#my parents are neoliberals and I didn’t know better

[disasterhimbo]

I’m going through my childhood books and I just found this, helppppp

[aestheticritique]

For young men (Part 1)

In my latest lockdown induced depressive episode I have been meeting some new people online. They are all young, male, mostly heterosexual, very nice and extremely considerate. However, they also are often afraid becoming a burden, insecure in their appearance or social skills, and often struggling with mental health. Given this, they are also usually extremely afraid of never finding themselves having sex or getting into a meaningful relationship in the late stage neoliberal capitalist dystopia we find ourselves in. To be honest I didn’t understand them at first, especially their obsession with sex. But the more I am thinking about it, the more I realize that we are united in the same dynamic of seeing sex or love as magic verfication of... What?

Growing up, I used hookups as a way to prove to myself that I am worth something. I thought that my value was defined by men’s desire. I originally in writing this wanted to show my perspective from the other side of the same coin, but after realizing how much of an undertaking that would be, I decided to start with the two most common answers from men used as justification to why they think they won’t get laid. These are things I find will help these kinds of people out, but as a great thinker once said...

“I can’t mom you through this one, boys. You are on your own.” - Contrapoints

(I link songs I like through out btw, the underlined text are links you can click on)

Foreword: Social factors

The average age of first intercourse has been rising in the US. Teenagers have less sex than ever before. These changes will affect you. In teen movies and shows charakters often experiment with sexuality before the age of 18. Everything else is played as an abnormality. If we compare ourselves to this misrepresentation of teenage sexuality, of course we seem like the losers.

“The proportion of young people who have had sexual intercourse increases rapidly as they age through adolescence”. It’s very likely, at least from my view, that you are just going to grow out of the awkward zone of wanting intimacy but not getting it. Just like you grew out of other things, such as bad musical taste or that one gaudy outfit. Don’t stress over this one specifically either.

Adolescence is weird for all of us. Even if your first encounter is after college, let’s be real here: having such a good thing in your own place without your parents looming or having to share your room with a roommate you barely know is so much better anyway.

The Ugly fuck too

A common answer to my question why they think that they will never have sex is that they are “unattractive”. The implication being, that sex is the prize for looking a certain way.

But is it? We are so used to the perfect, porn-ready bodies in the media that we forget that the Ugly fuck too. We never see the foldes of fat and skin, never see acne warriors or moles, never see people who actually look like us.

In the movie “The Parasite”, there is a scene where the husband of Gook Moon-gwang, the former housekeeper, is implied to have sex. (the clip, starts at 3:00) It gave me weird feelings of discomfort, as the illusion so stereotypically found on the silver screen was not present. These two characters are not pretty. They look old. She is fat and he is a balding skeleton. They are not special, and that’s okay.

Being fuckable does not equal beauty. Being fuckable does not equal beauty. It was a terrifying thought initially for someone like me who defined their value over beauty & their beauty as being fuckable. It might also be a scary thought for someone who doesn’t think that they deserve love and intimacy because of their looks. I promise you that you still deserve love! Sex did not cure my problems with my appearance, or the fact that I based my self-esteem on the way I look. It will not make you feel normal. It will not make you feel better, prove your worth or even give you more self esteem in the long term beyond the initial rush of dopamine. It is not a caravan to fulfillment.

Beauty is a concept that is based on exclusion. Allow yourself to feel the pain of being excluded, of not reaching the impossible beauty standards and the disadvantages that come with it. Allow yourself to feel the fear of not being “man enough” and be happy in spite of it.

“Patriarchal masculinity teaches us to control our pain, but it can block us from experiencing the grief that is part of a full life. Chasing pleasure and controlling pain is patriarchal. Opening ourselves up to joy and grief is to be fully human.”

”Those of us in that skinny nerd category are especially prone to thinking that we aren’t “man enough.” [..] But the more I talked to men, the more convinced I became that almost all men at some point in their lives don’t feel man enough. Even the men I thought were the “real men” were scared.

That’s not surprising. Masculinity in patriarchy—that is, masculinity in a system of institutionalized male dominance—trains men to be competitive, in pursuit of conquest, which leads to routine confrontation, with the goal of always being in control of oneself and others. But no matter how intensely competitive one is, no matter how complete the conquest, no matter how many successful confrontations, and no matter how much one stays in control—men are haunted by the fear that they aren’t man enough, that they can never stop proving their masculinity.” - Robert Jensen

Stop comparing your appearance to other men’s. Start talking and bonding with them over your undoubtably shared insecurities rooted in society’s relentless toxic masculinity. Unlearning the things you’ve been indoctrinated into since conception is damn hard. I am still in the middle of it personally, but I promise you it is worth it. It will improve not only your relationships with other men, but also with yourself and that one girl you’re pining after.

There are a ton of resources targeted at women about self acceptance, but not many for men. Robert Jenson comes from a tradition of critical men’s groups. Even though I don’t agree with him on everything, he manages to scare most men (especially the kind I mentioned in the first paragraph) to their core, but also improves their lives drastically with his kindness and radical ideas. I implore you to look him up, and try your best to keep an open mind.

“A person who functions normally in a sick society is themselve sick.”

The other most common answer  to the initial question was “being socially maladjusted”, implying that sex is something you earn by behaving a certain way. It is ingrained in the way we talk about love. “Deserving love” is the best example. Neither love nor sex is a product of work. Love and intimacy are a lot like sleep. It is a slow but unconscious process. You slowly work into it, with no idea of what comes next, and then, after an agonizingly long moment, you’re there. The fall is not often expected or easy, is always exhilarating, but never the product of conformity to anything except comfort with who you are.

I do acknowledge that social settings can be weird, existentially unsettling, and full of unseen complexities. This is especially true if you are neurodivergent and / or struggling with mental health.  Being neurodivergent or struggling with mental health goes against the impossible, hegemonically masculine standard of always being in controll. It’s a common cause behind feelings of emasculation. Disregard that feeling, and remember that you deserve love, no matter how manly you are or are not, no matter how you behave.

Learning social settings are lot like learning to skate. In the beginning you will be covered in bruises, but with enough effort, you will be better at it. The chance of mistakes will get lower, but never zero. You will always have awkward situations, but that doesn’t mean that you are bad at them. It just means that you have room to improve still. Maybe consider getting lessons or joining a skate crew.

We tend to hyperfocus on the accidents. Think about how many nice conversations you had over the internet, text or otherwise. I ask you to value them. Value these positive experiences, value your friendships and acquaintances, value the people supporting you, online and offline. We tend to hyperfocus on meaningfull longterm friendships, just like we hyperfocus on love. Value your social enviroment, value someone who just made you feel ok for a moment. You are socially adapted, because you have a social enviroment you feel comfortable in, where you have relationships with people. The depth of a relationship is not messured by time, nor by physical touch. Being mindful of your feelings for the people around you can make you realize that you are less alone than you thought.

Some Tips

If you want to make friends additionally to that, here are some tips from someone, who is bad at social clues:

Join a group with a common interest or struggle: Book clubs, activist groups, selfhelp groups, they are great settings to meet new people and you already have a topic to talk about :)

If you feel save about it: Being open about your issues can help other people adapt to you and understand you better - especially in early on in relationships.

People sitting at the bar or smoking outside are generally more open for conversation

Don’t be afraid of getting rejected: They don’t reject you, when they reject a conversation with you. The reasons people don’t want to talk to you is very diverse. Stay respectful and polite.

Don’t expect to much: No one owes you a long conversation. A smalltalk is perfectly fine.

Learn to make compliments casually and learn to compliments that aren’t based on appearance.

Find a common ground (politically, a interest ect.) and talk about it

Take a improv class, seriously TAKE A IMPROV CLASS! (there are online ones, and sometimes it’s even free)

Here are some youtube videos by Anna Akana with more tips. (1) conversations, (2) how to be a better friend, (3) overthinking

Here are is a piece about being bad at relationship I liked.

Footnote: Trophies and muses

“We do not want to do the work of helping you to believe in your humanity. We cannot do it anymore. We have always tried. We have been repaid with systematic exploitation and systematic abuse. You are going to have to do this yourselves from now on and you know it.” - Andrea Dowkin

Behind the whole obsession with sex is often a distorted perception of women. Just remind yourself that women are human? Access to female bodies is not a human right. We are not trophies to push your ego. We are not there to inspire you or heal you. We are humans with agency. We desire love and being loved, just like everyone else.

I am tired, but I believe in your humanity...

xoxo,

aestheticritique

[innuendostudios]

Research Masterpost

This is my research list for The Alt-Right Playbook. It is a living document - I am typically adding sources faster than I am finishing the ones already on it. Notes and links below the list. Also, please note this does not include the hundreds of articles and essays I’ve read that also inform the videos - this is books, reports, and a few documentaries.

Legend: Titles in bold -> finished Titles in italics -> partially finished *** -> livetweeted as part of #IanLivetweetsHisResearch (asterisks will be a link) The book I am currently reading will be marked as such.

Media Manipulation & Disinformation Online, by Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis Alternative Influence, by Rebecca Lewis The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer*** Eclipse of Reason, by Max Horkheimer Civility in the Digital Age, by Andrea Weckerle The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt On Revolution, by Hannah Arendt Don’t Think of an Elephant, by George Lakoff The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley*** This is an Uprising, by Mark and Paul Engler Neoreaction a Basilisk, by Elizabeth Sandifer This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, by Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson Healing from Hate, by Michael Kimmel The Brainwashing of my Dad, doc by Jen Senko On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin*** Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi Fascism Today, by Shane Burley Indoctrination over Objectivity?, by Marrissa S. Ballard Ur-Fascism, by Umberto Eco Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, by Lindsay C. Gibson Anti-Semite and Jew, by Jean-Paul Sartre Alt-America, by David Neiwert*** The Dictator’s Handbook, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith Terror, Love, and Brainwashing, by Alexandra Stein Kaputt, by Curzio Malaparte The Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert O. Paxton Neoliberalism and the Far Right, by Neil Davidson and Richard Saull Trolls Just Want to Have Fun, by Erin E. Buckels, et al The Entrepreneurial State, by Mariana Mazzucato

Media Manipulation & Disinformation Online, by Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis (free: link) A monstrously useful report from Data & Society which- coupled with Samuel R. Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water - formed the backbone of the Mainstreaming video. I barely scratched the surface of how many techniques the Far Right uses to inflate their power and influence. If you feel lost in a sea of Al-Right bullshit, this will at least help you understand how things got the way they are, and maybe help you discern truth from twaddle.

The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer (free: link) (livetweets) A free book full of research from Bob Altemeyer’s decades of study into authoritarianism. Altemeyer writes conversationally, even jovially, peppering what could have been a dense and dry work with dad jokes. I wouldn’t say he’s funny (most dads aren’t), but it makes the book blessedly accessible. If you ever wanted a ton of data demonstrating that authoritarianism is deeply correlated with conservatism, this is the book. One of the most useful resources I’ve consumed so far, heavily influencing the entire series but most directly the video on White Fascism. Even has some suggestions for how to actually change the mind of a reactionary, which is kind of the Holy Grail of LeftTube.

(caveats: there is a point in the book where Altemeyer throws a little shade on George Lakoff, and I feel he slightly - though not egregiously - misrepresents Lakoff’s arguments)

Don’t Think of an Elephant, by George Lakoff An extremely useful book about framing. Delves into the differences between the American Right and Left when it comes to messaging, how liberal politicians tend to have degrees in things like Political Science and Rhetoric, where conservatives far more often have degrees in Marketing. This leads to two different cultures, where liberals have Enlightenment-style beliefs that all  you need is good ideas and conservatives know an idea will only be popular if you know how to sell it. He gets into the nuts and bolts of how to keep control of a narrative, because the truth is only effective if the audience recognizes it as such. Kind of staggering how many Democrats swear by this book while blatantly taking none of its advice. Lakoff has been all over the series since the first proper video.

(caveats: several. Lakoff seemingly believes the main difference between the Right and Left is in our default frames, and that swaying conservatives amounts to little more than finding better ways to make the same arguments. he deeply underestimates the ideological divide between Parties, and some of his advice reads as tips for making debates more pleasant but no more productive. he also makes a passing comparison between conservatism and Islam that means well but is a gross and kinda racist false equivalence)

How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley (livetweets) A slog. Many useful concepts, and directly referenced in the White Fascism video. But could have said everything it needed to say in half as many pages. Stanley seems dedicated to framing everything in epistemological terms, not appealing to morality or sentiment, which means huge sections of the book are given over to “proving” democracy is a good thing using only philosophical concepts, when “democracy good” is probably something his readership already accepts. Also has a frustrating tendency to begin every paragraph with a brief summary of the previous paragraph. When he actually talks about, you know, how propaganda works, it’s very useful, and I don’t regret reading it. But I don’t entirely recommend it. Seems written for an imagined PhD review board. Might be better off reading my livetweets.

Neoreaction a Basilisk, by Elizabeth Sandier A trip. Similar to Jason Stanley, Sandifer is dedicated to “disproving” a number of Far Right ideologies - from transphobia to libertarianism to The Singularity - in purely philosophical terms. The difference is, she’s having fun with it. I won’t pretend the title essay - a 140-page mammoth - didn’t lose me several times, and someone had to remind which of its many threads was the thesis. And some stretches are dense, academic writing punctuated with vulgarity and (actually quite clever) jokes, which doesn’t always average out to the playfully heady tone she’s going for. But, still, frequently brilliant and never less than interesting. There is something genuinely cathartic about a book that begins with the premise that we all fear but won’t let ourselves meaningfully consider - that we will lose the fight with the Right and climate change is going to kill us all - and talks about what we can do in that event. I felt I didn’t even have to agree with the premise to feel strangely empowered by it. Informed the White Fascism video’s comments on transphobia as the next frontier of bigotry since failing to prevent marriage equality.

On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt Was surprised to find this isn’t properly a book, just a printed essay. Highly relevant passage that helped form my description of 4chan in The Card Says Moops: “What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without its being assumed that they are committed to what they say: it is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel. The main point is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under discussion. Therefore provision is made for enjoying a certain irresponsibility, so that people will be encouraged to convey what is on their minds without too much anxiety that they will be held to it. [paragraph break] Each of the contributors to a bull session relies, in other words, upon a general recognition that what he expresses or says is not to be understood as being what he means wholeheartedly or believes unequivocally to be true. The purpose of the conversation is not to communicate beliefs.”

The Reactionary Mind, by Corey Robin (livetweets) Another freakishly useful book, and the basis for Always a Bigger Fish and The Origins of Conservatism. Jumping into the history of conservative thought, going all the way back to Thomas Hobbes, to stress that conservatism is, and always has been, about preserving social hierarchies and defending the powerful. Robin dissects thinkers who heavily influenced conservatism, from Edmund Burke and Friedrich Nietzsche to Carl Menger and Ayn Rand, and finally concluding with Trump himself. There’s a lot of insight into how the conservative mind works, though precious little comment on what we can do about it, which somewhat robs the book of a conclusion. Still, the way it bounces off of Don’t Think of an Elephant and The Authoritarians really brings the Right into focus.

Fascism Today, by Shane Burley Yet another influence on the White Fascism video. Bit of a mixed bag. The opening gives a proper definition of fascism, which is extremely useful. Then the main stretch delves into the landscape of modern fascism, from Alt-Right to Alt-Lite to neofolk pagans to the Proud Boys and on and on. Sometimes feels overly comprehensive, but insights abound on the intersections of all these belief systems (Burley pointing out that the Alt-Right is, in essence, the gentrification of working-class white nationalists like neo-Nazi skinheads and the KKK was a real eye-opener). But the full title is Fascism Today: What it is and How to End it, and it feels lacking in the second part. Final stretch mostly lists a bunch of efforts to address fascism that already exist, how they’ve historically been effective, and suggestions for getting involved. Precious few new ideas there. And maybe the truth is that we already have all the tools we need to fight fascism and we simply need to employ them, and being told so is just narratively unsatisfying. Or maybe it’s a structural problem with the book, that it doesn’t reveal a core to fascism the way Altemeyer reveals a core to authoritarianism and Robin reveals a core to conservatism, so I don’t come away feeling like I get fascism well enough to fight it. But, also, Burley makes it clear that modern fascism is a rapidly evolving virus, and being told that old ways are still the best ways isn’t very satisfying. If antifascism isn’t evolving at least as rapidly, it doesn’t seem like we’re going to win.

(caveats: myriad. for one, Burley repeatedly quotes Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies, which does not inspire confidence. he also talks about “doxxing fascists” as a viable strategy without going into the differences between “linking a name to a face at a public event” and “hacking someone’s email to publicly reveal their bank information,” where the former is the strategy that fights fascism and the latter is vigilantism that is practiced widely on the Right and only by the worst actors on the Left. finally, the one section where Burley discusses an area I had already thoroughly researched was GamerGate, and he got quite a few facts wrong, which makes me question how accurate all the parts I hadn’t researched were. I don’t want to drive anyone away from the book, because it was still quite useful, but I recommend reading it only in concert with a lot of other sources so you don’t get a skewed perspective.)

Healing from Hate, by Michael Kimmel (Michael Kimmel, it turns out, is a scumbag. This book’s main thesis is that we need to look at violent extremism through the lens of toxic masculinity, so Kimmel’s toxic history with women is massively disappointing. Book itself is, in many ways, good, but, you know, retweets are not endorsement.)

A 4-part examination of how men get into violent extremism through the lens of the organizations that help them get out: EXIT in Germany and Sweden, Life After Hate in the US, and The Quilliam Foundation in Europe and North America. Emphasizing that entry into white nationalism - and, to an extent, jihadism - is less ideological than social. Young men enter these movements out of a need for community, purpose, and a place to put their anger. They feel displaced and mistreated by society - and often, very tangibly, are - and extremism offers a way to prove their manhood. Feelings of emasculation is a major theme. The actual politics of extremism are adopted gradually. They are, in a sense, the price of admission for the community and the sense of purpose. The most successful exit strategies are those that address these feelings of loneliness and emasculation and build social networks outside the movement, and not ones that address ideology first - the ideology tends to wither with the change in environment. The book itself can be a bit repetitive, but these observations are very enlightening.

(caveats: the final chapter on militant Islam is deeply flawed. Kimmel clearly didn’t get as much access to Qulliam as he had to EXIT and Life After Hate, so his data is based far less on direct interviews with counselors and former extremists and much more on other people’s research. despite the chapter stressing that a major source of Muslim alienation is racism, Kimmel focuses uncomfortably much on white voices - the majority of researchers he quotes are white Westerners, and the few interviews he manages are mostly with white converts to Islam rather than Arabs or South Asians. all in all, the research feels thinner, and his claims about militant Islam seem much more conjectural when they don’t read as echos of other people’s opinions.)

Terror, Love and Brainwashing, by Alexandra Stein A look at totalitarian governments and cults through the lens of attachment theory. While not explicitly about the Far Right, it’s interesting to see the overlap between this and Healing from Hate. Stein stresses that the control dynamics she discusses are not exclusive to cults, and are, in fact, the same ones as in abusive relationships; cults are just the most extreme version. So you can see many similar dynamics in Far Right organizations, like the Aryan Nations or the Proud Boys. It’s made me curious how many of these dynamics are in play in the distributed, less controlled environment of online extremism, and makes me want to look further into the subject before drawing conclusions.

(caveats: book is, as with How Propaganda Works, sometimes a slog and rather repetitive. I clocked a 4-page stretch in chapter 8 where Stein did not say a single thing that hadn’t been said multiple times in previous chapters. also, when talking about people coerced into highly-controlled lifestyles, she offhandedly includes “prostitutes” among them? it’s that liberal conflation of sex work and trafficking which is really not cool. this isn’t a major point, just something to notice while you read it.)

Alt-America, by David Neiwert (livetweets) A look at the actual formation of the Alt-Right, and the history that led up to it: the Militia and Patriot movements of the 90′s, the Tea Party, the rise of Alex Jones and Glenn Beck, and so on. Having been steeped in the rhetoric and tactics of the Far Right for so long, someone doing the work of sitting down and putting it all in chronological order is immensely helpful. Generally clear and well-written, too, and would be an easy read if not for how goddamn depressing the content is. Has an unfortunate final 7 pages, where Neiwert starts recommending actual policy. Falls into the usual “have empathetic conversations with genuine conservatives to turn them against the fascist wing taking over their party,” not recognizing the ways in which conservatism is continuous with fascism, nor the ways that trying to appeal to moderate conservatives alienates the people whose rights they deny. Means an extremely valuable book leaves a bad taste in the final stretch, but everything up to then is aces.

[zamancollective]

The Constructive Agony of Talking Politics at Shabbat (Or How to Survive a Debate with Your Relatives) 

By Gabriella Kamran  

Illustration by Sophie Levy

I wasn’t yet 20 years old and I had already forgotten what it felt like to join my relatives for Shabbat dinner and eat brisket without a side of political commentary. Was that a new phenomenon? Was I too busy spitting tomatoes into napkins as a child that I didn’t notice the moral axioms being thrown above my head? Regardless, charged conversation after charged conversation gradually emerged from background noise while I chewed to a dynamic that captured my interest and charted the course of my intellectual development. 

It seems accurate to say that I entered the fray around the same time I started buying my own clothes. These were the early teenage years: I was testing the waters of feminism, experimenting with political Facebook posts, and learning that not everything I believe to be true is, in fact, the truth. Every young person has a moment of realization that adults can sometimes be profoundly wrong. Mine took place gradually over a series of weekly dinners, as my male relatives argued and I felt an arsenal of my own opinions weighing in my chest. 

I will say with no qualifiers that it is difficult for a fourteen-year-old girl to wedge herself into a conversation with several adult men. First, there is the issue of a quiet voice, not yet amplified by the support of social affirmation. Then there is the matter of being taken seriously — that is, the unspoken surprise that I was not in the living room talking to my girl cousins about nail polish. 

(The aunts, for their part, either ladled soup in the kitchen or listened at the table, inserting a comment when appropriate. For a long time, I interpreted their disinterest as ignorance or resignation to gender norms, but with maturity one gets better at recognizing weariness. I remember once my jaw dropped when a cousin’s grandmother expressed a political opinion out loud- something about Hillary’s foreign policy. I hated myself for being so shocked that she’d have something to say.) 

I learned quickly that family debate is rocky terrain. The post-meal discussion usually unfolded as follows: 

Man 1: This ObamaCare is going to put doctors out of business, I’m telling you. 

Man 2: Just awful. The liberals are pushing us towards socialism. Aunt: We’re just giving more and more money to the lazy bums. Me: What about the majority of poor people who aren’t lazy and were born into poverty? I don’t think anyone genuinely wants to be on welfare. 

Man 2: Oh, no. We send our kids to the conservative schools and they still get brainwashed by liberals. 

Man 1: Question everything your teachers tell you, Gabs. They have an agenda. An agenda. 

Alternatively, the “elders” card was pulled and the conversation stopped short: 

Me: I don’t think you should call people _____ 

Relative: You can’t speak to me like that. How can you disrespect your family?

The more politically conscious I became, the more these dinners began to wear on my nerves. At school, I was learning so much I could almost feel my mind growing into itself. The classic teenage practice of finding oneself was in full force for me as I wrote school newspaper op-eds in my successive editor positions and defined myself in the lines of my rhetoric. Dinner with relatives sucked this pride out of my chest and pulled the plug on my budding confidence. I oscillated between righteous indignation that prompted me to sit firmly in place when the political debate started during our meal and outright fear that anyone would ask me at any point in the night about something of more import than my week’s activities. Family dinners became a matter of fight or flight.  

I took refuge in journalism and books. They seemed to possess more certainty than my relatives’ armchair sociological analyses. I read Betty Friedan, Ta Nehisi Coates, Ari Shavit… and the fact that I considered these all to be radical texts is indicative of how intimidated I felt in political terms. My progressive ideals were no longer inclinations; I could use words like “neoliberal” and “reactionary” to match my relatives’ rhetorical skill. Vocabulary aside, however, a gulf persisted between me and some of the men in my family.

What was this gulf, exactly? Was it a generational gap? Surely an ideological divide existed between every new crop of cousins, fathers and daughters, uncles and nieces. Common wisdom dictates that naïve youth will always be more progressive and open-minded than their older counterparts. It seemed to me, though, that something more was at play here. These Shabbat dinners meant more than a blasé tidal shift in opinions, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. 

The time came for me to go to college, and I was surrounded for the first time by a collection of politically conscious people who had enough intellectual acuity to rigorously critique the elder generation’s values. 

I met friends who told me their grandparents were “hella liberal” and still smoked weed on the weekends, and I beheld these friends in awe. This must have been the diversity they extolled in admissions brochures, the expansion of horizons — but which one of us was living in a bubble? Then there were the students who seemed to have swallowed their relatives’ platitudes like pills, rolling their eyes when they passed a student protest or snickering at T.A.’s requests to state our preferred gender pronouns. These students made me the most uneasy.  

Mostly, though, college brought me a network of friends who shared my experience. By this time we had all developed standby strategies to deal with opinionated table talk: some blocked out the rhetoric and ate their khoresht in peace, and some, like me, often ventured back into the weekly scuffles like moths to a partisan flame.  

But, of course, it was more than righteous indignation that pulled me back into the tides of argument. The supposed radical leftist hegemony on college campuses gave my relatives plenty of dinner table fodder on the nights when I made the ten-minute journey from my dorm to their dining rooms. They particularly liked to raise an issue with my chosen minor, Gender Studies, which they denounced as man-hating. As they prodded me about my professors in order to attack their liberal agendas, I felt the familiar nagging anxiety: Was the leftist haven I found in college making me tone-deaf, insular under the pretense of high-minded morality? I felt obligated to listen to every dismissal of Hillary Clinton, every racial slur, and every condemnation of Islam. This was my internal protest at their accusations of narrow-mindedness. 

I still wondered what was really new in our political conversations. Topics had changed — Obama and McCain became Hillary and Trump, Al Qaeda became ISIS, gay became LGBTQIA+ — but the emotions I had as a young progressive facing several elder conservatives were constant. What were we all feeling during those semi-heated exchanges? We one-upped each other and attacked arguments at weak points, but what was the seed of all this debate? Perhaps it was a sense of familial betrayal. 

We swear to keep family and business separate but there is no such promise when it comes to politics, although we know they are equally divisive. “The personal is political” is also true in reverse — to disparage someone’s worldview is an affront to their world. Political standpoints are currents that run deeper than the surface waters of opinion. Debate is healthy and insult is not, and the line between them is fine. 

One August night before my freshman year of college, one family member reminded me once again to question everything my professors would tell me.  

“These are a different kind of people. Really liberal. They don’t think like us.” 

I wondered briefly what he meant by “us,” considering our often radically divergent opinions. He had been at the dinner table all these years — could it be that he never truly listened to me? 

My cousin leaned toward me, interrupting my thoughts. 

“Or you could come back from college a flaming liberal, and we’ll still love you.”

 I was struck by the resonance of my cousin’s joke, and I still think about it often. By the very merit of calling one another family, we make an implicit promise to stand by one another and love unconditionally – that is, regardless of ideology. When we sit across the dining room table, embroidered white tablecloth stretching between us, and launch attacks intended not to teach, not to strengthen, but to change, there is a sense of combat that doesn’t belong in a family. These mealtime political debates are not a leisurely pastime but a battle driven by an attempt to win, and to win means to vanquish. Hovering over the platters of chicken and tadig is an intention to change one another, and the promise of loyalty feels contingent upon your next comeback.  

Isn’t that what families do, though? We change each other. Any amateur psychologist will tell you that our personalities begin at home. Parents, and to an extent other relatives, are charged with the responsibility of edifying their children. It takes a village, and a large part of this is the admonitions and proverbs of the villagers. Perhaps my relatives feel this weight of social obligation propelling them forward as they critique my beliefs. They crave my confirmation that they are succeeding in their efforts. Maybe when I push back and hold my own, they feel some kind of failure. 

There’s a Jewish parable in which a sage, faced with a crowd of scholars who disagree with his judgment, asks God to determine who is correct. God declines to comment. The wise men debate and eventually move forward with a decision. From heaven, God laughs with joy: “My sons have defeated me!” 

The goal of true mentorship has never been indoctrination. Young people look to their beloved elders to create some kind of safe space to learn to walk, to stumble, to mess up. The goal is that eventually, the pupil becomes the teacher. A student who recites their teachers’ talking points is a student lost.  

Through the ages, a 7 p.m. roundtable over plates of freshly-cooked dinner has been the family’s classroom. The curriculum is set by the routine inquiries of “What did you learn at school today?” and, “How was work?” Some families study in groups of three, and some are lucky enough to learn alongside dozens. I should hope that men in my family take enough interest in my growth to stretch my mind and challenge my thinking. So, too, should they hope I prove them wrong sometimes. 

[fightmeyeats]

Marvel’s Netflix Originals & the Reification of the Prison Industrial Complex: A Prison Abolitionist Intervention on Jessica Jones

I just finished the final season of Jessica Jones on Netflix and overall I feel fairly ambivalent about it. I think the first season was by far the show’s strongest and I felt like the show lost some of its heart (namely through the way we see the corruption of Trish and especially Malcolm), but overall I felt like it held to some of its core themes, and I certainly didn’t hate it. However, what this season got me thinking about, and what I think becomes a clear problematic which repeats throughout many of Netflix’s Marvel originals shows is the way the vigilante role of the superpowered heroes is represented and played out: heroes demonstrate repetitively the failing of America’s criminal justice system, and yet ultimately reify the validity of these structures in very frustrating ways. Definitely spoilers below. 

Before continuing, I do want to emphasize two things: first, this is intended to be an intervention on an incredibly prevalent problem, not a complete dismissal of the shows themselves. Considering how much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe centers on the stories of white men (frequently rich or middle-class, and exclusively canonized as heterosexual despite fan counter-readings), it is important to acknowledge the significance of Netflix shows centering their stories on women, people of color, and people with disabilities, as well as the way they, to some extent, address the social inequalities that marginalized communities and individuals experience. Secondly, I also do not want to suggest that all of the Marvel Netflix-originals have the same kinds of potentials; The Punisher, for example, does not, to me, hold the same possibilities as Luke Cage, and I’m not even looking at Iron Fist because I haven’t watched it and don’t intend to.

Let me first start by briefly discussing the concept of the prison industrial complex and prison abolition. If you are unfamiliar with the concept or the activism I highly suggest reading The Nation’s article “What Is Prison Abolition?” and looking at Critical Resistance, which was co-founded by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis. Taken from the website’s about, “the prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.” What prison abolition is about “is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.” There are a number of excellent scholars/theorists/activists who discuss prison abolition, but here I’m going to be citing and discussing “Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?” (the introduction to Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?) and Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade’s “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got.”

Let me start tracing this argument through Jessica Jones by drawing out a few of the examples which initially brought this criticism to the forefront of my mind while watching this final season:

Corrupt Cops & the Need for Jury Evidence: while the show demonstrates the limitations of policing and the criminal justice system, it simultaneously acknowledges corrupt cops who are abusing their power and the inability of police to lock up a villain because they don’t have enough evidence or the ability to get said evidence. By showing these together, there is a suggestion that the two issues at once separate from each other and equally problematic. We do not see police officers acting without warrants, assaulting/shooting suspects (although in one scene, an officer threatens to shoot Jessica when she is smashing a gazebo and digging beneath the foundation to recover a body neither the officer nor the homeowners realize is hidden there up until Trish begins filming her), or acting outside of the law to collect evidence; instead, the show’s hero does many of these things in contexts which suggest she is correct to do so (again, the antagonist she is facing up against is a psycopathic serial killer who tries to kill her multiple times). The corrupt cop in this season is removed from the central action; his corruption allows Jessica to do what she “needs” to do (destroy evidence which will allow the villain to be incarcerated, to keep her sister out of prison), and is represented as being separate from the police force as an institution. There is even a way in which his actions are presented as being potentially justifiable: he kills drug dealers to steal from them. We are told this is wrong because they are kids and still have “time to change,” implying that if they were adults, their murders would be perhaps justified (and one officer even comments that “one of those kids” hit her in the head with a bike lock, suggesting that their age doesn’t matter); we are also told it is wrong because his motive is the theft, not “justice.” This again implies that things might be different if he was murdering drug dealers for dealing drugs, and again obscures the systemic inequalities which produce crime, as well as the way the PIC contributes to and benefits from these inequalities.

“Supers” and Prisons: acknowledged but never fully addressed is the significance of “supers” as an unprotected category. When Trish is arrested, Detective Costa informs her that the NYPD doesn’t have jurisdiction and that powered peoples are, apparently, not afforded due process of law. When Jessica is initially reluctant to tell the police that the masked vigilante is Trish and hopes to stop Trish herself, Jessica comments that no one really knows what happens on the Raft because no one from the Raft is able to contact the outside world. Given the context that Luke Cage’s powers came from illegal experimentation conducted on him while he was incarcerated, it seems possible if not probable that experimentation/medical torture is being conducted on those incarcerated on the Raft, and it becomes all the more insidious that Luke shows up to explain to Jessica that he himself had to send his brother to the Raft, and convince her to do the same. Essentially by addressing some of the extreme human rights abuses involved in incarceration in the real world through the metaphor of fictitious superpowered people being denied the (facade of) protections that are extended to suspected criminals, the argument being made is that even incarceration at its worst is a necessary and viable solution to crime.

The problematic of “diverse” cops: this is less centered in the narrative and subsequently has lower stakes than the other two examples I discuss above, but by representing a “diverse” police force, we are given the illusion that police forces “are” “diverse”, and that this means something. Costa, who is shown having “personal problems” in the form of going through the adoption process with his husband, who is worried about how much Costa is working and whether or not he will be more present as a parent, obscures the reality of homophobia in the PIC.

Davis argues that “the prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it” (10) and the consequence of this is that “the U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the world’s total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States” (11). She goes on to raise the question “why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure?” (14). Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, The Punisher, and Daredevil, address, to varying degrees and varying success, some of the problems of the PIC: they acknowledge police corruption, wrongful incarceration, the effects of financial inequalities on criminal justice outcomes (namely in the power of the rich to avoid punishment), illegal treatment of prisoners (through experimentation/medical torture), the effects of trauma and poverty on the creation of the “criminal”, and the lasting effects of incarceration. However, the solutions suggested through these shows, at best emphasize alternative models of policing/surveillance (in the case of Jessica Jones, private investigator and serial trespasser, an increased kind of policing/surveillance) and reforming systems rather than abolishing them. The problem with this, as Davis points out, is that “frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison” (20). Furthermore, the shows, for the most part, do not even call of for reforms or imagine reform as a real possibility anyways; they suggest empathy but maintain that prison or death are the only ways to stop “real” criminals. The prison is almost always the natural solution in these shows; the only question is who belongs in them and how they should get there. Worse, the only show which consistently deviates from the naturalness of incarceration is The Punisher, which suggests the better alternative to prisons might be revenge killings. 

In discussing “the hero mindset,” Bassichis, Lee, and Spade discuss, essentially, the pitfalls of neoliberalism and argue that “stories of mass struggle become stories of individuals overcoming great odds,” and give the example of narratives which center Rosa Parks as “sparking” the Montgomery Bus Boycott through a solitary (“lonely”) act while obscuring the reality that she was an experienced civil rights activist acting in part of a series of civil disobediences (26). This is a general problematic of the superhero (and especially “vigilante” hero) genre, and it becomes particularly relevant in shows such as Luke Cage and Jessica Jones which are addressing systemic issues like racism, the prison industrial complex, and sexual assault/abuse in important (if imperfect ways). Superheroes, especially vigilante heroes, predominantly work alone; when they do team up it’s typically only with one or two others (Jessica working with Trish), short-lived (The Defenders), or both (Jessica sometimes working with Luke, Malcolm, and/or Erik). What’s important, is that they are vigilantes, working outside of structures or movements; while operating outside structures can have the potential to suggest alternatives solutions to the structures (ie the way that prison abolition looks to find solutions outside of policing/prisons), it also centers the solution (and problem) on individuals in ways which obscure the realities of broader structures. Even in these limited “team-ups” there is little to no potential for meaningful coalition between individual heroes and organizations/activist communities to address the broader inequalities which are being addressed/acknowledged. 

This plays out in the third season of Jessica Jones in the way that it centers on a binary logic which runs: prisons or vigilante-justice through murder. The audience is told that the police don’t cut it, they can’t always know who's a “good” person or a “bad” person, and because of that “good” people are vulnerable and “bad” people walk free. The initial antagonist is a psychopathic serial killer making it easy to subscribe to this model. While it is perhaps better that the solution isn’t for Jones to kill him (again, this is the solution suggested in The Punisher), the problem is not only a reification of the prison, but that in order for this solution to be realized, Jones must take on a heightened policing role, following him, illegally searching his house, and chasing down leads the police overlooked. As Bassichis, Lee, and Spade point out, “the violence of imprisoning millions of poor people and people of color, for example, can’t be adequately explained by finding one nasty racist individual, but instead requires looking at a whole web of institutions, policies, and practices that make it “normal” and “necessary” to warehouse, displace, discard, and annihilate poor people and people of color” (23). The binary is further traced through Trish Walker, who herself becomes a (vigilante) murderer; she is partially excused (morally/as a character) of the murders, because her first two kills are assaults that go to far because she flashes to her mother’s murderer, and the third is her mother’s murderer. Furthermore, her role as a vigilante is contextualized through her own experiences of powerlessness as the victim of abuse. However, even as Trish represents a more morally ambiguous case for the need for prisons, the solution (prison) never addresses the issues we are told shaped her actions, nor any potential for other outcomes.

[thaumaturtles]

Epilogue Thoughts

So, I finished the epilogues at around 11 AM on 4/21 and spent the better part of today mulling over it internally. Overall, I think I liked ‘em. Don’t get me wrong, they were brutal and tragic and ripped my heart out, but this is my garbage and I’m allowed to enjoy it. I was planning on liveblogging the epilogues but constantly pausing to jot down my feelings detracted from the overall experience. This is probably gonna be pretty scattershot, since I have neither the ability nor the desire to order my thoughts properly. Now, without any further preamble, let’s get into it.

Jane

 A lot of people said they didn’t like the treatment of Jane in the epilogues, and, fair enough, she was pretty awful and Crocker stans have every right to be pissed. But to anyone saying it came out of left field or didn’t make sense, I’d have to disagree (for the most part). Jane was brainwashed by the Condesce for the first 16 years of her life, and we see the effects of this when she goes Crockertier. She’d almost certainly have baked-in presumptions about how trolls were “meant to be” (ie super violent) even before she was consciously aware that trolls as a race existed. Jane was also always really in denial about having been brainwashed by the Condesce and I can definitely see adult Jane flat-out refusing to do any self-analysis and just assume there are no remaining effects of the brainwashing and she’s “totally cured” now or whatever. Jane’s also not super progressive? Like the conversation where she discovers Dirk has a crush on Jake and that Jake might even reciprocate was pretty uncomfortable to experience, and she starts a business on Earth C even though there’s no real need for corporations in a world with infinite resources. This shows that she’s still stuck in the belief that capitalism is inherently good/necessary for no reason other than “it’s what i grew up with.” All in all I could totally see Jane as someone who’d grow up to become xenophobic and have this colonizer mentality of “I have to regulate the Other because they’re not capable of functioning without me”

As for the non-consensual/rapey stuff... I’m actually not gonna touch that shit with a six-foot pole. The narrative is very explicit in the fact that Jane is an abusive partner and what she’s doing Is Bad, but like if she’s your favourite character you probably aren’t going to be all gung ho about seeing her do all the things that she did, which were admittedly very upsetting to read. I completely understand if you couldn’t read past those parts because they were pretty rough.

The Epilogues do get pretty unpleasant to read though :/

The Epilogues are highly antagonistic towards Homestuck’s readers. This is a fact. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to interpretation, but it is at the very least not a new thing. Listen to Kate Mitchell of the Perfectly Generic Podcast and YouTuber OptimisticDuelist for more in-depth analysis than I could possibly provide on this, but one of Lord English’s greatest weapons is his ability to get people not to care about Homestuck, or even better, to revile it. That’s what the aspect of Rage represents: Plot Contrivance. As Karkat says,

THERE ARE OUTCOMES THAT ARE EVEN WORSE THAN THE COMPLETE ANNIHILATION OF EXISTENCE ITSELF. FORCES MORE DAMAGING TO THE INTEGRITY OF REALITY THAN THOSE CAPABLE OF TURNING IMAGINATION INTO PURE VOID. THEY ARE FORCES WHICH IF HANDLED RECKLESSLY WILL NULLIFY THE BASIC ABILITY OF INTELLIGENT BEINGS IN ALL REAL AND HYPOTHETICAL PLANES OF EXISTENCE TO GIVE A SHIT.

This is repeated, by Hussie himself no less, later on during his smug self-insert, found here. After Hussie dies and loses control of the narrative, LE is free to try his hardest to get you, the reader, not to give a shit. Rose, in the Epilogue’s Prologue, says that if people stop caring about Homestuck, reality as they know it will break apart, which is exactly in line with LE’s plans. So the fact that the Epilogues are very hostile towards the reader is basically par for the course. That said, I can see how it kinda sounds like I’m being all “oh it’s SUPPOSED to be shitty you wouldn’t underSTAND,” but that’s. literally what’s happening. and there’s evidence for it in the text.

Of course, in the past, when the narrative would pull things like this it would be under the guise of, say, Homosuck, which is very obviously meant to be bad and is presented in a fun, satirical way. The Epilogues, on the other hand, are downright upsetting. They’re presented in a much grittier light, which can obfuscate to what degree it’s Actually A Joke, if it even is a joke in any capacity. The fact that they’re tragic, though, should not be seen as evidence that they’re bad.

Some stuff I Liked

Both routes had some really top-notch interactions in them. A lot of folks seem to be overlooking how genuinely good the writing was. I said the phrase, “they’ve still got it” ALOUD to myself once or twice because the dialogue really did have that good ole Homestuck Charm. The Dave/Karkat/Jade interactions early on in Candy (before everything went to shit) were pretty great, as was basically everything that came out of English’s mouth. I dunno who the Antiquities Consultant was, but they did an excellent job at mirroring Jake’s usual speech pattern. I find that a lot of people, when writing Jake, just kinda throw in as many random old-timey words as possible and as a result it feels kinda disjointed, but the writing team for the epilogues managed to make him feel very... would light be a good way to put it? Sort of airheaded I guess. Just very goofy idk

We got to see Rosemary and they were married and raised a kid and it was the best! Rose was really well-written, as was Kanaya; I really loved seeing those personalities balance each other out again. It was nice to see them be good parents in the Candy-verse. The Vriska they raised was such a fucking scamp too! It was nice to see a Vriska who had a positive home environment but still had that same spunk

Also, Dave. Just, all of Dave. He was really solidly written throughout the whole thing. I fucking love his interest in the economy holy shit. I got to hear Dave Strider say the phrase  “neoliberal austerity measures.” That’s the best. “Economically Aware Anti-capitalist Dave” is rivaled only by “Karkat (True Leftism)”. I’ve seen a few complaints that Dave’s interest in the economy was also OOC, but for one thing he’s an adult and can cultivate new interests if he likes, and for another Dave is a pretty clever kid, and very numerically-minded. (Is that a term? I mean he’s good at maths and such). Don’t forget, not only did he manage to accumulate all the wealth on LOCAH in the span of three days by taking over their stock markets, but he also used the hash map modus in his day to day life, showing that he was able to do calculations in his head as quick as breathing. As shown here, the hash map modus is pretty complex and requires you to come up with a word that has the same value as the thing you wanna use in order to use it. That’s not easy to do on a dime and yet he uses it in his rooftop battles with Bro. All of this is to say, he’d certainly learn to be very good at economics if he wasn’t already. It just suits him.

Oh and I also love that Dave still makes SBaHJ and Karkat has a bunch of sockpuppet accounts he uses to defend Dave’s honour. it’s very cute.

Karkat also had some lines in the epilogues damn. I hadn’t realized how starved I was of VantasRage until I read a few of his rants. Also we finally got to see Badass Rebel Leader Karkat and he’s just as great as we all knew he’d be

The davekat kiss in Meat was great too. It was very gratifying to see after all the narrative cockblocking that went down in Candy.

John realizing in the Candy universe that he isn’t responsible for everything and that they’re all still just people with their own autonomy was good. Much as I have problems with the Candy universe on a whole I liked this specifically.

Also, roxygen! I love roxy/callie as much as the next guy but John and Roxy were very cute near the end of the comic and I liked seeing them grow up and have a kid. John names his son after the guy from Night Court because he’s a massive dweeb. Love it.

We got some great Terezi writing as well. The johnrezi at the end of Meat was nicely written and made me feel a whole host of emotions despite me not even having shipped them that hard beforehand.

OH MY GOD THE OBAMA SHIT. I almost forgot to put this in because I was focused on other stuff but my word the whole Obama Situation was beautiful I loved every second of it. It was so over-the-top in the best way and it simultaneously carried airs of being So Serious And Important To The Narrative and being just the dumbest load of crap. I loved it so much

Also, I was very happy with Roxy and Callie coming out. Roxy talking about how he’d already come out as dating an alien with a green skull for a head and how it felt like maybe he was being “selfish” by also wanting to come out as trans was a great illustration of something that already-out LGB people often feel when realizing they don’t identify with their assigned gender. Additionally, Calliope coming to terms with the fact that they don’t have to identify as female just to further differentiate themselves from Caliborn was great. It really helped to show how far they’d come from just being Caliborn’s foil into being their own person. However, this leads into:

Some stuff I didn’t like

Speaking of Roxy and Callie’s transition, Dirk also came out. As a transphobe. Which was disappointing, to say the least. He made a point of misgendering Roxy as often as possible and was pretty dismissive towards NB people when he learned about Calliope’s identity. (You could make an argument that Dirk is being thoughtless by misgendering Roxy and not intentionally malicious, but I don’t see Dirk as the kind of guy who slips up very often. He’s very careful with language.) I always headcanoned Dirk as trans, as I’m sure most people did, so having him just up and become transphobic was kind of the worst. I intend to talk about Epilogue!Dirk a lot more in a later post but yeah. Not a fan.

EDIT: I’ve thought about the Dirk thing a little more and he does eventually start calling Roxy by the correct pronouns, albeit in kind of a “see see look at how openminded im being youre such a manly dudely stud bro” way. Dirk’s initial discomfort with Roxy and Callie’s identity more comes from his own egotistical belief that he should have already known about it than it does from genuine animosity. That aside, he does still say “She probably would have loved being a “they” when she was a teen,” which sorta rubs me the wrong way. I might just be being oversensitive though.

Also, in the Meat universe, Rose and Kanaya split up! I’m very upset about that. Ultimate Power be damned, I want happy, married lesbians! It sucks that we either have Rosemary OR Davekat but not both

On the topic of davekat, Jade really got done dirty by both Epilogues, huh? She was used as a narrative device in one and was an intrusive presence in the lives of Dave and Karkat in the other. TBH I was never a fan of davekatjade for a lot of reasons but I would have preferred they be in a happy poly relationship than what actually happened in Candy.

Actually, the only two polyamorous relationships in the Epilogues both turned out awfully. I doubt any of the writing staff had anything against poly people; I’m sure it was just a coincidence but either way it’s pretty unfortunate. I have a bit to say about this but this is running too long as is.

Gamzee

Fucking Gamzee.

Unanswered Questions

Will there be any further updates? I sure hope there will, because the ending was not very satisfying and creates more questions than it answers. I can sort of see where it might be going but they left way too much up in the air and it feels very much like it’s unfinished. V has referred to it as “the whole thing” on twitter, so it might be finished for good, but i really hope it isn’t

Why did Rose say the session they’re creating will be the most important session of SBURB ever played? Why couldn’t they play it on Earth C? Surely Earth C’s inhabitants would be more used to seeing alien life forms and would know the basics of SBURB, thus making it more likely for them to survive it. Why go to the trouble of seeding a whole new planet? I’m curious.

Can a character be said to be “Out Of Character” if the character’s own creator wrote those actions? What if they passed on the actual writing to someone else but still had to verify it themselves? What does OOC even mean? Does it mean “this doesn’t fit my headcanon” or “there is no evidence for this” or “the author wouldn’t write them like this”? If it’s the last one, can an author merely saying “this interpretation is correct” absolve ANY action from being deemed OOC? I like that I’m being made to think about this kind of thing now

To what degree is each universe truly “Canon”? I’m aware that Candy lost its canon-ness when John decided not to fight LE, but the two universes are intrinsically linked: we see characters from one universe travel to another and it’s implied that Terezi has spoken to both Johns. How canon is Meat, even? Are either of them even still bound by the need to be part of the Alpha Timeline anymore, since Lord English has been created? What does anything mean?

Final Musings

I understand completely if you don’t like the epilogues. Maybe you think they’re too dark. Maybe you just don’t agree with portrayals of the characters. Maybe you hate that they gave jade a fucking tail when she never had one in the main comic. There certainly were bits of it that I wasn’t a fan of, but there are also parts I really wanna go draw fanart of right now. I like the Epilogues, but if I write fanfic or make dumb joke posts about Earth C, I’m probably gonna ignore large swaths of it (such as, I’ll probably keep both John and Dirk alive, and make them kiss a lot)

There has been a great deal of vitriol directed specifically at Hussie about the epilogues despite the fact that other people worked on them. It’s difficult to take these criticisms in good faith when so many people are blaming solely Hussie. I’m aware that he had total control over actual plot elements and wrote a bit of dialogue, but the bulk of the actual text was written by V. Another thing I’ve noticed is that people’s attitudes towards the epilogues are very much like the general attitude towards Act 7 when it first came out. I’ll admit, I left the Homestuck fandom in like 2014 and didn’t return until mid-2017, but people’s Jimmies were definitely still Rustled even then. There was a general atmosphere of “I hate Hussie, and you should too! The ending was bad and no one asked for it!” but as time went on, and people started analyzing the ending and making meta posts about it, everyone sort of grew acclimated to the ending. Suddenly, the general consensus was that Homestuck was Good Again Finally and the ending was Amazing and The Fandom Loved It. I feel like maybe that sort of thing’s gonna happen again with the Epilogues. I really hope that, as it continues to update (if it does), everyone will sort of chill out about it

[thomasword-blog]

M13U1A1 Globalization and Education

INTRO

There was a phrase that my middle-school self promised to never utter, “I am a middle-school teacher.” Well, I am a middle school teacher and have been for the last four years. The school I work at, Pride Prep, was founded under a vision of project and action based learning with an emphasis on relationship based teaching. It was understood that we would not unionize because the school would take care of us. Though we would be required by state law to participate in standardized tests, as an organization we would not pay attention to the results. There we stood, a public charter school, free from the restraints of the system, able to focus only on the well being of the students. 

Given my background in construction, graphic design, and CNC operation I been hired run the school’s maker-space. However, the school was short on math teacher, so instead of helping kids build projects I found myself in the classroom teaching math. I had no formal mathematics background, had never taught before so I didn’t know enough to know better. I tailored my curriculum around my construction, design, and business background.  The students built board games, chairs, and copper art pieces. Each build was a different iteration of scaling, fractions/decimals, perimeter/area, addition, subtraction, multiplication, unit rate and so on. The students would then cost and price the products for resale so that we could use the profit to buy new supplies. For me it was a blur of a year; a trial by fire of classroom management. For the kids it was an illumination of the power of math as a real world tool.

TESTING

As a public school we where required to participate in state testing. We went in with our chins up, knowing the growth our student’s had made, hopeful that we would score on par with other public schools in our district. Our CEO (also acting as principal) reassured us that the test scores did not matter but when the test scores came out changes started happening in the school. We had performed on par with schools of similar demographics but it turned out the public scrutiny of the tests had more sway than was originally anticipated (see https://create.piktochart.com/output/20093013-u2m3a1-sps-and-pride-prep).  As was discussed in Minori Nagahra’s (2011, p.375) review of Globalizing Education Policy, our school was about to start, “implement[ing] policies set elsewhere and have [our] school achieve according to various league tables of performance indicators.”

The following year, in response to the test score, we created our schedule around the needs of the math department on the premise that math is very linear and sequential and requires a solid foundation of concepts before progressing. The problem with this was the unintentional ‘tracking’ of students in other classes. Tracking, or the leveling of students based on demonstrated abilities, is a very controversial topic. Research has shown that tracking sets the stage for a student’s self expectations such that when they are in what is perceived to be a ‘dumb’ class they have a very hard time breaking the mold. While students in mixed level classes have a much easier time stepping up to greater challenges. In addition, “Data shows minority and low-income students are few and far between in high level and Advanced Placement courses,” (Brindley, 2015, p.4). Our admin was aware of the problems with tracking and has since done their best to juggle students schedules so that they can have a leveled math class while maintaining mixed abilities in other disciplines.

This year, however, I was not on the math team. I had signed up for my teacher certificate training with Teach Now and was on track to becoming a science teacher. As such I was given a science class and joined up with the science team to develop curriculum. In silent response to the test scores we aligned the curriculum with The Next Generation Science Standards. We used them to develop projects that ensured students had exposure to a more mainstream science curriculum. The past year science was run as an inquiry based workshop where students led their lines of inquiry based on their areas of interest. The core standards were addressed by means of the online platform Summit PLP. 

As a result of the curriculum change, science projects became more like simulations than actual inquiries. We incorporated more practice and rote skill building into class time without a solid demonstration of the need for the skills. This diminished engagement thus begged the question of how do we keep up engagement while also giving students the tools they need to do well on a standardized test. We answered this question by incorporating design into the science curriculum. If we where studying keystone species we would have the students do a deep dive into one species, make a custom t-shirt and then sell them at venues to make money to be donated to conservation and preservation organizations. We also made backstories for the different experiments and workshops we did so the students had a colorful notion of why they where doing what they where doing. This payed off as our test scores in science where 74% passing while the state average was 63%.

RIGOR, CITICENSHIP & CAPITOL

The increase in test scores was not enough for our parents. There was a large cry out for more rigor in our school. The implementation of design in science and the remnants of inquiry based learning gave the parents the impression that we more of an arts and crafts school than an academic institution. Some wanted more ditto work others wanted more instruction. And while the school was founded on internationalist principles as defined in the article, Internationalism and Globalization as a Context for International Education, We would need to take on more of a globalist (as defined in the same article) approach to making our school a more desirable, thus competitive, institution (Cambridge & Thompson, 2004, p.164). A school school needs money to operate. Our first two years we had money from Bill Gates to fall back on but we made a choice as an institution to not use it unless we had no other options. Gates is an avid supporter of charter schools and even though ours is a public charter school, it is a step in the direction of public money for private charter schools. Our school was not founded on the neoliberal idea that schools should be part of a Laze Faire, free market (Nagahra, 2011, p.373). Instead it was conceived of as a dynamic institution that could defy union norms in the interest of a rich education. We hoped to be a school that students wanted to be at because we where doing the right things. 

The parents, however, had a hard time swallowing such an optimistic pill.  Naturally they wanted their kids to go out into the world and be successful and more often than not this involved attending college.  Even though we where using a vetted program to ensure students where getting their required standards, Summit PLP, we had to respond to the call. Since we are a public school we are allocated dollars by the number of students we have. If the numbers go down the budget goes down. If the budget goes down we loose the resources to implement great projects. If we loose the great projects we loose more students. Eventually we loose the school.

As a response to the call, our CEO decided to begin the acceptance process into the International Baccalaureate  program. This would lend credibility to our program and give us a framework to steer our projects. There are ivy league schools on the east coast that look at students with IB diplomas as their first draft (J. Ewan, personal communication, 2014)*. And what a way to level the playing field. Our school has around 50% free and reduced lunch. And students come from all walks of life. The only other school in our city to offer IB is a private school that charges over $30,000 a year in tuition and recruits wealthy students from china as a staple source of income. This does make the school more international but it also perpetuates the schism between the haves and have nots. 

Ans so it was, for the next two years we steeped ourselves in ATL’s, Global Contexts, and Statements of Inquiry. We tried very hard to balance the rigorous academic expectations of IB, with the original project based philosophies of our school. When things became too academic parents again stepped up with complaints. Only this time the complaints where that the school had lost its focus on project based learning. The drive to compete to be an institution that creates college candidates had overridden the desire to make well rounded, experienced, and thoughtful citizens capable of solving alien problems. On the down side we finished last year, our fourth year, with a higher than average attrition rate. We lost teachers mid year because they could not handle the pressure of balancing the IB with meeting the social emotional needs of kids from all walks of life. However, we are a resilient and dynamic (sometimes too dynamic) institution. And while we never will find a perfect solution to balance out the requirements of a free market competitive system with that of creating global citizens and stewards, we will continue to work creatively within the parameters we are given to maintain the first with the true aim of creating the latter.

Resources:

Nagahara, M. (2011). Fazal Rizvi and Bob Lingard: Globalizing education policy. Journal of Educational Change, 12(3), 377–383. doi: 10.1007/s10833-011-9170-1

*, J. C., & Thompson, J. (2004). Internationalism and globalization as contexts for international education. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 34(2), 161–175. doi: 10.1080/0305792042000213994

Brindley, M. 'Leveling' Raises Questions About Educational Inequality. Retrieved from https://www.nhpr.org/post/leveling-raises-questions-about-educational-inequality#stream/0

*J. Ewan is a 14 year veteran teacher who spent several years teaching in public and private schools on the east coast.

[halfthebattle]

Life Update

(Before you read this blog post, I just want to share that I’m currently listening to Sleeping with Siren’s playlist of Scene 1 to Scene 5 while writing this, hihi)

WARNING: Mahaba itong post na ‘to. Pagtiyagaan niyo nalang. Minsan lang naman ako magkuwento eh. Haha.

Hello! How are you? As always, I wish that you are all doing fine. As for me, well, I know I haven’t been active lately, and I have no better excuse than “My life has been a series of complicated mess and I didn’t know how to put those in words, I’m sorry”. Deep inside, there’s always been the urge and the need to write. Writing always calms me. It’s like an aromatic coffee that, once inhaled and sipped, gives me peace even just for a moment. But then again, I always want to find the right blend of coffee – the right words to write, that is. Maybe some of you can relate, but sometimes, it’s hard to put your emotions into words so oftentimes, you are left with suppressing them. But here I am now, about to mix in the best ingredients that I could find.

I’m about to share with all of you a glimpse of what happened over the past weeks – only those that I think are important but not too personal enough to mention.

1. Remember that post I had last August 16 when I said that I was having the worst weeks of my 2018 yet? Well, one of the reasons is my unfortunate chance of receiving ‘singko’. While taking our midterm exam, I was caught using my phone. No need to deny it now that I was checking if my answers were right, so yes, you can call that cheating, folks. I didn’t want to share it as much as possible because I felt ashamed, but then I realized, “To hell with it, I started out a blog, I should share even the bad sides that I have. I should be transparent to my readers.” My professor, who was already a senior citizen, had a hard time deciding whether he would fail me or not. He talked to the president of our class in private and asked for a second opinion. The president of our block didn’t know what to say but he did mention the oath that we signed when we shifted to Finance from Accountancy. It was written there that we are supposed to not receive a grade of 5.00 again, or else it will lead to expulsion. I was a coward, I didn’t have the guts to talk to my professor face-to-face about the matter, so I sent him a long message, explaining but mostly apologizing. He told me that I should just wait for my grades on the CRS. What really pained me were his other words. He told me that being a graduating student, being the eldest among the siblings in my family, and that my father is expecting me to graduate are not enough reasons to pass me. I swear I was tearing up when I read that. I was not worried about me, I was worried about my parents. I didn’t want them to know about this considering that it will only add to their burden. Left with no choice, I had nothing better to do than to swallow my pride and still attend classes in that subject and excruciatingly wait for my grades. As someone with depression, you could just imagine how that caused me to panic and pity myself. I kept on thinking, “Pwede bang sabihin nalang niya kung isisingko niya ako para alam ko na next move ko, kasi hindi ko na kaya na maghintay pa ng two months, hindi ako makahinga nang maluwag araw-araw?” You’ll know more about what happened after with this subject later.

Another reason for “worst weeks of 2018 yet” is our thesis. Even before we were able to do our business research, we were assigned to pass 5 thesis topic proposals. Among the 5 that my groupmates and I passed, nothing was approved. We were in dire need to start our business research already because time was against us – we only had one month left. To top it all off, sabi pa sa amin ng prof namin, “Ang babaw ng topics niyo.” Sinabi niya yun sa buong klase. Sobrang gusto na namin ng groupmates ko na kainin kami ng lupa. But I didn’t see it as mababaw. About Gender Finance yung isa naming topic, yung isa naman is about Neoliberalism. Ano mababaw run?

2. Last September 23, 2018, I wasn’t able to blog about it, but I took the Philippine Law School Admission Test (PHILSAT). I was able to muster all my strength and courage to take it and have our Thesis Oral Defense after two days! Yes, in less than a week, I faced the PHILSAT and our defense! Honestly speaking, hindi ko rin alam paano ko nakaya pero kahapon, October 15, 2018, the results were out. Lo and behold:

Hindi ko na ipapakita pangalan ko, pero NAKAPASA AKO SA PHILSAT! For less than an hour, I was happy about it, but things happen, and I feel like life (or some people) was selfish enough to let me rejoice for a day.

3. Last October 06, 2018, it was my first ever time to watch a movie in the cinema all by myself. The experience was fun and freeing at the same time. Though this was an impulsive decision I made after class, I think I should do it more often. It was a healthy way to reconnect with myself. Anyway, Exes Baggage is a 9/10 for me! Umiiyak akong lumabas ng theatre. Haha.

4. I had a day of pampering with my younger cousin at Laguna two days ago. We had a facial session, a whole-body Swedish massage, then we capped off the night with Seattle’s Best Double Chocolate Mint and Sip & Dip’s budget-friendly create-your-own snack! Gustung gusto ko kapag pumupunta ako sa kanila sa Laguna ‘cause parang pampering day ko talaga yun. Haha.

(Nagswitch na ako sa playlist ng LANY. Now Playing: Malibu Nights. Ang sakit, mga sis.)

5. Last night, as mentioned in my previous post, biglaan akong inatake ng Major Depressive Disorder ko. Masyado na marami nangyayari sa buhay ko minsan na minsan tinatry ko mawalan ng paki, tinatry ko huwag panghawakan yung mga bagay na yun, but sometimes, hindi pa rin ako matahimik. Kagabi, on my way home, di muna ako pumasok ng bahay kasi umiiyak na ako mag-isa sa labas ng bahay namin, mukha akong tanga though wala naman nakakakita sa akin. Chinat ko bestfriends ko. Ayun, minessage nung bestfriend ko since kindergarten yung nanay ko. Nung una, di ako pinayagan pero pumayag din naman. So, nagbook na ako ng Grab papunta sa kanila. Nag-usap kami sa kwarto niya about things that are going in our lives. Nagpa-McDelivery kami pero nakatulog na ako so siya nalang kumain kagabi. Sa umaga ko nalang kinain yung share ko. HAHA.

6. As of today, kumpleto na rin naman grades ko. Pasado ako sa lahat. Although hindi ako kontento sa grades ko, alam ko naman na deserve ko yung mga mabababa. Ang importante nalang sa akin ngayon is nakapasa ako. About dun sa prof ko na pinag-iisipan kung ibabagsak ako, well, nung Final Examination week namin, hindi na niya pinag-exam yung mga perfect attendance. Isa na ako run. Pero he talked to me separately. Nag-aral daw ba ako, sabi ko, “Opo, Sir.” Sabi niya, “Nevermind, don’t take the exam. You won’t fail. I assure you. In a 1/8 sheet of paper, just write the grade you think you deserve.” Oh, diba, mala-Fault in our Stars?! Haha. Nilagay ko 2.75. Binago ko. Nilagay ko 3.00. In the end, he gave me 2.50. I messaged him na super thankful ako kasi ang considerate niya. Di ko yata deserve. ☹ As for my other professor, gusto ko isampal sa kaniya yung sinabi niya na ang babaw ng topic namin. Pero thankful na rin ako kasi nabago topic namin. We got 1.25. KAMI PINAKA MATAAS, BESHY. We couldn’t get happier!

7. Oo nga pala, “sembreak” na namin ngayon. Pero limang araw lang. First time ko ‘to maexperience in my college life. Haha. Sa limang araw na yun, dalawang araw inilaan pa sa enrollment. Bawas pa ng isang araw kasi bukas, pinapapunta kami para i-file yung overload form namin for next sem. So, lumalabas na dalawang araw lang pahinga ko. At yung isa pa run ay kinuha sa akin ng depression ko. Haha.

That’s all, folks! If you’ve reached this far, please comment a heart for me! Kailangan ko ngayon ng love and attention. Asar, ang needy ko. Huehue. Anyway... Thank you so much!!

[arcticdementor]

The college-admissions cheating scandal of 2019 has provided plenty of opportunities for schadenfreude at the expense of the lower-upper class: hangers-on and minor celebrities who needed a bit of lift to get their underachieving children into elite colleges. (The true upper class does not struggle with educational admissions; those are negotiated before birth, and often involve buildings.) The fallout has stoked discussion, internet-wide, about social class in the United States.

…

Is this our society’s biggest issue? Hardly. Rich parents do all sorts of unethical things– often, completely legal ones– to give unfair advantages to their progeny. It has been going on for centuries, and it will likely continue for some time. College admissions fraud is a footnote in that narrative. I am glad to see the laws enforced here, but there are bigger issues in society than this.

Instead, I want to talk about the problem exposed by this scandal. See, it’s not enough for the American rich to have more money than we do, and all the material comforts that follow: bigger houses, speedier cars, golden toilets. They have to be smarter than us, too. But God did a funny thing: when She was handing out talents, she didn’t even in look in the daddies’ bank accounts. So, here we are. We live in a world where people make six- and seven-figure incomes helping teenagers cheat on tests. This isn’t new, either.

As a society, we suffer for this. Having to pretend talentless people from wealthy backgrounds are much more capable than they are, as I’ll argue, has major social costs. It keeps people of genuine ability in obscurity, and it leads to bad decisions that have brought the economy to stagnation. It would be better if we were rid of such ceremony and obligation.

…

I want to talk about “the idle rich”, the aristocratic goofballs who don’t amount to much. They get a bad rap. I don’t know why.

They’re my favorite rich people, to be honest about it.

I don’t much like the guys (and, yes, they’re pretty much all “guys”, because our upper class is not at all progressive) at Davos. They do significant damage to the world. We’d be better off without them. Their neoliberal nightmare, a 21st-century upgrade of colonialism, has produced unwinnable wars, a healthcare system that has exsanguinated the middle class, and an enfeebled, juvenile culture that has lain low what was once the most prosperous nation in human history.

…

I don’t especially want to “eat the rich”. I don’t even care that much about making them less rich (although the things I do want will make them less rich, at least in relative terms, by making others less poor). I want our society to have competent, decent, humane leadership. That’s what I care about. Eradicating poverty is what matters; small differences and social status issues, we can deal with that later.

American society seems to have a time-honored, historic hatred for “idle rich”. Why? It does seem unfair that some people are exempt from the Curse of Adam, often solely because of who their parents were? It’s hard to accept it, that a few people don’t need to work while the rest are thrown into back-breaking toil. From a 17th-century perspective, which is when the so-called puritan work ethic formed, this attitude makes sense. It was better for morale for communities to see their richest doing something productive.

In the 21st century, though, do these attitudes toward work apply?

…

We already afford a minimal basic income to people with disabilities, but most of these people aren’t incapable of work, and plenty of them even want to work. They’re incapable of getting hired. There’s a difference. Furthermore, as the labor market is especially inhospitable to the unskilled and young, it is socially acceptable for people of wealth to remove their progeny from the labor market, for a time, if they invest in education (real or perceived).

…

The second problem with the everyone-even-rich-people-must-work model is that it fails to create any real equality. Let’s be honest about it. “Going to work” is not the same for all social classes. Working-class workers are treated like the machines that will eventually replace them. Middle-class workers have minuscule autonomy but are arguably worse off, since it is the mind that is put into subordination rather than the body. For the rich, though, work is a playground, a wondrous place where they can ask strangers to do things, and those things (no matter how trivial or humiliating) will be done, without complaint. The wizards of medieval myth did not have this much power.

In other words, the idea that we are equalizing society by forcing the offspring of the rich to fly around in corporate jets and give PowerPoint presentations (which their underlings put together) is absurd. It would be better to let them live in luxury while slowly declining into irrelevance. When rich kids work difficult jobs, it’s toward one end: getting even richer, which makes our inequality problem worse.

Third, when we force rich kids to work, they take up most of the good jobs. There are about 225 million working-age adults. Whatever one may think of his own personal brilliance, the truth is that the corporate world has virtually no need for intelligence over IQ 130 (top 2.2%). We could debate, some other time, the differences between 130, 150, 170 and up– whether those distinctions are meaningful, whether they can be measured reliably, and the circumstances (of which there are not many) where truly high intelligence is necessary– but, for corporate work, 130 is more than enough to do any job. I don’t intend to say that no corporate task ever existed that required higher intelligence; it is, however, possible to ascend even the more technical corporate hierarchies with that much or less. So, using our somewhat arbitrary (and probably too high) cutoff of 130, there are still 5 million people who are smart enough to complete any corporate job. For the record, this is not an implication of corporate management’s capability. A manager’s job is to reduce operational risk and uncertainty, and dependence on rare levels of talent is a source of risk.

…

The European aristocrats, to their credit, were content to be rich. Our ruling class has to be smarter than us.

I don’t mind that the corporate executives fly business class and I don’t. I do mind being forced to indulge their belief that their more fortunate social placement is a result of their being (intellectually speaking) what they think they are but are not, that I actually am. That galls me. If these people could admit to their mediocrity and step aside, it’d be better for all of us. The adults could get to work; everyone would win.

[bonestructureandcontempt]

This is an immensely, deeply personal post about personal issues and experience spurred on by current events. I mention this as a preface in the hopes that if you read this, you will understand this isn’t a post that warrants reblogging or spreading in any way and I’m not even gonna tag it. Obviously, tumblr’s search algorithm being what it is, you may encounter this post and not even know who I am or follow me and while I can’t stop you from reading my blog, please just know I am writing this for my own peace of mind and not for notes. I’m going to put a cut below this paragraph but I don’t know if that will matter on tumblr mobile. I’m sorry if you’re bombarded with a wall of text you didn’t ask for.

We’ve barely had time to process how incredibly ill-advised it was that Elizabeth Warren actually took a DNA test to prove Native American ancestry to spite Donald Trump and inadvertently opened up a can of worms that exposed her personal racism and cultural appropriation AND how much indigenous people are still shit on in this country. Then the news broke about HHS and Title IX and the erasure of gender identity by the administration seeking to edge trans people out of society. THEN the migrant caravan news broke and with that came the usual conspiracy theories from the Right that this was a ploy by the Democrats to sway the midterm elections despite the fact that at the rate those refugees are moving, they wouldn’t reach the southern border of the US until well after the election. Or you know, falling back on the classic antisemitic trope that it was being funded by George Soros for the purpose of invading America for white genocide. And THEN the MAGAbomber shit happened. And the day after they caught him was when the shooting in Pittsburgh happened. And now here we are. I know there’s other incidents, I haven’t even mentioned the Brazilian election or Jamal Khashoggi or the murders of Gregory Bush and Vickie Jones in Kentucky. Point is you know as well as I do that we’re living in hellfire fanned joyfully by racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, and transphobes on parade. Every bigotry since the dawn of whiteness is here, it’s in our face.

Meanwhile, I just spent part of my past weekend holding a friend while they cried and hyperventilated because of everything the fascists are doing to roll back trans rights, trying and failing not to weep openly myself because what the fuck am I supposed to say? That’ll it get better? That milquetoast Democrats nobody actually likes or is inspired by MIGHT sweep the Midterms and end the Trump administration? Or that one of those same Democrats MAY win in 2020 but the Republicans’s campaign of obstruction they waged in Obama’s tenure will just start all over again and inspire more right-wing hatred and oh, by the way, Brett Kavanaugh is still on the Supreme Court regardless? What? What do you say to the people you love when they’re scared that their very humanity will be made forfeit in Fascist America? I didn’t even have words this past Saturday for my sister or her parents who treat me like one of their own and opened my eyes to how wonderful Judaism could be and inspire me to convert and who I fear for every fucking day someone will do them like that monster who shot up Tree of Life and I won’t be able to do a fucking thing about it. All I could tell her was that I loved her and that I hoped she was having fun wherever she was. And y’know, post on the internet like I always do, seeing all the ghoulish displays of Right-wing antisemitism I’ve come to understand only too well come to the surface. If there’s any solace to be gained from this, it’s from watching Gab get deplatformed and watch its dipshit founder Andrew Torba beg his beloved leader Donald Trump for help but be ignored.

America has always had glaring bigotry problems but today it is governed by fascists, gleeful, triumphant fascists. That is the truth, but do our journalists say it? No. They dance around it still and use cutesy euphemisms when the President and his goons and sycophants lie to us. They even go on and on about how the administration is waging a war on journalism but they won’t even fight back in a meaningful way and just say the fascists are fascists! Worse still, organizations like the New York Times or NPR will run profile after profile on right-wing figures, allowing them to broadcast their views without any debate or repudiation, thus normalizing them in the public conscience.

I've long liked to keep my ear to the ground when it comes to the Right and observe their patterns and learn their tactics so I can know when they make pushes for the mainstream. It's how I knew what "alt-right" was before Hillary Clinton talked about it. It's how I've been aware what Gab was and what kind of people used it before the shooting over the weekend. It’s how I’ve recognized that the old tastemakers of the conservative movement from the Clinton and Bush years, guys like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are all biting Alex Jones’ style now and peddling conspiracy theories about Democrats because that shit fucking SELLS. I’m not a journalist, not a detective, I didn’t go to school for any of that. I’m just a millennial raised on the internet like many of my peers. I was also raised as a conservative Catholic and spent much of my adolescence with talk radio and Fox News in the background. I think that’s what started me down this path. It helped that I also was familiar with sites like 4chan and sorta came rehabilitated from channer culture when I first joined Tumblr back in 2011.

In the past three years or so, I have watched the kind of language and ideas that used to only be used by fringe kooks, away from "normie" eyes in forums and threads you would never go to, end up on the evening news. And now even folks left of center use that language. “Fake News.” “Snowflake.” “Triggered.” Plays on “Make America Great Again.” Sure they mostly do it ironically and I’m not gonna yell at anybody for it, especially when I’m guilty of it too, but I also know it means that American culture leans just a bit more right in the Trump era, no matter how hard neoliberal capitalism tries to make us think otherwise with woke branding. This is so stupid and I could easily get made fun of for this, but I feel like an undercover cop who's been under too long and is never gonna be the same because of what I've seen and how woefully unequipped our institutions were and are to combat it. This knowledge is a curse and has only made me miserable because it will never end and I can never stop. At the risk of my own sanity, I can’t stop. I can’t remain ignorant of what these jackals want to do. What they WILL do. I can’t just “self care” myself away from this. 

And I’m angry. I’m angry all the time. I barely feel like myself anymore, I struggle to revert back to a “self” that existed before now. I struggle to enjoy things I love, even in the presence of the people I love. As much as I fear for the safety of my family, the one that matters, I also fear they won’t recognize me anymore before long. I don’t want my anger to be all there is. 

Maybe I’m just depressed and it’ll pass. 

Hey, if you read all the way through this little message in a bottle:

Here’s a good tweet  by Rabbi Dunya Ruttenberg.

Here’s a link to the GoFundMe for the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting.

[aegor-bamfsteel]

Yo man, I hear that the Blackfyres and their supporters were Conservative, sexist, brutish usurpers who couldn't stand to see a feminist king on the throne but here you are, an honest to God bra burning, women's lit thumping feminist unironically supporting the Black Dragon. In this entire fandom you're the only person I've found openly supporting them. If you don't mind me asking, why do you like them so much?

Hey dude, you’re asking me to talk about sexism, fandom hypocrisy, and my Blackfyre love in an inflammatory way that could result in getting me in trouble with the fandom? I probably shouldn’t be answering this, but ok. This has been sitting in my inbox for a week, and let no one say that I leave any ask unanswered. Wankery found under the cut:

Eyy dude, what if I told you that the perception of Blackfyres as sexist, brutish usurpers in fandom is largely due to some prominent people’s intellectual elitism and projection of neoliberal political views? Aspects of GRRM’s writing like the unreliable narrator, villains-are-heroes-from-another-side, and history is written by the “victors” are given no credibility in favor of condemning the Blackfyre supporters as racist, sexist, and ableist (?) in fandom. I’m extremely annoyed that no one seems to be asking the sort of questions or making the sort of connections that I have due to this blanket ban on Blackfyre sympathy. I’ve answered your broader question on why I supported the Blackfyres in an earlier ask (they were more honorable, less absolutist and cruel than the Targaryens, even demonstrated some meritocracy, and most died horrifically) so I will try to answer based on the sexism angle: How come I like the Blackfyres so much and support woman’s liberation at the same time?

First of all, you come into my askbox and tell me that Daeron II was a feminist king? Nah bro. A real male feminist ally in a position of power would’ve passed laws to ensure his father’s predatory behavior would be banned. He would’ve been trying to apologize for the way he and his father treated the Bracken sisters and actively sought to make amends instead of making the situation worse. He could’ve given widows a pension or granted certain protections to mothers with illegitimate children. He could’ve opened up exit shelters for prostituted women wanting to learn a trade, as Empress Theodora did back in sixth century AD Byzantium. Why does fandom think he is so Feminist™ when he did so little for women? Are they referring to him having Princess Elaena as an unofficial advisor while her husband Ronnel Penrose was Master of Coin, a man who could barely string two numbers together? (Which really undermines the claim that Daeron was a reformer who chose wise men as councilors, since he selected an incompetent based on his own family status) Might I remind everyone that Daeron arranged Elaena’s second marriage in the first place, a woman 3 years his elder who had been locked in prison for 11 years by her brother, bore illegitimate twins by her cousin, forced to wed an old man by her uncle/Aegon, and may have been forced into sleeping with the horrific Aegon IV? You’d think after enduring so much at the hands of her male relatives, the Kind™ Daeron would’ve backed off, but she has to pay for his son Aerys’ failed marriage by sacrificing her hard-won independence. How feminist. But I guess it’s OK, because after Ronnel died Daeron generously gave his blessing when she wed someone she truly loved! I can’t imagine she felt much affection for this entitled shit. But maybe the Great Fandom Minds™ are referring to how Daeron treated his wife Myriah, who is a blank slate in terms of personality and political actions? I can’t even think of any other names of women Daeron might’ve canonically “empowered”, so how exactly is he a feminist? And why does thinking he was a self-serving politician who treated all of his family members except his sons like expendable trash make me sexist? Do tell, Fandom Minds who know so much more than I.

By contrast, how does liking Daemon Blackfyre and thinking he’d be a better king than Daeron make one sexist? Eustace Osgrey said that he hung out with warriors rather than septons and women, but GRRM himself said that Daemon did have female followers (some we know even participated in the Second Blackfyre Rebellion, like Ladies Vyrwell and Smallwood. Not to mention the cause owes its continued strength after Redgrass to Queen Rohanne) who were “drawn to him.” There’s the rumors that Daemon thought that he could marry Princess Daenerys and Rohanne of Tyrosh, but even the biased Maester Yandel said that claim only developed long after the wedding from a few Blackfyre supporters, which is a few steps removed from the original source. I believe that version of the story was an attempt by the Westerosi Blackfyre supporters to acknowledge Rohanne of Tyrosh’s invaluable contributions to the cause of the exiles while still maintaining the romanticism of a Daemon/Daenerys forbidden romance. It absolutely blows my mind that Daemon gets more flak for what he might have said at fourteen than Daeron does for helping a teenaged girl and her two-week-old son get banished for something her father said. Because Daeron is called “the Good” and thus incapable of doing wrong, obviously.

But outrageously, the fandom has to headcanon abusive behavior on Daemon to make him look like a villain. Seriously, I’ve heard people claim he was an abusive father to Daemon II, cheated on or never loved Rohanne, would have killed his nephews, and tried to rape Princess Daenerys based on no canonical evidence (in fact, the evidence goes against the honorable father of at least nine presented in canon). Even a Daemon-hater like Yandel had to concede that Daemon’s love was for the mother of his children to whom he was married for 12 years. Daemon died protecting his son Aegon from the Raven’s Teeth arrows; he’d never hurt his children. As for the children of others, his faction during the First Blackfyre did not kill children (in fact, Quentyn Ball spared Lady Penrose’s youngest son, some say on Daemon’s orders), especially not those too young to fight. The fandom’s portrayal of Daemon as a vicious monster really serves to emphasize how little evidence they have that Daeron II was a truly good person; the man with grudges against two of his father’s underaged rape victims isn’t a hero, so they have to make his rival an even bigger villain despite it being complete nonsense in canon? Can I have at least a balanced depiction of a Daemon who loved his wife and kids, even if they do think he was an ambitious reactionary?

An especially infuriating piece of fandom hypocrisy is that to make Daemon sexist, they have to demonize or erase all of the female influence in his life. Example one is that for his first 12 years, he was raised as the son of Daena the Defiant, who GRRM said in an SSM raised him alone in the Red Keep. Some people in fandom claim she was an ambitious woman who wanted a son so she could be Aegon’s Queen over Naerys, which is a claim so insulting in its wrongness (Daena could’ve been Queen in her own right, having an illegitimate son actually hurt her chances of queenship and a stable future, she referred to Daemon as hers alone so she never wanted to acknowledge his father, she never agreed to wed a man after Baelor, etc) I’m shocked the people who make it can call themselves feminists with a straight face. Others are kinder toward the Daena-Daemon relationship, saying that Daena must’ve died before Daemon was four so she couldn’t pass on her ideals of honor and self-sacrifice for one’s children; this completely ignores what GRRM said about Daena “raising” Daemon alone, meaning he knew her well enough to remember her. Both these ideas about Daena either demonize one of the most beautiful mother-son pairs in Targaryen history (she loved that kid so much she put him ahead of her own reputation and chance at being Queen. I cry.) or they take away her influence in order to claim that Daemon had no female role models growing up. A mother like Daena, strong-willed, independent, a sportswoman, would’ve doubtless have shaped Daemon’s opinions on women, and especially on mothers of bastards. He may have grown up knowing a woman didn’t necessarily need a husband to be happy, that she could shoot and ride as well as a man, and that a princess could with smallfolk and minor nobles on her own. She was far away from a submissive woman and was Daemon’s sole parent until he was 12, and you mean to tell me her son was a raging misogynist? Nope, I don’t buy it.

Fandom also erases Daemon’s other important female figure: Rohanne of Tyrosh. Elite Tyroshi women are most similar to elite Dornishwomen out of all the ladies of Westeros; I say this because the Archon’s daughter was to serve as a cupbearer for Prince Doran without having been betrothed to Quentyn, indicating that they are valued as political actors for their families outside of marriage alliances. Tyrosh is a mercantile society where the elites don’t like to fight, which traditionally equalizes roles between the sexes. Rohanne was the reason the Blackfyre cause survived for so long; she didn’t need help from Bittersteel escaping to her own fucking country, rather the landless Blackfyre supporters needed her protection after they lost everything at Redgrass. Without her giving them a stable base of operations (and certainly using her dowry to pay for their accommodations), they wouldn’t have been cohesive enough for Aegor to create the Golden Company. I realize that Rohanne has very little canonical characterization, but neither do Princess Daenerys and Myriah Martell, and that doesn’t stop Fandom from writing fanfics and meta on these two while ignoring Rohanne. On a similar note, prominent meta writers claim that the Blackfyre cause is obviously based on the Jacobites (no, Daemon Blackfyre was based in part on James Scott the Duke of Monmouth, who was staunchly anti-Jacobite. Just because these writers don’t know about British history in depth doesn’t mean that they can make spurious claims), and use this comparison to make headcanons for how the Blackfyre court in exile operated. For some Unfathomable reason, these headcanons never include the invaluable contributions that the female Stuarts made to the cause; Queen Mary and Princess Louisa were much more popular than the charmless James II and the drunken womanizer Charles III, having great relations with the French court and funding the education of the daughters of Jacobite exiles (it was said that even Queen Anne wept when Princess Louisa died, for she had hoped to wed her son to him). For a fandom who loves to make headcanons about minor female asoiaf characters, and loves to show off its (rather one-dimensional) knowledge of history, I see no such fics and metas for the female Blackfyres. I guess Feminism™ can’t be wasted on the wives and daughters of “traitors.” Just ask Sansa Stark.

To conclude, Daeron II was not a feminist king who raised the status of women in Westeros; in fact, he used his power as prince and king to banish Barba Bracken and wed Princess Elaena off to an ally. Daemon Blackfyre was raised by a strong single mother and was successfully married to an older foreign woman, and enjoyed female support for his cause, so calling him a misogynist seems like a leap to me. I’d make the argument that it’s Fandom with the misogyny problem, as they ignore the suffering, contributions, and characterization of female characters they don’t like in order to prop up a “sexism” narrative that contradicts canon. Just because other people bleat about how sexist, racist, and ableist Blackfyre supporters like me are, it doesn’t mean it’s true.

[tatewellingss]

Week Three

If ‘Social justice is about making society function better – providing the support and tools to help turn lives around’ (UK Gov.co.uk), how well do you think the UK is achieving this today? What role can drama or theatre play in this?

When analysing the approach of tackling social justice within the UK today, it becomes apparent that many examples exist. For example, many scholars have described the work on improving social justice especially in educational settings, as well as, young offender and rape prevention programmes (Gallagher, 2016). When conducting my own further research, an example of theatre companies themselves providing an area of developing social change through the form of theatre is Mandala Theatre Company. Their project ‘Castaways’ focused in on ethnic minority issues within young people and wars with Syria and Iraq (Mandala Theatre, 2017).  This theatre company is a magnified example of how theatre companies are using the arts medium of theatre to tackle and address social issues to young people, to bring about awareness and get them talking about issues being expressed. 

From a personal standpoint, throughout school I watched a lot of theatre companies coming into my school to help address controversial topics that could be performed rather than just given in a traditional PSHE lesson. Another example that has stuck with me is; when my grandad was battling dementia in a nursing home, they had frequent drama groups come in to perform and bring theatre to them as a lot of patients were immobile; and this sometimes became the highlight of the patients, and sometimes carers, week. 

Of course Mandala Theatre and my own personal experiences are a small fraction of how the UK in general is achieving social justice. Most recently, Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 have been gaining less and less coverage within mainstream media, when the height of relevance was last summer (Baggs, 2020). This begins to question if social justice can ever be entirely achieved? The role of theatre can be argued as a main form of bringing about awareness, whether that be through working in schools, care homes and prisons; or even bringing about awareness through mainstream media, such as ‘It’s a Sin’ on Channel 4, which brought awareness about the 1980′s AIDS crisis and attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community (Mangan, 2021). We can see theatre as vital to bringing about connection amongst characters and linking them with socially damaging topics, therefore allowing topics regarding social improvements to resonate more with audience members. 

2. Gallagher states that some of the young people that they studied seemed to have internalised robust neoliberal messages, taking full responsibility for their social and economic struggles. In what ways do you think this might apply to you in the context of your life and your third level study of drama?

As a twenty-year old gay man, its taken myself a long time to 100% feel comfortable in saying that, and I only feel that right now I am fully myself in what I wear, what I say, who I’m friends with and what my interests openly are. My personal social struggle of coming to terms with my sexuality mainly derived from the underlayer of homophobia I felt from other people. Growing up in England can be tough, especially with the ‘stiff upper lip’ and neoliberal opinions some may have, and being gay sort of goes against this. I guess for a long time, I really supressed my own personality, not just due to my sexuality; but also for my appearance, my desperation to be popular but also be what I thought my parents wanted me to be. I think Gallagher (2016) is correct in suggesting young people have this internalised ‘failure’ narrative in their brain, which is something I can completely relate to. 

Since an early age, I have loved performing. It wasn’t until I went to a Performing Arts School at fourteen, that I felt comfortable enough to come out. Little by little, people accepted me, my family accepted me, and became who I am today, which is unapologetically myself. Gallagher’s (2016) suggestion of internal neoliberal views on oneself is accurate to say the least. As young people, we become hyper aware of the outer opinions of other people and are constantly bombarded with anxieties surrounding what we should be seen as, which is completely unattainable. As someone that is in their third level of study in drama, it becomes more relevant to myself than ever. I think the outlet of creativity I have within drama helps excel me in the balance of my academic second half of my degree, with being an Education major; but, it also helps provide me with an improvement with group work, social skills and also developing fresh perspectives on social issues that I may have no experience in the past. 

3. Describe in your own words what ecological thinking means?

Ecological thinking relates to the relationship we have within ourselves and relating this to the outer-world. As we develop in the world, our opinions are formed through social attitudes and concepts that are derived. When linking this to theatre, it can become hyper-important to recognise that when viewing certain theatre performances, it can change the views and opinions within our brain and lead us to reflect and question the values and social issues raised within the performance. Ecological thinking is all about recognising ourselves within the world and how we can change this through theatre in order to gain a more socially just world. 

4. Can you think of when you first became aware of or interested in social justice? Are there any specific things you do in your life that contribute to the notion of a just society for all?

I think my awareness in social justice has only recently been brought to the forefront of my mind. Being a student these past three years has opened my eyes to a glimpse of adulthood and how certain people are automatically given more on the basis of their race, gender, sexuality or disability. As a white gay man, I am automatically privileged in the wider LGBTQ+ community as these are the type of gay men you mostly see on in mainstream media. However, I have also faced homophobia in my past three years of university, and some of it unfortunately remains internalised in myself at times. After having slurs thrown at me on a night-out once by someone of my own age, it really began to form in my brain how we can’t box the whole of my generation into being ‘politically correct’ as issues surrounding sexuality are still so prevalent as they once were. 

This began to shape my own interest in social justice, and I started to follow some LGBTQ+ ally pages on social media and begin talking in forums surrounding issues in the gay community that we still face. An example I can think of is last summer, I kept seeing how the government still didn’t allow gay men to donate blood, due to prejudice surrounding HIV/AIDS still remaining. Fortunately, after signing petitions and educating my friends and family on the matter, in 2021 the law in England changed so that gay men could now donate blood, however only if they have been in a long term relationship. I’ve also shared petitions and links to the government’s stance on conversion therapy, as unfortunately it is still legalised, with social media being used as the new medium for them to try and convert gay men. The Conservative government have stated they’re still trying for this to change, however Boris Johnson PM voted against gay marriage and for adoption, leading to me question how long it’ll take for this to happen. 

For myself, I know the only way to combat social injustice is to talk about it and educate family and friends that may not be as socially aware of such topics. I think I will always been interested in social justice, due to the experiences I myself have faced, and until I see someone who accurately represents me as a young gay men within British politics. 

References

Baggs, M. (2020) Black Lives Matter in the UK: 'We're still not being heard'. [online] BBC News. Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-53812576> [Accessed 5 March 2021].

Gallagher, K. (2016) ‘Responsible Art and Unequal Societies: Towards a Theory of Drama and the Justice Agenda’, in Freebody, K. and Finneran, M. (ed.) Drama and Social Justice: Theory, Research and Practice in International Contexts. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 53-66.

Mandalatheatre.co.uk. (2017) Past Projects. [online] Available at: <https://www.mandalatheatre.co.uk/mandala-theatre> [Accessed 5 March 2021].

Mangan, L. (2021) It's a Sin review – Russell T Davies has created a masterpiece of poignancy. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jan/22/its-a-sin-review-russell-t-davies-queer-as-folk-aids-channel-4> [Accessed 5 March 2021].

[kawuli]

The 2000 Presidential election was the last election I was too young to vote in. My US history/gov’t/whatever it was I was taking at the time teacher made us do a bunch of research on the various candidates, and she’d found out about these websites that told you all sorts of information about everyone who was running for president! so we had to look up everyone who was running for president and write something about their platform.

Oh my god you guys, so many people run for president. She eventually agreed to let us pick 10 people to write about. Bush, Gore, Nader, some Libertarian candidate probably, and a bunch of people who didn’t have ANY party affiliation, or were one of 12 members of the “we really like weed” party.

Anyway. There was a lot of “well, Gore is just more of the same Clinton neoliberal globalization bullshit, we’re never going to get anything better if we don’t start supporting third parties” going around. I had a fair amount of sympathy for this position, as an 18-year-old who had just learned about the Battle of Seattle WTO shutdown and thought it sounded great. Rage Against the Machine played at the DEMOCRATIC National Convention. Not because they were worse than Republicans, but because neoliberals seemed to be running the Dems just as much as they were running the Republicans, and just maybe big protests would actually affect the Dems.

And so, election night. I was at Indiana’s public magnet boarding school for my last two years of high school (which was a lifesaver, wow, but that’s another story) and my roommate and I were in trouble because our room was a disaster zone. We had previously gotten away with it because when our RA came to do room checks, I’d been tutoring like 8 girls in AP physics using a chalkboard I stole from my parents’ basement, and when confronted with that many girls and that much math our RA backed out slowly without noticing the mess.

But she had caught on, and we had to clean up. So we had NPR on the radio and were sorting through stuff and taping important papers to the walls because we had an “important things don’t go on flat surfaces” policy, and we were listening to results come in.

And they were calling states, and it was very exciting except that I mean there wasn’t a real sense of urgency about it, both candidates were kind of terrible. Clinton signed NAFTA and welfare “reform” and we were supposed to be excited for 4 more years of a less-interesting version of that? Al Gore couldn’t even carry his home state! (Tennessee. Of course he couldn’t.)

And they kept not calling Florida. And not calling it, and not calling it, until finally, sometime after midnight, we went to bed. And we were all excited, because History was being made, woah!

And you all know how that ended up. And for most of 2001, GW Bush was just…a joke. The idiot president who got put in office by the Supreme Court and spends more time golfing than governing.

I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how sharply the rhetoric changed after 9/11. This idiot former coke addict draft dodging daddy’s boy became Our Fearless Leader, overnight, with the help of some rubble and a bullhorn.

And all of a sudden, the government that had never deigned to notice when feminist groups talked about how badly women were being treated under the Taliban was pointing to those same human rights violations as clear justification for overthrowing the regime in Afghanistan.  

And all of a sudden, the PATRIOT Act. I remember laughing about it, because seriously? That’s what you’re calling it?

And then, not all of a sudden but a couple years later, the day after my goddamn 20th birthday, George W Bush, the Shrub, that guy who used to talk about “compassionate conservatism” (and isn’t that a joke in 2018), was on TV saying Saddam Hussein had to get out or he’d start bombing.

And--here’s the kicker--lots and lots of people who should have known better thought that well, even if the justifications are dodgy, Saddam Hussein is a bad guy, we should take him out for the good of the Iraqi people. (Because the US has an excellent track record of that working out well, for literally anybody but maybe oligarchs and weapons manufacturers.)

I had yelling arguments with guys I smoked weed with over whether or not the war was a good idea.

Which is why one of my biggest “wow, the future is fucked up” issues is just how differently I feel about organizations like the New York Times (embedded journalists, Tom Friedman op-eds about how great the war was gonna be, etc) and the Democratic Party (ONE PERSON voted against the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists” on September 14, 2001: Barbara Lee, D-CA, a Black woman. In 2002, 82 Democratic Representatives and 29 Democratic Senators voted FOR the authorization of the invasion of Iraq). Y’all, if you wanna bitch about the Democratic Party NOW, at least go look at where it’s come from--just within my voting-lifetime, and I’m not that old.

In February 2003 there were 10 million people around the world protesting the buildup to war. And almost none of them were established Democratic politicians. At least in 2017 the Womens March wasn’t being controlled by weirdo socialists because nobody mainstream would touch it for fear of being called unpatriotic. (alas, it turns out that the Womens March is being run by asshole anti-semites, but at the time of the march, it was incredibly mainstream and at least seen as being run by a coalition of, well, pretty much everyone)

The only thing, the only thing good that seems to be coming out of the otherwise-unmitigated disaster that is the Trump presidency is that so many people have gotten together to oppose it.

There was no Indivisible in 2003. If there had been, maybe I wouldn’t have spent election night 2004 getting drunk because what the FUCK people how did you vote for this guy AGAIN oh my GOD MORE PEOPLE VOTED FOR HIM IN 2004 THAN IN 2000 WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?

When I talk about how important it is to support Democratic politicians, this is why. Not because I love the Democratic party. I remain fundamentally skeptical of political parties, especially given how much money is involved (way more now than in 2003, too). But if I’m anything, I’m pragmatic. “You can’t just keep voting for the lesser of two evils” was played out and disproved in 2000. You vote for the lesser of two evils, and then you keep pushing that person to be less evil. Your job doesn’t stop after you leave the voting booth, you don’t select the Perfect Representative and then go home and go to sleep for 2-4 years. You pick the person who’s most likely to listen to you and then you keep yelling at them for 2-4-6 years. But you gotta start by voting for someone who has a chance in hell of listening to you.

Somewhere, (maybe here?) I read something like: “For nonviolent resistance to work, it requires that the government be capable of shame.”

They were talking about Central America (I think Guatemala). I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot lately, but about the United States. Many parts of our current government are clearly incapable of shame. The current occupant of the White House, certainly, but also the Republican Senators who keep talking about how awful and uncivilized all this is, but vote however Mitch McConnell tells them to, and the guy on our local City Council who said “I don’t care what you people think, we’re cutting funding to after-school programs and also for crossing guards because fuck poor kids, amirite?”

If we want civil disobedience, protest, direct action, any of it to be effective, we need a government that is capable of shame. That will look at millions of its citizens protesting and actually think “well, maybe I better do something differently.”

The only way we get that kind of government is by voting for it.

---

(I started this as a reblog of this post from @idiopathicsmile about “what was the GWBush era really like?” but it...evolved.)

[rotationalsymmetry]

I *cannot* express how much it ticks me off to be told that my past self was “virtue signalling” good grief it’s not like I even told that many people. And yes, I was voting my conscience. I was voting for who I thought would be the best candidate. Which is what I’d been told to do my entire life. But I guess that stops being ok if you vote for the wrong candidate?

I’ve put in the work. I’ve campaigned on a zillion ballot measures. I’ve supported candidates, including democratic candidates, with money and effort. The first time I worked as a poll worker I was over 30, because for the first time in my adult life I wasn’t doing GOTV or canvassing or hanging door hangers for some candidate or issue and it just felt wrong to not be doing *anything* around an election other than voting.

And I suspect this is pretty normal? Moderation isn’t that motivating. Often the people working hardest *for the Democrats* are politically way to the left of the party platform, but we believe in a diversity of tactics and sometimes that means working for a Democratic candidate because they’re better than the Republican...but we also know the party isn’t going to ever go left unless there’s a price to not doing that, so yes, sometimes we vote third party. Or don’t work for a candidate (or plug them on social media) who’s on the more centrist side of the party.

And, mostly I haven’t been posting about this. There are bigger, more important things than my ego out here. There are bigger, more important things than me bragging about my activist credentials (experience that I have because I used to be able bodied if not necessarily able in the mental health sense, because I had parents who didn’t kick me out and made sure I had health insurance even when I kept boomeranging back home into my late 20’s, because I had the luxury of not prioritizing physical survival.) I’m not even recommending people not vote for Biden — not because I think voting third party is wrong on principle, but because this isn’t a good year for it. (Although if you’re in a state that’s never gone red in the last 30 years and won’t this year either, you do you.)

And I have enough, I guess self awareness, to realize I could be wrong and there could be privilege issues affecting my willingness to prioritize what could go right over what could go wrong. Maybe I was wrong in 2004. Maybe I was wrong in 2000 (although that’s still purely theoretical, I was 17 on the day of the 2000 election.) Goodness knows eight years of Bush was awful.

But out of all the things that could have gone differently, including Gore being willing to get called a sore loser for a little longer, including the Democrats actually not having policies that are nearly horrific as Republican ones (in terms of war, “tough on crime”, immigration, neoliberalism, etc) ...

In theory, people should be able to vote for the candidate they think is best. (If we had ranked choice voting on a national scale, this wouldn’t be an issue.) It’s OK to tell people that this world is far from ideal and practical concerns should be mixed in. It’s ok to say “I made this decision and this is why.”

I just don’t get why EVERYTHING I hear on this subject flat out refuses to acknowledge one single legitimate reason why someone might consider voting third party, or says the poster considered doing it or did in the past and this is why they decided not to this time, or literally anything other than “if you don’t vote Democrat you’re a monster.”

I hear “if voting didn’t work, they wouldn’t try so hard to suppress it” Anyways. I wonder if there’s a thing where, the thing Democrats (who would never have wanted to vote Green in the first place) fear about third parties isn’t the fear of losing an election to the Republicans, but rather the existence of third parties themselves.

If it’s not a threat, why work so hard to suppress it?

Maybe it’s just the circles I run in, but I genuinely don’t hear people being as hard on actual people who actually vote Republican, as they are on people who vote third party. Apparently one is understandable and normal, but the other? You just hate people.

[theatre-and-social-engagement]

Week 4:

1. If ‘Social justice is about making society function better – providing the support and tools to help turn lives around’ (UK Gov.co.uk), how well do you think the UK is achieving this today? What role can drama or theatre play in this?

The Social Justice approach which is explained in the document seems like it would be more beneficial overall than previous attempts to ‘turn lives around’(GOV.UK, 2012). This being because there are actions being put in place to prevent certain negative behaviours, work is promoted, and support is being given to those who have already fell victim to these behaviours rather than simply supplying them with money. According to a progress report in 2014, this scheme displayed some progressions. For example, it states that 250,000 more children were living with each of their birth parents than previous statistics, 387,000 less children were living in workless houses, 2,100 previous gang members were on better paths since the assistance of jobcentre advisers etc (Smith, 2014). However, with this being said, the 2019 statistic for poverty in the UK presented a staggering 14.3 million people, therefor meaning more can and must be done to improve this (O'Leary, 2019).

 One statistic presented in the Gov document was that 24% of prisoner’s were taken into care during childhood (GOV.UK, 2012). Drama could play a role in this improvement through social theatre. As we know this information it would be a beneficial idea to tackle this issue prior to imprisonment. Social theatre companies could provide government paid sessions (ideally) to children being taken into care and explore difficult topics aiming to prevent later negative behaviours and crimes. Similarly to this, as children who are eligible for free school meals are 4 times more likely to be excluded from school, workshops could be set up as part of school curriculum, again with the aim of preventing negative behaviour which in turn leads to expulsion and consequently a lack of academic grades or even later imprisonment (GOV.UK, 2012). There are many other issues drama could help tackle such as drug and alcohol abuse, crime in the family, preserving families and marital issues etc. Yet unfortunately this would require a higher demand for social theatre facilitators, therefor in an ideal world this could be stressed by the government and a greater and less expensive amount of training programmes should be available to accommodate these improvements. 

2.  Gallagher states that some of the young people that they studied seemed to have internalised robust neoliberal messages, taking full responsibility for their social and economic struggles. In what ways do you think this might apply to you in the context of your life and your third level study of drama?

The young people Gallagher studied didn’t think they were owed anything from society and didn’t wish for ‘hand outs’ which she explained to be an endeavour to hide feelings of humiliation, failure and powerlessness towards their economic situation (Freebody and Finneran, 2015). Gallagher expresses how this drastically affects drama as a turn away from the ‘collective, collaborative, shared experience’ (Freebody and Finneran, 2015) changes dramas initial sociality and emotional relatability. These youth had supposedly fallen victim to neoliberalism causing them to believe that considering or analysing the collective rather than considering the individual is offensive to individual freedom and also that they are solely responsible for their outcomes (Freebody and Finneran, 2015). With all of this in mind, there are noticeable ways in which this might apply to myself in the context of my life and my third-year level of study. It is definitely reasonable to say that I did have the same internalised neoliberal messages, in the sense that in certain negative situations I would find myself in, I would accept these situations as my own issue or finale and unchangeable when this was not the case. It is also noticeable in individuals within my drama course whose sole aim of drama is to partake in typical and solely aesthetic performances, rather than community based or performance that inspires change. However, I do believe that drama has the ability to break down and question these neoliberal messages through the process of civic engagement (Freebody and Finneran, 2015).

3. Describe in your own words what ecological thinking means?

I believe ecological thinking is how we see our relationship to the world around us and an understanding that the world, people and its eco-systems are connected and dependent on each other. Being that humans are not separate from each other and nature but part of a collective as caring and active citizens. Code believes that an instituting imagination ‘can interrogate the social structure to destabilize its pretentions to naturalness and wholeness, to initiate new meaning’ (Code, 2006) which is needed for ecological thinking, social critique and contesting conceived information. Ecological thinking juxtaposes neoliberal messages and ‘disengagement from collective civic life’ (Freebody and Finneran, 2015).

Self-Reflection: Can you think of when you first became aware of or interested in social justice? Are there any specific things you do in your life that contribute to the notion of a just society for all? 

I can’t pinpoint a time where I became aware of social justice, it just feels like something I’ve always briefly known about. I think I’ve been interested in it for a while and its always been something that I’ve felt the need to fight for; be that for myself or for other people. I was most interested in pursuing social justice through drama after my first year at university when my drama interests changed and I became less interested in typical aesthetic acting and started leaning more towards drama that makes a difference in society or for certain groups/communities. 

Reading:

Code, L. 2006. Ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Freebody, K. and Finneran, M., 2015. Drama And Social Justice: Theory, Research And Practice In International Contexts. Routledge, pp.53-66.

GOV.UK. 2012. Social Justice: Transforming Lives. [online] Available at: <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/social-justice-transforming-lives>

O'Leary, J., 2019. Poverty In The UK: A Guide To The Facts And Figures. [online] Full Fact. Available at: <https://fullfact.org/economy/poverty-uk-guide-facts-and-figures/> 

Smith, I., 2014. Social Justice: Transforming Lives Progress Report. [online] HM Government. Available at: <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/375964/cm8959-social-justice-progress-report.pdf> 

[berniesrevolution]

In 2016, pundits speculated endlessly on that mysterious place called Trump Country. To many in the Beltway, much of America was a foreign country, to be analyzed statistically rather than in person. Chris Arnade, on the other hand, was determined to escape his coastal bubble. Arnade got into his old van, and has spent the last several years traveling hundreds of thousands of miles, interviewing people all over the country, discovering their joys, sorrows, discontents, and aspirations. In the process he has produced a set of photographs and stories, depicting the everyday Americans who are left out of the media’s understandings of the country, and who feel left out of the 21st century economy. Arnade spoke to Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson about what he has learned in his travels.

NR: You’ve traveled over 100,000 miles across America talking to people from all stripes of life. What are some of the misconceptions that people have about the country they live in? What are some things people think they know about America that are totally wrong?

CA: Everyone knows we’re a divided country, but I don’t think people understand exactly how deep that division is, and what the true nature of it is. I was a banker for 20 years. I lived in Brooklyn Heights, I sent my kids to private school. I was paid well; I had a Ph.D. in physics. I was kind of the New York neoliberal elite who valued science, valued rationality. And that elite built a world over the last 30 years that is massively unequal. I think everybody knows statistically that we have massive wealth inequality and continued racial inequality. But we kind of pat ourselves on the back and say we’re an egalitarian society in other ways. We’ve given equal legal status to gender, sexuality, and race. And so we kind of think we’ve addressed many of the issues. But when you go out in the country, you realize that we’re massively unequal, and we’re unequal beyond economics. We’re unequal in terms of the way we live, how we choose to live, unequal in our valuation framework, what we view as moral, what we view as right and wrong, what we view as the goals. And beyond the obvious racial differences, which are huge—I spent, as much time in poor minority neighborhoods as I did in poor white working class neighborhoods—the most salient division I see beyond race is education.

NR: Yes, you’ve described this framework for thinking about educational inequality, what you call the “front row kids” versus the “back row kids.” The kids who did well in school and advanced to the top of the economic ranks, and the kids who were sort of left behind, and the differences that creates in their worldview. Could you talk a little bit about that framework and what that division in worldview really is?

CA: Right, the front row kids and the back row kids. Now within that there are some divisions and complexities obviously. But the most salient thing about it is that it’s not about political party. It’s non-partisan. “Front row kids” means both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. The front row is anybody who comes from an elite school, Princeton, Harvard, the Ivies or has a postgraduate degree, Ph.D. They’re mobile, global, and well-educated. Their primary social network is via college and career. That’s how they define themselves, through their job. And within that world intellect is primary. They view the world through a framework of numbers and rational arguments. Faith is irrational, and they see themselves as beyond gender. You can describe this using other frameworks, like “the Acela corridor” types.

On the Democratic side, you can think of the Matt Yglesias types in the media, these kinds of global technocrats, policy wonks. Their framework is: “Give me a problem and I’ll devise a maximally optimal solution using my data.” Most importantly, though, they view their lives as having been better than their parents, and they think their children’s lives will be better than their own. And for them, that’s still true.

The front row kids have won. They’re in charge of things. They are the donor class in politics, they’re the analysts and specialists who scream every time someone has a policy difference they disagree with. “You can’t do X, you’re going to cause a global world war.” Or “You can’t get rid of NAFTA,” “you can’t do Brexit.”

NR: What about the “back row kids,” then? What is that segment of society, and what is the difference in its worldview?

CA: It encompasses a lot of types of people, but it’s defined by its difference with the front row. It’s not just the “white working class,” it includes minorities, black kids who are stuck in east Buffalo or central Cleveland or Bronx in New York. Mostly they don’t have an education beyond high school degree and if they do it’s kind of cobbled together through trade schools and community colleges and smaller state schools. Their primary social network is via institutions beyond work such as family. And their community is defined geographically, meaning they generally don’t leave where they grew up. They might leave for 5-6 years to go to the military, take jobs that bring them to Alaska for a few years, but they’ll come back.

And they have different kinds of worldviews and values. They find meaning and morality through faith, which is also a form of community. And if you read the work of [Harvard sociologist] Michèle Lamont, she writes about the ethos of the decency of hard work. It’s the idea that you don’t necessarily use your brain to advance, you use your strength and you use your commitment. You’re going to play by the rules, you’re going to break a few rocks, you’re going to work hard. It’s also, and here’s where I’ll sweep a lot under the rug, a kind of traditional view of race and gender.

This group of people views their life as worse than their parents, and they think their children’s lives will be worse than theirs. And that’s rational, from their perspective. After all, they’ve lost. Their kind of worldview has been devalued, because it’s the front row kids that have been in charge: the globalized, rational meritocracy versus the more traditional concepts of morality.

NR: You mention rationality. One of the things that seems to puzzle elites as they try to understand these other parts of society is that they feel the grievances there are genuinely irrational. From their perspective, free trade has been good for everybody, it’s made everybody better off than the alternative. And so they don’t understand these kinds of populist backlashes in the form of the support for Trump (or Bernie Sanders), because they feel like the rage and the desire to destroy the elite is a failure to recognize their own self-interest. After all, why would you vote for someone whose economic policies are irrational, or who, like Trump, might destroy the universe? It just doesn’t make sense. They don’t know why people hate experts, since experts have expertise, and expertise is good!

CA: Well, let me approach it this way. I think that when you talk about any group’s failings as being atavistic, because of laziness, because of weakness, because of some other failing, you’re doing it wrong as a progressive. So when we progressives look at poor minorities and, from a sociological perspective, the frustrations and deviances that are there, and when conservatives say “Hey, there’s more crime in black neighborhoods because they’re more violent” or “There’s higher unemployment because they’re lazier,” we liberals rightly push back. We say “Whoah, let’s look at the structural issues here. Let’s look at the structural racism that denies them access to jobs. Let’s look at the structural inequalities in the educational system which provide a harder route for them to leave.”

And I’d say you have to do that for all groups, instead of dismissing them as irrational. And that includes the white working class. You have to look at the context of what they’re facing. So from their perspective, knocking over the system probably makes sense because their worldview is being devalued. It’s being devalued monthly, has been devalued for 25 years.

Now, some of that devaluation I agree with; I believe the idea that you should get supremacy from being white and male should be devalued. But regardless of what you disagree with, that devaluation is happening. And they’re also being devalued economically. And then, even further, their whole worldview, their sense of place and meaning, is being eroded.

So let’s talk about NAFTA, you alluded to NAFTA and free trade. Mathematically it works, because the winners win more than the losers lose. So on a net basis, you say: “Hey look! The data says everybody wins.” There are three fundamental problems with that. One is that winners never share with the losers, that just doesn’t happen. Secondly, what you’re measuring is a very narrow framework of what’s valuable; you’re making the assumption that everybody wants more stuff, having more stuff is what meaning’s about. But the back row finds meaning through their connections, their community, through their structure. When they lose, they’ve lost everything. When the factories go, the town and community fall apart. Their churches hollow out. Their families start facing problems with drugs. So when your sense of meaning and place and valuation comes from your community, and your community gets eroded, that’s it. Game over.

NR: And this something quite real, it’s not an illusion, it’s not just on paper. You’ve traveled all over, and there really are communities like that, that have just been hollowed out. And you’ve extensively covered the drug epidemic.

CA: I didn’t get into this because I wanted to write about politics. I got into this because I was writing about drugs. And I always kind of glibly say that wherever I went to find drugs, I found hope leaving. And where I found hope leaving I saw Trump entering, if it was a white community. Drugs don’t just go into a place because people are lazy; drugs go into a place because drugs work and help. They’re a get-meaning-quick scheme. So is fascism, so is populism. Both these things give a sense of meaning. People use drugs because they think their life is stuck. It’s a form of suicide, and for them, it’s a way of finding some relief from something that seems like it’s not working. That they’re humiliated and devalued, and they want to find a way to fight back against that. And drugs are just one way to do that, with another way being fascism and populism.

NR: So the rise of Trump is definitely some kind of response to despair and hopelessness, then.

CA: Oh, hell yeah. But I would go even further. First, just because I say I’m not surprised this happened, doesn’t mean I’m justifying it. But what I’m saying is: if you want to put a recipe together to create populist fascist white identity politics, we’ve done it over the past 20-30 years. We’ve created a system that’s immensely unequal, created a ruling class, which is educated and uses their education to elevate themselves and demean anybody else. And we’ve rendered it not simply economic, but cultural as well. These divisions are massive. You can blindfold me and put me in any town in the United States and I can tell you within five minutes if it has a college in it or not.

There are these marches across the country that are taking place against Trump. And they’re great. I approve. I don’t like Trump. But there’s a meme that’s going around now that says: “Look it’s all across America. It’s even happening in Texas! And Arkansas! But it’s happening on a goddamn college campus in Texas and Arkansas. I spent a week and a half in two towns, Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, Michigan, separated by 35 miles. One has a college, one doesn’t. Which one do you think voted for Trump? First time they ever voted for a Republican.

(Continue Reading)