#2. normal in france IS rape culture

[natandacat]

I wish this would spring a conversation about how bad rape culture is in french culture specifically but no ig most people just wanna say "men are bad even the nice ones". Hi. I grew up in france. The "average French man" is not nice. Yes its that bad.

[rad-translations]

“We’re used to death threats” 6 years after GamerGate, nothing has changed

(It’s impossible for me to continue playing Valorant. To be provoked, harassed, insulted as soon as people hear my voice, all of this because I’m a woman, is unacceptable. I won’t accept undergoing this constantly, and having to signal people constantly. I’m sickened.)

If for some years now, awareness of the bullying that women suffer from in all parts of society has been increasing, everyday changes appear to be barely noticeable.

The world of video games is one glaring example. Or how, behind the grand speeches, the life of female gamers hasn’t changed — maybe even got worse since GamerGate, an event that has triggered the first large-scale wave of online harassment against women.

In partnership with the YESSS podcast, Numerama investigated  the sexism in the community of male and female gamers, with a saddening but certain report: since 2014 and GamerGate, nothing has changed. What we gathered from the dozens and dozens of testimonies that we collected, is that the daily life of women gamers is punctuated by these microaggressions. Tweet after tweet, insult after insult, from sexist comments to targeted bullying, these are individual actions that, when added up, create an incredibly violent wave of online harassment. A wave that swallow them again, day after day.

“Gamergate had set the tone”

“GamerGate had set the tone in regards to sexism, and this changed things” assesses Julie, who mostly plays on League of Legends. “When they discover that you are a girl, it’s rampage” adds Leiden, a World of Warcraft player: “As soon as you’re a girl, you’re gonna eat shit. There are comments like “You don’t know how to play (...)”, it’s a very common behavior on WoW…” Kash, who also plays MMORPG, laments that “toxic comments became the norm”. One example: during a session, the presence of three female players triggered a collective cackling from the members of her guild, who said that “the disabled quota has arrived”. “I told them that we were fed up with these kind of remarks, that is was not normal. They responded by saying it was just humor. (...) That’s really a bummer, because when the game launched, this didn’t exist, we were a community. I wasn’t judged based on my sex.”. “Playing as a woman, it’s a hassle” confirms Lisa*, tiredly “There is always some pig there to tell you to “go back to the kitchen””. Laughter always follows.

She however assesses that GamerGate did not launch online bullying. Gamers are known to vehemently defend their passion: “In 2005, a wave of online harassment had been launched against the very controversial Jack Thompson, an american lawyer who declared that shootings in the USA were the result of the violence of video games” Brad Glasgow, a journalist who then published a study on GamerGate, reminds us, now asked by Numerama. Some gamers at the time sent death threats to his home, or even developed games in which the objective was to hit the lawyer… What GamerGate changed, is adding a sexist aspect to online bullying, focusing hate and attacks on multiple women.

Between journalistic integrity and harassment

On August 16th 2014, Eron Gjoni, a 24 years old programmer, published on his blog “thezoepost”, a 9000-words vitriolic announcement, describing in detail how his now ex-girlfriend, Zoe Quinn, had cheated on him. The story could have ended there. But here is the deal: Zoe Quinn is an indie video game developer, and the man she cheated on him with is a journalist specialized in gaming-related press. That was everything gamers and the Internet needed to ignite: this man is writing for a journal which recently published a highly positive review of Zoe Quinn’s new game, Depression Quest. Between blogs, subreddits and 4chan, the GamerGate movement was born.

“They wanted to be able to continue playing with half-naked female characters without anyone saying something about it”

What did gamers really want? They would say that they were fighting for “more ethics in videogame reporting, less cronyism between developers and magazines” Brad Glasgow, who conducted a study on this subject, explains.  “The gamergaters who I interviewed had the impression that the industry was pushing on them more censored, family-friendly games. They wanted to be able to continue playing with half-naked female characters without anyone saying something about it, and without being considered misogynists”. The GamerGate contributors were for a long time believed to be cliché young gamers, however Brad Glasgow’s study show that the median age was 30 years old, very different from the often depicted carefree youngsters. All the people targeted by the supporters of this movement were women. The victims and numerous reporters commented afterwards that GamerGate was never about claiming anything, but simply a way to express their hate and disdain towards Zoe Quinn. Zoe Quinn, as well as the video game creator Brianna Wu and blogger Anita Sarkeesian received so many rape, torture and death threats that they were forced to move out out of their homes, fearing for their lives. In the United States, this event was huge, so much that the New York Times described it  as “the beginning on alt-right hegemony on the Internet”, and even as a culture war. In France, despite being covered by the media, it didn’t have such an impact outside of the affected community. The problem however, doesn’t only exist on the other side of the Atlantic. The blogger Marlard was talking, since 2013, about a "sick community", soaked in sexism, fetishizing Lara Croft’s new design, and, in the famous 18-25 forum on jeuxvideo.com, misogyny was already the rule. She was actually one of the first to receive numerous waves of online harassment for daring to point out the sexism in the world of video games.

A masculine universe

Why talk again about Gamergate today? Because six years later, despite the problem being under the spotlight and having media coverage, female gamers still suffer. Video games seem to stay a masculine universe, a space where the famous rule 30 of the Internet “on the Internet, there are no women”  could be a reality. It’s nevertheless false: according to a IFOP study published in 2018, women play as much video games as men do.The Internet and Twitch are full of casual and professional gamers, like Kayane, Trinity, Little Big Whale, Zulzorander, Marie Palot…. But, inescapably, the presence of women in online games startles, surprises, annoys. 

“Being misogynistic is trendy”

To insult women and social justice warriors (nickname given to anti-discrimination  activists by their opponents) is still seen today as a way to make your audience  laugh, to gain a place inside the boy’s club, sometimes even to become famous. French streamer Jean Massiet admits it: “Being misogynistic is trendy”.

(I’ve been streaming for 5 years and there is an absolute constant: being misogynistic is trendy, make your chat laugh by playing the rebel. To be feminist is to oppose retaliations and gatekeeping. Conformism really isn’t where most people think.)

The “young boy” trick to conceal your voice

One of the main problems encountered by female players online, is “vocal”, the act of talking with other members of the team to coordinate certain attacks during a game. In this moment, it’s impossible to hide behind the neutral usernames of characters typically associated with male players: “As soon as people hear that I’m a girl, it’s over. Many women don’t want to communicate because of it” reveals Lisa. “You really feel a difference in behavior when comparing the before and after.”

Julie, another player, explains that the “after” is often synonymous with saucy flirting. “Immediately, dudes will come talk to you in private, ask for pictures and lewd requests…” To avoid this, almost all the female players that we interviewed explained to us that they use the “young boy” trick: passing as a young male player whose voice has not dropped yet, to justify their high-pitched tone. Lying to stay undisturbed is a common strategy. Some even prefer playing with the account of their male partners, thus avoiding unrequited comments.

The #MeToo aftermath is even worse

But it’s not always sufficient. Kate laments that “The #MeToo movement created a mistrust”, revealing a violent rejection of the liberation of feminine and feminist voices. “It has become a PMU* (“PMU” or “Pari Mutuel Urbain” is a bar/gambling place chain. Nowadays it is synonymous for many people with armchair psychology, politics and chauvinist behaviors) Everytime you want to point out to players that they are making sexist comments, it’s always the same reaction “you can’t say anything nowadays”, ‘feminazi”....” Far from letting those concerned question themselves, it seems that the #MeToo movement has reinforced their aggravation, which then leads them to be even more defensive or to conduct gratuitous attacks, especially on Discord, a chat/vocal platform often used by players to communicate with each other. 

“The memes are more aggressive, everyone jeers at feminists… There is some sort of frustration towards feminist awareness, a very violent reaction. It is even sometimes almost incel behavior,” explains Kash, referencing the men's rights activists movement of "involuntary celibates". “You won’t make friends talking about feminism” Nat’ali, streamer, confirms to us.

 “#MeToo has revealed the privileges that men have, and they didn’t like seeing it”

She isn’t the only one who saw the situation getting worse after Gamergate and #MeToo. “Since I started playing in 2007, I truly saw the atmosphere deteriorate” Kash told us. “I saw more bullshit these last two years than in the ten years prior, "I now see things that dudes never dared to do before. The whole community got worse”. Lisa also observed  the explosion of sexism after #MeToo. “It’s really then that I started hiding the fact that I was a woman. #Metoo has revealed the privileges that men have, and they didn't like seeing it. Don’t touch cis white hetero men, or you will get branded a fucking feminist, a whore, a feminazi.” Lisa reached the point of “not wanting to play anymore, too toxic. Gets on my nerves too quickly.” There is, too, a fear of underperforming: “I’m scared to play certain FPS (First Person Shooter, like Call of Duty) because I’m no very good at them, and I don’t want to help the belief that “girls sucks at video games” to persist” laments Nat’ali.

The liability of professional streamers

In the eyes of Julie, part of the problem resides in the fact that the gamer community is growing rapidly. “There are more and more gamers, and the newcomers are usually very young and very sexist. Even if some people change and gain understanding regarding this problem, they will be drowned by comments by teens that have no reflexion on sexism”.“ In addition to the jeuxvideo.com 18-25 forum, numerous streamers and professional players are accused of perpetuating sexism. As Numerama showed in a study made in April 2019, members of the Solary team, a french esport structure, have encouraged online harassment against several women, and have contributed in spreading sexist insults (a woman receiving compliments from a stranger, not responding to them and “calling them out on social media” is in their eyes a “whore”)

“It’s an environment in which men pat each other on the back”*

(Translator’s note: a more literal translation would be “men forgive each other” but the underlying idea in this sentence was that they allow themselves to forgive each other’s faults without actually hearing the people targeted.)

Sardoche, a League of Legends streamer and Twitch partner (video creators able to monetize their videos) has also been known for years for his very violent remarks against female players, that he calls “shitty little virgins” or “huge whores”. In addition to being aware about inciting his followers to harass, he often mocks feminist activists on twitter, and his followers always join the party. “The problem is that he is followed by a lot of boys that want to imitate him” Nat’ali tell us.

“Trolling feminists, best thing to do in the morning. Thanks to @MrKryorys for archiving these kinds of clips” Yet Sardoche is not called out, and can still enjoy the free publicity made by numerous other streamers, promoting him and condoning his unacceptable speeches. At the start of June however, the streamer announced that he was now suffering from online harassment on his Twitch lives, coming mostly from 18-25 users. These behaviors have no influence on the mentioned players’ and streamers’ careers. “They still don’t understand that they are participating to the trivialization of hatred against women” Nat’ali angrily adds “Sardoche is now co-hosting PopCorn, one of the most viewed programs on Twitch. It’s an environment in which men pat each other on the back.”

“One girl per team, no more”

This impunity is reinforced by the erasure of female players, firstly because some are reluctant to present themselves as women in online games, and secondly, because the professional environment is not giving them a platform. We call that “the quota effect”. “Those who want to become professional know that there is only one “girl�� slot per team”. complains Nat’ali. This infamous “quota woman” reminds us of the “Lara Croft effect” a overused argument often put forward when criticism against the lack of female characters in video games arise: You got it wrong, look over here, there is one woman.

“At the beginning of big web TV, 7 or 8 years ago, there was a of of competition between female players. No sisterhood whatsoever, girls were awful with each other because they knew there wouldn’t be a spot for everyone” Nat’ali, who had seen the problem herself, continues.

Once hired, these female streamers still have a lot to face. A friend of Nat’ali told her last year that her team forced her to wear a mini-skirt during a marketing campaign. According to Leiden “People still see their female players as sexy props, instead of focusing on their playing skills”.

The ambience is now healthier, and “there is a real solidarity on Twitch between us, we talk a lot. With #MeToo, we understand that we needed to help each other. These topics have the spotlight, we feel more comfortable talking about them. Dudes still behave the same, but the relationship between female players changed. This is the big victory of #MeToo.”   

“Streamers need to question themselves”

Should we see this whole problem as unsolvable? For Aurélie, “in practice men are not yet supportives. The knowledge is here, we know that “sexism is bad” But if you point out that a comment is sexist, they will immediately jump and respond that no, it’s just humor”. There are many hard to unlearn habits,” Lisa remarks: “It’s the patriarchal structure: nice guys sometimes have awful reactions. It’s rooted inside of them, they don’t even realize what they’re doing.” For all of the interviewees, the education of men regarding these problems is the solution. Kash affirms: “This men-only community create a unease. Streamers need to be the example. They need to question themselves, and they shouldn’t hesitate to take clear stances regarding this.” Still, it would be easier if these stances were the norm, and taking them was not a risk.

“When you keep talking to them about it, our male friends realize the problem” Lisa happily notices. One of Kash’s friends, with whom she’s been playing for years, has evolved a lot despite starting as “mostly uninterested in the sexism problem in games”. After our interview, she decided to talk to him about her experience, and he listened to her testimony. “Last week, during a raid in which I didn’t introduce myself, a player made a sexist remark about the body of a woman. My friend told me he felt uncomfortable and talked to the guild leader about it. Nothing happened, the player wasn’t sanctioned, but I’ve known my gamer friend for 11 years and it was the first time he reacted like that. So I’m hopeful!”

Aurore Gayte for Numerama 

*names have been changed This article was created in partnership with the YESSS podcast. .Their latest creation, "Warriors and Games" is available here. Every month, the YESSS team gathers testimonies of women who triumphed against sexism: those who responded, who corrected, who snapped and resisted. YESSS is a podcast for warriors, positive and decidedlyfeminist. It is conceived and hosted by Margaïd Quioc, Elsa Miské et Anaïs Bourdet, produced by the Popkast label in Marseille.

[things2mustdo]

Last week I expounded the idea that we should take the time to ponder about emotions. These matter much in prompting us to take action or not to, to think about something or not to. Sustained emotional states can lead us to pedestalize girls, ignore our own needs, or refraining from caring about our own interests, whereas others push theirs every day. They can also allow said girls to go shamelessly after short-term pleasure, or be complacent to rapefugees while shrieking and finger-waving against men of their own kin.

Pondering passions and emotions does not mean getting led by them at the expense of critical thinking. Rather, it is the exact opposite, as it allows us to spot the shrewd ones who want to push our emotional buttons, as well as being freer to take more thoughtful and actually less emotion-determined actions. Once we have gained awareness of passions, we can decide which ones we want to stimulate and why.

Following this idea, I made some suggestions of how and in whom we could stir positive emotions such empathy, hope, and love. Today I will do the same with four other passions or emotions: admiration, shame, humility, and fear.

1. Admiration

Society, I think, should admit some victimhood to those who were raised as weaklings or acted cluelessly out of good intentions. Women in particular should be more empathetic and nurturing towards nice and beta males—as long as their empathy does not extent out of admitted boundaries—hence taking an opposite direction from the egotistical, uncaring orientation a lot of them currently harbor. Of course, this should not equate to validating too much the unhealthy, unmanly men: women should also be trained into validating more manlier men. And here admiration comes into play.

As Nassim Taleb put it, we are living more and more in an “extremistan” where those at the highest level take the lion’s share while the resources diminish quickly down the ladder. Girls today tend to admire only the most famous or high-status people, which leads them to despise the ninety-nine per cent. This exasperated hypergamy should be tamed so that the average man, as long as he achieves the minimum and/or is upstanding and dutiful, gets his fair share. A more “democratic” but still conditional distribution of girls’ admiration would reward actual good behaviour for men and decrease the intramasculine competition.

Girls should also admire—and not mock—proper feminine role models. Upstanding mothers, females taking proper care of themselves and so on ought to be at least esteemed by the average girl.

2. Shame

Shame arises from measuring our actions against moral standards and discovering that they fall short. If our actions fall short and we fail to notice, we can ‘be shamed’ or made to notice… Shame is normally accentuated if its object is exposed, but, unlike embarrassment, also attaches to a thought or action that remains undisclosed and undiscoverable to others. (Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell, chap.4, p.38)

A particularly strong emotion, shame usually comes as a blow, makes one lose face or composure, to eventually feel guilt or remorse. Just like other strong emotions, it has been used with consumed malignancy by the Left.

Leftists created a narrative where whites are held entirely responsible for dreadful historical phenomena such as slavery, the Holocaust, an oppression of “minority” groups, or “racism.” As these phenomena are constantly talked about and expanded, whites are also supposed to feel a correspondingly boundless guilt. The sheer power of guilt can explain why so many whites have been afraid to stand up: being shamed as a “racist” or “Nazi” can be enough to endure rejection from one’s family, lose reputation and employment.

Shame can be aroused through two levers: the standards one agrees with, and one’s purported responsibility. Both levers have been skillfully used to unshame the liberal-favored groups. As for the standards, feminists attacked what they called slut-shaming while also shaming relentlessly manly behavior, and as for the responsibility, pretty much all those who claim to identify with a “minority” tend to deny all by slipping it over the majority’s shoulders.

This is how you get persistent offenders or Jihadi families expressing neither shame nor remorse, whereas the productive, working, and normally sociable person gets nagged for being white. In the Current Year, better be a true rapist who can evade responsibility and shame by invading Europe than a young virgin of European descent.

What we should do here sounds pretty obvious in theory though it will be much harder to carry on in practice, as people evidently hate being shamed, especially when they have been accustomed of blaming everything on the others.

Shame the fatties, shame the arrogant snowflakes whose unwillingness to respect is all too obvious, recall the self-determination of anti-white liberals and criminals. They all made free choices. They should carry all associated responsibility.

As for us, we must keep our face straight, never make clueless concessions to skillful framers or hysterical SJWs. If they appeal to moral standards, put forth your own as legitimate. If they appeal to your purported actions or responsibility, emphasize theirs—and how it cannot be boiled down to external factors.

Even dogs and cats are considered responsible by their caretakers so they can be punished for bad behaviours and learn: likewise, granting certain people or groups a constant de-responsabilization amounts to give them a free pass for destroying everything. Criminals of said groups have agency, and the liberals who gave them a pass to plunder and kill whitey are responsible as well.

Shame can also arise from being associated with something or someone deemed as despicable. The liberal policy of distinguishing sharply between terrorists and documented aliens, in spite of how much the latter to house the former, allows for the latter going without shame even when they are closely associated with terrorists—whereas every white is threatened with shame if he has a “-ist” or “-phobic” acquaintance.

Turn the table. Shake off the burden from the disenfranchised majority, and put it back on those who have been acting with impunity for too long.

3. Humility

Current Year girls’ overinflated ego is enough, notwithstanding economic or racial factors, to explain a host of social problems. Blinded by it, girls ignore how much they are determined by their own cravings, short-term desires, or by the latest fashions around. They drink loads of booze, fuck with random strangers, reframe their story as a “rape” later so they can blame it all on the guy. They never learn to cook, clean, take care of something else than their Instagram account and corporate career. (Speaking of corporate: isn’t it striking that so many men are badly in need of employment, sex, and have almost nothing, whereas spoiled corporate drones believe they can have—take—it all?)

Ego makes one lose any sense of proportion or balance. It leads to complacency, merciless exploitation of others, refusal to take responsibility, and open despise.

Augustine of Hippo wrote that humility was at the foundation of all other virtues. This makes sense. If one’s ego is inflated, one does not feel the need to practice virtues and feels entitled to never be ashamed of her shortcomings—that are easily denied or blamed on someone else. Ego also leads to wasting resources on luxury, parce que je le vaux bien, as says a famous brand of cosmetics, instead of focusing on self-improvement or caretaking.

Though girls should be the first to have their ego smashed, as the survival of basic family units depends on it, bloated ego is a general disease in our age. Men too can be sold the idea that, say, being a smug urban elf is a proof that one sides with progress and civilization whereas they are actually weak, dependent and unable to fix anything by themselves. It’s not all about our individual selves.

4. Fear

Readers asked for it, so, here it is. Fear is a very powerful emotion, to the point of prompting one to freeze, flee, abandon a previously planned course of action, or never even think to consider an idea or an action. The Left has been using it in two different, albeit complementary, ways.

First, it has constantly accused conservatives to “play on fears,” implying irrational or unjustified fears, when they dared to ask serious questions or making realistic assessment. When the 1965 Immigration Act was voted, democrat senators pretended that opening up the borders would not change the ethnic mix of America and that any suspicion it might happen was “highly emotional.” In France, the socialists and mainstream righters alike have been carrying the same accusations. Here the Left accused any doubt to be a hint of unjustified and intolerable “fear.”

Well, what happened since? Doesn’t it look like every “fear” from the right was justified—especially since the post-WW2 Right has always been incredibly wary, not to say coward, when it came to criticize the Left’s moral high ground?

Second, the Left has also been keen on doing exactly what it accused the conservatives to do, namely, stirring fear about political bogeymen. Liberals invented “rape culture” or “patriarchal oppression” when men actually became weaker. They associated to “Nazism” any white person who assumes his race should basically survive. They shamelessly bludgeoned whom they could call “white supremacists” as if defending one’s right to live in peace against hordes of thugs and violent parasites was equal to being Hitler himself.

Whites were led to fear their own supposed “authoritarian” tendencies, as the shrewd Jews who intrigued through the Frankfurt school put it (see Kevin MacDonald, Culture of Critique, chap.5). Whites were led to fear some of their fears—better have one’s daughter killed by Muslims than expressing concerns about them to other whites, because racism is so evil, boo.

When I was younger, I noticed the local thugs had a huge advantage over us normal people: they were much more fearless. They had this devil-may-care, provocative attitude, which made them potentially dangerous to the bourgeois prude beta male and attractive to females. Not incidentally, the first movie of the French essayist Alain Soral Confessions d’un dragueur (“Confessions of a Womanizer”) shows a young Arab with decent pick-up experience taking a young middle-class white boy under his wing as to help him escape from virginity.

Feeling fear is a necessary step in life. Fear appears greatly useful when there is something to flee from or watch as a potential hazard, but being too fearful or afraid of the wrong things can be a serious liability. Never trust a liberal who either points finger at you for being “fearful” or tries to paint you as dangerous and justifying his own fear-mongering.

On the flip side, being feared by others is not always a negative. Some people need to be afraid to respect you: if you try to treat them correctly or let free rein to your innate generosity, they will harm and exploit you. Such people, just as everyone around who may be tempted to disrespect, should be kept in check by a minimal fear. Better be feared and respected than getting tread upon.

Conclusion

Frame and unframe whatever matters when you have to, as you have to. The left cursed us by locking us into an always negative framing: when we fail, whatever the reason, we are despised as weak or “losers,” and when we succeed they say we are “privileged” and “oppressive.” In both cases, the chosen framing leads to negative emotions associated to us—no matter what we actually do.

Fortunately, it is always possible to turn the tables, provided we keep a tight frame, and change these emotions as well. For example, when we are weak, we should elicit empathy, be noticed for our good intentions or noble infirmities, and when we are strong, we should elicit admiration and trust.

Think, frame, feel positive about us and about what we do. Get rid of those who won’t.

Read Next: 3 Emotions Men Should Master

https://www.returnofkings.com/99453/3-more-emotions-men-should-master

Passions and emotions are an almost bottomless pit. Start digging there and you will find new ones, or new relations between this and that tidbit of emotional content. So-called Enlightenment philosophers who tried to theorize the passions—something that had been done at greater length, actually, by Thomas Aquinas—could never agree on how many there were or even how much they exactly mattered in the course of life.

Whether or not you have been reading my last two pieces on the topic, remember this is about mastering passions in the most general sense. This is not only about emotional restraint or seduction. Our own emotional states are the first in line, but mastering the passions is also about spotting what other people are feeling, how they can be led to a specific course of action, and what tends to make them tick. Mastering the passions is far from evident, it rather takes times and experience: the concepts and directions I am providing here aim at giving some conscious clarity about things that are by nature a bit muddy.

Artists, though they often suffer from mental problems, are skilled at painting a particular vision in vivid colours, allowing their public to share a specific point of view and emotional state. This is something the elite know very well. Critics trashed Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged because they could see themselves painted there as passive-aggressive cultural parasites. Rand’s novel was more cogent, and attracted more heat, than her barely original “philosophical” pieces today sold at the cheapest price on the second-hand book market.

More recently, the movie The Fall (2004) got backlashed by some of the mainstream media on the grounds that it depicted Hitler as “too human.” While seeing actor Bruno Ganz pondering, eating, talking to his closest company or getting angry, the viewer could perhaps feel a bit of empathy to him. Which is, of course, unacceptable to a Left that clings to the idea of a crazy, careless, “inhuman” dictator to be forever cast as an embodiment of evil. Hollywood directors do not like witnessing others competing with their own emotional mastery.

We need artists, as well as qualified cultural critics, to take some distance from the mainstream propaganda disguised as entertainment and expand an alternative culture and artworks. Emotions explored in the present series can be used just that way.

1. Gratitude

Gratitude denotes a trained and refined disposition. Being graceful means “recognizing that the good in our life can come from something that is outside us and outside our control” (Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell, chap.8, p.61). It focuses on positive things we already have and that cannot be ascribed to our sole merit or efforts.

The traditional world, whatever the particular cultural or religious form it was embodied into, always emphasized the necessity of being grateful. You owed your existence to God, to your family and your community. None of these goods were actually deserved, which meant you had to be grateful for them and repay them by being a dutiful member of the community as well as a dutiful father for your own children. A lot of prayers and ancient rites imply a thanksgiving for what one already has.

Moving later in time, it is striking to see that modern progressivism breeds the exact opposite mindset. The ideology of rights make many goods granted, not a “thank you for” but an “I have a right to.” Neophilia (the relentless pursuit of novelty) always casts a bad shadow on what has been around for some time, as if what was coming later was always better.

Advertisement, gossip culture, economic growth pressure, quest for victimhood lead to envy and always being more or less frustrated with what one already has, regardless of what it is. By leading us to always want more, progressivism makes us oblivious to what we already have or how it does not stem from pure individual merit—and, when it flatters the ego, it makes us complacent and far from cultivating the art of being thankful.

Turning our backs from the modern, ungraceful mindset is easier said than done. To start with: loud-mouthed girls should be remembered they owe their nice, luxurious workplaces to the men who built them, LGBTBBQ should thank their heterosexual parents and ancestors for their very lives, anti-white black activists should remember they would not even exist had their ancestors not benefited from their white colonizers healthcare technology. Feel free to expand the list. Ultimately, I think, every person who is modern or westernized enough can be outed as ungraceful for something.

2. Trust

A famous study showed that multiculturalism was closely correlated with defiance and a lack of trust in each other. Provided that we enlarge a bit our definition of multiculturalism, this absolutely makes sense. Some ethnic groups are especially prone to violence, and some “minority” groups are rewarded for freely accusing the silent majority, but the hegemony of political correctness made it a taboo. Communities have been fragmented by individualism, i.e. each person looking to take as much as she can, and by an “antiracist” white guilt that soon became an intra-white generalized suspicion of “racism.” People do not identify anymore with the larger society and often cannot even identify with a smaller community—which makes everyone else a potential enemy.

Yet, without trust, life becomes unbearable. If you can’t go to the streets without the possibility of getting mugged by, say, BLM activists, or go to a family meal without the prospect of a lukewarm struggle with aging leftist parents, or have a relationship with a girl without the possibility of her making a false rape accusation, there aren’t a lot of things you can do on the long run. Without trust in other people, you have to trust the complex of big corporations, NGO, and State institutions we call the system—and be dependent from it for things as basic as food and shelter.

Only trust in each other can make life sustainable and long-term projects workable. To re-create trust, we have to make people accountable and bound to precise rules, reward good behaviours while punishing bad ones. Actions must bear consequences. But before neomasculinity gets into power, men should strive to establish a reputation through reliability, persistence, and a strong mindset. I could wager you have been more trusting of your Facebook friends last years than of the mainstream media, the former conveying more trustworthy information than the latter.

3. Desire

Modern capitalism and progressivism always ran on desire. Want cheaper prices? More goods? Better goods? More TV channels to watch? More monies? More ego and thinking you are the hot shit? Well, just buy in X or do some work for Y, and here it is… um, nah, you just have to do some more, and some more, and some more. In the end, you forgot why exactly you are doing what you’re doing, or why you started to watch TV. But it all started with you led to perform something, no matter how surreptitiously framed as spontaneous or normal it was.

The system plays on desires in three ways. It sets things to be desired, things to be feared or never desired at all, and things to be consummated without end. Things to be desired include everything the advertisement wants you to desire, like a revolving credit, a new sofa, an SUV or whatever, as well as the next step of “progress” as it has been elaborated on the top of the pyramid.

Things to be feared are where the system wants you to be resigned and fatalistic: did you ever feel sad to see all these girls losing themselves into a sea of fat, bitching, and SJW-propaganda spouting? Too bad, that’s globalization, resistance is futile, move on! At last, things to be consummated are mainly produced to keep you busy and programmed though you are not really practising anything beyond staring at a screen.

Lately, an important shift has been happening between the first and third ways to play on desires. Decades before, the average consumer had to desire owning more junk or being part of the “progress”: the system needed him to work and monitor his peers. Today, the junk is already everywhere, PC culture is already hegemonic, and the average American worker is no longer needed. Active desire is not needed anymore.

Thus, the system has shifted into making the average Joe more passive. Instead of actually desiring more, the consumer should be content with surrogates of everything—pseudo-group identity with team sports, pseudo-sports with football and basket on TV, pseudo-sex with porn, pseudo-life with video games, pseudo-family life with animals, pseudo-expertise when the average libtard obnoxiously parrots the media on everything. This is Brzezinski’s tittytainment in a nutshell.

Even if you don’t give up on having a real life instead of a surrogate, the system will still want you to desire things only for yourself, thus retreating into individualism, instead of trying to actually weight on the world. Either you surrender to “the progress” or you try to ignore it before it comes for you. As if nothing could change.

Don’t let the elite frame the world according to its own interests. Desire self-realization and weighting on the course of the world. Of course, our female counterparts should desire being loving, caretaking, and definitely on our side.

To conclude this series

Once again, it is hard to sketch in a few words what could be done with passions or emotions. What I have mostly dwelled into is how those already in power manipulate them and what we could do as to take them back. If you find the topic worthy of interest, you can expand it in two directions: first, documenting yourself on a particular passion or emotion, and second, using some by stirring it with a certain aim in mind.

In the former case, I would recommend Neel Burton’s Heaven and Hell (quoted several times in the course of this series) as a point of departure. In the latter, being creative or simply assertive is up to you. Whether this looks more like efforts or self-persuasion or artistry does not matter much.

Here, as well as in seduction, a tight framing is key. Whatever the topic, no vocabulary and no picture are really neutral, which is a problem as our perception and thinking orientation are often conditioned by these. The mastery of emotions is reinforced—and reinforces—the mastery of representations. If this sounds far-fetched, let me provide some examples of use, examples you are absolutely free to expand as it suits you.

In the comments space, several guys here have been giving a very negative portrayal of the nice guy: he would be a fake, a “sneaky bastard,” a “jerk.” So guys who want to get laid or have their own interests, just as everyone else, are jerks? This looks like internalized feminist thinking. In my opinion, nice guys should elicit empathy, which goes through a positive portrayal emphasizing their willingness to respect the girl or how they were likely raised by an unmanly culture.

A recent ROK piece about mainstream media has shown how these are making a conscious effort to hide and de-legimitate white victimhood: they paint vividly any crime where the victim is non-white and the perpetrator is, but mention no detail or do not mention at all any crime perpetrated by non-white(s) on white(s).

The same pattern appears in the movie Elysium (2013), when the (of course) white villain mentions children she wants to protect from a mass of brown invaders, yet these children are never shown and consequently stir no empathy from the average watcher, whereas the brown-skinned are vividly depicted as humane and not responsible for their own poverty.

Analyzing these phenomena is fine, but ultimately insufficient. Creative people on our side have to provide an alternative that includes mastered emotions. Picking up girls is part of, and gives some experience in, this wider game.

[hopetofantasy]

I dare you to say 5 skam+remakes controversial opinions and send this to 5 people

Oh boi.

Well, let's get to it.

(Please don't kill me, this is my opinion!)

1. I think most of the SKAMs didn't treat the Noora assault storyline that well, in terms of the message. They didn't report it, their boyfriends weren't supportive (some even saying "he didn't actually rape you, so...") and they didn't show the emotional impact (that long) afterwards. Only SKAM España as well as wtFOCK get a pass, due to the most realistic portrayal (the psychological abuse, the alienating, the change in the Noora's, the morning after pill, the weeks of mental health problems, continue going to the psych).

2. There is a difference between stanning a remake and stanning the cast or crew behind it. It's not because you like SKAM France as a series, that you approve all David's decisions. It's not because you like SKAM Italia, that you approve of the casting choice or what the cast said. Etcetera. A finished product is the result of work from multiple people (camera crew, editors, composers, ...), working hours and days and weeks on it. I don't want to write the whole of it off, because of one or multiple dumbasses behind it all.

3. 'Bad writing' is a personal, subjective matter. Some shows don't spoon-feed everything of their character's intentions, some shows focus more on their own culture, some shows show more than they tell, some shows create drama to make it interesting. All of the SKAMs show flaws in their characters, because it's what normal people are. Flawed. So the writing may seem weird, in the eyes of some. Maybe because you don't understand the culture, maybe because they want to show realism or something a character does to teach them/us a lesson. It doesn't made it bad writing. Writing is personal.

4. There is nothing wrong with fantasizing about a crackship. If it's VDS, Elippo, Nooreva, Chrisak, Sans, LuKes, ... It's just something people want to see, because they like their combination, the character traits of both compliment each other. It isn't real. People know that. But that's just something fun to imagine, to do, to write or draw about. It doesn't negate the canon. It doesn't mean they want to fetishize the characters. It's because they just want to have fun with the canon. To play around with it. Please, just let people have fun. Life is tough, let them be.

5. SKAM OG wasn't perfect. It's not because it was the first, the example for the rest of the remakes, that it can't be flawed or can't be critisized for being the way it is. It was set years before, mindsets as well as society has changed since then. Not everything about it is 100% perfect. And it wasn't intended to be perfect either. So don't put in on a pedestal, if other people choose to have an opinion about it or prefer other remakes above it. We're all the same fandom, some just like all remakes equal (like me), some like one remake above the other. That's perfectly valid.

[karelysse]

Well... I can't take the trend that's been taken in the fandom of writing ooc porn fics not bc I'm qce, but bc it brings really bad memories from when I was in the fandom of the Anime of Hetalia. There was this character that represented spain and was a sweet guy overall and what the fandom did? Bc he was good with kids they decided to make him a pedophile. The character of France was made a rapist bc he was very flirty with everyone, and that happened with tons of my fave characters. (1/2)

So, if that alredy made me sick and get away from the fandom, imagine it now how it is for some of us. I can’t stand ppl mking Javier a douchebag when he’s a sweet nice guy, how painful is to see yuzuru being portrayed as a nymphomaniac bc he acts sexy in some of his programs. I can’t stand extreme personality twisting and seeing the direction this fandom is taking makes me wanna stop following fs altogether and abandon my works and orphan them. At least for me this is plain awful 

hey there!you know, i’m not rly the kind to speak publicly about issues bc truly, i hate drama in general,, but i decided to answer this still bc i feel it affects me directly– not bc i feel attacked by this message or anything, but bc this is about writing fics, and i write fics, and mostly i read them, so somehow, i guess, my opinion sorta matters. 

this issue is valid & i understand your feelings– seeing a trend that is not your taste becoming proeminent in a fandom u love is frustrating. you’re obviously not the only one who feels like this bc i’ve seen lots of cc/tweets/even tumblr asks about this lately. but mostly– i’ve seen comments on fics. and i guess thats the thing that bugs me the most. 

the two problematic things seem to be 1. characterization 2. twisted sexuality/nsfw incorporation into it. 

Characterization because readers feel the version of the “character” they read is way too far off reality to be acceptable. often they are deeply flawed– they are mean, violent, sadistic, manipulative– name it. That, and u add “twisted” porn scenes, where those flaws come in full display. if this is revolting to you, i think it’s perfectly fine and normal! but there comes the trick– there is no such thing as “too far off” bc hey. this is fiction. this is the F in RPF. nobody– even the ones considered the best writers in the fandom –has a damn clue of reality. u can try and be as faithful to it as u want, everybody can argue about it. 

The thing is that the fics you consider acceptable bc they are “the closest to canon” are JUST as far off reality as those weird ones. you consider them acceptable bc they are the closest to YOUR vision of reality, bc they fit your standards, your point of view and your fantasies the best. 

Feel like only reading the TRUTH about javi and yuzu? read news articles. There is no such thing as “true”, nor “wrong” characterization. (then u can argue– in this fic, there is no character development, or no dept or no that– that’s valid critic, as long as its done in the context and setting of the story. because that’s what it is. a story.) 

Then comes porn– i’ve read so many comments on fics being like “please, please lock this” or something. well– i get you’re trying to preserve the virtue u guess your idols have– or maybe protect the kids? but you CAN’T, and i will repeat you CAN’T police the internet. something you don’t wanna read? don’t read it. if javi or yuzu stumbles on a fic where javi or yuzu rapes the other– its because they CLICKED on the fic, and somewhat, were looking for it. just like you, reader. What you CAN argue on and ask nicely is to tag stuff. that is very, very valid. i recognize not enough stuff is tagged appropriately out there, and i understand that you don’t have to read rape if that is something you don’t want to read. nobody deserves that. but remember– the author is a person, if they don’t tag something, it might be just inattention or that they thought it didnt matter. be kind. 

 telling people that they should stop writing fics, or writing altogether bc they write something that doesn’t fit your taste is not only immature and dumb, but also very mean. remember those very bad fics you read are often written by very young people. probably younger than all of you. just. be kind, please. 

Let’s not fight, as fandom, over this. let’s not shame writers bc they write things you don’t approve of in general or bc for once, they tried something different that u didn’t like. let’s not try and install this culture of “black” and “white”, “good fics” and “bad fics” w no grey zone. 

and mostly, let’s remember– a cute hanahaki disease fic, a circus au or a very long, detailed, very realistic fic of RPF is JUST as creepy as any other dark!ish fic. Damn, as a celebrity, i’d be even more creeped out by very realistic and faithful to the truth fic than by a damn vampire mary-sue self-insert au a twelve year old wrote. 

And remember the most important part: don’t like, don’t read. I haven’t clicked on any of these /problematic fics b4 today, to see what all the drama was about. Hell, i was barely even aware of their existence. Please don’t generalize a whole fandom bc of 5-6 very productive writers.

[scripttorture]

1/2 Hi! I'm the one who asked about the magical "truth serum." Thanks for answering my original question! I don't know if this changes things, but the police and the laws themselves have been portrayed as ineffective and often brutal, and the society that I'm writing about is already shaking itself apart because of huge injustices. The only times I've shown the spell in action, it's with people who were eager to co-operate anyway, and when it started to hurt the interrogation fell apart.

2/2 My MC does have lasting psychological damage from his encounters with them. If the way to proceed is to show that this technique is worse than useless, that it's one more reason why the prisons are filled with unjustly convicted people, and that the police who do this are torturers with everything that goes with that, I do think I'm in a position to write that.

For readers generally theoriginal ask with my original response is here.

 Yes that contextchanges things. It means that I think I completely misunderstood the originalask. That happens occasionally and I’m sorry about that. Thank you for being sounderstanding.

 A lot of askers tend toapologise for sending in long asks but honestly more information is morehelpful for me. Having wider context for the story helps. We’re tackling toughsubjects here and I think detail and nuance is incredibly important

 Knowing that you’reshowing this as ineffective makes all the difference.

 The original ask wasabout effects, both on the victims and society more generally. I’m going tostart with the MC, this is going to apply to victims generally though.

 I’ve got a summary ofthe commonpsychological effects of torture here. Symptoms are generally the same nomatter what technique is used (there are a few exceptions but even thoseinclude the common symptoms on the list). Victims won’t all experience the samesymptoms and it’s impossible to predict who will experience which symptoms.

 As a result I tend tosuggest picking symptoms based on what the author feels fits the character andoverall story best.

 Given the way you’reusing this magic I think memory problems would be an excellent fit for thestory.

 In the long term aftertorture memory problems can manifest in several different ways and theseproblems can occur separate or together. Broadly speaking they come in aboutthree categories: memory loss, intrusive memories and inaccurate memories.

 Memory loss can mean forgetting the traumatic incidententirely but that’s not a very common form of problem. More commonly what itmeans is forgetting chunks of time immediately before and immediately aftertorture. It can also mean a sort of long term forgetfulness which makeseveryday life much more difficult. Learning new things, remembering wherethings are, being on time- simple everyday things like that become a lot moredifficult.

 That sort memoryproblem is incredibly common and rarely shown in fiction. I’ve actually had afew survivors contact me to say they weren’t even aware what they wereexperiencing was a symptom.

 Intrusive memories are alot easier to explicitly link to torture. They’re basically continuallyremembering and going over a traumatic event. It means that the character isconstantly reminded of torture, by small everyday things. And those remindersprompt an extremely vivid, detailed memory of the abuse they suffered. It meansthinking about what they survived almost all the time.

 Inaccurate memories aremuch harder to identify as a problem from ‘inside’. They feel like normalmemories and people experience them generally are convinced that their memoryis accurate.

 They usually affectmemories of and around torture and they’re often about details. Someone mightsay that the door of the room they were tortured in was on the left, when infact it was on the right. They can affect things like remembering exactly whodid what when and in what order.

 This can makeprosecuting a torture case extremely difficult.

 For your story inparticularly I want to highlight the work Morgan et al did with US soldiers.The soldiers, who all had years of front line combat experience, went through afake capture scenario as part of a ‘training exercise’. Some of them were thenput through a ‘high stress’ interrogation which included shouting, abuse andthe sorts of clean beating US rules allowed at the time. The other had a‘low-stress’ interrogation, a chat over a hot drink.

 Morgan then tested themthe next day to see who recognised their interrogator. Depending on how theywere asked to identify the interrogator between 51-68% identified the wrong person. Most of them wereconfident they’d gotten the right person. (The paper can be found here: C AMorgan et al, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry in 2004, 27, 265-279pgs)

 The interrogations werearound four hours and I think this study is really relevant to what you want towrite. Don’t worry too much if you can’t access the paper itself. The generalpicture of memory problems are more important than the in-depth statistical andmethod analysis the paper concentrates on.

 I’ve stressed all ofthese memory problems for a reason: I think you should show this magic as worsethan useless and I think this is the most sensible way to tackle it. It’s not alie if you honestly think it’s true and our memories are incredibly prone toflaws especially when we’re stressed or in pain.

 To put that a bit morebluntly: what we think is factually true canchange if we’re in pain.

 And those falsememories can persist and feel just as ‘true’ as accurate memories.

 The next thing I thinkyou really need to consider are the police officers themselves. There’s lessresearch on torturers then torture victims but what we have overwhelminglysuggests that torturing other people causes severe mental illness in thetorturer.

 Idiscuss the kinds of effects it has in another ask here (the questionitself involves mentions of rape and sexual abuse but there are no graphicdescriptions in the question or answer).

 Have a read through ofthat because whether you focus on any of the police as characters or not ifthis system comes down that’s a lot ofpeople with those symptoms who will be out of work. Their society is goingto have to come up with a way of coping with that.

 That can take a lot ofdifferent forms. In Soviet Russia it was lethal purges. In South Africa it wasthe Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the aftermath of the Bosnian war it’sbeen one of the most successful series of war crimes trials in history.

 On the nicer end you’relooking at long term mental health programs and re-training programs, jailsentences for the worst offenders and a structured plan to get these peopleback into the community in a healthy way.

 On the worse end it’signoring the problem and ending up with a lotof people who are violent, traumatised and can’t hold down a job anymore. Thatmeans a massive uptick in homelessness and problems related to addiction (iemore demand for health services then the set up can support).

 Those are problems forthis society afterwards. During all of this the problems are gonna be a littledifferent.

 This system will haveabsolutely destroyed the public’s trust in the police force. In a way that goesbeyond the ways torture normally destroys the public’s trust in the policeforce. There is normally a drop in people volunteering information to thepolice when the police torture but in most scenarios that’s because they’reafraid people they know will be tortured not because informants are at risk oftorture themselves. But everyone istortured in this scenario, including the witnesses and the people who reportcrimes.

 Simply put people willstop reporting crimes.

 The police might usethat to argue that crime has dropped and what they’re doing works.

 In fact you’ll have asystem of more or less complete collapse. I don’t know whether crime wouldactually rise but it would certainly go unpunished.

 With no onevolunteering information and a general culture of silence the police wouldprobably respond by arresting people at random. This is pretty common inpolicing systems that have come to rely on torture.

 Not only does this meanmore brutalised, injured people and less trust in the police it also creates aculture of fear. Because under these circumstances people tend to assume that there is a reason the police took the peoplethey did. They assume the raids and the disappearances are to do with someunder lying logic even when none exists.

 I think the best thingto read for the sort of societal affects you might see is Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. And luckily it’snow available for free over here.

 The only parts of Fanon’sbook I’ve read in detail are his psychiatric notes on patients he treatedduring and after the Franco-Algerian war. These included torture victims,torturers and the families of both groups.

 But the majority of thebook is about the injustice of colonialism, shaped by Fanon’s experience of France’sbloody, unjust policy of mass detention and torture of Algerians during thewar. (For further reading on France’s torture practices in Algeria see H Alleg’sThe Question)

 You’ve essentially gota society where there is no law enforcement and at the same time citizens areperiodically and randomly pulled off the street and tortured. There’s going tobe a lot of fear and a lot of distrust of authority. People may or may not haveformed their own parallel social systems already (with their own law enforcersand their own back-room courts).

 And that’s now edgingtowards @scriptsociology’s area of expertise. This is going to be an intensely fracturedsociety with a lot of genuine grievances and a lot of really profoundly illpeople who’ll need help. I strongly suggest consulting @scriptsociology if youwant this society to be rebuilt or come together, because it’s a lot easier forsocieties in this situation to fall apart rather than come back together.

 That may not havecovered anything but I think it’s a decent broad overview. If you’ve got any morequestions feel free to ask as soon as the box is open again. :)

Disclaimer

[necromancy-savant]

My opinions on every single Shakespeare play

Most of this consists of things I wrote down a while ago when I was reading a play a day so I could keep them all straight in my head, particularly the ones I’ve only read once. 

COMEDIES

All's Well That Ends Well – Forgettable and made me roll my eyes but still better than Love’s Labor’s Lost.

As You Like It – I’m left with a lot of questions at the end of this. Does Orlando know that Rosalind was Ganymede? If he’s friends with Ganymede now, won’t he wonder what happened to him? And shouldn’t he be friends with Rosalind knowingly before marrying her? Should a relationship be built on deception like that? I guess you could say the same about Twelfth Night, but Orsino finds out Viola was disguised before marrying her so actually no, you couldn’t.

Comedy of Errors – This might just be the silliest thing I’ve ever read but it made me laugh anyway. You’d really think they’d figure out they’ve been talking to different people by the end of Act 2 at the absolute latest, but whatever. The best line by far is: “If she lives till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.” It’s because she’s really greasy.

Love's Labor's Lost - So boring and pointless I almost couldn’t finish it. Literally nothing at all happens the entire time and there’s no reason for any of them to like each other.

Measure for Measure – Having already read Henry VI Part 3 a couple of times, this was déjà vu in the worst possible way. Plus the ending was fucked up in a whole variety of ways. Also, I realized I have no idea who the protagonist is, though I guess I thought it was Isabella. Other than the malapropisms (at least one character in this play should definitely have a Twitter) and the marriages, it’s hard to see this as a comedy. The aforementioned marriages are all fucked up in their own ways, except for Claudio and Juliet who were already pretty much married so they don’t count. Isabella should have stayed a nun and stayed single, and the Duke is totally the kind of guy who wants to think he’s a good person when really he’s an irresponsible douchebag. Like just do your fucking job instead of fucking with everyone for the sake of fishing for compliments or playing the hero or whatever.

Merchant of Venice – I might be able to like this if it weren’t for the worst anti-Semitism I’ve ever been exposed to. I like Portia; I kind of wish she was in a different play. I think Antonio and Bassanio should just be together, and she could be perfectly happy being single. This is one pairing I actually think is convincing, but to be fair I’m usually not particularly invested in the idea of anyone ending up with anyone.

Merry Wives of Windsor – I had high hopes for this because Falstaff is in it, because apparently Queen Elizabeth specifically requested more Falstaff, so in that regard she knows what’s up (I disapprove of the fact that she wouldn’t let Shakespeare perform Richard II because Richard II is wonderful). This was very silly but I thought the part where Mistress Quickly mishears a ton of Latin words was funny. Also there’s this girl whose parents each want her to marry a different guy except she wants to marry a third guy who she actually likes and he likes her and stuff, and her parents are like “you can’t marry him because he hangs out with sketchy people like Prince Hal and Ned Poins” and I just think it’s hilarious that they have such a bad reputation. After Taming of the Shrew I almost didn’t want to read comedies ever again but I’m glad I stuck with it because most of them really aren’t like that at all.

Midsummer Night's Dream – I love this and I can’t even explain why and I don’t really have a good reason for liking it; it just makes me lol, especially Nick Bottom. My favorite line is “In ten lines it is too long, making it tedious.” That’s a beautiful thing to say.

Much Ado about Nothing – I actually liked this one. It’s a tiny bit like Taming of the Shrew if Taming of the Shrew wasn’t horrible. I like that the leads have a healthy relationship based on friendship and mutual respect. They say they don’t want to get married because they just don’t want to have to settle for someone they don’t like enough, which I think is a good attitude to have cause it means they take marriage seriously, and they’re too afraid to be made fun of by each other to admit they like each other. Plus everyone likes Beatrice’s wit and outgoing personality instead of saying how awful she is and that she talks too much (for the record, Kate in Taming has waaayyyyy fewer lines than I expected her to have so that’s something to think about). I like how Benedick believes Hero when she says she was framed which was a pleasant surprise since I was worried he’d take Claudio’s side. It’s the part where Beatrice says “I’d eat his heart in the marketplace” and Benedick is on their side and doesn’t question or doubt them. And he and Beatrice were good friends first without being disguised as other people, except briefly but she might have known it was him. I like that he takes the high ground at the end by saying that it doesn’t matter what he said before and he doesn’t care what anyone says because he’s happy. And I like that he’s really, really picky about what he wants in a girlfriend but her hair color doesn’t matter. That was really funny.

Taming of the Shrew – Worst thing I ever read. First it’s all rape culture, and then it;s all abusive marriage. It has everything I can’t stand about certain kinds of modern comedies.

Twelfth Night – I didn’t think I’d like this one but I actually thought it was funny and really entertaining despite the fact that I don’t care who ends up together, so that tells me it’s doing something right. I also realized I remember whole passages that I had no idea I remembered from 8th grade.

Two Gentlemen of Verona – I don’t really have any strong feelings about this except that Proteus does not deserve a happy ending and I wonder what’s going to happen the next time he sees a woman other than Julia. But I guess that’s why they call him Proteus.

HISTORIES

King John – The whole thing was kind of just a will they/won’t they with the armies of England and France, but I like how extra Constance is, and Eleanor is pretty great which is why I’m pissed that she randomly dies offstage. Philip the Bastard is also an interesting character, but I still don’t really get how he walked into court one day a bastard and left it a Plantagenet.

Richard II – Love it; truly beautiful and tragic and has some of the prettiest, deepest lines I’ve read in Shakespeare, and it’s a reflection on the meaning of kingship that’s not seen elsewhere in the Histories. Richard is also not straight and seems kind of non-binary in the versions I’ve seen and I like that. Maybe part of the reason I like both of the Richards is that I see them as not straight. I know he’s no good at being king but I love him anyway. I didn’t think he was going to die though and was rather upset; when Bolingbroke was like “convey him to the Tower” I was like “oh shit, that’s where people go to die!” I mean I know they moved locations to Pomfret castle first, but that’s when I knew what was going to happen.

Henry IV, Part I – One of my favorites. I admit that at first I didn’t like Hotspur. I admit the most offensive thing about him to me was that he says he doesn’t like poetry. He struck the kind of person I can’t stand: loud, angry, annoying, and cares about things I think are stupid. But I’ve heard some different interpretations of his character, and I saw a production where he was really endearing and that got me to really like him. He’s a true chaotic good: he cares about justice first and doesn’t care who gets in the way of it, no matter how important they are. He really doesn’t deserve to die at all. Hell, he and Hal could probably be good allies if the circumstances were different. There are some really funny parts in this and Falstaff is great, and it’s actually really insightful when he says honor is a scutcheon in a way I wouldn’t have expected from him. Prince Hal strikes me as kind of a bro but he’s definitely more sympathetic for me in this one than the other two plays he’s in.

Henry IV, Part II – Honestly not much happens in this one until the end and I’m not sure if I can forgive Hal for what he did to Falstaff. The dude was so excited to go the coronation and see him and he was just like “I know thee not, old man.” It was cold, and normally when I say that I mean it in a good way but not this time. He was basically like “fuck off and die” and that’s exactly what he did. I’m not happy about that.

Henry V – I saw a joke summary of this that said “70% armed combat, 30% jokes” and that is completely accurate. This has its moments for sure. The comic relief characters aren’t as funny as Falstaff though, and I really can’t stand Pistol and couldn’t when he was briefly in the preceding play either. There are things I like about Henry V as a character, but sometimes I question his decisions. He manages to pull it all off somehow though, and that’s impressive.

Henry VI, Part I – I love this whole tetralogy. Joan of Arc was in this and that was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. York comes off as kind of a dick though. He and Somerset are the pettiest people ever. Plus I started to get some of Margaret’s backstory, and knowing what I know now I get why she’s so done with everyone by the time of Richard III. I still don’t forgive her for everything she ever said and I still don’t think she’s 100% a victim in all of this, but to be fair it turns out she is mostly a victim in all of this, and I get that she’s a bold person who’s willing to do what it takes to come out on top and survive, and this can be both a positive and a negative quality depending on the situation.

Henry VI, Part II – This one is largely about how York and Somerset’s pettiness almost destroyed England. Aside from that, this solidified for me that I really don’t like Henry, although Margaret continued to really grow on me in this one, and I feel bad for her that she has to put up with him and basically do everything for him. In spite of this, I find their relationship to be extremely entertaining. I like the part where she punches out the Duchess of Gloucester in front of the whole court and Henry’s just like “it’s whatever, she didn’t mean it” and the part where some guy fakes a miracle and they hit him to prove he can run away and Henry’s like “how could God let this happen?” but Margaret’s like “I thought it was funny watching him run away” (and I was like SAME; she really spends this whole play saying exactly what I’m thinking at any given time, particularly when it comes to Henry) and the part where they’re running away from the battle at the end and Henry can’t keep up because of fucking course he can’t and Margaret’s like “could you be any slower?” and he’s like “maybe we should just sit here and accept our fate.” He is such a wet blanket. I spent the whole thing yelling “Henry, what is wrong with you?!” at my book. While he’s not a terrible person he is mediocre and painfully stupid and I really don’t see him as having any redeeming qualities.  Also Richard shows up for like 5 minutes at the end to collect Somerset’s head and be called an “indigested lump” by someone he just fucking met, which incidentally is the same exact thing Henry said to him. Update: I finally figured out what it is I don’t like about Henry. It’s not even what he says to Richard in the Tower (that is not even half the reason I don’t like him, but for the record even if it was the entire reason it would be an excellent reason). It’s that I see him as childish and to me that’s an extremely negative quality, though I expect it’s also what makes him endearing to some people.

Henry VI, Part III – 10/10 I love it so much, I have a strong opinion on nearly every scene. Margaret is a badass in this one, Henry continues to be an ignorant, damp slice of bread, Richard is in it, and it has my favorite scene in all of Shakespeare when he kills Henry in the Tower, and another scene I love when he says “speak thou for me and tell them what I did” and then Margaret yells at Henry and says “art thou king and wilt be forced?” and her finest moment when she kills York, and the best piece of foreshadowing I’ve ever seen when Richard says about Margaret: “why should she live to fill the world with words?” Also Edward is a fuckboy and a bad influence. I’m ashamed to share a name with him. I kind of think he died of a deadly STD; serves him right.

Richard III – Favorite Shakespeare play, best thing I’ve read in a long time, and definitely one of the top five things I’ve ever read, especially taken together with Henry VI Part 3. It’s everything tragedy should be, parts of it are extremely relatable to me personally, I’ve memorized more of both plays than I care to admit, and it’s a good thing it’s short enough that I can read it over and over because that’s exactly what I intend to do. I don’t know why reading something about someone who makes all the wrong decisions would make me feel better about my life, but I think this is exactly what Aristotle meant when he said that tragedy should be cathartic. Also Richard is definitely ace as fuck and I will fight anyone who tries to say otherwise.

Henry VIII – First of all, Katharine deserved way better. Second of all, I feel like it really glossed over the part where he created the Anglican Church just so he could divorce her. Also there was some really shameless plugging of Queen Elizabeth at the end, so I’m guessing this was written during her reign, which would explain why Henry VIII doesn’t look as bad as he does literally everywhere else I’ve seen him (update: turns out it was written later). I seem to remember that he ended up killing Anne Boleyn and that didn’t happen in this play though I was kind of waiting for it to. I’ve really never read anything this positive about him, and that’s even counting the fact that he tossed Katharine aside after seeing Anne Boleyn once at a party. And I did find out that Buckingham’s real name is Henry, although it’s not like I needed another Henry to keep track of.

TRAGEDIES

Antony and Cleopatra – I really didn’t care for this one. Cleopatra seems like kind of a stereotype to me and I’m not terribly invested in either her or Antony. Romance isn’t really my thing unless it’s super compelling for some special reason or unless I like both the characters individually. This has neither of those qualifiers.

Coriolanus – I didn’t like this very much, even though it’s about Rome. Coriolanus is not a compelling figure to me; the whole premise is that he’s good at fighting but he’s also an asshole, and neither one of those things is interesting to me. Honestly the only part of this that isn’t extremely boring is Volumnia.

Hamlet – I hadn’t read this in a really long time and didn’t remember any of it, and I liked it more than I thought I would. It’s kind of gothic in a wonderful way, even though I know that’s not an appropriate term to use for something written at the time it was written. Honestly though, my liking for Hamlet as a character was severely diminished when he started making dirty comments to Ophelia, and she seemed way more sympathetic than I remember her being. The common theme in many of these tragedies seems to be a protagonist who is lost and overwhelmed and ends up lashing out because of it. The speeches in Hamlet are the best part for me by far, but yeah. As someone who likes language and anything dark, I like it.

Julius Caesar – This I quite liked; I think Brutus is a compelling character and it raises some interesting questions. It also contains the most passive-aggressive thing I’ve ever read. Although, during Act I when Cassius is trying to convince Brutus to kill Caesar, all I hear is “Brutus is just as nice as Caesar. Brutus is just as cute as Caesar, okay, people like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar.” Honestly I think Tina Fey purposely paraphrased Cassius’s lines when writing Mean Girls, which is pretty cool. I liked it when I auditioned for it and I’ve come to really love it, having been in it. I want to see more productions of this one.

King Lear – It’s grown on me over time, I guess. I do have some strong opinions on why Cordelia is actually kind of awful. I like Edmund and Regan and Cornwall, and Goneril have their moments, but none of these characters really get enough air time for me to like the play. What there is a lot of is Lear who is just depressing on multiple levels and his fool who annoys me with his overuse of the word “nuncle” even though I know it’s fairly normal for words in English to lose an /n/ at the beginning due to our articles like how “apron” used to be “napron” until people thought “a napron” was “an apron.” And there’s a lot of Edgar and Kent and Gloucester, none of whom I’m convinced to care about even though I have nothing against them. So overall I still think it is confusing and needlessly depressing, but I am slowly warming up to it. Like, I already know life is pointless, I don’t need something to tell me that like it’s some kind of revelation.

Macbeth – I really don’t understand Macbeth as a character. You think he’d be able to say “no” to murder seeing as he has no real interest in it. I don’t find it romantic at all that he does whatever crazy thing Lady Macbeth wants. I find it kind of disturbing, and certainly not something that reflects well on him. At first it seems like Lady Macbeth should just get rid of him and do everything herself if she’s going to be like that, and I don’t understand why she can’t bring herself to kill Duncan if she wants him dead so badly, and then she loses it halfway through the play and that’s always a let-down. Also isn’t this the one that has the line where it’s like “your father’s been murdered” -“oh, by whom?” and “what, you egg”? As funny as that is it doesn’t exactly speak volumes to Macbeth as having the greatest dialogue all the time. In conclusion, I want to like this play but I really don’t get what’s wrong with either Macbeth or Lady Macbeth and so I can’t really get into it.

Othello – This was always one of my favorites. I always thought Othello and Desdemona’s relationship was really beautiful and romantic in Act I but for some reason my liking of Othello never stops me from being intrigued by what Iago’s going to do next. There’s something appealing to me about being able to always say the right thing and having the self-confidence to make everyone do what you think they should do. That said, having now seen a Shakespeare villain who is manipulative (in an extremely different sort of way) but has motives and a personality, he seems really boring by comparison. I kind of get now how he’s just a plot device, and that does make Othello an even more sympathetic character. And it’s really heartbreaking how he thinks he’s not good enough for Desdemona and has to deal with his worst fears being confirmed after he’s had so much shit to deal with already. I think anyone would break.

Romeo and Juliet - I got tired of it a long time ago and honestly it’s not that good. It’s just kind of average. I get that people have to fall in love quickly in a play that can’t just go on for 10 hours but I still can’t bring myself to care about the characters. Juliet is mildly interesting but Romeo is just a boring person and I don’t care for him at all. Plus I feel like there’s a weird age difference between them considering she’s like 13 or 14 and he’s probably like 18. I’m probably just too ace for this play but I don’t get the appeal. (Update: I’ve now been in this play and I still don’t really get it. I don’t have anything against it but it doesn’t do too much for me either. I liked being in it a whole lot, but it wouldn’t be my top choice for something I want to watch).

Timon of Athens – I feel like there was the potential for this to be a good story about someone who kept giving people material things to get them to like him to the point of running himself into the ground (ha, literally) only to discover that doing that doesn’t actually make you real friends, but it never really came together for me. So good idea, not so sure about the execution, although my book thinks that Shakespeare only wrote part of it and Thomas Middleton wrote the rest so that probably has something to do with it.

Titus Andronicus – This has its moments but it’s not as violent as I thought it would be, which is not good for something that’s known for being violent. My first big problem with it is that Chiron and Demetrius get off way too easy. I was waiting the whole play for them to die horribly only to be let down. Being baked into pies hurts Tamora, not them, and I hate them so much that I’m out of fucks to give about her. My second big problem is that Titus is a selfish piece of shit. He fucking kills Lavinia because her condition is just too painful for him. He complains that he only has 5 children left but he kills two of them himself, on stage. I like Aaron in spite of myself, or at least I like a lot of his speeches; they’re a lot of fun to read. I was surprised that he wanted his child to live even if he couldn’t take care of it personally, but I have no idea how to feel about that because on the one hand I can see how it’s a redeeming quality, and so I like that there’s some effort to humanize him, but on the other hand I wish it was done a different way because that’s not something I have any basis to understand. All this said if I had the chance to see this performed, I admittedly would.

Troilus and Cressida – I’m confused because I spent most of this thinking it took place before the events of the Iliad when actually it was pretty much a different version of the same story, which is disappointing because as much as I love the Iliad, I already have the Iliad. As for Troilus and Cressida themselves, I was rolling my eyes when she thought she had to play hard to get, but then happy when he said that was never necessary and was just happy to be with her even though she thought she was embarrassing herself by expressing her feelings for him; he didn’t shame her for it and that perception was all in her head. But then she didn’t really have any choice but to go with Diomedes, so it’s not fair for Troilus to be mad at her. Plus they only just got together and they weren’t official or anything. He’s a bit of a dumbass, to be honest, even though he and Cressida have some sweet moments. I kind of like Thersites; he seems like my kind of guy. He hates lechery, doesn’t care for war, and thinks most of the Greek generals are full of themselves, which is pretty accurate. I like that he rejects the kind of masculinity most of them embrace where they just fight in order to get women. He thinks they’re the dumbest people ever for engaging in all of that, and frankly I think it’s pretty idiotic too. However, I don’t like that he makes fun of Achilles and Patroclus for being gay. There are already so many good reasons to make fun of Achilles.

ROMANCES

Winter’s Tale – I didn’t have any strong feelings about this until the end, but now I’m wondering where Hermione was for 16 years? I guess she stayed hidden somewhere, but how did she know when the right time to come back would be? Like that was some really good timing. I mean I guess I’m glad Leontes got his shit and part of his family together but to me that doesn’t really make for anything particularly memorable. And I don’t recall him actually apologizing to Hermione or Perdita, so he should really get on that.

Cymbeline – I wasn’t particularly expecting to like this, but I did. It had some of the same elements of the Winter’s Tale except it was way better and I liked the characters more – don’t get me wrong, it was still really…I’m not sure what the right word is, when all the male characters are assholes and they do awful things to Imogen and then she magically forgives them at the end, but at least I felt somewhat invested in her and her brothers, and there were some funny parts, but the part with the ghosts was really weird and I don’t know what to make of it. There are some weird parts in the Romances and I’m not feeling that.

Pericles – Not quite my cup of tea but I don’t hate it. I admit I don’t really like how it takes place over, what, decades? Plus I’ve never heard of this particular Pericles in my life. I totally thought it was going to be about the Athenian statesman. But I did like that it takes place partially in the Near/Middle East, even if it’s just the parts that were part of the Greek world (I’m guessing Hellenistic). But I liked the story well enough and I like that Pericles isn’t an asshole unlike Leontes or Cymbeline, and I like how Marina and Thaisa both were just dropped on a beach somewhere and by the time Pericles finds them they’re at the top of the societies they entered, and how the guy who was going to take Marina’s virginity was really embarrassed and gave her a bunch of money and was supportive when he found out she didn’t want to.

The Tempest – I actually enjoy this and I think it’s a fun play. Caliban is hilarious and I actually like that it turns out not to be a revenge story. Sometimes it’s nice to see someone be the bigger person and have everyone live, even if it’s not cathartic in the same way. There are some really cool interpretations out there but even on the surface I find it quite entertaining and I think there’s something to be said for something that makes me happy for no reason.

[chromemuffin]

Captive Prince Liveblogging Chapters 2 & 3

I’m trying not to read so fast I want to enjoy this but urrrgh it’s hard. I need to know what happens next.

Also, know that despite my weird half-criticizing/half-wtf comments, I’m actually enjoying the story immensely.

omg Damen you are kind of as much of as a little shit as you keep making Laurent out to be. love the snark, but I kinda fear for him a little, it’s like he has no self-preservation

“How was the Prince’s mood?” “Delightful.”

How do you expect to make it out in one piece when you keep snarking at people who have control over your very life at the moment.

Another stare, as though this answer was in some way suspect.

That’s because it is, coming from you.

Wonder what Damen is like when he’s not, you know, backed into a corner and basically powerless to do anything except snark. Is he like this normally? That’d be glorious.

did his best to look grateful and accepting.

did his best to look grateful and accepting. And just how grateful and accepting was that, I wonder.

ok but your half-brother ran you through with a sword when you were thirteen. wtf He hadn’t wanted to believe Kastor would be a traitor, but how could he not when the memory of him stabbing Damen stirs up worse feelings than the wound he received from an enemy in battle. And he was actually happy when it happened?? Did no one tell you people aren’t supposed to actually get run through in practice sessions.

Well, OKAY, did not expect him to walk into an orgy. But ok, where and what culture(s) is Vere based on? I have no clue, but I like the descriptions we get of the place. I just can’t quite pin where I’ve seen that type of decoration before...Well, the text gives the right amount of vivid detail; not too much/too flowery, and not too little where it counts. I am actually fond of heavily descriptive writing, but that can go wrong in so many ways.

Anyway, enough of that.

There was something obscene about someone with a face like that speaking those words in a conversational voice.

omg yeah I did not expect him to talk like that. Maybe it’s just because it’s late and I’m delirious, but god the words that come out of their mouths are morbidly hilarious. Can’t wait until they’re on more even footing and can actually exchange their words freely.

Although, kudos to Damen. He actually bit his tongue here. Wonder how long it will last.

What is élan. What language are these people speaking. Based on the places on the map, is it a vague France-like place? Maybe?

What the ever loving fuck their entertainment is rape. Okaaaay. I’m actually sort of surprised because this is something that gives me fanfic-y vibes, but the fact that it made it into a published novel that is not labeled erotica is a plus. Although it’s totally fucked up, I like that it’s there to set up how, well, fucked up this world is. 

But, at least I can see why people say the narrative doesn’t justify it, because Damen is clearly disgusted. He’s also an unreliable narrator because he obviously believes his country’s version of slavery is much better, but that’s a discussion for another time.

I also like the line breaks in the narrative, well timed there to fit with Damen’s thought process.

Damen is compared to a dog a lot, perhaps because of his current position and social standing. Reminds me of my old teacher’s Newfoundland/Mastiff mixes. Huge, fluffy, cuddly dogs, very loyal, but surprisingly vicious to prey animals.

Curious as to how Laurent ends up as adored as he is, because he’s a biiit of an asshole at the moment. Even if you don’t take what Damen says about him at face value, because he has a glaring bias at the moment.

Ah, yes, for once Damen is saying something smart in front of the guy who currently owns his life. Something that won’t get him killed. Good for him.

I really want to know what the heck is going on in Laurent’s head right now. Obviously, we can’t really trust whatever Damen observes in him, but something is obviously going on with his thought process right now.

Ok, but this time his snapping was understandable and good for him for laying down the line he will not cross.

Chapter 3

Oh, look, a name I might be able to pronounce: Jord. Unless this place really is based off French, in which case I’m back at square one.

Damen’s understanding of Laurent rearranged itself, in order that he might despise him more accurately.

I love this line, it is gold. And his understanding is going to have to rearrange itself a shit ton of times more if they are ever going to get to the couple status they seem to have in the fandom. But, it’s still early. Page 33 of book 1, out of 3 volumes.

...talk like he’d been raised on the floor of a brothel.

Ah, yes, a perfect way to describe last chapter’s one-sided conversation.

“...I see you haven’t struck anyone all morning, well done.”

Probably because he was too tired to do so, but also yes, he is behaving himself seeing as how fucking deep a hole he is buried in at the moment.

lol I was literally just thinking that Damen doesn’t talk like a regular soldier guy, and he states it outright in the text. He’s better at dodging topics and maneuvering around conversations like this than I thought initially.

Again, wondering what’s going on in Laurent’s head that he’s not worried that Damen might attack him. He hasn’t really given off the impression of skilled enough to contest him.

haha what the hell are these clothes that he had to give Damen a hint on where to start undoing them, I hope they are only for the nobility otherwise that would be highly impractical.

Ok but at least this time Damen is not immediately drawn to his looks, seeing as his animosity towards Laurent trumps his attraction. So, we get a whole paragraph of how glorious Damen thinks Laurent’s body is and he says that his animosity trumps his attraction, sure, you keep thinking that

oh no he did it again. that mouth of yours, Damen, how do you survive book 1

Probably everything in Vere looked like part of a harem.

pffft

So Damen is (for now) attracted to him so long as he shuts his mouth? ha

“the words just came out” and “there was nothing to keep them in check”

not that he was doing a great job of this before, but

and he keeps mouthing off oh my god

damn, poor guy, as if the first time wasn’t enough?? Geez. STILL WONDERING HOW THESE TWO GET TOGETHER

“I was curious what kind of man you were.”

hm, and I’m curious to know what the heck he’s thinking. For now, at least through Damen’s pov, it seems that Laurent staged everything from the fight to potentially his actions in the baths, though that last bit wasn’t guaranteed or anything. idk

OH yeah they’ve been hinting that Damen was the one who killed Laurent’s brother, and I vaguely recall reading that somewhere before. It’s all very hazy though, what these two consider ‘honorable’ behavior. hm

And that’s the end! Looking back, those two chapters were intense to say the least. It’s very well written to display Damen’s emotions, particular the times he gets disoriented for one reason or another.

I’m trying to keep myself from reading the whole first book in one night but it’s haaard...

[canofsweetyams-blog]

RapeMeShirt

Disclaimer: I promise the title is more provocative than the actual post itself. 

My whole life and especially during this trip, I’ve always found the male/female dynamic in society fascinating. I want to say I’m a feminist, but that term has been warped and manipulated to have so many connotations that I have to be careful how I say it otherwise people just stop listening to me. So I am “a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” 

Sounds familiar, right?

That is Chimamanda Adichie’s dictionary definition of feminism from her We Should All be Feminists essay and also featured in Beyonce’s “Flawless” track. And that’s my type of feminist. Also, according to Roxanne Gay, I’d be considered “the bad feminist” which is basically just a woman who is living her dreams and doing what ever the fuck she wants to do and not shaming other women in the process. Also me, most of the time. And there’s nothing bad about being a “bad feminist.” Read the book. 

For most of you reading this, you’re probably like “womp, womp, womp...I know this already.” But I’m hoping someone is reading this and is like “Oh, I never knew. I’m enlightened. I’m a feminist too!” Because while society is evolving, some days I feel like I have a big scarlet “A” on my forehead. Particularly on this journey. 

So now that I’ve given you a vocabulary lesson, let’s get to the juicy stuff. If you want to study feminism or gender dynamics, Indian culture is a great place to start. I think India gave birth to feminism. Just check out Buzzfeed’s “11 Incredible Women From Indian History Who Should Be Your Role Models:”

1. Kittur Chennamma -- led an armed rebellion against the East India Company.

2. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit -- the first woman (and first Indian) president of the United Nations General Assembly.

3. Savitribai Phule -- started India's first school for girls.

4. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay -- social activist and Indian freedom fighter.

5. Captain Prem Mathur -- the first woman pilot in India.

6. Sarojini Naidu -- the "Nightingale of India."

7. Sucheta Kriplani, the first woman Chief Minister in India.

8. Asima Chatterjee -- the first Indian woman to receive the Doctorate of Science from an Indian university.

9. Justice Anna Chandy -- the first female judge in India, and the first woman in India to become a High Court judge.

10. Captain Lakshmi Sahgal -- Indian independence revolutionary.

11. Rani Lakshmibai -- led rebellion against the British.

Every other woman is a rebel! Like, France had Joan of Arc, but we had multiple Joans. This list doesn’t even include Indira Gandhi, first female prime minister of India. Honestly, she’s nothing compared to some of these ladies. 

So after doing a little research on Indian Women’s history, I thought, well damn, Indian men must worship the ground women walk on. They worship female gods so why not mortal females themselves.  

Not the case at all. Rape is the fourth most common crime against women in India. According to the National Crime Records Bureau 2013 annual report, 24,923 rape cases were reported across India in 2012. Out of these, 24,470 were committed by someone known to the victim (98% of the cases).

And I’ve done a grand job of making India seem like this 3rd world, bobo country. It’s definitely far from that. Rape stats in the U.S. are quite alarming, but that’s for a different blog. I just assumed in a country where women hold political and religious power, this wouldn’t be as large of an issue.

And what’s even more messed up is I’ve heard of women who were raped, and the perpetrator said things like “you were asking for it” because of the clothes she was wearing or because of the job she had. I didn’t know my clothes could say “Hey dude! Come here and rape me!” Apparently ladies, the RapeMeShirts are 50% off at your local H&M and 100% visible to men everywhere.

I’ve had plenty of guy friends look at girls and judge her by the way she’s dressed and been like, “Oh yeah, she’s asking for it.” And my response is “What language are you speaking because she’s not saying anything. She’s just standing there.” 

So subconsciously women are aware that men hear these weird invisible voices that say “Hey! Go undress that woman with your eyes and make her feel super uncomfortable. Yeah, she wants it!” so women start responding proactively by doing the following:

1. Dressing conservatively - no showing legs, chest, shoulders, belly or anything too fitting. Like I’ll awkwardly wear scarves with v-neck shirts to avoid looking too busty. 

2.  Don’t smile or be friendly toward men - You’re asking for it if you do!

3. Slut shame the women who break rule #1 or 2 - Because women are also conditioned to believe a woman is “asking for it” by the way she dresses (i.e. wearing the RapeMeShirt). Now, the RapeMeShirt goes from being a metaphor to being reality. It’s a full on clothing line at Body Central.

I slut shame. I’m trying consciously to stop. But I’ve realized it’s a product of hanging around too many guys who think girls are asking for something by the way they dress or walk or talk.   

BUT THIS IS WHAT GRINDS MY GEARS: Men can run shirtless or swim shirtless and it’s all good. Women, you wear just a sports bra to the gym...BOOM, RapeMeShirt. You’re a loose lady. Men, stare like they’ve never seen boobs before. And yes, I stare at dudes too, but I quickly look away before I get caught staring out of respect for the dude so he doesn’t feel violated. But apparently, guys don’t feel violated. They just get their egos fed. 

So in a nutshell, in India (and probably the rest of the world) women do certain things to avoid men from doing certain BAD things to women. The certain actions women take include: dressing a certain way, not walking alone at night, not taking a rickshaw at night alone, not living in a slightly sketchy part of town, carrying pepper spray, being mindful of her drink at parties, not being too nice, not being too mean, not having too many guy friends, etc. 

Apparently all these things can suggest something to guys that girls have no intention of suggesting. Who knew. And we do these things, not as a precaution to avoid getting mugged, but to avoid getting assaulted. Boys, you’re biologically equipped with a piping hot gun in your pants, and girls, all we got is MAN-made pepper spray. The irony.

And of course, this doesn’t apply to all guys, but many. Rape culture is so alive in this world. I was on a train traveling through southern India. And I felt someone tickling my feet in my sleep. I woke up. Some dude was tickling me and watching me sleep. WHAT THE FUCK. I wasn’t even wearing a RapeMeShirt. I was wearing a normal t-shirt. Athletic capris. No make-up. Drool hanging out my mouth. Creepy. But that was just 1 out of 100 guys creepily watching me on that train. And I get paranoid. And scared. And I don’t deserve that. No woman does. 

So fellas, rule of thumb. If she wants you, she’ll say “I want you.” If she doesn’t verbally say that, she doesn’t want you. 

Stop listening to the invisible voices. And if you’re going to rip off a piece of clothing, let it be the metaphorical RapeMeShirt so women can be liberated to be women

sans fear.

[chloekapita]

PLEASE READ THIS February 2, 2017. Police in France are again facing allegations of brutality after an officer was charged with the rape of a young black man during a violent arrest in a suburb of Paris.
 Four officers arrived at a housing estate in Aulnay-sous-Bois, north of Paris, on Thursday evening, where they began stopping youths and asking to see identity papers. During the operation, a 22-year-old man with no criminal record, identified only by his first name, Theo, was allegedly forced to the ground and beaten. A police officer has now been charged with anally raping the young man with a police baton. Theo suffered such serious injuries to the rectum that he needed major emergency surgery, and remains in hospital. Three other officers were charged with assault. The four officers, who deny the charges, have been suspended. Theo testimony at the hospital: "I knew that where they were leading me there were no surveillance cameras so I tried to defend myself to be in front of the cameras. I said you have ripped my bag and they told me "we don't care". I told them "why are you doing this?" And they kept insulting me. One of them looked at me, he was behind me, but I could see him. He pulled out his baton and put it inside of me. I fell on the floor, I didn't have any strength anymore. They handcuffed me and told me to sit down but I say I couldn't so they sprayed tear gas. In the car I was bleeding and they made jokes about it. They continued to bit me and say racist insults. My pants was down it hurt really bad. I thought I was about to die." Theo is not a thug like they try to portray him in the media. His family is well known in the neighborhood. They are known for being good people. Theo has never committed a crime, he works as an animator in a youth centre. After Adama Traore (young black men who was killed by police officer for no reason in 2016) this is what we have. And once again the officers will get away with this Like I really don't understand what is going on right now. And all the medias in France find a way to try to make us believe that somehow this innocent young man deserve what happened because of where he lives and his skin color. I just can't with this fucking people anymore. Black people and Arabic people have been in this country for years, we work here, we pay are fucking tax here, we participate to the French culture and they still treat us like shit. My grand father who lived in Africa fought for this fucking country when Congo still was a colony. Like I don't understand... this is why I wasn't fucking Charlie, this is why in France a lot is young people (not only black and Arabic) choose to go to Syria or to commit fucking terrorist acts in the country they were born. How can you be proud of a country who treats you like shit? That is not normal. This fucking situation is not normal. Fucking hypocrits "country of liberties", "country of human rights" Bullshit. The whole social situation of this country is wrong, it's like we keep moving backwards. France= racist, misogynist and islamophobic. I can wait to get out of here. Ps: I'm sorry for all the grammatical errors and misspelling but I had to share this story to show the real face of France. I'm so angry and sad at the same time this situation is completely fucked up.

[allaboveall]

Silver Linings Review: Top Badass Moments of 2016 to Inspire You in 2017

This week is going to be tough one - full of Trump foolishness, nominations nonsense, and who knows what else. To inspire you in the face of all this, here are some of the throwback moments I’m holding close from the last year. It’s easy to look back on 2016 with a pessimism: after all, the reality of Donald Trump as our next President has shaken many of us to our core. But we cannot let that erase the fact that in many ways, 2016 was a year of women kicking butt all over the place, whether it was with athletic prowess, astrophysics, policy, or musical brilliance:

10. Women shine at the Olympics.

It may seem like a long time ago now, but 2016 was the year of the Woman Olympian. They broke records: Simone Biles’ feats of gymnastic excellence made her the most decorated U.S. gymnast ever in a single Olympics, while Katie Ledecky brought in four golds and a silver medal as she broke not one but TWO world records. They also broke barriers: Ibtihaj Muhammad became the first American athlete to compete in the Olympics while wearing a hijab. She also won a bronze medal in fencing. As Muhammad said to US Magazine, “A lot of people don’t believe that Muslim women have voices or that we participate in sport…I want to break cultural norms.”

From gymnastics, to swimming, to fencing, women Olympians inspired us all.

GIF credit: https://giphy.com/gifs/gymnastics-women-usa-PzCQrX9zzGLx6

9. Beyoncé’s Lemonade changes the game.

What do we say about King Bey’s Lemonade that hasn’t already been said in a million think pieces and tribute gifs? First came the surprise “Formation” video. Then the explosive Super Bowl performance. Then the transformative Lemonade. THEN, she capped it all off with that defiant and joyful performance of “Daddy Lessons” with the Dixie Chicks at the damn COUNTRY MUSIC AWARDS.

Whatever else we say about 2016, it will go down as the year Beyoncé slayed. And slayed. And slayed. OK.

GIF credit: https://giphy.com/gifs/formation-black-power-section-12-6WbZfpAkmosgg

8.  Latina Scientists discover Einstein’s gravitational waves.

This year, Argentina-born Dr. Gabriela Gonzalez and Mexican-American Dr. France A. Cordova accomplished the impressive feat of detecting gravitational waves from two black holes colliding, a discovery that confirms many of Albert Einstein’s theories about the universe. This discovery by these Latina scientists is one for the history books!

Image Credit: girabsas.com

7. Purvi Patel is released from jail.

In 2013, Purvi Patel was imprisoned and sentenced to 20 years for feticide and the neglect of a dependent—all because she ended a pregnancy on her own. The story is shocking – after all, no woman should fear arrest or jail for ending a pregnancy, losing a pregnancy, or seeking medical help. A small measure of justice was won for Purvi when she was released from prison in September. This case also creates an important precedent that strikes back against disturbingly widespread state laws that criminalize a woman for ending her pregnancy.

Image credit: SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective

6. Survivors shine light on sexual assault.

A major highlight from this year’s Oscars was Lady Gaga’s performance of her Oscar-nominated song, “Til It Happens To You.” She was introduced by Vice President Joe Biden and ultimately joined onstage by survivors of sexual assault. This was an important moment of visibility for survivors of sexual assault, who also made headlines later in the year when the #NotOkay hashtag moved women from around the world to share their stories of sexual assault and rape.

GIF credit: https://giphy.com/gifs/lady-gaga-till-it-happens-to-you-the-hunting-ground-SKIVBph41yAOk

5. Women bare it all at the RNC.

Back when it was just sinking in that Trump would be the Republican nominee, 100 women posed nude while holding mirrors as part of an art installation protesting the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. While their motives and politics were reportedly very diverse, there’s no question that the women’s agency over their bodies carried extra resonance this election season. Whatever their reasons, it was a powerful moment and brave demonstration.

Photo credit: Lindsey Byrnes.

4. Women strike against abortion ban in Poland.

This year saw women across the planet declaring their human rights and resisting schemes to take those rights away. Polish women organized a massive strike to protest an abortion ban. It was incredible to watch – and is a tactic we may need to learn from if Trump, Pence, and their cronies in Congress have their way.

Image Credit: The Guardian.

3. The Supreme Court declares that abortion must be accessible in real life.

Think back to late June: people gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court to hear the happy news – in a 5:3 decision, SCOTUS struck down Texas’ clinic shutdown law, HB 2. This landmark decision affirmed that a woman should be able to get an abortion with dignity, respect, and WITHOUT politicians standing in the way. In the wake of that decision, several other clinic shutdown laws fell. While there is still a lot to be done, this was a huge moment.

Photo credit: All* Above All (Flickr)

2. “This is not normal.” Michelle Obama responds to Trump’s videotaped admission and history of sexual violence.

When Michelle Obama took the stage in New Hampshire shortly after the video surfaced of our now President-elect bragging about sexually assaulting women, she articulated beautifully and painfully what so many of us had been feeling. It’s worth quoting at length:

“It's that feeling of terror and violation that too many women have felt when someone has grabbed them, or forced himself on them and they've said no but he didn't listen — something that we know happens on college campuses and countless other places every single day. It reminds us of stories we heard from our mothers and grandmothers about how, back in their day, the boss could say and do whatever he pleased to the women in the office, and even though they worked so hard, jumped over every hurdle to prove themselves, it was never enough.

We thought all of that was ancient history, didn't we? And so many have worked for so many years to end this kind of violence and abuse and disrespect, but here we are in 2016 and we're hearing these exact same things every day on the campaign trail. We are drowning in it…

This is not normal.”

With this speech, Michelle gave us the mantra we’ll need to get through the next four years, and face down the regressive policies Trump has promised. This. Is. Not. Normal.

Image Credit: The Nation.

1. A major party presidential candidate spoke out against the Hyde Amendment!

Even as we grieve, and cry, and even fear for our safety and the lives and well-being of those we love, we must remember this: More than 64 million Americans voted for a future where women are treated as human, and where the amount of money you have doesn’t determine whether you can get an abortion. Sixty-four million Americans voted to move forward, not backward, for love instead of hate, compassion instead of division. By a margin of more than 2 million, Americans voted for Secretary Hillary Clinton, the candidate who supported women’s health and rights and spoke out against the Hyde Amendment. While we won’t get to welcome her into the White House, we’ll always remember when she said:

“Any right that requires you to take extraordinary measures to access it is no right at all… [N]ot as long as we have laws on the book like the Hyde Amendment making it harder for low-income women to exercise their full rights.”

Here’s what I’ve learned from this year: women are STRONG AS HELL. We can do anything. We are resilient, we are talented, we are driven, and we resist. And that’s exactly what we’ll need to do to hold onto what we’ve won and keep fighting forward for as long as we have to.

Image credit: http://hbz.h-cdn.co/assets/16/44/980x653/gallery-1478362069-ev2i1649-dv-1024x683.jpg

[mcdouglecompany-blog]

Ann Coulter - U.S. Isn't Becoming Europe. We're Becoming Rome, 12 Shocking Facts About North Korean Soldiers and Who sold the solid fuel missiles to North Korea?

Ann Coulter - U.S. Isn't Becoming Europe. We're Becoming Rome, 12 Shocking Facts About North Korean Soldiers and Who sold the solid fuel missiles to North Korea?

  Ann Coulter talks w/Joe Concha & Lis Wiehl

https://youtu.be/Q5lCATuGfEk

Random Perfecta

Published on May 24, 2019

  Ann Coulter on the Lars Larson Radio Show

https://youtu.be/u07l9E9-VfU

Random Perfecta

Published on May 24, 2019

  U.S. Isn't Becoming Europe. We're Becoming Rome by Ann Coulter.

https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2019/05/22/us-isnt-becoming-europe-were-becoming-rome-n2546764 3/7

U.S. Isn't Becoming Europe. We're Becoming Rome Can we have a quick reality check and acknowledge that what is happening to America is a million times worse than what's happening in Europe and is of much greater consequence? Conservatives regularly point to the mass migration afflicting Europe as if it's the Ghost of Christmas Future for America. Since waves of Third World migrants began sweeping into the European Union, we've seen terrorism, knifings, rape gangs and riots popping up all over the birthplace of Western civilization. Sweden has gone from a country where rape was essentially nonexistent to the Rape Capital of the World. It's sweet of Americans to be so concerned about Europe, but maybe they should look at their own country. On account of a mass immigration policy imposed on us by our government, the United States has undergone a transformation unprecedented in all of world history. From 1620 to 1970, the U.S. was demographically stable -- not to be confused with "a nation of immigrants." The country was about 85% to 90% white, almost entirely British, German, French and Dutch, and 10% to 15% African American. (The American Indian population, technically in their own nations, steadily plummeted -- an example of how vast numbers of new people can displace the old, both accidentally and on purpose.) In a generation, the white majority has nearly disappeared, while the black percentage has remained about the same, with more than 90% of African Americans still native-born. White Americans are one border surge away from becoming a minority in their own country. In 2016, non-Hispanic whites were 61.3% of the population and 54% of all births. That was two years ago, before Trump came in and flung open the border to all of Latin America, especially children and pregnant ladies hoping to have an anchor baby. Back in 1995, the Census Bureau estimated that whites would decline to about 64% of the population by 2020. Today, the Census Bureau projects the nation will be less than 60% white by then. We're moving faster than even La Raza could have hoped!

This isn't about race -- though it might be of some concern to the rapidly diminishing white population that our cultural overlords are so tormented by "whiteness." E.g.: "The Unbearable Whiteness of Congress" -- The Daily Beast "Whiteness is terrorism" -- Trinity College professor Johnny Eric Williams on Twitter "The Problem of Whiteness" -- course at University of Wisconsin-Madison "Abolish the White Race" -- Harvard Magazine ("The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.") This stunning demographic replacement matters because American culture is the envy of the world. Not only was this wonderful culture created by white Western Europeans, but merely asking immigrants to assimilate to it is generally considered a hate crime. If everyone assimilated to our culture, who cares what race they are? But given sufficient numbers, they don't. They don't need to, and we certainly aren't asking them to. The reason we successfully assimilated not-so-different European cultures was that we controlled the numbers -- essentially stopping immigration for 50 years while we forged an American character. Let's compare our demographic situation to the European countries we're weeping over. France is still about 80% French (85% Western European), and England is about 80% English (85% Western European). Even Holland is still approximately 76% Dutch (80% Western European). What we're witnessing in Europe is that continent's first brush with the joys of diversity.

  American conservatives' obsession with Europe's snail-like introduction to diversity, while ignoring a demographic tsunami in their own country, is the mirror image of neoconservatives' fixation on unrest in the Middle East, while ignoring the invasion on our border.

When did it become deplorable, Walmart-y behavior to care about your own country? Not to care more, but merely to care as much as you do about the rest of the world? It seems as if progress is inevitable, that things always get better and never retrogress. But the Roman Empire had philosophers, literature, science, great buildings, statues and works of art. It had advanced communication, plumbing and transportation systems. It had a universal set of measures, laws and rules. And then the Dark Ages came. In the blink of an eye, all that was lost. The people no longer had the technological knowhow even to repair bridges and aqueducts built by the Romans. They had lost the ability to make cement. They lost many of the works of Aristotle. Roads and plumbing fell into disrepair. Statues crumbled. Nikki Haley would be happy! Only centuries later did civilization begin to reassert itself, barely climbing back to the accomplishments of several centuries earlier. Whatever the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire, one thing is for damn sure: There were not vast bands of powerful Romans prattling about "Roman privilege," demanding that the Huns be given preference over Romans and writing articles with titles like "Abolish the Romans!" That is the driving impulse of one of our two major political parties. The other party can't bestir itself to care about anything other than tax cuts, abortion and moving our embassy to Jerusalem.

Ann Coulter's Latest Book Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind is available on Amazon

  12 Shocking Facts About North Korean Soldiers. https://youtu.be/op7N3MGhUtk

Published on Aug 2, 2018

You’ve probably heard scary stories about the lives of the 25 million people in the reclusive and isolated nation of North Korea. If things are so rough for ordinary people, imagine how hard it must be for those serving in the military! Let’s see what it’s like to be a soldier in the North Korean army. Terrible nutrition, uniforms that injure soldiers, no way to escape and even worse conditions for women who suffer emotionally and physically - things get really tough and even more horrible you could imagine.

SUMMARY -Every man must serve his country for 10 years, and every woman must serve for 7. Guys lucky enough to get into university and get a bachelor’s degree are allowed to serve for 5 years after graduation. -The Worker-Peasant Red Guards has somewhere between 1.5 and 6 million reservists. There are also teenage soldiers. -North Korean soldiers go through hard military training on raw corn kernels or a few potatoes a day. Many soldiers pass away from hunger and related health conditions. -According to former soldiers, the boots they wear in cold winter months are thin and stuffed with cotton for reasons of economy. -During their 7 years of compulsory military service, many women fall victim to sexual violence or humiliation. -Kim Jong-un forced his army to throw landmines into the Yellow Sea, which would resurface in South Korea and kill locals and tourists. -If some North Korean soldiers refuse to support violence, their army commanders are working to change that. They spend about 60% of their time learning the “right” ideology. -When interviewed, former soldiers described how they had to pay for their treatment, and, even when they did, all they got was alcohol rubbed on them. -Personalities often shift so greatly that there’s nothing that can bring things back to normal. -Kim Jong-un doesn’t approve of defection, especially when soldiers try to flee the country. Running away abroad often seems like the only route to safety. -The US has around 72 submarines, and North Korea has somewhere between 70 and 75. -Official government reports say 15.8%, but many experts agree it must be at least 38%.

  TIMESTAMPS North Korea has compulsory military service for everyone. 0:52 Their paramilitary force includes teenagers. 1:57 The nutrition is so terrible that many soldiers can barely walk. 2:53 The uniforms injure the soldiers. 4:20 Things are even worse for female soldiers. 4:58 They have to throw landmines into the Yellow Sea. 6:20 Soldiers are brainwashed. 7:10 The military hospitals are dangerous. 8:08 Soldiers’ personalities change. 8:58 There’s no way to escape. 9:43 North Korea has the same number of submarines as the US. 10:40 They spent almost half of their budget on the army. 11:18 #northkorea #northkoreanarmy

  The John Batchelor Show

Who sold the solid fuel missiles to North Korea? Bruce Bechtol North Korean Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa: Enabling Violence and Instability, @GordonGChang @TheDailyBeast

16 May 2019

Photo: http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules Twitter: @BatchelorShow

  --------------------------------------------------------------------  

HELP ACU SPREAD THE WORD!

Please send to friends, post on Facebook, twitter, etc…

Over 3,000 commercial free archived shows are available on our podcast site here.  

  Ways to subscribe to the American Conservative University Podcast

Click here to subscribe via iTunes

Click here to subscribe via RSS

You can also subscribe via Stitcher

You can also subscribe via SoundCloud

If you like this episode head on over to iTunes and kindly leave us a rating, a review and subscribe! People find us through our good reviews.

  FEEDBACK + PROMOTION

You can ask your questions, make comments, submit ideas for shows and lots more. Let your voice be heard.

Download our FREE iOS App.

Download our FREE Android App.

Email us at americanconservativeuniversity@americanconservativeuniversity.com

Click here to download the episode

[phooll123]

Kroger to light up its headquarters for Women's Day

See more of the storyThe Latest on International Women's Day: Kroger says it will light up its Cincinnati headquarters for International Women's Day, another example of how corporations are honoring the day. The supermarket operator, which also owns the Ralphs, Owen's and Roundy's chains, says the 25-story building will be illuminated with the female Venus symbol Thursday night. Many companies are trying to spotlight women for the day. McDonald's, for example, flipped its Golden Arches logo on its website to look like a "W." ___ Black glasses covering part of her badly burned face, a victim of an acid attack joined hundreds of activists who rallied in Pakistan's port city of Karachi on Thursday to denounce violence against women and mark International Women's Day. Acid attacks are not uncommon in Pakistan, where men sometimes assault women for refusing to marry them. At Karachi's rally, held amid tight security, hundreds of Muslims and minority Christian women stood up as a sign of respect when the acid attack victim joined them. Victims of acid attacks tend to avoid public gatherings. They are often treated at hospitals with financial assistance from non-governmental organizations. ___ McDonald's has temporarily flipped its famous Golden Arches to look like a "W'' — a move it says it made to recognize International Women's Day. The upside-down logo appeared Thursday on the fast-food giant's website and social media accounts. It also flipped the arches at one restaurant in Lynwood, California. McDonald's says that at about 100 of its 14,000 restaurants, packaging and worker uniforms will have the flipped logo. McDonald's also says six out of 10 of its restaurant managers are women and it wanted to honor their accomplishments. The Oak Brook, Illinois-based company says it's the first time it has flipped its Golden Arches logo since they debuted at a restaurant six decades ago. ___ Hundreds of women have protested in Kosovo's capital to commemorate International Women's Day. Some posters held up during the demonstration in Pristina said "We march, we do not celebrate" and "Job for me." Luljeta Aliu of the nonprofit Justice and Equality organization says that "we fight for our rights as women. We want our rights at the workplace. We don't want to be sexually harassed." Kosovo's ombudsman has acknowledged that women are still discriminated against in the property and job markets. ___ Three current and former French ministers have performed in a play about women's sexual experiences amid the French government's push to highlight gender inequality. The state secretary for women's rights, Marlene Schiappa, performed in the Vagina Monologues alongside Roselyne Bachelot, health minister under conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy, and Myriam El Khomri, labor minister under Socialist president Francois Hollande. Schiappa is currently championing a new bill targeting sexual violence and harassment. Theater producer Jean-Marc Dumontet, who organized Wednesday's performance in Paris, stressed the three politicians took a risk. Dumontet told The Associated Press that "it brings women's issues to a very prominent position. They are really speaking out." Bachelot said she agreed to perform the play with Schiappa because the fight for gender equality goes beyond political divides. ___ Catholic women are challenging Pope Francis to give women a greater voice in Catholic Church decision-making, warning that they are leaving the church in droves because its all-male leadership refuses to change their entrenched second-class status. Former Irish President Mary McAleese, an outspoken advocate for women's ordination and gay rights, was the keynote speaker Thursday at an International Women's Day conference that was moved off Vatican territory this year because a cardinal declined to sponsor it due to McAleese's participation. In her speech, delivered at the Rome headquarters of Francis' Jesuit order, McAleese said "The Catholic Church has long since been a primary global carrier of the toxic virus of misogyny. Its leadership has never sought a cure for that virus though the cure is freely available: Its name is equality." ___ French President Emmanuel Macron says his government is going to name and shame companies that don't respect the law on gender equality. For International Women's Day, Macron has visited a property company awarded for its efforts toward gender equality. He said that pointing the finger at companies that don't comply with the law "will make them change, because no one wants to be the worst student in the class." Prime Minister Edouard Philippe unveiled Wednesday a government plan to push for gender equality in the workplace. One measure would sanction companies with more than 50 employees, if there is an "unjustified" gender wage gap, with a substantial financial penalty. Statistics show at the same age and equivalent job, there is a 9 percent gap between the wages of men and women in France ___ Asia Argento, an Italian actress who helped launch the #MeToo movement, is launching a new movement, #WeToo, which aims to unite women against the power imbalance in favor of men. Argento told Radio 24 on Thursday that her aim was "to finally change the patriarchal system so rooted in our culture, not just in Italy." She called on women to join her at a women's march in Rome later in the day, and participate in a strike to illustrate the contributions of women at home and in the workplace. Argento helped give strength to other women to report sexual assault and harassment when she accused Harvey Weinstein of rape in an expose by The New Yorker. The accusations drew a backlash in Italy for having waited 20 years to come forward. ___ Hundreds of women have marched in Pakistan's capital and elsewhere on International Women's Day, demanding more rights and denouncing harassment, which is common at homes and in work places. Chanting slogans, they rallied in the capital Islamabad, Pakistan's largest city Karachi, and in the cultural capital of Lahore. At Thursday's rallies, women denounced violence against them in Pakistan, where nearly 1,000 women are killed by close relatives each year in so-called honor killings. Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi earlier addressed a gathering of women and assured them full protection. Women in Pakistan have a reasonable presence in the parliament but they have to rely on fellow male lawmakers to amend discriminatory or flawed laws. Pakistani women have largely been deprived of their rights since the country gained independence in 1947. ___ Prince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle have met female students studying science, technology, engineering and math as part of celebrations marking International Women's Day. Some 90 students met the royal couple on Thursday at Millennium Point in Birmingham as part of an event to inspire young people to take part in science and tech careers. Markle seemed impressed by the aspirations of the students, many of whom wanted to be doctors or surgeons. Harry and Markle are touring the country to introduce the American actress to the people of Britain before their marriage at Windsor Castle on May 19. ___ South African President Cyril Ramaphosa says South Africans must work together to improve the status of women who face discrimination and disadvantages "at home and in the workplace." Ramaphosa, who took office last month, said Thursday that his compatriots should use International Women's Day to decide what they can do to advance gender equality. Ramaphosa says South Africa has made progress toward equality since the end of apartheid in 1994 in building an equal society. He said "patriarchy has no place in the South Africa we are building today." South Africa has a high rate of violent crime, including rape. ___ German Chancellor Angela Merkel says on International Women's Day that while much has been achieved, the struggle for more equality for women in Germany and worldwide must continue. Merkel, considered one of the world's most powerful women, said Thursday in a video message that "many women before us have made sacrifices and fought persistently so that women would have more rights ... but there's still a lot to do." The chancellor said that, "there are also new tasks for men" — but she didn't elaborate further. Merkel added, "Therefore today is not only a day to look back at what has been achieved, but also a day on which we say — the struggle for equal rights of women continues." ___ Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni is urging men to stop physically abusing their wives, in official remarks Thursday while marking International Women's Day. Domestic violence is common across in Uganda, although victims rarely report perpetrators to the police for fear of being stigmatized or thrown out of their homes. "If you want to fight, why don't you look for a fellow man and fight?" Museveni said, calling domestic abusers cowards. Museveni said lifting women up economically, through education and entrepreneurship, can help bring an end to rampant domestic violence. He said: "If the girls are not economically empowered, they will remain vulnerable to these bully men." ___ A leading French newspaper has found a novel way to mark International Women's Day — by upping its price for men, to mimic the pay gap. The all-red front page of Thursday's edition of the left-leaning daily Liberation wrote in bold letters "For Women 2 euros, normal price." The paper added that for one day only, men would pay 50 cents more, a reflection of the 25 percent less that women in France are paid than men, on average. Liberation said it wants to "highlight this injustice" with its price increase for men. "A punishment? No. A contribution!" the paper wrote on the front page, saying the extra money recovered from men on Thursday would go to the Laboratory of Equality, which has long fought for gender equality. ___ U.S. national soccer team striker Alex Morgan and Brazil forward Marta are among the players chosen for the FIFPro Women's World XI. The team was announced Thursday to coincide with International Women's Day. Goalkeeper Hedvig Lindahl of Sweden is joined by defenders Nilla Fischer of Sweden, Lucy Bronze of England, Irene Paredes of Spain and Wendie Renard of France. Midfielder Dzsenifer Maroszan of Germany, Camille Abily of France, Pernille Harder of Denmark and Lieke Martens of the Netherlands round out the 11. Morgan says having a Women's World XI team "helps female footballers recognize the talent among their peers and I'm really happy to encourage and be a part of that." ___ Opposition presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak has conducted a solo picket outside the lower house of the Russian parliament to demand the resignation of a prominent lawmaker whom several female journalists accuse of sexual harassment. The allegations against Leonid Slutsky, head of the Duma's foreign affairs committee, include sexual groping and making demeaning comments. Parliament speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has dismissed the complaints, saying that journalists who feel unsafe covering the Duma should get other jobs. Sobchak held her demonstration on Thursday, International Women's Day, which is observed as a public holiday in Russia. She held a placard reading "Deputies -- we don't want you." President Vladimir Putin, with approval ratings of some 80 percent, is seeking a fourth term in the March 18 election. ___ Spanish women are marking International Women's Day with the first-ever full day strike and dozens of protests across the country against the wage gap and gender violence. Under the slogan "If we stop, the world stops," women working both in and outside their homes, unpaid caretakers and students are called to join the 24-hour strike by the March 8 Commission, a platform of feminist organizations that also demands equal opportunities for working women. CCOO and UGT, two of the main workers' unions in Spain have called for morning and afternoon 2-hour work stoppages. In Madrid, a massive demonstration was expected later in the evening. In Barcelona, protesters who disrupted traffic into the city center were seen in social media videos being pushed by anti-riot police agents. ___ During Taliban rule many would have been afraid to leave their homes, but hundreds of women gathered in the Afghan capital Kabul on Thursday to commemorate International Women's Day — and to remind their leaders that plenty of work remains to be done to give Afghan woman a voice, ensure their education and protect them from increasing violence. The head of the Independent Human Rights Commission, Sima Samar, directed some comments at women in Afghanistan's security forces. "Your safety represents the safety of all Afghan women," she said, reminding women in uniform to report any abuse by superiors to the rights commission. She said no one has the right to comment on their physical appearance or to speak to them disrespectfully. ___ This item has been corrected to show that the women gathered in Kabul but did not march. ___ Hundreds of women have held street plays and marched in the Indian capital to highlight domestic violence, sexual attacks and discrimination in jobs and wages on International Women's Day. They carried placards reading, "Unite against violence against Women," ''Man enough to say no to domestic abuse," and "My body, My choice." Violent crime against women has been on the rise in India despite tough laws enacted by the government. Office workers, school teachers and sex workers were among those participating in the 2-kilometer (1.25 mile) march, which ended near Parliament. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted: "India is moving from women development to women-led development. Through their exemplary deeds, several women have left an indelible mark in the history of humankind." ___ Hundreds of South Koreans are staging a protest in support of the #MeToo movement on International Women's Day. Protesters, many wearing black and holding black signs reading #MeToo, gathered in central Seoul. They called for bringing alleged sexual offenders to justice, as well as action on other issues such as closing a gender pay gap. Since a female prosecutor's revelation in January of workplace mistreatment and sexual misconduct, South Korea's #MeToo movement has gained major traction. The list of women who speak out is growing daily. Several high-profile men have resigned from positions of power, including a governor who was a leading presidential contender before he was accused of repeatedly raping his secretary. ___ Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi says peaceful democracies make good use of women's strength in political, economic and social fields. In a speech marking International Women's Day, she said, "A country's human rights values will be enhanced when women are granted their rights." Thursday was the third year the annual event was celebrated under a civilian government in Myanmar, where the military that long ruled the country is still powerful. Suu Kyi leads the political party that won by a landslide in 2015 elections but the constitution bars her from becoming the president. Though Myanmar has a woman leading its civilian government, a profound gender gap remains in the country of 52 million people. ___ Students at China's prestigious Tsinghua University are celebrating International Women's Day with banners making light of a proposed constitutional amendment to scrap term limits for the country's president. One banner joked that a boyfriend's term should also have no limits, while another said, "A country cannot exist without a constitution, as we cannot exist without you!" Photos of the banners were shared on Chinese social media Wednesday night before they were scrubbed by censors. Several online commenters also said the posters appeared to have been swiftly removed. China's ceremonial legislature is poised to pass a constitutional amendment that will allow President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely during its ongoing annual session. Despite heavy censorship, the move has been criticized by liberal intellectuals as a return to dictatorship and satirized online. ___ Marches and demonstrations in Asia are kicking off rallies around the world to mark International Women's Day. Hundreds of women activists in pink and purple shirts protested Thursday in the Philippines against President Rodrigo Duterte, who they said is among the worst violators of women's rights in Asia. Protest leaders sang and danced in a boisterous rally in downtown Manila's Plaza Miranda. They handed red and white roses to mothers, sisters and widows of several drug suspects slain under Duterte's deadly crackdown on illegal drugs. A rally for the rights of female workers was scheduled for later Thursday in central Seoul in South Korea, where a rapidly spreading #Metoo movement is galvanizing support for women's issues. Other events are planned across Asia, the Mideast, Europe and the Americas.

via Blogger http://ift.tt/2Flo6CU

[things2mustdo]

“White people are terrible,” “I have white privilege,” and “most of the world’s problems are caused by white people” are three general statements countless social justice warriors and their enablers agree with. Yet they are all based on the severest distortion of reality. You or I should no more apologize for being white than an African-American should for being black.

Just as many blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities are made more pliable by the media and the establishment by being told they are eternal victims, white people are made more pliable by agreeing that they need to always feel guilty. Using an SJW “anti-racism” that feels awfully like the leftist version of a Nazi book about hereditary, white people supposedly inherit the evil deeds of dead dudes who owned slaves prior to the Civil War or arrived on a foreign continent in a year like 1492 or 1788.

The establishment-enforced guilt is even greater for those directly descended from such people, but even culturally and genetically unrelated individuals like Polish- and Italian-Americans, whose ancestors pretty much all arrived after periods like the slavery era, are held accountable, too. Why? Even if we ridiculously assumed we can find descendants “guilty” of their ancestry, the white guilt thesis is like putting all of Harlem’s young black men in 2016 under house arrest because 20 of them were involved in a vicious street brawl… in 1937.

Provided you adhere to our creed, neomasculinity and the Return Of Kings community form the broadest functional church you will find. We do not care where you come from, so long as you support our goal of a return to masculine societies that emphasize community-building and do not apologize for taking pride in their own cultures. ROK readers who are black, white, Asian or something else are all equal in this regard.

Here are just three of many reasons why I will not hate or feel guilty about my skin tone.

1. I’m the descendant of victims myself because many of my ancestors were from oppressed ethnic and religious groups

Look at those privileged starving Irish!

Are you heavily Irish-blooded, like me? Italian? Polish? Ukrainian? Were your ancestors Catholics living in heavily Protestant areas, or perhaps Huguenots who had to flee persecutory France?

It’s funny how SJWs prance on about white privilege when over half of all whites who emigrated to America, Canada or Australia, from the Puritans to Yugoslavian Civil War refugees, came because the civilian government or monarchy representing another ethnicity or religion essentially chased them out, had killed their family members, or wanted them dead, too. Many of the white groups who did take the journey, particularly the Italians or Irish, were then subjected to quotas and mistreatment in places like New York for years.

A great deal of my ancestors were Catholics in Prussia and other Protestant parts of northern Germany. This section of my family tree is replete with persecutions, including one great-great-great-great grandfather who lost sight in one eye and movement in his arm after being brutally assaulted by a Prussian policeman. His crime? Being an ethnic German leaving a Catholic church on Sunday in the 1800s. Catholic churches were only for “subhuman” Poles. Catholic Prussians were seen as traitors who belonged in Bavaria, prison, or dead. He ended up eking out an existence as a tailor with one good arm, after both he and his brother were repeatedly refused admission to the civil service for their faith.

In addition, I had Irish immigrant forebears whose fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters died as a result of the Potato Famine. One of these ancestors, the eldest child in his family, was working in Dublin to make money for the family when, in the space of three months, he received news that his parents, all his sisters, and all but one of his brothers had died from starvation, malnutrition, or diseases related to them.

When my aunt did the genealogy over three years, she counted 37 family members in one corner of an Irish county who died from starvation or starvation-related illness in 13 months. The famine was predicted and even aggravated by the British. Considering the squalor into which the occupiers had driven the Irish Catholics, the whole ordeal was fundamentally caused by them, too. With only an extra mouth to feed, this great-great-great grandfather of mine took his barely school-aged brother with him to Australia two months later. What role did these two have in oppressing others, white or non-white, that I should feel shame about today?

Look further back into my family tree and you find German, Dutch and Swiss Jews, many of whom were shunted around various locations within Europe, depending on what limited patience local authorities had for yarmulke-wearers at the time.

With this lineage, what exactly do I have to apologize for, aside from my supposedly very, very privileged, at best lower middle-class English forebears from drab West London and grim Yorkshire? Most of them never saw a dark person, let alone mistreated one. To boot, the vast majority lived poor, thankless lives without clean sanitation, abundant food, or anything close to job security. And these are the stations in life, through no fault of their own, that 95% of your ancestors reached as well.

2. Minorities and other non-whites frequently treated and still treat each other far worse than white people did

Rwandan genocide, anyone?

From the pre-Columbian Central and South American peoples to the Rwandan genocide, non-whites have very often treated one another even more abysmally than whites have treated them. European technology may have amplified the number of indigenous and other deaths in places like the Americas, but raw hatred, aggression, and the continuity of violence can be found in even greater quantities in non-white historical squabbles.

Europeans have also been incorrectly blamed for things like infectious diseases, despite the scientific work of antiseptic procedure pioneer Ignaz Semmelweiss being years, sometimes even centuries away. Meanwhile, non-whites have been allowed to kill non-whites without serious condemnation from SJWs.

For example, critics of the Iraq War and the attempted rebuilding of post-Saddam Iraq have said that the whole country is based on a fiction that dates back to the European post-World War I mandate systems. In other words, if Kurds, Shia Arabs, and Sunni Arabs inhabit the same country, they kill each other! Whilst it is appetizing for SJWs to blame the big, bad British and French for this, it is far from the truth. Kurds and Arabs have been butchering each other for countless centuries. The greatest Muslim figure of all the Crusades, Saladin, was consistently mistrusted because of his Kurdish origins. Similarly, intra-Arab or Arab-Iranian Sunni-Shia violence is age-old and has little if anything to do with Europeans.

Last year, Rock Thompson wrote a superb piece about the hypocrisy of attacking Columbus Day in the Americas. His work exposed the double standards of many Native American and also Central and South American tribes, who pretend their ancestors were routinely peaceful when, in fact, they regularly engaged in deplorable acts of gratuitous violence, including human sacrifices and the sadistic mutilation of enemies who were not so ethnically different. The conquistadors and Puritans are falsely seen as the harbingers of cultural and racial genocide in the Americas. Local indigenous tribes, however, were already hunting each other down for sport well before the tall ships arrived.

3. White-majority countries make the humanitarian world go round

A tent city the Saudis refused to make available for fellow Arab Syrian refugees.

Whenever you find an aid program for starving Africans, war-torn Arabs, or other suffering people, chances are that a number of white Westerners are behind it. Even if they’re not all white, they invariably come from white-majority and/or white-founded Western countries, or are funded by them. All to assuage the guilt of white people living in 2016 who feel the need to apologize for a European colonial regime that replaced almost always far more brutal indigenous ones.

Western countries also welcome non-whites in droves, both as immigrants and as “refugees.” The recent Syrian crisis is a testament to this (over-)generosity. While Saudi Arabia refused to accommodate fellow Arab Syrians in their already-constructed tent city, used normally for the Haj Priligrimage, Germany and other European states bore the brunt of those fleeing, including through the open door policies of leaders like Angela Merkel.

In general terms, white people care more about the developmental outcomes of non-whites. Wealthy non-white countries like Japan and Korea have perfected a system of meticulously keeping their populations pure and rejecting the asylum claims of over 99% of claimed refugees. This asymmetrical state of affairs is ironic when Japan’s own history of colonisation, notably the Rape of Nanking, is taken into consideration.

White guilt is also very profitable for certain establishment figures and zealous entertainers. It’s why twats like Bono and Bob Geldof get up every morning, after all. And, far from sucking the world dry, white folks have repeatedly tried to make it better. Very often this generosity is taken to an extreme, but the point of white-majority countries acting and non-white countries stalling or ignoring remains valid.

[heartsoftruth]

Pt1: Your last anon says that people on your blog try to make french people pass for sick fucks, but as a french I can assure you that our mentality here is clearly no better than anywhere, I see some trashy media similar to closer or public talk about Neymar and Rafa relationship and saying that it's weird and questionable, our mentality is sick for real, I read some of your french anon and they're right. French people and France are not better than the rest of the world, sometimes we are worse

Anonymous said:Pt2: But the problem is that us (french people) really don’t like when you talk bad about us or point out our flaws, don’t believe what you see on TV and movies, France is not just Paris, romance and the Eiffel Tower, we are definitly not perfect, trust me we have a lot bad sides like so much racism, politics problems, women’s inequality and violence, rape, poverty, homless people and a so much other things, french people are not all angels (of course I generalize)

Anonymous said:Final part: but just look at how we react about Ney and Rafa, we are the one who make a big deal about it for nothing, it was worse than in BCN or anywhere, even in my school people talked about it, a lot of french are really not open minded, we are not close of our siblings here but it’s not a fuckin reason to clam incest, plus we were so vulgar on the tweets. You can see how much assholes we have here too, ppl think that bc Ney is celeb its nothing to insult or invent dumb rumors about him..

So just as I answered my French anon  a couple days ago) who told: “Hey, no offense, but can everyone please stop make French people look like sick fucks ?? Anons are reaaaally exagerating I” You come with this message… 

I would normally laugh at the irony, might it be that I have to answer it now and I don’t want to get blasted xD 

I’m just going step by step with this xD 1. “I read some of your french anon and they’re right. “ - I have no idea what they’re right about tho? Are you refereeing to the French anon I just quoted here above?2. Of course I know France isn’t just Paris. France is much much more. You have the beautiful south (who I love to visit but it always looks beautiful on TV) and the North (where I’ve visited a few places). 

Doesn’t any citizen dislike it when people outside of it talk bad about your own country tho? I mean… I could list a few things about every country here and you will see how many people who live there will be pissed off. (so I won’t do that haha xD)

I have no problem if you say we Dutch people walk on clogs, eat cheese, go to the red light district and smoking weed all day. Those stereotypes don’t bother me at all… I think we all used to hearing that when we go on a vacay and say where we from (the weed part for sure). For me it would be more of a problem if you want to have an in dept discussion about my country and don’t know wtf you’re talking about ending up pissing me off. 

Racism/political problems (with far right parties) are sadly something of the last couple of years and with many countries these days. You have Le Pen, we have Wilders, Belgium has De Winter, the US has Trump, AfD in Germany etc etc. It’s taking over because people are sadly afraid. 

I think in Paris alone you can see everything what you just said if you look/go outside of the city centre. The poverty, homeless, immigrants on the streets etc. I think that has improved compared to the camps you used to had in Paris… I have no idea about rape etc, but I think as women we’re always alert on the streets. That’s sadly how it is… 

On the other hand I think almost every country has these same problems. The only difference is that not every country has the same no1 problem and not every country has enough finances to deal/find a solution for the problems they have. 

You can also say we both live in a country where you know there’s freedom of speech, elections, maybe not equal pay but other than that women and men are equal, same sex marriage. From what Wikipedia just told me your college intuition is also very low so you have the chance to become what you want if you have the brains of course haha. But even the fact that you have the chance to go to school and work on the future. Instead of having to work to help your family. Do you know how many people dream of that? I mean we sometimes forget how blessed we are to be born in a country we were born in, but dont forget that.

Every country has it’s flaws. Yours has, mine has, the person who’s reading this her/his country has flaws too. But I damn sure love my country: flaws and all!

3. Like I said to that other anon. I don’t think it’s a French thing per se. I think it’s more of a western vs other culture/country thing. Here in Holland people would probably react the same way. Germany, Belgium etc etc probably too. 

[euradiso-blog]

Weapons

PORNOGRAPHY AS A SECRET WEAPON

Lasha Darkmoon

May 9, 2014

Articles

,

Recommended Reading

Pornography is deployed today as a psyop or mind weapon: to pacify, control, brutalize, and ultimately enslave the masses.  

“We corrupt in order to rule.” — Italian Freemason Giuseppe Mazzini

How do you take a nation of free and independent citizens and turn them into slaves? How do you do this slowly and imperceptibly, without violence, and with the willing participation of the slaves-to-be?  

The answer is simple.

You corrupt them, undermine them, deprave them, demoralize them, until they have acquired all the characteristics of slaves.

As the sorceress Circe, with a wave of her magic wand, turned the followers of Ulysses into grunting swine, you can wield your weapon of mass hypnosis, the media, over a nation and transform its citizens into willing slaves. You can learn to roboticize man and turn him into a living machine. This is power. This is what it must feel like to be God — or the Devil.

Is there a secret weapon or “magic wand” for turning men into swine? Yes, there is. Sex is the secret weapon, the magic device, that turns men into swine.

1.  Jews use pornography “to destroy gentile morals”

Who are the richest and most successful entrepreneurs of the $100 billion year porn industry? [1] The peddlers of pornography belong to all races, but one race above all stands out as preeminent in this field.  Selling sex, like slave trafficking and moneylending, has always been a Jewish speciality.

Jewish academic historian Dr Nathan Abrams (right), perhaps the world’s most renowned authority on the Jewish role in pornography, let the cat out of the bag a few years ago in his controversial essay, Triple-Exthnics. [2]

Published in the prestigious Jewish Quarterly in 2004, this essay spelled out in detail how the world’s multibillion dollar porn industry was dominated by Jews.

Dr Abrams not only admits that Jews are the world’s most successful pornographers, he celebrates the fact. Jews, he tells us, have a grudge against Christianity, an “atavistic hatred of Christian authority” rooted in centuries of humiliation, and pornography is one of the ways in which they get their revenge on their Christian persecutors — the hateful oppressors who expelled them from 109 countries since the year 250 AD, always without justification. [3]

So it’s now payback time.

Jewish involvement in pornography [Dr Abrams notes candidly] has a long history in the United States. Though Jews make up only two per cent of the American population, they have been prominent in pornography.

According to one anonymous industry insider quoted by E. Michael Jones in the magazine Culture Wars (May 2003), “the leading male performers through the 1980s came from secular Jewish upbringings and the females from Roman Catholic day schools”.

The standard porn scenario became as a result a Jewish fantasy of schtupping the Catholic shiksa [non-Jewish female].

Jewish involvement in the X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire WASP establishment in America.

Jewish involvement in porn, Dr Abrams believes, “is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion.” [4]

Al Goldstein (pictured), the publisher of Screwmagazine, had once said — and Dr Abrams is happy to quote him: “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that CHRIST SUCKS.”

Dr Abrams’ indulgent attitude to porn is a little surprising. Here is a man who actually believes that Jewish domination of the porn industry is a stunning achievement. Jews get gold stars for masturbation promotion.

ADL National Director, Abraham H. Foxman,agrees with the “liberal” idea that pornography is a good thing — if not for the countless victims of porn addiction, at least for Jews who grow rich on exploiting those addicts. “Those Jews who enter the pornography industry,” Foxman notes with approval, “have done so as individuals pursuing the American dream.” [5]

Dr Abrams, the sober Jewish academic, now ups the ante by adding a sinister touch to the controversy. “Jews are the driving force behind the modern pornographic industry,” he tells us smugly, “and their motivation is, in part, to destroy gentile morals.” [6]

To destroy gentile morals.

Note that phrase well. It amounts to an open declaration of war. For why should Jews wish to “destroy gentile morals” unless they hated the gentiles — in this case, Christians —  and wanted to destroy our most  cherished values?

There is no law to prevent this Jewish comedienne (pictured opposite) from uttering blasphemous obscenities against Jesus Christ and giving offense to 2.1 billion Christians by her infamous comment, “I hope the Jews did kill Christ! I’d fucking do it again — in a second!”

Just imagine an equally well-known Christian comedian coming out with a similar insult against the victims of the Holocaust: “I hope the Nazis DID kill 6 million Jews! I’d fucking do it again — in a second!”

Such a grossly offensive comment would be unthinkable. The comic who made it would be ostracized at once and never allowed to work again in the entertainment business.

And yet the Jew today, in the person of Sarah Silverman, is perfectly free to spit in the Christian’s face and is even applauded for this hate speech.  The Christian can do nothing about it. He has become a slave in his own country — an object of ridicule and contempt.

2.  How Jews Dominate the American Porn Industry

It comes as no surprise to learn that Jews dominate the production and distribution of pornography. If you want to learn more about these luminaries of lust and see what they look like, here is an excellent starting point.

In a now defunct article entitled Jews in Porn, parts of which have been published on Henry Makow’s site,  Luke Ford notes:

Used to hatred from society, Jews will do its dirty work – such as money-lending in the Middle Ages or porn today – for the opportunity to make money.

Persecuted for millennia in the various societies they’ve lived in, many Jews developed an allegiance to their own survival as their highest value and care little about the survival of the persecuting society.

Even when Jews live in a society that welcomes them instead of harassing them, many Jews hate the majority culture.

Neither rooted in their own tradition or in that of the majority Christian tradition, they live in a community of rebels.

Because of Judaism’s emphasis on education and verbal dexterity, Jews dominate academia, entertainment and media generally. Porn flows out of this culture over which Jews exert an influence disproportionate to their 2% proportion of the American population. [7]

♣

Robert J. Stoller, M.D. in his 1991 book, Porn: Myths for the Twentieth Century, sought to understand the mentality of the people involved in the hard core pornography business. While interviewing some of the actors and actresses in California, he was told, “If you’re welcomed into the porn scene, it’s unbelievable. It’s an extended family…. So many Jewish people involved with it.” [8]

Today, most porn movies and porn videos in America are produced by Jews in the San Fernando Valley(pictured) in Southern California. This is located just north of Los Angeles in a sprawl of seedy suburbs known to locals as “Porn Valley” or “the Other Hollywood”.

Here Jews are the kingpins of the sex industry and own every single major studio. Chief among these is Vivid Entertainment [9], reportedly the largest porn production company in the world.

This is owned by Jewish multi-billionaire Steven Hirsch, sometimes known as the “Porn King”. Vivid generates an estimated $100 million a year in revenue, cranking out 60 films per year and selling them in video stores, hotel rooms, on cable systems and on the Internet. [10]

“Sex is a powerful thing,”  Hirsch notes complacently. “This is the right time for us!” [11]

Another billionaire Jewish porn mogul, Paul Fishbein, founder of Adult Video News (AVN), is also headquartered in Porn Valley, California. Fishbein’s business associates, Irving Slifkin, Barry Rosenblatt, and Eli Cross are all fabulously rich Jews. [12]

So make no mistake: Porn Valley, California, is a Jewish enclave, as Jewish as Tel Aviv or Brooklyn.

3.  The Jewish Role in Child Pornography

According to the British charity, National Children’s Homes, 55 percent of the world’s child porn in made in America. [13]

It would be astonishing to learn that Jews were not in the forefront of this sordid enterprise also, given that they dominate the porn industry as a whole. [14]

Pedophilia is a worldwide phenomenon, but it is an undeniable fact that the large number of Jews who practice it appear to do so with a certain impunity. Roman Polanski, after he had drugged and raped an unconscious nymphette, got off the hook lightly. All he had to do was buy a one-way ticket to Paris, France. Nothing was done to bring him to justice.

In July 2000, Brazilian police tried to arrest the Israeli vice-consul in Rio de Janeirio, Arie Scher. He was wanted on suspicion of running a child porn ring from the Israeli embassy. Vast quantities of pornographic material had been found on his computer. What happened to Scher? Nothing. Claiming diplomatic immunity, he hopped on a plane to Tel Aviv and that was the last that was heard of him. [15]

Another Jewish pedophile too important to receive serious punishment for his crimes was the son of the famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Found in possession of the hugest cache of child pornography in California, a federal crime normally carrying a 20-year sentence, David Asimov was to receive a slap on the wrist: six months home detention.

How is it he got off so lightly? “A look at the players yields the answer,” a sensational news report reads. “Asimov’s child porn stash was so big that many child victims and perpetrators would have taken a fall had Asimov been zealously prosecuted at trial.” [16]

There is one law for the Jews, it seems, and another for us lesser mortals.

4.  Jewish Gang involved in Child Murder and Snuff Pornography

If 55 percent of the world’s child pornography is produced in the US — according to the British charity National Children’s Homes — 23 percent of the world’s child porn is produced in Russia. [17]

Whether or not Russian child porn is dominated by Russian Jews remains a nebulous issue. There is a high probability that it is, given that there is more than enough solid evidence of Russian Jewish involvement in sex trafficking, kidnapping, pedophilia, and even child murder in the production of snuff porn movies.

See endnote 17 for more on the subject of the Jewish role in the world child porn industry.

Here is a news report first published in October 2000. It will give the reader some idea of the depths of depravity to which some pornographers are willing to sink:

JEWISH GANGSTERS RAPED, KILLED CHILDREN AS YOUNG AS TWO ON FILM

Rome, Italy — Italian and Russian police, working together, broke up a ring of Jewish gangsters who had been involved in the manufacture of child rape and snuff pornography.

Three Russian Jews and eight Italian Jews were arrested after police discovered they had been kidnapping non-Jewish children between the ages of two and five years old from Russian orphanages, raping the children, and then murdering them on film.

Mostly non-Jewish customers, including 1700 nationwide, 600 in Italy, and an unknown number in the United States, paid as much as $20,000 per film to watch little children being raped and murdered.

Jewish officials in a major Italian news agency tried to cover the story up, but were circumvented by Italian news reporters, who broadcast scenes from the films live at prime time on Italian television to more than 11 million Italian viewers. Jewish officials then fired the executives responsible, claiming they were spreading “blood libel.”

Though AP and Reuters both ran stories on the episode, US media conglomerates refused to carry the story on television news, saying that it would prejudice Americans against Jews. [18]

According to the Talmud, 3-year-old girls like this are fair game for sex with adults (Sanhedrin 54b). Killing them is permissible too. “The best of the gentiles deserves to be killed,” the revered Rabbi ben Yohai states authoritatively in the Talmud. [19]

5.  Mass Enslavement through Sex

It is a tragedy that the Jews should have been allowed to deploy pornography to such good effect that they have succeeded in enslaving entire nations, as Circe with a touch of her magic wand enslaved the Greeks, turning men into swine: an apt metaphor for what lies ahead for the masses under their new masters.

“A really efficient totalitarian state,” Aldous Huxley once noted, “would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” [20]

Organized Jewry seems to have no moral scruples about profiting from the sale of pornography. They show no concern about the proven fact that highly addictive and dangerous erototoxins are released into the brain after contact with pornography and can cause progressive brain damage. [21]

Nor do these pornocentric Jews have any qualms of conscience in regard to the wholesale corruption of families, whether Jewish or non-Jewish,  or show the slightest concern about the tragic descent of children into the hell of compulsive masturbation and porn addiction — a subject I have covered in detail in a soon-to-be-published article.

These sex entrepreneurs, intent on easy profits, have eagerly sought to provide the masses with the cheapest and deadliest of tranquilizers: opportunities for endless orgasms, by way of a ceaseless flow of pornographic images in the mass media they control.

This is one way to achieve world domination without the need for revolutionary violence or military conquest: to take entire countries and turn them into giant masturbatoria.

The model citizens of the future will be happy masturbators. This enthralling activity will keep them occupied throughout the day. It will make them docile and complacent, sated and semi-somnolent, like drugged dung flies in a cesspool or swilling latrine. They will be too busy debauching themselves to mount revolutions or plan revenge attacks against the shadowy elite who have been the architects of their slavery.

These are not the worldchangers and wizards of the future of whom Nietzsche said, “Behold, I show you the Superman!” Because of their degeneracies, their weaknesses, they are destined for the dustbin of history.

MEN  IN  STRIP  CLUB

“Behold, I show you the Superman!” —  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

___________________________________________

Here is what Brother Nathanael Kapner has to say on this subject. It is a neat summation. The fact that Kapner is Jewish makes his words even more compelling:

“The degradation of Western Christian social life did not merely happen, it was planned, deliberately fostered and spread, as outlined by The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This systematic undermining of the culture of the West continues today.

The instruments of this assault on Christian culture and consciousness are the weapons of propaganda: the press, television, cinema, and education. The chief fount of the propaganda is the cinema.

From his capital in Hollywood, the Jew spews out an endless series of perverted films to debase and degenerate the youth of America and the Western world. Divorce replaces marriage, abortion replaces birth, and the family becomes the battleground of individual strife. The Jew has attained his goal in destroying Western culture.” [22]

I am afraid I cannot agree with Kapner’s sweeping conclusion that the Jews are entirely to blame for the decline and fall of Western culture. If the West has gone to hell in a handbasket, the goyim are as much to blame. Their enthusiastic complicity with their own corrupters has been their undoing.

The society we get is the society we deserve.

6.  Conclusion

There is little doubt that the virulent sex epidemic we witness all around us is a deliberately planned sex psyop. This is what governments want.

The Puppet Masters who pull the hidden strings of our Western regimes, all masquerading as democracies, have managed to manufacture exactly what we see when we look around us: widespread neurosis, mass misery, the collapse of moral values, Christianity in ruins, and the coarse brutalization of the common man.

No need for gulags for those who consent to their own chains.

ENDNOTES

[1]   “Worldwide pornography industry approaches $100 billion.”

[2]    Nathan Abrams, Triple-exthnics, (Jewish Quarterly, Winter 2004, Number 196). Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American porn industry.  

[3]   109 Locations whence Jews have been Expelled since AD250

[4]   Nathan Abrams, Op.cit.

[5]    Quoted in Nathan Abrams, Op. cit.

[6]   Nathan Abrams, Op. cit.

[7]   Quoted in Henry Makow, Jews and Porn.

[8]    Robert J. Stoller, Porn: Myths for the Twentieth Century.

[9]   “Hard Times in Porn Valley.”

[10]   Vivid Entertainment (Wikipedia).

[11]    Forbes magazine, “The Porn King”. # 20,000 pornographic videos are produced each year in the San Fernando Valley, roughly at the rate of one new porn video every 40 minutes. (Rachel Alexander, Porn Addition at Crisis Levels.)

[12]   AVN Magazine (Wikipedia, history).

[13]    Penn State Law Professors Trot Out ‘Female Porn Leaders’ to Whitewash Realities of Adult Industry (explicit language).

[14]   Dr Lasha Darkmoon, Masters of Porn: The Systematic Promotion of Sexual Deviance. (See also n.2 above, Dr Nathan Abrams, Triple-Exthnics).

[15]   (1) Brazilian police stake out diplomat accused of running kiddie-porn ring (07/06/2000). (2) Israeli Consul Assistant involved with prostitution of minors escapes from Brazil (07/05/2000). (3) Brazil links Israeli consul to child prostitution (07/05/2000).

[16]   Isaac Asimov’s son, his involvement in child porn.  Link lost. We receive the message, “Server not found. Firefox can’t find the server at www.newsmakingnews.com.”

[17]   Penn State Law Professors Trot Out ‘Female Porn Leaders’ to Whitewash Realities of Adult Industry.

Since  55 percent of the world’s child porn is produced in the US (see above), and since 90 percent of US porn is produced by Jews in the San Fernando Valley, California, it follows that Jews dominate the child porn industry in America.

In addition, if 23 percent of the world’s child porn is produced in Russia, it is more than likely that Russian Jews are behind this sleazy industry  in view of the well-known involvement of the Judeo-Russian mafia in sex trafficking, sex slavery, prostitution and pornography in general.

This would make the Jews the predominant purveyors of child pornography  in the world — a remarkable achievement for a race who make up no more than 0.2 percent of the world’s population.

[18]   “Jewish Gangsters Raped, Killed Children As Young As Two on Film.”

Note. The article quoted above has also been published on a reputable Canadian website, the Jewish Tribune, giving it an added authenticity. Scroll down to: “Jewish Gangsters Raped, Killed Children As Young As 2 On Film. JEWISH CHILD PORN / SNUFF FILM RING DISCOVERED.”

[19]   Michael A. Hoffman, The Truth about the Talmud.  A Documented Exposé of Supremacist Rabbinic Hate Literature. Excerpts from Michael A. Hoffman’s book, “Judaism’s Strange Gods” (2000).

[20]   Dr Lasha Darkmoon, The Sexual Subversion of America (Part 2). An edited abridgement of E. Michael Jones’ 2003 essay, Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos.

[21]   Dr Lasha Darkmoon, Pornography’s Effect on the Brain.

[22]   Bro. Nathaneal Kapner, The Judaic Destruction of Western Culture.

Like this? Share it now.

child murder & snuff porn

child pornography

Jewish domination

pornography

LASHA DARKMOON

Dr Lasha Darkmoon (b.1978) is an Anglo-American ex-academic with higher degrees in Classics whose political articles and poems have been translated into several languages. Most of her political essays can be found at The Occidental Observer and  The TruthSeeker. Her own website, Darkmoon.me, is now within the top 1 percent of websites in the world according to the Alexa ranking system.

https://www.darkmoon.me/2014/pornography-as-a-secret-weapon-by-lasha-darkmoon/

Aug 21st, 2017 12:33:51pm