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fun fact about once upon a time at bennington, but matt jacobsen whose scary uwu remarks are being used in it and the article surrounding it hates it so that should tell you something.
#a couple years back matt and his wife were interviewed by another bennington grad who was their friend#and he absolutely feels the podcast is a sham and doesnt like talking about donna at all#like i dont think theyre friends by any means but cropping up someone's statemets to create a narrative... about one singular individual#also mind you its not “legal” or whatveer#this guy and his wife have more money than donna#his wife is a holywood exec#i do think its just not... that the podcast only exists to spread lies basically
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I just listened to this podcast, The Good Fight, which this week is about Sweden’s upcoming elections. I realize this topic isn’t super exciting for most people who read my dumb blog — although I suspect it’ll make global headlines, so you may become interested anyway — but if you’ve got a little time and you’re interested in the rise of right-wing populism, it’s worth a listen.
Here are some of my thoughts.
My book is significantly about social democratic politics. I did the bulk of my fieldwork in Sweden in 2005-2006, and I went back regularly in the years that followed, when the center-right Conservative party (Moderaterna) was in power. The Sweden Democrats, the right-wing populist party with roots in neo-Nazi organizations, were somewhat of an uncomfortable joke back then. They’re a party full of racists, led by a young, telegenic asshole named Jimmie Åkesson, and while they were making some waves at the local level, there was very little discussion that they’d ever make it big in national politics. Some worry, sure, but not much active fear. They’re literally only mentioned once in my book, in a footnote.
Now, on Sunday, the Sweden Democrats are poised to win big in the Swedish election, though of course we don’t know yet what will happen. And the question everyone outside Sweden seems to be asking is, why? What has happened that has shifted this historically tolerant, left-leaning country to embrace the barely-disguised virulence of nationalist white supremacists? And the answers folks come up with are all relatively predictable: immigration, the 2015 refugee crisis, rising crime rates, worry that the welfare state can’t afford these new “freeloaders,” etc. There’s more there, of course, and I’ll get to it, but I think that, while these familiar surface reasons matter, they’re also mostly wrong. Here’s why.
Sweden has taken in asylum seekers and other immigrants since the 1960s. That initial wave came mostly from Eastern Europe, and significantly from Poland, which was engaged in anti-Semitic pogroms at the time. This wave was followed by other waves, all the way up through the 2015 refugee crisis. Yet never before in those 50+ years has national politics turned to right-wing, anti-immigrant demagoguery to redress the issue. Of course one might say, well, those initial waves were made up of other white Europeans (Poland, Finland, the former Yugoslavia), and the refugees now are mostly non-white, so this is about racism — and that’s partly right. But other waves since the 1990s have included large populations from Somalia, Iraq, Turkey, and elsewhere — many non-white people, many Muslims, just like in 2015. This isn’t to say that these waves of immigration haven’t caused all sort of political strife in Sweden, but that the response has never involved turning to explicitly anti-immigrant electoral politics as a solution to the perceived problem. In other words, while racism is a part of the current situation, it’s not THE cause, nor is racism particularly new in Sweden. The new thing here is this turn to racism specifically in electoral politics, and that’s what needs to be explained.
I should say that along with all of those other immigration waves, the same rhetoric was used: the welfare state can’t afford them; they need to assimilate; they’re both very lazy and steal our jobs (not entirely dissimilar from what we hear in the US). This rhetoric is just as wrong now as it’s always been. Sweden, like the rest of Europe, has a population problem, and if Swedes want to keep their generous and robust welfare state going, they need the population to increase at a much higher rate than natural births can accommodate, and the only way to do that is through immigration. Without immigrants, the welfare state will eventually shrink and collapse in on itself, which means rather than being a drain on the system, immigrants are, in the long term, the system’s saviors.
So Sweden has undergone decades of immigration, including immigration from the Middle East and Africa, and white Swedes have used all sort of racist language and actions during each of those waves, but the anti-immigrant populists have never gained any power in parliament until very recently. If immigration isn’t new, and racism isn’t new, what makes now different?
I think there are two main answers to this question, both of which are mostly boring, but very real (and the podcast I started off with lands in a similar spot). The first is the steady degradation of the Social Democratic party. In the final decades of the 20th century, we saw the same basic pattern all over Europe and the Anglophone world: formerly left-leaning parties, including the Social Democrats, dazzled by the promises of financialization and globalization, turned to increasingly neoliberal governing strategies otherwise favored by center-right parties. The reasons they did this are complicated, but one result, electorally speaking, is that party brands ended up very muddied in a mishmash of left and right policy ideas with no coherent through-line (we saw this with the Democrats in the US, too). This move did lead to some initial electoral success in some cases, but in the long run it left these parties without any real, clear message or platform. This in turn ended up shunting voters more leftward and rightward, seeking parties that were much more earnest about the clarity of their politics (in the US, since we only have two parties, this process has worked out a bit differently). In Sweden, the Social Democrats themselves, the party that built the world’s strongest welfare state, spent the turn-of-the-century years remodeling it, generally with tasteless decor and poor craftsmanship, to the point where it was virtually unrecognizable from its former glorious form. Why vote for them, when there are plenty of parties on the right willing to do the same shitty renovations, and a few on the left who will argue for making the welfare state even stronger?
So I think the degradation of the Social Democratic party in Sweden — which has been in power for most of the last 90 years or so — and the effects that’s had on how other parties align and adapt, has set very specific conditions that impact how Swedes think about party politics today. But I think the much, much bigger issue in the current election, as it was in ours in 2016, is social media. Like, for real — this is a common and banal observation, to be sure, but I think we are all severely underestimating how much this matters. Had Facebook and YouTube been around (or as powerful) when waves of asylum seekers arrived in Sweden from Iraq and East Africa, I think we would have seen then what we’re seeing now. Like I said, racism isn’t new: people and their bigotry haven’t changed much; but the ability to spread that bigotry, to manipulate it, and to introduce and amplify lies and deceptions and exaggerations that then directly affect how people vote, that is something new, and mostly facilitated by social media.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the recent rise in right-wing populism tracks neatly with the growth of Facebook and other social media, both in Sweden and globally. Remember, I said earlier that the Sweden Democrats (the anti-immigrant party) were around, but were not taken very seriously, when I lived in Sweden in 2005-2006. Back then, most of us were still on MySpace. Facebook didn’t open to the general public until September 2006. YouTube’s first video was uploaded in 2005, and the company wasn’t bought by Google until late 2006. Twitter didn’t launch until July 2006. At that point the Sweden Democrats had no representation in parliament. But four years later, in 2010, they got over 5% of the vote, and in 2014 they got almost 10%. They’re expected to get around 20% on Sunday, which, if you’re paying attention, is basically a doubling of support in each election. I highly doubt this rate of growth would be possible absent the specific capacities of contemporary social media.
This is terrifying to me. I’ve been a Facebook skeptic from the start and I never joined, but that was mostly for other, mostly abstract reasons, like “I don’t want a corporation directly mediating my friendships!” I still feel that way, but looking back on it, I don’t think I had any idea how devastating the actual practical effects of this technology could be. And at this point I don’t really care about discerning whether social media spreads racism that already exists, and is thus merely a vector, or if it creates racism that didn’t exist before (my money is on “it’s both!”). That’s mostly (though not entirely) an academic distinction. What matters is that racism and hatred are clearly on the rise, and on the rise in formal institutions that have the power and authority to do some very bad things in the world at a scale I’ve never seen in my lifetime. And social media is playing a starring role in this drama. And none of us have any idea what to do about it.
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CHEMICAL AO-3959X.91 - 15
Written by Kethol, Jun-25-2017
WHAT IS IT? A black fluid that triggers virulent genetic and physical mutations to whatever organism is exposed to it. There are many different forms with different functions.
THERE IS NOT JUST ONE VERSION OF THE PATHOGEN - This is why you see it do four different things in both movies, and why in Prometheus we see different sized urns in the Juggernaut cargo hold and different writing on urns in the temple/head room.
David - "The pathogen took many forms and proved extremely mutable", he explained. "Fiendishly inventive, in fact. The speed of its mutability is one of its defining characteristics, and makes it such an effective weapon...the human bodies' own white blood cells would immediately be met by the pathogen adapting itself", he continued, "to counter the counter, and so on."
THE PATHOGEN HAS AN OFFICIAL IDENTIFIER
The Weyland website and Prometheus Blu Ray supplemental material show that the Weyland corporation called the pathogen CHEMICAL AO-3959X.91 - 15.
THE PATHOGEN IS COMPLETELY UNDETECTABLE WHILE DORMANT "While it is dormant, the virus is completely inactive. There was nothing for your ship or companion (Walter), competent as their respective instrumentation might be, to detect. Its not as if it is floating in the air like a common germ. The ability to lie inactive for a very, very long time is one of the things that makes it so dangerous. And dangerous to its Engineers as well."
THE PATHOGEN RECREATES ITSELF, AND WHEN IT RUNS OUT OF HOSTS, IT GOES DORMANT
"The original liquid atomizes to particles when exposed to the air. It then reproduces in whatever host it happens upon and eventually gives rise to more liquid, which at the appropriate time atomizes, and so on, and so on. The cycle repeating itself almost endlessly. ..Until there are no more hosts."
"The pathogen itself has an extremely long lifespan. Given a suitable environment in which to exist in stasis, it can lie dormant for hundreds, if not thousands of years, until a suitable host presents itself, and awakens it to commence the cycle again."
THE PATHOGEN INFECTS ALL NON-BOTANICAL LIFE. ALL THE FAUNA, NO FLORA "The pathogen was designed, engineered might be a better term since those of us on the Prometheus came to think of them as genetic engineers, to infect any and all non-botanical life forms. Its sole function is to reproduce. The offspring will stop at nothing to do so. It is their rationale for existence, designed into them by the Engineers. "
"Either kill them outright or use them as incubators to spawn a hybrid form, highly aggressive".
A SINGLE APPLICATION OF THE PATHOGEN CAN RENDER AN ENTIRE PLANET UNINHABITABLE "They kill by reproducing. An elegant method of 'warfare', if you take the time to think about it. Or 'experimentation' if one prefers that description. A very thorough way of cleansing a world of unwanted lifeforms. If even a single offspring of the virus is left, it will not stop until it has found a living host. It seeds, then it moves on. As you have seen, the seed incubates, mutates, and matures with astonishing speed, until it is reborn. If not controlled*, a single application is quite capable of rendering an entire world uninhabitable."
NOTE - This implies the spread can be controlled, if desired.
THE TINY BLACK MOTES IN COVENANT - these are basically the same type of delivery method as a facehugger, just a much tinier organism. The mote eggs are what the first two Covenant victims stepped on. Dozens of these little motes swarmed out and infected them with Neomorph eggs/embryos. The Covenant motes also look very similar to the motes we see swarming out of the Engineer in the Prometheus prologue as he is being disintegrated by the pathogen. We have this quote about those from John Spaith's on the Prometheus Blu Ray - "The black material that consumed him (the Engineer) transmuted into little scarab-like gnats that flew away across the earth…"
...and from the Covenant Novelization -
...each one was a cluster of tiny black motes preserved in something that that looked like amber.
"From the egg sacks came these parasites. Airborne, and gifted with a very primitive, but dutiful hive intelligence. Once released into the atmosphere they're relentless in their purpose. The shock troops of a genetic assault. Always searching for a potential host."
"Waiting for a host. Entering the host. Rewriting the DNA. And ultimately producing…well…these enviable unions. My beautiful bestiary."
The Captain could see frozen in place various stages of the pathogen's life cycle. Motes inserting feeding tubes into insect-sized subjects and pumping eggs into their unfortunate bodies. The eggs growing, hatching, and maturing, to finally burst free even from the diminutive hosts, only to begin the cycle again.
Reaching on to the table he (David) picked up what looked like black mold contained within a paper thin membrane, and playfully tossed it to Oram…Walking over to him, David ignored the gun as he took the stone hard egg sack from the momentarily petrified Oram. "Don't worry. It's fully ossified now. Completely inert and harmless."
THE PATHOGEN REWRITES THE DNA OF THE HOST, AND TAKES ON CHARACTERISTICS OF THE HOST
"Entering the host and rewriting the DNA, the pathogen produced mature offspring who's appearance and characteristics are wholly dependent upon the nature of the host itself. The progeny of a parasitized insect for example, will look very different from a creature that issues from a quadruped host."
This is why the ultramorph (deacon)/neomorph/xenomorph all have a humanoid shape and can walk upright, why the dog burster in Alien 3 primarily walked on all fours, and why the various alien experiments in David's lab resembled the animal hosts they were birthed from.
DAVID DID NOT "CREATE" ANYTHING, HE "ENGINEERED" WHAT ALREADY EXISTED
"...with nothing to occupy myself other than the compiling of a simple collection, I began to do a bit of genetic experimentation of my own. Simple cross-breeding, hybridizing, what have you. I like to think that the ill fate inhabitants of this world, the original Engineers, would gaze on my work with approval."
Oram - "You engineered these?" David - "Idle hands are the devils workshop."
Alan Dean Foster had this to say in an AVP podcast interview in 2017 - "David was working with material that had been left behind by the Engineers, and he’s been playing around with it...It is possible that the Engineers developed the xenomorph, or it is possible that David developed a more advanced version of the xenomorph".
We also have this quote from Ferran Domenech of MPC, who worked closely with Ridley on the design and effects work for the alien - "David spent years tinkering with the pathogen DNA and re-combining it to create the ‘Xenomorph’, a perfect organism. In the original 1979 ALIEN, the Xeno is a cool and stealthy killer. This made sense to us as he is a larger version of the bioweapon the Engineers designed in the Neomorph."
DAVID DID NOT CREATE THE EGG OR FACEHUGGER. THE ENGINEERS DID - this was already indicated by the fact that we see two facehuggers on the mural in Prometheus, which was thousands of years old. The novel just reaffirms that.
He gestured towards the end of the table. A sizable leathery egg shape sat there. It was separate from all the other specimens, as if occupying a place of honor...The interior revealed a motionless creature. All finger-like appendages and flattened body, with a muscular tail coiled beneath it as if it was ready to spring outward.
"In case you are wondering. I had nothing to do with it. It lies as I found it. A supreme example of the Engineers skill, and also I suppose, of their hubris. Would that I could create something so perfect in its function," he added. "I try, but I don't have thousands of years of practice at biological and genetic engineering. I have only my pitiable programming upon which to draw."
Note that the eggs in David's egg room look very different from the ones we saw in the derelict Juggernaut in Alien. The fact that the xenomorph in Covenant looks very different to the one in Alien indicates these are not (yet) that exact same type of egg.
THE PROTOMORPH WAS A RESULT OF DAVID'S CROSS-BREEDING, AN EARLY VERSION OF THE XENOMORPH - In Prometheus we saw a xenomorph-ish looking creature on the mural in the temple/head room. It had an elongated head like the other forms we have seen - ultramorph (deacon), neomorph, protomorph, and xenomorph. It also had smooth skin like the deacon and neomorph.
"Come. This is really what I wanted to show you. My successes."
David's contribution to the design seems to be the armored exoskeleton, considering all the other forms we have seen prior to that had smooth skin.
Also note that the resulting xenomorph-looking alien in Covenant does not look exactly like the one in Alien. This is an earlier version. That is not only apparent because of the design differences, but by the fact that the xeno's gestation period seems to be slightly faster and it is born fully formed, with all limbs, just as the dog/ox burster alien was in Alien 3. The Alien Covenant art department called this creature the Protomorph.
Alan Dean Foster wrote this about the proto xenomorph in Covenant. These are David's thoughts as he watches it being born from it's mother, Oram.
"It was already beginning to change, to mature, even before it had fully emerged. An advanced model possessed of a wildly accelerated rate of growth."
Saying "advanced model" implies the DNA and raw material already existed. Foster said FOX did not object and let that line stay in the book.
DAVID DID NOT DESTROY ALL THE ENGINEERS WITH HIS BOMBING - Remember the body of the Engineer posed upright in David's lab? It looked normal, other than the fact it was partially skinned, and was holding it's skin in one hand. Unlike the ones in the plaza, which were blacked and deformed.
"As you can see, my time here hasn't been wasted. It's in my nature to keep busy. Keep the mind exercised and all that, lest it fall prey to disorder from misuse." He indicated the massive body of the Engineer. "This specimen was particularly arduous to complete, and messy, you can imagine. Fortunately with thousands of examples from which to choose, I was able to practice on as many as I wished before finally getting this one right".
This implies that not all the Engineer's were killed by the bombing, but also raises more questions. Where were they and how did David subdue or kill them in order to experiment on them.
FOUR TYPES OF PATHOGEN
"The Pathogen was designed to infect all non-botanical life forms. All the animals, the "meat" if you will. Either kill them outright or use them as incubators to spawn a hybrid form, highly aggressive."
The dark liquid is a genetically engineered pathogen, presumed to be created by the Engineers, although Ridley and Damon Lindelof have indicated that may not be true. We have seen four different types of the pathogen in Covenant and Prometheus.
CREATION TYPE - In the Prometheus prologue we see a version of the pathogen which completely breaks down the host cells, re writes the DNA, and creates new types of fauna. The Engineers sacrificed themselves to "seed" worlds with new life using this version of the pathogen. Ridley has referred to them as gardeners. They seed a world, replace the fauna with their own creation, then come back periodically to tend to their garden.
This type appears to function by consuming living tissue and transmuting it into tiny black motes that fly away to infect other animals. We see them swarming out of the Engineers body as it disintegrates and John Spaiths described them as scarab-like gnats on the Blu Ray.
DESTRUCTIVE TYPE - This is the type we see David drop on the Engineer city in Covenant, It appears to break down and destroy tissue at a rapid pace, killing instantly. It leaves nothing but blackened tissue that appears to harden when dormant. This seems to be nothing more than a weapon to kill animal life.
This type appears to function with motes that become airborne and move collectively as a whole, similar to the type in the Prometheus prologue. In the movie we see the bombs drop from the Dreadnought and explode in mid air, releasing black clouds that hover in a thin layer. These clouds of motes then descend in swarming clouds, like a plague of locusts. These attack the Engineer bodies with a rapidly expanding infection that converts the tissue into more black fluid.
PARASITIC TYPE - This is the type that requires one of the Engineers infectious delivery organisms to infect a living host by planting a seed or egg inside a host. The two types we have seen are the tiny motes that move collectively as a whole, and the face hugger. Both are released from eggs - the motes from a small, spore like egg, and the facehugger from a large leathery egg.
That organism they implant in the host grows rapidly until it bursts out, killing the host. Lets call the resulting organism a Morph, for lack of a better term. We have nicknames for the various versions of the Morph we have seen - protomorph, neomorph, ultramorph (deacon), xenomorph.
From the Morph will come a new egg that grows a new delivery organism inside (face hugger being one type). We have yet to see the full cycle in a movie yet, but the director's cut of Alien shows us the xenomorph can grow eggs using human hosts as the raw material. Aliens shows us another way - an Alien queen that can create the eggs directly via a detachable womb.
Ridley indicated these have a short life span, and when there are no more hosts to infect, they die out. This is a parasitic incubator form of the Pathogen, designed to spawn hybrids, but it will also cleans a planet of all native animal life of specific types.
MUTATION TYPE - In Prometheus we see that one version of the pathogen, the type leaking from some of the urns in the temple/head room, can mutate the host and make it extremely aggressive. We saw this with Fifield's mutation, Holloway's mutation, and the mutation of the worms living in the soil of the temple room, which transformed into the hammerpede creatures, with the ability to quickly regenerate damage tissue. The organism(s) that infect the host appear to be tiny and worm-like. We see one protrude from Holloway's eye in Covenant.
It is also implied by the production designer that this version of the pathogen is what infected the decapitated Engineer in Prometheus - "Fifield was considered to be a mid point between the Deacon at the end and Hammerpede…the table where the head explodes, ultimately that’s going to happen to Fifield at some point. Whatever was happening to that Engineer is now happening to Fifield. His head is becoming horribly contorted. He is losing himself to the alien within him." - Arthur Max production designer
I assume this version was meant to be a weapon, but it may also be a mutation designed to propagate and create a customized delivery mechanism to infect more of the native host organisms.
Holloway was in the process of mutation when he had sex with Shaw. His DNA and that of his sperm had begun to be altered. The resultant organism birthed from Shaw was a type of face hugger, the delivery mechanism for the parasitic version of the pathogen.
Something like this may be how David created his own cross-bred version of the existing egg/facehugger using Shaw's DNA, Engineer DNA, and DNA from the native fauna.
I believe the accelerant is one in the same, just in different doses and methods of application change it’s resulting effect.
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