#I think it’s a very inherently American worldview to think otherwise

[arcane-vagabond]

I need some of you to stop trying to find homosexual romances in straight media and actually sit down and start supporting the LGBTQ+ media that’s already out there.

[catonator]

In Defence of Gatekeeping

Hey, remember when I said I’d write a story? Uh, oops. Anyway, here’s something that’s in no way extremely inflammatory.

I’ve had discussions with several people in the past few days, and most of them have ended up in a final point that usually goes something like “this is just gatekeeping, and gatekeeping is bad.” Funny that.

Gatekeeping as a concept dates back just about hundred years. The term was initially invented to describe the habits of journalists, where newspapers would filter out some stories from print. In some regards this tied to inherent biases within the organisations - during the red scare in the United States, many stories deemed “too red” were naturally left out of print. This made gatekeeping a rather important concept, since for many people, newspapers were the only source of information outside the immediate surroundings. Some stories not being reported at all end up shaping the worldview of the readership quite drastically.

In the 21st century, especially online, the term has taken up a new meaning in urban circles. I’ll wager a guess and say that the idea came from Reddit some 10 years ago, mostly because a misappropriation of a normally high-concept sociological or otherwise critical term usually comes from Reddit. Online, the term is more of a liberally applied critique of a “no true scotsman” fallacy. The idea was initially mainly levelled at people who define extremely strict rules to what constitutes as a true example of some kind of identity. This is extremely common in hobbyist circles, you’ve all seen it: “A true programmer uses C++,” “A true musician doesn’t use FL Studio,” there’s hundreds of examples of it. It’s a fair backlash.

So now we’re already quite a few steps removed from the original intention. Am I going to argue that gatekeeping is becoming a bludgeoning weapon against any kind of curation or meaning within a circle? Yes. The answer is yes.

Gatekeeping’s application to identity rather than access of information has made it a rather troubling tool for assholes everywhere. Group identity is a rather nebulous concept to begin with, and the past few years’ rapid expansion of what counts as a “community” hasn’t helped at all. The term is rather widely used to browbeat people or groups who try to keep up standards or secrets of some kind.

Ironically, gatekeeping itself is a victim of the process due to its origin; decades of exposure to the term either via literary circles, or more recently, Twitter, has flanderised the concept to a point where it just stands for “you don’t like my idea, therefore you are bad.” You can witness this for yourself on r/gatekeeping, the majority of the sub is rather basic applications of lines being drawn in sand.

Wanting to conserve an identity against a change isn’t always necessarily a bad response. I think a  rather good example is the mid-to-late 2010s, where for a while you couldn’t avoid hearing about a certain citrus-flavoured American gentleman. 4chan’s /v/ mostly turned to discussions of oranges, Ylilauta’s /b/ mostly turned to discussions of oranges, and boy howdy were all subreddits all about discussions of oranges. Especially if the original concept was about something rather benign, like memes or photography.

It's very easy for a community to fall to what I like to call the newcomer dilemma. Opening your gates too much can easily lead to a flood of newcomers to the scene, either overpopulating places that the native members praised for their quietness, or leading to most of the shared knowledge in the scene becoming food for beginners. This can easily cause issues of communication between the veterans, and will sooner or later kill any advancements in the scene. It's a case where a lack of curation leads to stagnation, not the opposite!

Corporations tend to prefer gatekeeping being frowned upon. Any limitations to who a concept could appeal to turns out to be bad for business. Someone doesn’t like <brand>? That’s a lost sale! Better change everything that defines it! If you’ve happened to wonder why the language of marketing with many Disney brands is rather similar to the language pushed forth by many online moralists, it’s because their ideals tend to be the same. The difference is, Disney has a much clearer reason for their goals.

I personally have never felt as lost as I do now, mostly because of the lack of any real defining individual traits in many communities, online or offline. Wanting to create a zone for the discussion of one idea has for a while meant that unscrupulous individuals would eventually attempt to twist the zone to the discussion of another idea.

And I don’t think I’m the only one. In the past few years as we’re advancing into the 2020s, many seem to be tired of the battle of meaning and how much of themselves they should be willing to give up for the acceptance of newcomers. A lack of standards is lethal to counterculture.

So how is gatekeeping done tastefully? Good question. I don’t have an answer for that. I’m fairly sure no-one does. Nothing will stay the same forever, no matter how hard you try to force it to. Even a very closed group, such as a real life friend group of yours, won’t stay the same. People will get new purposes in life, some of them will get married, the discussions and ideas will change. Resisting any and all change eventually just makes you a living fossil. Some scenes and groups will die on their own eventually, some will undergo large changes, some will stay the same and make a comeback. You never really know what the future will bring, but you shouldn't be discouraged from being who you are.

[weemietime]

This is why North Americans (Canadians and US, but it is very blatant in Canada) will never understand their indigenous communities, lol. I'm not specifically talking about this person which has a more complex answer beyond that they are white or a self-hating Jew.

Jews aren't a monolith and there is value in opposition to the Kahanist literal terrorists (some of y'all don't know who Menachem Begin was and it shows lol) in power in Israel.

It's neither, conditionally (the conditions are that they continue to spout this stuff. I sympathize, because the second they center their Jewishness in any meaningful way people will start having a problem with it and they'll be falsely labeled a Zionist and otherized by people who very much do view Jewishness as inextricable from Zionism).

But the fact is that most people who spew this rhetoric who are absolutely this person's friends and colleagues so those things inform your worldview, they're inherently colonialist. We had a bitch of a teacher in Canada interrupt the Grassy Narrows First Nations protest to force her Jewish and Indian students to wear t-shirts that said "colonizer."

I don't use the word bitch often especially for women but sorry, she was a bitch. She's the worst word. When I tell you that these people were fucking furious with this white lady's bullshit performance art at their protest, making it about her reductive, incomprehensible politics and her need to shame 8th graders.

They'll never get it. The divide between indigenous people and white people is too significant and until there is a serious reckoning, to the people who literally coined Land Back (Canadian First Nations, not this specific group of individuals who were protesting about the ongoing water crisis), there will never be understanding.

So yes, while it's equally reductive to say shit like oh you're just a self-hating Jew, this DARVO bullshit is inherently the colonialist imperialism of Islamic fundamentalist groups which is getting beamed at light speed into sympathetic white ears and regurgitated without comprehension.

And some people involved in perpetuating that will be Jews, because let's face it. In America, most of your friends are probably the actual descendants of settlers. Which means that they're inherently sympathetic to a world-view that places the indigenous group as the bad guy for taking back their land, because they're afraid that might one day be them.

They think Jews just rolled into Israel and slaughtered everyone for no reason, when really, we recognized that we didn't have an option other than the partition plan after a systemic attempt to eradicate every Jew pretty much world-wide (the Nazis wanted to take over the world and purge the rest of it of Jews as well).

On top of that we have had pogroms and expulsions from all over the Middle East which is why most Jews in Israel aren't even European. Only 31% of Israel is Ashkenazi and even amongst them, many were also expelled (such as Russian Jews) or are otherwise not European/white. The classification of 70% of Israel being a European settler colony is false. They live there because they have nowhere else to go. Ask your bae the Houthis what they did in Yemen.

It also fundamentally doesn't understand indigenous culture in North America, which is why that hasn't actually been done in hundreds of years, lmao.

excerpt from yasser arafat’s 1974 speech to the un general assembly (also sometimes known as the olive branch speech)

[waitmyturtles]

So I’m not sure if the following train of thought on EAW is going to hold water by the time I’m through, but lemme just fuck with it for a minute, because it’s been on my mind.

The dynamic between Young-woo and Min-woo has me thinking about power differentials. Why is Min-woo being a little snot? Even though they are both equals as rookie attorneys, Young-woo is clearly the better lawyer. Min-woo, in his ableist and misogynistic worldview, can’t understand how this can be, so he tries to undermine Young-woo (and is being a weenie dumbass about it). 

But when I was thinking about this, it actually made me realize that there’s a pretty significant socioeconomic conversation that’s not necessarily being highlighted among Young-woo, Jun-ho, and dad Gwang-ho. Namely: that Young-woo is out-earning the guys, possibly by a LOT.* 

I’m going to firstly assume from my limited research on American Google that Young-woo is earning quite the competitive salary at one of South Korea’s most prestigious fictional law firms.*

Now, in terms of other apparent power differentials between Young-woo and Jun-ho, we see one differential immediately in the way they address each other by South Korean naming conventions -- her calling him “Jun-ho” and him calling her “Attorney Woo.” However, I think it’s interesting that the economic power differential is either not addressed, or inherently implied by the naming conventions, and also by physical location -- while Young-woo has her own office as an attorney, of course, Jun-ho sits in an open office setting. 

We’re seeing that the writers of the show are not letting stereotypes or biases interfere with the way Jun-ho treats Young-woo as a behavioral equal. (And, let’s face it, as viewers -- we might be unknowingly expecting those biases to rear their ugly heads eventually, and we continue to be relieved that we’re not seeing them, which makes us love Jun-ho and the writers even more.)

However, what I’m also loving here is that Young-woo’s isn’t using her power as a brilliant attorney over Jun-ho. She’s got a lot of power! And remember, she totally knows she has power, and she totally knows she’s brilliant, because she knows she can and does outshine her peers and potentially other people around her. 

Remember what Su-yeon said about South Korea being a patriarchal society in episode 12? By setting up Young-woo as the brilliant breadwinner in her relationship, the writers quietly bat down the patriarchal expectation that Jun-ho would be the breadwinner. That’s why I think this socioeconomic twist is so wonderful. It’s more complicated than, say, the lawyer-student relationship that just concluded in SBS’s “Why Her.” There are real balancing acts taking place between Young-woo and Jun-ho. Jun-ho is quietly encouraging Young-woo to understand his emotional needs and boundaries, yes, and is not taking advantage of his position as a non-autistic person in an ableist world. But he’s also mad respecting her talent and power as an attorney. And she doesn’t wield her brilliance over him. AND even though this is not being put into words (yet?), if they end up together forever, then she would very likely be the main breadwinner. And the same deal applies to her and her dad. If I have my guesses correct*, she’ll likely out-earn her dad for the rest of his life. 

Y’all, come on. Can we love her more? If this show sets her up to grow in her professional AND emotional AND economic power, I’ll just keel over. She may not stay at Hanbada, by the way -- as we see, she may be contemplating something outside the elite hot seat. But this is all a part of her life as a brilliant attorney, these struggles she’s learning about and balancing, and she might not even be aware that she’s just blasting through patriarchal stereotypes of who she SHOULD otherwise be. Come on. I could not love her more. 

****

*I am only basing this theory off of the limited information about South Korean legal salaries that American Google offers. But it seems like the average salary for first-year lawyers across South Korea is similar to that in the US, which is around $50,000. Your top 50 law firms in the US are generally following the Cravath salary range, which, holy balls, seems to start at $215,000 nowadays. (I am IN THE WRONG PROFESSION, EVIDENTLY.) According to a lawyer family member of mine, an average first-year salary at a non-Cravath-level medium-to-big firm could be anywhere from $160,000 to $185,000. My limited research is telling me that maybe lawyers don’t earn THAT MUCH in South Korea as in America, but I would need a reliable source to tell me that. Anyway, I just want to make a safe assumption that Young-woo is hopefully making mad bucks, because seriously, she better be, and I am just going to go off of this until I stand corrected by someone who knows more than me on this question!

[theradioghost]

Can you talk more about the history of the language and storytelling techniques/conventions of audio dramas? That's an incredibly intriguing concept but I wouldn't have the first idea where to look for more info about it. It reminds me a lot of the idea of video game literacy and how a lot of games aren't accessible to people who are brand new to video games because there are so many established conventions that aren't explained to new players

It has taken me nearly a month to reply to this, which I know is in reply to this post, and I am sorry for that! But also, yes!!!!! Hell yes, yes, I see exactly what you mean about the video game stuff.

Unfortunately I think there’s not much out there already written about the developing conventions of the new wave of audio drama. In large part, I think, because coverage of new audio fiction from outside the community has been so notoriously poor. But maybe also partly because there seems to be a strangely negative take on classic radio drama from a lot of the US sector within that community? Which I think really comes down to exactly the things I was talking about -- Old radio drama feels wrong to a lot of people now, because its storytelling language just doesn’t exist in our culture the way it once did; and even fewer people are familiar with late-20th-century American audio fiction like ZBS that might feel more comfortable or closer to other present-day mass media storytelling techniques. I see it claimed sometimes that there’s something inherently unsophisticated about old time radio storytelling, which is just flat out untrue, and I would highly encourage anyone who’s wondering to check out something like the “Home Surgery” episode of Gunsmoke or “The Thing on the Fourble Board” from Quiet, Please to see just how effective and well-done a lot of those old shows were.

(Leaving the UK out of this, because audio fiction stayed way more prominent there and I do not think the same problems exist, and leaving everywhere else out because unfortunately I just don’t know enough about how the medium fared elsewhere, or how it’s doing now. Alas.)

I’ve been thinking lately about parallels to this in other media that I have been able to study and read other people’s writing on, and I think a good comparison is possibly novels? The western “novel” as we think of it is really something that didn’t exist at all until about the 18th century (there are earlier works that have been kind of retroactively labeled ‘novels,’ some of them centuries earlier, but even if they have the characteristics of what we now call a novel, they’re very much disconnected from the evolution of the novel as something we have a name and a definition for). There are no novels from the medieval period, from the Renaissance. There are books as long as novels, but they’re not novels.

The thing is, when you read 18th and even 19th century novels, it shows, because the techniques for telling a story in that form hadn’t been really figured out yet. What you get is a lot of meandering, episodic doorstoppers, some of which have hundreds of pages before the main characters even enter the picture. A lot of writers at the time, and into the 19th century, actually hated the whole concept of novels. I think it’s a bit like going back and watching Monsters, Inc. and then watching Monsters University. The first one was revolutionary, yeah, and it’s a good movie still, but it’s not hard to see the visual difference between the two just in terms of the tools that the people making them had available to them. Before you can write a story or animate hundreds of thousands of individual hairs on one character, you have to figure out how.

One of the big, obvious things about novels from that period, though, is that many of them are first-person, and many are epistolary. It’s hard to find one that isn’t supposedly a memoir or a journal or a set of letters. The third-person perspective in long-form prose was something that had to be figured out; it didn’t just exist in the void, automatically summoned into existence the moment we started writing novels, which I think is really fascinating. There’s a lot of work in those early novels that’s being put into explaining why, and how, and to whom the story is being told. Because otherwise, how does it make sense that the book exists? It’s not a poem, or a play; it’s not taking the form of a traditional story or myth, not attempting to be an epic. Those early novels were about contemporary, real-seeming people, so the writers and audiences wanted an explanation for how the story had been recorded that relied on other existing forms of writing -- letters, journals, memoirs, sometimes claiming to be older texts that had been “found” (gothic novelists seemed to like this one). Sometimes the narrative voice is just the author using first person to actively tell you the story. They hadn’t yet bought into the presumption that we take for granted now, that a novel can have a voice that knows everything, without being the voice of any character in it.

And I think that it’s fascinating how similar that is to the heavy use of recording media as frame narrative in modern audio drama. It’s worth noting: classic radio drama doesn’t do this like we do now. By far, the standard for OTR is the same as the third-person omniscient perspective, the film camera; the storytelling presumes that you’re not going to need an explanation for how you’re hearing this. The audiences those shows were made for were used to fiction told solely in audio, in a way that a lot of modern audiences are not, and so that narrative leap of faith was kind of inherently presumed.

There’s also a way more common use of omniscient or internal narration in old radio drama that I feel like I mostly see now only in shows that are deliberately calling back to old styles and genres. A good example is The Penumbra; we hear Juno’s internal thoughts, just like so many of the noir-style detectives from the 40s and 50s I grew up listening to, and we never really ask why or how. (Except, of course, when the show pokes fun at this affectation, which I think really only works because it feels more like lampshading the stock character tropes of noir, as opposed to the actual audio storytelling technique it facilitates.) To take it further, there are some old radio shows like the sitcom Our Miss Brooks which go so far as to use an actual omniscient narrator to facilitate a lot of the scene transitions, but do so in a much more confident and comfortable way than modern shows like Bubble, where the narration reeks of “we’re making this audio drama in the hopes we can finally make the TV show, and we actually hate this medium and don’t know how to work in it, so rather than learning how to make what’s happening clear with just audio, we’re going to tell you what’s happening and then reference that we’re just telling you what’s happening.”

Bubble’s narration doesn’t work, because it’s actively pushing against the show, telling you things that sound design could have told you just as easily, sometimes actively acknowledging that the narration feels wrong instead of just not using narration. Our Miss Brooks is admittedly not one of my favorite old radio shows, but its use of narration is much smoother, because it’s written with a confidence that it’s only being used to clarify the the things that would be the absolute hardest to show with audio alone; confidence that they know how to tell everything else with sound. Internal narration from the likes of Juno Steel or Jack St. James or my favorite classic detective Johnny Dollar works because noir as a genre is inherently tied to the expressionist movement, where the (highly idiosyncratic) personality and worldview of the characters literally shapes how the world around them appears to the audience; it works to hear their thoughts, because we’re seeing the world through their eyes. We don’t have to know how they’re saying this to us, they just are.

None of which is at all to say that there’s anything inherently wrong with using framing devices! Actually the opposite, kind of. First of all, because I genuinely do think that it’s a sign that we are actively, at this moment learning how to tell these stories, and how to listen to them, which is just so, so exciting I don’t even have words to express it. And secondly, because as a person who loves thinking about stories and storytelling enough to write this kind of ridiculous essay, I am obsessed with metafiction. I’m a sucker for the likes of Archive 81, The Magnus Archives, Welcome to Night Vale, Station to Station, Greater Boston, Within the Wires. They’re stories that take the questions that framing devices are used to answer for writers and audiences who don’t feel comfortable not asking them -- Why is this story being told? Who is telling it? Who is it being told to? -- and use those questions to the full advantage of the story, exploring character, creating beautifully effective horror, creating a bond with the listener. (Hell, one of the admittedly many things that Midnight Radio was about for me was exploring how much value and comfort I have found in listening to stories that acknowledged I was listening to them.) I think, though, that not all stories necessarily are their best selves when they feel like they have to address those questions, and as fiction podcasts become a bit more mainstream I’m really hoping that writers will feel more comfortable in trusting the audience to suspend that disbelief, and that audiences will feel more comfortable doing it, and that framing devices will be less unjustly maligned.

Of course, all of that is focused on writing techniques, and I think that’s because I’m a writer who has studied writing! I know very little concretely about the part of audio storytelling that relies on sound design, so while I have a definite feeling that classic and modern audio fiction is using different sound design languages, or that the audio language of British audio drama (where there’s much more continuity in the history of the medium) is different from audio fiction from elsewhere, that’s a lot harder for me to put into words like this. It’s something I would desperately love to see explored by someone who did know that field intimately, though.

[ritualpurposes]

Why History is Important

This week has been a week of terrible takes on History, Politics and how the two intersect. From the appalling article in the Telegraph on how the “woke masses” are trying to sabotage Britain’s history (I won’t give this the dignity of a link, but it is easy enough to find), the continued harassment and vilification of Dr Corinne Fowler for her work on the Colonial Countryside Project, to the release of the utterly disgusting 1776 commission in the US and as always, the plethora of ‘hot takes’ on Tumblr, I am seething with rage.

This is a long one, apologies. I won’t go into Tumblrs approach to history, that has been better covered by others here, and here and honestly this rant is long enough as is. 

Archaeology and history are inherently political, that is an inescapable fact. People are quick to turn up their noses at the subject of the past and say it has no bearing on the present, but that is a simplistic fantasy. The present is always built of the back of the past, our attitudes, our justifications, our worldviews are all artifacts of what has come before. And when our understanding of what came before is, shall we charitably say, flawed, that is dangerous. The links between the alt. right, white supremacy and fake, white –washed, hyper masculine ideas of the past are well documented. Many of these people justify their actions using versions of the past which to them are very real, ideas of a white ethno-state where the men were Men™. It should be noted, this isn’t a modern phenomenon, I’m pretty sure anyone who has had to sit through intro to archaeology has had to listen to at least once lecture on how Hitler used pseudo archaeology to justify his actions. And while academics can point out that Roman Britain was not white, or that the Vikings traded and intermarried with people from North Africa, these attempts are hindered, both by popular perceptions of the past, and by this idea that the left are attempting to rewrite history.

I find that last point difficult really to deal with, because it combines two opposing ideas, that historians want to make the past more ‘politically correct’ but also downplay the ‘greatness’ of whatever nation they are talking about by talking about the distinctly not political correct bits of history (colonialism and slavery).  There is this overwhelming idea that adding any sort of nuance is the result of massive bias. And that any history that doesn’t make your nation look 100% the Heroic Good Guys is part of some sort of plot to undermine national pride and patriotism. The Tories are terrified we might remove statues of slavers, but in the same breath attack the National Trust for trying to talk about the Colonial legacies of their properties.

I think at this point it’s also worth discussing the difference between history and commemoration.  I am 100% in support of removing statues, and of renaming streets etc. These things are not history, they are commemoration. History is found in museums, in books, in scholarship. History is knowledge, it is not objects but the context that surrounds them.  The removal of a statue does not equal rewriting history, a statue, while an archaeologically interesting artifact, does not in and of itself tell us much. Its context is far more revealing. There is an idea in archaeology called object biography, that looks at how items change in meaning and use throughout their ‘lives’. Items are not static, just like ideas are not static. In the 19th century that statue meant something very different to the people who are around today. What we commemorate, and what commemorations we destroy tell us about society. If the history of Edward Coulston is so important (a man, who I had never heard of before the statue was thrown into the river, so clearly not a priority in English history), then put the statue in a museum with an information board. And if you are really worried about the destruction of history? Why don’t you spend your time and money instead ensuring archaeological work gets done ahead of development or making sure history departments are adequately funded. Interesting, the Torries, while very concerned about statues, are actively fighting those two measures. I know less about the Republican agenda, but looking at the 1776 project, I’m pretty sure that any concern they have for history is less about the past and more about preserving the status quo.

I grew up in America. I took AP US history, and I remember having to write papers about how the Civil War was absolutely not about Slavery. I guess that doesn’t seem that harmful in and of itself, but let’s trace this bit of revisionism through shall we. The Civil war was over States rights, that doesn’t sound too bad. I mean I may not agree with the South, but is it really a moral issue to say that the Federal Government shouldn’t be able to override what individual States want? After all States are very different, what is good for New York might not be so good for Georgia. Ok, so using that logic I don’t really see what’s wrong with flying a confederate flag, I mean it can’t possibly be a symbol of oppression, because the Civil War *wasn’t* about Slavery. So I don’t see why people are getting all upset, it is simply a statement that States Rights are important.

Add to this the general romanticized picture of the Confederate South in the media and you suddenly are looking at a very different picture of the past, supported by, of all things, the fucking AP US History curriculum. The Confederates are seen as tragic heroes, on the wrong side of history perhaps, but with a point, fighting for a way of life.  And from there it doesn’t seem too far a leap to what happened on January 6 does it?  I’m not saying all media should demonize the South, but I think removing Slavery from the Civil war is dangerous and false representation of History, and one that directly plays into the Civil Unrest we are seeing at the Moment.

So that brings me back to the 1776 commission. It was published as a direct response to the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project sought to center slavery and its effects on American history. This is hugely important, and a weirdly contentious issue. The echos of slavery are still present in the USA, in the form of institutionalized racism, voter suppression, and increased levels of police brutality among other things. It is, at best impossibly naive and at worst actively malicious, to try and consider US history without dealing with the brutal legacy of slavery. And yet, this project was deemed to be ‘UnAmerican’ and ‘revisionist’. How dare any history of America undermine the idea that America is, and has always been, A noble nation that has never done anything wrong ever. To return briefly to my own experiences with AP US History, our textbook said we didn’t lose Vietnam (My father who was a war correspondent in Vietnam had some things to say about that comment). The myth of American Exceptionalism runs deep. The 1776 commission, which I have not brought myself to read in its entirety, is a horrific example of it. It justifies slavery, it states that “as a question of practical politics, no durable union could have been formed without a compromise among the states on the issue of slavery.”, states racism ended in 1964, and that Christianity is the reason we have secular law.

Why does this scare the shit out of me? Why do I care what people believe happened 200 years ago? Because if people truly believe that America can do no wrong, that patriotism means never questioning that we really will live in Trump’s America. Because if Slavery was justified, and racism doesn’t exist anymore than clearly we don’t have to do better, and any complaints are communist plot.  Because if Empire really did make England Great then why should we not continue in the same vain? History is grand! Let us live in the Good Ol’ Days!

History is messy. History is unpleasant. History doesn’t fit into simple narratives of good and bad, because people don’t fit into those categories. And while I agree it is impossible to teach history without some bias (interpretation being a key part), we need to accept our past. If we want a brighter future we need to confront where we come from. We need to fight the false narratives prevalent in our culture, be they the idea that Game of Thrones is a good picture of Medieval England or that the Civil War was over a simple ideological difference and not the lives of thousands of enslaved peoples. The best bit of advice on history I ever got was from my high school teacher “If you want to live in the past you haven’t been paying attention”, I think about that statement a lot. The past has power, let us not pretend otherwise.

[muchymozzarella]

I’m not trying to start drama or an argument, merely trying to get into the conversation... couldn’t you argue that it doesn’t matter how many Asian people are working behind the scenes on a project, if you don’t see them on screen? The majority of people who watch the film will not do the research into who worked on it, so it could be said that it doesn’t matter whether they are Asian or not? Whereas if a show has visible Asian characters, it’s plainly clear that there is representation.

I totally get what you’re saying, but what I think a lot of people don’t understand is that representation is an issue that has more than one answer, and a whole lot of problems that people don’t take into account. 

But to simplify, we have to look at it in two ways: 

Asians behind the scenes

Asians in front / represented

Each of these have their benefits and flaws. I would argue that one is better than the other, but neither is necessarily BAD because they are both forms of Asian representation. It’s just that they both come with their own baggage. 

Having both is ideal, but it’s often not the case. 

Asians behind the scenes

Pros 

-Asians have creative power

-Asians can bring their own cultural ideas to the fore even if the subject matter isn’t necessarily focused on Asian characters - thereby having Asian people feel like they are being spoken to by someone who shared their experiences and their culture

-Asians getting paid and getting their names on shows, which ensures these same Asians positions and jobs in other shows moving forward

-Asians, who have established themselves on a show ostensibly watched by everyone, will have their overtly Asian titles be taken on later down the line

-Asians could be in a position to hire other Asians 

-Non Asians, especially white people, being exposed to Asian worldviews and having a better understanding of at least some part of a culture they otherwise would not have had much exposure to, depending on their background

Cons

-Asians aren’t represented onscreen / the show itself isn’t Asian rep, so Asians do not feel represented visually and non Asians will not be exposed to Asian characters and have that normalised, or learn about Asian culture from said media 

-Asians are relegated to writing stories that they themselves don’t necessarily know about or experience [not always a con if, for example, it’s a fantasy or sci-fi or non real world setting, but can be if an Asian is expected to write an everyday White Experience] 

Asians in front / represented

Pros: 

-Asian kids get to see themselves represented in media, and non-Asians get to learn about and connect to Asian heroes onscreen 

-Asian media is seen as lucrative and more Asian shows are made

-Hiring more Asian actors [?] [see: Avatar The Last Airbender for exceptions to this]

Cons:

-Strong possibility of literary Yellowface - look up  CB Cebulski

-Asians are getting passed over for jobs because someone decided white people could do a better job portraying / writing about Asian characters - ASIANS AREN’T GETTING JOBS OR GETTING PAID AND WHITE PEOPLE PROFIT OFF ASIAN REP

-Stereotypes without cultural background / Fetishism / Asian Aesthetique 

-Misrepresentation of Asians as a if white writer is not respectful 

-People behind the scenes do not get to actually talk to Asians if the only ones in a creative field are non Asians

-If other POC are present in the writing room, they are asked to make decisions on Asian characters they are not always fit to answer

-Mulan 2020 [lol] 

-

-

I clearly personally prefer Asians behind the scenes, but it’s not because seeing Asians onscreen isn’t important. It is. It really is. 

But when you have a foot in the door of a North American industry like I do, especially in a group that looks after the interests of BIPOC film and tv workers in a white dominated field, you start to see the issues with white people taking over writers rooms, taking over showrunning, taking over directing. 

SOMETHING WHITE PEOPLE ARE OFTEN NOT WILLING TO HEAR IS THAT THEY HAVE AN INHERENT BIAS IN FAVOUR OF OTHER WHITE PEOPLE, AND THIS IS COMPOUNDED BY THE EXCUSE THAT “WE ONLY HIRE QUALIFIED PEOPLE” BUT BECAUSE THEY CHOOSE NOT TO HIRE BIPOC, BIPOC CANNOT EARN SAID QUALIFICATION. 

So the idea of hiring a white guy to write about Asians is not inherently bad, but when you put it up against a system already heavily skewed against Asians, it’s just another job a struggling Asian creative got passed over, another writer or artist who has every qualification going for them ignored because someone decided this white guy they like is the better pick. 

And sure, maybe he is. Maybe he’s just better at storytelling, better at writing, more passionate about the project. 

But maybe that excuse has been used so much that we see more white people than Asian people credited on the MULAN MOVIE and you start to think that maybe 80% of the time, it’s just a convenient excuse to lock out Asian creatives and not the truth.  

It may not always be racism, but it’s more often racism than people are led to believe. 

And idk, maybe it’s just me, but I like having a job and seeing other Asians and other BIPOC have jobs. And if I’ve done enough years on this nice white show then these nice white producers will eventually decide to take on my Very Filipino Show Idea. Or maybe I’ll find funding from other BIPOC and do it anyway, but in the very least people will see that I worked years on this Cool White Show and decide they liked it enough to give my Very Asian Show a try.

But also - even if the entire behind the scenes crew is white, I can’t be mad at a show, whether live action or animated, if the cast is fully or mostly Asian. That’s still getting Asians jobs. 

tl;dr It’s not inherently bad for white people to write Asian media [see: Avatar] but as an Asian creative in the North American TV and Film industry I prefer to see Asians Get Paid

And if you wanna see what happens when Asians get represented but not paid, just look at Bon Appetit  

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think society as a whole understands and values history? I don’t think they do. And I don’t understand why.

HoooooWEEEEEE, anon. What follows is a good old Hilary History Rant ™, but let me hasten to assure you that none of it is directed at you. It just means that this is a topic on which I have many feelings, and a lot of frustration, and it gets at the heart of many things which are wrong with our society, and the way in which I try to deal with this as an academic and a teacher. So…. yeah.

In short: you’re absolutely right. Society as a whole could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing history, especially right now. Though let me rephrase that: they could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing any history that does not reinforce and pander to their preferred worldview, belief system, or conception of reality. The human race has always had an amazing ability to not give a shit about huge problems as long as they won’t kill us right now (see: climate change) and in one sense, that has allowed us to survive and evolve and become an advanced species. You have to compartmentalize and solve one problem at a time rather than get stuck in abstracts, so in that way, it is a positive trait. However, we are faced with a 21st century where the planet is actively burning alive, late-stage capitalism has become so functionally embedded in every facet of our society that our public values, civic religion, and moral compass (or lack thereof) is structured around consumerism and who it benefits (the 1% of billionaire CEOs), and any comfortable myths of historical progress have been blown apart by the worldwide backslide into right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, and other such things. In a way, this was a reaction to 9/11, which changed the complacent late-20th century mindset of the West in ways that we really cannot fathom or overstate. But it’s also a clarion call that something is very, very wrong here, and the structural and systemic explanations that historians provide for these kinds of events are never what anyone wants to hear.

Think about it this way. The world is currently, objectively speaking, producing more material resources, wealth, food, etc than at any point before, thanks to the effects of globalism, the industrial and information revolutions, mass mechanizing, and so on. There really isn’t a “shortage” of things. Except for the fact that the distribution of these resources is so insanely unequal, and wildly disproportionate amounts of wealth have been concentrated in a few private hands, which then use the law (and the law is a tool of the powerful to protect power) to make sure that it’s never redistributed. This is why Reaganism and “supply-side”, aka “trickle-down” economics, is such bullshit: it presupposes that billionaires will, if you enable them to make as many billions as possible without regulation, altruistically sow that largess among the working class. This never happens, because obviously. (Sidenote: remember those extravagant pledges of billions of euros to repair Notre Dame from like 3 or 4 French billionaires? Apparently they have paid… exactly not one cent toward renovations, and the money has come instead from the Friends of Notre Dame funded by private individuals. Yep, not even for the goddamn cause célèbre of the “we don’t give a shit about history” architectural casualties could they actually pay up. Eat! The! Rich!…. anyway.)

However, the fact is that you need to produce narratives to justify this kind of exploitation and inequality, and make them convincing enough that the people who are being fucked over will actively repeat and promote these narratives and be fiercely vested in their protection. Think of the way white American working-class voters will happily blame minorities, immigrants, Non-Murkan People, etc for their struggles, rather than the fact of said rampant economic cronyism and oligarchy. These working-class voters will love the politicians who give them someone to blame (see: Trump), especially when that someone is an Other around whom collective systems of discrimination and oppression have historically operated. Women, people of color, religious minorities/non-Western religions, LGBT people, immigrants, etc, etc…. all these have historically not had such a great time in the capitalist Christian West, which is the predominant paradigm organizing society today. You can’t understand why society doesn’t value history until you realize that the people who benefit from this system aren’t keen on having its flaws pointed out. They don’t want the masses to have a historical education if that historical education is going to actually be used. They would rather teach them the simplistic rah-rah quasi-fictional narrative of the past that makes everyone feel good, and call it a day. 

The classic liberal belief has always been that if you can just teach someone that their facts are wrong, or supply them with better facts, they’ll change their mind. This is not how it works and never has, and that is why in an age with, again, more knowledge of science than ever before and the collected wisdom of humanity available via your smartphone, we have substantial portions of people who believe that vaccines are evil, the Earth is flat, and climate change (and 87 million other things) are fake and/or government conspiracies. As a medievalist, I get really tetchy when the idiocy of modern people is blamed on the stereotypical “Dark Ages!” medieval era (I have written many posts ranting about that, so we’ll keep it to a minimum here), or when everything bad, backward, or wrong is considered to be “medieval” in nature. Trust me, on several things, they were doing a lot better than we are. Other things are not nearly as wildly caricatured as they have been made out to be. Because once again, history is complicated and people are flawed in any era, do good and bad things, but that isn’t as useful as a narrative that flattens out into simplistic black and white.

Basically, people don’t want their identities, comfortable notions, and other ideas about the past challenged, especially since that is directly relevant to how they perceive themselves (and everyone else) in the present. The thing about history, obviously, is that it’s past, it’s done, and until we invent a time machine, which pray God we never fucking do, within a few generations, the entire population of the earth has been replaced. That means it’s awfully fragile as a concept. Before the modern era and the invention of technology and the countless mediums (book, TV, radio, newspaper, internet, etc etc) that serve as sources, it’s only available in a relatively limited corpus of documents. History does not speak for itself. That’s where you get into historiography, or writing history. Even if you have a book or document that serves as a primary source material, you have to do a shit-ton of things with it to turn it into recognizable scholarship. You have to learn the language it’s in. You have to understand the context in which it was produced. You have to figure out what it ignores, forgets, omits, or simply does not know as well as what it does, and recognize it as a limited text produced from a certain perspective or for a social reason that may or may not be explicitly articulated. The training of a historian is to teach you how to do this accurately and more or less fairly, but that is up to the personal ethic of the historian to ensure. When you’re reading a history book, you’re not reading an unmediated, Pure, This Was Definitely How Things Happened The End information download. You are reading something by someone who has made their best guess and has been equipped with the interpretive tools to be reasonably confident in their analysis, but sometimes just doesn’t know, sometimes has an agenda in pushing one opinion over another, or anything else.

History, in other words, is a system of flawed and self-serving collective memory, and power wants only the memory that ensures its survival and replication. You’ve heard of the “history is written by the winners” quote, which basically encapsulates the fact that what we learn and what we take as fact is largely or entirely structured by the narrative of those who can control it. If you’ve heard of the 1970s French philosopher Michel Foucault, his work is basically foundational in understanding how power produces knowledge in each era (what he calls epistemes) and the way in which historical “fact” is subject to the needs of these eras. Foucault has a lot of critics and his work particularly in the history of sexuality has now become dated (plus he can be a slog to read), but I do suggest familiarizing yourself with some of his ideas. 

This is also present in the constant refrain heard by anybody who has ever studied the arts and humanities: “oh, don’t do liberal arts, you’ll never get a job, study something worthwhile,” etc. It’s funny how the “worthwhile” subjects always seem to be science and engineering/software/anything that can support the capitalist military industrial complex, while science is otherwise completely useless to them. It’s also always funny how the humanities are relentlessly de- or under- funded. By labeling these subjects as “worthless,” when they often focus on deep investigation of varied topics, independent critical thought, complex analysis, and otherwise teaching you to think for yourself, we therefore decrease the amount of people who feel compelled to go into them. Since (see again, late-stage capitalism is a nightmare) most people are going to prefer some kind of paycheck to stringing it along on a miniscule arts budget, they will leave those fields and their inherent social criticism behind. Of course, we do have some people – academics, social scientists, artists, creatives, activists, etc – who do this kind of work and dedicate themselves to it, but we (and I include myself in this group) have not reached critical mass and do not have the power to effect actual drastic change on this unfair system. I can guarantee that they will ensure we never will, and the deliberate and chronic underfunding of the humanities is just one of the mechanisms by which late-stage capitalism replicates and protects itself.

I realize that I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud/going off on my paranoid rant, but…. this is just the way we’ve all gotten used to living, and it’s both amazing and horrifying. As long as the underclasses are all beholden to their own Ideas of History, and as long as most people are content to exist within the current ludicrous ideas that we have received down the ages as inherited wisdom and enforced on ourselves and others, there’s not much we can do about it. You are never going to reach agreement on some sweeping Platonic ideal of universal history, since my point throughout this whole screed has always been that history is particular, localized, conditioned by specific factors, and produced to suit the purposes of a very particular set of goals. History doesn’t repeat itself, per se (though it can be Very Fucking Close), but as long as access to a specific set of resources, i.e. power, money, sex, food, land, technology, jobs, etc are at stake, the inherent nature of human beings means that they will always be choosing from within a similar matrix of actions, producing the same kind of justifications for those actions, and transmitting it to the next generation in a way that relatively few people learn how to challenge. We have not figured out how to break that cycle yet. We are an advanced species beyond any doubt, but we’re also still hairless apes on a spinning blue ball on the outer arm of a rural galaxy, and oftentimes we act like it.

I don’t know. I think it’s obvious why society doesn’t understand and value history, because historians are so often the ones pointing out the previous pattern of mistakes and how well that went last time. Power does not want to be dismantled or criticized, and has no interest in empowering the citizens to consider the mechanisms by which they collaborate in its perpetuation. White supremacists don’t want to be educated into an “actual” version of history, even if their view of things is, objectively speaking, wildly inaccurate. They want the version of history which upholds their beliefs and their way of life. Even non-insane people tend to prefer history that validates what they think they already know, and especially in the West, a certain mindset and system of belief is already so well ingrained that it has become almost omniscient. Acquiring the tools to work with this is, as noted, blocked by social disapproval and financial shortfall. Plus it’s a lot of goddamn work. I’m 30 years old and just finished my PhD, representing 12 years of higher education, thousands of dollars, countless hours of work, and so on. This is also why they’ve jacked the price of college through the roof and made it so inaccessible for people who just cannot make that kind of commitment. I’ve worked my ass off, for sure, but I also had support systems that not everyone does. I can’t say I got here All On My Own ™, that enduring myth of pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps. I know I didn’t. I had a lot of help, and again, a lot of people don’t. The academy is weird and cliquish and underpaid as a career. Why would you do that?

I wish I had more overall answers for you about how to fix this. I think about this a lot. I’ll just have to go back to doing what I can, as should we all, since that is really all that is ultimately in our control.

[arlingtonpark]

#worthit

You know, we’re lucky Zeke is a moron. At long last he has access to the ultimate power in the world, and instead of using it then and there, he tries to show Eren the error of his ways like this is A Christmas Story or something.

Zeke thought he was Chris Marley and Eren was Ebenezer Scrooge. Turns out, he’s a QANON believer and Grisha is the owner of Comet Ping Pong.

It’s just stunning how unself-aware Zeke is. He’s like one of those hyper-partisan, extremely-online people who shout about how Obama is a tool for the rich, but freeze up when asked for details. This is a man so immersed in his own worldview, his head so far up his ass, that all he accomplished is making the most spectacular own-goal of the entire series.

I mean, he takes Eren on this wild ride, is basically making this all up as he goes along, certain that the next memory will be the one that proves Grisha’s EVIL-ness, and they spend God knows how long watching a dude filing paperwork.

This exercise was meant to turn Eren to his side, but all it’s done is create an opening for Eren to turn Zeke. And that may happen, honestly. Zeke’s beliefs have been pretty shaken now, so he may be receptive to some reasoned persuasion.

But up next is Grisha stealing the Founding Titan, so Zeke definitely won’t be want for validating material.

The only bigger jackass this chapter is Eren.

Eren really, honest and for truly, fucked up. He shat on his friends, he shat on his country, he shat on little kids, and he did it so he could trick Zeke into unlocking the Founding Titan powers for him.

Except now all that’s out the window because actually Zeke is in charge.

Oops.  

Eren presumably did all this because he couldn’t bear to see Historia’s life shortened, but now it seems he has no choice but to do it anyway, meaning he did all this shit for nothing! Amazing! Dreams really don’t come true in this story!

I love how the chapter foreshadows Eren dropping the ball by showing him literally dropping a ball.

At least now it means Historia is going to be relevant again soon. I don’t think I’ve ever said it before, but I lean towards the pregnancy being fake.

Yeah, Historia having a kid means Zeke’s dream can be easily undone, but Zeke probably realizes this and plans to overwrite King Fritz’s deal with the Founding Titan with one of his own: all future royal bearers of the Founding Titan will be infected with Zeke’s ideology instead.

After that, all he’d have to do is feed Eren to Historia. Zeke’s ideology takes over, and everything is set.

Eren needs Historia to eat Zeke, and Zeke would need Historia to eat Eren. And all the while Historia just wants to eat out Ymir.

Would Zeke really do that to his little brother?

…Yeah, he would. Zeke himself said Eren was just a key this whole time. He wants to save Eren from Grisha’s brainwashing, but remember that means convincing him life isn’t worth living. Because of that, Zeke probably wouldn’t even see it as a betrayal. From his perspective, it’d be him freeing Eren from the hell of life.

The reason why I think the pregnancy is fake is because I figure Zeke somehow coerced Historia into it, but then Eren told her about his true intentions and told her get pretend-pregnant. Then, once Zeke was disposed of, Historia could drop the act and live happily ever after.

(And then die with no heirs, thus leading to a succession crisis.)

And if the pregnancy actually is real?

Well, that would be a travesty and I’d rather not think about that.

This chapter has the most explicit endorsement of nationalism so far. Which is bad because no matter how much gold the series puts on it, nationalism is still a garbage heap of an ideology.  

Talking about nationalism and this series is a bit complicated because really there are two levels to this. There’s the depiction of nationalism in itself and then there’s that depiction as it relates to the social context of the story.

Just looking at the story, taking back the Founding Titan and actually having a ruler who cares for his subjects is very reasonable. King Fritz is a lunatic who believes Eldians deserve to die for the sins of their former Empire. And it’s understandable that people like Grisha would be pushed to support extreme beliefs like that the Empire must be restored.

Issues start to arise when you look at the social context of this story. King Fritz is pretty obviously a caricature of progressives who emphasize the need for society to own up to past sins. You see this in the United States with recent debates about Confederate monuments, for example.

Other debates about how the founding of the country is glorified and morally questionable actions like the three-fifths compromise are swept under the rug have been ongoing for literally centuries.

There are progressives who think these facts are not reflected upon enough, and then there are conservatives who think the progressives want Americans to hate being American.

Japan has a similar debate going on. The Japanese Empire of course did many awful things throughout its history, especially during World War II, when it tried to conquer East Asia. Japanese progressives argue this history is not given its due. (It isn’t)

King Fritz is obviously a caricature of these people and not a very flattering one. The strongest evidence that this series leans conservative is the echoing of the popular Japanese conservative talking point that the official history is a “masochistic” one designed to shame Japanese people.

Like, I don’t actually have to explain how the obvious parallel is obvious, do I?

Everything about King Fritz reads like a satire of liberals written by a Fox News pundit. Deranged king so obsessed with past sins he’s cool with his people dying for it? Did Sean Hannity write that?

Said King is a chump because he’s…a pacifist, which makes him weak, I guess. (How can a series be anti-war if #pacifismisforlosers?)

SNK’s brand of anti-pacifism seems reasonable on the surface, but when you consider the real world analogs the story’s set up, things start to fall apart.

The story’s message seems to be that the Eldians should be allowed to live as themselves with no outside interference and they should be allowed to use the wall titans to defend themselves if needed. That seems reasonable, but then you realize the Wall Titans are basically nukes, so the series is basically endorsing nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation.

Nuclear weapons are not military weapons, as their in-story equivalents are set to be cast as. They’re used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. And their use leads to massive environmental damage.

It’s disturbing that the series treats the morality of their use as a given. Isayama doesn’t seem interested in grappling with this exceedingly difficult question at all. There is no debate between the characters on this, literally everyone wants to use them, even Armin who previously made a point of not wanting to.

It’s simply stunning that this series would set up such a weighty situation and just not grapple with the moral implications of it. Does Isayama even realize the metaphor he himself has written?

This isn’t to defend Fritz’s actions. Just up and leaving like he did was lazy and irresponsible, but that just ties back into the hyperbole of the caricature. The details aren’t important in the sense that what’s important is the overall statement being made. It may seem weird, defending the idea this character supposedly stands for, but not defending his literal actions in the story, but that’s because you’re not approaching the story from the perspective of satire.

Isayama’s laughable statements aside, Attack on Titan is clearly satirical. It is making its point through hyperbolic caricature. Though with King Fritz the series arguably veers into straw-manning.

It may be hyperbole, but no reasonable pacifist actually believes we should roll over and let other people kill us, and I honestly can’t believe we are apparently supposed to take this seriously.

The point is that pacifism is bad.

King Fritz swears a vow to renounce war, which the series has lambasted at every possible opportunity. This vow is directly analogous to the vow to renounce war contained in Japan’s constitution, which also binds future generations no matter their personal beliefs since, ya know, it’s the law.

Fritz does this because he believes it will lead to an everlasting peace, which also echoes Japan’s constitution, which renounces war specifically in the name of peace.

Article 9 in Japan is broadly popular with the public, but is criticized by a small usually conservative minority.

All of this is to say that the series echoes conservative talking points and generally seems to be written from that perspective.

Now we come to this chapter. Zeke explicitly refers to Grisha’s ideology as a nationalism and is then made to look like a dumbass for thinking Grisha is an evildoer.

#nationalistshavefeelingstoo.

Yeah, Grisha loves his family, but who cares? The series is clearly going frame Grisha forsaking his mission to be with his family as a mistake, because that’s what this series does! In the world of SNK, people who chase their dreams either fail in some way or are otherwise evil, unless that dream is to fight for the survival of your race, in which case you’re a hero.

Nationalism is bad because it’s an ideology centered on loving your race. It is an inherently exclusionary belief system. The series may not be afraid to criticize specific methods, but the idea of fighting for your race is itself not presented as a bad thing.

Even though in the real world, you would be hard pressed to find a similarly sympathetic example of a nationalist movement.

Nationalism is an inherently emotional ideology, it is fueled by grievance. The series acknowledges that certain expressions of nationalism can be fueled primarily by emotion, but we are also apparently supposed to think that a “rational” nationalism is possible.

In fact, rational nationalism is an oxymoron.

The idea of fighting for your race can never be rational because the notion is inherently irrational. The only people who would care enough about their race to emphasize fighting for it are the desperately insecure.

Whether it’s because they’re desperate for anything about themselves to love, like with Floch, or outraged over the targeting of their race specifically, like with Grisha, nationalism is never born out of some coldly rational thought process.

So now the Yeager Bros. finally succeed and Eren finally gets to betray Zeke. But wouldn’t you know it! It’s the royal who has control of the Founding Titan!

I was leaning against this idea, but for a while now I’ve had the inkling that the Founding Titan is supposed to be a metaphor for the concept of sovereignty, and now it seems that instinct was right.

Sovereignty refers to the absolute authority that governments have. In republics like the United States, sovereignty resides in the government, but it is exercised on behalf of the people.

In monarchies, sovereignty resides in the reigning monarch, who rules by God’s grace.

The key word here is “resides.” The king/president is merely a vessel for the sovereign authority of the government.

For many centuries, kings, and, later, officeholders in general, were thought of as having two bodies.

Their body natural, that is, their physical, human bodies.

And the body politic, that is, the power that comes with the office.

When the king dies, only their body natural dies, but the body politic is eternal and passes on to the next body natural that occupies the position of king.

The Founding Titan is apparently modeled after this idea. Each successive Eldian king is a vessel for the Founding Titan, which grants absolute authority over all Eldians, but only to those who are of royal blood, ie those with the right to rule.

Of course, only people with a legitimate claim to the throne may properly exercise sovereign authority, just as only Zeke may command the Founding Titan. As I said in an earlier post, as a commoner, Eren’s use of the Founding Titan is illegitimate by default.

Needing a royal sympathetic to his cause creates an opening for Historia to become relevant again and that just highlights how everything would’ve been better if Eren had just used her in the first place.

I get that Eren cares about his friends (really hoping he and Historia are just friends), but if you think that makes Eren sympathetic, then let me tell you a little secret: it doesn’t.

Prioritizing someone’s literal life over another’s simply because you know them is awful. It reduces the choice of what you should do to the randomness of who you just so happen to have gotten to know better.

If this was just about who Eren was going to spend a Saturday night with, then choosing based on rapport would be fine, but the stakes here are significantly higher. People are dead.

The excuse that Eren is doing this for his friend’s sake is no excuse at all.

At this point we’re half way through the fourth volume of this arc. The next chapter will probably wrap up this A Christmas Story riff and the chapter after that will most likely end with the Wall Titans finally being awakened.

Afterwards, I’m betting it’s just one more volume to close out the story proper and then maybe we’ll get a volume for that epilogue Isayama mentioned once in an interview.

[innuendostudios]

New video essay! Internet reactionaries argue as though they have no core beliefs at all, and will just say anything to own the libs. So are they nihilists, or is there more going on?

You can ensure this series continues by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, you’re online blogging about a Black journalist’s commentary on marketing trends in video games, movies, and comic books, and you’re saying how the vitriol in response to her fairly benign opinions reveals the deep-seated racism and misogyny in a number of fan communities, most especially those that lean right, when a right-leaning commenter pops in to say, “Or maybe they just actually disagree with her about marketing trends! For Christ’s sake, there’s no mystery here. People aren’t aren’t speaking in coded language. They are telling you what they believe. She had a bad opinion; why do you have to make it bigger than that? Why can’t you ever take people at their word?”

You pause and ponder for a moment. Mmm… Aw heck with it, you’re in a discoursing mood. Let’s do this.

“Mr. Conservative, in order for me to take you at your word, your words would have to show some consistency. Let me just lightning round a few questions about the reactionary web’s positions on marketing trends: Do you believe that having the option to romance same-sex characters in an RPG turns the game into queer propaganda, or do you believe that killing strippers in an action game can’t be sexist since no one’s making you do it? Do you believe that the pervasiveness of sexualized young women in pop culture is just there because it sells and that’s capitalism and we all need to deal with it, or do you believe that a franchise has an obligation to cater to its core audience even if diversifying beyond that audience is more profitable? Do you think words are inherently harmless and only oversensitive snowflakes would care about racialized language, or do you think it’s racist if someone calls you mayonnaise boy? As long as I’ve got your ear: Are you the Party that believes in the right to keep and bear arms because you’re distrustful of all authority and what if we need to overthrow the government someday, or do you believe that cops are civil servants and we should trust their account of events whenever they shoot a Black man for looking like he might have a gun?

“Does optional content reveal a game’s ideology, or doesn’t it? Is capitalism a defense for decisions you don’t agree with, or isn’t it? Is language harmful, or not? Do you hate authority, or love cops and the troops?

Alright, alright, ease off. Add some nuance.     “Now, I know the Right is not a monolith, and maybe these arguments are contradictory because they’re coming from different people. We’ll call them Engelbert and Charlemagne. Maybe Engelbert’s the one who thinks any institution funded by tax money is socialist and therefore bad and Charlemagne’s the one who says we should dump even more tax money into the military and thinking otherwise is un-American. But here’s the thing: Y’all have very fundamentally different beliefs, and you’re so passionate about them that you enter search terms into Twitter to find people you don’t even follow and aggressively disagree with them, and, yet, you’re always yelling at me and never yelling at each other. What’s that about?

“And I can’t say how often it happens, but I know, if I let Engelbert go on long enough, he sometimes makes a Charlemagne argument. And vice versa.

“And, I see you getting ready to say, ‘The Left does the same thing,’ but ba ba ba ba ba, don’t change the subject. That’s an extremely false equivalence, but, more importantly, it doesn’t answer my question. What do you actually believe, and why are you so capable of respecting disagreement between each other, yet so incapable of respecting me - or, for that matter, a Black woman?

“See, I don’t take you at your word because I cannot form a coherent worldview out of the things you say. So, forgive me if, when you tell me what you believe, I don’t think you’re being candid with me. It kinda seems like you’re playing games, and I’m the opposing team, and anyone who’s against me is your ally. And you’re not really taking a position, but claiming to believe in whatever would need to be true to score points against me, like we’re in that one episode of Seinfeld.” [Card Says Moops clip.]

(This is borrowed observation #1, link in the down-there part.)

Hoo, it feels good calling people hypocrites! Person says B when earlier they said A and you point out the contradiction! You don’t take a position on A or B, and you still “win”! I see why Republicans like this so much.

But that’s the kind of point-scoring we’re here to deconstruct, so let’s get analytical.

There’s a certain Beat-You-At-Your-Own-Gaminess to the Card Says Moops maneuver. “Safe spaces are bullshit, but, if you get one, I get one too.” “There’s no such thing as systemic oppression, but, if there were, I’d be oppressed.” It’s dismissing the rhetoric of social justice while also trying to use it against you. Claiming “the Card Says Moops” does not, so much, mean, “I believe the people who invaded Spain in the 8th Century were literally called The Moops,” but, rather, “You can’t prove I don’t believe it.” Not a statement of sincere belief, simply moving a piece across the board. All in the game, yo.

If they could be so nakedly honest with you and themselves to answer “what do you actually believe” truthfully, one suspects the answer would be, “What difference does it make? We’re right either way.”

This has come to be known as “postmodern conservatism,” a fact I find hilarious, because, in The Discourse, “postmodernism” is a dogwhistle for everything the Right hates about the Left. (...it also means “Jews.”) Postmodern conservatism is the thinking that, at least for the purpose of argument, the truth of who invaded Spain is immaterial. You have your facts, I have alternative facts. What is true? Who’s to say?

Regardless of what you actually believe - what you believe serving no rhetorical purpose - you are at least arguing from the position that material truth does not exist. Truth is a democracy. Whoever who wins the argument decides who invaded Spain.

It would be reductive to blame this pattern of thought on the internet, but its recent proliferation isn’t really extricable from the rise of chan culture (this is borrowed observation #2, link in the down there part). 4chan didn’t cause this thinking, but sites like 4chan reveal it in its most concentrated form.

The two most common properties of a chan board will be anonymity and lack of moderation, which means, among other things, that you can say whatever you want with no systemic or social repercussions. People may disagree with you, but it carries no weight. You won’t be banned, you won’t have your comments deleted, and, because there’s no way to know whether any two posts are made by the same person, you won’t even get a reputation as “the person with the bad opinion.”

The effect this has on the community is that there is no expectation, in any given moment, that the person on the other end of a conversation isn’t messing with you. You can’t know whether they mean what they say or are only arguing as though they mean what they say. And entire debates may just be a single person stirring the pot. Such a community will naturally attract people who enjoy argument for its own sake, and will naturally trend towards the most extreme version of any opinion.

In short, this is the Free Marketplace of Ideas. No code of ethics, no social mores, no accountability. A Darwinist petri dish where ideas roam free and only the strong ones survive. If the community agrees Bebop is better than Eva, well, then I guess Bebop is better than Eva, because there wasn’t any outside influence polluting the discourse. Granted, it could just be a lot of people thought it was funny to shit on Eva, but it’s what the community has decided, so it will at least be treated as truth.

This demands that one both be highly opinionated and to assume opinions are bullshit, to place a high premium on consensus and be intensely distrustful of groupthink.

A common means of straddling these lines is what I call the Stanislavski Opinion: the opinion you entertain so completely that you functionally believe it while you express it, no matter the possibility that you will express - and, to an extent, believe - an opposite opinion later. Most of us go through a phase in our youths where we’re online and like the idea of believing in something, but don’t know what to believe just yet, so we pick a position and find out if we believe it by defending it. We try on ideologies like sunglasses off a rack. Most of us will eventually settle on a belief system, and this will usually involve some apologies and some comments we wish we could scrub from the internet, but it’s an important stage of growing up.

But some percentage of people will seek out a space where there is no embarrassment, the comments scrub themselves, and never growing out of the Stanislavski Opinion is actively rewarded. There, figuring out what you believe would make your ability to argue less flexible, and, besides, if you believed anything unironically, much of the community would still assume you’re trolling. Where no one is bound by their word, what, really, is the difference between appearing to have an opinion and having one?

Sincerity is unprovable and open to interpretation. Decide someone is sincere if you want to make fun of them, decide they’re trolling if you want to make fun of someone else. What is true? What do you want to be true? It’s easy enough to start thinking of one’s own opinions the same way: What do I believe? What is it advantageous to believe? Your answer isn’t binding. You’ll change it later if you need to.

The person I’m describing, you spend time online, you’ll meet him a lot. His name is Schrodinger’s Douchebag (borrowed observation #3, link in the down there part): A guy who says offensive things & decides whether he was joking based on the reaction of people around him. Any website that lacks effective moderation and allows some level of anonymity will, to varying degrees, approximate 4chan, and be overrun with Schrodinger’s Douchebag.

When this type of person defends rape jokes by saying all humor is inherently punching down because there must be a butt to every joke, he hasn’t thought about it. He assumes it’s true, because he figures he’s a smart guy and whatever he assumes is probably right, but he’s unfazed if you prove otherwise; there’s no shortage of dodgy reasons he might be right and you wrong. He’ll just pick another one. What matters is that the game continues.

The thing is, Bob, it’s not that they’re lying, it’s that they just don’t care. I’ll say that again for the cheap seats: When they make these kinds of arguments, they legitimately do not care whether the words coming out of their mouths are true. It is a deeply held belief for precisely as long as it wins arguments.

So it’s kinda funny, right, how many of these folks self-identify as “rationalists?” I mean, typical rational thinking would say: If I am presented with the truth, I will believe it, and, once I believe it, I will defend it in argument. This? This is not that! This is a different idea of “rationality” that views it not as a practice but as an innate quality one either possesses or lacks, like being blond or left-handed: If I’m arguing it, I must believe it, because I’m a rational person, and, if I believe it, because I’m a rational person, it must be true. You speak assuming you’re right, and, should you take a new position, this telescopes out into a whole new set of beliefs with barely a thought. Stay focused on the argument, and you won’t even notice it’s happening.

You might now conclude the internet reactionary believes in nothing except winning arguments with liberals. And, like Newtonian physics, if you assume this framing, you will get highly useful results. If you enter conversation with Engelbert and Charlemagne believing they do not mean what they say, they are only entertaining notions, and, on a long enough timeline, they will eventually defend a position fundamentally incompatible with the one they defended earlier in the same argument, you will navigate that conversation much more effectively!

But, like Newtonian physics, this framing is lowercase-a accurate without being capital-T True.

In reality, nihilism isn’t that popular. People will tell you, “I don’t care about anything, I just like triggering the libs,” but why is it always libs? It is piss easy (and also hilarious) to upset conservatives, why only go after the SJWs? The easy answer is, well, if you upset a feminist, you might make her cry; if you upset a Nazi, he might stab you, and that has a cooling effect. But the more obvious answer is that they actually agree with the racist, MRA, and TERF talking points they repeat, but would rather not think about it.

So much of conservative rhetoric is about maintaining ignorance of one’s own beliefs. To uphold the institution of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy while thinking you are none of those things. (Well, OK, knowing you’re a capitalist, but thinking it’s a good thing.) Most people have a baseline of fairly conventional, kindergarten morality, and conservatism often clashes with it. You can rationalize these contradictions - “I’m not a bigot, I just believe in states’ rights” - but, as American conservatism gets more radical, it gets harder to square one’s politics with what one assumes to be one’s beliefs. So you learn, when someone challenges you, to cycle through beliefs until something sticks, just play your hand and trust that you’re right, or, in extreme cases, insist you have no beliefs at all, you’re just here to watch the world burn.

But they’re not. They are willing participants in the burning of only certain parts. They don’t care what they believe, but they know what they hate, and they don’t want to think about why they hate it. On paper, they believe in freedom of religion and freedom of expression, but they also hang out in communities where Muslims and trans women are punching bags. And, like a sixth grader who believes one thing in Sunday school and another thing in biology class, they believe different things at different times.

This thinking is fertile ground for Far Right recruitment. I’d say the jury is out on whether chan boards attract Far Right extremists or are built to attract Far Right extremists, but they’re where extremists congregate and organize because they’re where extremists are tolerated, and where they blend in with the locals. They learn the lingua franca of performative irony: Say what you mean in such a way that people who disagree think you’re kidding and people who agree think you’re serious. People who don’t know what they believe but clearly have some fascist leanings don’t need to be convinced of Nazi rhetoric, they just need to be submerged in it and encouraged to hate liberals. They’ll make their way Right on their own. Folks start using extremist rhetoric because it wins arguments with SJWs - usually because that’s the moment SJWs decide it’s not fruitful and possibly unsafe talking to you - and this creates the appearance that, if it keeps winning arguments, there must be something to it. The Far Right literally has handbooks on how to do this.

Those who never consciously embrace the ideology - who don’t transition from participating to getting recruited - are still useful. They spread the rhetoric, they pad the numbers, and often participate in harassment and sometimes even violence.

There’s a twisted elegance to all this. Think about it: If you operate as though there is no truth, just competing opinions, and as though opinions aren’t sincere, just tools to be picked up and dropped depending on their utility, then what are you operating under? Self-interest. The desire to win. You’ll defend the Holocaust just to feel smarter than someone, superior. Think about how beautifully that maps onto the in-group/out-group mentality of dominance and bigotry. Think how incompatible it is with liberal ideas of tolerance. I think this is why we don’t see a lot of these “I’m just here to fuck shit up” types on the Left. Don’t get me wrong, the Left has gotten on some bullshit, but (excepting politicians, whom you should never assume to mean anything they say) it’s sincerely-believed bullshit! We don’t build identities around saying things just to piss people off.

The takeaway from all this is not only that you can’t tell the difference between a bigot who doesn’t know they’re a bigot and a bigot who knows but won’t tell you, but that there is no line dividing the two. When some guy, in the middle of a harassment campaign, says the victims should be nicer to their harassers because that will “mend the rift,” I don’t know if he believes it. But, in that moment, he believes he believes it. And that scares the shit out of me. But, if you’re asking how many layers of irony he’s on as compared with the harassers, nine times out of ten it doesn’t matter.

Borrowed observation #4 is: “We are what we pretend to be.”

[intergalactic-nimrod]

I thoroughly and firmly believe that education in America has been designed around making children into productive workers rather than meaningfully well rounded individuals, and it's thoroughly holding back civilization. I still don't understand why otherwise education would be constantly framed as a competition where you have to beat out all of your competitors to stand out and be the most successful. Growing up I constantly heard adults frame my education that way, and it's bitter and exhausting.

I don't think we have much of anything to gain by keeping young people perpetually trapped in these competitive systems; it instills a worldview and lifestyle that is inherently anxiety-inducing and dehumanizing.

The values we instill in young people through their education can mean everything. If our education systems prioritized preparing children for life and adulthood outside of making them efficient workers, we would find that so many of the children deemed uncurious, depressed, or otherwise problematic would flourish. Education is about enrichment and discovering purpose, it's an extension of the purpose of life itself, and right now it really reflects how fucked up our society's priorities are; Life shouldn't be about fulfilling productivity quotas or adhering to a rigid system in order to survive, that's not the kind of world that makes anyone happy.

When education that teaches you how to be good at capitalism does its job well, it still accomplishes only one thing and one thing alone: it makes you good at capitalism. Life and reality are way bigger than economics. If you program young minds to work in very singular and specific ways then they will become uncreative and unable to function critically and grasp nuance. The American education system as it is is failing our children so tremendously by actually making it harder for them to think and be discerning, you one should never trust a system that functions by occlusion rather than enlightenment. Someone always has something to gain by keeping others ignorant and tired.

A Twitter Thread from David Bowles:

[Text transcript at the end of the screenshots]

I'll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.

Most classroom practice is astrology.

Before the late 19th century, no human society had ever attempted to formally educate the entire populace. It was either aristocracy, meritocracy, or a blend. And always male.

We’re still smack-dab in the middle of the largest experiment on children ever done.

Most teachers perpetuate the “banking” model (Freire) used on them by their teachers, who likewise inherited it from theirs, etc.

Thus the elite “Lyceum” style of instruction continues even though it’s ineffectual with most kids.

What’s worse, the key strategies we’ve discovered, driven by cognitive science & child psychology, are quite regularly dismissed by pencil-pushing, test-driven administrators. Much like Trump ignores science, the majority of principals & superintendents I’ve known flout research.

Some definitions:

Banking model --> kids are like piggy banks: empty till you fill them with knowledge that you're the expert in.

Lyceum --> originally Aristotle's school, where the sons of land-owning citizens learned through lectures and research.

Things we (scholars) DO know:

-Homework doesn't really help, especially younger kids.

-Students don't learn a thing from testing. Most teachers don't either (it's supposed to help them tweak instruction, but that rarely happens).

-Spending too much time on weak subjects HURTS.

Do you want kids to learn? Here's something we've discovered: kids learn things that matter to them, either because the knowledge and skills are "cool," or because .... they give the kids tools to liberate themselves and their communities.

Maintaining the status quo? Nope.

Kids are acutely aware of injustice and by nature rebellious against the systems of authority that keep autonomy away from them.

If you're perpetuating those systems, teachers, you've already freaking lost.

They won't be learning much from you. Except what not to become. Sure, you can wear them down. That's what happened to most of you, isn't it? You saw the hideous flaw in the world and wanted to heal it. But year after numbing year, they made you learn their dogma by rote.

And now many of you are breaking the souls of children, too.

For what?

It's all smoke and mirrors. All the carefully crafted objectives, units and exams.

WE. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. PEOPLE. LEARN.

We barely understand the physical mechanisms behind MEMORY. But we DO know kids aren't empty piggy banks. They are BRIMMING with thought.

The last and most disgusting reality? The thing I hear in classroom after freaking classroom?

Education is all about capitalism.

"You need to learn these skills to get a good job." To be a good laborer. To help the wealthy generate more wealth, while you get scraps.

THAT is why modern education is a failure.

Its basic premise is monstrous.

"Why should I learn to read, Dr. Bowles?"

Because reading is magical. It makes life worth living. And being able to read, you can decode the strategies of your oppressors & stop them w/ their own words.

[glittergummicandypeach]

Christian Right Claims to be ‘Above Politics’ Are Unbelievable | Religion Dispatches

Have you ever noticed that for hardline ideologues, only their opponents are “doing politics,” while they are simply “being objective”? In my last piece for RD I looked at the related ways in which even overtly political evangelicals often connect the notion of “the biblical worldview” to their political vision. For example, Tony Perkins, head of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, claims that if churches played down politics and simply instructed their congregants “better” in matters of theology, right-wing politics would naturally follow. What I also initially wanted to address in that piece but ultimately had to leave out is how claims that an action or belief is entirely “apolitical” can serve the same ends.

To take a recent example from the current news cycle, witness racist Fox News host Tucker Carlson lambasting those who correctly draw connections between climate change and the massive fires here in the American West that continue to rage: “It took no time at all for the usual vultures and parasites to swoop in and try to make a political advantage.” Clearly, Carlson wants viewers to believe that he is not playing politics with his climate change denialism. No, you see, only their concerns are politics; our concern is truth.

It is thanks in large part to the often subtle but powerful influence of the dominionist ideology known as Christian Reconstructionism that the conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture has come to place so much emphasis on an all-encompassing Christian or “biblical” worldview as a source for “correct” action in every sphere of life. No one has done more to uncover and unpack this influence than University of North Florida Religious Studies Professor Julie Ingersoll, whose work carefully examines the ludicrous claims of Christian Reconstructionists that their drive for “dominion” is apolitical. Asked to comment for this piece, Ingersoll said:

“Christian Reconstructionists assert that God has delegated earthly authority to three institutions: the church, the family, and the civil government. For them, ‘politics’ pertains only to the realm of the civil government, while most aspects of life fall under the authority of the family. So, health care, reproductive rights, issues related to economics and property, etc., are all non-political.”

She added that Christian Reconstructionists consider all three of these “spheres” of authority to be “still accountable to God, so even the political, in their very limited usage, is religious.” Given the influence of this worldview on mainstream evangelicals it seems likely that there are echoes of this thinking in their claims to be apolitical even as they seek to impose their authority in such matters.

In any case, whether in more or less secular or overtly religious form, the rhetorical trick of grasping moral authority by claiming to be outside of or ‘above’ politics—as if any such thing were possible with respect to social issues and their accompanying human conflicts—works depressingly well for America’s right-wingers, who understand that many Americans will accept the claim. Further, in both its secular and religious incarnations, this type of rhetorical power play serves to uphold white supremacism.

While I am inclined to agree with Megan Goodwin’s claim that religion has “always been politics, full stop,” unfortunately, many otherwise savvy journalists and commentators forget that “the personal is political” when it comes to religion. They seem to sign on to a tacit agreement that anything Christians label “religious belief” shouldn’t be examined or criticized, regardless of the impact powerful conservative Christians’ politics have on those who don’t share conservative Christian beliefs. This is often accompanied by the nonsensical positing of a clear division between religion and politics that allows conservative Christians’ claims to be above politics to go essentially unchallenged, thus reinforcing the (white Protestant inflected) Christian supremacism that pervades American society. 

Notice, for example, how the New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias leaves unquestioned a claim that Christianity Today, the flagship “respectable” evangelical magazine, “is very apolitical,” despite its frequent discussion of such things as Supreme Court decisions, “religious freedom,” and other matters of concern to social conservatives.

The spread of campaign-style “Jesus 2020” yard signs around the country, which prompted me to think about this issue in this moment, might seem at first blush like a frivolous thing to pay attention to. But when such actions go viral, how we frame them matters. And in any case, the framing provided by Joyce Hubbard, a member of Sampey Memorial Baptist Church in Ramer, Alabama, who helped conceive the initiative with other women from her church, neatly illustrates how a claim to be promoting “apolitical” religion can function as a shrewd political move. By the same token, the way journalist Greg Garrison framed his write-up of the story for Al.com provides a neat illustration of how the media normalizes Christian supremacism and evangelical extremism by failing to unpack evangelical rhetoric.

To be sure, Garrison notes, “People have speculated about ulterior motives in attempting to affect the race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.” But instead of finding such people to talk to, or even adding a sentence or two regarding what reasons they might have for their suspicions, Garrison allows Hubbard to dismiss the concern. 

As he reports, “’We’re trying to keep politics out of this,’ she said. ‘Our focus is on Jesus.’” Good journalism—of which most religion journalism, frankly, is not—would press for what “focusing on Jesus” means in this context, including the voices of those who do not see Sampey Memorial Baptist Church’s project as apolitical. Instead, Garrison gives us only the hometown church’s celebratory perspective, leaving it to us to read between the lines of Hubbard’s rhetoric—or not.

And what does Hubbard have to say about the “Jesus 2020” signs? Firstly, that “We don’t see Jesus’ name out there,” a claim that anyone who has ever looked at billboards while driving through the South or the rural Midwest can immediately confirm is patently false. Hell, even here, in and around “secular” Portland, Oregon, I’m regularly bombarded with obnoxious billboard evangelism. 

Yet Hubbard still states, presumably without irony, “We’re trying to put Jesus out there so that people can see his name,” as if seeing Jesus’s name is not an everyday occurrence for, well, every American who doesn’t live under a rock. This disconnect from reality would seem to belie an insecurity related to white evangelicals’ persecution complex.

Meanwhile, Hubbard claims, “We want people to elect Jesus leader in their life. It’s not political, not denominational, we’re not trying to sway anyone’s votes.” But she also states, “We all have our personal beliefs and moral issues we’re standing for,” and adds, “Jesus is here for all the sinners.” 

Her statement about “personal beliefs and moral issues” is an example of a kind of convenient deliberate vagueness that’s become common among “respectable” evangelicals, but to anyone intimately familiar with white evangelical subculture, in context it’s instantly recognizable as a dog whistle gesturing toward anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion stances.

Meanwhile, the statement “Jesus is here for all the sinners” represents a faux-inclusive stance of the sort called out by Church Clarity, an organization that calls on churches to be unambiguous regarding whether or not they view LGBTQ identities as inherently sinful. In addition, in a pluralist society marked by Christian hegemony, “electing Jesus” can hardly be regarded as an apolitical statement by the non-religious and members of minority religions.

Any reporter who truly wanted to know how “apolitical” Sampey Memorial Baptist is should have pressed Hubbard for her and her church’s stance on abortion, LGBTQ acceptance, and religious freedom for atheists and members of minority religions. Instead, Garrison published a puff piece apparently based on a softball interview, which is an unfortunate pattern in religion journalism. 

So what of Hubbard’s claim that her initiative is not meant to sway votes? Well, perhaps there’s no need to try to influence votes directly if, as discussed above, one believes that a “Christian worldview” will automatically lead to “correct politics.” Indeed, some of Hubbard’s other statements give away the game. “There are a lot of things in the world that are disheartening. We know that Jesus is the answer. He can solve everything.” 

Here she echoes the long-time message of the late Billy Graham, often referred to as “America’s pastor.” Despite inconsistent attempts to avoid being seen as partisan, the anti-Communist Cold Warrior Graham was certainly engaged in politics. Although he’s often contrasted with his son Franklin, Billy Graham’s political efforts to sacralize American society and government, to place them “under God,” were massively influential in the formation of the Christian Right in which Franklin, who claims “I don’t speak on political views, unless they are moral issues,” now plays such a prominent role.

Not coincidentally, as Garrison reports, several members of Hubbard’s church “plan to attend a prayer march led by Franklin Graham in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 26, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol building. Sampey Memorial Baptist and other churches plan to host prayer events that Saturday at 8 a.m.”

Hubbard says the members of her church are “praying for a revival in this country.” This is another obvious Christian nationalist dog whistle to those of us who were taught in our families, churches, homeschooling curricula, and/or Christian schools that for the nation to be blessed, we must be obedient to God, which, in this context, means banning abortion, putting officially sanctioned prayer back in public schools, and keeping LGBTQ folks from having equal rights.

At the end of the day, a flood of “Jesus 2020” yard signs is far from the worst thing Americans will face in the current election cycle. But to allow such an obvious expression of Christian supremacism to be painted as “apolitical” plays right into the hands of those who want an authoritarian version of Christianity to dominate every aspect of American life.

This content was originally published here.

[fapangel]

With Hurricanes, Jihad, North Korea and other shit going on, why do people give a fuck about some football players?

The usual leftist obsession with pushing and enforcing their narrative at every turn is present, but absent that (and/or my REEEEservative biases regarding such,) this is an example of the culture wars moving into red state/rust belt blue state home turf. NASCAR is mostly a southern fixation, but the Rust Belt and its many union democrats take football very seriously - in Michigan, the week of the MSU vs. UM college football game is damn near a state holiday, complete with the ritual weekend-long excommunication of family members that back the Other Side. (Michigan takes college football more seriously than most - if your team was the fucking Lions, you would too.) It’s also significant because conservatives have been pretty vocal about left-wing censorship of people who dared to express a political opinion and were fired for it - some of them are taking it as a chance to “get their own back” with retributive REEE (with a healthy dose of throwing leftist rhetoric back in their faces,) and a good many others, with the shoe now on the other foot, are now discussing just where the line lies on things like this, and what the appropriate response is vis a vis free speech. 

But above all, the issue in question is big - it strikes at the idea of patriotism itself. Few things highlight how tone-deaf and ideologically blind the left is than this issue - they’re trying to tell people that disrespecting the National Anthem is really a protest about racial issues. The National Anthem is a symbol of our country - it has fuck-all to do with race, as the President has tweeted himself - and no matter how many impassioned screeds full of twisted bullshit logic the leftists pen, it’s not going to convince anyone that disrespecting our National Anthem is anything but disrespect for the nation itself. Colin Kaepernick, they guy who started all of it, said as much himself:  “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color.” 

That’s the most essential leftist sentiment, in as many words - America, as an idea, philosophy and nation - isn’t the enabler of those who’d destroy the evils of racism and oppression. They consider America to embody racism and oppression; so publicly shitting on the flag, the concept, the idea, the philosophy that many thousands of people have given their lives to defend from all enemies foreign and domestic comes naturally to them. They’re the purest form of racist, people who’s entire worldview revolve around dividing people into different groups based on skin color (“identity politics,”) so the tendency of their arguments to always return to “black people versus America” isn’t surprising - or even new. This is just a rare example of it surfacing in a public fashion. 

Trump’s certainly jumped into this imbroglio tweetfeed-first, but he’s following on this one, not leading. His success as a politician owes entirely to his keen understanding of the public consciousness; especially the Rust Belt - he knows how blue-collar democrats feel about some asshole calling America itself an inherently evil, racist, oppressive monster. Kaepernick isn’t calling racism un-American - he’s calling America itself racist. The Reagan Democrats actually do believe in America, to their core - it’s no surprise that such an open and egregious insult has them too damn mad to see straight. Trump obviously knows where the people’s feelings lie - the only ones that don’t are the racist media goons who think the same badly worn, eternally tractionless racism narrative is going to stick on something near and dear to the Rust Belt’s hearts, both personally (sports as a pasttime) and philosophically (patriotism and America.) 

It certainly doesn’t help that the media is increasingly inept, and the President increasingly skilled at dancing circles around the dumb bastards. With a few 140 character tweets he deftly turns arguments the mass media spent tens of thousands of words arguing across dozens and dozens of articles. When many players linked arms during the anthem - in a move the media spun as if it was a protest against Trump - he simply praised it as a laudable show of unity, and restated that kneeling during the national anthem is disrespectful. He’s also repeated what everyone already knows; that there’s nothing race-related about the National Anthem, tweeted/retweeted about combat veterans who sacrificed to defend all that flag and anthem stand for, and called for a boycott by fans, casting it as The People versus the NFL, instead of Courageous Black Protesters versus The Man, like the media keeps trying to do. This isn’t 4D chess or anything - it’s just Trump being intelligent and the media being that stupid. That their convoluted narratives and attempts to reframe the argument with race-baiting are so easily parried demonstrates just how overextended they are on this issue. 

Final note: Alejandro Villanueva of the Steelers; a combat veteran who served three tours in Afghanistan and made a point of walking out of the dugouts to stand for the Anthem - has seen his jersey become the number-one bestselling NFL memorabilia item almost overnight. The Steelers themselves were apparently standing to the man in the dugout - they were protesting Trump’s twitter statements alleging that NFL players ought to respect flag and country or lose their jobs. Villanueva himself has eloquently and properly defended their right to do so as their expression of free speech, and made it clear that his fellow players were disagreeing with Trump, not insulting the Anthem or nation. 

He’s right, of course - everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, whether it involve standing, kneeling or doing cartwheels. When most teams linked arms - and the Steelers stayed in the dugout - they were rebuking Trump for saying otherwise, and it’s a rebuke Trump accepted - note how he stopped with the “these bums should be fired” gut-feel expressions and started calling for NFL fans to express their own opinions in turn, with their feet and their money. 

Which they have. So far they seem to be backing Villanueva - and the flag. 

[eichy815]

Firing Up a ‘Dutch Oven’ of Common Sense

Originally Published on October 27, 2016 on Eichy Says 

Social etiquette isn’t so clear-cut in the 21st Century.  As our expectations of others change along with evolving perspectives on sex and gender, a whole new crop of young Americans are trying to figure out what that should mean when they frequent restaurants and coffee bars.

It always seems to come back to that precarious question:  on a first date, who should pay?  The man?  The woman?  Both?  Either?

In May of 2014, I wrote a piece on modern-day interpretations of “chivalry” – prefacing most of the article by commenting on a past discussion between cohosts of The Chew as to whether a man should always have to expect to foot the entire bill for him and his female date.

Before I weigh in with my own quaint little perspective, let’s look at what so-called relationship experts say.

Financial columnist Farnoosh Torabi offers up the theory that any woman offering to split a check 50/50 is actually trying to find a polite way to indicate to her male companion that she doesn’t want to see him again.  After consulting with numerous relationship experts, Torabi’s survey showed the most American men *want* to be the ones to pay, and, according to her, they *should* be the ones to pay – as it’s a good way of stroking their egos and making them feeling like a provider.

The only exception to this, according to Torabi’s perspective, would be if the woman is the one who asks the man out.  Overall, though, she found that a majority of female respondents (who were polled) automatically expect the guy to pay; out of those respondents, pluralities of the women asked would feel offended if they’re expected to pick up even part of the tab.

CSULA professor Janet Lever’s 2015 sociology study seems to corroborate Torabi’s observations.  Lever’s questionnaires determined that a majority of men still feel guilty about hypothetically accepting a dinner treat from a woman.  On the other side, women will often do the “wallet fake” by reaching for their purses and pretending as though they’re willing to go 50/50 – but they harbor an unspoken expectation that their male dinner companion will end up offering to pick up the entire check.  The female respondents indicated to Lever that they view this arrangement as a way for males to practice “being a gentleman,” whereas other women view the “wallet fake” as a way of asserting that they’re independent and not trying to be gold-diggers (even if they don’t actually *want* to pay for any of it).

As told to Lever by Allison Shiffler – one of her respondents who also identifies as a “feminist” – during an interview:

There’s only been one time I paid for my burger.  It was a cash-only place and the guy didn’t bring enough money...When I was younger, I was much more into splitting the bill.  As I’ve gotten older and more and more of my time has been wasted [on dates that went nowhere], I’ve felt fine about men paying for the first date.

Rebecca Adams – a Huffington Post writer on gender issues – delves into this dynamic even more intricately.  She finds that heterosexual women in her own research are actually split into four basic groups:  A.) those who believe a man picking up the check is a gentlemanly duty that’s part of the courtship; B.) those who view even check-splitting as a sign that her male companion may harbor financial insecurity, creating a stressor that causes her internal strife and panic; C.) those who regard “going Dutch” or going 50/50 as being a sign of compassion and empathy for each other’s socioeconomic realities; and D.) those who think, if the woman asks the man out, she should go into expecting to pay the entire bill...or at least 50/50 as a compromise.

In a sign that American thought is becoming more fractured on this question, lifestyle editor Sacha Strebe has found coed respondents to offer a diverse mixture of opinions.  Among nine of them:

The asker should always pay.

The guy should always pay, because it’s an old-school custom and it shows the woman that he’s considerate.

Women should offer to pay as part of “the dance,” but they secretly hope men will pick up the entire tab.

The guy should pay for dinner, while the girl pays for dessert.  

If the man is older, he should pay; if the man is younger, he and his female date should “go Dutch” or do a 50/50 split.

“Going Dutch” ensures that no one feels any sense of obligation for – or dependency on – the other person.

First dates should generally take place at free venues, to avoid any conflicts over billing.

If one person offers to pay, the other person should let them – and then offer to pick up the tab on the second date.

The guy should pay if there’s an expectation of sex; the girl should pay if there’s no expectation of sex.

But the “old-school” mentality still permeates the crevices of modern society.  Business Insider men’s lifestyle reporter Dennis Green advises men to go in expecting to pay for the full bill – and he encourages women to go into the date expecting to pay for at least half of the bill.  But, Green adds, the man should defer to the woman’s preferences or judgment...either let her pay for half if she insists, or just pay for the whole thing if she doesn’t protest.

Green also claims that same-sex dates (a gay male or lesbian couple) should involve both parties just evenly splitting the bill right down the middle unless the parties have specified otherwise.

Dating coach Evan Marc Katz echoes Green’s recommendation – Katz claims that guys should always expect to foot the entire bill, by default; in fact, he says a man should insist on covering the whole thing even if his female companion offers to chip in.  Katz states that men should just accept this as “the way it is” because it’s tradition; he concludes by telling men they should enjoy the rewarding feeling of being the “breadwinner” during their date, and that women should use good judgment by not exploiting this gesture.

Fashion/culture columnist Margaret Adams describes another serial dater’s technique:  one of the guys whom she interviewed tends to sneak away to the restroom, and then pays the bill covertly – out of the sight of his female dinner companion.  This way, there’s no awkwardness upon the bill formally arriving at their table.

Financial blogger Lauren Bowling examines it from yet another angle.  From the respondents in her own research, some men think a woman should pay for half of the bill because of the segment of females who are dating only to wrangle themselves free dinners.  Some women, on the flip side, think a man should pay for half of the bill because of the segment of males who are looking for a casual hookup rather than a serious relationship.

Bowling also points to the trend among many same-sex couples, where the person who initiates the date should pay for the entire first date – and then both parties take turns by alternating who pays on each date after that.

Then, she qualifies her findings by saying:

And yes, being a guy who wants to date women is expensive.  But if we’re comparing apples to apples, being a woman is just as expensive.  We pay more for beauty treatments, clothes, hair care and healthcare.  Because society demands it and also because we’re a beauty-obsessed culture.  Guys can get away with paying less for things and perhaps this comes out in the wash within our dating customs.

So what’s my perspective?  First, as a gay dude, I don’t have to worry about the question of gender when going out on a first date with someone.  However, I have experienced those awkward moments where I’ve been out on a date with another guy, and we don’t really know how to approach the whole matter of who pays.

In general, I go into the date assuming that I will be paying exclusively for my share – that we’ll be “going Dutch.”  This rule-of-thumb makes sense to me...regardless of whether a first-time-dating couple is homosexual or heterosexual.

I see no inherent reason why there should be totally different standards for same-sex and opposite-sex couples.  As relationships progress, each couple can adjust its habits to whatever works for them.

But the blanket expectation that men should pay for the date, by default – that’s a sexist, antiquated worldview that essentially relegates males into human ATM machines.

Likewise, it’s heterosexist to have double standards for straight and gay couples on this front.  Why should heterosexual males be held to some patriarchal “social duty” from which homosexual males are exempt?  Does this mean there’s something inherently “less chivalrous” about the dynamics that can exist within a lesbian relationship?

And, to address Bowling’s argument that women spend a lot of time and money dolling themselves up for men (even on a first date) – as I pointed out in my assessment of the so-called “Pink Tax” – if a woman is going through extra steps to beautify herself for a new companion, that’s her choice.  But no one is asking her to do that.  If she feels that she needs to cloak herself in makeup and sartorial accessories just to impress a guy – well, maybe that guy who she might end up impressing isn’t all that worth it, if he can’t look beyond those layers?

Of course, I’m very cautious when dating...so I haven’t done a whole lot of it.  But this is my viewpoint, from a gender equality perspective.  If you’re embracing the neofeminist belief that men should have to foot the bill for women because men (“on average”) earn more money than women...well, unless you’ve seen your date’s income tax forms ahead of time, you’re jumping to a very presumptuous conclusion in light of your future date’s personal economic circumstances.

There’s a separate conundrum that can arise when hashing out the matter of bill-paying etiquette: what to do when going out for dinner and/or drinks with a large group?

Every time I’ve been out on a “group dinner,” in my experience, each individual simply pays for his or her own share of the bill.  So I didn’t realize it (“group check-splitting”) was actually a “thing,” until recently.

But past Survivor contestant Francesca Hogi, who now runs a matchmaking business, posed this question to her readers on her Facebook wall, last summer.  Two of her friends – Eliza Orlins and Semhar Tadesse (also former contestants on various installments of the Survivor franchise) – both expressed incredulity that anyone would be opposed to splitting a restaurant check into equal shares amongst all members of the dining party.

As Eliza and Semhar both chirped, to paraphrase:  “If you’re really my true friend, you shouldn’t have a problem paying an extra two or three dollars when dining out with me!”

To which Francesca responded that, in her opinion, she doesn’t feel she should have to subsidize her dining companions’ alcoholic choices – as alcohol tends to be amongst the priciest items on menus.

Needless to say, I agree with Franny’s perspective, here.  But let’s give it some context.

Many critics believe that “going Dutch” within a large group of multiple people is stressful (especially for the wait staff, when having to divide up totals across many different credit cards).  It’s also believed that it can make you look “stingy” if you only want to pay for exactly what you ordered.  Some say that you should only pay an individualized share of the bill if you refrained from ordering alcoholic drinks or ordered a salad/side rather than an entree.

Book editor Nell Casey believes group dinners should be a strictly even split amongst all diners, regardless of how little or how much the individual diner ordered.  She justifies this by holding that “it’s the easiest thing to do and the right thing to do.”  And, she adds, it will “even out” in the end – and, by insisting on down-to-the-number check-splitting, it can harm your reputation amongst your friends.

Casey also stipulates that any even-split or individualized-split agreement should be stipulated at the beginning of the meal (obviously, as a way of being more considerate toward the servers).  She advocates that each person should bring cash (individual bills), since that makes it easier for everyone to chip in their share – especially when it comes to the tip.  On those latter two points, I agree with her.

But I differ with Casey’s recommendation on across-the-board even check-splitting.

I acknowledge that asking for separate individual checks (in a large group) will usually be convoluted and time-consuming.  Whenever separate checks are requested, it must be done at the beginning of the meal...in order to avoid causing a backlog for the wait staff as a whole.  But there are other alternatives that are fairer than just evenly splitting up the check amongst everyone regardless of their menu choices.

For example, Venmo and PayPal allow you to use a SmartPhone app to send your share of payments to your friend who’s using their card to render the composite group payment.  With this speedy electronic feature, there’s no reason why one person can’t send the payer $12 for their fried calamari while another person separately transfers another $21 for their gourmet ahi tuna entree.

Some groups of friends just take turns having one person pay for the entire meal; they will rotate who pays, each time the group goes out.  Of course, some diners could take advantage of this by ordering a more expensive meal when it’s not their night to pay.  Or some cheaper individuals might skip out on the meal when their “turn” (to be the one paying) arrives.

An even simpler way to do it is just to designate one member of the dining party to make the group’s payment in person (via credit card, check, or cash) – and then each person would pay back the designated individual (presumably with cash) afterward.

Regardless, it’s generally best to reach a consensus upfront as to how everyone would like to pay for their meals.  Some other group dining pointers, courtesy of food reviewer C.A. Pinkham:  it’s fine to eyeball the bill for potential pricing errors; never render the tip in coins; and each person should round up their share of an evenly-split group tip.

To me, your valuing (or devaluing) of my friendship shouldn’t hinge on how much I’m willing to chip in to cover your personal menu choices.  If you’re going to use that as a barometer of how much we mean to each other...then you’re probably not someone with whom I’d want to be regularly spending time.

On the rare occasions when I dine out with groups for meals, I go into the situation expecting to pay for exactly whatever my share is (based specifically on what I ordered) – plus I will round up generously to help out with the group’s tip.  So, for instance, if my share of the bill comes out to $14.87, I’ll probably just throw in an even $18 to account for tipping (handing over a ten, a five, and three ones).

Yes, I’m one of those people who always makes sure I have lots of five dollar bills and one dollar bills on my person, when going out.

So there you have it.  Eichy’s guidelines for dating and casual dining.  Earth-shattering, isn’t it?

When on a blind date or a first date, “go Dutch.”  As the relationship evolves (*if* it evolves), you can make adjustments accordingly.

And when you go out with a group:  carry enough cash so you can contribute an amount equal to exactly what you personally ordered, plus throw in a few extra dollars to help out with the gratuity.

*That*, Ms. Nell Casey, is truly the “easiest and rightest thing to do.”

[cassiecantyousee]

I Don’t Believe in Science

(the first in a series on religion and science because as advertised that is my jam)

Let's just jump right in, shall we?

There seems to be this idea in American Christianity that science is The Enemy and out to destroy everything good and holy in the world. I’ve even seen it come up in puppet form in a Sunday school video! And honestly? What. The. Heck. Christians should support science! Shoot, Christians should LOVE science, so let’s start getting some major misconceptions out of the way.

I often hear things from the Christian community about "not serving two masters" when discussing science. A good verse for sure, but it is not super relevant in this situation. I even hear things like "I worship God, scientists worship Darwin!" That may seem like it takes it to the extreme, but honestly, that’s what a lot of the Christian opposition to science boils down to. There's a perception that Science (with a capital S) and Christianity are two competing belief systems, with completely different worldviews that cannot exist together.

THIS. IS NOT. THE CASE.

First of all, only Christianity is a religion/belief system. Science is a tool. So by definition they are NOT inherently mutually exclusive. I see a lot of stuff about "believing" or "not believing" in science, and that makes no sense. I don't believe in science. I believe in objective reality and facts, and I use science to find those things. So you can use the tool of science in all sorts of situations, even studying the Bible (cue elderly church ladies clutching their pearls)! There is no “Science with a capital S” that is some sort of central creed for all scientists. The Oxford Dictionary defines the scientific method as “a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” Scientists are just investigating things in as rational a way as possible, and there is nothing intrinsically un-Christian about that.

The Bible is also all about objective reality and critical thinking. I'm still trying to keep this from becoming too much of a theology blog, but please know that God is VERY MUCH ABOUT logic and evidence and thinking things through. Faith and belief are not blind or illogical, and are full of common sense (the original Miracle on 34th Street LIED, although it is otherwise an excellent movie). Jesus tells his disciples to touch his hands and side for evidence after the resurrection. Whenever God asks his followers to trust in a new promise, he reminds them of all the other promises he’s already kept. (Long aside: I tried to find a quick easy link laying all of this out to share with you, but after about two hours of wading through internet theology I had turned up nothing, which is telling in and of itself. Literally just super dense apologetics or angsty teen blogs. So I’m going to tell you to read The Death of Truth by Dennis McCallum et al., everything by Harry Blamires and C.S. Lewis, and also to email my dad, who will talk about this for days. *Digory Kirke voice* “What do they teach them in these schools!”) Anyway, moving on.

So there’s no reason science and Christianity can’t get along. In fact, I would argue that they should help each other out.

If you've been in any sort of Christian community in the last few decades, you've probably heard about relativism. It's been the boogeyman of Christianity for a while now. And if you're a person alive in America, you probably also have been hearing a lot about relativism in the form of "fake news" and "alternative facts." Scientists especially have been very stressed about this! With good reason! It's a horrifying problem! The scientific community and the Christian community are, at their core, worried about the same thing: they’re worried that the idea of truth doesn’t mean anything anymore. And science is so ready to help with this! Remember the scientific method? It’s all about proving (or failing to disprove) things.

I could keep rambling about this forever, but I guess basically what I'm saying here is that Christianity and science should STOP. FIGHTING. You’re worried about the same stuff! Science isn't an alternate worldview here to steal your religion. You're not supposed to BELIEVE in science, you're supposed to USE it. So please, go out and do so.

[shirlleycoyle]

The USPS Isn’t Made of Superheroes, But It Is a Miracle

This article was sent on Tuesday to subscribers of The Mail, Motherboard’s pop-up newsletter about the USPS, election security, and democracy. Subscribe to get the next edition before it is published here, as well as original articles and the paid zine.

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VICE Media c/o Aaron Gordon 49 S 2nd St. Brooklyn, NY 11211

In case you, like the postmaster general, don’t know how much it costs to mail a postcard, it’s 35 cents. I’d love to hear from you!

When Sarah* was six or seven years old, all her friends dressed up as superheroes for Halloween. Batman, Superman, Aquaman. She dressed up as the mailman.

“This is what I wanted to do my whole life,” Sarah—which is not her real name because postal workers can be reprimanded or even fired for speaking to the press—told me about a month ago. She's now a clerk at a small town's post office. She was drawn to the post office because of the role postal workers play in their communities, the postal service’s history in shaping this country, and the pride she has in serving fellow citizens. She wanted to be part of something that matters. To other kids her age, that meant saving Gotham from the Joker or reversing the rotation of the Earth to turn back time to save Lois Lane. But not to Sarah: “The mailman was my superhero,” she said.

Is it really so odd to think of the mailman as a superhero? The same person comes to our home six days a week with pieces of paper or boxes filled with goods from all over the world. I like to imagine little Sarah asked the mailman one day how he got all these things, and he gave a cute reply, something like I went to all these places and got them myself, just for you! That sounds like a superhero to me.

Of course, the real answer is a mail carrier is just a small part of a 633,000-strong group of people, all working together to get the mail from one place to another because it is something our society has decided it wants to do. Delivering the mail is something we have wanted to do since before we even had a country. And it is something we have consistently done, without prolonged disagreement or interruption, for 245 years.

But mailmen and mailwomen are not superheroes. Not because what the USPS does every day—as just one example, bringing life-saving medicine to people who otherwise couldn't get it—fails to qualify as a superpower, but because superheroes aren’t real. The post office is even better, because it is real.

This is no small point. The post office is an anomaly to the United States of America I know, one that asks not what big business can do for you but what you can do for big business. I have lived my entire life in a country that, almost without exception, believes as a matter of faith that the private sector will address our needs, that government involvement in our life is to be avoided. Yet, here is this government service, created by the very "Founding Fathers" our country worships, that delivers to every single American six days a week, a service many of our fellow countrymen, including our retired soldiers, literally cannot live without. 

Over the last few months, I've spoken to dozens of postal workers around the country, corresponded with dozens more, and received emails from hundreds yet more. I've read five books on the post office—there are, to my surprise, relatively few books about the post office, and only a handful that cover the last 50 years in any detail—and reviewed countless government reports about the post office. I've received thousands of pages from public records requests. 

Which is to say, I've been obsessed with the post office, even before Louis DeJoy took over and instituted changes that have made the USPS a consistent news headline. I've been obsessed with it because I want to know what it says about our country that the post office was created, survived through a revolutionary war and a civil war, but is now facing its greatest crisis yet: a financial crisis created by the very people who take an oath to support and defend it. I have come to view the post office as living, breathing evidence that the worldview which has dominated our society for the last several decades is fundamentally flawed, because even as it has been hobbled and weakened, the post office still works. If the post office, long decried by conservatives as the poster child of government inefficiency and therefore undeserving of our tax dollars, is consistently rated the most popular part of the government even without those tax dollars, then maybe inefficiency isn't the pernicious disease they say it is. Perhaps there's something more important than efficiency.

Over the next few months, this newsletter will be a story of the post office, told through what has happened before and what is happening today. With apologies to Sarah and all other postal workers, it is not a story about superheroes—or, for that matter, supervillains. It is a story about people who have done remarkable things and people who have profoundly erred, and the hundreds of thousands of people who show up in what can often be a very difficult, even hellish, place to work. 

But the story of the USPS is mostly one of contradiction and confusion. It must cover its own costs without government subsidy, but must also serve nearly all Americans six days a week, something private carriers like UPS and FedEx would never do because it cannot possibly be profitable. It must put aside tens of billions of dollars in future retiree benefits, but has almost no control over what it charges for stamps and packages. It cannot rent out unused retail space or open new lines of business, even something as simple as installing a copy and fax machine in the lobby (although, if a post office already had one prior to 2006, it can keep it). It is, in other words, a "business" that is legislatively barred from doing what businesses do.

This isn't to say the postal service hasn't innovated. To pick just a few examples, it was one of the first entities to utilize optical character recognition computer programs, wisely deployed to read addresses on mailpieces. Sorting mail has evolved from a manual, laborious task to a largely mechanized one. It has cut its workforce by more than 100,000 people over the last few decades while still delivering the mail six days a week.

But the USPS has not been rewarded for these advances. In fact, it has effectively been punished for them, since its productivity has made it a constant target for budgetary chicanery to make the federal deficit appear smaller than it is. The modern USPS has been defined by an extended, bipartisan effort to cut costs, especially what it pays its workers, even as every government and consultant review acknowledges delivering 48 percent of the world's mail to some 330 million people is an inherently labor-intensive task, made more intensive every year as there are more people and businesses to deliver mail to. From 2009 to 2018, the USPS had to make deliveries to 8.5 million more homes and businesses with 77,000 fewer employees. And now, in 2020, we are being told yet again the USPS must be more efficient and cut costs. It's no wonder the post office has become an increasingly difficult place to work.

This conflict between "efficiency" and the quality of life for its workers is at the heart of the postal service's troubles, and it is not a new conflict for the post office (or, for that matter, the industrialized world). In 1919, Postmaster General Albert Burleson, a fervent anti-unionist who re-segregated the post office based on race, called unions "a menace to public welfare and should no longer be tolerated or condoned" shortly after declaring it was his goal to get the post office to make money every year (it is worth noting postal unions didn't even have collective bargaining power at the time). In response, National Association of Letter Carriers president Edward Gainor retorted in a union newspaper in early 1920, "Shall a postal surplus be achieved at the expense of inadequate service or underpaid postal employees?" (This reply was documented in historian Philip Rubio's indispensable book Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service.) Gainor's question is the question that has haunted the USPS for a century.

In recent weeks, millions of Americans have woken up to the USPS’s plight. Americans are aware the post office will serve as a critical link in the chain of democracy, bringing empty ballots to voters and completed ballots back, and they are worried about whether the post office will be able to do that without major incident. But what makes the post office a major source of concern is fundamentally the same thing that concerns us about the state of the country as a whole: that our critical institutions have been starved of resources, that our government is no longer robust enough to deal with new challenges, that it is being run by people uninterested in serving the agency’s stated mission. With respect to the post office, it is an overdue awakening. “Save the post office” has become a widespread sentiment. Indeed, the post office needs saving; it has needed saving for a long time.

We don't need a superhero to save the post office. We need something equally rare. We, as a country, need to agree on something important: that the post office is not a business but a service every American directly benefits from, and therefore every American should pay into. In fact, it is difficult to imagine anything more deserving of tax dollars than a peaceful, civil service that binds every American together, promotes commerce, and serves as a link of last resort to vulnerable populations. Instead of feeding the good thing, we, as a country, have decided to starve it. Reversing this policy would require not just reversing a bad law, but admitting we were wrong about some very big ideas. That is what makes it so difficult, and also so important.

But if there's anything that can possibly accomplish this, it is the post office. I don't believe in superheroes, but if the post office can manage to do that, I just might start believing in one.

The Week In Mail

A postal union member told a San Antonio newspaper they were instructed to hide backlogged mail for a Congressman’s visit to the post office.

DeJoy announced a “suspension” of some of his most controversial policies but it didn’t actually change anything. The USPS will also not reconnect any of the sorting machines it has already unplugged.

There is a massive disconnect between the rhetoric from USPS management, which generally characterizes mail delays as minimal and an unfortunate side effect of new policies, and what postal workers are experiencing on the ground. No wonder the USPS is warning workers not to speak to the press.

While many of DeJoy’s policies are concerning, there’s good reason to believe voting by mail will still work. But mailing your ballot back early can’t hurt.

There’s a growing concern about the process that got DeJoy the job in the first place, including possible undue influence by Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin. Former Vice Chairman of the USPS Board of Governors David Williams told the House Progressive Caucus he resigned because “it became clear to me that the administration was politicizing the Postal Service with the Treasury Secretary as the lead figure for the White House in that effort.”

As disruptive as DeJoy’s changes have been thus far, what he has planned for after the election is way bigger.

Cher, please.

This Machine Arrests Fascists.

Postcards

We’ll post the postcards here! Send me one so this section isn’t empty next week.

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