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bereft-of-frogs · 6 months

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friday! ✨

reading:

(in-progress) Jaw Bone - Monica Ojeda - This is an excellent follow-up to Yellowjackets in that it is about how teenage girls can and will start a cult, while an adult figure in their lives looks on in horror and then does something way worse. Also, the line "Why do [girls] love [their girl friends] so much that they would rather see them dead?" tell me that's not Shauna

(phone book) Into the Dark - Claudia Gray: omg I forgot how much I love Reath. This is legit making me considering pushing through my issues with Midnight Horizon because this can't be where we part ways. He's just so me. He stays behind for historiography. I loved historiography. He shows up kind of buzzed for an important journey. Do you know how many times I've gone through TSA still drunk? So many times. Ok not when I was 17 because I was kind of a square back then, but I for sure made up for it in my 20s. I love him. I think my issues with Midnight Horizon were 1) just being #done with forbidden romances. There are like 4 of them. I'd just read Gray's Lost Stars for book club (which was a disappointment). I don't love forbidden romances at the best of times and I was just over it. 2) some of the dialogue literally made me cringe it was so bad. But. I am considering powering through because Reath is just so me. I will say, this is probably because of my MH annoyance, but I do wish that Jora hadn't died, I think she was better for him than Cohmac is but...maybe that opinion will shift during this reread. I also really appreciate that this dodges some YA sins (unlike some others in this recap...👀 see below) by making a major theme be that the adults are equally as lost and stressed as our teenage protagonist. Like, they're sort of useless because yeah adults are also lost and confused sometimes, not just to get them out of the way of the plot. I just love the cut from Reath's POV being like 'look at them, they've got it all together, maybe when I'm an adult I won't feel so lost and uncertain' and then to all the adults' POVs being like '*internal screaming* what if I'm making a huge mistake.' I feel like, for me, this is what makes a YA book readable as a 30+ year old, treating the teen protagonist and the adult side characters with equal respect and depth.

Lord of the Rings chapter-a-day: I was supposed to finish this today, based on that blog's schedule, but once I fell behind I just decided to keep with the one chapter per day thing. Should finish by early next week and then I'm moving on to The Silmarillion to spite that one person who didn't believe the 'have you read this book' poll results. Many Partings today <3 ah.

watching (tv):

Severance (AppleTV+): I love how for like half an episode I was like 'idk this might not be such a bad idea' because I have a lot of work-related dreams and I'm like, hm but if I can't remember work, will have I have nightmares about it, and then the show immediately spent the rest of that episode and the three following being like 'hey this is a fucking horror show'. What a nightmare. Possibly the most disturbing show I've watched all year so far. Patricia Arquette's character is legit a little triggering haha.

watching (film):

the only movies I watched this week were all of the Hunger Games movies. They put them on Netflix. And. Look. I have such a complicated relationship with the Hunger Games series, some of you might be like 'um don't you bitch about that series quite frequently' yes. Also, when Netflix puts them on I WILL watch all of them. I saw the new one in theaters. I'm committed but. Hunger Games rant incoming, this is one of those things that has gotten a bit ruined by the fandom. Because I really enjoy it -- at least the first two -- I just don't think it's a masterpiece that is so deep it should be taught in high schools. It's pretty shallow actually. The first two books/movies are so fun, they're tropey and fun and a great angsty setting. (When I'm in a certain mood, oof, Hunger Games AUs? Hit so hard.) But they do indulge in some YA sins. Like not as many as the wave of knockoffs that followed, for sure, but they're there. The one that bothers me the most Katniss is both a blank slate for the reader to project on, and also the only one that's ever right. None of the other characters have depth or development just so that Katniss can be right all the time, even though by Mockingjay that just makes her seem like a hypocrite. Mockingjay, both the book and the unnecessary two-part conclusion, is just abysmal. But it feels like both my enjoyment of the tropey dystopian first two books and my dislike of Mockingjay, gets this response of 'you just don't get it, Suzanne Collins is playing 5D chess--' and I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. Anyway, this is but a fraction of the rant I could go on, Netflix tried to email me a little 'what did you think of The Hunger Games' survey and I was like, Netflix, babe, you don't know what you're asking. I also apologize to everyone who has to put up with my commentary whenever I put these on, the victim this time was @aurorawest thank you for putting up with my commentary. Also Gwendoline Christie is in the last one for like 2 minutes and cannot do an American accent so that was kind of endearing. Ok. End Hunger Games rant.

list:

guest-ready level clean of my apartment. we're mopping. we're doing the baseboards. we're making sure there's not any more butter on the walls (side note, I finally figured out how butter got on my wall: I was holding the butter knife in my right hand while picking up the bread in the toaster with the same hand and it tilted and gently brushed the wall exactly where I found the butter, so. no one asked by that's how butter got on my wall it's been like three days and I've been like....what happened here)

ECLIPSE DAY!!! I am both very excited and slightly stressed because the news has been like 'APOCALYPTIC CROWDS' but I do have to remember that my measurement for 'apocalypse-level crowds' has been shaped by almost exclusively living in places with much, much higher population density. So what I consider intolerable crowds and what the good citizens of this lovely state consider intolerable crowds...is slightly different. I definitely am anticipating a lot of traffic but I do think I need to recalibrate my understanding here. XD We'll see maybe it will be bad, but I have alternate routes planned, we'll have snacks, it'll be an adventure either way.

I have no other plans this is all I've been thinking about, this is the first thing I put in my calendar when I got it, I put in my PTO request in January lol

anyway, happy friday

#lists lists lists #long post

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harrison-abbott · 1 year

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Cristiano & Lionel

I wanted to write a lil thing about a ‘debate’ which I’ve always found bizarre:

Who is better: Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi?

This discussion has baffled me for fifteen years or so, and I find it odd to understand why so many people compare these two soccer athletes. So I thought I’d offer my opinion on it.

Who is the most attractive supermodel on the planet? Bianca Balti or Kate Bock … Hmm. How would you rate something like physical attractiveness? Is this possible? Because isn’t such a thing [finding a person physically pretty] based on subjective interest? You could compare Balti and Bock with, perhaps, the amount of money they earn and the amount of fashion shows they’ve achieved, or similar things. But why would that even matter?

People endlessly compare Cristiano and Lionel objectively. As to how many goals they have, and trophies won. Football icons are powerful people. Because soccer as a sport is the most popular on the planet; because they are famous, wealthy and successful: and lots of the eight billion folks on the globe covet such attributes.

At the same time: many people have zilch interest in soccer. Doesn’t intrigue them; they couldn’t care less. Instead they’re interested in pop stars or movie actors.

So which actor is the ‘best’? Or who is the greatest band in pop history?

Well – if you were to look at the music example objectively, it’d hands-down be The Beatles. But many, many folks say they despise the Beatles: can’t stand them. If you were to judge who is the finest writer it’d be William Shakespeare.

To know Bill Shakespeare personally, you would have to invent a time machine and travel back 400 years and go speak to him in a grimy part of London, where the entire population of the city drank from the same river that they used to dump their sewage in. Bill would not be able to understand what you were saying. Because Old English had a totally different accent to how English is verbally used today. This man would also be about five foot tall.

Furthermore, Shakespeare was deeply unhappy, and you can see this in his sonnets; which is the only autobiographical information we have of him. He was just as vulnerable as any of us are, and had a personal life in tatters. But in the modern age we know almost nothing about a man who changed the English language, and whose quotes and quips we still use in everyday talk, perhaps without realising it. [Football pundits love to use the phrase ‘comedy of errors’ when the defenders get all clumsy in the lead-up to conceding a goal.]

Cristiano Ronaldo was a man who built, paid for and directed a museum for himself. I.e., he made a building/museum and funded it personally, to prove how great he is. Does this sound like a man who feels secure with his own ego?

If you were to go back to the history of the Premier League, and ask fellow footballers/managers who they thought was the best player. Paul Scholes was regularly the number one. Thierry Henry, Zidane and Vieira all said that he was the top player. And they were part of that French clique which won the World Cup, Euros – alongside the famous Arsenal side that were victors in all kinds of ways too.

Paul Scholes wasn’t a star in the glitzy sense of the word. Not goodlooking like David Beckham was; hated that sense of celebrity. But Ferguson [the most successful football manager ever] said he was the best midfielder of his tenure.

My whole point is that there are many contradictions and ironies within fields like sport or artistic achievement, and many clashing opinions which don’t seem to make sense if you look at them in an alternative way.

Do you know the Andrei Tarkovsky films? I looked at a list of fan-voted TOP 100 movies ever, from magazines like Empire and Total Film, and the internet movie site IMDb. Not a single Tarkovsky movie features in any of these lists. Thus we can assume that they are not popular in a mass sense?

There was another poll conducted by the BFI whereby they asked 400 of the top directors internationally what their favourite films were. Two of Tarkovsky’s movies made their top 10. Indicating that Tarkovsky is perhaps a ‘filmmakers’ filmmaker’: in much of the same way that Scholes was a footballers’ footballer.

When people say things like ‘Ronaldo is better than Messi’, is it not the individual who is making a fallacy? By saying person X is superior to person Y, this is essentially negative and minimalistic. The comment is supposed to be provocative and offensive, in order to undermine the abilities of an athlete which the commentator does not have. And most of it is subconscious.

There is no ‘best’ sports athlete. Even if you analyse it objectively, it’s not quite possible to label one man or woman who is the greatest ever. It’s just that people like that idea – of being the most superb, the ultimate gladiator, whatever you wish to call it.

Those who have a larger sense of knowledge in a particular field tend to answer differently to people who have a smaller knack of information. And knowledge is the key to harnessing a threatened ego. They will be less fearful of famous people because they are wiser, and such comparisons between figures are made trivial. In short: they won’t be as judgemental.

When a mind has a spanning resource of information it tends to not think between subjectivity and objectivity as black & white slates; rather looks beyond both of them and focuses on further intellect, because that is boundless and unlimited.

Please can we stop comparing Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi? It’s so tiring, and people have missed the point for such a long time.

Fallacies like status get lost in history and individuals with ‘greatness’ are only as scared as the rest of us. Of course it’s hard to be less afraid of other people. But with learning we can grow a bit, expand, and keep on being informed, rather than judging others.

#writeblr #essay #oberservational writing #sociology #Lionel Messi #cristiano ronaldo #beatles #kate bock #bianca balti #paul scholes #ronaldo nazario #essays

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blackswaneuroparedux · 3 years

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Anonymous asked: I enjoyed reading your posts about Napoleon’s death and it’s quite timely given its the 200th anniversary of his death this year in May. I was wondering, because you know a lot about military history (your served right? That’s cool to fly combat helicopters) and you live in France but aren’t French, what your take was on Napoleon and how do the French view him? Do they hail him as a hero or do they like others see him like a Hitler or a Stalin? Do you see him as a hero or a villain of history?

5 May 1821 was a memorable date because Napoleon, one of the most iconic figures in world history, died while in bitter exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon Bonaparte, as you know rose from obscure soldier to a kind of new Caesar, and yet he remains a uniquely controversial figure to this day especially in France. You raise interesting questions about Napoleon and his legacy. If I may reframe your questions in another way. Should we think of him as a flawed but essentially heroic visionary who changed Europe for the better? Or was he simply a military dictator, whose cult of personality and lust for power set a template for the likes of Hitler?

However one chooses to answer this question can we just - to get this out of the way - simply and definitively say that Napoleon was not Hitler. Not even close. No offence intended to you but this is just dumb ahistorical thinking and it’s a lazy lie. This comparison was made by some in the horrid aftermath of the Second World War but only held little currency for only a short time thereafter. Obviously that view didn’t exist before Hitler in the 19th Century and these days I don’t know any serious historian who takes that comparison seriously.

I confess I don’t have a definitive answer if he was a hero or a villain one way or the other because Napoleon has really left a very complicated legacy. It really depends on where you’re coming from.

As a staunch Brit I do take pride in Britain’s victorious war against Napoleonic France - and in a good natured way rubbing it in the noses of French friends at every opportunity I get because it’s in our cultural DNA and it’s bloody good fun (why else would we make Waterloo train station the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening in 1994? Or why hang a huge gilded portrait of the Duke of Wellington as the first thing that greets any visitor to the residence of the British ambassador at the British Embassy?). On a personal level I take special pride in knowing my family ancestors did their bit on the battlefield to fight against Napoleon during those tumultuous times. However, as an ex-combat veteran who studied Napoleonic warfare with fan girl enthusiasm, I have huge respect for Napoleon as a brilliant military commander. And to makes things more weird, as a Francophile resident of who loves living and working in France (and my partner is French) I have a grudging but growing regard for Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy, especially when I consider the current dross of political mediocrity on both the political left and the right. So for me it’s a complicated issue how I feel about Napoleon, the man, the soldier, and the political leader.

If it’s not so straightforward for me to answer the for/against Napoleon question then it It’s especially true for the French, who even after 200 years, still have fiercely divided opinions about Napoleon and his legacy - but intriguingly, not always in clear cut ways.

I only have to think about my French neighbours in my apartment building to see how divisive Napoleon the man and his legacy is. Over the past year or so of the Covid lockdown we’ve all gotten to know each other better and we help each other. Over the Covid year we’ve gathered in the inner courtyard for a buffet and just lifted each other spirits up.

One of my neighbours, a crusty old ex-general in the army who has an enviable collection of military history books that I steal, liberate, borrow, often discuss military figures in history like Napoleon over our regular games of chess and a glass of wine. He is from very old aristocracy of the ancien regime and whose family suffered at the hands of ‘madame guillotine’ during the French Revolution. They lost everything. He has mixed emotions about Napoleon himself as an old fashioned monarchist. As a military man he naturally admires the man and the military genius but he despises the secularisation that the French Revolution ushered in as well as the rise of the haute bourgeois as middle managers and bureaucrats by the displacement of the aristocracy.

Another retired widowed neighbour I am close to, and with whom I cook with often and discuss art, is an active arts patron and ex-art gallery owner from a very wealthy family that came from the new Napoleonic aristocracy - ie the aristocracy of the Napoleonic era that Napoleon put in place - but she is dismissive of such titles and baubles. She’s a staunch Republican but is happy to concede she is grateful for Napoleon in bringing order out of chaos. She recognises her own ambivalence when she says she dislikes him for reintroducing slavery in the French colonies but also praises him for firmly supporting Paris’s famed Comédie-Française of which she was a past patron.

Another French neighbour, a senior civil servant in the Elysée, is quite dismissive of Napoleon as a war monger but is grudgingly grateful for civil institutions and schools that Napoleon established and which remain in place today.

My other neighbours - whether they be French families or foreign expats like myself - have similarly divisive and complicated attitudes towards Napoleon.

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle, who led France from exile during the German occupation in World War II and served as a postwar president.

The split in French opinion is closely mirrored in political circles. The divide is generally down political party lines. On the left, there's the 'black legend' of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the 'golden legend' of a strong leader who created durable institutions.

Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a history professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and president of the Napoléon Institute, once explained at a talk I attended that French public opinion has always remained deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France, Boudon observed, rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.

On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin penned a controversial best selling book entitled “the Napoleonic Evil” in which he accused the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination”, “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people. He wrote Napoleon was "an obvious failure" - bad for France and the rest of Europe. When he was booted out into final exile, France was isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, hated and smaller than before. What's more, Napoleon smothered the forces of emancipation awakened by the French and American revolutions and enabled the survival and restoration of monarchies. Some of the legacies with which Napoleon is credited, including the Civil Code, the comprehensive legal system replacing a hodgepodge of feudal laws, were proposed during the revolution, Jospin argued, though he acknowledges that Napoleon actually delivered them, but up to a point, "He guaranteed some principles of the revolution and, at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it," For instance, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in French colonies, revived a system that allowed the rich to dodge conscription in the military and did nothing to advance gender equality.

At the other end of the spectrum have been former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, an aristocrat who was once fancied as a future President, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, and author of several works on the subject. As a Napoleonic enthusiast he tells a different story. Napoleon was a saviour of France. If there had been no Napoleon, the Republic would not have survived. Advocates like de Villepin point to Napoleon’s undoubted achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralised and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centres of advanced learning known as école normale, chambers of commerce, the metric system, and an honours system based on merit (which France has to this day). He restored the Catholic faith as the state faith but allowed for the freedom of religion for other faiths including Protestantism and Judaism. These were ambitions unachieved during the chaos of the revolution. As it is, these Napoleonic institutions continue to function and underpin French society. Indeed, many were copied in countries conquered by Napoleon, such as Italy, Germany and Poland, and laid the foundations for the modern state.

Back in 2014, French politicians and institutions in particular were nervous in marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile. My neighbours and other French friends remember that the commemorations centred around the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the traditional home of the kings of France and was the scene where Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard in the "White Horse Courtyard" (la cour du Cheval Blanc) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. (The courtyard has since been renamed the "Courtyard of Goodbyes".) By all accounts the occasion was very moving. The 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau stripped Napoleon of his powers (but not his title as Emperor of the French) and sent him into exile on Elba. The cost of the Fontainebleau "farewell" and scores of related events over those three weekends was shouldered not by the central government in Paris but by the local château, a historic monument and UNESCO World Heritage site, and the town of Fontainebleau.

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, over a decade ago, the president and prime minister - at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin - boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest military victory. Both men were known admirers of Napoleon and yet political calculation and optics (as media spin doctors say) stopped them from fully honouring Napoleon’s crowning military glory.

Optics is everything. The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon” or “Place Napoleon” in Paris. On the streets of Paris, there are just two statues of Napoleon. One stands beneath the clock tower at Les Invalides (a military hospital), the other atop a column in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon's red marble tomb, in a crypt under the Invalides dome, is magnificent, perhaps because his remains were interred there during France's Second Empire, when his nephew, Napoleon III, was on the throne.

There are no squares, nor places, nor boulevards named for Napoleon but as far as I know there is one narrow street, the rue Bonaparte, running from the Luxembourg Gardens to the River Seine in the old Latin Quarter. And, that, too, is thanks to Napoleon III. For many, and I include myself, it’s a poor return by the city to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.

It's almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story.

How Napoleon fits into that national story is something historians, French and non-French, have been grappling with ever since Napoleon died. The plain fact is Napoleon divides historians, what precisely he represents is deeply ambiguous and his political character is the subject of heated controversy. It’s hard for historians to sift through archival documents to make informed judgements and still struggle to separate the man from the myth.

One proof of this myth is in his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world.

The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him.

It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a seminal book entitled Napoleon: For and Against, which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Post-Second World War Marxists would argue that he was not, in fact, revolutionary at all. Eric Hobsbawm, a notable British Marxist historian, argued that ‘Most-perhaps all- of his ideas were anticipated by the Revolution’ and that Napoleon’s sole legacy was to twist the ideals of the French Revolution, and make them ‘more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian’.

This contrasts deeply with the view William Doyle holds of Napoleon. Doyle described Bonaparte as ‘the Revolution incarnate’ and saw Bonaparte’s humbling of Europe’s other powers, the ‘Ancien Regimes’, as a necessary precondition for the birth of the modern world. Whatever one thinks of Napoleon’s character, his sharp intellect is difficult to deny. Even Paul Schroeder, one of Napoleon’s most scathing critics, who condemned his conduct of foreign policy as a ‘criminal enterprise’ never denied Napoleon’s intellect. Schroder concluded that Bonaparte ‘had an extraordinary capacity for planning, decision making, memory, work, mastery of detail and leadership’. The question of whether Napoleon used his genius for the betterment or the detriment of the world, is the heart of the debate which surrounds him.

France's foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, put forward the thesis that Bonaparte was the architect of modern France. "And I would say also pâtissier [a cake and pastry maker] because of the administrative millefeuille that we inherited." Oddly enough, in North America the multilayered mille-feuille cake is called ‘a napoleon.’ Tulard’s works are essential reading of how French historians have come to tackle the question of Napoleon’s legacy. He takes the view that if Napoleon had not crushed a Royalist rebellion and seized power in 1799, the French monarchy and feudalism would have returned, Tulard has written. "Like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, Napoleon wanted a dictatorship of public salvation. He gets all the power, and, when the project is finished, he returns to his plough." In the event, the old order was never restored in France. When Louis XVIII became emperor in 1814, he served as a constitutional monarch.

In England, until recently the views on Napoleon have traditionally less charitable and more cynical. Professor Christopher Clark, the notable Cambridge University European historian, has written. "Napoleon was not a French patriot - he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation," Clark believed Napoleon’s relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent.

Did he stabilise the revolutionary state or shut it down mercilessly? Clark believes Napoleon seems to have done both. Napoleon rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display. A month before crowning himself emperor, Napoleon sought approval for establishing an empire from the French in a plebiscite; 3,572,329 voted in favour, 2,567 against. If that landslide resembles an election in North Korea, well, this was no secret ballot. Each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was recorded, along with the name and address of the voter. Evidently, an overwhelming majority knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

His extravagant coronation in Notre Dame in December 1804 cost 8.5 million francs (€6.5 million or $8.5 million in today's money). He made his brothers, sisters and stepchildren kings, queens, princes and princesses and created a Napoleonic aristocracy numbering 3,500. By any measure, it was a bizarre progression for someone often described as ‘a child of the Revolution.’ By crowning himself emperor, the genuine European kings who surrounded him were not convinced. Always a warrior first, he tried to represent himself as a Caesar, and he wears a Roman toga on the bas-reliefs in his tomb. His coronation crown, a laurel wreath made of gold, sent the same message. His icon, the eagle, was also borrowed from Rome. But Caesar's legitimacy depended on military victories. Ultimately, Napoleon suffered too many defeats.

These days Napoleon the man and his times remain very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator seem to have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot. In his widely praised 2014 biography, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts writes: “The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman empire.”

Roberts partly bases his historical judgement on newly released historical documents about Napoleon that were only available in the past decade and has proved to be a boon for all Napoleonic scholars. Newly released 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote that still survive are now used extensively to illustrate the astonishing capacity that Napoleon had for compartmentalising his mind - he laid down the rules for a girls’ boarding school on the eve of the battle of Borodino, for example, and the regulations for Paris’s Comédie-Française while camped in the Kremlin. They also show Napoleon’s extraordinary capacity for micromanaging his empire: he would write to the prefect of Genoa telling him not to allow his mistress into his box at the theatre, and to a corporal of the 13th Line regiment warning him not to drink so much.

For me to have my own perspective on Napoleon is tough. The problem is that nothing with Napoleon is simple, and almost every aspect of his personality is a maddening paradox. He was a military genius who led disastrous campaigns. He was a liberal progressive who reinstated slavery in the French colonies. And take the French Revolution, which came just before Napoleon’s rise to power, his relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilise it or shut it down? I agree with those British and French historians who now believe Napoleon seems to have done both.

On the one hand, Napoleon did bring order to a nation that had been drenched in blood in the years after the Revolution. The French people had endured the crackdown known as the 'Reign of Terror', which saw so many marched to the guillotine, as well as political instability, corruption, riots and general violence. Napoleon’s iron will managed to calm the chaos. But he also rubbished some of the core principles of the Revolution. A nation which had boldly brought down the monarchy had to watch as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, with more power and pageantry than Louis XVI ever had. He also installed his relatives as royals across Europe, creating a new aristocracy. In the words of French politician and author Lionel Jospin, 'He guaranteed some principles of the Revolution and at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it.'

He also had a feared henchman in the form of Joseph Fouché, who ran a secret police network which instilled dread in the population. Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, stifling political opposition. Dozens of newspapers were suppressed or shut down. Books had to be submitted for approval to the Commission of Revision, which sounds like something straight out of George Orwell. Some would argue Hitler and Stalin followed this playbook perfectly. But here come the contradictions. Napoleon also championed education for all, founding a network of schools. He championed the rights of the Jews. In the territories conquered by Napoleon, laws which kept Jews cooped up in ghettos were abolished. 'I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France,' he once said, 'because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country.'

He also, crucially, developed the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws which replaced the messy, outdated feudal laws that had been used before. The Napoleonic Code clearly laid out civil laws and due processes, establishing a society based on merit and hard work, rather than privilege. It was rolled out far beyond France, and indisputably helped to modernise Europe. While it certainly had its flaws – women were ignored by its reforms, and were essentially regarded as the property of men – the Napoleonic Code is often brandished as the key evidence for Napoleon’s progressive credentials. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, 'the ideas that underpin our modern world… were championed by Napoleon'.

What about Napoleon’s battlefield exploits? If anything earns comparisons with Hitler, it’s Bonaparte’s apparent appetite for conquest. His forces tore down republics across Europe, and plundered works of art, much like the Nazis would later do. A rampant imperialist, Napoleon gleefully grabbed some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance, and allegedly boasted, 'the whole of Rome is in Paris.'

Napoleon has long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a field commander – his capacities as a military strategist, his ability to read a battle, the painstaking detail with which he made sure that he cold muster a larger force than his adversary or took maximum advantage of the lie of the land – these are stuff of the military legend that has built up around him. It is not without its critics, of course, especially among those who have worked intensively on the later imperial campaigns, in the Peninsula, in Russia, or in the final days of the Empire at Waterloo.

Doubts about his judgment, and allegations of rashness, have been raised in the context of some of his victories, too, most notably, perhaps, at Marengo. But overall his reputation remains largely intact, and his military campaigns have been taught in the curricula of military academies from Saint-Cyr to Sandhurst, alongside such great tacticians as Alexander the Great and Hannibal.

Historians may query his own immodest opinion that his presence on the battlefield was worth an extra forty thousand men to his cause, but it is clear that when he was not present (as he was not for most of the campaign in Spain) the French were wont to struggle. Napoleon understood the value of speed and surprise, but also of structures and loyalties. He reformed the army by introducing the corps system, and he understood military aspirations, rewarding his men with medals and honours; all of which helped ensure that he commanded exceptional levels of personal loyalty from his troops.

Yet, I do find it hard to side with the more staunch defenders of Napoleon who say his reputation as a war monger is to some extent due to British propaganda at the time. They will point out that the Napoleonic Wars, far from being Napoleon’s fault, were just a continuation of previous conflicts that arose thanks to the French Revolution. Napoleon, according to this analysis, inherited a messy situation, and his only real crime was to be very good at defeating enemies on the battlefield. I think that is really pushing things too far. I mean deciding to invade Spain and then Russia were his decisions to invade and conquer.

He was, by any measure, a genius of war. Even his nemesis the Duke of Wellington, when asked who the greatest general of his time was, replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.'

I will qualify all this and agree that Napoleon’s Russian campaign has been rightly held up as a fatal folly which killed so many of his men, but this blunder – epic as it was – should not be compared to Hitler’s wars of evil aggression. Most historians will agree that comparing the two men is horribly flattering to Hitler - a man fuelled by visceral, genocidal hate - and demeaning to Napoleon, who was a product of Enlightenment thinking and left a legacy that in many ways improved Europe.

Napoleon was, of course, no libertarian, and no pluralist. He would tolerate no opposition to his rule, and though it was politicians and civilians who imposed his reforms, the army was never far behind. But comparisons with twentieth-century dictators are well wide of the mark. While he insisted on obedience from those he administered, his ideology was based not on division or hatred, but on administrative efficiency and submission to the law. And the state he believed in remained stubbornly secular.

In Catholic southern Europe, of course, that was not an approach with which it was easy to acquiesce; and disorder, insurgency and partisan attacks can all be counted among the results. But these were principles on which the Emperor would not and could not give ground. If he had beliefs they were not religious or spiritual beliefs, but the secular creed of a man who never forgot that he owed both his military career and his meteoric political rise to the French Revolution, and who never quite abandoned, amidst the monarchical symbolism and the court pomp of the Empire, the republican dreams of his youth. When he claimed, somewhat ambiguously, after the coup of 18 Brumaire that `the Revolution was over’, he almost certainly meant that the principles of 1789 had at last been consummated, and that the continuous cycle of violence of the 1790s could therefore come to an end.

When the Empire was declared in 1804, the wording, again, might seem curious, the French being informed that the `Republic would henceforth be ruled by an Emperor’. Napoleon might be a dictator, but a part at least of him remained a son of the Enlightenment.

The arguments over Napoleon’s status will continue - and that in itself is a testament to the power of one of the most complex figures ever to straddle the world’s stage.

Will the fascination with Napoleon continue for another 200 years?

In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which, among other First Empire artworks, houses a plaster model of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor astride a horse, has described France's fascination with him as ‘a national illness.’ He believes that the people who met him were fascinated by his charm. And today, even the most hostile to Napoleon also face this charm. So there is a difficulty to apprehend the duality of this character. As he wrote, “He was born from the revolution, he extended and finished it, and after 1804 he turns into a despot, a dictator.”

In France, Guégan aptly observes, there is a kind of nostalgia, not for dictatorship but for strong leaders. "Our age is suffering a lack of imagination and political utopia,"

Here I think Guégan is onto something. Napoleon’s stock has always risen or fallen according to the vicissitudes of world events and fortunes of France itself.

In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's about the industrial revolution. Man does not make history. History makes men. Or does it? The study of history makes a mug out of those with such simple ideological driven conceits.

For two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain as he has swung like a pendulum according to the gravitational pull of historical events and forces.

The question I keep asking of myself and also to French friends with whom I discuss such things is what kind of Napoleon does our generation need?

Thanks for your question.

#question #ask #napoleon #french #french history #history #military history #bonaparte #france #historiography #republic #historians #personal

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felassan · 4 years

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Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 1

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler played DAO, specifically the mage Origin. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, or personal accessibility reasons). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into DA2 and DAI. Some of it is info which is known having been out there already, some of it is new, and all of it imo was really interesting! It leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

Note on how future streams in this series are going to work: The streams are going to be every Friday night. Most likely, every week, they’re going to play DAO. Every second week it will be Liam and DG and they’ll be doing more of this developer commentary style/way of doing things, talking about how the game was made as they play through, covering quirks and quibbles etc. Every other week, it will be Liam and a guest playing a different campaign in DAO, and Liam will be talking with them about how DA changed their lives or led them into game development, to get other peoples’ thoughts on the series (as it’s now been like 10 years). Some of these guests we may know, some we won’t. When other DA devs are brought on, it’ll be in the DG sessions. They hope to have PW and Karin Weekes on at some point. Sometime they hope to have an episode where they spend the whole time going through the lore.

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

DAO’s development actually finished up around April 2009. They then put it on ice for around six months before release. Human Noble is DG’s favorite Origin. It’s one of the ones he wrote. He also wrote the Dalish Origin as well (Tamlen is his doing ;__;). DAO’s temp name during development was Chronicles. DG has never played any of the DA games after they were released. He played them pre-release loads of times, when they were half-broken or incomplete etc. This stream is his first time seeing everything played after completion.

NWN: Hordes of the Underdark was the first game where DG was a/the lead writer, in charge of other writers, as opposed to a senior writer. It was pretty well-received. In the fall of 2003, BW were just finishing up HotU when James Ohlen came to DG to talk. BW had been having issues during the development of NWN with the IP holder for D&D Wizards of the Coast, so they were interested in starting their own IPs that they would have ownership over (and also for financial reasons). JO said to DG that one of these new IPs would be fantasy and one would be sci-fi. He knew that DG was more fantasy-oriented, and so asked DG if he wanted to take this on. DG was down, and the first thing to figure out was what that fantasy IP was going to be.

JO gave DG an atlas of European history, which he still has, and said that he wanted him to make a fantasy world that is reminiscent of medieval Europe and reminiscent of D&D - “make it like D&D but not, file off the serial numbers really well”. This worked for DG because he was pretty familiar with D&D and there were also lots of things that he didn’t like about it and wanted to change. So DG went off and for the next six months worked on creating a setting, beginning with documentation and the map. This was kinda strange because they had no idea at that time what their story would be. JO was very interested in having a “genetically evil” enemy in the setting (like an equivalent to orcs). DG wasn’t a big fan of this and his initial go at the setting omitted this (i.e. darkspawn were not a thing) and was a lot more realistic. JO insisted on adding them later on.

This period of development wasn’t actually a good process. There were other people who were working on the project who were designing the combat side. Looking back, DG feels that they should have put their heads together a lot sooner. The combat designers had various ideas for various prestige classes and subclasses, and DG would be like “these are nowhere in the setting [lore]”. He tried his best to add a few of them after the fact, which is why we see things like DA’s version of the bard archetype. The combat designers and artists originally had a vision in mind of a game that was much more along the lines of the type of fantasy you’d find in the Conan the Barbarian world - bare-chested barbarians, sorceresses that show a lot of skin, a grimdark world with barbarian hordes. They were just assuming that’s what it was going to be. At this point in time DG had never thought, “Oh, maybe I’m responsible for communicating my ideas to them” - he’d never done this role before and was just told to go create the world. He created world-building documentation and would send out emails saying “I’m making this documentation, please go ahead and take a look”, not learning until later on that nobody outside of the writing team really likes reading such documentation. He learned tricks later on like making the docs more accessible, less dense and wordy, and overall easier to peruse.

There was no real ‘vision holder’ for DA. Mass Effect did a much better job of that. Casey Hudson was the project director and the vision holder for ME, and he had the power to enforce a set vision of what was and was not ME. ME therefore ended up having a bit more of a coherent vision. DG was in essence the vision holder for DA, but he didn’t really have the authority to enforce it on the artists. The DA teams ended up spending a good 3.5 - 4 years of the ~6 years of DAO dev time going in circles, not exactly sure what they were going to make, the various people working on it having different ideas of what ‘kind’ of fantasy they were going to make. The writing team were leaning towards LoTR; the artists were leaning towards Conan; at one point one of the project directors was leaning towards a point-and-click Diablo-style action adventure; and nobody was overriding anybody else.

The fans who hang out on the forums and in similar places have a very different idea about what kind of game they like and want to play versus the telemetry BW get from the public in general. As an example, fans on the forums tend towards playing non-humans and feeling that playing as a human is boring. Forum-polls reflected that, but BW’s general public-telemetry shows that around 75-80% of the playerbase played a human in DAO. Elves were at 15% and dwarves 5%. In contrast, in the core/forum-based fanbase, the human figure dropped down to 30%.

DG originally wanted Zevran to be a gay romance (he has talked about this before). He asked JO if he could do that pretty early on, thinking of Jade Empire which had same-gender romance options which were really popular. BW were surprised about that, and DG had no idea that the JE team were going to do this. For DAO, he had an idea for an assassin character. He had been reading about how the CIA and KGB would often recruit gay men to be their assassins, as they didn’t tend to have family ties. DG thought this was really interesting. JO was cool with the idea on a conceptual level, but thought that the work that would end up going into it would be better served if those characters could be romanced by both male and female PCs. Zevran and Leliana weren’t intended to be bi, they were “bi out of convenience”, but at the time these sorts of things (representation and such) didn’t enter into the equation as much as it does today. DG wrote Zevran in his head as being romanceable by men.

DG would ask the hair artists, “Why all the mullets?”, because he never understood that, and he’d get “a sort of shrug response”, and an indication that “it’s easier to model, I guess?” Having hair which is loose, in the face, in locks, coming over the shoulders etc wasn’t really supported at this point by the tech or the engine. Hence, they ended up with like five different versions of mullets. On the subject of the engine, for the first half of development they were using an upgraded version of the Aurora engine from NWN, and it was not good. Several years in they decided to switch. Trent Oster was in charge at the time of making a new proprietary BW engine. At the time it wasn’t ready yet, but the DA team decided to grab it, use it and hammer it into the DA engine. That engine had “so many little weird quirks”, like lighting on skin not working properly and looking bad, and one of the issues was hair. It was supposed to be BW’s proprietary engine but it really wasn’t optimized for RPGs and didn’t include a dialogue system. They had to custom-build the conversation system. (At the time Trent didn’t think BW should be doing RPGs anymore, which is a whole other story of its own). DG recalls programmers complaining about things in the engine that weren’t ready for ‘prime-time’. Even compared to games released concurrently, DAO’s graphics were a bit dated.

For the worldbuilding, they had an internal wiki and they kept everything on there. They ended up with a lot of legacy documentation on there very quickly. Eventually they solved this by hiring an editor whose sole job it was to wrangle the documentation. DG started work on the setting in the same manner in which he’d embark on starting a homebrew - ‘so like, first, here’s a map, oh, I like this name, vague ideas, a paragraph on each major nation, a rough timeline of the history, expanding, and it just growing from there’. After about six months, they brought on other writers, and by then he had around 50 pages of documentation. This 50 pages was a minute amount compared to the amount they had generated at the time of release. Originally, they weren’t sure where in the world specifically the story would take place, so DG made sure to seed potential and brewing conflicts throughout Thedas. They settled quite quickly on the new Blight starting in Ferelden. Once they established that, the writers went to town on taking Ferelden specifically and blowing it up detail-wise. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of the dwarves and Orzammar. Mary Kirby was on Fereldan customs and traditions.

The first version of the setting was more grounded in realism, almost like a post-fantasy. The dragons and griffons were extinct and a lot of the things that were thought to be fantastical were thought to be over with. During development, they started clawing these things back. They brought back dragons because the game was named Dragon Age (lol). DG was approached like, “Hey, we named the game DA, can you bring back dragons and weave them into the story more powerfully?” Wynne’s writer Sheryl Chee had a bit of an obsession with griffons and was often like ‘omg, griffons :D’, and this is the origin of Wynne’s dialogue with the Warden about griffons.

KotOR was the first time BW had tried to do a game that was fully voiced-over. For KotOR, BW sent the work of casting, direction and so on down to another studio in California called Technicolor. BW had little say in the process then and when they got it back, “it was what it was”. By the time they got to DA and the first ME, BW had a good system down for recording and VO had become an important thing in games at the time. BW are really one of the premieres for this, a lot of actors really like acting on BW games as they get a lot of space to act where they wouldn’t normally be able to do so otherwise. DG has learned a lot from Caroline Livingstone on how to encourage the best performance out of an actor. For DAO, DG worked together with the various lead designers and Caroline to decide on the auditions, casting etc. This was one of DG’s favorite things to do.

Gideon Emery as Fenris, GDL as Solas and Eve Myles as Merrill were times where DG had written the character and then went to Caroline and said “I have an actor in mind for them, can you check it out?” These were specific times where he was able to secure the actor he wanted. This didn’t always work out, for example there are times when actors aren’t interested or have no time due to scheduling conflicts or were too expensive etc. Eve and GDL were DG’s roommate Cori’s idea. Cori was a big fan of Torchwood/the actors from Torchwood, and worked as an editor at BW for a long time. Gideon was DG’s idea after playing FF12. For DAO, DG didn’t have any specific ideas in terms of actors. Casting Morrigan was the longest, most drawn out process.

The Circle went through a whooole process during worldbuilding. Initially, mages in the game weren’t supposed to have any “fighting magic”. The restrictions were originally such that in the lore, they didn’t teach mages that. Mages weren’t taught any magic that could kill people, only ‘indirect’ forms of magic that could support others. However, [during what sounds like] playtesting it was asked “Why can’t I cast a fireball? I just want to cast a fireball”, so the writers had to go back and rework how magic in the lore worked completely.

Flemeth was originally going to be voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, and she was totally on-board, but unfortunately because of DAO’s development delays, she was unable to attend the new recording time as she had a conflict in her schedule (she was filming House of Sand and Fog). Shoreh was quite disappointed about this and her family had been so excited that she was going to be in a video game. When the movie was finished, Shoreh came back to BW and let them know that she was still available, and this is how she ended up in ME2. For a while they were trying to find an actress with an accent that authentically mirrored Shoreh’s. Out of the blue around this time, Claudia Black’s agent sent BW an audition tape of her. At the time Claudia hadn’t done any games but wanted to get into it. The tape was of Claudia doing a beat poet rendition of Baby Got Back. DG still has this tape. DG was a big fan of Farscape and on listening to the tape, it clicked right away in his head that Claudia would be perfect for Morrigan.

The Fade ended up being a big irritation for the writers. They wanted the PC to be able to assume different forms and such while in there. A lot of this stuff proved too difficult for the combat designers to work out, and so it ended up getting changed a lot. They had a hard time coming up with gameplay that could work in the Fade. The mage Origin is DG’s least favorite of the Origin stories, as he’s really dubious about the Fade section in it. It didn’t work out like how they had pictured it in their heads. By the time they got to DAI, that’s when the Fade really looks like how the writers first described/envisioned it. By this point the artists were more keen to give it a more specific feel. DAO was made at a time when ‘brown is realistic’ was a prevailing thing in games dev.

The experience of a mage in the world isn’t represented or conveyed very well to the player when the player is a mage. The experience of the player when they’re playing a mage or have a mage in their party doesn’t really match up with how the world lore tells them how dangerous mages can be - for example, how they can lose control and so on, we never really have an example of a PC mage struggling with being taken over by a demon. This was originally supposed to be a subplot in DA2 for mage Hawkes, in one of the last cuts. In Act 2, mage Hawke was originally slowly being tricked by a demon in their head that they thought was real, only to realize at the last minute. Mouse the Pride demon in the mage Origin is the only time in the entire series that they really ever properly demonstrated how demons can fuck with [PC] mages. Also, PC templars were originally supposed to have a permanent lyrium addiction that they needed to ‘feed’, but this was scrapped as the system designers weren’t keen on it and felt that it was essentially handicapping the player.

Mages were originally also not supposed to be able to deal with pure lyrium (it would ‘overload’ them). There is a plot where mage PCs run around touching lyrium nodes to refill their mana bars. On this DG was like “Wtf is this?” The designers said that it works, and DG said “but it flies in the face of the lore”. This instance is an example of how the DA team was working where the various departments (writers, artists, designers etc) all had their own ideas about how the game and its world would work and never overrode each other (see above). DG feels that DAO is a little contradictory in that way. It’s only after the game came out that a lot of the people on the team really “bought into” what they’d put forward. This got easier as they went on, with people involved buying then into the things that make Dragon Age, Dragon Age. At one point, not everyone on the team was even aware of those things.

DG relates that originally, they would ask the artists, “Ok, can we get a village?” and said village once created would be quite generic and non-specific to DA. The writers would try to relate how things are in the DA world and list things that would be found in a village like this specific to the DA world, and the artists either didn’t read it or had their own ideas (DG isn’t sure which), and nobody was around to tell them not to do that and that they should do it differently. Everyone having their own ideas like this is why we ended up getting something that is this sort of “cobbled together half-Conan half-LotR mish-mash”, and after a while this sort of became DA’s “thing”.

Initially, BW had concepts drawn up for a lot more different creatures. After they went in circles for those years and consequently ran out of time to do all the models, they had to cut these concepts down more and more. Demons were among the ones that were the first to go (this is why we have situations like a bereskarn as the Sloth Demon in the mage Origin). The original concepts for things like spirits of Valor and Sloth demons were really good. Early on, JO made a list of D&D creatures that he liked. He picked the ones that they were thinking of doing, sent them to DG and said to make a “DA version of this”. For example, D&D succubi essentially became Desire Demons. Desire Demons were originally patterned off Sandman, neither male nor female yet really alluring, acting more like a genie and trying to ferret out mortals’ inner desires (which are not necessarily sexual in nature), without being overtly sexual. The artists’ version came back and that was basically the model seen in-game. The writers were like “What is this, this is nothing like the description?” and the artists responded that on the list from JO, it was included, in that you had to click on “succubus” to get to the Desire Demon description, so they had just read “succubus” and done their version of a succubus. The artists did loads of great work, but this was one of the instances were DG was like “???” By then, it was too late to change it. The writers were able to encourage them to make Desire Demons a little more fearsome, so that made it in at least.

The mage Origin was one of the more contentious Origin stories. It had like 4 different versions written of it over time. It was often the case that BW would hire someone, and writing an Origin story was their first test. Three different writers came in and wrote a version of the mage Origin and those versions just didn’t work. Finally they passed it to Sheryl Chee and she wrote it. The Origins were the parts of the game in general that were written/rewritten the most often. There were several others that got written that they discarded.

Duncan was slated for death from Day 1. When DG writes a story, the thing he does first is pick out the big emotional beats that he wants, such as deaths. He decides these ahead of time and the stuff in-between comes later and is more often changed. Oghren was also originally supposed to die, but this ended up getting cut. DG related a story of how Oghren came to be: At the time, there was a phase JO went through when he thought everything had a formula that it could be done by. One of these ‘creative forumulas’ was that all such IPs had a two-word name that they’re known by, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonlance (being Dragon-Lance). This is how ‘DA’ and ‘ME’ came to be. One of the formulas he wanted to implement was how to distill the ‘comedy character’, like Minsc or HK-47. These characters were very popular with the fans and JO was certain that there was a way to figure this out to create one for DA. At the time, DG argued with him a lot about this. JO insisted it could be done. DG was originally supposed to write this character but ended up not doing so. JO came up with a list of comedic archetypes and had DG write a blurb about what kind of character each could be. These were then sent out to the team who voted on which was their favorite. This process eventually resulted in an archetype basically called ‘The Buffoon’ (think Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, the kind of guy people laugh at because he’s such an oaf).

At this point ‘The Buffoon’ wasn’t named or made a dwarf yet. JO came to DG to write him, but DG said there was a problem which is that he hates this archetype. Homer and Peter are characters that he despises. DG is a professional writer, but this was comedy (outside of his areas of strength), and he felt the best he would be able to do is write a character who makes fun of this archetype and lampshade that. Comedy is something that has to come from within the writer. Oghren was given to someone else, and he ended up getting rewritten again anyway. By the time they were working on Awakening, DAO had not yet come out, and the assumption prior to the game going out was that Oghren was still going to be the most popular character from among the followers. The comedic character that ended up being the most popular along these lines was Alistair, which was interesting as he wasn’t intended as a comedic character, “so shows what we know”. DG was dubious that Oghren was going to be popular, because “he was kind of pathetic, honestly”, but that was the thinking at the time. Thinking he would be well-loved is why he was in Awakening.

On Alistair, any character DG writes is going to be sarcastic. At the time DG had made it a sort of personal challenge to recreate Joss Whedon’s dialogue patterns in his characters. Alistair was a sort of mish-mash of Xander from Buffy and maybe Mal from Firefly. DG wanted to see if he could do it, so Alistair was kind of quippy and self-deprecating. DG never really considered this to be Alistair’s main personality feature, but when other writers wrote him, they often had him doing this, as they liked the trait so much, and so this is how Alistair ended up as he did.

On dwarves, the dwarves being cut off from the Fade is very much baked into who the dwarves are as a race. There’s a specific reason why. This has been hinted at so far and it’s likely to come up in the future. DG had various ideas for some things that he wanted to include with the races or the way the world works etc. Some of them ended up never happening or some are mentioned only as part of the lore (templar lyrium addiction never coming up in gameplay is an example of this). Dwarven history and the nature of the dwarves is one of the things that survived pretty well though. DG calls Jennifer Hepler “mistress of the dwarves” and says that she did a really detailed, amazing breakdown of their history. After Jennifer left it was Mary Kirby, and DG feels that they did a good job of maintaining how dwarves were, in terms of both how they’re often presented in fantasy and yet also quite different in DA. Orzammar is one of DG’s favorite plots all together. You can really tell that Jennifer Hepler really enjoyed the dwarves and brought a lot of love to that plot.

DG draws a distinction between DA fans and the unpleasant people who harassed Jennifer Hepler.

They managed to keep the Tranquil in. There was a while there where they were going to be cut. At the same time, DG regrets that they couldn’t solve the making of the player more aware of how mages are dangerous, thing. Players could make a cogent argument like “they’re not that dangerous, look at me [mage PC]” and the writers were like “well... yeah, that is fair”. It was a case of showing one thing and the player experience of it being another. DG feels that this made the templars come off worse than they are. DG feels that they are being massively unfair and too extreme in their approach to the problem, but the problem itself is a real thing. He feels that there’s some merit/truth in the argument that mages are oppressed, but he looks at it more like an issue like gun control rather than as treatment of oppressed people, saying that we don’t have an example in real life of oppressed people who can explode into demons and cast fireballs and so on.

There are some funny pronunciations that worked their way into DA, and the reason for a lot of them is as follows: the writers had to create a pronunciation guide for VO, because otherwise you end up with a lot of inconsistencies. (Some did still slip through). The guide was online, and if you clicked on a word, an audio file for it would play. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of this and did a great job, but has a really strong NY accent, and in some cases the ‘NY-ness’ of her pronunciation endearingly worked itself into things (the way Arlathan is sometimes said is an example of where this happened sometimes).

Sometimes the writers trying to communicate the “hotness” of a character to the artists didn’t go smoothly. The writers would sometimes say things like, ok, this character is a romance, they need to be hot, and the designs would come back looking “like Burt Reynolds”, and the writers would be like “???” And then a character that wasn’t particularly intended to be hot, as in that wasn’t mentioned at all in the descriptions of them, would come back “accidentally hot”, and the writers would be like “Why couldn’t you have done this when we were asking for a character that was meant to be hot”, and the artists would be like “What?? He’s not hot”. And this became a thing (lmao - this discussion was prompted by DG being asked “Was Duncan meant to be that hot?”, for context). Some of the artists were so paranoid about their [in]ability to judge actually-hot characters that when it was time to pick an appearance, like for Alistair, they gathered up all the women at BioWare, and DG (“resident gay”) into a room to show them an array of faces and bodies like “Is this hot? Is this hot?” DG and co would sit there like, “How can you not tell? Is this a straight man thing?!” Anyways, this is why oftentimes we ended up with characters who are accidentally hot.

Over time, the writers realized that the way they communicated to artists needed to be managed better. The words they would use would have different connotations to them the writers, than what they did to the artists. For example, for Anders’ design in DA2, he was supposed to be “a little haggard”. When DG thinks of haggard, he thinks ‘a little tired, mussed hair, looking like you’ve been through some shit’. But the artists based on that produced concepts with super sunken cheeks, looking like he’d been terribly starved. The writers needed to develop a specific vocabulary for communicating with the artists, as artists think in terms of how something looks, but writers are thinking in terms of what the character “is”. Anders’ description talked about his history a lot, and the one visual-type word that jumped out was “haggard” due to its visual connotations. “A lot it came down to the writers being up their/our own asses.”

When they got to DAI, they had figured out that the way to get best results on this front was /not/ to have the writer go off and develop a long description and pre-conceived notion of what the character looked like in their head. In such scenarios artists don’t feel that they have much to contribute to the process or an ability to put their own stamp on who this character is and make them interesting to them (the best, most interesting characters are when people at all stages of the pipeline properly get to feed into it). They learned that the better solution was to bring the artists in earlier, and to give them little blurbs, and not name the character but give them an ‘archetype’-sort of ‘name’. For example, Dorian was “the rockstar mage”, “cool”, “Freddie Mercury”. The writers wouldn’t be sure that a particular concept would ‘hit’, so at this stage they would offer an array of options and sit the artist down and walk them through the concepts. The artists would then provide a bunch of sketches and it would go back and forth, with both taking part in the character creation process together. For the first two games, the writers were “really hogging” this process to themselves. They got better at not doing this and better at communicating with the artists by DAI.

There were a lot of arguments about how mages in DAO had a lot of specific lore words like “Harrowing”, “phylactery”, “Rite of Tranquility” etc. There was concern that this would be too confusing for players to understand and that it was too complicated. DG says that thankfully he put his foot down and pushed for this stuff to be kept. A lot of fans assume that as lead writer DG had all this influence, way more influence than he could possibly exert on a team. He wasn’t even a lead, he was a sub-lead, under a lead designer. He only had so much say. If the lead designer or lead artist wanted to do something differently, often there was not much he could do. Hence he had to pick his battles carefully, choose the important ones to fight. The mage vocabulary thing was one of these.

Templar Greagoir’s name is pronounced “Gregor” and it comes from a place in Alberta near where DG lived.

Codex entries are usually one of the last things that get done in a project like this, and so all of that kind of textual lore comes in super late and is super punchy as by then the writers have written so much and are exhausted. They had to find a way to make this process cute or interesting or fun for themselves, which is why a lot of entries are quite fun to read. Sometimes a writer would make a joke for banter [irl], and it would end up making it into an entry.

Only Morrigan and Duncan got unique body models in DAO. The companions all have custom-morphed heads but not custom-morphed bodies (Morrigan not included here). This is why every model has a necklace or a collar right at the point where they had to be attached to be a body. These sometimes used assets that couldn’t be used by the PC but were not unique to that character. Duncan probably got a unique model because he was in a lot of marketing/promotional material. Qunari were originally conceived as having horns.

Most people didn’t even finish DAO once (public telemetry again here), only approximately 20-25% actually did. The devs try not to read too much into this kind of thing, but the telemetry does tell them where a lot of people stop playing the game permanently (they call these “drop-off points”). One of these points in DAO is the Fade during Broken Circle. Sometimes when people interpret this data they involve self-serving biases, but it was generally accepted that the Fade there was too long, too complex, not interesting enough, etc. [source]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[��Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

#dragon age #bioware #morrigan #solas #video games #queen of my heart #mass effect #lgbtq #jade empire #fenris #the Fenaissance #alistair theirin #lul #fav warden

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famedroleplayarchive · 3 years

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As promised, here’s an admin update post. This addresses several topics you all probably knew were coming and might have been waiting for the answers on, as well as some other topics, additions, and changes! Please take your time to read this thoroughly, and thanks again for four years of Famed! There’s a lot here, so take your time reading it.

URL change

The main blog’s URL has changed to famedroleplay. Some links are still being updated, but if you notice anything still links back incorrectly after a week or so, please do let me know!

Faceclaims

After hearing out the opinion of everyone who shared theirs regarding banning faceclaims involved in bullying scandals and taking that into consideration, face claims will be banned if they are linked to outside crimes or severe such as sexual assault, molka, or bullying in connection to suicide / suicide attempts. This means the initial ban on actor Kim Jisoo and April members Kim Chaewon, Lee Naeun, Yang Yena, Lee Jinsol, and and ex-member Jeon Somin remain in tact.

Bullying allegations not linked to these outside factors will still be grounds for someone to be allowed to ask to change a faceclaim before their faceclaim change waiting period is up, though, if they are uncomfortable continuing to use a faceclaim because of bullying allegations. If a faceclaim leaves the industry and/or removes themselves from the public eye for the foreseeable future for any reason, they are also still unusable, but this rule was already in place.

As for how this will affect parts of the roleplay other than faceclaims, please see the section further down about Element. Two April songs (”Oh My Mistake!” and “Love Clock”) were previously used for the first season of base’s COLLA3ORATE. These will be retroactively replaced with Elris’s “Jackpot” and “Like I Do” respectively, but if you had a muse involved in “Oh My Mistake” and would prefer to remove them from COLLA3ORATE season one entirely, just message me and they will be removed. I assigned the lines trying to match the positions and line distributions up similarly, but if your muse was involved and you’d like to keep them in “Jackpot” but want to switch to an untaken position, you’re welcome to request that as well. Otherwise, any references to that can simply use those songs instead now.

Element update

Due to the recent allegations involving Somin, a major revamp of Element has had to be conducted. After discussing the situation with the current muns of the group, the past model discography of Element has been replaced using Checkmate, K-Tigers Zero, and Lucky J, and they will be making their final comeback on April 12. After those promotions end, Element will be disbanded and the members will re-debut later in the year in a boy group, Quicksilver, with model groups of Ateez and Treasure and a girl group, Marigold, with model groups of BVNDIT and Melody Day with two new members each. The Element spots have been reopened, but the new positions in the new groups won’t be opened until after Element have finished promoting. This will be a major plotline for the roleplay and Gold Star in particular so expect to see it brought up in schedules and in some articles on the Exclusive blog as the storyline unfolds.

The new debuts in Quicksilver and Marigold will be available on May 13.

Fuse’s model discography update

Thanks to everyone’s suggestions, I was able to find two groups to add to Fuse’s model discography that I felt could align with their sound, direction, storyline, and positions enough to be happy with for now. These groups are Cherry Bullet and Weki Meki. The updated line distribution can be found on Fuse’s page.

There are other groups I’m looking into adding onto the model discographies of, but Fuse was the most urgent, so they’re the only official update I have today!

Canon soloists

Ultimately, after the poll, more people voted to remove canon soloists than to keep them, and they are officially being removed from the roleplay.

Those discographies previously used for the soloists will begin to be open for points claims at midnight/12AM EDT on April 12.

With the removal of canon soloists, the plan is to allow a solo music career to become a more prominent claiming option, and there are plans for some additional claim options to become available in relation to such a career, but those will be added and addressed at a later time.

As for storylines linked to some of the soloists, this is how those will be retconned:

BC Soloist 1: Instead of BC signing and debuting a known Gold Star trainee, BC hired a high profile creative director from Gold Star known from working with Gold Star since their inception and had worked on some of their most defining comebacks and announced she would be taking over as one of the company’s main creative directors. She has since worked on conceptualizing several group’s comeback as well as most heavily on Chroma’s pre-debut project.

Dimensions Soloist 3: Instead of Dimensions buying out a small and brand new company created by a crew of popular music producers with one soloist who they transferred to their label, in early 2020, Dimensions bought out a music production company that was created by a top music production team with several rising producers signed with them and made the producers in-house producers for Dimensions. Since then, the new producers have helped to produce several hit Dimensions songs since.

While Gold Star Soloist 1 no longer exists as an IU stand-in, Gold Star still had an incredibly popular and loved NPC soloist as one of their first artists that helped give their name prominence. At the beginning of 2021, she announced her departure from the agency to create her own label, citing her reasoning as feeling she needed a more focused environment than Gold Star’s growth could provide. There are rumors she was alluding to dissatisfaction with Gold Star’s recent management and gossip that Gold Star was pushing for her to pursue activities in overseas markets she wasn’t interested in.

Anyone who had a feature or MV appearance claim on a soloist can contact me and let me know whether they’d like to just drop the claim (and, if a points claim, recollect those points), keep it as a claim in an unspecified work, or try to replace it with something else. The following muses had claims this applies to:

Features:

Cha Kyonghwa (Kami) (app claim) Kang Sunghee (app claim) Park Jaewon (points claim, 10 points) dropped! Choi Joosung (Sun) (points claim, 10 points) Moon Chaeyeon (Dita) (app claim) Park Duri (points claim, 10 points) kept as unspecified!

MV appearances:

Kim Kyongmin (Alice) (app claim) Ryu Jaein (points claim, 5 points) dropped! Seo Minjung (points claim, 10 points) points reclaimed! Moon Chaeyeon (Dita) (app claim)

Points shop updates

There have been a few updates to the points shop!

Firstly, the nation’s title claim checklist now requires a headcanon on the muse’s image and how it relates to their claims and career to be completed. This is just so I can see a mun’s own intentions for how everything ties in with their image. This headcanon shouldn’t focus on the title itself since that isn’t ever guaranteed for approval, but the muse’s general image as the mun has shaped it. The viral moment requirement for a nation’s title is now also specified to need to relate to the image involved in the desired title.

In the wake of canon soloists being removed, I’m planning on being a little more strict regarding music claims aligning well with positions.This applies to both individual songs and whole discographies. Still, the intent is to be reasonable. Chungha having a rap-like verse in “Bicycle” won’t require someone to have a rap position to claim it since it’s not a lot of the song and she’s not known as a rapper, but I also wouldn’t approve a muse whose most prominent position is main rapper or a main dancer making their entire discography IU releases since IU is primarily a singing-focused artist.

There used to be a rule requiring that muns seek admin approval before claiming songs written by deceased artists, but that rule has now been removed. Keep it respectful, though, please. If any issue arises with muns breaking the fourth wall in relation to these songs to be disrespectful about a real person’s passing, that claim may be revoked and the rule may be reinstated. Songs performed by deceased artists still cannot be claimed.

There’s also a new claim available — a YouTube variety show or talk show. Please see the variety page for examples and more information, but note that this is separate from both a reality show claim. I’ve tried to specify the difference, but if you’re ever unsure which one what you want to claim would fit into, feel free to ask! Both will now be uploaded in-’verse to base’s Youtube Channel. Likewise, there has been a small change so that future radio show claims are now through base Radio, a radio streaming application (think Naver Now).

Company building pages + Pinterest

I’m currently working on pages that give more detail on the layout of the company headquarters. They aren’t quite finished yet, but I have created a Famed Pinterest account for those of you who find more muse visually or who are into visual worldbuilding! One of the sections on the boards there gives a rough idea of company building visuals. There are group concept boards as well, so if you’re struggling to decide where your muse might fit, looking at those might help you if you’re more of a visual person. No one is required to follow it and I won’t be answering messages or anything of the sort there, but I thought it might be a helpful way to visually convey locations and concepts! I’ll make a small post to let everyone know when the pages with in-depth information on the company buildings is available.

Activity rules updates

I mentioned there’d be a few more touch-ups to the activity rules to fill in loopholes that have been around a while, so here they are.

- There is now a formal hiatus request form that must be submitted to request a hiatus. Simply sending the main an IM that you want a hiatus will no longer qualify as a valid request and it will not be processed.

- There will no longer be a week-long grace period after a hiatus ends. You are responsible for being active for the next activity check after your hiatus ends.

- The maximum length of a hiatus is now three weeks (and the minimum one week). The initial hiatus request maximum is still two weeks with one week extensions, but extensions may not be stacked to exceed three weeks total without a passed activity check in between. If you can’t be around for a longer period of time, it might be best to rejoin at a later time when you’re more available! In total, a mun is allotted a maximum of four weeks of hiatus over any twelve week period.

- If a muse reaches three activity warnings in a month, they will be automatically moved to the unfollow list on their third warning instead. If a muse is removed and refollowed three times over the course of six months, they will not be able to be re-followed again and will have to re-apply.

New points opportunity

As of this post going up, muses may now collect one point for every first closed thread with a new muse after it has reached ten posts. This will no longer only apply during events and the ten post requirement is new. Members should be interacting with new muses all the time, not just during events, so it felt right to adjust this accordingly. This applies only to threads started after this post goes up.

Chroma

As schedules have been made quarterly, all remaining Chroma roles will be made available for reserves and applications in at midnight/12AM EDT on April 12.

Suggestions + Feedback

I want to end off this post by reminding everyone that I’m always taking suggestions for events, tasks, etc! I plan on opening an official suggestion submission blog at some point down the line, but I’m happy to take suggestions through the ask box or submit if you have any. I’m also open to feedback as well. If you do send in either of these things, please specify if you’d like a reply from me, since sometimes I might be naturally inclined to keep a message simply giving a suggestion or idea without any questions instead of responding to it.

Thanks for reading this very long update! There are more additions to the roleplay in the works, some I’ve hinted at here and some I’ve not, but I hope Famed’s fifth year is able to be its best one yet!

#fmdadmin #queued post

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kiingocreative · 3 years

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The Structure of Story is now available! Check it out on Amazon, via the link in our bio, or at https://kiingo.co/book

There’s a lot of talk amongst the indie writers community about how to deal with bad reviews. I myself have had a lot of conversations on the topic to see how others handle the negative reviews they receive.

I’ve been given a lot of good advice, from looking at it from a critical standpoint, and something you can learn from, to making memes out the worst reviews you get, to completely ignoring them and never looking at them.

My History of Bad Reviews

I still remember the first couple of bad reviews I got for No Pain, No Game.The first one was from someone who couldn’t take the graphic scenes of torture and violence in the book. Though one side of my brain obsessed about how much of a failure this made and my book (…yep, I totally went there), the other part was able to rationalise the feedback. If it wasn’t for them, it was fair enough.

The second bad review I got though was brutal. The reader hated the book and everything in it and wrote a very strongly worded (and somewhat entertaining) review about it. This was a gut-punch, though thankfully by the time it happened I’d gained enough confidence in myself and in my work not to let it bring me down (or at least, not too much).

In a time where everyone’s used to hiding behind a screen, people forget that there’s an actual breathing person on the other end, with feelings as acute as their own.

And because I know how painful it is to receive a bad review, especially when you’re starting out and your confidence in your art may be fragile, I don’t leave bad reviews on others’ books. I wouldn’t lie and leave a positive reviewif I didn’t like it, I just wouldn’t leave a review at all.

I realise we focus a lot on what it’s like to be on the receiving end of bad reviews — what about the other side, I wonder? Do writers who know how crushing a bad review can feel leave negative reviews on fellow writers’ work?

It takes one to know one

In another highly unofficial poll in my Instagram stories recently (I’m loving those!) I asked people whether they leave negative reviews on books, and 62% said they don’t.

Speaking to other authors, I had a feeling that, like me, they may be able to put themselves in other writers’ shoes and be reluctant to leave negative reviews.

Jen Furlong, author of Hidden City, for instance, doesn’t leave negative reviews. ‘Authors, especially new ones need support and encouragement,’ she says. ‘I focus on what I did like about the book and how I see the author growing in future books’. If there was something she didn’t like about a book, she continues, ‘then that’s on me. Someone else probably loved it! Who am I to poo on a fellow writer’s hard work?’

For author of The Path to Resilience Severine Desrosiers, ‘feedback is paramount’ so she does give negative reviews. However, whether or not the title is an indie book or not still influences what she does: ‘ifit’s someone like myself,an indie author who is trying to get known then I wouldprobably not leavea public review. But if it’s someone like Stephen King’s latest book for example then yes because I don’t think that that will affect him as much’.

And this seems to be a recurring view — that it’s not only about leaving a negative review or not, but that there may be a distinction leaving negative reviews on indie books or books written by debut authors, versus those written by more established authors.

When asking people about this in my Instagram stories, someone said that, rather than leave a bad review, they ‘tend to leave no review when it is an indie book with less than 500 reviews’.

I thought that would be a widely spread opinion but, in my unofficial poll, I asked people just that: when deciding to leave a review or not, does it matter whether or not the book is an indie book? And 75% of respondents said it doesn’t.

The Holy Grail of Constructive Criticism

That left me a little confused, and it definitely got me thinking. When checking whether people tend to leave no review at all rather than leave a negative review, the results were inconclusive — 53% said they do, 47% said they don’t… How’s that for a divided jury!

So, most people don’t tend to leave bad reviews, and for 75% of people that decision isn’t impacted by whether or not the book’s an indie book. And there’s no clear trend on leaving a negative review versus leaving no review at all.

Digging into the matter more, however, it looks like there’s more to it than meets the eye. Because most people don’t tend to look at it as a ‘negative review’ or a ‘bad review’. What everyone’s unanimously aiming for is:

constructive criticism.

‘Bad is a relative term,’ a poll respondent said, ‘I’ve never intentionally bashed something’, it’s all ‘constructive criticism’. ‘If worded correctly’, someone else concurred, ‘I think the author can and should use it as constructive criticism and learn’.

And many authors see it that way, too. Lane Northcutt, author of The Delivery Company, says he reads all reviews, good and bad because writers have to listen to their readers. Reviews should be used as fuel for future improvement, he says: ‘I think to myself “how can I see my book through this lens?” or “is this a trend?” and go from there. […] If is a theme within many reviews, then it’s worth taking your time to see what’s going on and how to fix it’.

Alexander Michael, author of Transformations, looks at it in a similar way: ‘Writers, including myself, need to grow. But no review I write will be rude or unhelpful’.

As I was researching this, I came across a great conversation on this very topic in the comments of a post by writer Anna Sheremeteva— here’s some of what people said:

‘I don’t think I’ve ever written a bad review. The lowest rating I’ve done is 3 stars, but I was still able to point out things I liked about the book. I’d say be bold yet polite in your opinion, yet still try to find positives.’

Or again:

‘Give constructive critique and be encouraging at the same time. If it is downright terrible then I’d just not write anything. Better that than trash someone in full view of the IG community. Or maybe DM the person, but again, don’t be harsh.’

I’m sensing a trend… Could it be then that it’s not that people don’t leave ‘bad’ reviews, but that they leave ‘constructive criticism’ reviews instead?

The Right to Conflicting Opinions

In the comments on that Anna Sheremeteva's post I came across this beautifully phrased piece of feedback by a fellow author:

‘I always tell people when I hand them something I’ve written: ‘if my work sucks shit, I wanna know’. Far better to be honest and kind than to be dishonest and coddling.’

There is truth in that, for sure, which is probably why so many people seem to favour giving feedback through a review, constructively, rather than not at all or lying by leaving a falsely positive review.

I hear that, and to an extent I agree. But is all constructive criticism valid criticism? We’re told to write the books we want to write, one that will not necessarily appeal to everyone…

So by definition, some readers won’t like certain books because they simply aren’t right for them — constructive or not, is there value in such reviews, and what is to be made of them? How can we be objective in reviewing a book that simply wasn’t for us?

Reading through the conversation on that Instagram post, I see that angle crop up:

‘I feel it’s ok to have an overall negative opinion,’ someone commented. ‘I would likely find a polite way to express what I liked and didn’t like. But, one thing I’ve seen that I don’t think is very nice to do is when people rate a book based off of what they would do to change the story, not rating the story itself’.

And someone else argued: ‘Today, any topic could be controversial. I may not agree with the authors view on a particular topic, but that doesn’t mean they have no right to express it. I would say, ‘for those who like…’ this is a good read. […] There’s nothing wrong with saying: I don’t necessarily agree with the author’s views, but…’.

And I see their point. There are bound to be books we love and books we don’t. As writers, we have to accept that our work won’t float everyone’s boat. And it seems that everyone’s aligned with the idea that people are allowed their own opinions, whether or not anyone else agrees with them — as long as it’s phrased in a polite and constructive manner. As someone else commented on the post: ‘For sure write a review. Positive or negative, it’s always opinion!’

It’s All Subjective

And that’s the key word, I think. At the end of the day, reviews are just that: opinions.

They’re one person — with their upbringing, values, culture, views of the world — commenting one another person’s work — who will have their own upbringing, values, culture, views of the world. I love the way Jen Furlong puts it: ‘as a writer I find that reader reviews are a lot more about the reader than the book!’

I know from experience that receiving reviews comes with a lot of ups and downs. There’s joy to be found in the ups, and acceptance in the lows. In the words of Alexander Michael:

‘If I receive a bad review, all I need to do is realise that stories and writing are subjective. Someone is going to dislike it. BUT someone else is going to love it. Hang in there and find your clan. Good reviews, on the other hand, are a joy. It's nice to know that something that came from your mind, like a living dream, can be walked in by someone else, and hence enjoyed’.

How wonderfully put!

Bad Reviews… as a Favour?

Here’s one final thought for you, and one I hadn’t really considered until I came across these two comments on Instagram:

‘Express why YOU didn’t like it. This helps people with similar likes and disliked so they know they probably won’t like the book. So they don’t read it. So that’s one less future bad review.’

and:

‘As long as you’re coming from a place of thoughtfulness, then honesty is the way to go! Some people write poorly or write books that aren’t great. If it’s bad, you’ll be helping people not waste money. That’s a good thing.’

How about that?

Yes, constructive criticism can be helpful for authors if they decide to take it onboard. But I’d never really thought about negative reviews as preventing people unknowingly spending their money on a book they wouldn’t like (and therefore writing a bad review afterwards because they’re annoyed they spent their money on a book their didn’t like). And so by helping readers figure out whether a not a book’s for them, you’re helping the author by preventing people posting more negative reviews.

I absolutely love that. I think about the reviews I’ve written and the reviews I’ve received, and I realise — rather shamefully — that neither of these things had really crossed my mind. I thought of writing a positive review as supporting a fellow author, but I’d never considered the upsides of negative reviews like that…

It’s food for thought for me, and something I’m definitely looking to take onboard!

#writingtips #screenwriting #creative writing #writers on tumblr #writers #writing #writerblr #writing advice #writing community #writing resources

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zoe-dinh · 3 years

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Shameless Media: A Start-up's Guide To Digital Stakeholder Engagement

OVERVIEW

Today’s businesses exist in a world where everything is rapidly changing. How organisations communicate with stakeholders, and vice versa, have been transformed by the digital age.

Not only are stakeholders powerful and tech-savvy, thanks to digital media, they now also have direct contact with companies and organisations 24/7 (Ozer 2020).

Companies therefore are much more accountable for their conduct and value (Tench & Yeomans 2017). This can either play to their advantage, or hinder it in a critical way.

As such, businesses need to foster relationships with stakeholders by leveraging the power of digital media. The goal is to have a community of people who support the organisation, who resonates with the brand’s value and message.

An example of modern organisations championing this is Shameless Media. Utilising digital media, Shameless engages with their stakeholders through strategic branding and content marketing.

How can we capture people’s hearts and minds in an attention economy? Let’s learn from this millennial start-up.

CASE STUDY: SHAMELESS MEDIA

Profile

Shameless Media (SM) is a millennial gen Z’s destination for all things digital content. Operated in Melbourne by a team of five young women, the company was founded in 2019 by writers Zara McDonald and Michelle Andrews.

Although relatively young, the podcast venture has accumulated a consumer base of over 20 million listeners, plus a growing community of 220,000+ followers across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. SM also recently created a brand-new agency for content creators and influencers, The Sana Agency.

Stakeholders

Since its inception, the podcast has not had a single episode that has not been sponsored (Forbes 2021). More notably, Shameless listenership is overwhelmingly 94.7% women in their 20s (Gillezeau 2021).

SM's key stakeholder groups thus include:

1. Consumers: audiences, readers, listeners; and

2. Sponsors: collaborators, business partners.

Current digital operations

PLATFORMS

1. Podcast

At first glance: Eye-catching cover. Good tag line (“The pop culture podcast for smart people who love dumb stuff”). Almost always seen in the Top Charts.

My thoughts: I was surprised to discover how new the podcast is. Its popularity, large growing number of listeners and content quality make Shameless seem a lot more established.

Open and honest, the hosts are not afraid to let audience knows where they stand on critical issues (feminism, politics, climate change etc.). New episodes are regularly scheduled which is good for audience retention.

As a consumer, I am drawn to the show/company for their seeming authenticity and relatability. Not to mention the well-balanced research that allows audience to form their own opinions without being spoon-fed. 10/10 recommend.

2. Website

At first glance: Layout is easy to look at. Visually appealing. All relevant info seems to be there.

My thoughts: Nice design, but not as much interactivity as I would have liked. When I tried looking for more information on the founders and organisation, something like an About Us section for example, there was none. Neither was there any resource or material on the business side of things (annual reports or data analytics or anything of the sorts).

One may excuse this considering the age of the organisation. However, I believe SM might benefit from a website update or revamp. It will certainly be helpful for those like me who are curious, who do research on the firm and would therefore like more access to information.

3. Instagram

At first glance: Quite large following. Relatively high audience engagement. Content layout not my personal taste, but appealing overall.

My thoughts: Shameless has great social media presence, especially on Instagram. The company made good efforts in interacting with followers. There are the ‘Your say Fridays’, polls and Q&A every other day on Stories. Users regularly comment on posts (memes, podcast updates & announcement), and many get replies from admin.

Overall, Shameless is doing very well with social media engagement and audience interactions.

4. Facebook

At first glance: Not much to see/do as this is a private group. Nice cover image though.

My thoughts: Large community of readers of nearly 34,000 members. The group has been active since 2019. While discussion threads cannot be publicly viewed, those interested in the content can find related episodes on the Shameless podcast.

Over on Instagram, there are links in bio to the book-selling site for each month’s pick. Makes me wonder whether or not these are affiliate links.

5. LinkedIn

At first glance: Small-to-medium sized following. Appealing visuals, though not too much information.

My thoughts: I have seen the Shameless LinkedIn profile before, but has only started following them recently. The account is not too active, the latest post was from a few months ago. Perhaps this is because the content that circulates on LinkedIn often revolves around business culture, not the usual focus by SM. Most of the posts thus far are general announcement and job openings.

In the future, SM might be benefit from a more active LinkedIn page, so as to not only attract new audience and potential talents, but also to establish their presence more firmly among competitors in the corporate world.

DIGITAL STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT

The corporate brand is constantly being co-created by organisation with their stakeholders. Dialogical communication is said to enhance this along with corporate reputation (Gundolf et al. 2018; Ozer 2020; Rosenberg & Seager 2017).

In reality, what might this look like?

From tactics to dialogic communication in digital media, let’s look at how SM has been engaging with stakeholders.

Dialogical communication in digital media

Tactics

Potential areas of improvement

Lack of strategy

Upscaling the business

Other types of content, especially video

CONCLUSION

So far, leveraging social media has helped Shameless achieve their goal and stay true to their brand. “Win their niche, core audience, nurture specific community of mostly young working women” (Gillezeau 2021).

The company’s success is in no small way thanks to the relationship they have with their audience. SM has intimate understandings of what the audience wants, and are able to deliver it.

This is in large part due to the founders being in the same demographics as their audience. As McDonald put it, “[W]e wanted to tap into a younger demographic that we thought were generally being ignored by mainstream media” (Forbes 2021), which explains the company slogan.

“We make content for ourselves, our mates, and you”.

Branding and content wise, SM is doing a good job capitalising on the trends, particularly with interactive content, content marketing, and online content communities (Clark-Keane 2021; Thomson 2019).

Yet, it is also important to note the fortunate position SM finds themselves in. As a millennial start-up, they are already advantaged by having skills in digital media and technologies.

Nonetheless, through forces of strategic digital communication, Shameless Media has been successfully engaging with their stakeholders through a combination of clever branding and content marketing.

---

REFERENCES

Clark-Keane, C. 2021, ‘7 Content Marketing Trends to Watch in 2021’, Wordstream, https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2020/11/23/content-marketing-trends

Forbes, T. 2021, ‘How I Do It: Shameless Media’s Zara McDonald and Michelle Andrews on building their empire’, Fashion Journal, https://fashionjournal.com.au/life/how-i-do-it-shameless-media/

Gillezeau, N. 2021, ‘Shameless Media: The podcast start-up that’s rejecting big offers’, Australian Financial Review, https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/how-they-built-it-shameless-media-20210330-p57fbu

Gundolf, K., Jaouen, A. & Gast, J. 2018, ‘Motives for strategic alliances in cultural and creative industries’, Creative Innovation Management, vol. 27, pp. 148-160, DOI: 10.1111/caim.12255

Johnston, J. & Rowney, K. 2019, ‘Social networks’, Media Strategies: Managing Content, Platforms and Relationships, Taylor & Francis, Sydney, pp. 75-103.

Kim, K. 2021, ‘How to make sure you’re marketing to Gen Z the right way’, Sprout Social, https://sproutsocial.com/insights/marketing-to-gen-z/

Ozer, D. 2020, ‘Organisations’ use of social media from the perspective of dialogical communications and marketing-oriented public relations’, In B.O. Aydin, S. Gurbuz & O, Dugan (eds.), Public Relations in the Networked Publics, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, pp. 211-235.

Rosenberg, M. & Seager, P. H. 2017, ‘The Big Picture: Four Trend that Change Everything’, Managing Media Businesses, Retrieved from ProQuest EBook Central, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52021-6_1

Smart Insights 2020, ‘7 ways to reach and influence millennials using social media marketing’, https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/7-ways-to-reach-millennials-through-social-media-marketing/

Tench, R. & Yeomans, L. 2017, ‘Exploring Public Relations’, Global Strategic Communication, Pearson Education, Harlow, Available from: ProQuest EBook Central (14 August 2021).

Thomson, C. 2019, ‘Top Marketing Trends For 2020’, Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2019/10/03/top-marketing-trends-for-2020/#6889ba113d5d

-END-

#shameless media #digital stakeholder #engagement #RMIT #participatory media #strategic communication

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dxmedstudent · 4 years

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Risk

I’ve written about many things under lockdown, but I feel there’s something important we have to address. What happens now that lockdown is being relaxed? I think we as people struggle to comprehend complex risk - it’s one thing to work out how likely something is to directly affect us, and another to conceive that a simple, innocent seeming action of ours may not only risk lives directly affected to us, but people we pass on the road, anyone who touches the same rail on the tube, and anyone who is in contact with them. This is why rules work best when they are clear, and don’t ask us to make lots of decisions where we pit what we want or need against the greater good. I was a fan of clear, simple rules under the acute phase of the lockdown, even though the cutoffs sometimes seemed arbitrary, because we had to cut transmission as much as possible. And I’ve made it clear already that I’m disappointed that the UK has not brought case numbers and fatalities down as much as I would hope, and that I worry we are easing out too early and likely to see a second wave. I have a lot of complicated feelings about lockdown, as a clinician and as a person stuck isolated from my loved ones during the pandemic. But as lockdowns are eased, including in the UK, we will all have to navigate the freedoms we have been given (or denied) and decide for ourselves how we navigate the very different world we find ourselves in. Because as restrictions are eased, things become a lot more open to interpretation. Quite simply the rules are harder to gauge. As a doc, I struggle with the government’s decision to allow those who were asked to shield out into society again, to allow them to socialise or go out or shop whilst we are still seeing so many cases. I struggle with the fact it was announced via tweet on Satuday night - and that GPs were left to field questions from anxious patients. That this leaves them vulnerable to being asked back into work - and that there are no protections in place for those who feel worried about returning to work whilst the rate of infection remains high. I struggled with who was asked to shield - for example we know that people with hypertension, diabetes or who are obese are at particular risk - but many such people were not given any protection. The government’s own lockdown alert levels do not suggest that the shielded should have been allowed to stop shielding. The CMOs do not feel we can step down our alert level. And yet, in contraditction to this, the government encourages the most vulnerable to go out there. Social distancing, even when perfectly enacted, is not without risk - a 2m distance reduces risk. Being outside doesn’t completely rule out catching coronavirus.

In the UK, people are allowed to go to someone’s house and eat (and walk through to the garden, and use the toilet), but not stay overnight with a partner who lives apart from them. They must stay 2 metres apart, and can’t meet more than 6 people, though they can all be from different households. It’ll be really important for people to socially distance during any such events, and to evaluate how risky it is for them to attend. Likewise, non-essential shopping will be allowed - as long as it’s socially distanced. Schools will be reopened - good luc trying to make 30 small children in a class socially distance! There is no 100% safe choice - all the precautions we take reduce our chances of transmission, but do not rule out infection. I am concerned that a lot of the time, danger is either presented as risky (and therefore morally wrong) or completely safe (if you follow whatever the current rule is) - when the reality is that all activities - from those not allowed to those actively encouraged by the government, have risk - some more, some less. For some of us, availing ourselves of those freedoms remains a significant risk. For example, my parents have pre-existing conditions like HTN, diabetes, being cuddly-sized, that would make catching coronavirus risky for them. And apart from socially distanced and careful park trips and essential shopping, I couldn’t advise them it’s OK to go out shopping or live life as normal. So I’m not sure I could advise that for anyone at risk, if I wouldn’t advise it for my parents. I will remind you that the government have frequently changed their rules without evidence or justification. That it remains unclear why they’ve chosen to relax them to this degree, all at once - when it will mean that if thereis another peak, we won’t know what has had the most effect. That they have failed to listen to scientific and medical advice when they were asked to re-consider relaxing lockdown. That they have contradicted themselves on what’s allowed - when it’s us, versus when it’s them. That their current rules at times contradict the clear plan they laid out at the start of lockdown. I will remind you that they have voted to end virtual parliament despite it so far being successful - and against government policy that people should work from home if they can. Thus putting workers in parliament at risk, as well as whoever they are exposed to. They only considered quarantine for travellers or making face masks compulsory well after the horse has bolted. I could sum it up only by saying: I do not feel that the government has handled this well, and I don’t feel, at present, that their policy is evidence based as much as it’s based on keeping the economy going. Now, I’m not in the know, I don’t have all their data, but my concerns and disappointment remain. Especially after the Cummings fiasco, my belief in the government’s coronavirus response has reduced significantly, thought the reservations were there from the start. I want to remind you most of all that they will not be the ones suffering if our loved ones get sick. Which is why I personally feel we need to explain the risks to people, and help them decide based on their own risk rofile how much risk they are willing to accept, even if restrictions are eased. We need to highlight that our new freedoms are not suddenly ‘safe’ just because they are allowed. What also worries me is that we’ll be living with some form of restriction for some time - life will not go back to normal any time soon. I’m against unnecessary criminalisation during this pandemic - I feel we have to try to police by consent as much as possible unless that’s absolutely not working to the point it’s a public health hazard. I believe in making things guidance first, and law only if that’s not working enough. It seems like the government are outright making more things illegal - travelling (people have already been fined) staying the night (i.e. sex), and now, from today not wearing a face mask on public transport. It’s one thing for us all to agree to curtail our freedoms for the collective good, and another for governments to start bringing in law after law that stats to infringe upon civil liberties. We know that BAME people are disproprortionately likely to be stopped and fined for breaching lockdown in the UK - I worry that these laws will never be applied equally. And that they won’t touch at the root of things - which is that people need to know why rules are applied and believe they make a difference. And after the Cummings fiasco, opinion polls have shown that people are significantly less likely to follow lockdown rules. We need to manage people’s longterm behaviour, and get them on board with sensible restrictions. And help people to keep as safe as possible, and avoid unnecessary risks wherever possible.

#covid-19 #covid-19 journal #long post

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ataswegianabroad · 4 years

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Alone Amongst the Gum Trees Part 3 - It Was Murdoch All Along

NOTE - this article has been migrated to Medium. As of 2021, A Taswegian Abroad will be closed down, and all of my writing will be published on my Medium profile.

“For some time, Australia’s democracy has been slowly sliding into disrepair. The nation’s major policy challenges go unaddressed, our economic future is uncertain and political corruption is becoming normalised. We can’t understand the current predicament of our democracy without recognising the central role of Murdoch’s national media monopoly.

There is no longer a level playing field in Australian politics. We won’t see another progressive government in Canberra until we deal with this cancer in our democracy.”

- Kevin Rudd - THE CASE FOR COURAGE

Foreword

I started this as a brain dump on July 25th, 2016 just before I flew back to Australia for 4 weeks. I decided to wait to finish it as an “Alone Amongst the Gum Trees” piece after the 2016 US election as it would have directly impacted the outcome.

That was the plan, anyway. I forgot entirely that I had written this draft for almost 5 years. The next thing you know: it’s early 2021, I’m married, have a dog, a car, and my first child is due in August.

My last political opinion piece was from April 11, 2016: a piece on how Bernie Sanders was being treated in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

So what happened from mid-2016 to early 2021? I didn’t jump back down the political commentary rabbit hole. No more rants on Tumblr blogs. No angry posts on Facebook. The odd spicy tweet about the current election happening between my old home (Australia), my new home (Canada) and the messed up cousin next door (United States). I instead chose to divert my love of writing to sports (see https://thefiftyfooty.com/), technology, and music.

From a political standpoint I chose to mostly stop talking, and to listen. Now don’t become misconstrued: I did not ignore it. I was very active over the Provincial and Federal Canadian elections of 2015 and 2019, I followed the unprecedented US political climate very closely given our proximity to the United States (and learned a lot in the process), and I voted in the most recent 2019 Australian election (my third from Toronto since leaving in 2012).

If I take a step back - I still need to be self-critical: I was defeated and I surrendered to the tidal-wave of the far-right. I was watching the US tear itself in two over race, alternative facts, and radical ideology. I was watching the UK go down a similar path with Brexit and Boris Johnson. I was watching my beloved homeland of Australia continue to confusingly elect damaging conservative governments despite the polls, trends, movements and more indicating it was time for a change.

As I matured into my late 20′s and now early 30′s (*gulp*) I was asking myself: was this how it was going to be? Did the western world just decide “we’re done with progressive views, let stick it in reverse for a bit and see how we go”? If that was true, then why did Canada buck this trend with Trudeau in 2015 & 2019? Why was New Zealand thriving under Arden after 2017 and 2020?

I went to a dark place on this.

But then something amazing happened. Enter former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd talking about wanting a royal commission into Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp empire who control 70% of print media in Australia.

Did he say 70% of all print media in Australia?

I STRONGLY recommend taking 15 minutes to watch this video. It will do a much better job of painting the scene than I ever could. If not, you can still read on through.

youtube

After doing some looking into this: all I can say is that I didn’t have to dig very far to have my fire reignited. All I can think about now is this #MurdochRoyalCommission

My world view has changed, and what I am about to write next will explain a few things that I hope will change yours too.

This is not a left vs right piece. This is not a blame, shame, or complain piece either. I won’t curse or abuse, because this is a self reflection, a cry of encouragement, and a call to action to all who live in and want to protect the political integrity of democracy around the world.

I am here to explain my thought patterns with the goal of having at least one more person under the thumb of Murdoch’s “beast” realise just what’s going on, and to encourage that person to make more informed decisions knowing the facts.

The Path to En-frightened-ment

February 2014 was the last time I updated the long-form political arm of my blog. Back then as a young man exposed to his first bout of political and social disappointment after the 2013 Australian election - I felt the need to get it all out and I did in a little more linguistically brash Part 2 of “Alone Amongst the Gum Trees”.

I was in an interesting position then. I was a 23 year old finding his place in the world - personally, politically, spiritually, environmentally. I was mostly deciding whether or not I was done with Toronto and it if was time to stay home permanently after spending 3 months back in Australia.

I chose no. I left. I came back to Toronto and the rest is history.

Then one day a couple of years later I got us flights back to Australia for a visit. After nearly 3 years avoiding it (mostly because of my post-election distaste for Australian ignorance), it was time to bite the bullet and go home for a bit.

In 2014 I mentioned:

...let’s talk about Australia, how things changed, how it looked from outside the huge wall that the government apparently has built around the country now, and how it looks from a bloke who literally can not wait to leave again.

I had been anxious about that trip for a while. Not because I hadn’t seen everyone for so long or because it was my wife’s (then girlfriend who became my fiance on that trip) first time visiting, it was because Australia had a chance to move away from the “ignorance, inequality, narrow-minded idiocy, and over-conservatism” I mentioned in 2014.

But we didn’t. Turnbull won the 2016 election. I was so angry at the Australian people. I was so scared of that ignorant, greedy, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, narrow minded, privileged, climate denying creature that seems to be slowly devouring the planet.

From that point in time, all I could think about was some sort of big right-wing populist shift happening across the globe. Outside of the obvious ones: Trump in the USA, Johnson in the UK and Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison in Australia, there were a few more extreme cases: Putin in Russia, Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orban in Hungary. Then there’s Cambodia, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt etc who saw this as a huge advantage as well. It may not be the end of a progressive vision of the world but it definitely seemed like the beginning of a big switch.

One thing I learned during my political writing hiatus while serving my self-induced “exile” to Canada is that this country was one of the few blips in this trend. Why did Canada choose to elect Justin Trudeau in 2015, a left wing liberal, after 9 years of Harper’s conservative government? Was it simply because Canadians were good and fair people? Did they just fundamentally understand that you need both conservative and progressive governments to advance society? Perhaps they do, and Canadians are most definitely good and fair people regardless of election results. I am even set to become a Canadian citizen myself (and a dual-citizen overall) in 2021.

So where is this all coming from? Why are the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom on a continued path to segregation, protectionism, populism and division while Canada and New Zealand show basically zero of these tendencies?

The News Corp cancer that is Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is the deciding factor.

So What Does Kevin Rudd Have To Do With It?

Mr. Rudd has been living in the USA for the last 5 years and is firmly spearheading the charge in that Rupert Murdoch’s media behemoth “News Corp” has been unlawfully influencing Australian opinion and undermining elections in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States for close to 3 decades (more predominantly in the last 8 years).

Before you read any further I have to be transparent about my opinions of Kevin Rudd. I accredit his “Kevin 07″ campaign as the catalyst for my interest in politics, my decision to study economics at university, and my ongoing support for progressive policies in every federal and state election since 2007. His work has played a big part in shaping me into the person I am today.

Despite my positive position on Mr. Rudd, I am also disappointed he did not action this during his time as prime minister. However, I am “all in” when it comes to what he is standing for, and that is:

Eradicating monopolies in all forms (be it political, business, journalism, etc)

Improving media literacy to encourage fair and unbiased journalism

Avoiding the pitfalls of Murdoch's divisive influence on the USA happening to Australia

There’s a few key factoids to his claims of mass-media bias:

70% of print media in Australia is owned by ONE MAN: Rupert Murdoch (100% owned in Queensland)

Print media influences the national conversation on a daily basis

Rupert Murdoch owns the biggest YouTube channel in Australia (news.com.au)

The line between fact-based and opinion-based reporting continues to blur, resembling that of CNN (Democrats) and Fox (Republican) extreme partisanship in the USA

All of Murdoch’s papers have backed the Liberal/National party in all 19 out of the last 19 federal and state elections

The ABC is breaching the Australian Broadcasting Act of 1983 by not standing up to Murdoch media purely out of fear

Politicians are not standing up out of fear of character assassination

Whether or not Murdoch is backing left or right, Labor or Liberal, the question still remains:

Do you think it is healthy for a FOREIGN PRIVATE ENTITY to own a monopoly level of influence on a sovereign country’s political system for that private entity to use for their own personal gain through targeted media attacks and character assassinations?

Watch This Space...

There are utter mountains of evidence to accompany these claims, and to make sure you can digest what I am trying to say, I recommend that you sink your teeth into the following videos to validate and truly comprehend the size of the tumour we are dealing with:

Feb 20, 2020 - 1h - Friendlyjordies informal interview with Kevin Rudd

This is right before the Covid outbreak in March, which delayed Mr. Rudd’s ability to move for a formal commission into media bias

Provides excellent insight into the ABC’s lack of action, the opportunism of the Green party, and the complete absence of unbiased reporting in Australia

Feb 18, 2021 - 1h 30m - Kevin Rudd Officially Requesting Royal Commission to Australian Senate

The first 20-30 minutes provide Mr. Rudd’s summary of the situation

The remainder of the video consists of questions from both Labor and Liberal senators about Mr. Rudd’s claims

Mar 1, 2021 - 2m - Kevin Rudd speaks to Sunrise about the Murdoch monopoly

Mr. Rudd went on a national flagship morning show to discuss his concerns regarding News Corp

LISTEN to the questions being asked of him: completely disregarding his valid points and dismissing him as “sour grapes”

Channel 7 is not News Corp, so why try to discredit Mr. Rudd? Fear of being targeted by News Corp

Mar 9, 2021 - 1h - National Press Club: The Case for Courage

Mr. Rudd stands up in front of The National Press Club of Australia to promote the four big challenges facing Australia in his upcoming book “The Case for Courage”

He takes questions from journalists from both Murdoch and non-Murdoch media outlets

As I start to conclude this piece, for action to happen, an independent royal commission is required to get to the facts. Mr. Rudd already gathered over 500,000 signatures that were recently sent to Prime Minister Scott Morrison asking for the royal commission to take place, but this is not enough.

Even former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, a friend of Rupert Murdoch and political opposite to Mr. Rudd, signed the petition and said the following:

Mr Turnbull, a former Liberal prime minister, said the Murdoch media used to be a group of traditional right-leaning outlets but has now become "a vehicle of propaganda."

He told ABC television's Insiders program on Sunday that Australian democracy was suffering for allowing the "crazy, bitter partisanship" of social media to creep into the mainstream.

"We have to work out what price we're paying, as a society, for the hyper-partisanship of the media," Mr Turnbull said.

"Look at the United States and the terrible, divided state of affairs that they're in, exacerbated, as Kevin was saying, by Fox News and other right-wing media."

I recently sent a (somewhat long) letter to Mr. Rudd expressing my concern for the state of Australia’s media landscape, with it culminating in the following questions:

I am deeply moved and inspired by your bravery to take on "the beast" as you so aptly name it, and I want to boldly ask: how can I help? How can I get involved?

I am yet to hear back from Mr. Rudd himself - but I think if you’ve gotten this far, you know what I am about to say next.

I want to help, learn more, or get involved.

That’s amazing. We’re not asking for money, just action. Here’s some ways you can help is stop the rot:

SUBSCRIBE TO and FOLLOW direct updates from Kevin Rudd:

Website / Newsletters

https://newsroyalcommission.com/

https://kevinrudd.com/

Social media alongside the #MurdochRoyalCommission hashtag on all platforms:

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Boycott News Corp media sites, publications, and channels

I’ve linked a list of all assets by News Corp above

This includes steering clear of ALL mediums of news owned by these publications and outlets including the respective:

Social media channels and pages

Television and radio news channels

Print and online newspapers and articles

SHARE and spread the word of this cancer affecting our democracy

Talk TO your friends and family (not AT them) and LISTEN to their views - people are not dumb: this will make sense if given time to digest

WATCH the videos posted above as a start, alongside a few more recommendations:

This interview between Friendly Jordies and former Labor Leader Bill Shorten from earlier in March 2021

I learned more about Bill Shorten in the last 20 minutes of this interview than I did in his entire run as opposition leader.

This just goes to show you how utterly mistreated he was by Murdoch media

For a laugh - every episode of Kevin Rudd: PM from Rove McManus’ late night show

I want Australia to remain a safe, secure, and lucky country to raise my family in someday. I care about this very much and plan to ramp up my content around this until we are free from the Murdoch beast and its lies.

Thank you so much for reading, as always, I am happy to discuss.

List of Murdoch (News Corp) Owned Outlets [Expanded Below]

Television

Foxtel (65%)

Australian News Channel

Fox Sports Australia

Streamotion

Fox Sports News

Fox Cricket

Fox Footy

Fox League

Kayo Sports

Binge

Sky News Australia

Sky News Weather

Sky News Extra

Sky After Dark

Australia Channel (News Streaming channel)

Sky News New Zealand

Sky News on WIN

Internet

Punters.com.au — Australian horse racing and bookmaker affiliate.

SuperCoach

Australia Best Recipes

hipages

odds.com.au

Mogo

One Big Switch

Knewz, a news aggregator

Realestate.com.au

Advertising, Branding & Tech

Global

Storyful

News UK

bridge studio

wireless Group

wireless studios

urban media

First Radio

Switchdigital

TIBUS

ZESTY

News Corp Australia

SUDDENLY - Content Agency

Medium Rare Content Agency

HT&E (Here, There & Everywhere)

News Xtend

Radio

News UK & Ireland

wireless Group

talkSPORT

talkSPORT 2

talkRADIO

Virgin Radio

FM104

Q102

96FM

c103

Live 95FM

LMFM

U105

Scottish Sun 80s

Scottish Sun Hits

Scottish Sun Greatest Hits

Times Radio

Magazines and Inserts (digital and print)

News Corp Australia

Big League

body+soul

Broncos

Business Daily

delicious

Escape

Foxtel

GQ Australia

Hit

Kidspot

Mansion Australia

Motoring

Sportsman

Super Food Ideas

taste.com.au

The Deal

The Weekend Australian Magazine

Vogue Australia

Vogue Living

Whimn

Wish

News & Magazines (digital and print)

News UK

The Sun

The Times

The Sunday Times

Press Association (part owned, News UK is one of 26 shareholders)

The TLS (Times Literary Supplement)

News Corp Australia

The Australian including weekly insert magazine The Deal and monthly insert magazine (wish)

The Weekend Australian

Australian Associated Press

news.com.au

New South Wales

The Daily Telegraph

The Sunday Telegraph including insert magazine sundaymagazine

Victoria

Herald Sun

Sunday Herald Sun including insert magazine sundaymagazine

Lions Raw

Samizdat

Queensland

The Courier-Mail including weekly insert magazine QWeekend

The Sunday Mail

Brisbane News

South Australia

The Advertiser including the monthly insert The Adelaide magazine

Sunday Mail

Tasmania

The Mercury

The Sunday Tasmanian

Northern Territory

Northern Territory News

Sunday Territorian

Community suburban newspapers

Cumberland/Courier (NSW) newspapers

Blacktown Advocate

Canterbury-Bankstown Express

Central

Central Coast Express Advocate

Fairfield Advance

Hills Shire Times

Hornsby and Upper North Shore Advocate

Inner West Courier

Liverpool Leader

Macarthur Chronicle

Mt Druitt-St Marys Standard

NINETOFIVE

North Shore Times

Northern District Times

NORTHSIDE

Parramatta Advertiser

Penrith Press

Rouse Hill Times

Southern Courier

The Manly Daily

The Mosman Daily

Village Voice Balmain

Wentworth Courier

Leader (Vic) newspapers

Bayside Leader

Berwick/Pakenham Cardinia Leader

Brimbank Leader

Caulfield Glen Eira/Port Philip Leader

Cranbourne Leader

Dandenong/Springvale Dandenong Leader

Diamond Valley Leader

Frankston Standard/Hastings Leader

Free Press Leader

Heidelberg Leader

Hobsons Bay Leader

Hume Leader

Knox Leader

Lilydale & Yarra Valley Leader

Manningham Leader

Maribyrnong Leader

Maroondah Leader

Melbourne Leader

Melton/Moorabool Leader

Moonee Valley Leader

Moorabbin Kingston/Moorabbin Glen Eira Leader

Mordialloc Chelsea Leader

Moreland Leader

Mornington Peninsula Leader

Northcote Leader

Preston Leader

Progress Leader

Stonnington Leader

Sunbury/Macedon Ranges Leader

Waverley/Oakleigh Monash Leader

Whitehorse Leader

Whittlesea Leader

Wyndham Leader

Quest (QLD) newspapers

Albert & Logan News (Fri)

Albert & Logan News (Wed)

Caboolture Shire Herald

Caloundra Journal

City News

City North News

City South News

Ipswich News

Logan West Leader

Maroochy Journal

North-West News

Northern Times

Northside Chronicle

Pine Rivers Press/North Lakes Times

Redcliffe and Bayside Herald

South-East Advertiser

South-West News/Springfield News

Southern Star

The Noosa Journal

weekender

Westside News

Wynnum Herald

Weekender Essential Sunshine Coast

Messenger (SA) newspapers

Adelaide Matters

City Messenger

City North Messenger

East Torrens Messenger

Eastern Courier Messenger

Guardian Messenger

Hills & Valley Messenger

Leader Messenger

News Review Messenger

Portside Messenger

Southern Times Messenger

Weekly Times Messenger

Community (WA) newspapers

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#murdochroyalcommission #rudd #auspol #politics

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cybersecopossum · 4 years

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Parler: Less Free Speech, More Analytics

The free speech social media platform that disallows dissenting opinions and promises to farm your data

In the summer of 2020, Youtubers started bring up the social media platform Parler as a new alternative to Twitter and Facebook, after many of the same creaters also promoted Minds, Gab.io, and Candid (the platform that was allegedly a front to run analytics on users that were likely to be troubling). The appeal: free speech. Free to say anything you want and defend your ideas.

Truth be told, I've been to these sites, and I've been disappointed by every one of them. I support free speech, but I have no patience for a platform with the majority of their users are explicitly trolls or seemingly crazy people. These platforms have a habit of rapidly devlolving into holocost and world order conspiracy theories. It's a fine thing to offer everyone to say their piece, but I think apealling to the people that normally can't stay civil on major platforms is a recipe for disaster. Parler, however, has moderation, which seems a bit counter intuitive to free-speech, but it offers a clean image for new members. It's going into it a bit further that reveals that there's a lot more going on than a bunch of conservatives and Trumpettes getting a platform to say their tagline of the week.

My Views on the Relationship between Privacy and Free Speech

This is important, as I am often seen as trying to get away with saying my own crazy spew and not answering for it. That is not my intention. Today the public forum is used by special interest groups for unethical studies on users and as targeting platforms for retaliation. All I want is to seperate speech from identity and livelihood. The express purpose for doing so is to allow people to know what is being said and argue with the ideas while avoiding violence and the distraction of ad hominem. I do not support the use of social media bots at all, and I appreciate removing harassing content, spam, and obvious trolling from a forum. I do not appreciate removing one's sincere opinion while of sound mind or tracking them across platforms and this does a disservice to everyone to either have things hidden from them about a person and their beliefs or reading too far into their behavior and even predicting their real-life behaviors which puts many individuals at risk of violence.

Their Problems with Privacy

When you sign up for Parler, just like Twitter, you have to provide a phone number. This phone number is attached to your account, and by extension, your activity. While this is a way to ensure that people are not easily making replacement, spam, or bot accounts, it's also a bit of you that they get to market. You likely use your cell phone for other social media, it's used for a lot services like shopping rewards programs as well.

Who's interested in your phone number and why? Well, we can take a look at Parler's own Privacy Policy. For them they want to market things to you, identify you along with more personal details if you want to be a part of their influencer network, and to sell as part of their company to whomever that may be. They also allow for 3rd party analytics just like Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to view users on their platform.

Now, depending on how you connect to the platform, either by their webpage or their app, you can expect more information to be taken about your device. If you're using their app, their Privacy Policy specifically states that they will collect your contacts if you permit them. It's already required when you install the app, so by installing it, you already permitted them. More on the app store, on Android, they request to read, modify, and delete the contents of your SD card and take pictures and video from your camera. While these can be used implemented selectively in the code for uploading videos and pictures to your post, it's concerning given their other behaviors, such as requesting other applications that you have installed.

Regardless of whether you're using the web or app, you can expect that 3rd party cookies like those from Google, Amazon, and Facebook will be used to track you while you use the website. This along with information about what posts you view, searches you make on the site, times that you're online and active, and the people you follow make a nice package for people interested in your data, such as Google and Facebook, meaning the same exact companies may still be able to track you and affect your experience browsing online through ad services.

Overall this Privacy Policy leaves a lot to the imagination but still emphasizes enough that they will collect data on you to monetize it as an asset and with 3rd party research and advertising analytics. It is the same problems as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but now with a neat controlled group of a mostly conservative user base. This, in the wrong hands, might be an interesting petri dish for highly-targeted political research.

Just My Privacy? Is that so bad?

Their ToS is a garbage fire, and I highly encourage everyone to read it just for the audacity of what it says outright, and what it carefully leaves out.

The Censorship-Free Twitter Alternative: Now with Censorship!

Probably the goofies thing to come out of Parler is all of the stories of people's accounts getting deleted for sharing their opinions. To add to this, I was having trouble getting my account removed (more on that later, so I opted instead to use the trending hashtags and tag a few popular users in a post where I stated that the website had all of the hallmarks of being shady. I waited over two days to have my account deleted the normal way, but within ten minutes of posting that Parley, I was banned. Amazing. But don't take our words for it, they explicitly tell you that if they don't like you, they'll ban you in section 9 of their ToS!

Coming soon: Worthless Microtransactions!

Section 6 of their ToS describe their virtual items. Interestingly, they outright deny you the right to trade or sell any of the items on the site without their permission. This is interesting not only because they are explictly enforcing the worthlessness of their virtual items, but this also precludes anyone from exchanging their account, and thus all the associated virtual items for money, goods, or services. This means if you grew an engaging account on the platform and a company is interested in buying access to it, you have to ask Parler's permission, and then they may only allow it contingent upon you giving more personal information such as, in their own example of them buying items back from you, your social security number.

Old Issues: The Deleted Sections

Very recently, the ToS have been changed. As you can see in this reddit post from the time of Parler's launch, any user of their platform was legally bound to be ready to defend and idemnify Parler in court for actions you take on the platform, and you are already bound to pay their fees in court if you are defending yourself against them or anyone responsible for Parler. You also were not allowed to sue them or be a beneficiary of a class-action lawsuit against them.

Final Thoughts

Parler is yet another alternative social media site which is has attracted the worst users from other sites right away. This makes the platform less attractive to "normal" users. Interestingly, their banning practices seem to indicate that they only want the conservative, but not too edgy crowd, the kind that is of really big importance socially and politically right now; the middle of the road, fly-over state blue collar family type that got excited about Trump because of the chants and rallies without really understaning the greater policies.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and outright describe Parler's intentions like I know them, because I don't. But I know that if I wanted to do market and polling research on the group of people in Europe and America that fit this general trend of hyper politics, I would curate similarly to Parler, protect myself from litigation from the users, collect as much information as I could on them and share that information with other websites to get a holistic picture of the users. I would make their usage of the platform unempowering and worthless to see what they were willing to do for minimal incentive. I would attract A and B-list figures within the different movements thant have supported the shift in politics and have them promote it for me, as well as get the alternative media sites to do gushing admiration articles on it over and over while more generally well regarded sites scoff and criticize it to get this particular subset of users into this one place where I can observe them.

Bottom line: this website's policies and behaviors are antithetical to free speech. You cannot advocate for free speech and be so anti-privacy in my view. You cannot claim to be a legitimate alternative to other sites when you are curating an environment for a specific group. You cannot be against censorship and then censor users for the most mundane posts that go against your image. This website is DOA, worst than the ones that came before it, because where as the others had hope of being normal that just ran out, this place squashes it right away. Parler is an exclusive right-wing platform and my personal opinion is that it is also a petri dish for analytics for this political persuasion

#conservatism #trump #parler #social media #why are people so into this site #i was on it for two days and it was just like wow we have ted cruz #ted cruz #is a wax golem #politics #privacy #digital rights #free speech #long post #very long post #news #tech #technology

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stoiccthulhu · 4 years

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Update time...actually, why should these be titled? I mean, whats the point of writing a title to these if all I’m going to do is ramble on and on with no specific topic of discussion, just several things on my mind?

Election day 2020 happened yesterday and I voted for nobody. And if I would have voiced my polling choice I would have voted for the candidate I see as being the best option in line with my thoughts and opinions concerning the state of the world at the moment as well as the future.

You can insert whomever you want to believe that would be based off an assumption and a look at my internetting footprint, but you would be wrong, but that’s part of the fun of interpreting what I’m writing down for you in the future. Trying to figure out what I’m actually saying. While it makes complete sense to me, because you don’t have the hidden key phrase you can’t decipher what it is that I am putting to digital paper.

I get it, I’m an asshole.

And this isn’t, completely, a justification towards my actions but a direct result of your intervention within my life that has caused this behaviour. Think of it sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You interpreted me, came back, and intervened in any little way imaginable. Negatively or positively, but no matter your justification, it was still an intervention that didn’t need to happen because, as Malcolm once said, “Life, finds a way.” And just like destiny, it will find a way. But enough of all that crazy talk, you’re here because you want to hear all about my political leanings and to unravel the mystery as to this anonymous random on the internet’s preferred presidential choice in the election that has already passed.

But before I do that, let’s get some shit off my chest because I tend to swear and if you don’t like it, go the hell away. I’m sick of people being sensitive over everything. As if they’re looking for any reason to complain or get offended nowadays.

“The internet has given everyone in (the world) a voice, and evidently everyone in (the world) has chosen to use that voice to bitch about (anyone they find offensive)” -Holden McNeil (with some modern revisions)

And that’s why I’ve chose not to be PC in this thing, whenever I feel the urge to put pen to paper, relatively speaking.

Like, let’s see who I can offend right off the bat.

Women need to start getting punched more and treated like human beings instead of china dolls. If you’re a pro-gender equality advocate, and you’re a woman, you need to be willing to be punched in the face for doing ANYTHING a man would otherwise be punched in the face for. They also need to be held accountable for the shit they do to everyone. I am a strong supporter in believing that no matter what women say about women controlling the government and such, while women have great communication skills, they have the worst track record when it comes to not being aggressive, biologically speaking.

In the wild, whom are normally the more aggressive of the genders? Whom is usually the one more protective of the young? more willing to go out to hunt?

To be fair, I have a very limited knowledge when it comes to the animal kingdom. But, I mean, the Black Widow is normally depicted as being a deadly female, the female preying mantis devours the head of her mate after they’re done mating. There are so many, example, of females being worse than males in nature its hard to ignore. And, to add religious believers to the list of people offended, if you’re not ignorant to science and knowledge, or at least the pursuit of it, we evolved over a long period of time from apes, which, by nature, makes us, humans, not white people, black people, yellow people(to stick to the color scheme), brown people(gotta throw the other Asian people’s in there as well), animals. Highly evolved and communicative animals, but animals none the less. Was that supposed to be one word? Nonetheless?

Doesn’t matter. So, if you stick with my logic, you’ll see that women are terrible. Terrible. But, because men like to have sex with females as opposed to men for the most part in today’s society women have a stranglehold on the pelvic reason of an entire world, which means they can make anyone, for the most part, do anything they want and see things their way, even if they’re saying the sky is as green as the skies of Namek. An example of this is perfectly laid out in a clip from That 70′s Show. Kelso and Hyde prove women can’t play fight because they’ll turn it real, for whatever reason, just because they’re girls. To prove this, Kelso and Hyde play fight, and it looks bad, but they stop, laugh, and hug it out. Then Jackie and Donna play fight, starting out playfully, but then turning it into hair pulling and needing to be pulled apart. Both visibly angry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUwxxJvtQnI

(OK, my memory was bad, it was Eric and Hyde, and it was set up differently, but the concept is still there.)

And I get it, they’re actors, being paid to do what the script is telling them to do, but it is true. Girls are worst during puberty as well, from what I’ve heard. And I get it, I have a biased standpoint being a male, but in today's culture that shouldn’t matter, it’s about what’s being said, not my gender.

Now that women are out of the way, lets also as black people, but not specifically black people, its more of a systemic form of racism that I believe shouldn’t exist. In which, if you are not of that specific race, you are not allowed to say the n-word. What makes me giggle right now is that with just that sentence every single person reading this probably got a bit riled up. A bit ruffled in the feathers because I’m not a black person. And if you weren’t, you are now, knowing what you know now.

So let me provide you with some context so you can understand how I’m not racist at the same time as saying what I said above.

I enjoy rap music and hip-hop, as do a lot of people throughout the world, black or otherwise. Which, in this current climate, would be considered one of the forms of cultural appropriation we tend to sweep under the rug because it doesn’t fit our narrative of being offended about something. Because I like rap music I tend to learn the word to all of the songs I enjoy listening to. Because I learn the words to the songs that I enjoy listening to I sing along. But, because I’m not black, I have to ruin my flow to edit myself just because the artist chose to use nigger in their song. Which, as an artist, is their choice.

Now, why should I have to edit myself? I have tried to replace it with “wigger”, but because of the closeness of the words, I felt that would still be offensive if I was ever overheard by the wrong black person who, understandably, would be mad if they heard a pasty white boy say the word nigger without any context.

I just think, unless the person is using the word in a hateful way, directed at the person the speaker either personally knows or is conciously speaking about, as in “i hate that nigger” or “you’re a nigger”. If it’s something like that, totally beat the shit out of that racist.

But if you’re singing along to Wu-Tang, and you say:

I be that insane nigga from the psycho ward I'm on the trigger, plus I got the Wu-Tang sword So how you figure, that you can even fuck with mine? Hey, yo, RZA! Hit me with that shit one time! And pull a foul, niggas, save the beef for the cow I'm milkin' this ho, this is my show, Tical! The fuck you wanna do on this mic piece, duke? I'm like a sniper, hyper off the ginseng root PLO Style, buddha monks with the owls Now who's the fuckin' man? Meth-Tical It shouldn’t be labelled as being racist.

There is more rattling around in my head right now, things that I’ve been thinking about for years, and things that have been bothering me for just about as long, but for now those were the two that fell out when I vomited all over my keyboard.

And if you’re offended. Get over it. You need to start.

Oh, I almost forgot. I was going to tell you whom it was I was going to vote for yesterday if I had voted for anybody. Jokingly I wanted to write-in “Obi-Wan Kenobi”. But in truth I was going to vote for Biden. Not because I thought he was the better candidate, but because there was not a good option at all, he was just the lesser of two evils. This election has made me decide I want a third option when it comes to my politicians, or at least, get rid of political parties all together. We spend so much time infighting and holding each other back instead of up no real change has happened in the past decade? Longer? And whatever change that does happen gets nitpicked apart so much it becomes a shell of its former self. But, enough about that. I have a baby demanding eggs and waffles and I still need to tag this.

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dailyaudiobible · 4 years

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11/03/DAB Transcript

Ezekiel 7:1-9:11, Hebrews 5:1-14, Psalms 105:1-15, Proverbs 26:28

Today is the 3rd day of November welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian it is a joy and an honor and everything good to be here with you today as we move into the Scriptures and take the next step forward together. And it’s so good that we can be together today in God's word. So, let's set let's dive in. We’re reading from the Evangelical Heritage Version this week. Ezekiel chapters 7, 8, and 9 today.

Commentary:

Okay. The book of Proverbs today tells us that two things are not good things - a lying tongue and a smooth mouth. And, so, I suppose this is as good of a day as any to talk about what the Proverbs are talking about. And yeah, we…we can certainly look out…outward and see all this stuff but as is always the case once we identify it in the world what's going on then, we need to turn it back inward to discover whether we’re part of the noise, whether we’re part of the problem, or if we’re part of the solution. So, a lying tongue hates the one it crushes. So, what is a lying tongue? I mean, we could probably say that’s sort of self-evident. It's…it's the tongue that doesn’t speak what is true. But there are so many nuances to the way that we lie to each other aren't there? Like we sort of think that we’re telling the truth as long as we have some sort of morsel of truth in the thing that we are fabricating but we have a…we are like being deceptive. So, if we’re willing to embellish and puff up or the opposite, to diminish or crush down the truth, the actual truth, in order to manipulate somebody or in order to hide behind something and try to protect ourself from exposure then we’re not only gonna be crushing people, we’re gonna be doing it with hatred. That is a massive, massive thing to realize. If we’re gonna flatter, if we’re gonna manipulate, if we’re gonna nuance the things that we’re gonna say and they aren’t really what we mean in order to kinda like get close to somebody or get into somebody's life because they have something that we want or they have something that we need, that we think that we need, we need to get close to them, then it's going to cause a ruin everywhere ultimately because it's foundation is false. It's a lie. It's gonna crush. And there's something in me that’s saying stop. Like don't keep trying to reexplain this with…with other metaphors or analogies. Like this is enough. Its stark. A lying tongue hates those it crushes and a smooth mouth causes ruin. So, if that's you, then this is where the road is going. If that's not you, then this is what to avoid because it brings destruction.

Prayer:

Father, we come before You on this and it rings true and it's convicting, and it does penetrate. It makes us reflect. It makes us consider but the deeper that we consider the more we realize that our entire culture is based on this kind of sidestepping. We are a world of people so afraid of being exposed the truth of who we are that we do everything possible to nuance and to hide when we are all guilty. Like, were any of us, anybody to be fully exposed then we would be fearful of the judgment that would come against us, but we are all in the same boat. It would happen to anybody. And You have invited us into the light. You have essentially said, “that's the world. That's how it works. It's a system built in falseness and held captive by the author of deception and lies.” You have invited us to be free, to walk into the light, to be in the truth. And no matter what that may bring, to know that we don't have a divided heart or a divided mind. We don't always have to figure out which personality we have to put on depending on what circumstances we’re in. We just get to be who You made. This is freedom indeed, but it flies in the face of the structures of the world that we live in. And, so, living like this…well…it would indeed be living like You lived Jesus. It would look like You. And we can see the raging of the world against You. And, so, we scratch our heads because it doesn't make sense because freedom is available, but the system is so rigged against freedom that we find ourselves just trying to find ways to cope and manage when You are offering freedom, that we can live in the light, that we can live in the truth. So, come Holy Spirit and help us over these coming days as we meditate upon this, as we catch ourselves being false or as we become more and more aware of the falseness around us, as we begin to see it. We need Your help to navigate it. There’s no way we’ll be able to figure this out. So, come Holy Spirit we open ourselves to You, well up within. Lead and guide our steps, the thoughts and intents of our hearts. We pray in the mighty name, the victorious name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is home base, it's the website, it’s where you find out what's going on around here. And there’s always something or another going on around here.

Kind of have to be under a rock to not know that today is election day in the United States. Probably no matter where you are in the world. And, yeah, we’ve been on the radar kind of all year, with all kinds of stuff and Covid hasn't helped and there’s just a lot of swirl going on. And I make it a very, very specific, very intentional point to do what we do here, to take the rhythm of the Scriptures and let it be a part of our lives every day. And I feel like the Scriptures In our lives can comment on what's going on in our world better than me being some…just another noisemaker. So, I would like to give as simple, as trivial, as obvious of advice as I can give you. Maybe you’re one of the people who have already voted. Great. Awesome. If you’re going to the polls today, pray, listen, obey and then walk away in peace. There's nothing else to do here. I mean I've lived long enough that I've been through several elections and even from my youth I cannot think of an election where the rhetoric hasn’t amped up to the point where we are led to believe that what we are about to do is the most pivotal thing we have ever done in the nation's history, maybe in the history of all humanity. That's…that's not true. The most important thing we have ever done is to become a part of the family of God. We are a part of a kingdom that is upon this earth that spans and crosses every single border. This is our allegiance - the kingdom of God. And God will not be toppled my brothers and sisters over this or anything else. And, you know how this goes. This ends at some point and somebody is…is the winner and that's gonna leave about half the people bumbed and about half the people rejoicing. And we can all do what people do these days - get on the Internet and just start making noise, start sending out memes. Take all of the divisiveness that has been amped up this entire year and really live into it, like really live into it and make this country an “us versus them” understanding that we are making the body of Christ, then divided in “us versus them” because so many of us are believers who are completely and totally opposite in their political convictions. So, the last thing that I have to say isn’t my opinion, isn't anything to do with me other than it's my voice reminding you. We have a Savior. His name is Jesus. He loved us when we were still His enemy. He loved us as a people despite our animosity and he laid his life down that we might live. And just mere hours before He did that, He was sitting with his friends having his last meal. And at that last meal He said something that must reverberate through everything about our lives, including all of what happens today. He said a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you. So, friends it gets pretty simple then. When you pray and listen and obey and walk away in peace and love one another as we have been loved as we come out of this, the most divisive of all seasons that we experience as a nation every four years. If there...if there ever were a time to be a city on a hill, to be the salt of the earth, to be light in the darkness, to be the hands and feet of Jesus to love one another as we have been loved, well it that would be coming out of this wouldn’t it. And, so, let's walk through this day at peace loving one another as we have been loved.

And that's it for today, I’m Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi everyone, this is Lisa the Encourager. I’m calling tonight to pray for our elderly parents or just our parents in general. I’ve certainly called in for our children many times, but I definitely want to focus on our parents today. I know Howard called in about his mom being in rehab and how difficult that was and how she looked very weak. And I just want to pray for him and his mom. And I have a similar situation with my dad going through that. So, I can empathize with your situation Howard. And also, Charlie called in about his parents and them being diagnosed with Covid. So, I want to also pray for his parents and anyone else out there that is going through a difficult time with their parent’s health and how stressful that can be and making a lot of hard decisions. And I’m just gonna pray that God is gonna guide us through those things and that they will be as peaceful and as comfortable as possible. So, let’s go to the Lord in prayer about all of our parents. And also, I wanted also to just say, I respectfully admire Brian for what he went through with his mom and continued to be a ministry to all of us. So, I just thank you again Brian for that because I know that had to be a hard time when you lost your mom. Dear God, I thank you so much for Pastor Brian and what he means to all of us and also thank you God for these…all of our parents Lord that are getting older in life. And I just pray God that your hand will be upon them, that they can recover, and you can comfort them where they need your comfort…

Hey DAB family this is Danny from Southern Oregon I wonder if you could please pray for my 15-year-old grandson Christopher and his friends. The other day these four friends skipped school and they were heading to one of the boy’s houses. And Christopher’s not allowed there. And anyway, shortly after he left school the school called my son and his mom, and they immediately began looking for him and texting him and calling him. And it appears that Christopher got a little bit worried that he was and I get into trouble so when he was about two blocks from this boy’s house he ended up going home to his mom’s and that was about 11 o’clock in the morning. And at 1230 the police were dispatched to a fatality. One of the…my grandsons’ best friends accidentally shot and killed one of the other boys and the third boy was standing right next to him and I’m sure is suffering a lot of PTSD from what he witnessed. And I know…I’m so thankful my grandson was not there but he’s so upset that he’s lost his best friend and they ended up arresting the boy for murder because some things just didn’t add up. And so please…please pray for Tony. He was the one standing next to him and ended up just covered head to toe in brain matter. It was point-blank. And…and pray for Dustin who’s been arrested for murder, that the truth come out and maybe they would all come to know the Lord through this. Thank you.

This is Kathy from Kentucky. I have a different kind of prayer request. I’m gonna take a test in martial arts specifically, Shaolin in two weeks. If I pass, I’ll be a 2nd degree brown belt and well on my way to black belt. When I was a girl growing up, I was not allowed to play team sports __ passed after I got out of high school. And I would’ve been good at some kind of sport. I trained on the swim team the summer before I graduated from high school and then after that I was too old. So, it’s important to me to be able to do something at my age, 67. So, please pray for my martial arts test Shaolin on the second Saturday of November the 14th.

Hi this is Julie from California I just started listening to the Daily Audio Bible about a week and a half ago. It was recommended through another podcast that I listen to and it has been up total and complete godsend. The last three years or so have been just really horrible. My marriage was almost at its end. My father-in-law passed away. We sold everything and moved out of state to take care of my mother-in-law at a very remote place where I had no support and found out she had Alzheimer’s and ended up staying for 2 ½ years when our plan was to stay a year. And then my dad passed away while we were gone, and my mom was diagnosed with leukemia. She’s in remission and doing phenomenally well praise God, but also there were issues with my son and now he no longer talks to us and I lost my job and we filed bankruptcy. Like, just thing piled on after thing piled on after thing and really kind of wrecked my relationship with God for a long time because I really couldn’t read my Bible, I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t do journaling. I mean I was on…I was on a regular track of reading the Bible in the year every year for like three or four years and then I just stopped. And this is miraculous because I actually am feeling like I’m getting the word in me and feeling more joy and I just am really thankful for you guys and I would just appreciate prayers where…where you feel like praying for me and a…a word. I’m happy to hear a word if you have a word for me because I need God so much right now. Thank you. God bless.

Hi family this is Peggy in California. And I, like so many of you, just absolutely love this community and appreciate it so much. It’s a place to share our deepest hurts and our joys and it’s just wonderful and I thank you all for participating and making it what it is. I’m calling today like many others who have called for my adult children. In particular one of my sons, he’s a twin, actually. I got a call from his twin yesterday telling me that his brother’s not doing well, he’s very depressed and seems to be disinterested in…in life, in not moving forward. Recently had a breakup with a girlfriend that I think what’s…he’s exhibiting is actually something that started before that. So, of course, I’m heartbroken and I worry about him. And he was raised in the church, but he doesn’t seem to have a very strong connection if any. So, I just pray that would lift Mason up in your prayers. And I thank you for doing that for me. Have a good day.

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phroyd · 5 years

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I totally support all of the Liberal “Left” Proposals, and yet, this simple observation, the quote below, is quite correct, and the body of this Opinion Piece shows the path Democrats should take in THIS particular election:

“ ... Not all elections are equal. Some elections are a vote for great changes — like the Great Society. Others are a vote to save the country. This election is the latter. That doesn’t mean a Democratic candidate should stand for nothing, just keep it simple: Focus on building national unity and good jobs. ... “

- Phroyd

I’m struck at how many people have come up to me recently and said, “Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” And in each case, when I drilled down to ask why, I bumped into the Democratic presidential debates in June. I think a lot of Americans were shocked by some of the things they heard there. I was.

I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 million Americans and have “Medicare for all” instead. I think we should strengthen Obamacare and eventually add a public option.

I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country. I think people should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country.

I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants. I think promises we’ve made to our fellow Americans should take priority, like to veterans in need of better health care.

And I was shocked by how feeble was front-runner Joe Biden’s response to the attack from Kamala Harris — and to the more extreme ideas promoted by those to his left.

So, I wasn’t surprised to hear so many people expressing fear that the racist, divisive, climate-change-denying, woman-abusing jerk who is our president was going to get re-elected, and was even seeing his poll numbers rise.

Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

But please, spare me the revolution! It can wait. Win the presidency, hold the House and narrow the spread in the Senate, and a lot of good things still can be accomplished. “No,” you say, “the left wants a revolution now!” O.K., I’ll give the left a revolution now: four more years of Donald Trump.

That will be a revolution.

Four years of Trump feeling validated in all the crazy stuff he’s done and said. Four years of Trump unburdened by the need to run for re-election and able to amplify his racism, make Ivanka secretary of state, appoint even more crackpots to his cabinet and likely get to name two right-wing Supreme Court justices under the age of 40.

Yes sir, that will be a revolution!

It will be an overthrow of all the norms, values, rules and institutions that we cherish, that made us who we are and that have united us in this common project called the United States of America.

If the fear of that doesn’t motivate the Democratic Party’s base, then shame on those people. Not all elections are equal. Some elections are a vote for great changes — like the Great Society. Others are a vote to save the country. This election is the latter.

That doesn’t mean a Democratic candidate should stand for nothing, just keep it simple: Focus on building national unity and good jobs.

I say national unity because many Americans are terrified and troubled by how bitterly divided, and therefore paralyzed, the country has become. There is an opening for a unifier.

And I say good jobs because when the wealth of the top 1 percent equals that of the bottom 90 percent, we do have to redivide the pie. I favor raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to subsidize universal pre-K education and to reduce the burden of student loans. Let’s give kids a head start and college grads a fresh start.

But I’m disturbed that so few of the Democratic candidates don’t also talk about growing the pie, let alone celebrating American entrepreneurs and risk-takers. Where do they think jobs come from?

The winning message is to double down on redividing the pie in ways that give everyone an opportunity for a slice while also growing the pie sustainably.

Trump is growing the pie by cannibalizing the future. He is creating a growth spurt by building up enormous financial and carbon debts that our kids will pay for.

Democrats should focus on how we create sustainable wealth and good jobs, which is the American public-private partnership model: Government enriches the soil and entrepreneurs grow the companies.

It has always been what’s made us rich, and we’ve drifted away from it: investing in quality education and basic scientific research; promulgating the right laws and regulations to incentivize risk-taking and prevent recklessness and monopolies that can cripple free markets; encouraging legal immigration of both high-energy and high-I.Q. foreigners; and building the world’s best enabling infrastructure — ports, roads, bandwidth and basic social safety nets.

Ask Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island’s governor, and my kind of Democrat. She was just elected in 2018 for a second term. In both her elections she had to win a primary against a more-left Democrat. When Raimondo took office in 2015, Rhode Island had unemployment near 7 percent, and over 20 percent in some of the building trades.

“When I ran in 2014, there was a temptation to appeal to particular constituencies — gun safety, choice, all things that I believe in,” Raimondo recalled. “I resisted that temptation because I felt the single greatest issue was economic insecurity and people who were afraid they were never going to get a job. So I said there are not three or four issues, there’s one issue: jobs.” Unemployment in Rhode Island today is about 3.6 percent.

Raimondo has faced a constant refrain from critics on her left that she is too close to business. “I created an incentive program for companies to get a tax subsidy if they created jobs that pay above our state’s median income or jobs in advanced industries,” she noted. “I have cut small-business taxes two years in a row since 2015. I am not ashamed of any of that.”

Because, she continued, “I listen to people every day, and you hear what they are worried about. People say to me, ‘Governor, I just got a real job.’ And I’d ask them, ‘What is a real job?’ And they’d say, ‘It’s a job where I can support my family with real benefits.’ So I named our state job-training program ‘Real Jobs Rhode Island.’”It will be impossible to “sustain a vibrant democracy with this level of inequality.”

The right answer is to reinvigorate the key elements of a healthy public-private partnership, said Raimondo: higher taxes on wealthier people, more investments in affordable housing, infrastructure and universal pre-K, and empowering the private sector to create more real jobs — “so that no one who is working full time at any job should have to collect Medicaid and need food stamps to make ends meet.”

Concluded Raimondo: “I am no apologist for a brand of capitalism that leads to unsustainable inequality. But I do believe a more responsible capitalism is necessary for growth. We need to redivide the pie and grow the pie. I am a ‘pro-growth Democrat.’ I am for growing the pie as long as everyone has a shot at getting their slice.”

That’s a simple message that can connect with enough Democrats — as well as independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women — to win the White House.

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman

Phroyd

#election 2020 #trump #democrats

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Trump Lashes Out on Syria as Republicans Strongly Rebuke Him in Vote https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/world/middleeast/trump-erdogan-turkey-syria-kurds.html

Trump Lashes Out on Syria as Republicans Rebuke Him in House Vote

President Trump again defends his decision to withdraw American troops, an order that many, including Republicans, have interpreted as acquiescing to Turkey’s incursion against a United States ally.

By Peter Baker and Catie Edmondson |

Published Oct. 16, 2019 Updated 8:38 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 16, 2019 9:25 PM ET |

WASHINGTON — President Trump faced off against both parties in Congress on Wednesday in an extraordinary confrontation over his decision to abandon America’s Kurdish allies as the vast majority of House Republicans joined Democrats to condemn his policy in an overwhelming vote.

Mr. Trump found himself increasingly isolated after withdrawing troops from Syria and clearing the way for a Turkish offensive against Kurds who had fought alongside the United States. The president all but washed his hands of the conflict, saying that it “has nothing to do with us,” generating withering criticism from Republicans and leading to a stormy clash with Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Bereft of supporters and under pressure from an impeachment inquiry, Mr. Trump spent much of the day defending his decision and lashing out against foes. He dismissed the Kurds, who until last week shared outposts with American soldiers, saying they were “no angels” and fought for money. And he berated Ms. Pelosi as a “third-grade politician” or “third-rate politician,” depending on the version, prompting Democrats to walk out of a White House meeting.

“I think now we have to pray for his health,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters afterward. “This was a very serious meltdown on the part of the president.” She said Mr. Trump seemed “very shaken up” by the cascade of criticism.

Mr. Trump said it was the other way around. “Nancy Pelosi needs help fast!” he wrote on Twitter. “She had a total meltdown in the White House today. It was very sad to watch. Pray for her, she is a very sick person!”

The collision in the Cabinet Room came shortly after the House voted 354 to 60 for a nonbinding resolution expressing opposition to Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the Kurds, a measure that drew support from two-thirds of the House Republican caucus and all three of its top leaders. Senate Republicans spoke out individually on Wednesday, warning that Mr. Trump was courting “disaster,” as one put it.

The fireworks erupted as Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Robert C. O’Brien, the president’s new national security adviser, left for Turkey in an effort to persuade President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to agree to a cease-fire in Syria.

But Mr. Trump’s commitment to that diplomacy seemed in doubt as he declared that the United States had no real interest in the matter. “That has nothing to do with us,” he said. He said he could understand if Syria and Turkey want territory. “But what does that have to do with the United States of America if they’re fighting over Syria’s land?” he asked.

Mr. Trump dismissed concerns that his decision to pull back had opened the way for Russia, Iran, the Syrian government and the Islamic State to move into the abandoned territory and reassert influence in the area. “I wish them all a lot of luck,” Mr. Trump said of the Russians and Syrians. “If Russia wants to get involved with Syria, that’s really up to them,” he added.

Mr. Trump’s approach upended decades of American policy in the Middle East, a region presidents of both parties have considered vital to the United States. While many presidents have been reluctant to commit troops to conflicts there, they rarely brushed off the importance of the region’s disputes so dismissively nor accepted the influence of Russia or other hostile players so readily.

But Mr. Trump argued that he ran for president on a platform of ending “endless wars,” a pledge that resonated with many Americans tired of nearly two decades of overseas military operations. “Let them fight their own wars,” he said. “They’ve been fighting for 1,000 years. Let them fight their own wars.”

Critics in both parties condemned the president’s decision. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, opened his weekly news conference by expressing his “gratitude to the Kurds,” adding, “I’m sorry that we are where we are.”

Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said that by sending Mr. Pence and Mr. Pompeo to Turkey, Mr. Trump was trying to fix a problem of his own creation, but too late.

“It’s very hard to understand why it is the vice president and secretary of state and others are going to talk with Erdogan and Turkey,” Mr. Romney told reporters. “It’s like the farmer who lost all his horses and goes to now shut the barn door.”

Mr. Trump got into an extended back and forth with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, normally among his closest allies but one of the sharpest opponent of his Syria decision.

“I hope President Trump is right in his belief that Turkey’s invasion of Syria is of no concern to us, abandoning the Kurds won’t come back to haunt us, ISIS won’t reemerge, and Iran will not fill the vacuum created by this decision,” Mr. Graham wrote on Twitter.

“However,” he added, “I firmly believe that if President Trump continues to make such statements this will be a disaster worse than President Obama’s decision to leave Iraq.”

The president pushed back against Mr. Graham later in the day, saying that the senator should be focusing on investigating Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponents, including former President Barack Obama. “The people of South Carolina don’t want us to get into a war with Turkey, a NATO member, or with Syria,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Graham then rebutted Mr. Trump again. “With all due respect for the president, I think I’m elected to have a say about our national security,” he told reporters who relayed Mr. Trump’s remarks. “I will not ever be quiet about matters of national security.”

Mr. Trump had little patience for Ms. Pelosi when she and other congressional leaders of both parties arrived at the White House for a briefing on the fighting. It was the first time the president had been in the same room with her since she declared the opening of an impeachment inquiry last month and while the topic did not come up, the room crackled with friction.

When Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, cited Mr. Trump’s former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, on Syria, the president cut him off. Mr. Mattis, a retired Marine general, was “the world’s most overrated general,” Mr. Trump said, according to a Democratic account of the exchange.

“You know why?” Mr. Trump said. “He wasn’t tough enough. I captured ISIS. Mattis said it would take two years. I captured them in one month.”

According to the Democratic account, Ms. Pelosi at one point noted that President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia has always wanted a “foothold in the Middle East” and now has one.

“All roads with you lead to Putin,” she told Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump suggested that the Democrats liked the Kurds in part because they included some communists. He lashed out at Ms. Pelosi. “In my opinion, you are a third-grade politician,” he told her, according to the speaker. (Mr. Schumer and the White House both recalled the insult as “third-rate politician.”)

When Ms. Pelosi and Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, stood to leave, Mr. Trump called out, “Goodbye, we’ll see you at the polls.”

Particularlyangering critics in both parties on Wednesday was Mr. Trump’s cavalier attitude toward the Kurdish troops who have been America’s most reliable ally against the Islamic State. Seven times during two public appearances on Wednesday, Mr. Trump used some variation of the phrase “no angels” to describe the Kurds and suggested they fought out of their own financial interest.

“We’re making the Kurds look like they’re angels,” he said at one point. “We paid a lot of money to the Kurds. Tremendous amounts of money. We’ve given them massive fortunes.”

Echoing Mr. Erdogan’s talking points, the president compared one faction of the Kurds to the Islamic State and asserted that Kurds intentionally freed some Islamic State prisoners to create a backlash for Mr. Trump. “Probably the Kurds let go to make a little bit stronger political impact,” he said.

But he denied that he gave Mr. Erdogan a green light for the incursion when he agreed to remove several dozen troops from the border who had served effectively as a trip wire deterring any Turkish operation, citing a letter he wrote the Turkish president last week.

“History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way,” Mr. Trump said in the Oct. 9 letter to Mr. Erdogan, which was obtained by Fox News on Wednesday and confirmed by a White House official. “It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool! I will call you later.”

Even as he discussed the conflict, Mr. Trump effectively confirmed the presence of 50 nuclear weapons at the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, violating the longstanding tradition of not publicly acknowledging where such arms are located. “The key issue is whether the U.S. can retain access to the weapons and assure their safety,” he said when asked by a reporter about the weapons.

Pentagon officials said on Wednesday that the first several dozen American military forces have left northern Syria, the start of a withdrawal that ultimately will pull out nearly 1,000 troops in coming weeks.

After the troops had left a base near Kobani, Syria, two F-15E’s attack planes carried out a preplanned airstrike to destroy an ammunition cache and reduce the facility’s military usefulness, according to Col. Myles B. Caggins III, a spokesman for the American-led coalition in Baghdad.

However, he also said the Trump administration did not want to isolate Turkey“Our goal isn’t to break the relationship,” Mr. Pompeo said. “It is to deny Turkey the capacity to continue to engage in this behavior.” But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned that the United States could impose more severe sanctions on Turkey if a ceasefire does not occur, possibly targeting more Turkish ministers, ministries or sectors.

Robert Ford, the last American ambassador in Syria before the civil war forced the closing of the United States Embassy in 2012, said Mr. Trump has understandable goals but has mishandled how he pursued them.

“The Trump administration is correct to limit our commitment in eastern Syria, but it is very clumsy in managing the policy and the rollout,” said Mr. Ford, now a fellow at the Middle East Institute and Yale University. “At this late stage," Mr. Ford said, “it is not clear what the administration can hope to salvage.”

Emily Cochrane, Catie Edmondson, Lara Jakes, Annie Karni, Alan Rappeport, Katie Rogers, David Sanger, Eric Schmitt, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

*********

Former Top State Dept. Aide Tells Impeachment Investigators He Quit Over Ukraine

Michael McKinley, who resigned as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said career diplomats had been sidelined on Ukraine.

By Nicholas Fandos, Julian E. Barnes and Michael D. Shear | Published

Oct. 16, 2019Updated 8:02 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted October 16, 2019 9:25 PM ET |

WASHINGTON �� A former top aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Congress on Wednesday that he resigned amid mounting frustrations with the Trump administration’s sidelining of career diplomats on Ukraine policy and its failure to support them in the face of the impeachment inquiry.

In several hours of closed-door testimony, Michael McKinley, who until last week was a senior adviser to Mr. Pompeo, described his disappointment with how politicized the State Department had become under President Trump, saying that the last straw for him stemmed from the ouster of Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine whom Mr. Trump ordered removed.

According to a copy of his opening remarks reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. McKinley said that after reading in late September that President Trump had disparaged Ms. Yovanovitch as “bad news” on a July phone call with the Ukrainian leader, he had tried to get top State Department officials to publicly laud Ms. Yovanovitch for her “professionalism and courage.” He said he ultimately received no meaningful response, no statement was issued and he decided to step down.

“The timing of my resignation was the result of two overriding concerns: the failure, in my view, of the State Department to offer support to Foreign Service employees caught up in the impeachment inquiry on Ukraine,” Mr. McKinley said in an opening statement. “And, second, by what appears to be the utilization of our ambassadors overseas to advance a domestic political objective.”

Mr. McKinley told investigators that State Department officials were discouraging people from testifying, and were not supporting diplomats who had received subpoenas and requests to appear before the House, according to a person familiar with his testimony.

Echoing concerns raised by Ms. Yovanovitch last week in her own testimony, Mr. McKinley warned that reported efforts by some Trump administration officials to pressure foreign powers like Ukraine “to procure negative information on political opponents” would “have a serious impact on foreign service morale and the integrity of our work overseas.”

“I was disturbed by the implication that foreign governments were being approached to procure negative information on political opponents,” he said.

Mr. McKinley’s testimony was the latest in a string of accounts that top career diplomats and administration officials have given to impeachment investigators about how experts were sidelined as the president pursued his own agenda on Ukraine, including in a July telephone call in which Mr. Trump asked President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.

Taken together, the interviews have corroborated and expanded on many aspects of the intelligence whistle-blower complaint that prompted the impeachment inquiry, which claimed that Mr. Trump abused his power to enlist a foreign government for his own political gain.

And House investigators continued to line up crucial witnesses to fill out the deepening saga. William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, received a House summons to appear on Tuesday, according to an official familiar with the investigation. One associate of Mr. Taylor’s indicated that he was traveling back to the United States this week to prepare for his testimony.

Text messages released by investigators this month showed that Mr. Taylor was alarmed by the White House’s decision to freeze $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine, fretting that the administration was withholding the aid as leverage.

As more evidence emerged, senators met behind closed doors to discuss their plan for a likely impeachment trial within weeks.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, arrived at the weekly party luncheon armed with a PowerPoint presentation he showed colleagues outlining the process, which he said he expected could be completed by Christmas, according to two Republicans familiar with the private discussion who described it on the condition of anonymity. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. would preside, he explained, and the Senate would meet six days a week for the proceeding.

During the lunch, Mr. McConnell told members that he believed House Democrats wanted to move expeditiously, possibly approving articles of impeachment by Thanksgiving, and said he also hoped it would go quickly, wrapping up a trial in the Senate by Christmas.

“We intend to do our constitutional responsibility,” Mr. McConnell said.

While Mr. McKinley told lawmakers that he did not have detailed knowledge about the Ukraine matter, he said the handling of the issue was emblematic of a troublesome trend at the State Department, the people familiar with his testimony said. He spoke of his frustration with Rex W. Tillerson, the former secretary of state, saying he had gutted the department, and praised Mr. Pompeo for his leadership.

But Mr. McKinley said he was alarmed at how poorly diplomats were treated. Ms. Yovanovitch, a 30-year veteran of the Foreign Service, testified privately last week that she was abruptly removed from her post after a monthslong push by Mr. Trump to get rid of her on the basis of “unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.”

He said that when he reached out to Ms. Yovanovitch in late September, she indicated that no senior department officials had contacted her amid revelations of the whistle-blower complaint and Mr. Trump’s July phone call, and that she would welcome more public support, according to his opening remarks.

Mr. McKinley also testified that George Kent, a senior State Department official in charge of Ukraine policy, had written a memo documenting an early October meeting with a State Department lawyer about how to respond to the impeachment inquiry that had alarmed him. Mr. McKinley said Mr. Kent shared the memo with him, and he in turn passed it on to other department colleagues with no reply. The document is likely be of intense interest to investigators.

Democratic lawmakers who participated in the questioning of Mr. McKinley said he fit the mold of other witnesses the impeachment inquiry had interviewed.

“Another career Foreign Service officer with a 33-year career trying to do the right thing,” said Representative Harley Rouda, Democrat of California, as he left the deposition. Mr. Rouda said that Mr. McKinley, like some other witnesses, provided the committees with an opening statement.

After leaving the hearing room, Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina, said that Mr. McKinley had been both “complimentary of Secretary Pompeo,” and made clear he was “supportive” of Ms. Yovanovitch.

Mr. Pompeo has defended the administration’s actions regarding Ukraine, saying that the impeachment inquiry has incited a “silly gotcha game” in Washington.

Mr. McKinley appeared voluntarily before the committee, which did not issue a subpoena to compel his testimony, according to an official involved in the inquiry.

He arrived on Capitol Hill Wednesday as the House’s impeachment inquiry has accelerated, with daily hourslong depositions that Democratic lawmakers hope will expose the activities of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, to pressure Ukraine’s government to dig up damaging information about Mr. Trump’s political rivals.

The steady stream of diplomats and White House officials have appeared before the committees despite Mr. Trump’s vow not to cooperate with the inquiry. Mr. McKinley’s testimony further sets the stage for the expected deposition on Thursday of Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union and a Trump loyalist.

In the past week, witnesses have described a shadow foreign policy led by Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Sondland and Rick Perry, the secretary of energy, which was meant to sideline the diplomats with formal responsibility over relations with Ukraine.

Reporting was contributed by Sharon LaFraniere, Emily Cochrane, Catie Edmondson and Julian Barnes.

********

The Ukrainian Prosecutor Behind the Dossier Targeting Hunter Biden

Kostiantyn H. Kulyk has been indicted himself on corruption charges and has a reputation for using investigations as political weapons.

By Andrew E. Kramer and Michael Schwirtz | Published Oct. 15, 2019 Updated Oct. 16, 2019, 12:54 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 16, 2019 9:25 PM ET |

KIEV, Ukraine — When the Ukrainian prosecutor Kostiantyn H. Kulyk compiled a seven-page dossier in English that accused the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. of corruption, he helped set off a political firestorm that has led to the impeachment investigation of President Trump.

But even as he was reopening a corruption case related to Hunter Biden’s service on the board of Burisma Holdings, a major Ukrainian gas company, Mr. Kulyk himself was under a cloud of suspicion.

He has been indicted three times on corruption charges and accused of bringing politically motivated criminal cases against his opponents. In a Ukrainian security clearance form, Mr. Kulyk admitted having ties to a warlord in eastern Ukraine accused of working for the Russian intelligence services.

Yet none of this — including the case related to the Bidens — has seemed to harm the career of Mr. Kulyk, who remains a department head in the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office under a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

“In Ukraine, a toxic person can keep a job,” said Yuriy Butusov, editor in chief of the political news outlet Tsenzor.net. “That’s not a problem.”

Mr. Kulyk’s continued presence in the halls of government illustrates the blending of politics and criminal justice in Ukraine, where investigations are routinely used as political weapons or to grease the business interests of wealthy insiders. And the spread of his dossier in Washington shows how these tactics have spilled into American politics.

In a July phone call that is central to the impeachment inquiry, President Trump asked Mr. Zelensky to investigate the Biden case, including supposed conflicts of interest by Mr. Biden when he was vice president, and a debunked theory that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Zelensky agreed, according to White House notes on the call, saying a new prosecutor general “will look into the situation,” though he said later that the new prosecutor would act fairly and independently.

In a statement, the prosecutor general’s office declined to clarify if Mr. Kulyk retains control over the Biden case, which is now under an audit that delays any prosecutorial decisions. Mr. Kulyk did not respond to requests for an interview.

Mr. Kulyk’s dossier did more than revive the Biden case. The seven-page document he compiled and circulated also accused American diplomats of covering up for crimes committed by the Bidens, a spurious theory that played a role in the recall of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch.

A strapping former military prosecutor with a buzz cut, Mr. Kulyk pivoted his allegiance to Mr. Zelensky late in the Ukrainian presidential race last spring, allowing him to continue holding sway over important matters.

Currently, he is pursuing a case against a former central bank governor that could aid a powerful oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky, a former business partner of Mr. Zelensky. The case has become entangled in talks with the International Monetary Fund about a $5 billion aid program for Ukraine. Those broke off last month amid concerns about Mr. Kolomoisky’s influence on the government. Calls seeking comment from Mr. Kolomoisky on a phone number he has used in the past went unanswered.

The Kolomoisky case and Mr. Kulyk’s role in it have become a credibility test for Mr. Zelensky, who swept to office on an anticorruption platform.

“If he doesn’t fire Kulyk it will be a big negative for him, because then no one will believe that he is a reformer,” said Valeria A. Gontareva, the former central banker involved in the case. “If this country doesn’t get real rule of law then all of our reforms will be easily reversed.”

In March, Mr. Kulyk, who with a former prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, had coordinated with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to promote the allegations against the Bidens, suddenly switched allegiance in Ukraine’s domestic politics.

He and Mr. Lutsenko had been seen as staunch enforcers for President Petro O. Poroshenko. But two days before the first round of the country’s presidential election — with opinion polls showing Mr. Zelensky crushing Mr. Poroshenko — Mr. Kulyk filed criminal corruption charges against dozens of Poroshenko aides. He then went on a television talk show to discuss the highlights of these cases.

An on-air confrontation ensued. Mr. Poroshenko rushed to the studio and accused Mr. Kulyk of naked political abuse of the justice system. The 11th-hour smear nevertheless reinforced Mr. Zelensky’s campaign message that the country needed a new leader to root out corruption.

Corruption allegations trailed Mr. Kulyk long before his role in the Biden case. In 2016, he was indicted on charges of illegal enrichment, with prosecutors noting that his expensive tastes seemed incongruous with his modest salary as a prosecutor. Court documents describe Mr. Kulyk as owning assets equivalent to 1,615 times the minimum cost of living for Ukraine, including two apartments in central Kiev and a Toyota Land Cruiser that together cost more than four years’ worth of his income.

“In any other country a prosecutor like this would have been fired a long time ago,” said Andrii Savin, a lawyer with Ukraine’s Anticorruption Action Center who has followed Mr. Kulyk’s career closely. “But what happened in this country? The prosecutor general promoted him.”

Mr. Kulyk has also come under fire for his ties to a man believed to be a Russian intelligence agent in his hometown, Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Kulyk disclosed the friendship in an application for security clearance in 2014 as war broke out between Russia-backed separatists and Ukraine, Mr. Kulyk’s former boss in the military prosecutor’s office, Anatoly Matios, told Ukrainian media in 2017.

Mr. Kulyk had known the man, Yevhen Zhylin, when Mr. Kulyk served in the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office and Mr. Zhylin ran a martial arts club in the city, called Oplot, or the Stronghold. Oplot was subsequently transformed into a large, Russian-backed paramilitary unit fighting on the separatist side.

Mr. Matios told the Ukrainian media that Mr. Kulyk had passed the security clearance, but added: “I will tell you something: The moral principles of this person are worthless.”

Investigators who pursued the illegal enrichment case against Mr. Kulyk did, however, find the source of one unexplained asset: the Toyota Land Cruiser. It was registered to the father of Mr. Zhylin, the commander on the pro-Russian side in the war.

In the middle of his corruption trial, Mr. Kulyk was transferred from the military prosecutor’s service to Kiev, where he became a department head in the prosecutor general office’s international department. (Ms. Yovanovitch, then the new American ambassador, was among those who objected to the move.)

It was in this position that Mr. Kulyk began digging into Burisma, the gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board.

In an interview published in The Hill in April, Mr. Kulyk told the conservative commentator John Solomon that he had been trying to give the United States government what he said was evidence of sweeping wrongdoing by Democrats and American diplomats, but had been blocked by officials in the American Embassy in Kiev.

The substance of the interview was consistent with the theory laid out in the dossier he compiled in late 2018, according to his former colleagues at the prosecutor’s office. The dossier, which was leaked by a Ukrainian blogger, asserted that Ukrainian prosecutors had evidence that “may attest to the commission of corrupt actions aimed at personal unlawful enrichment by the former Vice President of the United States Joe Biden.”

Mr. Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general, said in an interview that he never gave Mr. Kulyk’s dossier to Mr. Giuliani. But notes taken by Mr. Giuliani during their meeting in January, passed to Congress this month by the State Department inspector general, mirror the ideas laid out in Mr. Kulyk’s memo.

And in her testimony in the impeachment inquiry on Friday, Ms. Yovanovitch, the former ambassador, suggested that Mr. Kulyk’s dossier, or its main points, had filtered even higher in the American government. She said her recall from Kiev last spring was tied to “unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.”

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.

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