are intrinsically flawed and that the best that can be hoped for is a series of trade-offs between conflicting values?

Who is your OCs most unlikely friend? What made their friendship so unexpected?

Pine: Healing and Longevity.

What is the worst physical injury or illness that your OC has ever suffered?  How long did it take them to recover?  Does it still have an impact upon them now?

What is the worst emotional or spiritual wound that your OC has ever suffered?  What was the long-term impact of this experience? What helped them to move on from it (if they ever have)?

Does your OC make a good patient?  Or are they resistant to being given medical treatment - or even agreeing to rest?

Does your OC expect to live a long and fruitful life?  Or do they consider themselves to already be living on borrowed time?

Does your OC believe it is better to burn out than to fade away?  Or do they perhaps pretend to believe this, when actually they would be quite happy to retire peacefully one day?

Birch: Rebirth and Regeneration.

Has your OC ever experienced something that changed them irrevocably?  If so, then how do they view the person they were before?

Does your OC believe that sometimes a person needs to hit rock bottom before they can begin to rebuild their life?  Has this ever been their personal experience?  Or would they rather spare someone suffering, even if it meant they failed to learn from their mistakes over and over again?

Does your OC recover quickly from injuries?  Or has it got harder for them to keep bouncing back as they’ve got older?  If so, is this something they would ever admit?

Has your OC ever made a heroic or unexpected comeback from a dire situation?  What helped them to do so?

Has your OC ever been part of a wider cultural or spiritual renaissance?  Perhaps following the defeat of an occupying force?  Or the rediscovery of long-lost wisdom?  Or even a reinterpretation of existing traditions?

[astroboyart]

Astro Boy Reboot not dead yet; new visual unveiled at 2024 edition of Annecy International Animation Film Festival

Sources: TF1 Pro (English Google Translation), Mediawan Kids & Family (X)

Announced on June 11, 2024 at the Annecy Festival in France, Astro Boy Reboot has surfaced once again with a new visual.

This version of Astro Boy Reboot will be co-produced by Method Animation (Mediawan Kids & Family) and Shibuya Productions. No release date was given.

TFOU, a youth based TV channel in France, signed an agreement with Method Animation/Mediawan Kids & Family to develop this new version of Astro Boy Reboot which will be geared towards the 6-10 year old crowd.

It will have 26 episodes which will each last 22 minutes.

A pitch for the show was posted:

Atom is 9 years old, he plays soccer, has his small group of friends at school, bickers with his little sister Uran, and dreams of telling his friend Silica that he is in love with her. But Atom is no ordinary boy. He is a 9-year-old ultra-advanced robot and the only android capable of feeling real emotions! He hides his true nature to live like a normal child. But when supervillains threaten the coexistence between humans and robots, he must act, because he dreams of a world where everyone lives in harmony. Secretly, he transforms into a superhero to protect Metro City. To all the locals, he is Astroboy! But can Astroboy save the city without revealing its secret and thus preserve his complicity with the marvelous Silica?

A couple major figures for Astro Boy Reboot also commented on Astro Boy Reboot:

Yann Labasque, director of youth programs at TF1. "Welcome Astro Boy to the TFOU family! We are delighted to launch the development of this new animated series with Mediawan Kids & Family," rejoices Yann Labasque , director of youth programs at TF1. "A series rich in promises of action and adventure, but also of emotions through the eyes of this little robot boy with a human heart who will have to find his place in a divided society and the solutions within him. Themes with great stories to tell and great values ​​to convey.

Katell France, General Manager and Content Director of Method Animation. "We are very happy to be able to develop the reboot of Astroboy, an iconic character created by Osamu Tezuka, with our historic partner TF1 who has supported us for many years on the Miraculous franchise with the success that we have known. Astroboy is a legendary character whose values ​​such as the cohabitation of technology and nature, tolerance and friendship, perfectly embody those that we defend at Mediawan Kids & Family. This series responds to our strategy of creating a great franchise for young people and families. We look forward to bringing Astroboy back to life through this reboot, and new stories in which all children today will recognize themselves."

[ponett]

Recently, I've been looking back at MLP FIM. I was in high school when it began and was at the height of it's popularity. I was never a super fan or anything and watched a few episodes, but never every one, mainly in the first few seasons. I mostly experienced the fandom through fanart and fanfics, oddly enough. I think I stopped paying attention around the time Starlight Glimmer was introduced. It actually wasn't until a year or so after it ended in 2019 that I realized the show had finished lol

One thing that always bothered me about FIM was how it handled non-ponies and their cultures. The early fandom from what I remember, NEVER liked to talk about racism in the show. Not a surprise given it's 4chan roots. It's only fairly recently, on places like Reddit and Tumblr, that these conversations can happen.

From the early seasons, the most egregious examples were Zecora in her debut episode Bridle Gossip and the Buffalo from the episode, Over a Barrel. I have to wonder what exactly were Lauren Faust, the team at DHX and Hasbro thinking. Zecora is pretty much a magic negro stereotype and the Over a Barrel episode was offensive bothsidsing of the historical conflict between settlers and Native Americans. I could see that the writer intended a "don't judge a book by it's cover" lesson in Bridle Gossip, but that's kind of undermined when Zecora is an insensitive racially-coded stereotype.

Later on, it was nice they focused on non-pony races and diversity, but there was this weird cultural imperialism that showed up with the ponies needing to teach everybody else about friendship. Pretty much every society they visited was dysfunctional or were villains. It was like a pony version of the White Man's Burden. They even installed their own Equestria-friendly leaders. It's a good thing the Native American-coded Buffalo never came back for the Friendship School.

I can only imagine that a lack of diversity in the production crew let these things happen. I can see how the staff didn't think through the implications of the Pony's Burden stuff, but Zecora and the Buffalo are a lot less excusable imo. Lauren Faust and co in Season 1 really should've known better

Believe me when I say people have always been critical of the weird racial coding of the non-pony species in MLP, going all the way back to 2010. Especially here on Tumblr, where you'd find more progressive corners of the fandom compared to, like, /co/ or Equestria Daily or wherever. I guess there's less pushback against those criticisms now, which is good, but they aren't new. It's always been one of the show's most glaring flaws, and something that I hope future iterations of the franchise can improve upon.

[robertreich]

Is Donald Trump a Fascist? 

I want to talk to you about the F word. No no — not that F word.

I’m talking about fascism.

Is Donald Trump really a “fascist,” as some would claim?

Is “authoritarian” adequate?

The term “fascism” is often used loosely, but you can generally identify fascists by their hate of the "other," vengeful nationalism, and repression of dissent.

To fight these ideas, we need to be aware of what they are and how they fit together.

Let's examine the five elements that define fascism and what makes it distinct from, and more dangerous than, authoritarianism.

1. The rejection of democracy in favor of a strongman

Authoritarians believe strong leaders are needed to maintain stability. So they empower  strongmen, dictators, or absolute monarchs to maintain social order through the use of force.

But fascists view strong leaders as the means of discovering what society needs. They regard the leader as the embodiment of society, the voice of the people.

2. Stoking rage against cultural elites

Authoritarian movements cannot succeed without at least some buy-in from establishment elites.

While fascist movements often seek to co-opt the establishment, they largely depend on fueling resentment and anger against presumed cultural elites for supposedly displacing regular people. Fascists rile up their followers to seek revenge on the elites.

They create mass political parties and demand participation. They encourage violence.

3. Nationalism based on “superior” race and historic bloodlines.

Authoritarians see nationalism as a means of asserting the power of the state.

For fascists the state embodies what is considered a “superior” group — based on race, religion, and historic bloodlines. To fascists, the state is a means of asserting that superiority.

Fascists worry about disloyalty and replacement by groups that don’t share the same race or bloodlines. Fascists encourage their followers to scapegoat, expel, and sometimes even kill such “others.”

Fascists believe schools and universities must teach values that glorify the dominant race, religion, and bloodline. Schools should not teach inconvenient truths about the failures of the dominant race.

4. Extolling brute strength and heroic warriors.

The goal of authoritarianism is to gain and maintain state power at any cost. For authoritarians, “strength” comes in the form of large standing armies that can enforce their rule. They seek power to wield power.

Fascists seek state power to achieve their ostensible goal: achieving their vision of society.

Fascism accomplishes this goal by rewarding those who win economically and physically, and denigrating or exterminating those who lose. Fascism depends on organized bullying — a form of social Darwinism.

For the fascist, war and violence are means of strengthening society by culling the weak and glorifying heroic warriors.

5. Disdain of women and LGBTQ+ people

Authoritarianism imposes hierarchies. It’s about order.

Fascism’s idea of order is organized around a particular hierarchy of male dominance. The fascist “heroic warrior” is male. Women are relegated to subservient roles.

In fascism, anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider, and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order.

Fascism seeks to eliminate homosexuals, nonbinary, transgender, and queer people because they’re thought to challenge or weaken the heroic male warrior.

These five elements of fascism fit together and reinforce each other.

Rejection of democracy in favor of a strongman depends on galvanizing popular rage.

Popular rage draws on a nationalism based on a supposed superior race or ethnicity.

That superior race or ethnicity is justified by a social Darwinist idea of strength and violence, as exemplified by heroic warriors.

Strength, violence, and the heroic warrior are centered on male power.

These five elements find exact expression in Donald Trump. His uniquely American version of fascism is rooted largely in White Christian Nationalism. It is the direction that most of the Republican Party is now heading in.

It’s not enough to call Trump and those promoting his ideas authoritarians when what they are really advocating is something far worse: fascism.

[girlactionfigure]

in broad daylight

It's 2024, not 1933. 

Crowds of thousands are chanting for the indiscriminate murder of Jews in major western cities.

why do you continue to gaslight us?

Intifada: indiscriminate suicide bombings, bombings, stabbings, and shootings targeting civilians.

There it is. In plain English. To a crowd of thousands, in front of an exhibit in New York City memorializing the victims of the October 7 massacre. "Long live October 7."

These are not ceasefire marches. They are Jew-hate rallies. Why are you still gaslighting us?

OCTOBER 7 SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOUR WAKE UP CALL

For years, as someone whose politics have always been left, myself and others have been warning of the genocidal antisemitism brewing on the left. Our concerns were minimized, and we were gaslit, both within and outside the Jewish community. Even when people conceded that yes, antisemitism does exist on the left, they insisted that only right-wing antisemitism was actually dangerous. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know how frustrated I always was with this sentiment. I hope they see now that they were wrong. 

Even though I knew something ugly was brewing on the left, even I was shocked not just by the Hamas atrocities committed on October 7, but by the world’s reactions. On October 7 itself, very few people on the left unequivocally stood with the Israeli victims, no ifs, ands, or buts. They talked of “context,” decided that was the appropriate time to criticize the Israeli government, justified, or even went as far as to celebrate the heinous massacre. Now, as more indefensible information came out, they deny it. 

Supposedly progressive organizations, like the Women’s March, #MeToo, and even some chapters of Black Lives Matter either ignored the atrocities or outright supported them. On October 8, before Israel retaliated, enormous crowds in New York City marched in support of the murderers of October 7. As recently as a few weeks ago, influential progressive politicians were gaslighting us about the unabashed antisemitism present at the college encampments. 

If you haven’t noticed that genocidal hatred for Jews has become acceptable, in broad daylight, so long as it’s disguised under the costume of “pro-Palestine activism,” I don’t know if you ever will. Maybe you will after it’s already too late. Every genocidal antisemite in history had an excuse. This is no different. 

WHO IS ACTUALLY RUNNING THESE PROTESTS?

Virtually all “ceasefire,” “pro-Palestine” protests in the United States are organized by groups such as Within Our Lifetime, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Samidoun. 

Samidoun, which has ties to the internationally-recognized terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and has an office in Tehran, is banned as a terrorist organization in Germany. Within Our Lifetime and Students for Justice in Palestine both openly support Hamas, other Islamic Republic proxies, and the October 7 massacre. 

On October 7, various SJP chapters released statements justifying and even celebrating the massacre. National Students for Justice in Palestine released a “toolkit” calling the massacre a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” 

SJP’s founder, Hatem Bazian, is also the co-founder of American Muslims for Palestine, an organization formed by former members of the HolyLand Foundation, KindHearts, and Islamic Association of Palestine, all of which were disbanded after its members were convicted of transferring material support to Hamas. 

Meanwhile, Within Our Lifetime is openly supportive of Hamas and other Islamic Republic proxies. WOL promotes “Palestinian resistance by any means necessary.” On October 7, WOL issued a statement, saying, “We must defend the Palestinian right to resist Zionist settler violence and support Palestinian resistance in all its forms. By any means necessary. With no exceptions and no fine print.” Abdullah Akl, a WOL organizer, has a top role at the Muslim American Society, which was founded as the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, though MAS denies that they continue to have an affiliation. 

Would you attend a protest hosted by the KKK? By the Nazis? If a hate group organizes a protest, can that protest actually be deemed “peaceful”?

WHAT ARE THE PROTESTORS ACTUALLY SAYING?

In between “ceasefire now” and “free Palestine” calls, the protestors aren’t exactly making their genocidal aims a secret. Among the most popular chants at “pro-Palestine” protests since October 7 are “intifada, intifada,” “there is only one solution, intifada revolution,” and “globalize the intifada.”

The intifadas were Palestinian “uprisings” that indiscriminately and primarily targeted civilians, in a series of suicide bombings, car bombings, shootings, stabbings, and even stoning. When you call for a “global intifada,” you are openly calling for violence against Jews, not just in Israel, but around the globe. The chant couldn’t be any more explicit. 

Even more horrifying, “there is only one solution, intifada revolution,” alludes to the Final Solution. Of note, at the outbreak of the 1948 war, the Palestinian Arab leadership, which had allied with the Nazis during the Holocaust, vowed, “The Arabs have taken the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out.”

Another popular chant is “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which, regardless of Rashida Tlaib’s lies, is not a peaceful call for coexistence. It’s a call for the destruction of the State of Israel, which has nine million citizens, the majority of them Jews. Its Arabic counterpart is “from water to water, Palestine will be Arab,” also heard at the protests, an even more explicit call for genocide and ethnic cleansing. 

Another common chant at pro-Palestine protests is “Khaybar, khaybar ya Yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa Yahud,” translating to “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning,” which alludes to the surrender to Muhammad, ethnic cleansing, and extermination of the Khaybar Jews in the seventh century. The chant is also explicitly genocidal. 

We’ve spent the last decade discussing microaggressions and dog whistles, and yet, when we hear antisemites call for the murder of Jews in broad daylight, you tell us that’s not what they reallymeant. Why?

MAYBE YOU MEAN WELL

I understand that you don’t want to see Palestinians suffer. No moral person likes to see people suffer. But has it ever occurred to you that terrorist organizations are not moral? That terrorist organizations extort your empathy to further their goals? Just the other day, The Wall Street Journal uncovered secret documents that revealed that the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, openly said that more Palestinian deaths help Hamas further its political goals. They are extorting you because you care. This is not brand new information. Hamas leaders and leaders of virtually all Palestinian political factions and terrorist organizations have made similar statements in the past. 

(And yes, you could argue that Israel didn’t have to “give them what they wanted” by retaliating. Either way, though, it’s a lose-lose situation for Israel, because no matter what, the message Hamas would be getting is “slaughtering and kidnapping people is a great way for you to get what you want,” such as releasing Palestinian mass murderers from Israeli prisons. Most countries would react to October 7 exactly as Israel did, or worse, but this is a separate discussion from this post). 

If the “globalize the Intifada,” “there is only one solution, Intifada Revolution,” “intifada, intifada,” and “long live October 7” crowds do not represent the core of the free Palestine movement, why are these the voices leading the protests? Where are the condemnations from “pro-Palestine” organizations? From “pro-Palestine” celebrities? Why do they not issue statements making it explicitly clear that these people don’t represent them? When pro-Israel protestors fired fireworks into a “pro-Palestine” crowd at UCLA, Jewish organizations issued loud and clear condemnations. 

If these sentiments didn’t represent the pro-Palestine movement, the movement would be the first to distance themselves from them. Instead, they are either silent, or worse, they openly support them. 

PLEASE SEE WHAT'S HAPPENING BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

Every antisemitic regime in history has mobilized the masses under the guise of a “righteous cause.” The Catholic Church did it. Hitler did it. Stalin did it. Now the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies — Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — are doing it too. And you, who has vowed to “punch Nazis,” are falling for it. 

In the nearly eight decades since the Holocaust, just about everyone has wondered: had I been alive during World War II, what would I have done? Would I have I have hid Anne Frank, as Miep Gies did, or would I have been a collaborator? Everyone, except the most rabid of Jew-haters, reaches the same conclusion: of course I would have hid the Frank family. I’m not a monster. 

The problem is that most people have been playing the wrong game, deliberating on a misguided rhetorical exercise. If it’s between the bad guy and the good guy, well, of course everyone will choose to be the good guy. But in truth, it’s notbetween the bad guy — and don’t get me wrong, the Nazis were certainly bad — and the good guy. It’s between the antisemite and the Jew.

When people pontificate over what their behavior would have been during the Holocaust, they tend to do so with one glaring oversight. Antisemitism, this deeply-engrained 2000-year-old hatred, projects whatever any given society hates the most onto the Jewish people. Nowadays, certainly in left-leaning circles, where white colonialism is considered the most egregious sin, we are powerful white oppressors and settler-colonialists. When we play bad guys versus good guys, a whole bunch of people will conclude that the bad guys are…well, the Jews. 

If you can't figure out a way to oppose the war without supporting protests led by groups that back Hamas and Hezbollah, call for a global intifada, protest in front of Holocaust museums and October 7 memorials, and wave banners that proclaim "long live October 7," your problem is not with the war. Your problem is with Jews.

Hope that helps. 

[the-modern-typewriter]

Do you have any advice on writing a truly scary villain?? How do I make them genuinely terrifying but also still realistically human y’know?

The short answer is 'be specific', think about all the ways that humans can be scary, and show how the villain is scary/human by the story stakes/other character's reactions to them.

The longer, more rambling, answer is...

Whenever I think about villains, and a lot of the study that goes into villains/monsters, I think about the idea of either the Self or the Other.

Villain as Self:

The self is the us, in 'us vs them'. It is what we recognise within ourselves when we look at and explore villains.

This often comes with a realistically human motivation. For example, it could be that the villain is motivated by greed, recognition or desire for power or control (flaws that many of us have) or fear, desire to protect ourselves/our loved ones (good qualities that many of us have that become warped) and all these motivations ultimately lead the villain to do awful thing. We don't think we'd do the bad thing ourselves, but there is an uneasy terror in recognising that actually we might.

Alternatively, it is the villain who is well-respected and loved. The person we trust. The person we feel safe with. Except, we're not safe. And we can't tell, because we think they're just like us, and in many ways they are, and that's horrifying.

This kind of villain is always the dark side of our own society, our own assumptions and ideologies and belief systems. They are very popular at the moment.

We as a people are deeply uneasy with our own monstrosity.

Villain as Other

The 'other' is the 'them'. It's the fear that many of us still have with what is different to us, or what we don't understand or know.

This is the villain that is the random stranger, not secretly your best friend. It's, historically speaking looking at literary canon, the cannibal savages in different cultures. It's aliens. It's monsters where the scary thing is that they have no humanity, nothing we can reason with, a morality that is completely different to ours etc.

We as a people are still deeply uneasy about what we don't understand, even if many of us are trying to be better about it.

Some villains are a mixture of the two, but broadly speaking, you're considering the Villain as Self vibe of villain. I mention both because I find it interesting, and because our ideas of otherness are so often tied with our ideas of monstrosity that I can't not!

Scary nowadays often looks very much like someone persecuting what is considered 'other' or 'different'.

What is actually scary?

The first part of writing a genuinely scary villain is tapping into something that is genuinely scary.

While the vague can work, when it comes to villains that are realistically human, specificity is your friend. We understand these people, or at the very least we know and recognise them. And it's not a broad threat of 'end of the world' that tends to scare us most, it's much more personal.

We don't want to get hurt. We don't want to lose someone we love. We are scared when we realise we completely misjudged a person we trusted. We are scared when we see someone do something terrible and have a gut lurching feeling that, in their circumstances, we might do the same thing because we absolutely recognise the feeling and the motivation. We are scared when we see villains who persecute people just like us, because we know there's an uncomfortable sliver of truth to it.

Story stakes

All the above bit is all to do with your character understanding and construction. The internal bit. The premise of your character.

Story stakes is external and how you apply your character in your story. In short - if there is clearly no chance of your villain ever winning, and nothing bad ever happens and you just tell people that they are scary, the reader has no reason to believe you.

Have other characters react in terror to your villain. Have the villain's actions and goals have consequences in the story. They must be a genuine threat within the story world, even if they lose in the end. I hope this helps!

[mixelation]

i've finished reading xiran jay zhao's iron widow! here is my review so far (contains spoilers, including the "twist" at the end). my tl;dr is that it starts as a fun revenge story but both the quality of the narrative and the writing itself decline over the course of the novel. you might like it if you want a power fantasy where the main character is unapologetically violent and selfish, and you don't mind cardboard characterization or shallow worldbuilding. if you want a nuanced take on how misogyny functions in a society, a book about strong female characters (as opposed to a singular, capital Strong Female Character), or you find descriptions of anime-style action scenes cringey, you this book may not be for you.

on to the full review ->

iron widow is a scifi-fantasy YA book set in alternate timeline china, where humanity battles invading alien "hunduns" using gundam-esque giant robots called "chrysalises." a lot of the worldbuilding draws on the aesthetic and certain social norms of ~old timesy~ china (iirc zhao has stated they pulled inspiration from lots of time periods, but my familiarity with both historical china and chinese historical fantasy is very low, so i am absolutely not the person to label anything beside "the past"). so you have people checking tablets and riding around in hovercraft and using modern slang, but a lot of Aesthetic elements are more traditional, and society is deeply, deeply sexist in a way that.... feels old-fashioned (wording chosen to set the Mood apart from how modern misogyny tends to work). for example, the main character has bound feet but also uses phrases like "railed on."

chrysalises, the giant robots, work by the pilot channeling qi. for whatever reason that's not really well explained, they require a copilot to boost their control/power over the chrysalis. think "drifting" in pacific rim, except here when pilots are not compatible with their copilot (this seems to rely largely on "qi levels" and pilots don't seem to have control over it), the "weaker" copilot can become overwhelmed and die. in this setting, the main pilot is always male the copilot always female, with the copilot usually dying. this part of the premise as it is described on the back of the book confused me as a setting for a ~feminist~ story, because why would men always win in a wild mind-meld, battle-of-wills situation? however, the main character slowly figures out that it's not that men are inherently stronger pilots-- it's that women are always paired with a male pilot the military has tested to be stronger (based on qi levels), and then later one of the plot twists is that the chrysalises are designed to weaken the female copilot. this is because, in the way sexism works in this society, "families wouldn't send their sons to be pilots if they knew they could be killed by some girl." (not an exact quote, but what one character gives as the explanation)

weaker female copilots are called "concubines" and teenaged girls are frequently sold to the military to be concubines. if the concubine survives, she's dubbed a "balanced match" for the male pilot and they become quasi-married. more on this later.

this leads us to wu zetian, a "frontier peasant" who offers herself up to be a "concubine" (co-pilot). we learn that zetian's older sister was sold off by their family to be a concubine, but was murdered by her assigned pilot. like, regular murdered, not killed by a psychic link the way most concubines are. so zetian, having a shit home life, and under pressure to sell herself as well, decides she will enlist and then murder her sister's killer.

now, i had a lot of fun with the beginning of this story. but in order to get into this book, you have to accept upfront that zetian is very firmly the main character, and she is always right and ridiculously strong, clever, and resilient just because. she runs her mouth even at the risk of violence, and is usually meant to be right about whatever she's saying. she rejects her role in society just because, and she decides she doesn't care if her whole family is punished or even killed for her actions because they're terrible to her, and the reader isn't really expected to criticize this. despite having no formal education, she always knows what she needs to know to logic her way through things successfully, and she can strategize and debate on par with people whose literal jobs it is to do these things.

for the first ~25% of the book, this is fun. zetian has decided fuck the system, fuck her family, and fuck her own life-- if they're going to kill her, she's bringing her sister's murderer down with her. she doesn't care about having to endure demeaning tests or people insisting on putting her through painful make-up routines. this is a girl who just has murder on her mind, and it's pretty entertaining.

then, she's shoved into the co-pilot seat of a chrysalis with the man who killed her sister as the main pilot, and through some messy mind-scape battling, she kills him. she takes control of the chrysalis and wins the battle. and then..... the book sort of stops having a real plot, and everything slows down.

see, in the first chunk where we're reading a vengeful murder plot, everything is centered around this one goal. zetian's extreme personality makes sense because we're reading about someone who's actively thrown her life away for revenge. we're on board with it and we wan to see how she manages it. this premise allows for an unhinged protagonist making unhinged decisions.

so what happens next, if she accomplished her goal a quarter of the way in? the military decides to pair her with a character called li shimin, who is the current top pilot. he's the top pilot in that pilots are given scores (their battles are televised and they're treated as a celebrities) and also he has the highest qi level. he's also a convicted murderer and was recruited off death row. sounds fun, right? wrong. shimin is a cardboard cut out of a man. he barely speaks. the only thing he really does is drink and fight people. he gets into physical fights with little provocation. the narration makes a big point of really driving home how big and intimidating he is.... and also how he's an ethnic minority. i cannot comment on if this was meant to reflect any real world group or how they're treated, but overall shimin's characterization make me slightly uncomfortable AND he's just not very interesting. later we find out he's an ex-scholar who murdered his whole family after walking in on his brother raping someone (yeah, i..... idk), and he used to write poems. i think this was meant to make him seem more fleshed out, but the character writing needs a lot of work, so "ex-scholar and poet" is a very informed trait.

if you've followed the buzz on this book, you'll know one of its "draws" is that the end game ship is polyamorous. so, zetian has a second love interest. his name is yizhi and he's the fifth son of the richest man in the country, and he made friends with zetian before the start of the novel. the way they met and bonded doesn't super make sense, but i'm willing to buy into it. yizhi has been infused with SLIGHTLY more personality. he signs up to work for the military as a strategist, which is how he gets to hang out with zetian and shimin. his contribution to the plot is mostly just that he has money to throw at problems. oh, and he can give their chrysalis a boost of qi for extra power and starts hanging out with them in their cockpit during battles. why others don't also do this, and why pilots need to parasite a copilot instead of just having other people around for extra qi, is never explained. zetian has a line where she says something like "don't you know a triangle is the strongest shape?" so i kind of dig what i think zhao was going for (that they balance each other better than just two of them would), but it's not really a realized theme.

okay, so if zetian killed who she wanted to kill, then what's the rest of the book about? good question! it's a little unclear. zetian survives copiloting with shimin and they're declared a balanced match. then the buddies of the pilot zetian killed try to kill her. then the military tries to kill her AND shimin by sending them into battles when they're too tired. then zetian asks yizhi's rich dad to help them with their PR so the government will stop trying to kill them. then they decide to "take back" a province the hunduns took over years ago. then zetian realizes the chrysalises are rigged against female pilots and they go and kidnap and torture a guy to make him confess to how it's done. then they go to take back the province and zetian finds the cryopreserved body of an ancient emperor and his dragon chrysalis. oh, did i not mention him? yeah he's some legend that gets brought up a couple times and then suddenly he's there at the end. but he doesn't do anything. he just agrees with everything zetian wants to do, for some reason, and what she spontaneously decides to do with her new giant robot is go take over the government. she kills multiple people. then the book ends with them finding out they're on the hundun's native planet. okay???

the last 75% just reads like a bunch of things happening because why not. this by itself isn't necessarily bad, but the events are not well connected nor do events get set up in a way where you understand why they occur in the order they occur. zetian stays angry and determined, but her actual overall goal evaporates and instead it just feels like every few chapters she just decides on a new thing she wants. one could argue her overall goal is "claiming agency" or "survival," but they narrative doesn't really carry either of these themes through. for example, in the first quarter of the book, zetian repeated emphasizes she's ready and willing to through her life away if she can get her revenge, and i believed that. but after she miraculously survives.... that willingness to throw her life away vanishes, but not in a "character has undergone development" way. it's just not there anymore.

the writing isn't amazing in the first quarter, but i thought it was fine. it steadily declines over the course of the book, making it feel like a rough draft where zhao was losing steam. instead of getting to see characters interact and play off each other, we just read descriptions of events and conversations. this is nitpicky, but one thing that was starting to drive me crazy through out the book is that the narration frequently would be like "oh, earlier so-and-so showed me this" and then it would be something that could have EASILY just been included at the beginning of the scene and would have also been INTERESTING to see.

the world has a lot of elements going on, but there is a huge problem with telling and not showing, so even with lots of details, the worldbuilding feels shallow. for example, despite zetian saying defeating hunduns has to be a priority, i don't know what happens if hunduns successfully invade an area. we're never shown a ransacked village or hunduns killing anyone but unnamed pilots. the narrative spends a lot of time talking about different element qi and the advantages and disadvantages of each element, but this never actually becomes plot relevant. the pilots are paraded out to the public as fancy celebrities and zetian and shimin have photoshoots for PR, but this also never really becomes plot relevant besides being well-liked being something zetian decides would be a good idea for a few chapters. we don't even know what zetian's relationship with her sister is like, even though she decides to die seeking revenge for her.

i want to expand on that last part a bit. zetian states repeatedly that she wants to help save other girls from becoming concubines, and yet no stakes are attached to this. shimin accidentally killed a concubine he was in love with before the start of the book, so we get some flashbacks of her, but otherwise we never see the impact (or lack of impact) of these young girls' deaths. like, that character really only exists as a tragic backstory for shimin. there's no sympathetic concubine character that dies to drive home the point (although there IS a mean concubine character that presumably died and zetian never thinks of again); there's no meeting a family that misses their daughter; there's no dramatically prying open a cockpit to free a concubine. there are two other female pilots who are balanced matches, and one is a bitch to zetian and the nice one backstabs and attempts to kill her later. zetian never sympathizes with another girl or woman for more than a few lines, including her own sister, so it is unclear why saving girls is so important to her. there's a brief moment where the "nice" female pilot points out to zetian that living in poverty and being terrified of hunduns attacks likely contributed to the various types of misogynistic abuse going on in her family and that providing more support for them would help them.... and zetian sympathizes with her mother for maybe a paragraph.... and then at the end of the book she decides to murder her family. Uh. Okay? Oh, and when the "nice" pilot betrays her, she says it was because the military had her kids and was threatening them. zetian decides to literally crush her to death. Feminism, I guess.

when i read through reviews of this book, the negative ones largely complained about zetian as a character. i always take reviews complaining the main female character is a bitch with a grain of salt, because often they're just bullshit and also i like horrible women. i liked zetian alright for the first two thirds of them book, although she starts to come off as weirdly arrogant at some point. (she starts to refer to herself as one of the most powerful women in the world due to her qi level, even though this does not help her physically, politically, or socially, and she has very little actual agency until just revives a frozen emperor at the end and goes off the rails.) however, this time i think the complaints are merited. you ever read a dark harry fic? or a "naruto gets chased by villagers, becomes powerful and murders them all" type fic? it's like that but if those types of writers were 5% more aware of social issues. zetian is self-righteous about wanting to change the pilot system, but her actions do not indicate she actually gives a shit about anyone but her and her boyfriends. so in the end it seems like even though she's preaching about saving girls, she's actually going, "me! what about me! how dare you do these bad things to ME!" which like. obviously it's fine to be angry about wrongs done to you, but it comes off like she's less upset about systemic problems and more upset the systemic problems happened to HER. there's a lack of nuance and character work that would make or explore this difference.

hmm, what else. i don't really have specific compliments or complaints about the romance aspect, other than the inter-character relationships aren't really built up well. there's definitely effort put into the zetian-yizhi and zetian-shimin relationships, it's just that.... neither of the boys have a ton of personality....? also there's a few oddly placed asides about zetian not feeling ashamed of having two lovers, which feel more liek they're there to justify it to the reader than zetian's actual internal monologue. it's okay, zetian. i did not for a second think you were a shamed of a single thing you've done.

The top review on amazon says, "Wow… this is everything you could want from a science fiction novel." Iron Widow is sci-fi the way Star Wars or Pacific Rim are sci-fi: it's fantasy with robots. Except there's no loving descriptions of engines revving or switches being flipped. There's not even cool little alien dudes; I don't even know what a hundun looks like.

[darkesttiimelines]

Throughout history, women have left an undeniable impact on society with their hard work, creativity, and dedication to progress. Unfortunately, their accomplishments have often gone unnoticed, been undervalued, or even stolen. Despite these challenges, brave women of today continue to push boundaries, break barriers, and pave the way for a more fair and equal world. It's our duty to keep going, so that future generations of women can inherit a kinder, more just, and supportive world. By following in the footsteps of the incredible women who came before us, we can create a world where every woman can flourish and succeed, and where their contributions are recognized and celebrated.

Joan of Arc is a patron saint of France, honored as a defender of the French nation for her role in the siege of Orléans and her insistence on the coronation of Charles VII of France during the Hundred Years' War. Claiming to be acting under divine guidance, she became a military leader who transcended gender roles and gained recognition as a savior of France. She was put on trial by Bishop Pierre Cauchon on accusations of heresy, which included blaspheming by wearing men's clothes, acting upon visions that were demonic, and refusing to submit her words and deeds to the judgment of the church. She was declared guilty and burned at the stake on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen.

Rani Lakshmibai was the Maharani consort of the princely state of Jhansi from 1843 to 1853. She was one of the leading figures in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 became a symbol of resistance to the British rule in India for Indian nationalists. When the Maharaja died in 1853, the British East India Company under Governor-General Lord Dalhousie refused to recognize the claim of his adpoted heir and annexed Jhansi under the Doctrine of Lapse. She rode into battle with her infant son strapped to her back, and died in June 1858 after being mortally wounded during the British counterattack at Gwalior.

Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was instrumental in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Her contributions were largely overlooked by her male colleagues, James Watson and Francis Crick, who used her data without her permission or acknowledgement. This theft of her intellectual property and erasure of her contributions is a prime example of the systemic sexism that has historically plagued the scientific community.

Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who co-invented a frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology during World War II that was used to guide torpedoes. However, her contributions were largely ignored and dismissed by male engineers and the military at the time. It was only later in life that she received recognition for her scientific achievements.

Emma Weyant is an American competitive swimmer. She was the US national champion at the individual medley. She qualified for the 2020 Olympic Games in the 400m individual medley and won the silver medal in this event. Weyant finished second in the 500-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA Division I Women's Swimming and Diving Championships. She was beaten by William (Lia) Thomas, a fetishist, who when competing as a member of the Penn men's team, which was 2018-19, ranked 554th in the 200 freestyle, 65th in the 500 freestyle and 32nd in the 1650 freestyle. Weyant is the fastest swimmer in the 500-yard freestyle and had her position stolen by a man.

Maryna Viazovska is a Ukrainian mathematician who made a breakthrough in sphere packing, solving the centuries-old mathematical problem known as the densest packing of spheres in dimensions 8 and 24. She was awarded the Fields Medal in July 2022, making her the second woman (after Maryam Mirzakhani), the second person born in the Ukrainian SSR and the first with a degree from a Ukrainian university to ever receive it.

Hannie Schaft was a Dutch resistance fighter during World War II who played a crucial role in the resistance movement against Nazi occupation. Schaft was a former university student who dropped out because she refused to sign a pledge of loyalty to Germany. Nazis arrested and killed her in 1945, just three weeks before the war ended in Europe. According to lore, Schaft’s last words were, “I’m a better shot,” after initially only being wounded by her executioner.

Shakuntala Devi was an Indian mathematician and mental calculator who was known as the "Human Computer" for her exceptional ability to perform complex mathematical calculations in her head. Her extraordinary abilities earned her a place in the 1982 Guinness Book of Records. Her lesser known achievement is that in 1977 she wrote what is considered to be the first book in India on homosexuality titled “The World of Homosexuals.”  

J. K. Rowling is a British author and philanthropist. She wrote Harry Potter, a seven-volume children's fantasy series published from 1997 to 2007. Known for her philanthropy, she was doxxed and harassed after coming out with support for women's and gay rights in 2020. Rowling secretly donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to save 100 female lawyers and their families facing murder in Afghanistan. In 2022, she funded a women's only rape shelter in Edinburgh.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Today, January 6th 2024, is the perfect day to make purchases at Overstock.com AND then donate to organizations supporting the unarmed Americans who were waved into the Capitol, unnecessarily pepper sprayed, unnecessarily shot with rubber bullets & smoke bombed to create the illusion of a Capitol Hill riot.

Christmas Miracle: Patrick Byrne, Overstock CEO, offers matching $500,000 donation to January 6 Legal Defense. $250,00 via GIVE SEND GO and $250,000 to Stand In The Gap.

Give Send Go Matching Fund

Stand in the Gap

Stand in the Gap is a non-profit foundation dedicated to advocating for change in re-entry, family services, and justice reform. We believe in second chances, providing support to individuals transitioning back into society, and working towards a more equitable and compassionate world. Through our programs, partnerships, and advocacy efforts, we strive to make a lasting impact on the lives of those in need and promote systemic change.

Join us in standing for justice and being a voice for the voiceless.

Our Story

On January 6, 2021, a historic day unfolded in our nation's capital that will be etched in history. As the foundation of our nation was put to the test, many individuals heeded the call to stand up for their rights, their future, and their beliefs. However, the aftermath saw the government taking action against them, leading to a series of events that unveiled the deep-seated issues within the American justice system.

Before January 6th, many were unaware of just how broken the justice system in America truly was. The January 6th defendants and their advocates soon realized that this injustice had persisted for far too long.

In September of 2021, The Real J6 was founded with a mission to give a voice to the voiceless. Its primary focus was to shine a light on the treatment of January 6th defendants at the hands of their own government. However, as the organization delved deeper into this mission, it became clear that there were numerous unmet needs for the defendants and their families. This realization led to the creation of Stand in the Gap.

Shane Jenkins, the co-founder of Stand in the Gap, possesses a unique perspective on the challenges within the incarceration system and the broken nature of the justice system. His life story, marked by several run-ins with the law prior to January 6th, is one of transformation and redemption. Raised in a religious environment and attending Episcopalian school, Shane's life took a different path due to personal struggles and feelings of abandonment stemming from his adoption and an abusive stepfather. In 2016, while incarcerated and at a low point in his life, Shane had a transformative encounter with CHARM – Christ's Hope And Reconciliation Ministries. Through CHARM, he found faith and redemption, and his life took a new direction.

Paroled in July 2018, Shane transitioned to a CHARM Prison Ministries transitional house and dedicated himself to a life of faith and service. He became involved in prison ministry, took on leadership roles, and found a supportive community at church. Despite his personal transformation, in 2021, Shane once again found himself facing government action. Since then, he has been incarcerated, ministering to others within the system and working to bring about positive change.

Through the efforts of many individuals including The Real J6, significant improvements have been achieved within the DC Department of Corrections, including changes in visitation policies, COVID restrictions, guard behavior, and even Congressional intervention. Shane's unique perspective and experience are foundational to the mission of Stand in the Gap, as it strives to address the systemic issues within the justice system and provide support to those who have been affected by it.