#were renamed in the German editions

[bibliophilecats]

13 August 2023: Left-Hander's Day

There used to be a time in Germany when left handed pupils were trained to only use their right hand (with the accepted teaching methods at that time, i.e. force and punishment). I seem to remember it wasn't as big of an issue in the UK?

Also, all German speakers, did you see this cool video with Ralph about left-handedness?

[inficetegodwottery]

So. Werewolf 5th Edition.

Werewolf 5th edition sucks. A lot.

Edit- I made some errors in my initial edit of this post that were fuelled entirely by being underinformed and almost insensible with anger, disappointment, and anxiety.

Some very informative responses have been made that I intend to incorporate into a much better and less rambling post with those updates and corrections. I'll probably delete this one soon as I type that one together, so folks only see the updated version.

Sorry for any mistakes I made on this old version, again, I was in an extremely poor place mentally and thoroughly dispirited by the total butchering of what was supposed to be a less shitty and mean-spirited version of a setting I care deeply for despite its foundational flaws and 30+ year history of exactly this thing happening.

I'm still very, very angry. But it's important to be angry and correct. This post was not made by someone informed of all the facts, and I intend to correct that.

Paradox Interactive has made the brave decision to reboot the controversial Werewolf the Apocalypse setting entirely rather than try and fix it, and have somehow done a worse job than the games studio that released an RPG book titled an ethnic slur.

It's taken me almost a month since this came out to be anywhere near mentally prepared enough to even collect my thoughts on it.

Man, it is rare to see an edition of ANYTHING that pisses off old players, new players, players who want to keep the lore the same, players who want to change the lore, conservative players, radical players, and even powergamers.

How do you set out with the intention of making an infamously dated and poorly researched/outreached setting LESS uncomfortable and racist from a modern perspective.... and end up with something EVEN MORE racist and uncomfortable, but also suffocatingly tonedeaf, insincere, and deeply sinister and corporate in its erasure of existing issues rather than addressing them whatsoever.

We made the Get of Fenris irredeemably evil because some of them in the past were nazis and also nazis like Germanic mythology, so the viking werewolves are all nazis now.

Okay, I understand why you did that from a modern political perspective even if its kind of heavy hand-

The Native American werewolf tribes have been removed entirely and replaced with American Murican werewolf tribes. Renaming and rewriting them to be more respectful was just too much work! Now they're more inclusive. :)

The Irish werewolf tribe is now the Nature Werewolves tribe, like every other tribe of Werewolves also is, but also stripped completely of celtic origins.

The Red Talons are openly genocidal ecofascist malthusians and somehow NOT IRREDEEMABLY EVIL like the Get of Fenris are.

Also the feminist all women werewolves are no longer all women or even feminist. AND ALSO SOME OF THEM ARE SOCIAL DARWINISTS AND THATS SUPPOSED TO BE A GOOD THING!?!

Also we entirely dropped the themes about how forcing children to be a part of a war they barely understand while also lying to them about the crimes their ancestors committed that led to the current crisis is fucked up and evil.

Now its actually awesome to be a child soldier born into a repressive apocalyptic death cult with a siege mentality and everything is cool about that actually, you're the Good Guys, and no amount of covered-up historic genocides or internal/external bigotry will ever change that! :)

Also we solved the way people were uncomfortable with the idea that werewolf society is transitioning messily from being horrible ableist assholes that discriminated for centuries against those they view as deformed, disabled, or sexual deviants to new generations that don't care about that stuff, by removing disabled werewolves entirely! Problem solved! No more discomfort or moral conundrums! We are the liberal-est!

There's just something so unbelievably fucked up and suspicious about erasing entire minorities from a fictional universe because they were handled poorly in the first edition, rather than talking to writers and outreach specialists FROM the real world equivalents to those minorities to try and rewrite them.

Don't worry, we removed the group the setting was bigoted against! Problem solved! Just remove the minority!

I've written my own post on why the Metis/Crinos-born should be renamed and probably rewritten, but as a severely disabled individual with multiple hereditary disabilities that severely impact my QoL, outright removing disabled characters in a work of fiction because the prejudice other characters showed them in-universe made people uncomfortable makes me want to tear out someone's throat with my teeth.

Sure, completely remove my ability to play disabled a character fighting back against prejudice and bigotry, rather than rewrite the most uncomfortable aspects of YOUR FUCKING PORTRAYAL OF THOSE CHARACTERS to make it more clear who the sympathetic one is supposed to be.

It's just so unbelievably cowardly and whinging and wretched.

So fuck it, I guess!

Fuck the deeply applicable themes of being born into a well-intentioned but deeply flawed and bigoted society, and trying to create the better world your parents always told you your ancestors fought for, while dealing with the fact that your world is built on mass graves those ancestors helped fill.

Fuck a game that deals with intergenerational trauma and the ethical hellscape that is a highly religious society devoted to the very same ideals it often violates just to win fights against the enemies it created through its own arrogance and prejudice.

Fuck a game that lets you play someone born different, born strange and sickly, bouncing constantly between people who pity you and people who view you as subhuman, before finally finding the people, the family who love and accept and fight alongside you for a world that has never accepted you, but WILL FUCKING KNOW YOUR NAME.

That's not relevant to the real world at all!

There are no kids born in deeply flawed and hypocritical societies, who grew up on stories of the glorious future their society would create, forced then to reconcile the hopeful dreams of a better world with the comprehensive list of horrific things done in the name of that future.

There are no children born confused and alone in their navigation of the maze that is past atrocities, ethnic conflicts, religious prejudice and dogma, or modern propaganda attempting to erase the histories of all of those things.

There are no disabled teens who spent their lives believing they didn't belong in the world, kept going only by the connections they forged with other outsiders and people who fought back against the kind of wretched bigotry that suffocates children to death, who found homes and families they could trust outside the pissant communities they were born into.

Apparently those people don't need a game! They don't need to explore those feelings!

Just throw some more nazis in, so we can pretend we care about social issues or understand the redeeming threads of a deeply flawed gameline, ostensibly so we market it to leftist youngsters, but while we also erase the entire point of a game WHICH IS ALL ABOUT BEING PUNKASS YOUNGSTERS DESPERATELY TRYING TO FIND THE REDEEMING THREADS OF A DEEPLY FLAWED AND PREJUDICED SOCIETY THAT CONSTRAINS THEM, FINDING A WAY TO REBEL AGAINST BOTH THE EVILS OF THE RACIST BASTARDS WHO RAISED THEM AND THE POMPOUS SHITHEADS WHO WANT TO DESTROY THE WORLD OUT OF GREED.

No! We want a squeaky clean, sterile white game that AmericanTM parents can be proud of their kids for playing! A marketable game, that advertisers will gladly pay Revenue to put their products in! Play the good guys, everyone! You're the good guys! Be a big werewolf UwU!

Don't worry about historical atrocities or the flaws of the society that raised you! That's Pentex propaganda!

Fighting bad guys means you can't do anything bad yourself! The Emperor told me so! Deus Gaia Vult!

A hollow, performative, offensive jizzstain that should've been scrapped in its crib. I have no idea how this edition got past a quality assurance team.

Hell I have no idea how it got past a legal team, given the number of real peoples' likenesses they used without permission.

Devoid of artistic integrity or merit.

[petervintonjr]

"The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future."

This summer, let us browse the stacks of the remarkable life and career of archivist, collector, and curator Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (the "Father Of Black History"), without whom there almost certainly would not have been a Harlem Renaissance. Born in 1874 Puerto Rico to a black mother (from the Virgin Islands) and a Puerto Rican father of German ancestry (hence his distinctive surname), Schomburg recounted a childhood tale of a bigoted grade school teacher in San Juan, who asserted that black people had "no history, art or culture." He moved to New York City in his teens but he never forgot this racist sentiment, and he remained fiercely connected to his Puerto Rican heritage. Activism called to Arturo early; in 1892 he was deeply involved with Las Dos Antillas, an advocacy group that pushed for Puerto Rican independence from Spain --a mission which of course sputtered to a disillusioning end after Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States.

Schomburg pivoted to academic life and embarked on a study of the African Diaspora. In 1911 he co-founded the Negro Society for Historical Research, a long-term reclamation project in which materials on Africa and its Diaspora were collected. Schomburg would devote the next 20 years of his life to this project --travelling throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America to rare book stores, antique dealers, and even used furniture stores (one from which he apocryphally claimed to have recovered a handwritten essay by Frederick Douglass). Over time he and his team of African, Caribbean, and African American scholars would amass a collection of over 10,000 books, manuscripts, artwork, photographs, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and even sheet music. One of his proudest finds was a long-forgotten series of poems by Phillis Wheatley.

Of course as any curator will tell you, acquiring unique pieces is nothing without a means to share the knowledge and the history that comes with them --by 1930 (the year of his eventual retirement), Schomberg would have lent numerous items to schools, libraries, and conferences and organized exhibitions. In the midst of all this he wrote articles for a wide range of publications, to include Marcus Garvey's Negro World; the NAACP's The Crisis (edited by W. E. B. Du Bois), and A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen's The Messenger; as well as essays for the National Urban League and The Amsterdam News (Harlem's newspaper).

Significantly in 1926 the Carnegie Corporation bought Schomburg's collection for $10,000 (about $125,000 in today's currency), on behalf of The New York Public Library. The collection was added to the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints of the Harlem Branch on 135th Street, of which Schomburg would later be appointed curator (following a stint as curator of the Negro Collection at Fisk University). The Division became the "go-to" centerpiece of many a Black artist, writer, and scholar; to include Arna Wendell Bontemps and Zora Neale Huston. After his death in 1938, the Division was renamed the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature, History and Prints. Schomberg's protégé, an up-and-coming author and poet named Langston Hughes, assumed responsibility for the collection.

Today the collection is known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (still under the auspices of The New York Public Library) --now topping out at more than 11 million indexed items, and considered to be one of the world's foremost research centers on Africa and the African Diaspora.

[chaifootsteps]

I am begging on my knees, give us more of your blessed Warrior Cats takes.. I am h0ngry

- Mapleshade did nothing wrong up to a certain point. No one is allowed to shit on Mapleshade for taking her kittens across the river unless you’re also going to shit on Bluestar for dragging her kittens out into a blizzard.

- Hailstar consistently sucks. 

- Speaking of how much Hailstar sucks, Crookedstar will never be Crookedstar to me. Like, I’ve got edited PDFs of his books. If his leadership ceremony isn’t this then I don’t want it. 

- Unless it’s the German translation which apparently has Shellheart rename him Stripestar at his ceremony on the grounds that his old name had caused him enough pain.

- I don’t like Crowfeather’s Trial. The Windclan Dysfunctional Family all hurt each other and were interesting for it, it wasn’t all Crowfeather’s fault.

- Justice for Squirrelflight.

- Ravenpaw/Barley and Cloudtail/Brightheart are the healthiest ships in this godforsaken series.

- Please, for the love of god, get rid of Moth Flight’s garbage rule and also can we have some more medicine cats that actually chose to be medicine cats?

- I still ship Shadowsight/Ashfur in a “fucked up to high heaven” sort of way. Fight me.

[namesisfortombstones]

ICH, DR. FU MANCHU LEBEN...

Recently I discovered that in Germany when they released the five European Christopher Lee Fu Manchu films (known as “Fu Man Chu” in Deutschland), they recut and released their own specific versions of the films there. They are comparable to how the Japanese monster movies were changed for release in the United States, but no one in America or the series' native England seems to be aware of this. 1. THE FACE OF FU MANCHU - I, DR. FU MANCHU: 96 mins - 83 mins (PAL)/ 88 mins (NTSC)

Whilst he was known as "Dr. Fu Manchu" in the Sax Rohmer books, in the Christopher Lee series, not once is he referred to as "Dr." The Germans, however, go out of their way to refer to him as only "Dr. Fu Manchu." The times "Fu Manchu" alone is used in the German dubs of the entire series can be counted on one hand. Because this was a German co-production with Great Britain, the Germans exported Joachim Fuchsberger and Karin Dor, two of the biggest stars of their "krimi" films, for the cast and they are given billing above Christopher Lee and Nigel Green! The Face of Fu Manchu begins with a moody prison beheading and the credits run over a rainstorm. I, Dr. Fu Manchu has the same video footage for its credits, but plays a jaunty, spritely tune inappropriate in the extreme, written by Gert Wilder. This tune would go on to be used for the main titles of each subsequent film as well. How the Germans felt a Chinese criminal mastermind should be represented musically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzXwjKk_nFA&ab_channel=MarcoPrati Fuschsberger and Dor dub themselves in the German dialogue, but Christopher Lee does not, which is bizarre considering Lee spoke fluent German. However, whoever did dub Lee dubs Fu Manchu for all five films.

The entire movie has been rescored (presumably by Gert Wilder, credited for the score) to replace the English score. The only time Christopher Whelan's music appears is a brief bit at the very end as Nigel Green rides off on horseback. Most of the new music amounts to stings for the end of scenes or a shock moment. Additionally, scenes that did have music in the English version go scoreless here.

The movie's opening thunderclap has been removed as well. Various scenes throughout are trimmed or cut entirely, including the action sequences. Professor Mueller (and his daughter, Maria Mueller) have been renamed Professor Merten (and Maria Merten) for some indiscernible reason.

There is a new shot and a new scene edited into the German version which seems to have been shot by the British crew.  An establishing shot of the museum director's door is inserted when Nayland Smith goes to warn him about Fu Manchu.

In case you just weren’t keeping up with the movie... When the movie's action switches to Tibet, Nayland Smith's party is shown attacking and replacing the monks bringing the Black Hill Poppy seeds to Fu Manchu. Alas, there is no extra footage of Fu Manchu, though.

British colonialists beating up some Buddhist monks because they’re the heroes? Lastly, Fu Manchu's infamous warning, "the world shall hear from me again," has been replaced. As the Tibetian palace Fu is in is blown sky high, Fu seems to somehow [telepathically?!] be addressing Nayland Smith directly and tops off his threat with "I, Dr. Fu Manchu live." This phrase would be repeated for the rest of the series except the last one. There are no end titles, and this would repeat for the other four movies. 2. THE BRIDES OF FU MANCHU - THE 13 SLAVES OF DR. FU MANCHU: 94 mins - 81 mins (PAL)/ 86 mins (NTSC)

The German version opens with a recap of the end of the first movie much like the U.S. version did. However, it does not use the same footage (because the U.S. version somehow managed to have unused footage in their recap). Fu's North African stronghold is shown with establishing shots frequently, presumably with footage from another movie.

In the normal version, Fu’s stronghold is hidden under a desert mountain. Here, it’s just sitting out in the open where God and everyone can notice it. A German voiceover explains something, then the opening credits begin, again accompanied by Gert Wilder's Fu Manchu Theme. The film has once again been entirely rescored by Wilder. And as in the first movie, German actor Heinz Drache gets billing over Christopher Lee. When Jules Merlin is dragged into Fu Manchu's Egyptian-style lair, Fu welcomes him over an intercom system that is not present in the English version. Characters are again renamed for no discernible reason. Michele Merlin is renamed "Maggie." The unseen-because-he's-dead Dr. Ramchad (and his quickly-dead daughter, Shiva) has been renamed "Dr. Preston." Most outrageous of all, Douglas Wilmer's turn as Nayland Smith has been rechristened "Terrence Spencer"! Whether or not, this was done because the part had been recast is unknown. Most of Fu's references to Nayland Smith have been removed. When the film goes to England, a super appears onscreen reading "London 1924." The German version of the first movie had no such claims (and Brides takes place almost immediately following Face). A shot of Maria Mueller's home from Face has been taken and used as an establishing shot when Franz first visits Dr. Merlin in London. There are also some new shots of newspapers featuring photos of Otto Lenz. Some extra footage of a map of North Africa has been inserted when Nayland Smith/Terrence Spencer and company are trying to locate the Temple of Karnac where Fu is holed up.

Well at least they thought to show this new building blowing up in the climactic inferno as well. 3. THE VENGEANCE OF FU MANCHU - THE REVENGE OF DR. FU MANCHU: 92 mins - 80 mins (PAL)/ 85 mins (NTSC)

The movie starts out with a brand new title sequence, underscored with Wilder's theme music. However, the original composer Malcolm Lockyer is given credit this time around and indeed, this version has not been rescored. Christopher Lee is finally properly given top billing, as he would for the remaining two films. However, German actor Wolfgang Kieling playing the very-extremely side-character Dr. Lieberson is given second billing! Horst Frank manages to get the "and" credit. Apparently, the Germans just wanted a new credit sequence because they then proceed to use the raw footage from the movie's original credit sequence as Chinese slaves haul Fu Manchu and his daughter to their homeland province of (the fictional?) Kwang Su.

Look, ma! No supers! When the movie cuts to England, a super identifying it as "London" appears, though no year is given this time. Douglas Wilmer is back to being Nayland Smith with no explanation whatsoever. However, Horst Frank's cowboy gangster character Rudy Moss has been renamed "Ronald Moss." When Fu Manchu and his daughter speak Chinese (which they do an inordinate lot in this film), they are merely dubbed with new German dialogue. It is unknown whether the dialogue was made up or actually translated from Chinese (Tsai Chin helped Christopher Lee with his Chinese lines). Of the five movies, this one has the least changes, though a sequence of Fu Manchu explaining to Rudy/Ronald just what the hell they're doing has been removed.

4. THE BLOOD OF FU MANCHU - THE DEATH KISS OF DR. FU MANCHU: 94 mins - 78 mins (PAL)/ 82 mins (NTSC)

A new shot of some Amazonian waterfalls opens the movie before cutting to Fu Manchu's dacoits hauling the bevy of women to his Incan lair. There is supposedly a thunderstorm nearby (though the sky looks clear) and the sound effects are culled from audio of King Ghidorah's gravity beams in Monster Zero (no, for real)!

Are there even waterfalls on the Amazon?

The credits, this time, are the same credits seen in The Blood of Fu Manchu, but again have been rescored with Gert Wilden's tune. Tsai Chin does not get credit in this one (despite her being onscreen in the credit sequence!) and Jess Franco's name is cut off the screen (you just see "Regie" and no actual name).

Directed by None of Your Goddamn Business Wilden has again rescored the film with stings and cues. Only one piece of Daniel White's original score remains in the film during an early scene in a jungle. The character of Celeste has been renamed "Cheleste" for some reason.

Much of the movie's ending explosion has been cut considerably leaving things even more abrupt than the film already did. And instead of using the amazingly moody and avant garde version of "the world shall hear from me again" from the English version, here, a shot of Fu from the opening titles is superimposed over the waterfall to assure Nayland Smith that "I, Dr. Fu Manchu live."

Germany, what the hell? You thought THIS was better than this???

5. THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU - THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. FU MANCHU: 92 mins - 80 mins (PAL)/ 85 mins (NTSC)

The Castle of Fu Manchu has been entirely overhauled by the Germans as if they knew the film was a piece of shit and decided they were going to make it better as best they could. Constantin Films gave it a valiant go, but ultimately, the movie is still a slog. Just slightly more interesting because of the changes to the English version. The movie opens with a brand new shot of a tree limb before cutting to the insert of Fu Manchu from the opening of the previous movie as he explains his new plan.

Behold, the tree limb of terror! The footage from both The Brides of Fu Manchu and A Night to Remember that make up the film's prologue has been trimmed considerably. All the footage of the ship's revelers has been taken out. Once the iceberg--er, the chunk of ice Fu has caused to appear in the Caribbean--hits the ship, the film does not cut back to the Brides footage, leaving us to believe Fu's test was a complete success, rather than the utter failure it is in the English version. Also, the Titanic footage goes from tinted blue to completely black and white and back again. The final shot of the Titan-er, ship sinking has been cropped considerably.

Instead of the travelogue scenes of the movie's titular castle from the English version, the movie has a brand new titles sequence. Using the footage from The Blood of Fu Manchu's credits sequence and Gert Wilden's theme song, the Germans manage to invent a far superior work (and Tsai Chin gets her credit back). Amusingly, every so often, Fu Manchu himself interrupts the credits sequence via radio broadcast announcing each time, "This is the voice of Dr. Fu Manchu!" The rest of the film has been rescored. None of the original score makes it in this version.

This time, people are not the only ones being renamed. The castle of Fu Manchu becomes a "palace." Honestly, "The Palace of Fu Manchu" does sound better and more exotic. The ailing Burt Young look-alike Dr. Heracles now becomes Dr. Henderson.

Much like the other films, new foley sounds abound. When Lin Tang follows Lisa across Istanbul to meet Omar Pasha (named for a real Ottoman field marshal), Muslim chanting can be heard in the distance.

There are two brief new scenes not in the English version, both made up of stock footage. Firstly, a scene of Lin Tang walking through the Incan prisoner cells from The Blood of Fu Manchu has been inserted for no particular reason, unless to justify the movie's new title. Another new scene uses shots from elsewhere in the film to feature Fu Manchu condemning Lisa to his torture chamber. She does not take it very well.

Pretty ballsy, Germany. The lame-ass explosion taken from what looks like a black and white silent film when Fu's dacoits attempt to assassinate Nayland Smith with a grenade has been replaced by an almost-as-lame still image of smoke from an explosion.

Is this really better? The end of the movie drops the bombshell that Lisa is actually Omar Pasha's daughter. She calls out "Mein vater!" before ditching Nayland Smith and Dr. Heracles/Henderson. In the English version, it's heavily implied that Pasha and Lisa are lovers! The Germans obviously took one look at this film's weak-ass "the world shall hear from me again" and wisely replaced it with the much better one from The Vengeance of Fu Manchu despite the fact Fu never wears a feather in this film. For the first time in German, Fu actually does say the phrase "the world shall hear from me again" instead of the "I, Dr. Fu Manchu live" from the prior four films.

Thanks, guys. This is a lot better. Is The Torture Chamber of Dr. Fu Manchu better than The Castle of Fu Manchu? Honestly, for all its numerous changes, it's about the same quality. No better, no worse, just an interesting variant. At least it's over about five minutes quicker. The German version is certainly better, though, than the awful American version utilized for Mystery Science Theater 3000 that looked like amateurs made the film. The German versions have been released onto DVD in Germany. There is The Dr. Fu Manchu Collection and The Complete Collection of Dr. Fu Manchu. Despite the wildly different packaging, they appear to be the same disc contents and should be easily available to anyone trying to track them down (I got my set from Amazon UK).

[polhurl]

Dune 2000 trainer 1.06 nocd

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[sevenkittensinatrenchcoat]

Misto’s Mating Dance Partners

Because the White Cat Lift AKA Mating Dance scene of the Jellicle Ball focuses mainly on Victoria and whoever she’s dancing with, what’s going on in the background is often ignored. But, there’s a clear pattern. The other cats pair off, go to the edges of the stage, forming a circle around Victoria and Her Man. They then do...whatever. There don’t seem to be official rules for what the pairs do, so some of them nap, some of the stare out into space, some of them cuddle...

And some of them blatantly fuck.

This scene is often called the Cat Orgy because of the blatant fucking that often occurs. So, you can watch the characters, see who pairs up with who and whether or not they fuck. Because Misto is my favorite character and one of the easiest to identify in even low-quality bootlegs, I went and watched him during this scene in every production in my bootleg collection.

Part One: Failure

In several of the older productions, I couldn’t see anything. Bootleggers and professionals alike tended to zoom in on Victoria and Her Man and stay there for most of the scene. Mexico 1991 mainly did this. Also, Vienna, with its Dark Voids and Weird Editing Choices was impossible to decipher.

Among the newer productions, Madrid was lost to Weird Editing Choices. Most of the dance wasn’t even visible! There were long close ups on Old Deuteronomy and Grizabella doing nothing when they should have been filming Victoria and Plato doing Something. It wasn’t even like they were distracted by an interesting background event. They just held the camera on characters who weren’t doing anything other than Reacting Slightly.

Part Two: Mistoria

Paris and Zurich paired Misto with Victoria for the Mating Dance. There was a slightly different dynamic with Misto and Victoria than there is when Plato or Tumblebrutus is Victoria’s Man. When Plato or Tumble, the most common choices for this part, approach Victoria, they’re awkward, but they still sort of take the lead. Victoria comes across as a bit shy at first, but she quickly gets into it. In the Mistoria versions, Misto is far more nervous approaching and often jumps back startled after touching Victoria. It feels like Victoria takes the lead in these versions, turning her back and basically being like “lift me”. Zurich Misto in particular is practically freaking out and the lift is kind of bizarre to watch because he looks so tiny!

Part Three: You’d Think Misto/Cassandra Would Be a Bigger Ship

Broadway-based productions, which paired Alonzo with Demeter, seemed to love pairing Misto with Cassandra for the Mating Dance. Troika and Buenos Aires did this and they did it in the same way. Misto and Cassandra practically have a dance of their own, performing the same motions when paired together. Usually, these pairs tend to seem like they’re improvising a little, but this specific couple has its own choreography.

The idea to pair Misto and Cassandra most likely comes from Misto later choosing Cassandra as his “lovely assistant” when he brings back Old Deuteronomy. In most productions, they don’t have much interaction outside of that. In Troika, Cassandra is also one of the cats who sometimes stands in for Coricopat and Tantomile, who were cut. Coricopat and Tantomile’s twin stuff was given to Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, while a lot of their psychic moments were given to either Demeter or Cassandra. So, in Troika, Misto and Cassandra are both mystical cats of some sort, which brings them together, because it’s something other cats don’t get.

I’m not super into this ship, because I generally don’t ship Misto with women, but the implications of the pairing in the Troika version are interesting.

Part Four: Lonely Misto

Hamburg, The German Tent Tour, and probably Moscow didn’t pair Misto with anyone. He just sat by himself. In Hamburg, there was a reason for this. Just like how Buenos Aires and Troika gave Misto’s role of fetching Old Deuteronomy to Skimble, Hamburg has a Mistotable instead of a Skimbletable.

I probably should’ve listed Moscow as a failure, but I’m still not sure what happened there.

The German Tent Tour just has Misto sitting by himself. He crawls to the Cuddle Pile, does a handstand, and no one cares.

But, the German Tent Tour shows signs of being part of a trend. While earlier, Broadway-based shows liked pairing Misto and Cassandra, newer productions never seem sure who to pair him with, so you have this scene of a lonely Misto surrounded by happy, horny straight couples and looking a bit out of place. This was probably unintentional, but it gives Misto an extra layer of gay coding.

Part Five: More Recent Stuff That Doesn’t Fit in the Other Categories

The 2013 UK Tour does something a bit interesting. Misto just sort of naps during the Mating Dance, but Carbucketty, who’s been following him around and imitating his dance moves for the past few minutes, lies down to nap at his feet. They don’t really interact and they’re barely touching, but it still counts as a pair. This is the closest I’ve gotten to finding a version where Misto’s paired with a tom. Of course, compared to most of the straight couples in any version of this scene, there is no horniness to be found. So, they’re two bros napping next to each other, but not quite cuddling ‘cause they’re not gay :(

Also I think Carbucketty might’ve ditched Misto for Rumpleteazer at the last second. We can never have nice things.

The Broadway Revival, having different choreography and staging for most of the Jellicle Ball is interesting in the way the Broadway Revival is usually interesting (kind of frustrating tbh). In the new choreography, everything from Bomba’s solo through the Mating Dance is basically one scene. Some queens dance, even more queens join them, a bunch of toms show up and pair up with them, the Boys Ballet and Whirlygigs are replaced with a romantic dance, everyone takes a hit of moonlight and things start to resemble other productions a bit more from there.

Because the pairs pair up quickly and stay together for a long time, it’s easy to see all of them. Only most of the cast is paired up, but I can identify, Tugger/Bomba, Munk/Demeter, Alonzo/Cassandra, Skimble/Jenny, Plato/Victoria, Coricopat/Tantomile (why do the siblings always stay together for the horny scenes?), Mungojerrie/Rumpleteazer (they’re probably not siblings in this version, so they get a pass), Pouncival/Electra, and Carbucketty/Sillabub.

Jellylorum, Tumblebrutus, and Mistoffelees are absent. They’re offstage until the Mating Dance properly starts. I have no idea where Tumblebrutus went, but this isn’t about him. Tugger crawls past Misto and they almost interact before Tugger leaves with Bomba. Jellylorum pairs up with Misto, presumably because neither one could find an actually date.

Now, the actress who played Jellylorum in this production has said in interviews that she played Jellylorum as the same age as Tugger. (The actors are besties irl so they made their characters besties too). So, this isn’t quite as weird as if feels when you first read it. Everyone’s the same age in this show, except for the kittens. Electra, Sillabub, and Pouncival were played as literal children in every scene but this one, because no one can escape the cat orgy (except Tumblebrutus, for some reason). But, unlike in 1998, which featured a lot of crack pairings during this scene (Tugger/Jenny, anyone?), pretty much every pairing in the 2016 orgy is the most obvious pairing possible. Anyone who didn’t have an obvious opposite gender counterpart was given one, except for Misto, Jelly, and Tumble. They could’ve brought back Peter (renamed Asparagus) from the opening to be Jelly’s obvious pairing, and then just had Tumble nap on Misto’s feet like 2013 Carbucketty, but they didn’t.

The result is that they created a bunch of comphet pairings but simply couldn’t do so for Misto. All his usual comphet pairing were taken. Cassandra’s with Alonzo and Victoria’s with Plato. Knowing that Tyler Hanes and Ricky Ubeda both shipped Tuggoffelees, they probably didn’t want to do the comphet thing either. Up until this point, this production had actually downplayed Tugger/Bomba, compared to other versions and added Tugger/Misto moments. I think, if it’d been allowed, Tugger and Misto would’ve been paired up there. Bomba can be like 1998, not having her usual partner and just going with whoever’s not paired up, which would be Tumblebrutus this time. Peter could be there for Jelly. Everyone’s happy!

But seriously, Gay Misto Mating Dance Scene when? Somebody get on that. People already find the horniness in Cats to be weird and adding gay horniness won’t make much of a difference.

[thebeautifulbook]

MAXIMILIANA OR THE ILLEGAL EXERCISE OF ASTRONOMY by Max Ernst (1891-1976) and Iliazd (1894-1975). 34 color etchings and aquatints, 6 of which are double-page, and numerous drawings by Max Ernst.

The binding’s elliptical decoration by Pierre-Lucien Martin (1913-1985) was inspired by some of the etchings that Max Ernst composed for the work.

Limited edition of only 75 copies, all signed by the artist and the publisher.

–––

Both artists were fascinated by the personality of Ernst Guillaume Tempel (1821-1889), a self-taught German astronomer who discovered planet 65 in 1861 and named it after the King of Bavaria, Maximilian II, renamed Cybele.

[argumate]

I think if people are going to obsess over Nazi antisemitism but laugh off Catholic antisemitism then they should probably take a closer look at the timeline (mostly lifted from Wikipedia) before assuming that these things are entirely unrelated:

1806: French Catholic philosopher Louis de Bonald publishes Sur les juifs, one of the most venomous screeds of its era, which combined anti-liberalism, a defense of a rural society, traditional Christian antisemitism, and the identification of Jews with bankers and finance capital.

1826: Cayetano Ripoll is the last victim of the Spanish inquisition, executed for allegedly teaching Deism to school children.

1840s: The popular counter-revolutionary Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot propagated Bonald's arguments against the Jewish "financial aristocracy" along with vicious attacks against the Talmud and the Jews as a "deicidal people" driven by hatred to "enslave" Christians.

1850: In Italy the Jesuit priest Antonio Bresciani's highly popular novel The Jew of Verona shaped religious anti-Semitism for decades, as did his work for La Civiltà Cattolica, which he helped launch. The Jesuits banned candidates "who are descended from the Jewish race unless it is clear that their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather have belonged to the Catholic Church" until 1946.

1858: Six year old Jewish boy Edgardo Mortara is kidnapped after allegations that he was secretly baptised by a servant as a baby and raised as a Catholic by Pope Pius IX despite the protestations of his family.

1869: Gougenot des Mousseaux's Le Juif, le judaïsme et la judaïsation des peuples chrétiens argued that Jews had manipulated the ideals of the Enlightenment to subvert and destroy Catholic France, and held them responsible for the French Revolution. He maintained that Jews engaged in ritual murder and conspired with Freemasons to control the world, and that the French Revolution was wrong to grant them equal rights. Pope Pius IX blessed the work and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg edited and published the first German edition in 1921.

1880s: French priests published twenty antisemitic books blaming France's ills on the Jews and urging the government to consign them back to the ghettos, expel them, or hang them from the gallows.

1889: Adolf Hitler is born.

1903: An antisemitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is published in Russia.

1912: Catholic priest Ernest Jouin founded the Ligue Franc-Catholique. The league's journal, the Revue internationale des sociétés secrètes, was one of the two main antisemitic tribunes of the interwar period (along with the paper of the Action Française). Revue often published right-wing antisemitic canards from Russian, such as hoaxes about blood libel, and claims that Bolshevism was a Judeo-Masonic plot. Describing the Protocols, Jouin wrote: "From the triple viewpoint of race, of nationality, and of religion, the Jew has become the enemy of humanity." Pope Benedict XV made Jouin an Honorary Prelate. Pope Pius XI praised Jouin for "combating our mortal [Jewish] enemy" and appointed him to high papal office as a protonotary apostolic.

1920: Hitler becomes chief of propaganda for the newly renamed Nazi Party (NSDAP) and begins making antisemitic speeches.

1933: While meeting a Catholic bishop, Hitler declares: “I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the Church, and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.”

now obviously Hitler was full of shit, but he chose his words based on what he thought his listener wanted to hear, and a Catholic bishop in 1933 was far more concerned about threats to the church than the threat of antisemitism that the church had stoked.

[bopinion]

Book of the month / 2021 / 04 April

I love books. Even though I hardly read any. Because my library is more like a collection of tomes, coffee-table books, limited editions... in short: books in which not "only" the content counts, but also the editorial performance, the presentation, the curating of the topic - the book as a total work of art itself.

björk :archives. A retrospective

Klaus Biesenbach

Monograph / 2015 / Schirmer/Mosel Publishing House

Iceland, the land of geysers, the largest volcanic island on the planet. Home of the Icelandic pony with its exclusive gait of the tölt and the most active literary community in the world. Soccer mecca and most sparsely populated country in Europe. Icelandic names - for example the highest mountain Hvannadalshnúkur - are hardly pronounceable, although the alphabet does not even know many common letters such as C, W, Q and Z. There is a separate holiday for seafarers and a division of time into 3-hour periods starting at midnight. 16 German cities each have more inhabitants than all of Iceland, which has therefore its own dating app to prevent relatives who are biologically too close from mating. It's a fascinating country.

Given the size of the country, it's probably no wonder that Iceland's pop cultural influence internationally is rather limited. Despite the Nobel Prize for Literature winner Halldór Laxness, whose work I don't know, and the crime series The Valhalla Murderers, which I know thanks to Netflix. But wait - wasn't there something else? Yes, that's right, Iceland has a globally successful Gesamtkunstwerk named Björk. Her contributions to music, video, film, fashion and art have influenced a generation worldwide.

Björk Guðmundsdóttir, born in Reykjavík in 1965, has made a name for herself as a singer, music producer, composer, songwriter and actress with a broad interest in different types of music, including pop music, electronic music, trip-hop, alternative rock, jazz, folk music and classical music. To date, she has sold over 20 million albums worldwide. Certainly not only because of the seemingly endless variability of her compositions, but also because of her voice, which one can confidently call unmistakable. She causes goose bumps, whether you like her music or not.

Little Björk attended music school at the age of five and was taught singing, piano and flute, among other things, for ten years. One of the teachers sent a recording of her singing the song "I Love To Love" by Tina Charles to a radio station. The broadcast was heard and liked by an employee of the Icelandic record publisher Fálkinn and subsequently offered her a recording contract - when she was eleven years old. With the help of her stepfather, who played guitar, she recorded her first album. It contained various Icelandic children's songs and cover versions of popular titles, such as "Fool on the Hill" by the Beatles. The album became a great national success.

At 14, Björk formed the girl punk group Spit and Snot, the maximum contrast program to the children's songs. This was followed by the fusion jazz group Exodus, later Tappi Tíkarrass and Kukl (Icelandic for witchcraft), with whom she developed her signature vocal style. First foreign tours to England and West Berlin followed. Then in 1986 came the formation of the band Pukl, later renamed The Sugarcubes. The first single brought respectable success in England and USA, The Sugarcubes reached cult status. The first record deal with Elektra Records led to the album "Life's too good" in 1988, making them the first Icelandic band ever to become world famous.

The transformation into a total work of art began in 1992 at the latest with Björk's move to London. The first solo album, appropriately named "Debut," became the album of the year according to New Musical Express. Now even Madonna wanted to have a whole album written by Björk, but it remained with the title track "Bedtime Story", she remained true to herself and her love of experimentation. The New York based news magazine "Time" named her the "high priestess of art" and in 2015 put her on the list of the 100 most influential people on earth. She rounded off her visual extravaganza, that even her wardrobe was prominently featured in the major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Schirmer/Mosel Verlag is an art book publisher in Munich founded in 1974 by Lothar Schirmer and the commercial artist Erik Mosel. Schirmer became friends with artists such as Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys at a young age and began collecting their works. By buying and reselling art prints and drawings, he earned the start-up capital for his publishing house. With his publishing debut, he ensured the rediscovery of August Sander, a visual artist of the Weimar Republic. There were various publishing collaborations with the MoMA, and in 2015 there was also the retrospective mentioned above. And of course, in keeping with the protagonist, the publication had to become a work of art itself.

"björk :archives" comes in an elegant slipcase containing six parts: four booklets, a paperback and a folded catalogue raisonné poster with the covers of all Björk albums. A closer look is worthwhile: first there is a thematic introduction by the editor and exhibition curator at the MoMA, Klaus Biesenbach. Then an illustrated essay by Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, which deals with Björk's creative dissolution of musical and aesthetic boundaries. Another by Nicola Dibben, professor of musicology at the University of Sheffield, on Björk's creativity and collaborations. And the collected e-mail correspondence similar to a pen pal relationship between Björk and American publicist, philosopher and literary scholar Timothy Morton.

The book itself, the centerpiece of the edition, is about Björk's seven major albums and the characters she created for them. Poetic texts by Icelandic author Sjón, with whom Björk has long collaborated, are joined by a veritable treasure trove of illustrations: Photos of live performances, stills from the music videos of masters like Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze, Björk in stunning costumes by designers like Hussein Chalayan or Alexander McQueen, and PR shots by star photographers like the duo Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin or provocateur Araki.

The design of the publication quotes music scores and comes from the renowned Parisian design studio M/M. It all adds up to an extraordinary visual masterpiece, a tribute to the magical world of Björk. And that at an hardly believable price of € 19.80. A reviewer on Amazon (no, you shouldn't shop there - support local businesses!) sums it up: "This is a collection of art, stories and references very well organized and assembled with care. The price does absolutely not represent how valuable this product is, I am positively surprised." Positively surprising - that could truly be Björk's mission statement.

Björk's music itself is so rich in pictorial statements that it doesn't really need any exuberantly creative videos to go with it. Therefore, according to Slant Magazine, her best video is her first, relatively simple one: "Big Time sensuality" from her "Debut" album purely shows her joy in music. Here's the link:

https://youtu.be/-wYmq2Vz5yM

[whumpster-fire]

Trivia Fun Facts

Defenestrating Sphere has been voted the Best Dungeons and Dragons Spell for sixteen consecutive years since its publication in 2004 by the Royal Society For Yeeting Your Bitch Ass Out Of A Fucking Window, which is the greatest number of consecutive wins of this award for any spell published in a D&D splatbook by nine years, and the most awarded spell in the game overall by four years with the runner-up being Telekinesis (although Telekinesis has more total wins due to its being in the game for longer - it was already published at the founding of the Royal Society For Yeeting Your Bitch Ass Out Of A Fucking Window in 1983.

The American Your-Bitch-Ass-Out-Of-A-Window-Yeeting Association predates Dungeons and Dragons, but has only given awards for tabletop RPG spells since 2006. Defenestrating Sphere has won every single year in America, except for 2016 and 2008. In 2016 the award was given to Bigby’s Grasping Hand in a close vote, with the prevailing opinion being “come on, it’s just too easy, man.” The resulting riots nearly led to the AYBAOOAWYA’s collapse, and over twelve members were killed, most by the obvious cause but one by gunshot wounds. In 2008 the award was given to Hurl Through Hell. However, this was no longer valid in 2010 with the resolution to no longer consider D&D 4th Edition a Dungeons And Dragons Game, resulting in the award being moved to the new “Best Spell From A Tabletop Imitation Of A MMORPG” category, later renamed the “Best D&D 4th Edition Spell” in 2013. Hurl Through Hell has won this award every year since its inception. The 2008 “Best Dungeons And Dragons Spell” award was reinstated in 2014 after the release of D&D 5e and the inclusion of Hurl Through Hell, but was later rescinded in 2018 when somebody pointed out that Hurl Through Hell is a class feature and not a spell in 5e.

The AYBAOOAWYA currently does not recognize a winner for Best D&D Spell in 2008. The Czech Defenestration Society is the oldest and ninth-most prestigious recreational defenestration organization, established in 1419. However, to date CDS Windowlords have refused to add roleplaying games as an awards category, on the basis that it would detract from their reputation. This is hard to argue, as a photo of Lake Prague, once the site of a medieval Czech city that was hurled through a window-shaped dimensional portal by CDS mages on multiple occasions, clearly demonstrates the society’s power. After its third defenestration in 1618 which resulted in Prague falling over 17 miles (27358.8 meters), the city was never rebuilt and the crater was allowed to fill with water, though there are several villages surrounding the lake, as well as several villages that now lie at the bottom of the lake after being flung through a 400-meter tall iron window purpose-built by the CDS. Sadly this window was destroyed by Nazi bombing campaigns during WWII as retaliation for the 1939 Defenestration of Wolfenbüttel . Nevertheless the foundations of the great window, and the lake as a whole, have been designated a world heritage site by UNESCDO, the United Nations Cultural, Scientific, Cultural, and Defenestration Organization, and tourism has replaced fishing as the dominant industry in the area.

But this atrocity did not deter the CDS, and over the course of the war the Czechs proceeded to defenestrate several other German settlements including Cloppenburg, Dingolfing, and Bad Mergentheim (Good Mergentheim fifteen kilometers to the South was also leveled in an unrelated attack by the Budapest Pyromancy club. Sorta Okay Mergentheim still stands to this day, although it has been depopulated since 1971 due to the actions of the Slovenian Necromancer’s Guild), as well as Lubbock Texas, which was sadly confused with Lübeck, Germany (Which was sunk into the sea in 1955 by the Liverpool Cult of Neptune), and Ipswich, which was destroyed just for the fun of it. Luckily for the allies, the CDS was finally brought to its knees with the 1942 defeat of most of its Council of Archdefenestrators by Defenestrierungsmeister Hans Von Liechenberg, also known by his post-war professional wrestling stage name Hurl-It-Out Hans, using his signature finishing move, Defenestrierenkugel (roughly translates as: Defenestrating Sphere). Hurl-It-Out Hans was the third most popular defenestration-themed professional wrestler of all time, after Max Pane, and The Undertaker, best known for the 1998 match where he threw Mankind out the window of Hell In A Cell and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.

However, while the Czech Defenestration Society has the most total destroyed cities to its record, the largest individual city to be defenestrated was San Antonion in 1993 by the Texas-based biker gang known as Yeet-Haw. A 2008 attempt by the CDS to overturn this record by defenestrating Hamburg ended in tragedy when Hamburg, Arkansas was accidentally defenestrated instead of Hamburg, Germany. After major public outcry, the CDS’s Senior Geography Officer Pepik Otradovec was ejected via the 14th-story window of the organization’s headquarters in Hradec.

This was also the same year that American Your-Bitch-Ass-Out-Of-A-Window-Yeeting Association retroactively failed to crown a Best Dungeons and Dragons Spell winner. As a result of these two incidents 2008 has been voted the Worst Year In History by the Royal Society For Yeeting Your Bitch Ass Out Of A Fucking Window five times, the third-most wins of any year. It is tied for third place with AD 79, when both Pompeii and Herculineum were destroyed by a volcanic eruption without windows being involved at all. In second place is 1965, when the Chicago Municipal Building Code briefly banned windows. This ban was quickly overturned due the entire committee responsible being hurled out of an existing window which had been grandfathered in and was not affected by the ban. In first place is 1903, the year when impact-resistant windowpanes for high-rises were invented.

1903, coincidentally, is also exactly 173 times the number of votes by which Bigby’s Grasping Hand won in 2016. But even more impressive is that 2016 happens equal the height in feet of the current world record for Highest Purely Architectural Defenestration in the Women’s Category by use of a rolling chair, set by Agnes Bilchmoitner of Lincoln, Nebraska (Defenestrator) and the late Joe Rusell Bracegirdle Junior (Defenestratee) of Schaumburg, Illinois, off the 137th floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which shattered not only the previous record but also the impact-resistant glass in use on the tower, although the record would have been higher if the structure had not been built with lower roofs which interrupted Mr. Bracegirdle’s fall against the recommendation of the American Your-Bitch-Ass-Out-Of-A-Window-Yeeting Association. Regardless, the floor number this record was set from with the last two digits reversed is equal to the ratio of the calendar year which was voted the Worst Year of All Time by the RSFYYBAOOAFW to the margin of victory for Bigby’s Grasping Hand, and the last two digits of the year when Bigby’s Grasping Hand won Best D&D Spell is the same as the distance in feet that the Undertaker threw Mankind out the window of Hell In A Cell and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table. This took place in 1998, which is not only the best version of Windows Operating System according to the  AYBAOOAWYA, but is also equal to the current height in feet of the world record for Highest Magically-Assisted Purely Architectural Defenestration By A Minor, set by 16-year-old Brian Woolworth in 2004, which is when the D&D 3.5 edition Complete Arcana was published, including the spell Defenestrating Sphere, and Brian’s age when he set the record is equal to the number of consecutive years Defenestrating Sphere has been voted the Best Dungeons and Dragons spell by the RSFYYBAOOAFW.

And that, according to the Czech Defenestration Society’s 2021 annual awards ceremony, is the Greatest Defenestration Trivia Fact of the year.

[duhragonball]

Hellsing Liveblog Chapters 25-27

This is the first leg of the “D” arc.   I had originally planned on trying to do the whole thing in one post, but it’s pretty long and meanders in places, so instead I’m going to break it up, starting with the part that wraps up volume 4 of the collected editions.

Much of these first three chapters just showcases Millennium preparing to depart their secret headquarters in Brazil.  They have three blimps, maybe more.   We already saw the Graf Zeppelin III, but there’s also a Graf Zeppelin II and a Hindenberg II.   Also, the Major refers to all of this as “Operation Sea Lion 2″.  The original “Operation Sea Lion” was Nazi Germany’s plan to invade the U.K. during World War II.   It was never enacted, however, because the Germans couldn’t establish air and naval superiority over the British.  Basically, the Major is declaring that he has finally achieved what Hilter could not, thanks to his “Last Battalion” of 1000 vampire soldiers.

The bridge of his flagship (flagblimp) has this big comfy chair on a robot arm, and a panoramic world map.   The arrows on the map point in all sorts of nutty directions, including the United States and other European nations.   I could have sworn I had heard some mention in Hellsing Ultimate of Millennium sending forces to the U.S., but the international angle was never mentioned again, and I assumed that I must have imagined it.  In any event, the Major made it clear that his target is Alucard specifically, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to invade places where Alucard is not.

The Major prepares to take his seat only to find Warrant Officer Schrödinger sitting in his chair.   Remember, Schrödinger inexplicably teleported himself to London to address Hellsing and Iscariot, and then he got shot and killed for his trouble.   But now he’s back, alive and well.   He mocks the Major for being to slow, and the Doctor scolds him for his insolence, but the Major orders Doc to back off.   This is a running gag throughout the rest of the series.  The Doctor keeps trying to chastise Schrödinger, but the Major lets him do whatever the boy wants, almost like he’s some favorite pet.  

Meanwhile, an unidentified helicopter tries to land on a British carrier, the H.M.S. Eagle.   The Captain orders his crew to open fire, but the first officer suddenly does this:

So yeah, the first officer is a vampire now, and he’s sold out Queen and Country for Millennium.  He and a handful of vampire crewmen kill the rest of the crew and turn them all into ghouls, allowing the helicopter to land, making way for...

This lady, Lieutenant Rip Van Winkle.  I should point out that in the pages leading up to her boarding the Eagle, she was singing Engelandlied, a German war anthem from World War I.   She’s nutty, is the idea.

So, I’m gonna go ahead and put forth my fan theory that all the bad guys we dealt with prior to Rip were just patsies for Millennium, and not actual members in their own right.   This includes Tubalcain “Dandyman” Alahambra, because, for all his powers, no one ever said his rank, leading me to think he didn’t have one.   Same with the Valentine Brothers and any of the vampires Alucard and Seras were sent to fight during the first dozen or so chapters of this manga.   Millennium may have turned them into vampires, and in some cases they even let them in on Millennium’s inner workings, but they were never more than cannon fodder.   Jan seemed to understand this, although Luke and Dandyman seemed to believe they were genuinely created to represent the new pinnacle of vampiric power.   Even the Doctor thought Dandyman had a strong chance of beating Alucard, but in the end they were just experiments meant to test Alucard’s mettle.

And, really, the rest of Millennium is not much different, except Rip and the others actually know why they’re being sacrificed, even if they don’t necessarily understand how or when.

Meanwhile, Seras still won’t drink blood, and she keeps trying to eat regular food instead, even though she struggles to swallow every bite.   I’ve never been very clear on whether vampires in Hellsing can eat non-blood food or not.  Seras is doing it, albeit painfully, but I don’t think she really gains anything from it, except whatever coping mechanism this is supposed to serve.   

So in walks Sir Integra, who dumps a bag of medical blood on her table.  Seras never really answers Integra’s question, but she already told Walter, and it’s not much of an answer.   The heart of the matter is this: Seras really doesn’t want to be a vampire.   Or, maybe, more accurately, she doesn’t want to stop being human.   The trouble is that she already lost that battle way back in Chapter 1. 

In many ways, Seras has accepted her fate.   She works for Hellsing, recognizes Alucard as her vampire master, and so on.  I think she understands that this is the only life she can have now, and her will to live is strong enough that she appreciates what Alucard and Integra have done for her.    At her core, Seras is a public servant, and fighting monsters for Hellsing is not so different from fighting crime as a policewoman.  I think she sees her current condition as a means to that end.   She doesn’t crave power like the evil vampires we’ve seen thus far.    Seras views her abilities as a means to an end.   Alucard biting her gave her a way to stay alive and continue fighting the good fight.

However, she doesn’t want the baggage that goes along with that.   She wants to retain as much of her humanity as she can, and drinking blood is the one thing that she has some control over, or so she believes.

But Integra’s far too practical for that dilemma.   Alucard was willing to respect Seras’ relucatance, but she needs her troops on their toes and ready for action.  So she takes a knife and cuts open her finger, and then orders Seras to lick the blood off.    This is... disturbingly sexual, and one of a number of scenes that reminds me that Hirano Kouta had done a lot of, er, adult comics before Hellsing.   I think he did a lot of uniform fetishy stuff too, which is why Seras and Schrödinger’s uniforms look so similar to each other.   Both are meant to resemble German WWII gear.   I’m willing to grant some leeway here, because there’s probably only so many ways to do a finger-licking scene like this without sexualizing it a little, but the last bit with the saliva trail is just revolting. 

So, what’s bugged me for a long time was that if Seras drank (a little) of Integra’s blood here, why did this subplot not get paid off until much later in the story?  She drank blood, didn’t she?   Well, yeah, but Integra ordered her to do it, so it doesn’t count.   This came up a couple of times earlier in the story, when Walter and Al mentioned that she wouldn’t drink blood willingly.  It’s not just an ethical issue for Seras, or she’d simply chow down on the medical blood.  I guess Integra could force feed her every night, but that wouldn’t solve anything.   This is about Seras accepting her transformation as a fait accompli.   I think this is why she very nearly drank Alucard’s blood back in Northern Ireland, when it sure looked like there was no other way for her to survive.  But if she’s just sitting there with no one making her do it, and no urgent need to do it, she’ll refuse every time.  

I think Hellsing uses the premise that a vampire has to do more than just bite a human to turn them into a vampire.  That is, Alucard had to put his own blood in Seras’ body to complete that transformation.   I think that’s how it worked in the Dracula novel, and Seras herself mentions it in the Gonzoverse anime.   But that wouldn’t count either, because it’s part of the change itself.  The idea is for the new vampire to partake in blood-drinking by choice, and until that happens, they won’t get all the cool powers.   

One other thing, Integra takes this opportunity to mention that she’s a virgin, which is a weird flex for this situation, but okay.  In Hellsing, that means Integra could become a vampire herself, but not if Seras bites her, because it has to be a vampire of the opposite sex.   In any case, Tegs warns Seras not to bite down during this creepy finger-licking KFC-hentai thing.   

Back in the damn ocean, Lt. Rip van Winkle is welcomed aboard by the traitorous crew of the Eagle.   She asks them how it feels to be a vampire, and causally reminds them of their treachery.   Then she gives them new orders, which are to die by her magic gun, which fires a bullet that can turn around in midair.

And so the First Officer and his lackeys learn the same lesson as the Brazillians working for the Dandyman, and the Dandyman himself, and the Valentine Brothers and whoever else.  Millennium might turn you into a vampire, but that hardly means that you’ll live forever.   Millennium always demands treason as payment for their help, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that they might betray you sooner or later.

Besides, Rip doesn’t need the British crew, because she has her own henchman on board her chopper.   While she waits for them to wake up, she paints a swastika on the deck, just to make it clear that they’ve taken control of the Eagle, which she renames the Adler.  That’s German for “Eagle”, you see.

Back on his blimp, the Major cuts this twenty-minute promo which basically amounts to “I love war, we have no particular agenda except to wage endless war for the fun of it.”   Back in England, Alucard is eagerly awaiting their arrival.  

[handeaux]

20 Curious Facts About The “Old Lady of Vine Street,” The Cincinnati Enquirer

On Saturday, the Queen City’s last surviving daily newspaper celebrates its 180th birthday. Here are a few nuggets of Enquirer trivia.

A New York Birthday Twin The first issue of the Cincinnati Enquirer came off the presses on 10 April 1841. On the very same day in New York City, Horace Greeley published Volume 1, Number 1 of the New York Tribune. Merging in 1924 with the New York Herald, the New York Herald-Tribune eventually shut down in 1967.

What Goes Around . . . With all the debate about the voting rights these days, it is interesting that the lead story in the very first edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer consists of the entire text of a bill under consideration by the Ohio General Assembly “To Preserve the Purity of Elections.”

Publishing On The Sabbath On 20 April 1848, the first Sunday edition of the Enquirer appeared and created a great deal of controversy. Although it should be obvious that a Monday morning edition required a lot more Sunday labor than a Sunday edition, tut-tutting ensued. Only four other newspapers published Sunday editions in 1848 and all have ceased publication, so the Enquirer’s is the oldest Sunday edition in the United States,

Stop The Presses In its entire 180-year publication life, the Enquirer has failed to publish on nine days. For its first 102 years, the Enquirer missed only one edition when, in 1866, fire destroyed Cincinnati’s Pike Opera House and, with it, the Enquirer’s print shop. Since 1943, the Enquirer has failed to publish on eight days – all due to labor disputes.

Three Groans For The Francophile Rag When France and Prussia went to war in 1870, Cincinnati’s newspapers, fully aware of the Deutschland sympathies of their readers, quickly announced their support for Prussia. All but one newspaper, that is. The Enquirer proclaimed support for France, right up to Prussia’s crushing victory. A day after France’s surrender, Cincinnati’s Germans marched through the streets, stopping at every newspaper office to cheer. All but one. In front of the Enquirer, the crowd gave “three tremendous groans” of disapproval.

No Respect For Artists Lafcadio Hearn’s grisly reporting on the hideous crime known as the Tanyard Murder in 1874 is well known. It is not often remembered that two other major Cincinnati talents were involved in the dissemination of the gruesome details of this foul affair. Artists Frank Duveneck and Henry Farny – both of whom have multiple works on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum – provided the gothic sketches accompanying Hearn’s spine-tingling prose.

The Compositor’s Despair During the 1880s and 1890s, the sports editor of the Enquirer was a former news reporter named Harry Weldon. This was the era before typewriters when journalists turned in their copy on handwritten sheets. Weldon’s penmanship was so atrocious that few typesetters could decipher it. He was nicknamed “The Compositor’s Despair.”

Corrupting The Morals of Cincinnati’s Youth Cincinnati’s Roman Catholic Archbishop decried the Enquirer’s flagrant immorality in the 1880s, describing it as “a daily newspaper unfit to be read by any human being, much less a Christian.” The offending material? A “personals” column in the classified advertising section, through which young men and women arranged illicit assignations and prostitutes marketed their services.

Set ‘Em Up, Colonel! In 1899, the bonifaces of Cincinnati collaborated on a small book called “The Bartender’s Guide,” full of recipes for their signature cocktails. Colonel Thomas Cody, star mixologist of Covington’s Latonia Hotel, contributed the Enquirer Cocktail: A glass half-full of fine ice over which is poured a wineglass of imported sherry, a half glass of cream of cocoa, and eight to ten dashes of orange bitters, served with an orange slice.

Flowers For The Old Lady The deep ruby-red “Enquirer” carnation has been described as the most perfect cultivar of that species, mostly by the newspaper that sponsored a carnation-growing contest in 1899. Winning the plaudits, and a gold medal, was Richard A. Witterstaetter of Delhi, who bred this outstanding flower and named it after the newspaper who awarded him the gold medal.

Not Today, Madame! Under the iron rule of Marion Devereux, society editor of the Enquirer from 1910 to 1939, no respectable woman in Cincinnati would dare to select a convenient date for a luncheon, charity event or family wedding on her own. Every society matron in the Queen City religiously conferred with Miss Devereux to be assigned a date consistent with the regal editor’s social calendar.

His S.O.B. Book John Roll McLean was owner of the Enquirer from 1881 until his death in 1916. For a time, he was the unelected boss of Cincinnati, predecessor to George “Boss” Cox. McLean ran for office several times and always lost. He carried around a little notebook containing the names of people he particularly disliked. He called it his “Son-of-a-bitch Book.”

Diamond Connection Perhaps the most famous diamond in the world is the deep blue Hope Diamond now on display at the Smithsonian Institution. Few remember that this luxurious stone has a connection to the Cincinnati Enquirer. One of its owners was Edward Beale McLean, who owned the Enquirer (and the Washington Post) from 1916 to 1933. McLean bought the diamond for his wife, Evalyn. The diamond is reputed to be cursed. Maybe so; McLean died in an insane asylum.

The Rites Of Spring In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a young sportswriter named Whitney Tower gained a reputation as something of a character, even among the oddballs in the Enquirer newsroom. He was an excellent writer and turned out travel pieces as well as sports copy, but he really didn’t need the work because he came from wealth on both sides of his family. Every spring, he would enter the newsroom and proclaim a bawdy little ditty that began, “Hooray, Hooray, The First of May! Outdoor [lovemaking] begins today!“ Tower went on to cover horse racing for years at Sports Illustrated.

Owned By The Competition From 1956 to 1971, the Enquirer was owned by the E.W. Scripps Company, publishers of the competing Cincinnati Post. After buying controlling stock in the Enquirer, the Scripps Company purchased the only other remaining daily in town, the Times-Star, and merged it with the Post, leaving Scripps in control of every daily newspaper in town. Federal anti-trust regulators filed suit in 1964 and Scripps agreed to sell the Enquirer. Ironically, Scripps limped into a “joint operating agreement” with the Enquirer by the end of the decade in a last-ditch effort to save the Post.

Promo For A Face Change Throughout the summer of 1963, Enquirer readers found daily advertisements proclaiming nothing but “Bodoni Is Coming!” Curious subscribers called to ask whether it was a promotion for a trapeze artist or maybe a lawn fertilizer. On 30 September, the secret was out: The Enquirer had ditched Cheltenham, its long-suffering headline typeface for Bodoni Bold, adopted after much research into the optimum typeface to “give readers headlines they might read more quickly and with clearest possible understanding.”

I’m A Music Critic, Dammit, Not A Journalist! Longtime Enquirer classical music critic Henry S. Humphreys accompanied the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra on one of its world tours. One night, he called the city desk to let the editor know he would not be filing a review of that day’s concert because the pilot got lost and landed the orchestra’s plane in the wrong city. He hung up on an editor dying for details but clueless as to where Henry had called from.

A Missed Bicentennial The Enquirer could have celebrated a bicentennial in 2018. Today’s daily newspaper traces its origins to a weekly launched on 23 June 1818 and originally named The Inquisitor and Cincinnati Advertiser. Over the next couple of decades, the paper was renamed The Advertiser, The Advertiser and Phoenix, and The Advertiser and Journal. Along the way, it began publishing twice a week and, in 1838, daily. On 1 April 1841, owner Moses Dawson sold the whole operation to the Brough brothers of Marietta, Ohio, John and Charles, who bought new type, but published from the Advertiser’s offices and presses 10 days later.

Happy Birthday! The Enquirer celebrated its 150th birthday on Wednesday, 10 April 1991, by publishing the news that the newspaper had won its first Pulitzer Prize ever. The prize was awarded in editorial cartooning for the work of cartoonist Jim Borgman, who had joined the Enquirer staff 15 years previously.

Grand Or Grey? Over many years, the Enquirer was known as the Old Lady of Vine Street, the title of Richard K. Mastain’s book on efforts to save the paper in the 1950s. Sometimes it was the Grand Old Lady of Vine Street. That’s the title of Grady DeCamp’s survey of Enquirer history published for its sesquicentennial in 1991. But, among competitors and targets of the Enquirer’s investigations, not to mention art & design critics appalled by its somber, bland layout, it was always the Grey Old Lady of Vine Street.

[ill-will-editions]

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CURRENT PANDEMIC FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF IVAN ILLICH

David Cayley

Last week I began an essay on the current pandemic in which I tried to address what I take to be the central question that it raises:  Is the massive and costly effort to contain and limit the harm that the virus will do the only choice we have?  Is it no more than an obvious and unavoidable exercise of prudence undertaken to protect the most vulnerable?  Or is it a disastrous effort to maintain control of what is obviously out of control, an effort which will compound the damage being done by the disease with new troubles that will reverberate far into the future?  I hadn’t been writing for long before I began to realize that many of the assumptions I was making were quite remote from those being expressed all around me.  These assumptions had mainly come, I reflected, from my prolonged conversation with the work of Ivan Illich.  What this suggested was that, before I could speak intelligibly about our present circumstances, I would first have to sketch the attitude towards health, medicine and well-being that Illich developed over a lifetime of reflection on these themes.  Accordingly, in what follows, I will start with a brief account of the evolution of Illich’s critique of bio-medicine and then try to answer the questions I just posed in this light..

At the beginning of his 1973 book Tools of Conviviality, Illich described what he thought was the typical course of development followed by contemporary institutions, using medicine as his example.  Medicine, he said, had gone through “two watersheds.”  The first had been crossed in the early years of the 20th century when medical treatments became demonstrably effective and benefits generally began to exceed harms.  For many medical historians this is the only relevant marker – from this point on progress will proceed indefinitely, and, though there may be diminishing returns, there will be no point, in principle, at which progress will stop.  This was not the case for Illich.  He hypothesized a second watershed, which he thought was already being  crossed and even exceeded around the time he was writing.  Beyond this second watershed, he supposed, what he called counterproductivity would set in – medical intervention would begin to defeat its own objects, generating more harm than good.  This, he argued, was characteristic of any institution, good or service – a point could be identified at which there was enough of it and, after which, there would be too much.  Tools for Conviviality, was an attempt to identify these “natural scales” – the only such general and programmatic search for a philosophy of technology that Illich undertook.

Two years later in Medical Nemesis – later renamed, in its final and most comprehensive edition, Limits to Medicine – Illich tried to lay out in detail the goods and the harms that medicine does.  He was generally favourable to the large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good food, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal etc.  He also praised efforts then underway in China and Chile to establish a basic medical toolkit and pharmacopeia that would be available and affordable for all citizens, rather than allowing medicine to develop luxury goods that would remain forever out of reach of the majority.  But the main point of his book was to identify and describe the counterproductive effects that he felt were becoming evident as medicine crossed its second watershed.  He spoke of these fall-outs from too much medicine as iatrogenesis, and addressed them under three headings: clinical, social and cultural.  The first everyone, by now, understands – you get the wrong diagnosis, the wrong drug, the wrong operation, you get sick in hospital etc.  This collateral damage is not trivial.  An article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus – Rachel Giese, “The Errors of Their Ways, April 2012 – estimated 7.5% of the Canadians admitted to hospitals every year suffer at least one “adverse event” and 24,000 die as a result of medical mistakes. Around the same time, Ralph Nader, writing in Harper’s Magazine, suggested that the number of people in the United States who die annually as a result of preventable medical errors is around 400,000.  This is an impressive number, even if exaggerated – Nader’s estimate is twice as high per capita as The Walrus’s – but this accidental harm was not, by any means, Illich’s focus.  What really concerned him was the way in which excessive medical treatment weakens basic social and cultural aptitudes.  An instance of what he called social iatrogenesis is the way in which the art of medicine, in which the physician acts as healer, witness, and counsellor, tends to give way to the science of medicine, in which the doctor, as a scientist, must, by definition, treat his or her patient as an experimental subject and not as a unique case.  And, finally, there was the ultimate injury that medicine inflicts: cultural iatrogenesis.  This occurs, Illich said, when cultural abilities, built up and passed on over many generations, are first undermined and then, gradually, replaced altogether.  These abilities include, above all, the willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality, and the capacity to die one’s own death.  The art of suffering was being overshadowed, he argued, by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved – an attitude which doesn’t, in fact, end suffering but rather renders it meaningless, making it merely an anomaly or technical miscarriage.   And death, finally, was being transformed from an intimate, personal act – something each one can do – into a meaningless defeat – a mere cessation of treatment or “pulling the plug,” as is sometimes heartlessly said.  Behind Illich’s arguments lay a traditional Christian attitude.  He affirmed that suffering and  death are inherent in the human condition – they are part of what defines this condition.  And he argued that the loss of this condition would involve a catastrophic rupture both with our past and with our own creatureliness.  To mitigate and ameliorate the human condition was good, he said.  To lose it altogether was a catastrophe because we can only know God as creatures – i.e. created or given beings – not as gods who have taken charge of our own destiny.

Medical Nemesis is a book about professional power – a point on which it’s worth dwelling for a moment in view of the extraordinary powers that are currently being asserted in the name of public health.  According to Illich, contemporary medicine, at all times, exercises political power, though this character may be hidden by the claim that all that is being asserted is care.  In the province of Ontario where I live, “health care” currently gobbles up more than 40% of the government’s budget, which should make the point clearly enough.  But this everyday power, great as it is, can be further expanded by what Illich calls “the ritualization of crisis.”  This confers on medicine “a license that usually only the military can claim.”  He continues:

Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency.  He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human…Because they form a charmed borderland not quite of this world, the time-span and the community space claimed by the medical enterprise are as sacred as their religious and military counterparts.

In a footnote to this passage Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation.  The insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.”  There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s claim in his Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty is the power to “decide on the exception.”  Schmitt’s point is that sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the law – declare an exception - and rule in its place as the very source of law.   This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims…in an emergency.”  Exceptional circumstances make him/her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates.  But there is an interesting and, to me, telling difference between Schmitt and Illich.  Schmitt is transfixed by what he calls “the political.”  Illich notices that much of what Schmitt calls sovereignty has escaped, or been usurped from the political realm and reinvested in various professional hegemonies.  

Ten years after Medical Nemesis was published, Illich revisited and revised his argument.  He did not, by any means, renounce what he had written earlier, but he did add to it quite dramatically.  In his book, he now said, he had been “blind to a much more profound symbolic iatrogenic effect: the iatrogenesis of the body itself.”  He had “overlooked the degree to which, at mid-century, the experience of ‘our bodies and our selves’ had become the result of medical concepts and cares.”  In other words he had written, in Medical Nemesis, as if there were a natural body, standing outside the web of techniques by which its self-awareness is constructed, and now he could see that there is no such standpoint.  “Each historical moment,” he wrote, “is incarnated in an epoch-specific body.”  Medicine doesn’t just act on a preexisting state – rather it participates in creating this state.

This recognition was just the beginning of a new stance on Illich’s part.  Medical Nemesis had addressed a citizenry that was imagined as capable of acting to limit the scope of medical intervention.  Now he spoke of people whose very self-image was being generated by bio-medicine.  Medical Nemesis had claimed, in its opening sentence, that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.”  Now he judged that that the major threat to health was the pursuit of health itself.   Behind this change of mind lay his sense that the world, in the meanwhile, had undergone an epochal change.  “I believe,” he told me in 1988, “that…there [has been] a change in the mental space in which many people live.  Some kind of a catastrophic breakdown of one way of seeing things has led to the emergence of a different way of seeing things.  The subject of my writing has been the perception of sense in the way we live; and, in this respect, we are, in my opinion, at this moment, passing over a watershed.  I had not expected in my lifetime to observe this passage.”  Illich characterized “the new way of seeing things” as the advent of what he called “the age of systems” or “an ontology of systems.”  The age that he saw as ending had been dominated by the idea of instrumentality – of using instrumental means, like medicine, to achieve some end or good, like health.  Characteristic of this age was a clear distinction between subjects and objects, means and ends, tools and their users etc.  In the age of systems, he said, these distinctions have collapsed.  A system, conceived cybernetically, is all encompassing – it has no outside.  The user of a tool takes up the tool to accomplish some end.  Users of systems are inside the system, constantly adjusting their state to the system, as the system adjusts its state to them.  A bounded individual pursuing personal well-being gives way to an immune system which constantly recalibrates its porous boundary with the surrounding system.

Within this new “system analytic discourse,” as Illich named it, the characteristic state of people is disembodiment.  This is a paradox, obviously, since what Illich called “the pathogenic pursuit of health” may involve an intense, unremitting and virtually narcissistic preoccupation with one’s bodily state.  Why Illich conceived it as disembodying can best be understood by the example of “risk awareness” which he called “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.”  Risk was disembodying, he said, because “it is a strictly mathematical concept.”  It does not pertain to persons but to populations – no one knows what will happen to this or that person, but what will happen to the aggregate of such persons can be expressed as a probability.  To identify oneself with this statistical figment is to engage, Illich said, in “intensive self-algorithmization.”  

His most distressing encounter with this “religiously celebrated ideology” occurred in the field of genetic testing during pregnancy.  He was introduced to it by his friend and colleague Silja Samerski who was studying the genetic counselling that is mandatory for pregnant women considering genetic testing in Germany – a subject she would later write about in a book called The Decision Trap (Imprint-Academic, 2015).  Genetic testing in pregnancy does not reveal anything definite about the child which the woman being tested is expecting.  All it detects are markers whose uncertain meaning can be expressed in probabilities – a likelihood calculated across the entire population to which the one being tested belongs, by her age, family history, ethnicity etc.  When she is told, for example, that there is a 30% chance that her baby will have this or that syndrome, she is told nothing about herself or the fruit of her womb – she is told only what might happen to someone like her.  She knows nothing more about her actual circumstances than what her hopes, dreams and intuitions reveal, but the risk profile that has been ascertained for her statistical doppelganger demands a decision.  The choice is existential; the information on which it is based is the probability curve on which the chooser has been inscribed.  Illich found this to be a perfect horror.  It was not that he could not recognize that all human action is a shot in the dark – a prudential calculation in the face of the unknown.  His horror was at seeing people reconceive themselves in the image of a statistical construct.  For him, this was an eclipse of persons by populations; an effort to prevent the future from disclosing anything unforeseen; and a substitution of scientific models for sensed experience. And this was happening, Illich realized, not just with regard to genetic testing in pregnancy but more or less across the board in health care.  Increasingly people were acting prospectively, probabilistically, according to their risk.  They were becoming, as Canadian health researcher Allan Cassels once joked, “pre-diseased” – vigilant and active against illnesses that someone like them might get.  Individual cases were increasingly managed as general cases, as instances of a category or class, rather than as unique predicaments, and doctors were increasingly the servo-mechanisms of this cloud of probabilities rather than intimate advisors alert to specific differences and personal meanings.  This was what Illich meant by “self-algorithmization” or disembodiment.

One way of getting at the iatrogenic body that Illich saw as the primary effect of contemporary biomedicine is by going back to an essay that was widely read and discussed in his milieu in the early 1990’s.  Called “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” it was written by historian and philosopher of science Donna Haraway and appears in her 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.  This essay is interesting not just because I think it influenced Illich’s sense of how bio-medical discourse was shifting, but also because Haraway, seeing – I would claim – almost exactly the same things as Illich, draws conclusions that are, point-for-point, diametrically opposite.  In this article, for example, she says, with reference to what she calls “the post-modern body,” that “human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical.”  “In a sense,” she continues, “organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components.”  This leads to a situation in which “no objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; and components can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.”  In a world of interfaces, where boundaries regulate “rates of flow” rather than marking real differences, “the integrity of natural objects” is no longer a concern.  “The ‘integrity’ or ‘sincerity’ of the Western self,” she writes, “gives way to decision procedures, expert systems, and resource investment strategies.”

In other words, Haraway, like Illich understands that persons, as unique, stable and hallowed beings, have dissolved into provisionally self-regulating sub-systems in constant interchange with the larger systems in which they are enmeshed.  In her words, “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…the cyborg is our ontology.”  The difference between them lies in their reactions.  Haraway, elsewhere in the volume from which the essay I have been quoting comes, issues what she calls her “Cyborg Manifesto.”  It calls on people to recognize and accept this new situation but to “read it” with a view to liberation.  In a patriarchal society, there is no acceptable condition to which one could hope to return, so she offers “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”  For Illich, on the other hand, the “cyborg ontology,” as Haraway calls it, was not an option.  For him what was at stake was the very character of human persons as ensouled beings with a divine origin and a divine destiny.  As the last vestiges of sense washed out of the bodily self-perception of his contemporaries, he saw a world that had become “immune to its own salvation.”  “I have come to the conclusion,” he told me plaintively, “that when the angel Gabriel told that girl in the town of Nazareth in Galilee that God wanted to be in her belly, he pointed to a body which has gone from the world in which I live.”

The “new way of seeing things” which was reflected in the orientation of bio-medicine amounted, according to Illich, to “a new stage of religiosity.” He used the word religiosity in a broad sense to refer to something deeper and more pervasive than formal or institutional religion.  Religiosity is the ground on which we stand, our feeling about how and why things are as they are, the very horizon within which meaning takes shape.  For Illich, the createdness, or given-ness of the world was the foundation of his entire sensibility.  What he saw coming was a religiosity of total immanence in which the world is its own cause and there is no source of meaning or order outside of it – “a cosmos,” as he said, “in the hands of man.”  The highest good in such a world is life, and the primary duty of people is to conserve and foster life.  But this is not the life which is spoken of in the Bible – the life which comes from God – it is a rather a resource which people possess and ought to manage responsibly.  Its peculiar property is to be at the same time an object of reverence and of manipulation.  This naturalized life, divorced from its source, is the new god.  Health and safety are its adjutants.  Its enemy is death.   Death still imposes a final defeat but has no other personal meaning.  There is no proper time to die – death ensues when treatment fails or is terminated.  

Illich refused to “interiorize systems into the self.”  He would give up neither human nature nor natural law. “I just cannot shed the certainty,” he said in an interview with his friend Douglas Lummis, “that the norms with which we ought to live correspond to our insight into what we are.”  This led him to reject “responsibility for health,” conceived as a management of intermeshed systems.  How can one be responsible, he asked, for what has neither sense, boundary nor ground?  Better to give up such comforting illusions and to live instead in a spirit of self-limitation which he defined as “courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation accomplished in community.”  

To summarize: Illich, in his later years, concluded that humanity, at least in his vicinity, had taken leave of its senses and moved lock, stock and barrel into a system construct lacking any ground whatsoever for ethical decision.  The bodies in which people lived and walked around had become synthetic constructs woven out of CAT-scans and risk curves.  Life had become a quasi-religious idol, presiding over an “ontology of systems.” Death had become a meaningless obscenity rather than an intelligible companion.  All this was expressed forcefully and unequivocally.  He did not attempt to soften it or offer a comforting “on the other hand…”. What he attended to was what he sensed was happening around him, and all his care was to try to register it as sensitively as he could and address it as truthfully as he could.  The world, in his view, was not in his hands, but in the hands of God.                    

By the time he died, in 2002, Illich stood far outside the new “way of seeing things” that he felt had established itself during the second half his life.  He felt that in this new “age of systems” the primary unit of creation, the human person, had begun to lose its boundary, its distinction and its dignity.  He thought that the revelation in which he was rooted had been corrupted – the “life more abundant” that had been promised in the New Testament transformed into a human hegemony so total and so claustrophobic that no intimation from outside the system could disturb it.  He believed that medicine had so far exceeded the threshold at which it might have eased and complemented the human condition that it was now threatening to abolish this condition altogether.  And he had concluded that much of humanity is no longer willing to “bear…[its] rebellious, torn and disoriented flesh” and has instead traded its art of suffering and its art of dying for a few years of life expectancy and the comforts of life in an “artificial creation.”  Can any sense be made of the current “crisis” from this point of view?  I would say yes, but only insofar as we can step back from the urgencies of the moment and take time to consider what is being revealed about our underlying dispositions – our “certainties,” as Illich called them.  

First of all, Illich’s perspective indicates that for some time now we’ve been practicing the attitudes that have characterized the response to the current pandemic.  It’s a striking thing about events which are perceived to have changed history, or “changed everything,” as one sometimes hears, that people often seem to be somehow ready for them or even unconsciously or semi-consciously expecting them.  Recalling the beginning of the First World War, economic historian Karl Polanyi used the image of sleep-walking to characterize the way in which the countries of Europe shuffled to their doom – automatons blindly accepting the fate they had unknowingly projected.   The events of Sept. 11, 2001 – 9/11 as we now know it – seemed to be instantly interpreted and understood, as if everyone had just been waiting to declare the patent meaning of what had occurred – the end of the Age of Irony, the beginning of the War on Terror, whatever it might be.  Some of this is surely a trick of perspective by which hindsight instantly turns contingency into necessity – since something did happen, we assume that it was bound to happen all along.  But I don’t think this can be the whole story.  

At the heart of the coronavirus response has been the claim that we must act prospectively to prevent what has not yet occurred: an exponential growth in infections, an overwhelming of the resources of the medical system, which will put medical personnel in the invidious position of performing triage, etc.  Otherwise, it is said, by the time we find out what we’re dealing with, it will be too late.  (It’s worth pointing out, in passing, that this is unverifiable idea: if we succeed, and what we fear does not take place, then we will be able to say that our actions prevented it, but we will never actually know whether this was the case.). This idea that prospective action is crucial has been readily accepted, and people have even vied with one in another in denouncing the laggards who have shown resistance to it.  But to act like this requires experience in living in a hypothetical space where prevention outranks cure, and this is exactly what Illich describes when he speaks of risk as “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.”  An expression like “flattening the curve” can become overnight common sense only in a society practiced in “staying ahead of the curve” and in thinking in terms of population dynamics rather than actual cases.

Risk has a history.  One of the first to identify it as the preoccupation of a new form of society was German sociologist Ulrich Beck in his 1986 book Risk Society, published in English in 1992.  In this book, Beck portrayed late modernity as an uncontrolled science experiment.  By uncontrolled he meant that we have no spare planet on which we can conduct a nuclear war to see how it goes, no second atmosphere which we can heat and observe the results.  This means that techno-scientific society is, on the one hand, hyper-scientific and, on the other, radically unscientific insofar as it has no standard against which it can measure or assess what it has done.  There are endless examples of this sort of uncontrolled experiment – from transgenic sheep to mass international tourism to the transformation of persons into communications relays.  All these, insofar as they have unforeseeable and unpredictable consequences, already constitute a kind of living in the future.  And just because we are citizens of risk society, and therefore participants by definition, in an uncontrolled science experiment, we have become – paradoxically or not – preoccupied with controlling risk.  As I pointed out above, we are treated and screened for diseases we do not yet have, on the basis of our probability of getting them.  Pregnant couples make life and death decisions based on probabilistic risk profiles.  Safety becomes a mantra – “farewell” becomes “be safe” – health becomes a god.  

Equally important in the current atmosphere has been the idolization of life, and aversion from its obscene other, death.  That we must at all costs “save lives” is not questioned.  This makes it very easy to start a stampede.  Making an entire country “go home and stay home,” as our prime minister said not long ago, has immense and incalculable costs.  No one knows how many businesses will fail, how many jobs will be lost, how many will sicken from loneliness, how many will resume addictions or beat each other up in their isolation.  But these costs seem bearable as soon the spectre of lives lost is brought on the scene.  Again, we have been practicing counting lives for a long time. The obsession with the “death toll” from the latest catastrophe is simply the other side of the coin.  Life becomes an abstraction – a number without a story.  

Illich claimed in the mid-1980’s that he was beginning to meet people whose “very selves” were a product of “medical concepts and cares.”  I think this helps to explain why the Canadian state, and its component provincial and municipal governments, have largely failed to acknowledge what is currently at stake in our “war” on “the virus.”  Sheltering behind the skirts of science – even where there is no science – and deferring to the gods of health and safety has appeared to them as political necessity.  Those who have been acclaimed for their leadership, like Quebec premier François Legault, have been those who have distinguished themselves by their single-minded consistency in applying the conventional wisdom.  Few have yet dared to question the cost – and, when those few include Donald Trump, the prevailing complacency is only fortified – who would dare agree with him?  In this respect insistent repetition of the metaphor of war has been influential – in a war no one counts costs or reckons who is actually paying them.  First, we must win the war.  Wars create social solidarity and discourage dissent – those not showing the flag are apt to be shown the equivalent of the white feather with which non-combatants were shamed during World War One.  

At the date at which I am writing – early April – no one really knows what is going on.  Since no one knows how many have the disease, nobody knows what the death rate is – Italy’s is currently listed at over 10%, which puts it in the range of the catastrophic influenza at the end of World War I, while Germany’s is at .8%, which is more in line with what happens unremarked every year – some very old people, and a few younger ones, catch the flu and die.  What does seem clear, here in Canada, is that, with the exception of a few local sites of true emergency, the pervasive sense of panic and crisis is largely a result of the measures taken against the pandemic and not of the pandemic itself.  Here the word itself has played an important role – the declaration by the World Health Organization that a pandemic was now officially in progress didn’t change anyone’s health status but it dramatically changed the public atmosphere.  It was the signal the media had been waiting for to introduce a regime in which nothing else but the virus could be discussed.  By now a story in the newspaper not concerned with coronavirus is actually shocking.  This cannot help but give the impression of a world on fire.  If you talk about nothing else, it will soon come to seem as if there is nothing else.  A bird, a crocus, a spring breeze can begin to seem almost irresponsible – “don’t they know it’s the end of the world?” as an old country music classic asks.  The virus acquires extraordinary agency – it is said to have depressed the stock market, shuttered businesses, and generated panic fear, as if these were not the actions of responsible people but of the illness itself.  Emblematic for me, here in Toronto, was a headline in The National Post.  In a font that occupied much of the top half of the front page, it said simply PANIC.   Nothing indicated whether the word was to be read as a description or an instruction.  This ambiguity is constitutive of all media, and disregarding it is the characteristic déformation professionelle of the journalist, but it becomes particularly easy to ignore in a certified crisis.  It is not the obsessive reporting or the egging on of authorities to do more that has turned the world upside down – it is the virus that has done it.  Don’t blame the messenger.  A headline on the web-site STAT on April 1, and I don’t think it was a joke, even claimed that “Covid-19 has sunk the ship of state.”  It is interesting, in this respect, to perform a thought experiment.  How much of an emergency would we feel ourselves to be in if this had never been called a pandemic and such stringent measures taken against it?  Plenty of troubles escape the notice of the media.  How much do we know or care about the catastrophic political disintegration of South Sudan in recent years, or about the millions who died in the Democratic Republic of Congo after civil war broke out there in 2004?  It is our attention that constitutes what we take to be the relevant world at any given moment.  The media do not act alone – people must be disposed to attend where the media directs their attention – but I don’t think it can be denied that the pandemic is a constructed object that might have been constructed differently.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remarked on March 25th that we are facing “the greatest health care crisis in our history.”  If he is understood to be referring to a health crisis, this seems to me a grotesque exaggeration.  Think of the disastrous effect of smallpox on indigenous communities, or of a score of other catastrophic epidemics from cholera and yellow fever to diphtheria and polio.  Can you then really say that a flu epidemic which appears mainly to kill the old or those made susceptible by some other condition is even comparable to the ravaging of whole peoples, let alone worse?    And yet, unprecedented, like the Prime Minister’s “greatest ever,” seems to be the word on everyone’s lips.  However, if we take the Prime Minister’s words by the letter, as referring to health care, and not just health, the case changes.   From the beginning the public health measures taken in Canada have been explicitly aimed at protecting the health care system from any overload.  To me this points to an extraordinary dependence on hospitals and an extraordinary lack of confidence in our ability to care for one another.  Whether Canadian hospitals are ever flooded or not, a strange and fearful mystique seems to be involved – the hospital and its cadres are felt to be indispensable, even when things could be more easily and safely dealt with at home. Again Illich was prescient in his claim, in his essay “Disabling Professions,” that overextended professional hegemonies sap popular capacities and make people doubt their own resources.  

The measures mandated by “the greatest health care crisis in our history” have involved a remarkable curtailing of civil liberty.  This has been done, it is said, to protect life and, by the same token, to avoid death.  Death is not only to be averted but also kept hidden and unconsidered.  Years ago I heard a story about a bemused listener at one of Illich’s lectures on Medical Nemesis who afterwards turned to his companion and asked, “What does he want, let people die?”  Perhaps some of my readers would like to ask me the same question.  Well, I’m sure there are many other old people who would join me in saying that they don’t want to see young lives ruined in order that they can live a year or two longer.  But, beyond that, “let people die” is a very funny formulation because it implies that the power to determine who lives or dies is in the hands of the one to whom the question is addressed.  The we who are imagined as having the power to “let die” exist in an ideal world of perfect information and perfect technical mastery.  In this world nothing occurs which has not been chosen.  If someone dies, it will be because they have been “let…die.”  The state must, at all costs, foster, regulate and protect life – this is the essence of what Michel Foucault called biopolitics, the regime that now unquestionably rules us.  Death must be kept out of sight and out of mind.  It must be denied meaning.  No one’s time ever comes – they are let go.  The grim reaper may survive as a comic figure in New Yorker cartoons, but he has no place in public discussion.  This makes it difficult even to talk about death as something other than someone’s negligence or, at the least, a final exhaustion of treatment options.  To accept death is to accept defeat.

The events of recent weeks reveal how totally we live inside systems, how much we have become populations rather than associated citizens, how much we are governed by the need to continually outsmart the future we ourselves have prepared.  When Illich wrote books like Tools for Conviviality and Medical Nemesis, he still hoped that life within limits was possible.  He tried to identify the thresholds at which technology must be restrained in order to keep the world at the local, sensible, conversable scale on which human beings could remain the political animals that Aristotle thought we were meant to be.  Many others saw the same vision, and many have tried over the last fifty years to keep it alive.  But there is no doubt that the world Illich warned of has come to pass.  It is a world which lives primarily in disembodied states and hypothetical spaces, a world of permanent emergency in which the next crisis is always right around the corner, a world in which the ceaseless babble of communication has stretched language past its breaking point, a world in which overstretched science has become indistinguishable from superstition.  How then can Illich’s ideas possibly gain any purchase in a world that seems to have moved out of reach of his concepts of scale, balance, and personal meaning?  Shouldn’t one just accept that the degree of social control that has recently been exerted is proportionate and necessary in the global immune system of which we are, in Haraway’s expression, “biotic components?”

Perhaps, but it’s an old political axiom which can be found in Plato, Thomas More, and, more recently, Canadian philosopher George Grant that if you can’t achieve the best, at least prevent the worst.  And things can certainly get worse as a result of this pandemic.  It has already become a somewhat ominous commonplace that the world will not be the same once it is over.  Some see it as a rehearsal and admit frankly that, though this particular plague may not fully justify the measures being taken against it, these measures still constitute a valuable rehearsal for future and potentially worse plagues.  Others view it as a “wake-up call” and hope that, when it’s all over, a chastened humanity will begin to edge its way back from the lip of catastrophe.  My fear, and one that I think is shared by many, is that it will leave behind a disposition to accept much increased surveillance and social control, more telescreens and telepresencing, and heightened mistrust.  At the moment, everyone is optimistically describing physical distancing as a form of solidarity, but it’s also practice in regarding one another, and even ourselves – “don’t touch your face” – as potential disease vectors.  

I have said already that one of the certainties that the pandemic is driving deeper into the popular mind is risk.  But this is easy to overlook since risk is so easily conflated with real danger. The difference, I would say, is that danger is identified by a practical judgment resting on experience, whereas risk is a statistical construct pertaining to a population.  Risk has no room for individual experience or for practical judgment.  It tells you only what will happen in general.  It is an abstract of a population, not a picture of any person, or a guide to that person’s destiny.  Destiny is a concept that simply dissolves in the face of risk, where all are arrayed, uncertainly, on the same curve.  What Illich calls “the mysterious historicity” of each existence – or, more simply, its meaning – is annulled.  During this pandemic, risk society has come of age.  This is evident, for example, in the tremendous authority that has been accorded to models – even when everyone knows that they are informed by little more than what one hopes are educated guesses.  Another illustration is the familiarity with which people speak of “flattening the curve,” as if this were an everyday object – I have even recently heard songs about it.  When it becomes an object of public policy to operate on a purely imaginary, mathematical object, like a risk curve, it is certain that risk society has taken a great leap forward.   This, I think, is what Illich meant about disembodiment – the impalpable become palpable, the hypothetical becomes actual, and the realm of everyday experience becomes indistinguishable from its representation in newsrooms, laboratories and statistical models.  Humans have lived, at all times, in imagined worlds, but this, I think, is different.  In the sphere of religion, for example, even the most naïve believers have the sense that the beings they summon and address in their gatherings are not everyday objects.  In the discourse of the pandemic, everyone consorts familiarly with scientific phantoms as if there were as real as rocks and trees.  

Another related feature of the current landscape is government-by-science and its necessary complement - the abdication of political leadership resting on any other grounds.   This too is a field long-tilled and prepared for planting.  Illich wrote nearly fifty years ago in Tools for Conviviality that contemporary society is “stunned by a delusion about science.”  This delusion takes many forms, but its essence is to construct out of the messy, contingent practices of a myriad of sciences a single golden calf before which all must bow.  It is this giant mirage that is usually invoked when we are instructed to “listen to the science” or told what “studies show” or “science says.” But there is no such thing as science, only sciences, each one with its unique uses and unique limitations.   When “science” is abstracted from all the vicissitudes and shadows of knowledge production, and elevated into an omniscient oracle whose priests can be identified by their outfits, their solemn postures and their impressive credentials, what suffers, in Illich’s view, is political judgment.  We do not do what appears good to our rough and ready sense of how things are down here on the ground but only what can be dressed up as science says.   In a book called Rationality and Ritual, British sociologist of science Brian Wynne studied a public inquiry carried out by a British High Court Judge in 1977 on the question of whether a new plant should be added to the British nuclear energy complex at Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast.   Wynne shows how the judge approached the question as one which “science” would answer – is it safe? – without any need to consult moral or political principles.  This is a classic case of the displacement of political judgment onto the shoulders of Science, conceived along the mythical lines I sketched above.  This displacement is now evident in many fields.  One of its hallmarks is that people, thinking that “science” knows more than it does, imagine that they know more than they do.  No actual knowledge need support this confidence.  Epidemiologists may say frankly, as many have, that, in the present case, there is very little sturdy evidence to go on, but this has not prevented politicians from acting as if they were merely the executive arm of Science.  In my opinion, the adoption of a policy of semi-quarantining those who are not sick – a policy apt to have disastrous consequences down the road in lost jobs, failed businesses, distressed people, and debt-suffocated governments – is a political decision and ought to be discussed as such.  But, at the moment, the ample skirts of Science shelter all politicians from view.  Nor does anyone speak of impending moral decisions.  Science will decide.

In his late writings Illich introduced, but never really developed, a concept that he called “epistemic sentimentality” – not a catchy phrase, admittedly, but one that I think sheds on light on what is currently going on.  His argument, in brief, was that we live in a world of “fictitious substances” and “management-bred phantoms” – any number of nebulous goods from institutionally-defined education to the “pathogenic pursuit of health” could serve as examples – and that in this “semantic desert full of muddled echoes” we need “some prestigious fetish” to serve as a “Linus blanket.”  In the essay I’ve been quoting “Life” is his primary example.  “Epistemic sentimentality” attaches itself to Life, and Life becomes the banner under which projects of social control and technological overreach acquire warmth and lustre.  Illich calls this  epistemic sentimentality because it involves constructed objects of knowledge that are then naturalized under the kindly aegis of the “prestigious fetish.”  In the present case we are frantically saving lives and protecting our health care system.  These noble objects enable a gush of sentiment which is very hard to resist.  For me it is summed up in the almost unbearably unctuous tone in which our Prime Minister now addresses us daily.  But who is not in an agony of solicitude?  Who has not said that we are avoiding each other because of the depth of our care for one another?  This is epistemic sentimentality not just because it solaces us and makes a ghostly reality seem humane but also because it hides the other things that are going on – like the mass experiment in social control and social compliance, the legitimation of tele-presence as a mode of sociability and of instruction, the increase of surveillance, the normalization of biopolitics, and the reinforcement of risk awareness as a foundation of social life.  

Another concept that I believe Illich has to contribute to current discussion is the idea of “dynamic balances” that he develops in Tools for Conviviality.  This thought came to me recently while reading, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a refutation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s dissident position on the pandemic.  Agamben had written earlier against the inhumanity of a policy that lets people die alone and then outlaws funerals, arguing that a society which sets “bare life” higher than the preservation of its own way of life has embraced what amounts to a fate worse than death.  Fellow philosopher Anastasia Berg, in her response, expresses respect for Agamben, but then claims that he has missed the boat.  People are cancelling funerals, isolating the sick and avoiding one another not because mere survival has become the be-all and end-all of public policy, as Agamben claims, but in a spirit of loving sacrifice which Agamben is too obtuse and theory- besotted to notice.  The two positions appear starkly opposed, and the choice an either/or.  One either views social distancing, with Anastasia Berg, as a paradoxical and sacrificial form of solidarity, or one views it with Agamben as a fateful step into a world where inherited ways of life dissolve in an ethos of survival at all costs.  What Illich tried to argue in Tools for Conviviality is that public policy must always strike a balance between opposed domains, opposed rationalities, opposed virtues.  The whole book is an attempt to discern the point at which serviceable tools – tools for conviviality – turn into tools which become ends in themselves and begin to dictate to their users.  In the same way he tried to distinguish practical political judgment from expert opinion, home-made speech from the coinages of mass media, vernacular practices from institutional norms.  Many of these attempted distinctions have since drowned in the monochrome of “the system,” but the idea can still be helpful I think.  It encourages us to ask the question, what is enough? where is the point of balance?  Right now this question is not asked because the goods we pursue are generally taken to be unlimited – we cannot, by assumption, have too much education, too much health, too much law, or too much of any of the other institutional staples on which we lavish our hope and our substance.  But what if the question were revived?  This would require us to ask in what way Agamben might be right, while still allowing Berg’s point.  Perhaps a point of balance could be found. But this would require some ability to sustain a divided mind – the very hallmark of thinking, according to Hannah Arendt – as well as the resuscitation of political judgment.   Such an exercise of political judgment would involve a discussion of what is being lost in the present crisis as well as what is being gained.  But who deliberates in an emergency?    Total mobilization – total preoccupation – the feeling that everything has changed – the certainty of living in a state of exception rather than in ordinary time – all these things militate against political deliberation.  This is a vicious circle: we can’t deliberate because we’re in an emergency, and we’re in an emergency because we can’t deliberate.  The only way out of the circle is by the way in – the way created by assumptions that have become so ingrained as to seem obvious.  

Illich had a sense, during the last twenty years of his life, of a world immured in “an ontology of systems,” a world immune to grace, alienated from death, and totally convinced of its duty to manage every eventuality – a world, as he once put it, in which “exciting, soul-capturing abstractions have extended themselves over the perception of world and self like plastic pillowcases.”  Such a view does not readily lend itself to policy prescriptions.  Policy is made in the moment according to the exigencies of the moment.  Illich was talking about modes of sensing, of thinking, and of feeling that had crept into people at a much deeper level.  Accordingly, I hope that no one who has read this far thinks that I have been making facile policy proposals rather than trying to describe a fate that all share.  Still my view of the situation is probably clear enough from what I have written.  I think this tunnel we have entered – of physical distancing, flattening the curve etc. – will be very hard to get out of – either we call it off soon and face the possibility that it was all for naught, or we extend it and create harms that may be worse than the casualties we have averted.  This is not to say we should do nothing.  It is a pandemic.  But it would have been better, in my view, to try and keep going and used targeted quarantine for the demonstrably ill and their contacts.  Close baseball stadiums and large hockey arenas, by all means, but keep small businesses open and attempt to space the customers in the same way as the stores that have stayed open are doing.  Would more then die?  Perhaps, but this is far from clear.  And that’s exactly my point: no one knows.  Swedish economist Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy, made the same point recently in defence of Sweden’s current policy of precaution without shut-down. “The theory of lockdown,” he says, is “untested” – which is true – and, consequently, “It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.”  

But, to say it again, my intention here is not to contest policy but to bring to light the practiced certainties that make our current policy seem incontestable.  Let me take a final example.  Recently a Toronto newspaper columnist suggested that the current emergency can be construed as a choice between “saving the economy” or “saving granny.”  In this figure two prime certainties are pitted against one another.  If we take these phantoms as real things rather than as questionable constructions, we can only end up by setting a price on granny’s head.   Better, I want to argue, to try to think and speak in a different way.  Perhaps the impossible choices thrown up by the world of modelling and management are a sign that things are being framed in the wrong way.  Is there a way to move from granny as a “demographic” to a person who can be nursed and comforted and accompanied to the end of her road; from The Economy as the ultimate abstraction to the shop down the street in which someone has invested all they have and which they may now lose.   At present, “the crisis” holds reality hostage, captive in its enclosed and airless system.  It’s very difficult to find a way of speaking in which life is something other and more than a resource which each of us must responsibly manage, conserve, and, finally, save.   But I think it important to take a careful look at what has come into the light in recent weeks: medical science’s ability to “decide on the exception” and then take power; the media’s power to remake what is sensed as reality, while disowning its own agency;  the abdication of politics before Science, even when there is no science; the disabling of practical judgment; the enhanced power of risk awareness; and the emergence of Life as the new sovereign.   Crises change history but not necessarily for the better.  A lot will depend on what the event is understood to have meant. If, in the aftermath, the certainties I have sketched here are not brought into question, then the only possible outcome I can see is that they will fasten themselves all the more securely on our minds and become obvious, invisible, and unquestionable.

FURTHER READING

Here some links to articles which I have cited above or which have influenced my thinking:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/why-draconian-measures-may-not-work-two-experts-say-we-should-prioritize-those-at-risk-from-covid-19-than-to-try-to-contain

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/17/listen-cbc-radio-cuts-off-expert-when-he-questions-covid19-narrative/  (This story is misheaded – Duncan McCue doesn’t cut off Dr. Kettner – it’s because Kettner gets to make so many strong points that the item is valuable.)

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/24/12-experts-questioning-the-coronavirus-panic/

https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ (Agamben’s view can be found here along with a lot of other interesting material.)

Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness  (Anastasia Berg’s critique of Agamben)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-lockdown-please-w-re-swedish  (Frederik Erixon)

[szallejh]

Fun facts about me, GW2 edition

Tagged by @tinymoonmoth , thanks for that x3

List 5 facts about yourself as a player and tag people to get to know the fun and surprising stuff they're willing to share

#1: The first time I played the game was in 2013, when my ex wanted to show it to me. But I didn’t find my way into it back then (couldn’t even get out of Caledon Forest because a level 5 panther was too strong for me), so I quit after an hour of trying. 2016, my best friend brought me back and since then I’m absolutely addicted.

#2: I love all my characters except one: Connor. He’s some kind of hate-love for me, and I don’t even know why I can’t delete him. In my Fanfiction, Connor is also written as a tiny ugly weakling. Heh. Connor was first named “Der Ewig Zeitlose”, which is a character in OBAN Star Racers. Eventually I didn’t like that name anymore, so I renamed him. Because “Der Ewig Zeitlose” is also called Cannaletto, I chose something that reads as a normal name, but still sounds similar. Cannaletto - Connor Letho.

#3: I started to write my Guild Wars Fanfiction “Blink of an Eye” in 2017. It’s still running, and the german version currently has 28 chapters and 180k words. The english version is at 10 chapters and 50k words, I really have to translate faster.

#4: Even tho Heart of Thorns was already out when I started to play, I played the vanilla version for a whole year before buying the first expansion. Travelling through Tyria with a glider was a complete new experience and I can’t understand how I managed to survive a whole year without it (back when mounts were not even thinkable).

#5: It took me almost 2 years to finish my first legendary, and only 5 months to make two more. A bit over a week ago, I got my fourth (and believe me, the secend gen legys are a pain when it comes to wood and mithril), and am already starting with the fifth. I want to have each weapon type as a legendary somewhen in the future.

Now it’s up to you, @hiddencarpet @we-are-dragonslayer @harukaemberfall Feel free to do this or ignore this if you have been tagged already!

[thedadadon]

History of BMW

The official founding date of the German motor vehicle manufacturer BMW is 7 March 1916, when an aircraft engine manufacturer called Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG was formed. This company was renamed to Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) in 1922. However the name BMW dates back to 1913, when the original company used the name BMW (which in German appears as Rapp Motorenwerke). BMW's first product was a straight-six aircraft engine called the BMW IIIa. Following the end of World War I, BMW remained in business by producing motorcycle engines, farm equipment, household items and railway brakes. The company produced its first motorcycle, the BMW R 32 in 1923.

BMW became an automobile manufacturer in 1928 when it purchased Fahrzeugfabrik Eisenach, which, at the time, built Austin Sevens under licence under the Dixi marque.[1] The first car sold as a BMW was a rebadged Dixi called the BMW 3/15. Throughout the 1930s, BMW expanded its range into sports cars and larger luxury cars.

Aircraft engines, motorcycles, and automobiles would be BMW's main products until World War II. During the war, against the wishes of its director Franz Josef Popp, BMW concentrated on aircraft engine production, with motorcycles as a side line and automobile manufacture stopped altogether. BMW's factories were heavily bombed during the war and its remaining West German facilities were banned from producing motor vehicles or aircraft after the war. Again, the company survived by making pots, pans, and bicycles. In 1948, BMW restarted motorcycle production. BMW resumed car production in Bavaria in 1952 with the BMW 501 luxury saloon. The range of cars was expanded in 1955, through the production of the cheaper Isetta microcar under licence. Slow sales of luxury cars and small profit margins from microcars meant BMW was in serious financial trouble and in 1959 the company was nearly taken over by rival Daimler-Benz. A large investment in BMW by Herbert Quandt and Harald Quandt resulted in the company surviving as a separate entity. The BMW 700 was successful and assisted in the company's recovery.

The 1962 introduction of the BMW New Class compact sedans was the beginning of BMW's reputation as a leading manufacturer of sport-oriented cars. Throughout the 1960s, BMW expanded its range by adding coupe and luxury sedan models. The BMW 5 Series mid-size sedan range was introduced in 1972, followed by the BMW 3 Series compact sedans in 1975, the BMW 6 Series luxury coupes in 1976 and the BMW 7 Series large luxury sedans in 1978.

The BMW M division released its first road car, a mid-engine supercar, in 1978. This was followed by the BMW M5 in 1984 and the BMW M3 in 1986. Also in 1986, BMW introduced its first V12 engine in the 750i luxury sedan.

The company purchased the Rover Group in 1994, however the takeover was not successful and was causing BMW large financial losses. In 2000, BMW sold off most of the Rover brands, retaining only Mini and Rolls Royce.

The 1995 BMW Z3 expanded the line-up to include a mass-production two-seat roadster and the 1999 BMW X5 was the company's entry into the SUV market.

The first mass-produced turbocharged petrol engine was introduced in 2006, with most engines switching over to turbocharging over the following decade. The first hybrid BMW was the 2010 BMW ActiveHybrid 7, and BMW's first electric car was the BMW i3 city car, which was released in 2013. After many years of establishing a reputation for sporting rear-wheel drive cars, BMW's first front-wheel drive car was the 2014 BMW 2 Series Active Tourer multi-purpose vehicle (MPV).

Aircraft and industrial engines[edit]

1913–1918: World War I[

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1917

BMW IIIa

aircraft engine

1916 advertisement for Bayerische Flugzeugwerke

BMW's origins can be traced back to three separate German companies: Rapp Motorenwerke, Bayerische Flugzeugwerke and Automobilwerk Eisenach.

The history of the name itself begins with Rapp Motorenwerke, an aircraft engine manufacturer which was established in 1913 by Karl Rapp. A site near the Oberwiesenfeld was chosen because it was close to Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (then called Otto Flugmaschinenfabrik), with whom he had contracts to supply his four-cylinder aircraft engines.[2][2] Rapp was also sub-contracted by Austro-Daimler to manufacture their V12 aircraft engines, under the supervision of Franz Josef Popp who was delegated to Munich from Vienna.[2] Popp did not restrict himself to the role of observer, becoming actively involved in the overall management of the company.[3]

In April 1917, following founder Karl Rapp's departure, Rapp Motorenwerke was renamed Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW).[4](p11) BMW's first product was the BMW IIIa aircraft engine. The IIIa engine was known for good fuel economy and high-altitude performance.[5] The resulting orders for IIIa engines from the German military caused rapid expansion for BMW. The large orders received from the Reichswehr for the BMW IIIa engine were overwhelming for the small company, however government officials in the relevant ministries were able to give BMW extensive practical support for the rapid expansion[6] and funding to build a new factory near BMW's existing workshops. The German Empire did not, however, wish to go on supporting BMW with loans and guarantees, and therefore urged the flotation of a public limited company.[7]

The name-change to Bayerische Motoren Werke compelled management to devise a new logo for the company, therefore the famous BMW trademark is designed and patented at this time. However, they remained true to the imagery of the previous Rapp Motorenwerke emblem.[8] Thus, both the old and the new logo were built up in the same way: the company name was placed in a black circle, which was once again given a pictorial form by placing a symbol within it. By analogy with this, the blue and white panels of the Bavarian national flag were placed at the center of the BMW logo. Not until the late 1920s was the logo lent a new interpretation as representing a rotating propeller.[9]