#I feel like maybe browbeat is too strong a word?? but I can’t think of something else so we’re sticking with it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

masterofthespade · 4 years ago

Text

Pull the Trigger.

“I don’t think I give much of a fuck for your tone there Sister.” Oh, she had him pissed tonight, didn’t she? And what better way to piss right back than to call her that? It was almost as bad as- “Neither do I you fuckin’ would-be. Yes, staring from the outside in, what does it look like Lucifer? Warm? Are you comfortable at night?” “Miss Paolazzi I do believe we’re finished for the evening.” With that, he closed his ledger book and offered her an annoyed look from behind his desk. It was going to be another one of those evenings, wasn’t it? Ankle over knee, elbow to knee, hand to face. Staring at his wombmate, it was hard to believe sometimes they were cut from the same cloth. “You quite finished then, ah?” A beat. “You ever going to tell me my birth name?” “Fuck you.” “Now granted dear, I don’t believe they named me that. Sure it was something nice, something complimentary to yours. Maybe a bit more Italian.” Standing with a huff, her face was charcoal speckled, the way it always got when the blood ran to her face. Pointing aggressively, her face continued to twist up more. “Watch. It.” “Or what Ro-Jo? What you going to do? Oh, how’s Anna by the way?” A thumb ran over his lower lip. Emerald eyes paled, bored. Sneering, “She was your sister too.” “That so? Last time I checked, you were more of her sibling than I was. After all, I’m just an outsider looking in.” The clicking of her revolver got him to lift a brow as it was pointed at him. “I told you to watch it once. I’m not in the business to start repeating myself.” “Mm? Right then.”

It happened very quickly. He didn’t even have to think, his body just did what had been rattling around in his subconscious for a long while. Unsheathing his Browning, eyes traced down the sights as he took aim on his twin. He had the shot, it could easily go through her heart and all of this riff-raff would be taken care of. Then again, should she finally meet their maker and take a pinewood overcoat, it would be the end of his free nights, happily making Gotham the bloody hellhole that it was known to be. The money was still good, the drugs flowed freely, and the pills. My God were the pills worth it. He was decided then. Not the heart, but three inches to her northeast. Never pull a trigger, otherwise your aim will be shot to shit. Squeeze it instead, and allow the natural movement of your hand to take care of the finer details. Stressing over each facet of minutia will only go head and sully things. Squeeze, click, bang. All things considered, she took it quite well. The bullet ripped through her shoulder joint and buried itself somewhere deep into the wood of the wall behind her. Turning the hand with his gun over in it, Lucifer frowned slightly. Hm. It wasn’t the first time he had shot someone, nor was it anywhere close to being the last, but watching the muzzle flare light up his twin’s face was a moment that would be burned into his rotting grey matter from now until the end of his days. Especially that look that she gave. Groaning on the ground, a light hissing could be heard. Placing his gun on the desk and his hands in his pockets, Lu rose, slow footsteps making his way over. Ro groaned on the ground, black blood having sprayed everywhere, burning tiny holes in whatever it caught, her shoulder and bicep completely exposed. A hand held over the wound as she continued to swear up and down. Putting a foot on her undamaged shoulder, he rolled her onto her back, catching her wrist under the heel of his shoe. Last thing he needed was her getting any bright ideas. “Having fun there?” “You’re a fucking bastard Hughes.” Nodding, “Something like that yes. Oh I’m sorry, you’re left-handed, yah? A right-out tragedy that is.” Leaning more weight onto her pinned wrist, another groan of pain left her. “Tough old girl, aren’t you? I’m surprised you’re not yelling more.” “What’d you want, me to scream your name to fucking hell and back?” “Mean, it’d be a start.” Putting more weight down on her wrist, the bones were bending. The limit on stress to the human body was a tried and true formula that the tall man had committed to heart. Squatting down, he looked her face over, pursing his lips. “Let’s have a parley, shall we?” “Keep fucking talking and I’ll send someone to fucking finish you off.” “No you won’t,” he murmured matter-of-factly, looking around his office before his gaze lazily dropped down to her. “You can’t even bring yourself to pull the trigger. Had to have me do it, didn’t you? And I think this circle is something that’s going to keep on until the end of time. But that’s what family is all about, isn’t it? Being there to do the things you’re not strong enough to do in and of yourself. See, that’s where we differ, Rosemary, much to your own chagrin. I’ve seen the way you take your victims apart, and frankly, I’m a bit disappointed. You’re so emotional, all those feelings involved. It’s all mathematics, arithmetic. The more you let yourself fall to your feelings, the sloppier you get. And with that, if you can’t manage to pull the trigger on me, you’re going to choke at the moment of prime opportunity and let someone, oh I-don’t-know, shoot first.” “Done? Got it all out of your system you fuck?” “Shut it, I’m not finished.” Leaning onto her wrist more, Ro yelped another bout of pain. Continuing to look around, a hand smoothed his hair back. “You, are never going to pull a gun on me ever again. You do, and I’ll make right good to even you out before hitting dead center. I don’t have the reservations of your life of crime and codes to think twice about doing it. Fuck, I don’t even care much that we’re kin and twins. You’re just another of the masses, no matter how hard you do your best to separate yourself. You’re to indict me into the Family, giving me my full blood rights, and make me Caporegime. I won’t go for your crown, I don’t have much interest in the way of doing anything like that. So worry not Sister dear. But I want to be close to you. Be the reminder that, no matter how much you micromanage, there is still going to be someone that got one over on you. And you go head and carry that scar and shame from now until your world ends, because I’ll have the other half of the coin, forever and always. Deal? Don’t start threatening me, it’s not going to do much for you.” “It’s not a threat if I follow through with it.” “Right then.” The hollow empty quality to his voice continued on as he stood, kicking her revolver out of her hand and into the corner of his office. “I know you got that other one on you, so don’t bother. I’ll beat your ass wholesale if you think about pulling that on me. Next time you pull a gun on me will be your last.” “Fucking choke on it.” “I’ll take it under consideration.” Leaning back, he leaned against the edge of his desk. “You got a lift home?” “Rot in hell.” “See now there’s a thought, send Lucifer back to hell. Sadly, you’re a little late on that Sister dear, there’s a whole line of people looking to do that, so you’ll have to pull a number and wait on it. But, considering we’re kin, I might go ahead and let you skip the line.” Tapping his fingers on the desk in succession, a large breath billowed from his nose. “We’ve an accord?” “Fine.” “I want it in writing.” “And you think it wouldn’t be? Insulting.” “I think I have the opportunity to do what I want with my words now. Though tomorrow, you’re more than allowed to return the regularly scheduled browbeating.” “Yeah?” Slowly, she rolled to her knees, starting to stand. “Yeah. Go on and fuck off now Rosemary, I’ll deal with you tomorrow.”

#stories #ladyofthespade #thoughts on myself

3 notes · View notes

myfriendpokey · 6 years ago

Text

GARBAGE DAY!

a bunch of scrappy shorter pieces to clean out my drafts folder for the new year!

***

A videogame will tend towards exhausting every possible variation of a design space whether anyone wants it to or not.

Videogames and duration - if something is good it should continue being good however long you extend it. You don't really encounter the idea that something can be good for a little while and then be evil.

***

Works of art are "in conversation" with their audience, with materials, with history, with each other. The aim of an artwork is to start, or add to, "the conversation". "Conversation" sort of edges out the older tic whereby art "examines" or "explores" something, which always made me think of a big magnifying glass being propped up for the benefit of some eerily calm 1950s scientist. But now that sounds too chilly, and perhaps sort of sketchy in the power dynamics it implies. "Conversation" is much warmer, informal and more fluid - "conversation" is the assurance that any given power dynamic can be dissolved away in the warm glow of basic, mutual humanity. Let's talk it through! My door is always open! Whenever there's a complaint over labour conditions or harassment it's nearly de rigueur to also quote the wounded-sounding HR lackey, upset that people didn't talk to them about it before going public. Why would anybody deny the friendly, outstretched hand of the respected opponent and their entirely in-good-faith quibbling about word meanings, personality and tone? Why don't we have an honest conversation about the "honest conversation", that numbing discourse cloud sprayed out like formic acid to neutralize a threat, to melt any unsettling edges or contraries back into the familiar gloop of the private and the personal.

***

One of the pleasures of videogames is that of an infinitely repeatable, always identical procedure. Pressing the button makes something happen, and by pressing it again it will happen again in the same way. So there's a kind of abundance or excess built into the system - like partaking of a fruit which will never be depleted, and in the process taking on in your own actions something of that same infinity. You can temporarily identify with the self-identical, eternally reproducing action that you are performing. I think one of the difficulties of videogames is that as you get (slightly!) older, that immortal quality becomes more visibly alien, harder to align to your sense of self. That these mechanics act like black holes, able to absorb any amount of your life without ever being satiated, becomes a terrible curse rather than an unexpected gift. That endlessness now seems eerie and artificial, a horrible parody of life rather than the highest version of it.

The dadification of vgames has gone much remarked. But as well as a demographic shift I think this reflects a certain anxiety about the centrality of these immortal entities, these endless loops, within the culture. As reward for your fealty to the Mario brand you get even more Mario games, which by now you may not have time or energy to actually play. The VG dad (or even the buff, single pseudo-dads of the superhero movies) is eternally exhausted with the genre that he’s trapped in. We hear him groan and complain as he painfully slogs through the motions. The gratuitous loop is redeemed by the finite human suffering of the dad, as he manfully does what it takes to keep these things going forwards to the next generation, so that the next set of children may be able to actually take pleasure in them again. But the attempt to symbolically re-integrate these things into human life by casting them as a family drama never quite works: their ultimate indifference to that life shines through. A blind, eerie deathlessness is both their charm and their authority.

***

That saying that when all you have is a hammer everything else looks like a nail - similarly, when all you have is willpower, everything looks like an obstacle to be pounded into submission by that same willpower.

Laziness is a good thing in that it means stepping back from this idiot insatiability of the will. If you're lazy you have to pay more attention, because you're more aware of both your own limits and the limits of your material.

I think there can be value in suspending a formal problem rather than building an exhaustive system to solve it forever. That way it's still something you have to think about, something that still throws off and reroutes the normal workings of your awful private fantasy machine. Dropping text strings into the game as elements to spatially encounter is not ideal technically but does force you to be more responsive and exploratory with how you use that text. Robust systems can be cool, but can also really homogenize everything - now "text" is just the miscellaneous stuff within the all-purpose "textbox" at the bottom of the screen, cementing its role as filler content.

The funny thing about really systemic, open-world type games is that their very robustness tends to suffocate exprience before it happens. We know nothing will happen which will significantly impact this camera POV, this dialogue system.. anything can happen except for anything which would require a fundamental change to the underlying inventory system. But maybe the whole pleasure of the open world game is just being able to hold those experiences in suspense.

***

Mostly the characters voicing my own opinions in my videogames are explicitly malign and sinister - which is a corny device for me to vent without worrying as much about browbeating people with my opinions. But it's also a way of having those opinions without allowing them to overdetermine the rest of the game, or be fully in control over the more ambivalent and drifting work of "putting together different pieces on a screen to make interesting spaces". So in that sense my own ideas really are the enemies, and any plot role they serve in the game is a dramatisation of the effort to create a space where they lack controlling power.

***

RPG Maker is a collage machine, you get a set of pictures and start placing them around until they start to form some kind of charged and interesting space.

I think the collage aspect is a lot of what I enjoy about making these things, which is why games with more polished or consistent art styles frequently leave me cold. For me the greater the discrepancy between different objects on screen means a greater effect when they're combined.

How does gameplay etc tie in? For me gameplay can divert the interest but never truly capture it. For decades games have had the problem of effectively being able to train you to do something, but having no idea what that thing should be or why it would matter. They effectively move your attention around without being able to settle it because their inner logic is basically always the same ahistorical, mechanistic void. But this can be a good thing - the permanently restless and unsettled nature of videogame attention can't illuminate itself, but can do so to other things in passing.

Distraction becomes a way to examine surfaces, rather than being sucked into depths or settled to one fixed meaning. And the drift of unsettled consciousness is ultimately what animates game collages, the spaces that shift and react as attention plays across them, revealing or withholding. And so from this perspective, the answer to why I make videogames is: because I don't trust myself to look after an aquarium.

***

Design is managerial aesthetics - a mode of expertise framed as meta-expertise specifically because it scales up so well to systems of mass organisation and production. It's a universal discipline insofar as the task of removing any obstacles to the frictionless flow of attention and of capital is now also a universal chore. In this context a designer is like the MBA who can be dropped into any business to improve it, without ever having to know just what product they make – because the ultimate goal is always the same, the same tools can always be used.

The cutesy books about the design of everyday life and so forth exist in the same vein as the ones that tell us there's nothing wrong with marketing because ultimately isn't all human discourse and activity some form of marketing? Isn't everything "design"? The strange top-heaviness with which these things outgrow their host categories parallels the unstoppable expansion of executive salaries within the businesses themselves. The task of managing other people's labour becomes ever more grandoise, ineffable, cosmic and well-paid as that labour in turn is framed as a kind of undifferentiated slop which exists for the sake of being shaped by creatives.

***

tragedy / comedy:

Generalizing hugely I feel like tragedy is about an event or experience so powerful it changes everything - for the characters involved, for the people in that world, for the audience watching - while conversely comedy is the idea that no event or experience can change anything. Oedipus dies and there's a big announcement and everyone has to sit through the awkward two-minute silence before getting back to work, while trying not to fart or itch too noticeably, and the next day somebody's selling Oedipus commemorative pens which run out of ink five minutes after opening, and the pen cap gets lost and the cat starts playing with it.

In comedy the tragic can still happen, it’s just never strong enough to escape the constraints of the inert material universe which we find ourselves in – all that which remains so stubbornly intractable towards the higher instincts. I can talk about the dignity of man but there's still a risk that my pants will fall down or that someone will hit me with a ladder, causing my head to get stuck inside a bucket of paint, etc. Or my voice might be ridiculous or I might have a stutter (old comedy standbys!), or someone might hear part of my words out of context and assign them a different and unintended meaning. Comedy is consciousness imprisoned within a cumbersome matter which it can't completely do anything with, but also can't exist without.

Taken as a worldview, this sort of risks congealing into the kneejerk reactionary things-can-never-change, whatever-moment-of-human-history-i-was-reared-in-is-eternal-and-inviolate radio DJ / South Park mindset. And of course somebody's view of what constitutes a tragic, life-changing event depends greatly on whether it's happening to them or someone else. But as exaggeration, in its neurotic overemphasis of the inescapable material, i think this approach still has interest and use. Many of my favourite writers have a kind of comic understanding of consciousness: consciousness becomes a churning material process with its own independent momentum which has to be examined and accounted for as part of any real reckoning with the world. In this light comedy becomes a way to think about opacity and limitation, both in physical matter and in our own selves.

I think many people have made the point that vgames are generally comic, intentionally or unintentionally. The rhetoric around them still tends towards the tragic: make the choice which changes everything! Deal with the consequences, accept your fate! But in practice those moments feel less visible than the clumsy material layer of GUIs, inputs, mechanics and representations that contain and constrain them. The opacity of the black box is one inhibition: was that meant to happen? Was it scripted or a glitch? Maybe I should reload my save and try again. Another is the inertia of the various game systems and loops themselves - [x] character may have died but you still need to collect those chocobo racing feathers if you want the Gold Sword. The numbers in a videogame "want" to keep going up, whatever happens: there's an affordance there which exists independently to any merely human wants and needs, and so tends to act as a gravity well for distracted consciousness as it wanders around. When people talk about tragedy in videogames it's usually with the implicit rider that it's within a game, or set of game conventions, which have become naturalised enough to become invisible. Which also tends to mean the naturalisation of a form, of inputs, of technology, of distribution mechanisms and assumptions, which however arty we can get are still inherently tied to the tech industry. Every art game is to some extent an invitation to spend more time internalising the vocab of your windows computer.

I've mentioned that the materialism of comedy can tend towards unthinking reaction. But the insistence on certain limits inherent to the human body – requirements like clean water and clean air, food and shelter, actual bathroom breaks and not piss jugs and also not having to live six feet beneath a rising sea level - can be helpful at a point when all these things are regarded as negotiable impediments to the pursuit of future profit. Maybe it’s a good thing that some materials can still be so insistent about refusing to be absorbed into the will.

***

I think what I most enjoy about art is the sense of a game with moveable stakes: where you never quite know the value of what you're playing for, which now appears absolutely trivial, and now appears to stand in judgement of the whole world, etc. I think this is also the Adorno idea of the aesthetic as really the extra-aesthetic, that which can step outside or threaten to step outside the limits of the merely aesthetic. It's why "just make a good game / pop song / comic / etc" never quite works, in rhetoric or in practice: the really good pop song is never that which just gives the enjoyable three minutes of listening we might consciously assign to be its remit, it's what overflows or undercuts that category, that which however briefly seems at risk of stepping outside it and into the realm of everyday life.

I grew up on pop culture so I don't have to feel positively towards it. Who am I meant to be defending it from? The handful of surviving WASPs reared on Brahms who get the ostentatiously-fussy-culture-review posts at print newspapers looking to pick up a slightly higher quality of margarine advertisement? The best thing pop culture ever gave me was its own critique: that of containing artists and moments which couldn't be squared with what the rest of it was saying, which seemed to call the whole enterprise into question and in doing so broadened the sense of what was possible. Pop culture was never quite identified with itself, the value it has is in containing elements which make that self-identification impossible. So it always throws me off to see people celebrating "pop culture", like it's a self-produced totality, when that totality was only ever good for kicking.

Pop culture survives through a negativity it can never properly acknowledge.

[images: Tower of Druaga, Detana!! TwinBee, True Golf Classics: Wicked 18, Microsurgeon, Dark Edge]

#gamechat #criticism #vgames #garbage day

32 notes · View notes

ruginite · 7 years ago

Text

Call Out Post - Bullying

bul·ly

ˈbo͝olē/

verb

gerund or present participle:

bullying

use superior strength or influence to intimidate (someone), typically to force him or her to do what one wants."a local man was bullied into helping them" synonyms: persecute, oppress, tyrannize, browbeat, harass, torment, intimidate, strong-arm, dominate; informal push around, bullyrag "the others bully him" coerce, pressure, pressurize, press, push; force, compel; badger, goad, prod, intimidate, dragoon, strong-arm; informal bulldoze, railroad.

Now that we’re all on the same page as to what exactly the word bully means....

What the actual fuck is going on? When did such a noticeable chunk of the rp/tumblr community just up and decide that manners and respecting other people’s opinions and points of view isn’t a thing? Tumblr and the RP community isn’t fucking high school. It’s a community of people from all, I repeat, A L L walks of life. Of every race and creed.

It’s not okay to bully someone for something. Does it happen? Yes. Why? Because there’s insecurity in so many people, and they don’t know how else to handle it. Some people? Well some people are just straight up evil assholes, who take pleasure in other people’s pain and suffering. And all to often LOVE to be the one causing it.

That has got to god damn stop.

If you enjoy causing people pain? Maybe you should consider going to talk to someone. If you think the only way to feel better about yourself is to make someone else hurt. Maybe you should go and talk to someone. That’s not positive. You need to work through your issues and figure out what’s causing the abusive behavior. You need help. And that’s something you’d be able to see if you would stop tormenting others for five seconds and take a look at yourself and your actions.

Because whatever the reason is you’re doing it? I guarantee that if you got a taste of your own medicine you wouldn’t like it. You’d see ‘wow this shit sucks.’ But it doesn’t have to get to that extreme. You can stop yourself. You can seek help in a positive way. You can better yourself.

Now----

Everyone has a different opinion on anyone topic on until the universe ends. That’s just the way it is, because we are all different and unique individuals. (Yes even you guys that are acting like grade a assholes as of late). So here’s some ideas on how to peacefully go about your life here on tumblr.

1. Don’t like the way someone writes a character? Unfollow.

2. Don’t like the content of a blog? Unfollow or if they provide a specific tag, block the tag. Viola problem solved. (Which by the by you can also do on mobile now)

3. Are being harassed via anons? Turn anons off, either permanently or for a set length of time that is of your choosing. (and for god sake please for your own mental health delete the hate asks. There’s no reason to keep them. They’re bad juju and you just don’t need that baggage okay?)

4. Someone specific harassing you? Block their blog. That means you can’t see them and they can’t see you. (on the dash anyway) And they can’t send you asks anymore from the blog you blocked. It makes it harder for them to be mean.

5. Have an issue with an RP partner? Don’t vague post. Again this isn’t highschool. Instead, find or make the time to have an adult non-aggressive conversation with that partner. Find out what’s going on. See if there’s something you may have inadvertently done to create the problem. Or vise versa tell them what it is they’ve done that’s upset you. Give both of you the chance to calmly and peacefully work out the problem.

6. Sometimes the above just doesn’t work. When it doesn’t? Unfollow, block, etc. Do what you need to do to make yourself comfortable again. Just don’t be a dick about it. Some people just don’t get along. That’s life. Sometimes it really is just better to block and walk away.

7. I would wager a guess that about what? 80% of the people in the RP community (and tumblr as a whole really) have some kind of mental issue. Be that depression, anxiety, phobias, bipolar, etc. Please, please take this into consideration when you talk to people. Not just here but in your real life too. You have no idea what someone is going through until you ask. You have no idea what is or isn’t going on in their life. You have no concept of what it is to stand there in their shoes because you are standing in your own. Majority of people wear the ‘i’m okay’ mask. That doesn’t mean their okay. And one hateful comment or question or whatever it is, could be what breaks the camel’s proverbial back.

8. Remember the golden rule we were all taught in kindergarten. If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Or at least give yourself the chance to come up with a way to make the negative words you have the urge to say, constructive criticism instead.

9. Some people are jealous of other people’s talents. That’s just the way it is. It’s been that way since the dawn of time. It’s not going to change. If people are hating on you? Brush your shoulders off, adjust your shades and keep moving forward. Don’t let the green get you down and keep you there.

10. In all harm none. --- Definition? Do what you do and do it with pride, in so long as it harms no one else, or yourself everything’s cake.

#[ I've been watching things unfold here on tumblr and in multiple places else where over the last few days of not being here ]#[ I had to get this out ]#[ This petty bully nonsense gotta stop ya'll ]#[ it's doing no body good ]#[ mobile post ]#Mind Out of Matter || OOC

9 notes · View notes

lodelss · 5 years ago

Link

Jordan Michael Smith | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,744 words)

If someone spits bigotry at you while you’re a kid, you’re unlikely to forget it. You’ll remember it not because it’s traumatic, though it can be. You’ll remember it not even because it’s degrading and excruciating, though it is certainly those things, too. No, you’ll remember it because it instills in you an understanding that people are capable of motiveless evil. That humans can be moved to hate because they are hateful. You aren’t given a reason for why people hate you, because they don’t need a reason. You’re you, through no fault of your own, even if you want desperately to be anyone else. And that’s enough.

I am a Canadian. I was born in Markham, which is a small city about 30 kilometers northeast of Toronto. That distance meant a great deal. Markham was a large town of middle- and working-class families when my newlywed parents moved there, in the late 1970s, with a population that hovered around 60,000. It was pretty mixed demographically, I recall, though containing a white majority. My older sister and I were the only Jews in our elementary school, except for one other family who arrived after we did and seemed not to attract much ire; I imagined it was because they were beautiful and popular (we were neither).

We were one of the minority of Canadian Jewish families living outside Toronto or Montreal. More than 71% of all Canadian Jews reside in these two cities, according to Allan Levine’s serviceable but unexceptional new book on the history of Jewish Canada, Seeking the Fabled City. Levine describes a familiar story of an immigrant group gradually gaining acceptance (and some power) in a once-largely white Christian country. For the first half of the 20th century, Jews in Canada were arguably detested to a greater degree than in America. By the 21st century, Canadian Jews felt as safe as Jews anywhere felt safe. Levine quotes a Toronto rabbi as saying, “Living in Toronto, my children don’t know that Jews are a minority.”

Local Bookstores Amazon

I always knew. I knew it when my grade five teacher encouraged me to sing along with the Christmas Carols, mouthing the words about how greatly I loved Christ, the Lord. I wrote an essay about how I hated Christmas because I felt left out — but when the teacher, annoyed, asked me if I actually felt that way, I lacked the courage to affirm that I did.

That was what might be called casual antisemitism, deniable to its practitioners because of its thoughtlessness. It can be distinguished from other varieties of antisemitism, which are less casual and more menacing. Such as the kid — the most popular in my grade, who I badly wanted as a friend — who told me that I looked Jewish because I had a big nose. Such as the kid who used permanent marker to brand the word ‘JEW’ on my sister’s knapsack in giant black lettering. Such as the kid who teased my sister for being Jewish so intensely that my family left Markham when I was in grade eight.

I’d like to look back satisfied at having reacted to these incidents with righteous anger. In the School Ties version of my life, I confront every single kid who hissed antisemitism at me, beating up the boys and browbeating the girls. Maybe I confront their parents — in the pre-internet era, they likely learned their precocious bigotry at home — and beat them up, too. My grandfather beat up his antisemitic childhood tormentor, my father used to tell me proudly. In high school, one of my friends attacked a kid who called him a dirty Jew when they were playing hockey, and my Dad always congratulated my friend, for years after.

But what I remember feeling on those occasions in Markham was not anger but fear. That emotion infused a few crucial years in my adolescence, and it’s one that singularly hinders heroism. Fear cripples action and encourages paralysis. So I reacted to jokes and slurs by laughing along — I actually once brought a yarmulke to class and paraded it around on my head to the amusement of my social betters, like a dancing Russian bear — or by pretending I didn’t mind while I panicked internally.

One of the awful things about oppression is that sometimes you can’t bring yourself to hate your oppressors. You want them to like you too badly.

Experiencing bigotry can instill a morbid curiosity about the perspective of one’s oppressors. At some point, in grade six or seven, I started wondering why my school chums despised my Jewishness. Or, perhaps it wasn’t that intentional; maybe I simply became enthralled with the Holocaust at the same time I faced antisemitism at school.

I fixated on the swastika, the symmetrical right angles hypnotizing me. I drew them on notebooks and spots where my parents wouldn’t see. In a remarkable feat for a 13-year-old, I read William L. Shirer’s mammoth The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, as well as a book on Auschwitz and a biography of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor. I didn’t feel strong emotions reading about the Holocaust, no eruptions of horror or sadness. It was just fascinating to me, the way an unfamiliar animal can seem fascinating. Skinheads, the frightening antisemitic menace at the time, were attractively dangerous. I remember thinking that I’d be a neo-Nazi if I could. They were tough and feared, and I was weak and scared.

Something else was happening to me that became apparent only later on. In his excellent new book on the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, A Specter Haunting Europe, Paul Hanebrink writes about how the Holocaust became the primary moral tale for the contemporary Western world. The unique nature of genocide “made the Holocaust a paradigmatic case of evil, and charged Holocaust memory with implications for the teaching of toleration in a modern multicultural and liberal society,” writes Hanebrink, a historian at Rutgers University. The Holocaust wasn’t just something else to learn about it. It offered clear, imperishable moral lessons that could sustain me. I had evidence, if I needed it, that my Jewishness was innocent, and my persecutors were guilty of … something. And that those distinctions mattered.

Local Bookstores Amazon

The problem was that I lacked internal strength. I had convictions, but they gave me no courage. Even if I was convinced I was undeserving of discriminatory treatment, I was too unsure of the other parts of me to act. And so I didn’t. Not when I sat during recess against the brick walls of the school and two boys turned the corner to toss pennies at me. Not when two other boys directed Hitler salutes at me. Not when one of those kids drew a swastika on his pencil box and the principal happened to see it and ineffectually told him to erase it and walked off. Not even then.

I suppose I did have one conviction — I wanted to be popular. Popular kids seemed to have more fun and get more respect. And so, even while I burned at the Jew-hatred thrown my way, I wanted to be friends with the flamethrowers. The next few years I invested heavily in ingratiating myself with the same kids who heaved pennies and Hitler salutes at me. One of the awful things about oppression is that sometimes you can’t bring yourself to hate your oppressors. You want them to like you too badly.

Hanebrink’s book gestures at this without quite making the connection. A Specter Haunting Europe is about the once-widespread theory that Jews were imposing communism on Europeans as a way to destroy the continent. In our era, conspiracies about Jews normally involve them trying to extinguish the white race, using Zionism to poison humankind, or just running the financial system to their own benefit.

But Hanebrink recalls a time — beginning at the end of World War I, culminating in the Holocaust and surviving into the 1980s — when the primary threat from the Jews was thought to be communist. “Over the course of the twentieth century, the belief that communism was created by a Jewish conspiracy and that Jews were therefore to blame for the crimes committed by communist regimes became a core element of counterrevolutionary, antidemocratic, and racist ideologies in many different countries,” he writes. That belief was crucial to Hitler’s worldview, and to some postwar conservative anti-communists, as well.

Several factors combined to smother the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. The Holocaust’s penetration into mass consciousness offered lessons about where conspiracy theories could ultimately lead. The rise of human rights as an ethical system for understanding the world gained popular appeal. And the demise of the Soviet Union meant the danger posed by communism was pretty obsolete anyway.

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

But conspiracies about shadowy communities didn’t disappear alongside the U.S.S.R. Instead, Hanebrink writes persuasively, a fear of political Islam and terrorism assumed the position in the Western imagination once held by Judeo-Bolshevism. “The figure of the Jewish Bolshevik was imagined as a cunning border crosser who brought a dangerous and foreign ideology to a disloyal and discontented minority,” he writes. Jews then, like Muslims today, were seen as hostile to European traditions, preying on innocent whites. When Donald Trump and Ted Cruz advocate patrolling Muslim-majority neighborhoods in the United States to monitor foreigners, or when states introduce a ban on the implementation of “sharia law”, they are repeating lines read by political actors a century earlier who feared Jewish communists.

Hanebrink situates Islamo-panic in the 21st century. Certainly the 9/11 terrorist attacks inaugurated an era of unprecedented mass hysteria about the threat posed by Muslims. But in the United States, that hysteria actually dates to 1979, when Iranian students captured American diplomats and staffers at the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held them hostage. That event, coupled with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s verbal assaults on America, inspired hostility toward Muslims that has never abated. As early as 1981, the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said observed that, “In many instances ‘Islam’ has licensed not only patent inaccuracy but also expressions of unrestrained ethnocentrism, cultural and even racial hatred, deep yet paradoxically free-floating hostility.” The rise of political Islam in Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine, Algeria and elsewhere in the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s provided further impetus for the fears of Americans and Europeans, as did increased immigration to Western countries by people from the Global South.

It was strategic forgetfulness, acting like I remembered less than I did.

A Specter Haunting Europe notes how Jews morphed from being seen as opposed to Christian civilization to being part of it — to being the bulwark of “Judeo-Christian civilization.” A term regularly invoked primarily but not exclusively among conservatives, “Judeo-Christian” meant in the sense of a shared moral or spiritual sensibility is a fairly recent construct. (The earliest known uses of the term were, utterly predictably, antisemitic.) Instead of invoking Jews as The Other, “Judeo-Christian” integrates them into a White West besieged by alien forces. But it still maintains the paranoid mindset in opposition to foreigners, Muslims, atheists, gay people or feminists. The players are different, but the game is the same. (The sharp-witted gay atheist Jewish former Congressman Barney Frank once memorably quipped, “I’ve never met a Judeo-Christian. What do they look like? What kind of card do you send them in December?”)

The ethos of “Judeo-Christianity” is not something strictly imposed on the Jewish community by outsiders; some Jews participate in the creation of the narrative of the Muslim takeover. In the United States, scholar-activists like Daniel Pipes have been instrumental in spreading fear about Muslims, as have Republican magnates-cum-donors like Sheldon Adelson, activists such as David Horowitz, organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and politicians like Joe Lieberman. And Israel has been at the forefront of anti-Islam activism for decades. It is telling that, in Seeking the Fabled City, Allan Levine repeatedly and favorably quotes the Canadian Jewish columnist Barbara Kay, who wrote in the immediate aftermath of the Toronto van attack that it was normal, and in fact commendable, to hope that a Muslim was the perpetrator, because when a Muslim attacks people it is “part of a pattern” that is familiar and legible, but when anyone else does it, it’s just “a random act over which we hadn’t a scintilla of control.” She wrote this even while acknowledging early (and accurate) reports that “sexual grievances” had motivated the killer, who was later reported to be an “incel” inspired by a previous mass murderer who targeted women. That kind of “sexual grievance” is just the product of mental illness, Kay asserted at the time — the work of someone with “addled perceptions”; only if a Muslim had perpetrated the attack would it have been the result of “radicalization” because “jihadists are not insane.” Kay also persistently inflates the danger posed by Islamic fundamentalism and its attendant symbols, like women’s face covering, portraying a fringe practice that should be easily tolerated in a democracy as some kind of existential threat to the body politic. But Levine cites her as “bright and insightful … possess[ing] a sharp and witty sense of humour … she continues to write about the important issues that matter to her with award-winning and always readable columns, while also being the best grandmother she can be.” Segments of the Canadian Jewish community are as hostile to Muslims as their American counterparts are, and Levine thinks they are just good bubbes.

These Jews are part of a community that was — and still is — the target of conspiracy theories alleging their nefariousness. Now they are indulging in their own parallel prejudices. This fact says nothing about Jews or Judaism. But it says something about human beings. About the ease with which victims become victimizers, and the oppressed become oppressors. About my desire to be among my tormentors rather than their mark.

That ambition actually led me to befriend the guys — and they were all guys — who had leveled slurs and coins at me. In grade eight, my final year in Markham, I made a point of ingratiating myself with them. It wasn’t that I forgave them. More that I pretended to forget what they had said and done. It was strategic forgetfulness, acting like I remembered less than I did. It was more convenient that way, for them and me. We all became pals, watching The X-Files, smoking cigarettes and chasing girls together. I never expressed discomfort with their antisemitism, let alone disapproval.

But geography, like time, can change an adolescent’s thinking. When my family emigrated to the predominantly Jewish suburb of Thornhill, it was just a 25-minute drive from Markham but seemed a world apart. After being one of two Jewish families in town, I became one of the few Jews to have spent time in a non-Jewish neighborhood. My status made me more aware of my Judaism, not less. Here it was cool to be Jewish and un-cool to be anything else. Slurs about Jews were out. Jokes about goys were in. My ethnic pride ballooned, and my confidence likewise did as I aged. But for years I continued to have nightmares about my former friends, the only recurring nightmares I’ve ever had.

And yet, with about 25 years’ hindsight since all this went down, what’s striking is how little all of it has affected me. At least consciously, I never thought much about the pennies and the Hitler salutes. Nightmares aside, I never agonized over facing antisemitism, or even got angry about it. I simply filed it away as something else that happened in my childhood, alongside the time someone stole a porn magazine I’d hidden in a tree and the night my friend and I stayed up late to watch as many Friday the 13th installments as we could. I have this weird ability to analyze the events clinically, devoid of emotion, let alone trauma. If I wasn’t over-sensitive about endless other things in my life, I’d be worried about this detachment.

While thinking about writing this piece, I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in decades. When I was in grade two or three, my friend and I leveled a slur at a kid of South Asian descent. I said something terrible to him, using a word whose meaning I didn’t even know — my friend had used the term, and I joined in, wanting as always to be part of a good crowd (an impulse that can make adults into fascists). A teacher explained to me that we had done wrong and made us apologize. A few years later, the kid we bullied and I became friends, too. I wonder if he forgave me, or just strategically forgot about what I’d done. Sometimes kids have to do a lot of forgetting. Sometimes they don’t forget at all.

* * *

Jordan Michael Smith is the author of the Kindle Single, Humanity. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Washington Post and many other publications.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

republicstandard · 6 years ago

Text

American Autopsy: That Esquire Article

———

Social media is aflame with the vile reactions to the March 2019 Esquire article profiling an American boy, Ryan Morgan. An American boy who is, as we need to clarify these days, white.

While the anti-white reactions indeed indicate the downward spiral of our society and warrant discussion, I want to take a different approach.

We’re going to focus here on the Esquire article itself.

The piece is a high wire balancing act, ping-ponging between the familiar anti-white line and some vague gestures towards understanding the white experience. “Gestures” being the operative word.

The article and its packaging do just enough to seem edgy in 2019 America—they have to sell magazines after all, and while most media outlets parrot the anti-white rhetoric, every so often we get an editor who wants to feel like a maverick.

Is this really anything risky though? Or is it a sleight-of-hand that’s only supposed to appear risky?

Passages of the article are banal, which seems purposeful as if to project Ryan’s voice into the writer’s. This is especially true of the awkward opening, where Ryan was expected to answer what it might be like to be a girl. Who knows how the question was posed, how the journalist spun it, and what we can or should expect from an average seventeen-year-old boy when asked about what it might be like to be a girl.

As for the main thrust of the piece, the Esquire staff knew this would cause a stir among the anti-whites, as writers and YouTubers are rightly discussing.

So let’s look at what you’re allowed to think, the furthest you’re allowed to go in the mainstream if you’re presenting a neutral profile of an individual—the escape valve, the acceptable controversy, the corporately approved rebellion Esquire is engaging in.

The article states that the subject, Ryan, lives in West Bend, Wisconsin, “one of the last Republican strongholds.”

But then it goes on to say,

“Trump held a campaign rally at its conference center in 2016, where he declared, ‘I’m asking for the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today,’ even though only 2 percent of West Bend’s population is African-American (Whites account for 95 percent.)”

The article also makes sure to point out that the most popular opinion at West Bend High School seemed to be anti-Trump.

The high school itself is described as, “looking like a five-acre Tetris block fallen in a grass field. A guard buzzes us in. The risk of school shootings is taken seriously.” Sounds a little too reminiscent of a prison for those of us imagining ennobled Faustian societies, and how the education of the youth might look in such an order.

All this in spite of the town and high school being generally safe, with barely any violent incidents in its recent history.

So we see a major theme established: atrophy. No greatness being made again. Even in the American heartland. Even with a President in office who was supposedly dog whistling white-positive overtures while on the campaign trail.

Ryan describes a loss of agency he’s experienced, not trusted because he’s a straight white male.

While discussing social media, he’s quoted as saying,

“I’d post a comment, and the replies would all be the same thing: ‘You’re stupid, and that’s dumb’ or ‘You suck’ or ‘You’re straight, you can’t talk about something LGBT.’”

We learn that Ryn takes in all perspectives and now makes sure to watch both Fox News AND CNN. He leans rights but has embraced the center. So the general reader is meant to lap up this conclusion: Ryan sidestepped the pitfalls of slipping further into the right wing and the scourge of identity politics.

The article makes a comment on how Ryan doesn’t fit into social cliques, notably indicating that he doesn't spend time with, in his own words, “white guys who all hang out with their trucks and guns and say, ‘Heil Trump’ and all that.” Other cliques were listed in the article, and all must have been mentioned by Ryan when the writer, Jennifer Percy, was interviewing him. But only this “white Heil Trump” group was put in quotes, put in Ryan’s own words. A telling detail.

Nevertheless, Ryan is ultimately presented as a representative of Trump’s base, albeit more level-headed. Despite that, we hear no positive political reasoning or viewpoints from Ryan.

We’ll have wait for the subsequent articles in this Esquire series that present the diversity crew, but something tells me that those kids will be more outspoken and opinionated. Esquire wouldn’t dare profile a budding James Allsup, for example, someone who could have debated finer points of white identity and offer critiques of multiculturalism.

Of course, I’m not attacking Ryan himself. I’m analyzing the magazine’s choice of profiling him, the slice they are presenting—as the edge of acceptability, no less. You get the impression that their subject, Ryan, is just, kind of...floating.

Ryan is quoted as saying: “It’s better to be a moderate, because then you don’t get heat. We want everyone to be happy.”

This is the Peterson Principle, everyone!

Another young white male saved from taking too strong a stance for his identity. From caring too much about his European heritage and the European civilization in which he lives. All this despite the swarms currently belching their contempt on social (and professional) media over the mere fact that you’re even hearing from Ryan.

Maybe he’s hiding his power levels, who knows? But we have to assess what we’re being shown.

There’s a passage where a teacher of his makes a gesture towards fairness—much like the article itself—in having the class sing two songs, one representative of liberal views, the other of conservative views.

Putting aside the childishness of having high school seniors participate in a singalong as a lesson, the liberal song contains lyrics with a positive vision while the conservative paints a picture of fear and destruction.

The article tells us,

“The Liberal Song” is set to the tune of “Ode to Joy.” Mr. Inkmann offers to sing first before everyone joins in. “If I were a liberal, liberal, life would be so very great,” the lyrics read, “knowing that in liberal land this other man could marry me.” ...“The Conservative Song,” set to the tune of “Beer Barrel Polka,” includes lines like “I hate social programs, they really make me want to puke / I would rather use the money for a two-ton nuke” and “Welfare is not good, before we had it, people tried / And I hope the biggest criminals are electrified!”

When mainstream news media is referenced, only one fall from grace bears mentioning, that of Fox News pundit, Bill O’Reilly.

We see a rather unmissable portrait outlined: conservatism and its avatars in traditional white America are on the wane. This way of life and these people are losing their grip. When one realizes Wisconsin is set to be a swing state come the 2020 Presidential election, we get an even better idea of why Ryan Morgan of West Bend was chosen as the subject.

In it's general the tone the article is drab.

The accompanying photographs convey a detached, almost bored eye. The colors and emotions expressed are often bland, save for one sweet photo of Ryan carrying his girlfriend on his back, both smiling.

We hear of Ryan’s divorced parents at a couple of points. They live as far away from each other as legally possible for having joint custody. When they meet bi-monthly at a parking lot to exchange him, Ryan’s parents park their cars in opposite directions so that they don’t even see each other. Fracture and sadness abound in modern America.

Esquire is showing you a snapshot of something in decline. Through the semblance of presenting something fair, interesting, or controversial—depending on who you ask— you can feel this sort of exposé throwing a deathly pall over white America.

While Ryan indeed seems like a good kid, Esquire shows its hand in choosing him because there’s a troubling story from his past woven throughout the article. There had been an incident where a girl at school slapped him, and he then slapped her back.

There were ramifications that followed and even a bit of legal action.

Although we also learn that Ryan doesn’t drink or do drugs, is in advanced classes, aspires to work as an environmental scientist, getting up at 5:30 am for an internship at a water plant, and seems like he genuinely wants to do right by people, this specter of the incident with the girl haunts the article, repeated at intervals.

The message is this: no matter how upstanding a young white man may seem, there could be a woman beater lurking inside.

There could be a hater lurking inside.

He is born guilty, always carrying the stain.

So step back, be mild, be moderate, stay in the center. Take in the perspectives of the margins as if they drive society and don’t question it.

If you color outside these lines, you risk becoming a monster. Be a nice Jekyll and let the new culture ministers continually browbeat you to prevent the ugly Hyde from emerging.

This is the sandbox you are allowed to play in, white man.

We’re shown the outer edges of that sandbox in this article. As mentioned, many are indeed vehemently pushing back against this article even existing “in the current year.”

Every so often, the white man may be acknowledged in new media. But even that is becoming verboten.

The sandbox is shrinking.

Don’t say anything.

As Ryan himself stated, quoted on the magazine cover,

“I know what I can’t do… I just don’t know what I can do.”

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine http://bit.ly/2Ij9qGm via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine

0 notes

lodelss · 5 years ago

Text

I’ve Done a Lot of Forgetting

Jordan Michael Smith | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,744 words)

Local Bookstores Amazon

One of the awful things about oppression is that sometimes you can’t bring yourself to hate your oppressors. You want them to like you too badly.

Local Bookstores Amazon

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

It was strategic forgetfulness, acting like I remembered less than I did.

* * *

Jordan Michael Smith is the author of the Kindle Single, Humanity. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Washington Post and many other publications.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

from Blogger http://bit.ly/2Mlcu6U via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes