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foreverlogical · 4 years ago

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Donald Trump’s descent into madness continues.

The latest manifestation of this is a report in The New York Times that the president is weighing appointing the conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who for a time worked on his legal team, to be special counsel to investigate imaginary claims of voter fraud.

As if that were not enough, we also learned that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was pardoned by the president after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, attended the Friday meeting. Earlier in the week, Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, floated the idea (which he had promoted before) that the president impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election in several closely contested states that voted against Trump. It appears that Flynn wants to turn them into literal battleground states.\

None of this should come as a surprise. Some of us said, even before he became president, that Donald Trump’s Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering him, was his psychology—his disordered personality, his emotional and mental instability, and his sociopathic tendencies. It was the main reason, though hardly the only reason, I refused to vote for him in 2016 or in 2020, despite having worked in the three previous Republican administrations. Nothing that Trump has done over the past four years has caused me to rethink my assessment, and a great deal has happened to confirm it.

Given Trump’s psychological profile, it was inevitable that when he felt the walls of reality close in on him—in 2020, it was the pandemic, the cratering economy, and his election defeat—he would detach himself even further from reality. It was predictable that the president would assert even more bizarre conspiracy theories. That he would become more enraged and embittered, more desperate and despondent, more consumed by his grievances. That he would go against past supplicants, like Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and become more aggressive toward his perceived enemies. That his wits would begin to turn, in the words of King Lear. That he would begin to lose his mind.

So he has. And, as a result, President Trump has become even more destabilizing and dangerous.

“I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,” Jonathan Swan of Axios tweeted. “I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell/Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top.”

Even amid the chaos, it’s worth taking a step back to think about where we are: An American president, unwilling to concede his defeat by 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes, is still trying to steal the election. It has become his obsession.

In the process, Trump has in too many cases turned his party into an instrument of illiberalism and nihilism. Here are just a couple of data points to underscore that claim: 18 attorneys generals and more than half the Republicans in the House supported a seditious abuse of the judicial process.

And it’s not only, or even mainly, elected officials. The Republican Party’s base has often followed Trump into the twilight zone, with a sizable majority of them affirming that Joe Biden won the election based on fraud and many of them turning against medical science in the face of a surging pandemic.

COVID-19 is now killing Americans at the rate of about one per minute, but the president is “just done with COVID,” a source identified as one of Trump’s closest advisers told The Washington Post. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with COVID ... It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”

This is where Trump’s crippling psychological condition—his complete inability to face unpleasant facts, his toxic narcissism, and his utter lack of empathy—became lethal. Trump’s negligence turned what would have been a difficult winter into a dark one. If any of his predecessors—Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, to go back just 40 years—had been president during this pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives would almost surely have been saved.

“My concern was, in the worst part of the battle, the general was missing in action,” said Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, one of the very few Republicans to speak truth in the Trump era.

In 30 days, Donald Trump will leave the presidency, with his efforts to mount a coup having failed. The encouraging news is that it never really had a chance of succeeding. Our institutions, especially the courts, will have passed a stress test, not the most difficult ever but difficult enough, and unlike any in our history. Some local officials exhibited profiles in courage, doing the right thing in the face of threats and pressure from their party. And a preponderance of the American public, having lived through the past four years, deserve credit for canceling this presidential freak show rather than renewing it. The “exhausted majority” wasn’t too exhausted to get out and vote, even in a pandemic.

But the Trump presidency will leave gaping wounds nearly everywhere, and ruination in some places. Truth as a concept has been battered from the highest office in the land on an almost hourly basis. The Republican Party has been radicalized, with countless Republican lawmakers and other prominent figures within the party having revealed themselves to be moral cowards, even, and in some ways especially, after Trump was defeated. During the Trump presidency, they were so afraid of getting crosswise with him and his supporters that they failed the Solzhenitsyn test: “The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.

”During the past four years, the right-wing ecosystem became more and more rabid. Many prominent evangelical supporters of the president are either obsequious, like Franklin Graham, or delusional, like Eric Metaxas, and they now peddle their delusions as being written by God. QAnon and the Proud Boys, Newsmax and One America News, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson—all have been emboldened.

These worrisome trends began before Trump ran for office, and they won’t disappear after he leaves the presidency. Those who hope for a quick snapback will be disappointed. Still, having Trump out of office has to help. He’s going to find out that there’s no comparable bully pulpit. And the media, if they are wise, will cut off his oxygen, which is attention. They had no choice but to cover Trump’s provocations when he was president; when he’s an ex-president, that will change.

For the foreseeable future, journalists will rightly focus on the pandemic. But once that is contained and defeated, it will be time to go back to focusing more attention on things like the Paris Accords and the carbon tax; the earned-income tax credit and infrastructure; entitlement reform and monetary policy; charter schools and campus speech codes; legal immigration, asylum, assimilation, and social mobility. There is also an opportunity, with Trump a former president, for the Republican Party to once again become the home of sane conservatism. Whether that happens or not is an open question. But it’s something many of us are willing to work for, and that even progressives should hope for.Beyond that, and more fundamental than that, we have to remind ourselves that we are not powerless to shape the future; that much of what has been broken can be repaired; that though we are many, we can be one; and that fatalism and cynicism are unwarranted and corrosive.

There’s a lovely line in William Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude”: “What we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how.

”There are still things worthy of our love. Honor, decency, courage, beauty, and truth. Tenderness, human empathy, and a sense of duty. A good society. And a commitment to human dignity. We need to teach others—in our individual relationships, in our classrooms and communities, in our book clubs and Bible studies, and in innumerable other settings—why those things are worthy of their attention, their loyalty, their love. One person doing it won’t make much of a difference; a lot of people doing it will create a culture.

Maybe we understand better than we did five years ago why these things are essential to our lives, and why when we neglect them or elect leaders who ridicule and subvert them, life becomes nasty, brutish, and generally unpleasant.

Just after noon on January 20, a new and necessary chapter will begin in the American story. Joe Biden will certainly play a role in shaping how that story turns out—but so will you and I. Ours is a good and estimable republic, if we can keep it.

PETER WEHNER is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

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yea-no-thank-you-nope · 4 years ago

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The Philosophy of Dr. Stone

My intentions for this essay are not to try and persuade you into thinking Senku is an awful person and whoever thinks like this is selfish and childish. I’m very sorry if I did come across as that. I do believe Senku is right in some aspects like the whole “leveling the playing field” thing and the curiosity humans naturally have towards science. I just think that everyone should not be unpetrified, that there should be laws in place on science to make sure it’s not unnecessarily cruel or harmful, and that in this situation it would be better to try and rebuild humanity better than in the past. Both Senku and Tukasa are flawed in their way of thinking. Humanity cannot survive with only one in power, shaping the world to what they want.

Now I wanted to say this at the start but I absolutely love Dr. Stone, this essay is not a barrage of the story and how it’s garbage or anything or that anyone is. This is not an attack but an invitation to a discussion. I’m making this essay because I appreciate the story and think it is so incredibly interesting. This essay is constructive criticism so the story can be better and so people can discuss the topics and the opinions they have of them, basically just an excuse to make people talk about this awesome story. I also have not read the manga, I’ve only watched the anime so if you decide to respond please do it very vaguely. I’m fine if you talk about the new arguments brought up but not ok if you spoil the show so please be careful.

I’m going to begin with psychology because that’s my jam and I obsess over psychological topics and discussions. I am by no means a professional but I haven’t heard anyone point out or talk about the ideas and opinions I have, so I’ll just do it. The psychology in Dr. Stone is incredibly thought provoking and makes the audience take a close look at their society and the people around them. What would you do if all of humanity was turned to stone and when you wake up all evidence of humans has corroded away except for the statues of said people scattered everywhere? What would you do if the world was basically reset, including humanity? What would you do?

That in-and-of itself is exiting. It's fun to think of what you would do in such an radial situation. With that the audience can automatically empathies with the cast of characters and their versions of how they decide to handle the situation. Senku’s choice is to unpetrify everyone and bring humanity back to the modern age. This may be what most people would do, I don’t know for sure but I haven't heard a lot of people who actually disagree with his point of view so I’m just assuming. This is like the textbook, basic ideology a human could have. All humans have that basic instinct to save as many people as possible, it just makes sense. This and the fact that Senku is google reincarnated makes him the perfect protagonist for this story. People may not be able to empathies with a scheming scientific genius but they can empathies with his desire to save everyone just like in any other Shonen anime. It’s easy to think this way and it's understandable, but that doesn't mean it’s right.

On the other hand we have Tsukasa. He is, to put it simply, the complete opposite to Senku. He is still smart but is not a walking talking Alexa and is incredibly strong. He believes that they shouldn't bring back everyone and instead pick and choose who to unpetrify. He thinks that bringing back humanity to the way it was will only cause destruction, war, power imbalances, and greed. Now you may call this a “hot take” but I came across some misunderstandings on Tsukasa’s stand. He does not disagree with science, he disagrees with Senku. He does not think that science itself is the root of all human evil, he thinks humans are. Now you may be asking “How do you know that for sure?”, well, why would he compliment Senku on his knowledge of science if he hates it? The only time I can remember him saying anything bad about science is when he was talking about guns, bombs, and other weapons of mass destruction. But it’s clear that he only brought that up to persuade Senku in not reviving the greedy and the ones who will use them to oppress and kill others. Again, just like with Senku, the audience can sympathize and understand this character and their actions. No one wants to see another in pain and surely does want anyone to die, they want to save everyone.

Senku and Tsukasa are on the absolute opposite side of each other but are still on the same coin. They both want the best for humanity but have 2 conflicting viewpoints. Now it would be incredibly easy to just pick a side and argue for that side and why it’s right but I don’t think people see that both of those are very flawed ideals and although in theory they could work, in practice both of them fall apart. If Senku gets his way and everyone is revived and basically back to the way the world was, humanity will get right back on track to the destruction of the world. We were already on that track before the petrification. Scientists predict that 2050 is basically the doomsday year. In 2050 there will not be enough food to feed us all due to overpopulation and global warming is getting worse and worse by the second. If we don’t take drastic steps to stop it then the world is on track towards an early ice age and even the destruction of the entire planet. But in this universe that exact thing happened (the drastic steps not the destruction of the world). With all of humanity frozen in an instant all pollution creation stopped, the furnaces burning coal died out, and over hunting/ over deforestation ceased in an instant. I’m not a professional scientist so I don’t know if 3,000 years is actually enough time for the world to completely reset but I do know that with the sudden halt on human activity could allow the earth to completely heal.

So the issue with Senku’s viewpoint seems to be that he viewed the modern age as a utopia of sorts which makes sense, it’s the peak of science and he loves science. Senku was born physically weak and preferred to use his brain over his muscles. He viewed science as a way to “level the playing field”, and he’s not wrong. It definitely levels the playing field but that’s only if they have access to it, it does not work if the people who don’t need it are the only ones who can have it. In primitive society (I’m mainly going to focus on Native American culture and history because that’s the one I know the most) many people were born with deformities or any other phenomenon that now-a-days is seen as a disability, but they were just as important as anyone else in the group. Back then it didn’t matter. Yes you were more likely to be killed or die by natural occurrences but not by other people. By eliminating the dangers of nature, people shift their hatred onto other people. This is exactly the reason that in so many stories 2 opposing groups come together to defeat a common enemy. That's where the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Now to be fair the show never really touches on the topic of nature being dangerous, it always seems to just be humans. It only ever sturs away from this in situations like the acid lake that gives off toxic fumes, but the show doesn't really want to focus on that aspect, which is fine, if they want to tell a story about the people then they can, I mean that's what I’m writing about now.

Senku wants to bring back everyone because he knows that that is the fastest way to create all the technology. If you remember from before I touched briefly on how the world was going to shit was in part due to overpopulation. I think you know where I’m going with this. Even with the earth reset and nature covering all, that is still not going to be enough food for all of them. It has already been proven that there is no way to sustain this large of a human population. The reason we are not all dying of starvation right now is because most of the food produced can barley be considered food at all, the other food is genetically altered, and it all goes to only one group of people. You see, when I asked “why are we not starving to death” I was technically lying, we are. Not counting the small percentage of the population that can afford all the food, we are starving to death, and it is by our own hands. The world we live in today is not a utopia. Yes we have science that can save lives but those are made by the countless deaths of rats, monkeys, and so many other animals we use as “lab rats”.

I’m not saying all this to make you feel bad, I’m bringing it up to try and explain why what Senku is doing terrifies me. I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to wake up to a fresh new start on life only to find out someone wants to rebuild it all again. He is not learning from history, he is repeating it. That is why Senku’s idea of what he wants the world to be is great on paper but crumbles apart when put into practice.

I have also heard that the reason Senku wants to bring back the modern age is because he just wants to go to space, making it a selfish act on his part. I thought this was incredibly interesting and relatable and really made me look at his character differently. This would be another way of thinking about the petrifying if humanity, some would see it as this horrible event that ruined their lives and again, this makes sense. All Senku ever wanted to do was go to space. That’s why he learned science in the first place. He spent his entire life working towards that goal and right when he could have had it, it disappeared. I don't blame him for wanting everything to go back to where it was and now I really want to see if this is addressed or challenged in the story. I want to see Senku come to terms with this and finally get closure, not only on the situation but also his dad. Basically I just want him to cry god dammit! Let him cry! Let him be healthy and accept his emotions!

Speaking of emotions, it’s well known that he hides his and if you have been screaming at me about that fact, I know. I understand that until this point I may have been portraying Senku as this selfish greedy and mean person who doesn't care about humanity at all and I’m sorry if it did. That description does not fit him at all. It’s subtle but when you see it you can’t unsee it. As mentioned before he was born very weak and so couldn’t really protect himself from others, this is by no means a disability but close enough to where he can understand the pain and struggles that people who are disabled face. When he made glasses for the 2 villagers he stated that science levels the playing field. That little interaction reveals that he does care about helping other people and hoping to fix their problems with science. He also further elaborated on his idea with Magma when they were mining. He stated that everyone has a job to do and neither job is better than the other. This shows his understanding of everyone's roles and how, as a species, to thrive we must all work together. This further drills home the point to me that it’s not that Senku is stupid or that he doesn’t care about humanity but that his still a little kid who never really had to go through or see the awful and corrupt side of the world. I hate using this word because I feel like it’s used too much but by all intents and purposes, Senku is privileged. He only seems to know the science of today as this life saving, world altering and fundamentally good concept, not the steps in which it took to get there, how many lives and dead ecosystems it took to get where we are today, and what we are still doing. Don’t forget about the whole global warming thing, mass deforestation, and pollution.

I am going to give 2 examples of how science can be cruel and how it doesn't need to be. I’m going to get into deep stuff here so it’s ok if you skip it. I’m talking about slavery and the experimentation of animals. Do you remember when the U.S.A was tearing down statues? One of them (I don’t know if it was torn down. I just know that it’s in front of a university and people wanted it gone) was a statue of a man who progressed the field of medicine and healthcare immensely, but did so at the expense of specifically black women. He believed that they were incapable of feeling pain and so performed many horrific surgeries and tests on them with no pain killer. Yes he greatly furthered the field of healthcare, but that doesn't make it right and especially not humane. He should not and did not need to do that. We would figure it out on our own. Sure it would probably take a lot more time but that doesn't justify the actions of that man. The other example is an ongoing process that is still in practice today, the experimentation of animals. If you don’t know, before a beauty product or medicine of some sort can enter the market it needs to be checked by the government to see if it is safe for us to use. So companies use monkeys and other animals to test their product on. It is horrific. The scientists treat those animals with no respect or care for the lives of them. It is unnecessary and cruel. We would figure it out on our own. Sure, it probably would take longer, but that doesn't make it right. It’s an excuse.

Senku doesn't seem to know this seeing as how he basically learned everything from scratch with experiments. That’s why I’m saying Senku is naïve and not a cruel monster who doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as it satisfies his curiosity and expands the field of science. I do hope that later down the line the story confronts that fact and we see first hand that he is not willing to do whatever it takes to go back to modern civilization as much he wants us to believe. I want to see him come to terms with this and decide that, with everything, there are rules and boundaries. This is also why I keep harping back to how I want to see this explored in the story. Senku clearly wants to help humanity and cares for others. He has morals and so has boundaries. I want to see him pushed to the edge, to see just how far he will go in the name of science and for the bettering of humanity. At the end of the day he is still human, everyone is.

Tukasa’s turn! The issue with Tukasa’s view point is simply because he thinks all young people are good people. This is not true. Old people can be good and bad. Adults can be good and bad. Children can be good and bad. It all depends on the person. This is not even mentioning the fact that children can not raise other children. No matter how wise Tukasa is for his age, he can not raise children (and yes teenagers count as children). There's a reason why in every culture all 3 stages of life serve a purpose and depend on each other, one cannot live without the other. He needs good people, not young people to restart humanity.

At first I saw it unfair and one sided how the story constantly depicted Tukasa as an evil person and that he is a tyrant. This was until it was pointed out to me that the reason for that is because Senku is the main character so the audience sees through his perspective, so if he sees Tukasa as evil, the audience will too. Even with that I understand why people will not like Tukasa and so in extension not listen to his argument. I want to give him a chance because he, and by extension the people like him, deserve it. I understand why people don’t though. He smashes the statues of people because he genuinely believes that all are bad and so takes action to protect others, just like Senku who seemed ready to kill Tukasa with the crossbow he made and the gun he was going to use on him, they both thought what they were doing was right. This does not excuse either of their actions, no one to be clear can use this as an excuse, I still want to bring up a fact that I personally think people forget (including myself). The show is set in a post-apocalyptic world. Yes, characters can unpetrify other characters but some are too far gone. In the background we see statues missing limbs and body parts. I was actually surprised and skeptical when it was shown that there were so many perfectly intaced statues Tukasa was able to find. They must be made out of harder rock than I thought. Either way, I know people can survive without certain body parts and I’m not saying they can't. It's just as far as we know, if they attempt to unpetrify someone missing a body part (especially if it’s a leg) they might bleed out instantly and without all the proper equipment needed. Or will the stone heal the stump? If so what if they find the missing part later? Can they reattach it? Can they attach body parts from other people and unpetrify them? What would happen? Would the stone merge the parts together or reject it? The stone is explicitly stated to have healing properties so what would happen? It’s still too early to know and with knowing that information comes from human experimentation and could lead to many lives lost. It was ok with the birds because they were small and still intaced so there was no danger. The point that I’m getting to is that the line is incredibly blurred and the drastic life-and-death situation everyone is in, I wouldn't jump to say Tukasa is a monster. He may be killing people or they could have been dead in the first place, not to mention like I said before it would be impractical and deadly to revive every human being on planet Earth.

This is why I think Tukasa’s plan is flawed. He is only one person and so is limited in his ideas. He thinks that only the young are good people and if only the characters would actually TALK to each other then both of them could see the flaws and work together instead of jumping to conclusions. I hope now that Senku and Tukasa are friends of sorts that they finally get to do that but again, I don’t know I have not read the manga.

I have also heard (mainly from video essays on YouTube) that, uncoincidentally, people think that Tukasa’s ideals are naïve when I think Senku’s is. I find it amazing that both of us thought the same thing but of the opposite philosophy. The opinions they expressed made me realize something. Because humanity discovered science, it will do so again and again. While I thought it was naïve to simply return to the way things were and not carry any of the emotional baggage needed to at least try and better humanity and learn from the past, someone else thought that it was futile to hinder the scientific process of humanity and go back to hunter-and-gatherers. I did disagree with some things they said, that is to be expected, but I also realized that that is what we have been doing since as far back as the history books go. It was called different names but the idea is still the same. We try to make sense of the world around us. In cultures across the world gods represented the natural world and phenomenon that occurred, it was just by a different name. Those religions and science try to explain the world around them. Why does corn grow? Quetzalcoatl makes them grow. Chlorophyll provides the nutrients necessary to sustain the plant and make it grow by Photosynthesis. Why does it snow? Frau Hole shakes her sheets and some feathers fall out, causing snow. With the evaporation of water leaves the gaseous form in the sky and if it gets cold enough will freeze and fall. It’s all the same thing. Humans are curious by nature and will always be.

The things that I disagreed with was that they didn’t really seem to think that science can coexist with nature, like it’s either one or the other. They explain that Tukasa believes humanity should be more naturalistic but also calls him stupid. I understand his side in thinking there is no way to revert back to being hunter-gatherers and that no matter what, over time people will rediscover science so the effort is futile. What I don’t seem to understand is why we can’t have both? It might seem naïve at first considering everyone only knows a society of science that destroys the world for progress but with a world altering event like the one in the story and a good leader to boot, it is absolutely possible. The world has already changed so much so I don’t see why people wouldn't (not talking about those greedy people and politicians, I’m talking about the average human being). It just seems so cynical of humanity as a whole to give up before even trying. I understand we are all depressed but still. It’s no excuse not to try.

My ideas for what they can do is to live both with nature and science. First set up rules and laws. Everyone can pitch in to create them and vote on which ones should be reinforced so that not one person has too much power and so the people collectively can understand the importance of those laws. Everyone can choose their job to do like black smithing, building, hunting, sewing and other jobs that are needed. With that they can either choose to have a form of currency or not but under no circumstances is anyone allowed to own land. The land is for everyone and the resources are to be shared accordingly. With the issue of the statues, it could be voted on who can be unpetrified. This way we don’t raise the issue with Tukasa and Senku. One thought too narrow minded and the other was too broad. With the voting system everyone gets to assess the needs of the society as a whole and if the person unpetrified turns out to be bad, the blame would not fall on one person but everyone. This eliminates one person having too much power and subsequently the people would not revolt and kick them out of power, putting another in their place and the cycle starts anew. There can still be science, there will just be restrictions on what is acceptable to do or not.

I understand the flaws in my ideas. I know that making everyone agree to certain things is incredibly hard especially when there's no way anyone can really stop people from doing what they want. There is no government already put in place. They need to build one from scratch and make it so that everyone is down with it and will follow it. I also understand that people can be lazy and not know what they want. Some people will choose to be lazy and either not do their job or choose a job that is specifically lazy in nature. People also probably don’t know what job they want to perform, this is especially prevalent in the young. People could also fight over who will be revived. I know many people, including myself, who have people in their life that they love but are not good people or who will probably not survive in the new world. I mean who’s going to tell Becky that we all know she loves her grandfather but he’s racist, a known sex offender, and already has a diet of 20 hamburgers and 50 Gatorades, there is no way we can provide that much food, we don’t even know if he’ll eat it considering he’s use to junk food and we just reinvented bread a week ago. It tastes awful and the bakers are trying their best but no one can make 50 Gatorades . No one sure as hell wants a sex offender or racist around either.

If you want to use my essay in a video or something you are welcome to as long as you credit me. If you want to respond or just talk about this topic feel free to, this is a discussion, not an argument.

#Dr. Stone #drst #dr stone #drs #essay #philosophy #tukasa #senku #senku ishigami

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scientificphilosopher · 5 years ago

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I’m still learning how to be an effective ally in the pursuit of social justice. Part of this, for me, comes through figuring out how to best support other allies, how to effectively engage with them, even when they’re not as well-versed in the issues as I’ve become through many years of education. I often ask myself this: How can I balance meeting people where they’re at while also holding people responsible for their ignorant and harmful actions and beliefs? Is there a place for compassion and patience toward well-meaning allies, even when they unintentionally harm others?

What I want to focus on for this blog post is the phenomenon of what I’m calling “anxious allyship” — what it is, how it manifests in certain spaces, and what I do to prevent myself from both being an anxious ally and driving others into anxious ally behaviors via things like gatekeeping.

Anxious allyship, in short, is the tendency for well-intentioned allies to shut down and fail to meaningfully engage with social justice work — be it online or in person — out of fear of saying something wrong or appearing ignorant or racist. Now, it’s important to keep in mind that there are MANY reasons why an ally might fail to show up. There are various elements at play that lead to white people’s fear of appearing ignorant or racist in the first place. For the sake of this blog, I want to focus on how this crops up in online spaces full of predominantly white, left-leaning allies and the tendency for these spaces to partake in gatekeeping (though much of what I’m talking about can extend beyond just conversations with allies — that is simply what I’m focusing on for now). By gatekeeping, I mean for members of these spaces to be overly hostile toward people who are presumably not as knowledgeable in the topic or who say problematic things. In some cases, this type of gatekeeping results in driving people out of the spaces or even harassing them. This type of gatekeeping can be seen as self-righteous bullying, both deliberate and unintentional. At its core, it’s shaming people for not knowing what you know and using that to drive people out of an online space. Again, this can be done with the best intentions. Sometimes gatekeeping occurs out of righteous indignation, to really show that problematic fool how wrong and ignorant their views truly are. More often than not, though, it’s done for the sake of showing off; it’s done to signal to others just how knowledgable and committed of an ally you truly are. To be clear, I am not speaking about justified criticism or the moderation of certain spaces in the service of keeping discussions civil. There are often good reasons to call people out; there are good reasons to react with anger or exasperation; there are good reasons to ban people from certain online forums or refuse to take the time and effort to have a fruitful discussion with them. Just because an ally has good intentions doesn’t mean they are immune to criticism. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as William James said. No, what I’m talking about is white folks lording their knowledge over fledgling allies for reasons like sanctimony and virtue signaling.

Just to be clear as possible, I want to emphasize what I am not saying throughout this post. I am not saying that there is no room for anger (there is). I am not saying that I shouldn’t call people out — allies or otherwise — for their harmful ignorance (I should). I am not saying that patience and effectiveness should always be the primary focus when engaging with allies. I am not saying that there is a singular way of doing any of this. The last thing I am interested in is tone policing. I am, instead, advocating for a pluralistic approach, and that means leaving space for people to be angry, enraged, unresponsive, disengaged, or any other manner of reaction. It is not my place to say that one should not react in anger or ridicule to a well-intentioned but harmful comment simply because it might not be the most effective way to engage with that person, to get them to understand or change their mind. Express your anger if you're angry. Be angry. There is a whole helluva lot to be angry about.

Instead, I am arguing that overprivileged people such as myself should, perhaps, harbor some sense of responsibility in thinking about how to respond in ways that are more inviting to allies based on where they’re at in their educational journey, especially since it has increased potential for maximizing effectiveness and minimizing anxious ally behaviors. I am coming at these issues from a very different place than a lot of marginalized folks. It does not require as much emotional labor for me — an overprivileged white male — to discuss race with people as it might for many people of color. As Audre Lorde — a queer black woman — put it, “Frequently, when speaking with men and white women, I am reminded of how difficult and time-consuming it is to have to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message.” White men should, I think, be more willing to sometimes take on the time and effort to reinvent that pencil, especially since other white men are more willing to see us as “objective” and authoritative merely by merit of our maleness and whiteness. In a clear case of cosmic irony, white men will listen to other white men, even in regard to realities like racism, about which we tend to be utterly inexperienced and grievously ignorant. And to further the injustice of that irony, those very white men are the ones who are more likely to harbor power and social capital, thus the ones who can leverage our platforms in ways to most swiftly bring about systemic change. That is why I think those of us in privileged positions have a moral responsibility to learn to engage effectively on these issues.

Still, I’ve certainly found myself attacking people on social media, sometimes looking for that mic drop moment, and in hindsight, I realize I was doing it simply out of self-righteousness or to look smart to my virtual onlookers. If I had taken time to step back and evaluate what was motivating me to say what I was saying, I would’ve recognized that unproductive performative allyship showing its face. I don’t want to lend my energies to creating spaces that are needlessly hostile to people, including other allies. Spaces that are highly judgmental of their participants will engender performative behaviors precisely because people become anxious that they will mess up and get shamed for it. Not a feedback loop I want to amplify.

So, what can I do? Well, I don’t know, exactly. Probably a lot of things. One thing I try to do when interacting with other people who might be in the early stages of exploring their privilege or learning about race, gender, oppression, etc., is that I remind myself of my own journey. As an exercise in perspective and compassion, I reflect on the fact that education is largely a privilege. I have been absurdly lucky to learn the things I’ve learned, to have the resources and support in my life, the patient and empathic teachers. I remind myself of all these privileges, privileges that are not present for many people. Next, I meditate on the many ignorant, problematic beliefs and behaviors of my younger self. I was still me, just a version of me who was oblivious to the fact that a world existed outside the scope of my perspective. I harbored deeply racist, sexist, homophobic, and self-serving beliefs — because I was raised in a deeply racist, sexist, homophobic, self-serving culture. We all are. And I still grapple with these things today, and I imagine I always will. Of course, it is emblematic of privilege that some of us learn about oppression in more academic, impersonal ways, rather than having to confront its realities on a day to day basis. For overprivileged folks such as myself (and, really everyone to some extent), learning about the experiences of marginalized identities is an ongoing journey. None of us comes fully equipped. I remind myself of these things in order to temper my criticism with kindness and compassion. It is an exercise in humility and empathy.

I’ve also alluded to “effectiveness” throughout this post. How can I most effectively engage with other allies? Exercises in compassion and humility are good for me for a variety of reasons. They are humanizing. They are perspective-giving. They are, also, practical. I care deeply about social justice and I want to do what I can to keep privileged eyes and hearts on progressive change. One strategy that I find particularly effective is to meet people where they’re at, ask questions, and engage with them as if they were sitting in the room next to me. I try to remember that this computer screen acts as a veil of anonymity, which gives me a felt sense of licensing in treating people more coldly or harshly than I otherwise would.

So, in discussions with fellow allies, I try to exercise compassion and humility, while still keeping an eye on effectiveness. But this post isn’t solely about what I personally do to prevent others from becoming anxious allies. It’s also about how I try to recognize and combat the anxious ally in myself. Personally, I try to steel myself against some of these more toxic tendencies by practicing these things:

Being Okay With Mistakes. In fact, I have to work to get to a place where I embrace my mistakes. I have to be ok with being dumb and ignorant much of the time. I have to embrace the fact that I will mess up plenty. I have a wrinkly monkey brain and I know somewhere in the vicinity of none percent about the world. I am human, I am fallible, I am ignorant, and my understanding of reality is inherently limited by insulating and unequal social systems. One of the most insidious symptoms of privilege is how its benefits tend to be concealed from those who reap them. White people don’t need to think about racism; men don’t need to think about sexism; able-bodied people don’t need to think about accessibility, etc. This is all expected and understandable; it’s how we respond when our privilege is challenged that matters.

Staying Open and Receptive to Criticism. Ok, so making mistakes is inevitable. What do I do once I realize I’ve made one? How am I responding? An unfortunate reality for marginalized identities is that they too often have to undertake the emotional labor of teaching privileged identities all about these issues. This is not fair. It shouldn’t be this way. This makes it all the more meaningful when I get called out for saying something offensive, ignorant, racist, sexist, or bigoted. My initial response might be embarrassment or shame, and I might take refuge in my intentions: “That’s not how I meant it!” But this is defensiveness. This is symptomatic of what Robin DiAngelo calls “white fragility.” More to the point, it’s a bad interpersonal habit. As Cori Wong points out in her TEDtalk on feminist friendship, you would not react with hostility if a friend lets you know you had a big ol’ booger hanging out your nose in public. You might be embarrassed at first, but you’d ultimately thank your friend for speaking up so that you could take care of it (by wiping it inside your shirt like every warm-blooded American would). The same goes for people pointing out my mistakes in regards to social justice. My ultimate response, regardless of my intentions or initial emotional reactions, should be to listen and to give thanks. I have, after all, been presented with an opportunity to learn more.

Engaging With the Literature. Okay, so I’m willing to make mistakes and I’m willing to listen when people say I’ve messed up (at least some of the time). Is that enough? No. There’s still plenty left to do — and I cannot simply count on the emotional labor of oppressed peoples to figure out what to do next. Thankfully, I have incredible resources at my fingertips. I have YouTube channels, I have article after article after article, Instagram feeds, Facebook pages, books, books, books. There’s so much to learn and it can feel overwhelming to get started, but it’s never too late. There’s no better time than now. (I will also be making a blog post that provides a more extensive list of resources.)

What we have now, as mentioned by activist Maya Rupert, is a climate where the only people who are readily talking about race are those who know the least (vis-��-vis Dunning-Kruger effect) and those who engage with it regularly or professionally. The center has collapsed, with too many well-meaning white people sitting in anxious silence, thus reinforcing the very status quo they’re concerned with challenging. This is not an atmosphere conducive to collaboration, democratic and egalitarian participation, and effective mobilization. As an ally, I hope to do what little I can to correct this. I want to encourage other allies to take the leap of getting engaged. Advocating for spaces that are less hostile to newcomers is only a tiny piece of the puzzle, of course. But I think it’s a good step toward combating white fragility, white inaction, and anxious allyship — though white folks must recognize that it is our ultimate responsibility to undertake this.

In short, I want to be mindful of my impact, whether I’m criticizing people for virtue signaling and engaging in counterproductive ways, or I’m the person being accused of that very thing. I strive to foster allyship environments that are more welcoming and more willing to meet people where they’re at, while also fostering a willingness on my end to make mistakes while remaining open to feedback and staying committed to learning and changing. That’s just me though. In the end, a pluralistic approach to effective social engagement is likely what’s needed. It’s not realistic or productive to prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach to such dynamic and prismatic realities. On top of that, it’s clear that what I’ve talked about so far is just the beginning. A single angry Facebook post does not an activist make. Activism is more than simply learning about a topic; it’s getting involved in ways that lead to direct social and political shifts. It’s taking concrete steps. This requires more than reading a book or posting a hashtag (though these are not necessarily meaningless steps either). Remember: this is just the beginning.

Are you an ally of these movements? Are you nervous about engaging with folks, looking stupid or making mistakes? All understandable. The key? Make mistakes! Look stupid! Wade into the muck of it. Get messy. But just be sure to LISTEN and LEARN while doing so. Put down those defenses. Own your ignorance. Don’t center discussions on your own emotional well-being, but don’t render yourself paralyzed to the point of doing nothing either. Engage. Speak up, speak out. Explore ways to be an effective activist. Understand that social justice work is ongoing. You do not arrive into a state of enlightenment. You have to keep fucking up and keep learning. The reward? A better planet. Keep up the momentum, you messy, ignorant ally, you.

#long post #blog #the scientific philosopher #antiracism #anticapitalism #social justice #nich

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gillzilla · 5 years ago

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A Treatise on the aTROSity, Including How Hope Came to Me in the Form of The Lego Movie 2, Knives Out, and Little Women

I will start out by saying that I have never made a real, detailed post on Tumblr, mainly because social media kind of scares me. But the Reylo community's amazing kindness, strength, openness, and willingness to speak the truth in their writing over the last week and a half is honestly what has gotten me through the heartbreak and depression caused by the stabbing in the chest that was this movie. I am one of the people who loves Kylo/Ben Solo because I have mental health conditions and an abuse/trauma history within my family, which is also why the holidays are hard for me, so a big thanks to the people in charge of the story for TROS for making it even harder this year. After a week and a half of legitimate mourning for the butchering of the themes of Star Wars and of all the characters, but particularly the sequel trilogy characters, I am ready to add my two cents to all that has already been written about this movie.

First off, I have not been a Star Wars fan for my whole life. My parents tried to introduce me to the original trilogy as a kid by taking me to see A New Hope in the movie theater for the 20th anniversary screening in 1997. I fell asleep for most of it and was terrified by the trash compactor scene, so you could say the movie did not resonate with me. It actually wasn't until Phantom Menace came out that I started to get attached to Star Wars. So many older fans love to shit on that movie, and it certainly has many flaws, but a lot of us who were around the same age as Anakin when that movie came out and are now adults have started to speak up about how the movie was a gateway into Star Wars for us. Anakin gave me a window into the Star Wars universe that I could understand and relate to. I could relate to Anakin being a kind-hearted kid who wanted to help others and just wanted adults he could look up to, and I liked the podracing scenes. As with every single other sci-fi/fantasy hero's journey story that I loved as a kid, I empathized with and related to a male hero. Now, the wooden dialogue/acting/directing of Attack of the Clones and the tragic ending of Revenge of the Sith that left me so emotionally devastated that I vividly remember calling my friend to tell her I was so depressed I couldn't focus on studying for my eighth grade English final, kind of took me out of Star Wars again. There had been a spark there, but at that point I figured, eh, I guess it's not really for me after all.

I didn't rediscover Star Wars until the end of the first semester of my freshman year of college. This was a very difficult time in my life, as I was in what I would now consider to be a mental health crisis that unfortunately lasted for five years because I was too ashamed and uneducated about mental health to seek out help. I was very, very lonely during that time. It was close to finals week and I was sick, so as I sat in my dorm room I decided, why not pop in those DVDs of the original trilogy that I got at Costco last month. After watching them, I remember thinking, "Why have I not been watching these my whole life???" The original trilogy hooked me after that point and I started watching the movies every year around Christmas in commemoration of my rediscovery of them.

I was just as surprised as anyone when I found out that Disney bought Lucasfilm and that they were going to make a sequel trilogy. I had thought there would never be any more Star Wars, so I was overjoyed, though tentative, because I knew that though I loved Star Wars, it also had a tendency to make missteps that were somewhat endemic to sci-fi/fantasy hero's journey stories, such as poorly written dialogue, emphasis on ridiculous plot points that took away from the deeper overall themes, lack of diverse characters, and objectification/misogyny against female characters (I do not like watching Return of the Jedi because I hate, HATE the Jabba's palace stuff for what they did to Leia, honestly they gave Leia nothing interesting to do in that whole movie basically, but that's a whole nother essay).

So I went into The Force Awakens not really knowing what to expect. But oh my god, was I blown away. I am not lying when I say that I cried for at least an hour after the scene where Rey and Kylo are both reaching out for the legacy saber and it goes to Rey as the music swells, oh my god. I FINALLY realized what it meant to feel seen in the stories that I loved. My whole life I had been attached to and empathizing with male heroes, because they were pretty much the only heroes out there. To see Rey as this amazing female heroine who was not objectified and was a compelling character with an intriguing backstory that I related to as a child with a trauma history who often grew up feeling lonely, and to see that she was going to be the main Jedi in this new trilogy, I was overjoyed. It gave me hope. And then, on top of that, we got Adam Driver. Need I say any more. So many people have written about what an absolutely incredible actor Adam is, and I swear he is the only actor who could have pulled off the role of Kylo/Ben. The first time I saw TFA I didn't catch all the nuances of the character and his dynamic with Rey, but something about him really intrigued me (and made me want to watch everything Adam had ever been in). My love for TFA led me to start investing time in the online Star Wars fandom, which I never considered myself to be a part of previously, as the fandom had always reeked of being a "no girls allowed" type of zone. I found out about amazing, female-led podcasts that I started listening to every week and whose hosts I value just as much as my friends. I also started following the Reylo fandom on Tumblr. Learning more about the mythology behind the sequel trilogy, including how the creators were writing Rey's story as a heroine's journey and her and Kylo/Ben as dual protagonists, added so much to my understanding of what was going on in the storytelling and gave me the words to describe why I was connecting with these stories so much. I can honestly say that Star Wars and the Reylo fandom generally have been instrumental in helping me to get through the last four years, which have been a very difficult and isolating period in my life.

And now I'm up to TROS. As so many have said, the vast majority of it is a steaming pile of trash. People have done such an amazing job of breaking down why this story and how it treated its characters and retconned the beautiful story and themes that Rian gave us in TLJ was so painful for us. Many have pointed out that this movie is a result of catering to the most toxic portion of the Star Wars fandom, the "dudebros." Going further, I want to state that, whether consciously or not on the part of the cis, straight, white, male writers/director/CEO of Disney, this movie is a reassertion of masculinist ideologies. I want to clarify that when I talk about "masculinist" vs. feminist ideologies, I am talking about how our society and culture defines "masculine" vs. "feminine" ideas, traits, etc. Gender has nothing to with biological determinism and is socially and culturally constructed. Masculinist ideologies include beliefs such as extreme individualism, competition, "us vs. them" dichotomies, and power and value being defined based on hierarchy, which necessitates the use of violence to perpetuate the hierarchy. Feminist ideologies include valuing community and collaboration, connection and empathy, the idea that every person has inherent worth regardless of their productivity, actions, mistakes, class, race, sexuality, etc., respect for all people, and an abolishing of hierarchies. Masculinist ideologies are those of the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy, which, as we can see playing out in various ways all over the world, has been rearing its head in a very obvious and ugly fashion the past few years (though of course it has been around for wayyyyy longer than that).

Anyone who has been reading the fantastic analyses of TROS by those in the Reylo community can likely see how TLJ and even the story as it was set up in TFA were communicating feminist ideologies. One big example of this is Kylo Ren/Ben himself as a character. As so many have eloquently described, this is a complex character that commits atrocities, but is shown to be a victim of immense abuse and trauma that was failed by everyone in his family when he needed them most. This is a character that, had he been able to have the full and well-written redemption arc that he deserved, would have had an extremely moving story of how toxic masculinity and masculinist ideology is destroying boys and men by keeping them from being full people who can express all of their emotions, be vulnerable, and be open to love and connection. Reylo resonates so much with me not because it is about Rey supposedly doing all the work to change Kylo in some sort of toxic, co-dependent way, but because Rey and Kylo/Ben were always equals to each other. They both pushed each other to be better, more whole people. The wonderful work that folks have put into analyzing the mythology behind the feminine and masculine symbolism in TFA and TLJ (again, to clarify, "masculine" and "feminine" being culturally defined terms), and even the more obvious original goal of the sequel trilogy for the force to finally be balanced by Rey and Ben themselves becoming balanced between dark and light all relate to these gender issues. Balancing the dark and light sides of the force is also about balancing the "masculine" and "feminine" aspects within themselves.

This is a beautiful message that has so many real world implications. In our world, for lack of a better term, everything "feminine" is basically shat on. Patriarchy hates anything "feminine." This is how sexism plays out, but it also has to do with the ideologies that we believe in, down to our basic understandings of empathy and whether or not people have inherent value. The world would certainly be a better place if the "masculine" and "feminine" were better balanced, specifically if "feminine," and feminist, ideologies were more valued. This is what makes TROS feel like a stab directly in the heart. This was a trilogy that clearly did have feminist messages, regardless of DLF's bullshitting about Star Wars being "for everyone." Star Wars has always been progressive, the original trilogy is about rebels taking on fascists for god's sake. DLF's pandering to the most toxic part of the fandom for TROS is therefore representative of a much larger cultural, social, and political battle that is going on around the world right now. We are at a turning point for humanity in which we are starting to face the devastation that has occurred due to masculinist ideologies being the most highly regarded and utilized by those in power, but those in power are also trying to maintain their power by strongly reasserting those ideologies. So I would argue that this is not just about one movie that I and many other people didn't like. This movie is a small representation of a much larger battle that we're fighting.

Now, that reassertion of masculinist ideology that was the stabbing in the heart of watching TROS has made me super, duper depressed for the past week or so because, as others have pointed out, it communicated to me that no matter how hard we fight, the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy will reassert itself and win in the end. It even re-triggered the pain I've felt over the past few years since our current president came into office in the U.S. However, as I near the end of this long treatise I would like to share the stories that gave me hope over these past few days. I re-watched The Lego Movie 2 the other day, and that story gave me hope. The "bad guy" in that story is a literal embodiment of toxic masculinity/masculinist ideology, and it ends with the male hero realizing that he doesn't need to sacrifice his humanity and connections to other people to be a hero, or even just to be a man. How to Train Your Dragon 3 also told a story about a male hero/leader that rejects masculinist ideology. Additionally, I was given hope by Rian's amazing movie, Knives Out, which I went to see solely because people on Tumblr recommended it (thank you folks!). Rian had a clear theme and vision for this story that was about exposing and dissecting what I would call "toxic whiteness," and what it does to a family and those around them. And lastly, I saw Greta Gerwig's incredible adaptation of Little Women today, and that gave me hope because one of its main themes is about the struggle that (cis, heterosexual) women have in asserting themselves as full humans with talents, dreams and goals for their lives outside of being in romantic relationships, but also wanting to have romantic relationships at the same time. As has been said by so many, "STRONG" WOMEN CAN FALL IN LOVE AND HAVE ROMANTIC/SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS. Feminism is about giving all people the chance to be fully human, and for heterosexual women that includes being able to have a relationship with a man and still be valued and respected for everything that we are outside of that relationship. The above mentioned stories, and others (She-Ra, Dragon Prince, AtLA & Legend of Korra, I'm sure there are others) give me hope that there are creators out there that are communicating feminist themes, even in big-budget movies that lots of people go to see. We need more of this. Tied to this is that THE HEROINE'S JOURNEY OF THE SEQUEL TRILOGY SHOULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN/DIRECTED BY A WOMAN/WOMEN. Folks, we need the opportunities to tell our own stories. All of the diverse folks out there, if you are a creator, please keep on creating! We need you out there and we value all of the beautiful, integral work that you do!

So in sum, I'm not going to let what happened with TROS ruin my love of Star Wars or of the sequel trilogy. The story belongs to the fans now, and there are so many of us out there to care for it. You better be sure that I will never stop speaking up about how wronged we were by TROS, that is the hill I will die on. But I am not giving up hope and I hope that you will also join me in not giving up hope. As Poe stated so well in TLJ (with one minor adjustment), "We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn the [patriarchy] down." End of treatise.

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garden-of-succulents · 7 years ago

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Ask I got: So with your post on your writing and Kent its like yeah I usually love a lot of your stuff but whenever Ngozi's line about "Kent getting all he wanted and not getting to grow and Jack getting all he feared and growing" I'm just kind of shocked you agree with that cause I mean you know Kent didn't want Jack to OD and I bet losing Jack in anyway was one of Kent's biggest fears.

plus like here the idea of growth ends up being tied to being out or closeted. Jack's maturity and self acceptance ends up being reflected through how open he is, the high point of his arc and growth as a player ended with him coming out to the world. Which unfortunately bounces back and frames Kent as immature and ties that immaturity to being closeted. [SOME BITS TRIMMED FOR LENGTH] And then make him an antagonist and frame all of his interactions with Jack/Bitty and all of his victories as negative just kind of burn my tongue

even more so when fans intentionally or not run with all that framing and end up connecting all of Kent's issues with his choice to be closeted for his career condemn his choice and point to it as evidence of immaturity or lack of self love or warped priorities, when that choice isn't just the norm but literally the only one any NHL player has ever made at this point and a choice millions of us make each and every day for our own safety, success, and happiness.

My reply: People criticizing the link between immaturity and closetedness are really on point, I think. When I was supporting N's comments about "Kent got everything he wanted, and didn't grow, while Jack got what he didn't want, and grew", I didn't know the full content of 3.26, especially the fact that Jack was going to come out on television and that Kent's teammates were going to be pretty LGBT-hostile.

I mean, I do think that Kent is immature, especially in the sense that his social and emotional development is stunted, and that his immaturity is the result of his decision to go into the NHL and be a professional player from age 18, while Jack's relative maturity is the result of his time in rehab and at Samwell. However, I don't think Kent is uniquely immature in the NHL, and his immaturity isn't linked to him being queer—I think, rather, that immaturity is a result of the incredibly toxic masculinity an NHL career demands, and the effects of that toxic masculinity. Jack's unique because his talent, family history, and financial privilege have given him the advantage of being able to fight that toxic masculinity in the way few professional hockey players have been able to.

So, I'm from Alberta. Small town with a hockey rink and not much else. Major oil-producing sector. Grew up around hockey players. I did part of my practicum as a mental health therapist at a university counselling centre in Vancouver where they had a really strong athletics program, and I had hockey players on my caseload. And the hardest thing for me to communicate to people from elsewhere about hockey culture is how relentlessly, insistently hypermasculine it is. Everything you've heard about a "man box", everything from The Mask You Live In or Men's Work or I Don't Want to Talk About It. That's what gets pushed by coaches, by commentators, by everybody—toxic masculinity is how you play. Dominate, suppress your emotions, overcome pain, win at all costs.

I am honestly saying that the entire feeder system for men's professional hockey is fucked up on a very fundamental level. From elementary school-aged kids getting up at 4am for practice and doing hockey every day and having no social lives outside of hockey, to teenagers leaving home before they're developmentally ready to be away from their families, having substance abuse issues at a grossly disprortionate rate to their peers, shortchanging their educations, and earning very little money. The system produces top players by getting them to focus on hockey at the expense of everything else, which includes their social and emotional development.

I'm talking about basic shit like "realizing when you are feeling an emotion and being able to identify what emotion it is". The inability to do this is called alexithymia, and it often comes from growing up in an invalidating environment where your emotions are never recognized, acknowledged, or accommodated. I'm talking about stuff like "not being able to tell someone about your basic wants and needs"—something that is really hard when the least expression of emotion is seen as "weak" or "gay".

So when I say that Kent "hasn't grown" or is "immature", I mean that things went so bad at the Epikegster because these are skills he hasn't developed. When he spits out, "I miss you," it comes out like it's the absolute limit of what he's capable of saying. His entire sales pitch to Jack has been in terms of money, power, and dominance—You'll be on a great team; you'll earn lots of money; you'll be better than before. It's not until he's at the end of his rope that he admits to wanting Jack back because he misses him. And therefore he doesn't see why he's failing at persuasion; he doesn't realize that Jack has an emotional attachment to the Samwell players, that his priorities for joining a team aren't just about prestige and money.

Because here's the thing about toxic masculinity: there are the things Kent really feels and wants, and the things he is allowed to admit he feels and wants according to toxic masculinity.

Acceptable masculine interests according to toxic masculinity:

Money

Power

Violence

Dominance

Competition

Prestige

Sex

Unacceptable masculine interests according to this system:

Emotional intimacy

Intellectual curiosity

Artistic expression

Play

Authenticity

Personal fulfillment

Safety

According to the system, Kent was only allowed to want to be rich, famous, and successful. Those were the only things he could admit to without being lambasted in international press outlets, because hockey media is sooooo fucked up.

Jack's OD emotionally devastated Kent Parson—and he would have been pilloried for letting it show. In that moment, he wasn't expected to feel anything except humble, grateful, and happy. So that's how he acted. Being closeted is such a secondary concern here.

So in some ways "immature" is the wrong word because Kent is an incredibly mature public figure, polished and good at keeping his mouth shut; he's mastered the art of being what he's expected to be, at being what will let him succeed at his chosen profession. It's kind of like how PTSD is a disease, a dysfunctional set of behaviours, in a peaceful, prosperous society, but it's what keeps you alive in a warzone. It's why I don't counsel hockey bros as a chosen profession: I don't respect their athletic and professional achievements enough to work with them every day. I don't think it's worth winning a trophy if you were never home and ruined your marriage and failed to look after your children, and I'm not good at honouring a belief system that says it is worth it.

But I would define "maturity" as the ability to understand your own needs and fulfill them; to live your own reality and express it in a way that satisfies you.

The ways Jack "grew" were when he admitted that something was wrong and accepted convalescence and treatment instead of skating through the pain. When he got to know himself as an intellectual and artistic person as well as an athletic one. When he made space in his life for empathy and play. Because when you see NHL players being criticized on a personal level, what's it for? For having "big personalities", for being "unprofessional" and "unserious", for being "girly". For celebrating too much, dancing too freely, being political, intellectual, for questioning power hierarchies, and for putting their personal welfare ahead of their teams' success.

(Hockey players' compliance to power hierarchies is valued above all things, but that's a different rant)

Jack's moment of maturity wasn't kissing Bitty on the Stanley Cup ice; it was a year earlier, in his own room, when he understood how he felt and acted on it, and communicated it to Bitty, thereby achieving an emotional intimacy that was more important to him than hockey. In that same room, Kent struggled so badly to understand what he wanted and why, and to express it to somebody else, that he backfired in his intended aim, injured his friendship with Jack more deeply than ever, and hurt the person he wanted to express love for.

So the dichotomy of closeted/out is super new in the comic, and super new to analyses of Kent. A lot of what we've been talking about, and the theories we've evolved, have really not been based on 3.26.

And yes, like you, I'm really leery of letting that be a consistent part of the analysis. We don't know why Kent isn't out yet (my personal theory is that it was strategic) and I'm way more willing to say he's immature because of the way that interaction with Jack went to shit, than to say he's immature because he's doing the smart thing and surviving in a homophobic-as-fuck industry.

And, as always, a lot of my fic about Kent is about him developing those things his industry wants to punish him for having--why I write about him escaping to music festivals with queer pagan poets, respecting and supporting female athletes, caring for helpless animals, developing strong aesthetic tastes and artistic hobbies, finding spirituality, fighting back against his hierarchies, admitting his problems, or quitting to raise a baby. Because I want him to develop too. But I think the draft sent him to the desert in more ways than one, and it’s a struggle for him to thrive.

#stuff i wrote #kent parson #omgcp #coming out discourse

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eannahk-blog · 7 years ago

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LOVE ME A LITTLE LOUDER TODAY

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?’_Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

That is probably the most profound line I have ever read. J.K Rowling is magical in every sense. I might be one to read too much into books and stories ( like Moana being my spirit animal) but I’m sure those words from Dumbledore resonate with most of us. The Moana part is a story for another day.

Now, we’ve heard the statistics over and over again; an estimated 1 in 4 people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their live according to WHO. We know the statistics, but what do they really mean? If you come from a family of four or you have four siblings, if you consider your 8 closest friends, if you’re in a class of 400, if you’re in contact with 20 lecturers a week; a whooping 25% will be affected by mental illness. That means you are either under the 75% or the 25%. Now, before you exempt yourself from the 100 of your 399 classmates, I’d like to remind you that all 400 have role and responsibilities.

Despite the global disease burden of mental illness, it is perhaps due to its unseen nature that we often neglect not only our mental health but also that of those around us. MRSA once said, “Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.” -unfortunately, being the multicellular eukaryotes that we are, we cannot possibly live up to those standards all the time (and indeed not all staphi can) especially where disease is concerned. It is just like a cancer invading through our minds or a thrombus that keep our brains from healing and flourishing. The cancer and thrombus, albeit in invisibility cloak, need to be controlled in a healthy environment to improve on quality of life…for all of us.

So, what roles do we play and what responsibilities do we have as the 1s and the 3s?

The one. The chosen one. The coveted prime number. Perhaps the biggest responsibility bestowed upon them is to gain a deep understanding of their ‘situation’. I say situation because many of them don’t know they are ‘the one’. A lack of understanding of mental illness leads to negligence from ourselves and those around us. Negligence begets a further niche in understanding. It’s a vicious cycle. A recent loss of interest in others, drop in functioning in daily activities, problems with concentration or memory, increased sensitivity, apathy, a sense of disconnection, illogical thinking (Mac-and-Bloo situation form Foster’s home for imaginary friends, Eliot-Kid situation…yes I draw lessons/diagnoses from cartoon network) sleep or appetite changes, dramatic mood changes etc. are among the signs to look out for before seeking expert opinion.

The one also has a role to play in the metamorphosis of cultural norms and beliefs. They should change the conversation from one of blame to one of empathy and support. They should be at the frontline to lead the exodus from blaming spirits, the devil and weakness to understanding body functions and dysfunctions. There’s need to reorganize priorities because there crops a sense of hypocrisy amongst us when we demand government bodies to prioritize healthcare over infrastructural development whereas we care more about wealth (intellectual or physical) than health. I dare say, your mental health is more important than your grades or your fancy job. Bite me. Additionally, men not only cry, they weep! They get vulnerable. Bite me. Self love is more important than others’ love of self; pride over vanity! Bite me.

The one, you have a responsibility to rise above. You might have thought, as a child, that monsters sleep under your bed. Well they sleep inside your head. You will wrestle with them some days but a day comes when you have to snuggle. Self-actualization is at the top tier of HUMAN NEEDS. The pyramid upon which quality of life is built on; and the only way to truly be successful (that which you talk about so often but know little about) is to be fulfilled. You will only be fulfilled when you rise above to seek assistance and to snuggle when you need to.

What are the responsibilities of the 3? It’s quite the party in there. There’s strength in numbers.

You have a responsibility to wipe out ignorance. You too have to gain an understanding on mental health and disease, more so when you’re a symbol of healthcare in society. There’s need to fathom ‘the ones’ around us to either better understand their situation or to create a conducive environment for healing. Again, ignorance begets negligence, which begets further ignorance. Educate yourself. Educate others. Educate your community. Maybe then we can be a more mentally sober society.

The three have a role to be attentive and vigilant. The worst possible thing you can do to one with an invisible illness is to make them feel the need to prove how sick they really are. Unfortunately, there’s no pain scale here either. Being empathetic will give them the confidence to make longer strides towards overcoming. Listen even where words are not used and engage some critical thinking before holding onto judgement.

The big 3 also have a role to be sensitive. The GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) concept not only applies to computer science and mathematics but also to our minds. We’re guilty of littering social media with all sorts of negative and disturbing content. Mainstream media is also guilty (although somewhat regulated) of constant airing of negative news and pictures. This insensitivity has led many to suicide and a whole lot more are living with the consequences of media madness. We may be saving our world from garbage but what are we doing to save our minds from equally toxic trash? Facebook comments and twitter threads are a reflection of who we are and where we lie on a mental health scale. We need to make media regulatory bodies do better and focus our energies on worthwhile campaigns. I mean, Facebook comments are a lot more morally-eroding than the melanin video will ever be.

Most importantly, you can’t pour from an empty cup; take care of yourself first.

I leave your mind to rest on this last piece of mind-food to nibble on: was there no one else in Cinderella’s kingdom with the same shoe size as her? (No data links her to hobbits although she clearly lived in a hole)

-By EannahK

#normalizing mental illness #mental health awareness #positive mental attitude #love #checking up #writers #eannahk

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witchqueenofthemoon · 7 years ago

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Emily Gaudette of Newsweek interviewed me and many other witches for her article (Sandy DeVito is me!). She gave me permission to post the initial questions she'd asked me and my answers here. Link to the article here: https://t.co/4j4ddg3u7A?amp=1

1. How do you define your practice? Which terms are you most comfortable with, and how do you use witchcraft or similar concepts in your life?

Regarding my religious beliefs, I identify primarily as agnostic--agnosticism is the belief that it's not possible for us to know (at least at the current time) with absolute certainty what the nature of the universe and "God" is, rather that the question is the nature of the belief--the question is the answer. I therefore define my personal craft as that of a "secular witch"--that is, a witch without a specific set of religious credo or ritual, but one who practices ritual that feels right to me personally, and gives tribute to effigies that I personally identify with. Basically I do rituals that feel right to me, and I have altars fashioned in a way that feels right for my personality, my beliefs, and my home: one of them functions as an open altar, and the other altar is a tribute to Santa Muerte--sometimes called the Goddess of Death. I don't believe Muerte is a physical being so much as I believe death is a strong energy in the universe, and my tribute is to the idea of death and Muerte's connotation with the feminine, rather than to any physical being. I have Puerto Rican ancestry on my mother's side, and I also identity with Muerte for that reason; and with "her" purported affinity for the working class, as I come from a long line of working class people, and have been working class for my entire life. My practice is also "solitary"--I do not subscribe to group ritual or to covens. I feel group energies in magick rituals are both extremely strong and very difficult to control. It can be hard for one to control one's emotions in such an environment, and I think the result is too unpredictable. I prefer the safety and control of a focused, personal craft. To me, my witchcraft is deeply tied to what most people would identify as "feminine" energy, that is, protection, empathy, the cleansing of negative energies, openness to wisdom and knowledge, and curiosity. I think anyone can be a witch, but women are born with an inherent aptitude to the craft's particular wavelength. I use my own to help the people around me--I focus on cleansing rituals, candle magick, and protection spells primarily, with some tarot and occasional vague premonition. I think it's a lifelong journey--I still feel I've only begun to truly tap into my own craft.

2. Do you remember the first time you saw a witch in a movie? What film was it and how did you feel?

It was Margaret Hamilton in THE WIZARD OF OZ. I'm willing to bet at least half of the people born in the United States first became acquainted with a "witch" through that film--it's part of the pop vernacular in this country. As a kid I probably had the same reaction to her as any other kid--repulsion and fear, though I honestly don't remember well. I do remember my little brother was so afraid of her he'd leave the room anytime she was on screen.

3. What's the worst depiction of witchcraft you've seen in film, and why is it so inaccurate or damaging?

It's still probably that one, though as an adult I've come to love her in that film, and feel protective of her in my own way, as I do pretty much all negatively-portrayed witches in media. That role is still what the average person thinks of when you say the word "witch"--green skin, crooked long nose (which is in fact a racist stereotype), conical hat, broomstick, black clothes. The "witch" in patriarchal society is a caricature of an "undesirable" woman--she is haggard, wicked, and unwanted. And since I began to personally identify with actual, intersectional, inherently feminist witchcraft several years ago, I've worked hard to reclaim those words from toxic patriarchy on a personal level. The Witch does not belong to men, she is self-involved in the most essential sense, free from societal expectation, firm in herself, always open to learning. Probably the most important idea that is inherent to witchcraft is the autonomy of women. And since we still live in a toxic patriarchy, the witch is smeared the way women are smeared--she is shunned, she is defiled, she is named evil, she is made ugly, she is nefarious. But actual witchcraft couldn't be further from the negative pop culture stereotype. It's about the natural world, the esoteric that is inherent to life, and freedom of the spirit.

4. Do you have a favorite witch character on film, or maybe even a moment in a film you identify with or appreciate?

One of the mainstream witch films I love the most is PRACTICAL MAGIC, which oddly enough was directed by a man (Griffin Dunne, who was a close friend of the late Carrie Fisher and is probably more well-known as an actor than a director), based on the book by Alice Hoffman. It's an antithesis to the negative witch stereotype--it's a movie about love, sisterhood, feminine energy, and independent, strong women. I particularly love the witch aunts, Jet and Francis, played by the amazing Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing. In a lesser film, they'd have been degraded and made "crazy cat ladies", but in Dunne's film they reflect the bold, beautiful women I know in real life. Likewise Sandra Bullock as Sally and Nicole Kidman as Gillian are sister witches who love each other utterly, though they could hardly be more different. To me they've always reflected that every woman, and every witch, has her own unique path in life and in her own craft, and that path, whatever it is, had deep worth and must be honored. The whole movie is a breath of fresh air in a culture inundated with negative witch stereotypes, and it has a potent magical energy. And it has songs by Stevie Nicks, who I love so very much, another witchy woman who has always dared to be herself.

5. What would you like to see in future films touching on magic, spells, witchcraft or wicca?

I'd love to see more witches on film who remind me of women I know in daily life, rather than a constant indulgence in bad, old stereotypes and reliance on overt supernatural fantasy. Witchcraft deals with the esoteric, but it's also about learning about oneself and personal growth. There can't be real witchcraft without intersectional feminism, and I really want witch films that are written and directed by women from different walks of life. Women already get so few opportunities in Hollywood, but especially when it comes to witches, an area that inherently belongs to us, we've been constantly shut out from telling our personal stories. I was happy to hear Leigh Janiak is supposed to be doing a reboot of THE CRAFT, for instance, but I want at least ten more witch films helmed by women. We deserve to tell the story of the witch experience in our own words; because it's different for all of us.

#newsweek #witches #witchcraft #witch movies #personal #me #my stuff

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michaelsmediablog-blog · 8 years ago

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Final Blog Post: House of Cards

House of Cards is a currently running political drama on Netflix. It is poised to enter it’s fifth season in May, 2017. The cast is lead by Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood, Much like the political environment in the show, House of Cards is a work of art. This can be seen from the very beginning of the opening credits to the end of the most recent season. There is a heavy focus on appearance, public appreciation, and lasting influence. Frank Underwood, the shows main character reminds us of this many times, regularly speaking about power and legacy in his asides (an element that screams classical theater, e.g. Shakespeare's monologues and soliloquies). This focus on influence and the struggle between reality and appearance has been philosophized by countless philosophers, from Plato to Marx to Arendt to Baudrillard.

“The Marxist approach to culture insists that texts and practices must be analysed in relation to their historical conditions of production” (Storey, 61) Keeping this in mind, House of Cards is being created in a time where the historical conditions of production are largely political so it makes sense that the show would be a strong story about the American political system. The conditions of production are an über-political capitalist system steeped in corruption and uncertainty perhaps more than any other time in American history and the show reflects that very strongly.

I hypothesized that the shows portrayal of politics and the media may be damaging to people's opinions and views about what can and should be done by people in power in our country. Frank’s portrayal as a “ruthless pragmatist” is abrasive on the surface, and is counterbalanced by many small things he does at certain parts of the story. Frank’s media appearance and his focus on power consumes his life. Every waking moment he is focused on how he can secure a legacy for himself through any means possible. The problem comes when we look at the reason why we like Frank, I personally like Frank because of his intelligence, his drive, and his perfectionism. When we analyze Frank’s quest for power and legacy, we find that he is in fact an immense hypocrite. At multiple moments in the show Frank is condescending, rude, and mean to people who he sees as idiots for going after money instead of legacy and power, under the guise that money is only a means to an end and earning money holds no value over time. Despite his views on this he completely misses the fact that there is quite the same conundrum with an unending quest for power; he believes that his power and legacy will have use or value, endlessly validating his need to inflate his ego. He focuses on the immortality of legacy, missing or ignoring the fact that legacy is not lasting, and that it can be created through good or evil methods.

The other reason one wants to like Frank is that we have a much more intimate relationship with him than any of the other characters do. His asides provide insight and what feels like an honest view of Frank. While this is in fact his own “honest view,” the appearance/feeling of honesty is what matters. These asides don’t just blur the lines between reality and appearance, it removes it. For Frank, and for the show, appearance IS reality. We justify his manipulation of the media because we are shown the stresses his job and actions cause in his own personal life, despite his manipulation being one of those stressors; we see his reality, almost forcing us to have empathy for him. In fact, if the show only portrayed Frank through his media appearances and his public image we would get a much different view of Frank, we might be less or more approving of his political actions simply due to personal bias and ignorance about what goes on behind the facade. One might find him boring and political, or just outright despise him. Making it feel like Frank trusts you, and making you feel like you trust him back, like he’s your friend, is crucial to his relationship with the viewer and is woven near perfectly into his persona, the manipulation of trust and affection being his primary tool for bending and breaking people and their lives. Not even the viewer knows when they’re being lied to because they’ve been shown that everything he has said is “true”, allowing Frank to tell his lies whenever and to whomever he chooses.

Frank does everything for his own gain, even things he does not want to do or like doing are done with Frank’s interests at heart. He will abuse people who helped him with no regard to the ramifications simply because of the power he feels he has. His power and appearance are simply a house of cards waiting to collapse until it is finally cemented together and left to collapse from time. Throughout the show, Frank shows an almost childish displeasure towards non permanent things; he insists Edward Meechum stays his personal bodyguard, he shows contempt for the Buddhist monks who came and made then eventually destroyed the sand mandala. Because of this Frank ties and unties his political connections with ease, choosing to ally with whomever may increase his chance at permanency.

One of the driving factors behind the American political system is the capitalist economy we base it on. Capitalism is by no means a bad thing, but the current economic landscape is very toxic. The rich are now very much in power. Marx believed that the rich being in power served to keep the other classes in conflict with each other. This conflict removes attention from the true goings-on of the rulers, and focuses it on more menial grievances like minimum wage, pay equality between races and genders, etc. Marx believed that this hid the larger scale politics involving corporations and their intent to grasp “power” by having a tight hold on money.

This connection between power and money is not left out of the show, former president Garrett Walker is a very close friend and business partner with Raymond Tusk, a multi-billionaire who owns nuclear power plants around the world. He uses this influence, his near-monopoly on the power in China is used as leverage to end a military conflict between the United States and China. This is strongly capitalized on by Frank, who sees money as a fake form of power, only useful in making people do what you want for a little, and universally fleeting, unlike a legacy. Frank uses a Chinese businessman’s ties to Democratic action committees to spin a story in the media that ultimately ends in Garrett Walker’s resignation and Frank Underwood taking position as the President of the United States of America.

Claire Underwood is a very startling representation of a woman in power and in the fourth season we watch as she sheds her husband’s control over her and reminds us that she herself is just as much a strong and power-hungry sociopath as Frank. Claire finally receives the agency she has desired and that she deserves. Although she uses this agency to do arguably terrible things, the fact that she has this agency is something not seen often in the first three seasons. The most notable scene for Claire before the fourth season is perhaps her interview on CNN in season two where a reporter bluntly asked her about her and Frank’s lack of children. This question would absolutely not have been posited to a male and Claire responds with strength. She turns the question and its subsequent prying into Claire’s past abortions, a private topic that she is essentially forced to lie about in order to save face. She uses this lie to expose a military member, now a general, who raped her and to shift the conversation towards her bill about rape in the military and the victims of it. This is a very powerful refusal to go on what the media wants to get attention for, yet we still feel Claire’s pain of being cornered into answering a question on a topic that has no business being asked about by anybody outside perhaps a healthcare environment.

Although we see this strength in Claire, she uses it in much the wrong way. Because of the oppression and attitudes surrounding her Claire aspires for something that is almost completely ridiculous, to be the First Lady and the Vice President at the same time. Now, this isn’t ridiculous because she is a woman, it is ridiculous because of the immense conflict of interest and the easy target for government overreach accusations. This use of Claire as a strong character, Frank’s Lady Macbeth finally sharing the stage is very important to the representation that women can have and want power in the same way men do, and although Claire is an awful and powerful person, she struggles much the same way that many other women do under the attempted control from men.

Because of the “reality” of this television show, the fact that it’s fully contained world almost completely mimics our own makes us think about these hyperbolic representations and consider that maybe some of them aren’t so hyperbolic. It creates worry, or, based on the writings of Zizek (Storey, 112), it illustrates the worry that we already hold in our mind, the worry that is in fact, our reality. This worry has grown exponentially this past year, from the rhetoric spewed by then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump, to the actions and rhetoric still spewed by him and his close allies after he won the presidency. His entire presidency so far has felt like a television show, that is why satire of his characters is so strong it doesn’t even need to be accurate, the worry people have is enough to make the satire all too real. Our reality has become a melding of our dream realities and real life, a personification of our fear for the outcome of our country and the hope that President Trump may at some point not play into our nightmarish views of him and his scary and isolating ideals.

I believe that my hypothesis was in fact wrong. I believe this kind of representation of power and backroom dealings in fact brings awareness and discomfort to the people who watch it. We watch it not because we agree with Frank or his ideals and practices, but because we have an obsession with triumph. History has been controlled by the powerful and always will be. The triumph over history and truth itself is an immense position of power and many people may have a subconscious desire to have that sort of respect. Admiration of them is not necessary if a leader is strong enough to keep your country looking strong. I think that being powerful enough to have such a strong disregard for public opinion, to the point where you can create and lie about public opinion is enticing. Everyone wants to feel like they have created their own identity and have control over it, and absolute power seems like the ultimate form of control, no matter what history has proven to be true.

“Democracy is so overrated.” -Frank Underwood

“The road to power is filled with hypocrisy, and casualties” -Frank Underwood

youtube

References:

House of Cards - Willimon, Beau. “House of Cards.” House of Cards, Netflix, www.netflix.com/title/70178217.

Cultural Theory and Popular Culture - Storey, John. Cultural theory and popular culture: an introduction. Harlow, Pearson, 2015.

#mcst2030 #house of cards

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surviving-guilt · 8 years ago

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Checks and Balances

Many are keen on accepting the notion that the abused carry the abusers. This is what we call a revolving door.

They would also argue that the indifference of man is just as evil as evil men are by their actions.

If your friend texts you they’re going to kill someone and 10 minutes later does it, are you evil for not stopping them? Most people would say no.

If you and your friend are in a room with someone else, and they tell you they’re about to shoot the other person and 10 seconds later they do, are you evil for not stopping them? A little more wishy washy, but most people would tell you there was nothing you could do.

What if you were in the car with them, they parked in front of an ex’s house, and told you they were going to run them over the moment they walk out of the house? The ex opens the door, your friend whips around the block to gain speed and momentum, it takes about a minute and a half to make it around the block, you see the ex walk into the street, you see the impact coming and it happens. Are you evil for not grabbing the wheel at any point? For not texting someone or calling the authorities when it was still being premeditated? For not getting out of the car when you had the chance? The courts would decide if you were an accomplice or not, but would you be evil for your inaction? Whether you tried to talk them out of it or not? -- If you say yes, why aren’t you equally as evil for the first example with the text? Why not for the second. People act as though “evil” and “immoral” are synonymous, they like to pretend all things are circumstantial, but that is truly a conclusion that people make up within their own minds. I will start my point here by saying on the conversation of “good” vs. “evil” there is no gray, it truly is black and white; it is light vs. darkness, or light vs. the lack there of.

I say this because “morals” are man-made and vary culturally, therefore, in the grand scheme of mammal existence, morals do not exist. I know this because my dog does not know I’m an asshole for calling women bitches, but it does know if someone or something malicious or evil is present. Quick word of advice -- if your dog is usually nice to most humans and literally hates someone that walks in one day and you don’t know why, take the hint. Your dog will know to run away because of an earth quake or tsunami before you will, and it will know evil and toxic people before you realize it. Trust your dog. Anyhow, no one would argue that walking passed someone drowning a child in a pool or lake and not doing or saying anything makes you a fucked up person, but everyone has this confused fucked up conversation about what if that child was Hitler? Would a strict Catholic, against homosexuality and abortion, still believe in the purity of that fetus if it was born gay? Where are these invisible lines we draw in our heads and when is something gray and not black and white? I ask all these conflicting questions as someone who believes very little in circumstantial exclusions and gray areas. For example, many people recognize “high functioning” people on the Autism spectrum and that have asperger’s as having extraordinary talents despite their “disorder” but would look at someone who is schizophrenic as having a simply negative disorder. I do not. I feel all mental disorder, both naturally occuring and developed through physical or mental trauma, is both an affliction and a potentially powerful adaptation and expansion of mental ability and/or capacity. This is not to say that this is true at face value. I am sociopathic, have bipolar disorder including BPD, seasonal depression on top of Bipolar, PTSD, severe ADHD, and go through bouts of anxiety at different points in my life depending on where I am, it’s a living hell, i know. But surviving it and battling it head-on when it’s easier to run away long enough to learn ways to manage it and cultivate the “positive” symptoms along with the bad ones has left me more capable than I was before these disorders overtook my entire life. I am in no way saying that ALL people with mental disorders are better for having them, not at all actually. At their worst, these disorders are so debilitating that they kill who they afflict, or rob them of the ability to lead a successful functional life, or even form basic human relationships, and these examples are what most of society uses as their basis for their impression of mental illness in general. When you hear the term “sociopath” the images that come to mind may be serial killers, child abusers, animal abusers, or generally evil people, but I’m sure your first thought isn’t “Owner of a Fortune 500 company.” As i’m sure when you hear “Autistic child” you don’t immediately imagine tech geniuses that are the best in data analysts, developing algorithms to make for better technology, or catching hackers and predators by sorting metadata for big companies and the government. I’m also sure you hear schizophrenia and think that someone should be in a jacket or heavily medicated and a danger to society, but have never thought that you may have met a very high fuctioning schizophrenic who goes untreated and you just think of them as nice and quirky. Someone you may know with dissociation may come off as selfish and forgetful and insensitive or overly sensitive, but I’m sure you wouldn’t think that in the time of complete crisis, they may be the sanest, most calm and rational person in the room capable of leading everyone to safety rather than being in complete panic, now would you? Someone with OCD may come off as an anal, controlling, selfish, narcissistic, and sometimes condescending prick, but they’ll know where the exits in the room are, when someone may trip in front of you due to an untied shoe, exactly how much time until the next bus, etc. Someone suffering from severe anxiety that has learned to manage it may actually know better than you when something is worth freaking out about, because they focus so hard on reasoning and not letting irrational fears and feelings overtake, that when they finally do let themselves freak out, just like my dog hating someone, it IS time to listen and freak out. People often mistake ADHD as the inability to concentrate, but often time the issue is that they are focused on TOO MANY things at once and don’t have the energy to fix any one thing because they’re experiencing more of the world at once than you can fathom without drugs. Most people don’t believe that in any given moment, I can be listening to you speak, have music on, have a completely different song playing in my head, while thinking about the past and wondering about the future on two different trains of thought going in different directions, and texting someone all at the same time while still actively listening and responding to whomever I’m speaking to with no issue. My ADHD is an issue when I have to sit in a quiet room and accomplish one task, too little stimulus is my downfall, not too much. My last example is those with emotional disconnection issues, be it from PTSD, sociopathy, autism, anxiety, or a variety of other potential factors. They may find it hard to care, like, and especially love, and may come off as “cold” and incapable of sympathy, empathy, or tenderness beyond simple introductory kindness, but believe me when I tell you that when they DO care, when they DO love, when they do form a bond, no one you ever meet will care more, love harder, and try with everything inside them than they will. Saying “I love you” less DOES make it more valuable when it is said.

So with all this said, when is the last time you had an argument with yourself? Who won? Did that seem like a stupid question? You see, people think that symptoms of disorders are exclusive to those WITH disorders, but you see people every day who exhibit the same behaviors as people like me. How many times have you caught yourself purposely not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk? Do you think your have OCD for that? Do you get sad and not want to go outside or leave your bed when there’s bad weather? Do you think you suffer from major depression for that? Does a similar sound, smell, or image that reminds you of an old bad memory make you cringe or feel bad? Do you think you have PTSD for that? More than often, the case is no with all these questions, but you exhibit symptoms without having the rest. So if someone with bipolar disorder learns how to manage their bad symptoms, but allows themselves to exhibit the more practical or useful symptoms, such as high energy and drive during a manic phase, are they not using their disorder as a beneficial tool or way to get ahead without suffering fully from the full negative symptoms of the disorder? Is this wrong? Or an unnatural leg up? Is it wrong to exploit a disorder for a benefit? You may think it’s circumstantial, but I simply do not. One can take advantage of manic symptoms to simply gain, such as being able to go to school, go to work, hang out, party, have the confidence to get with someone and do school work all in one day with little sleep, yes. But what if someone was just coming out of their major depressive episode, finals are coming up, work is at it’s busiest, their friends need them for help through a tough time, and they’re having personal issues at home? Is tapping into the manic energy, drive, and full-on go mode to not collapse under the pressure they’re undergoing considered taking advantage? I would think not. Now let’s revisit our more extreme examples from the beginning. Someone has a dissociative personality disorder, or “split personalities”, they are both you and your friend in the example about killing someone. Part of them fears the other part doing something they consider evil such as murder, does the part that doesn’t reach out or do something about it get the same judgement the part that carries out the act does? Is not stopping a death you can evil? Yes. But what if your reason is because there is so much stigma against the mentally ill that the absolute fear of being attacked, detained, misunderstood, or not listened to is what causes your silence? If you tell someone you get institutionalized and labeled a danger, if you don’t you commit the act and are looked at as evil over ill, and you can’t just walk faster past it because both people are inside you. This is the torment that leads us to kill ourselves out of fear for not stopping ourselves from the pain we can cause because we’re afraid to reach out for help. But now, what if one personality is a sociopath and the other is human as can be, and just anxious? What if that sociopath is smart and instinctual enough to catch on to the fact that someone is evil, maybe about to go runover their girlfriend and kill her? It wants to do the right thing because the other personality cares about morals and it sees evil. The sociopath recognizes evil, and realizes he can’t reach out for help because he’s labeled as mentally ill, therefore not credible and “damaged” so he decided to drown the person who is going to kill his ex. You, a neurotypical person, walk past him drowning the would be murderer, and choose to keep walking. Putting all morals to the side, who was evil? The stigmas we have towards the mentally ill not only cause them to suffer directly, but it blinds us to the great potential those who have mental illness have and how they can do such greater things in society BECAUSE of their disorder, and we shut them out instead of letting them in out of fear for what they may do, instead of letting them in out of excitement for what they may do. That same person struggling with an inner sociopathic personality may be a huge asset to law enforcement, but won’t be allowed to be because they would fail a psych eval. The point of this post is that if we were more supportive of those with mental disorders CULTIVATING and managing their symptoms to their benefit, rather than suppressing ALL symptoms with stigmas, shame, and medication, we could be a lot further along on our progress as a society instead of muting the great minds that could better us all. We create the serial killers and “psychopaths” of the world by forcing them to have to run away from themselves based on the potential of the damage they can do rather than the potential of the great they can do with self discipline, self awareness, and joined management with professionals that can give them the tools to use their disorders for good rather than suppress what makes them who they are. For some, we are not defined by our disorders, but in some cases we ARE our disorders, and suppressing that makes us less human than you think we are with them. Abusing us makes us the abusers when we give up on trying to get help, and for many the ones we abuse are ourselves to dangerous and even fatal extents.

The biggest thing I want to stress is not looking at someone with connection issues or sociopathic tendencies as a serial killer or societal reject, because when we learn to put our resentment for not feeling things the same as others aside, we rely on our instinct and we’re much closer to recognizing evil the way your dog does than you are, and our trouble grasping “moral” vs “immoral” doesn’t mean we can’t teach ourselves right and wrong if you let us try to learn more about ourselves other than “YOU’RE BAD.” All of this is food for thought, and me realizing what I wish I did years ago, I’m not as bad as I think I am, and I’m not as bad as I can be, and most importantly, not letting myself be as bad as I can be makes me good. It is okay that the only opinion of me I care about it my own, because it is me that has to learn how to live as me, manage me, and control myself for better or worse. Not accepting help is okay, taking a step back and saying “i need this time to figure me out” is okay, and warning people that you’re afraid of not responding well in certain situations or doing something others would find wrong is okay if you recognize something and say or do something about it.

It is okay to be ill and not suppress yourself if you learn to cultivate the good. I am not handicapped, in fact, I’m one of the most capable people I know. Self improvement is not selfish. I may never love myself, but I can appreciate the good parts in all the bad, and that’s huge. FUCK YOUR STIGMA, BE YOUR OWN BIGGEST FAN AND CRITIC, AND BE WHAT YOU GOTTA BE EVEN IF ITS IMMORAL AS LONG AS ITS GOOD.

Congrats if you read this.

Thoughts?

#food for thought #personal

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riichardwilson · 5 years ago

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4 Signs Your Workplace Environment is Toxic

The data-driven signs that entrepreneurs and executives should be looking for.

March 4, 2020 5 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Harassment and bias have been hot topics within C-suites and corporate boards since the dawn of #MeToo in 2017 when high-profile cases started to hit the headlines.

Despite lip service to the contrary, most business leaders only realize their workplace is toxic when they see their Glassdoor reviews, start to experience high turnover, get slapped with a lawsuit or even get fired. With this in mind, last year my company decided to embark on a benchmarking study that collected data from 40,000 employees at 125 healthy and unhealthy companies. This Workplace Culture Report 2020 allows companies to benchmark how they measure up to the best and worst cultures along six key indicators (including these four warning signs).

Here are some of the very clear, data-driven signs your company’s culture is infected and headed down an increasingly unhealthy road if untreated. Consider these the four deadly horsemen of a toxic workplace culture.

1. Unchecked power dynamics

Power dynamics refers to the way people use or abuse their authority. Many managers are unaware of how their power impacts their social interactions with coworkers and how coworkers don’t feel comfortable saying “no” to them. The result: Managers do not get the feedback they need when they misstep, and employees tolerate disrespectful behaviors they would not accept from others.

For example, consider the scene from a harassment training video showing a manager who, at the end of a long “stressful” day at the office, asks a very visibly uncomfortable subordinate to walk on his back to massage out the stress. One in three of the employees who saw the video said they would still have trouble saying no to this clearly inappropriate request.

According to recent data collected from 40,000 employees across 125 companies, more than one-third of employees (34 percent) report their managers are not aware that employees find it difficult to say no to them. In addition, 17 percent report they do not feel comfortable speaking up if they have a concern.

2. Too many people who feel they are part of an “out group”

When certain groups are favored, there’s power in belonging to an “in group” and disadvantages to being relegated to the unfavorable “out group.” Think of the office in a liberal-leaning city like San Francisco. An out-group employee could be someone with conservative political views. This type of employee feels less respect and empathy from coworkers, less confident that management will take a complaint seriously and is less likely to share corrective feedback with their colleagues. Or it could be a company comprised of mostly millennials as the in group, while those in the gen X/boomer demographic are in the out group.

This is more than just a case of people not liking the cool kids. Out-group dynamics have a real impact on the workplace. Our research has found that out group members are less comfortable speaking up and less trusting that their colleagues will speak up for them if they are subject to offensive comments. Only 40 percent of out group members are confident that if they report a workplace incident, their manager will take them seriously.

3. Your employees don’t believe the company is adequately addressing unconscious bias

The more bias that exists in an organization, the more there will be in-group/out-group dynamics, which are negative in any workplace. In some cases, unconscious bias shows up right from the start of the hiring process.

For example, often-cited research by the MIT Department of Economics showed that fictitious resumes sent to help wanted ads with white-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews compared to the same resumes with African American sounding names. Race is just one of many factors that come into play. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that for every 1 percent increase in a woman’s body mass, there was a .6 percent decrease in family income.

Sadly, despite the fact that we often encourage people to “bring their whole selves to work,” only 32 percent of employees strongly agree they can be their authentic self in the workplace, and about two-thirds of them say they don’t actually see any processes in place at their workplace to minimize unconscious bias. Actions speak louder than words. And if employees don’t see and believe that you are working to address bias, they won’t care if you say it’s important.

4. Lack of commonly understood behavioral norms and practices

Norms and practices define “the way we do things here.” Positive norms and practices, where people’s behavior is generally respectful, civil and inclusive, are widely recognized by employees who rate their organization as healthy. When there aren’t strong positive norms in an organization, significantly fewer employees rate their organization as healthy. Unhealthy organizations have a vacuum of norms and practices, which provides an opening for toxicity to enter the workplace. This matters because every workforce is going to bring employees with different mindsets. Without understood norms, problems fester.

If you suspect these danger signs are present at your company, what’s the solution? Well, we can’t change what we don’t measure. And yet, we spend $5 billion each year on harassment training for a problem we don’t diagnose, measure or benchmark. It’s not surprising, then, that we’re no closer to eliminating harassment and bias despite decades of effort. I hope these key insights (and the rest of the report) help entrepreneurs focus and prioritize resources more strategically and in a way that generates the best results for their organizations. Together, we can spare Gen Z from these workplace culture failures.

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source http://www.scpie.org/4-signs-your-workplace-environment-is-toxic/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/611675538100256768

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laurelkrugerr · 5 years ago

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4 Signs Your Workplace Environment is Toxic

The data-driven signs that entrepreneurs and executives should be looking for.

March 4, 2020 5 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Harassment and bias have been hot topics within C-suites and corporate boards since the dawn of #MeToo in 2017 when high-profile cases started to hit the headlines.

1. Unchecked power dynamics

2. Too many people who feel they are part of an “out group”

3. Your employees don’t believe the company is adequately addressing unconscious bias

4. Lack of commonly understood behavioral norms and practices

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/4-signs-your-workplace-environment-is-toxic/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/03/4-signs-your-workplace-environment-is.html

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scpie · 5 years ago

Text

4 Signs Your Workplace Environment is Toxic

The data-driven signs that entrepreneurs and executives should be looking for.

March 4, 2020 5 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Harassment and bias have been hot topics within C-suites and corporate boards since the dawn of #MeToo in 2017 when high-profile cases started to hit the headlines.

1. Unchecked power dynamics

2. Too many people who feel they are part of an “out group”

3. Your employees don’t believe the company is adequately addressing unconscious bias

4. Lack of commonly understood behavioral norms and practices

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/4-signs-your-workplace-environment-is-toxic/

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theconservativebrief · 7 years ago

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Who among us can resist getting a little verklempt upon hearing the strains of some familiar Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood song? Hum with me:

It’s such a good feeling to know you’re alive It’s such a happy feeling, you’re growing inside And when you wake up ready to say, “I think I’ll make a snappy new day!”

Generations of American children now have grown up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, in part because it runs on public television, something that Fred Rogers himself was instrumental in saving. Somewhere between a playmate, an affable uncle or grandpa, and a fairy godfather, Rogers’s slow and compassionate approach to children’s television ran counter to what we typically expect of TV shows for kids; there are no bright, flashy, fast-moving cartoons or slapstick humor in his neighborhood, just simple, direct conversation and storytelling. You got the feeling he cared.

Those same qualities might seem to disqualify Rogers from being a very good subject for a documentary, unless it’s the kind that “exposes” a public figure. But Morgan Neville’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor tackles him anyway, and comes to the benign conclusion that Fred Rogers was, in fact, the guy he appeared to be. It’s a gentle film that doesn’t take a lot of risks but doesn’t really need to. Fred Rogers was a kind and gentle man who saw children as important, his work as ministry, and kindness as essential to human existence.

So the main goal of Won’t You Be My Neighbor is to convince us that while kindness and empathy are in short supply today, it need not be that way. Through interviews with Rogers’s close collaborators and friends (his wife, several performers, and the head of the Fred Rogers Center), archival footage (some of it rare), and interstitial animated segments, the film builds out a portrait of a man who saw in the new technology of television an opportunity to communicate with a generation of children and tell them that they were special just the way they were.

And in 2018, that makes him a subversive figure.

The film opens with black-and-white footage of Fred Rogers in 1967, playing a piano and then using a musical metaphor to explain, in the familiar gentle cadence that somehow never comes off as patronizing, that one of his jobs is “to help children through the modulations of life.” What he means is helping children figure out how to express and regulate their emotions during exciting, scary, and confusing moments they encounter in life: dealing with bullies, experiencing parents’ divorce, feeling uncertain about the future, and going through frightening world events.

David Newell and Fred Rogers in Won’t You Be My Neighbor. Focus Features

That last one — the world events that children in the late 1960s and onward have had a greater awareness of, in part due to the very medium Rogers worked in — is a key part of Won’t You Be My Neighbor. Neville (Best of Enemies, 20 Feet from Stardom) is less interested in giving us a straightforward cradle-to-grave account of Rogers’s life than in making an argument around his subject. That argument is that Fred Rogers’s worldview, a kind of humanism that had roots in Rogers’s Christianity but expressed itself as a commitment to everyone’s dignity, is what helped many navigate the scariest events of childhood (RFK’s assassination, the Columbia shuttle explosion). And the power of that worldview, the film suggests, doesn’t stop when childhood ends.

The film is structured around those big world events. The first episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired in 1968, amid heated political debates about borders and wars. On the show, King Friday (the stern monarch of the Land of Make-Believe) erected a border fence of his own around his castle, and was convinced to take it down only by messages of goodwill and peace that other characters (both puppet and human) floated over the fence.

The parallels are almost too obvious (a border wall in the first week, 50 years ago?), but this really was the way the show started, and the film carefully shows how Rogers went on to gently and subtly address other cultural battles. In one segment that aired during pitched battles about integration, he soaks his feet in a small wading pool outside his home, then invites the black mailman to cool his feet in the pool with him. Today, a shot of the two men’s feet in the same pool may register as little more than a nice image, but Won’t You Be My Neighbor splices the show’s footage together with images from that time of black children being chased out of a public pool. Rogers knew what he was doing.

Sections like this are the strongest in the movie, straightforwardly told with historical footage to contextualize the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood segments and to remind us what it was like, as children, to see an assassination or explosion on TV and wonder what it meant for the future. Rogers’s commitment to addressing these events is framed as stemming from two things: his Christian faith (he was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and many interviewees talk about how he saw the show as “ministry”) and his deep interest in child psychology. Those two things led him to believe that children’s emotions were important to address and talk through, and he spent his life doing just that.

“The space between the TV screen and whoever is watching is ‘very holy ground,’” Rogers says in archival footage at one point.

What’s so striking about Won’t You Be My Neighbor isn’t really onscreen, though. It’s the effect the film has on the audience, and what that reveals about us.

As a number of critics have noted, what’s so startling about the movie is the revelation that Mr. Rogers was, as far as anyone seems to be able to tell, basically the person he presented himself to be onscreen. And more importantly, that’s unexpected. Watching the film, it’s hard to believe it’s true. Even after seeing the film, it seems a bit suspect, as if a story of a hidden crime will eventually come to light if we just wait long enough.

That we expect this so keenly (and fear it just as sharply) tells you almost everything you need to know about the times we live in. And it’s reflective of a conversation that many women have been having during the era of #MeToo — making lists in private conversations of the men we know or respect whom we’d be shocked and genuinely devastated to discover were predators. They’re very short lists.

If as a nation we were to make one of those lists, Fred Rogers would almost certainly be on it. The man who told us through the TV every day when we were children about our own worth, about feeling our emotions and then learning to control them, about living in harmony with other people — we need that man.

Thankfully, what Won’t You Be My Neighbor turns up is just that man, and a crowd of people who loved him. That’s probably why just watching the trailer of the film can induce weeping: It’s jarring to realize how much his simple message still makes sense, and how little it is evident in our public life.

And maybe most uncomfortably, the film surfaces why. There’s a clip near the end of the film in which a talking head on Fox News decries Rogers and the “narcissistic society he gave birth to.” I briefly expected the audience at my screening to riot, because it was such a plainly stupid response to what we’d just seen.

Fred Rogers believed in radical kindness. Focus Features

But it’s also a good example of the confusion that marks public discourse today, in which kindness far too often is decried as weakness, courtesy as political correctness run amok, respect as pandering, and the belief in each individual’s dignity and worth as narcissism. These things can all go in toxic directions, of course. But it seems clear that ordinary, old-fashioned goodness has gone out of fashion.

Rogers, the film proposes, was interested in “making goodness attractive in this next millennium,” as he says in a PBS segment recorded late in his life. The idea that everyone has inherent dignity was obvious to him; if you say otherwise, for him, “you might as well go against the fundamentals of Christianity.”

After all, Jesus’s answer to someone who asked him “Who is my neighbor?” was to tell the story of the Good Samaritan, a parable in which the most “righteous” and powerful members of his own society passed by a man lying in a ditch on the side of the road. Who finally rescues him and cares for him? A Samaritan — the people whom Jesus’s listeners considered to be less worthy of dignity and respect than themselves. There’s no chance that Fred Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, didn’t have this story in mind when he structured his entire show around the concept of neighbors.

And you can’t miss the parallels to today. Rogers was against the fast-paced children’s programming of his time that, as he saw it, found most of its humor in denigrating its characters’ dignity via pratfalls and cartoonish violence; it’s an easy line from that to the loud and shallow form that cable news uses to get its adult viewers addicted. Similarly, his slow, self-effacing, and deliberate way of speaking, with a gaze that made his audience certain he was paying attention only to them, is in stark contrast to all kinds of public figures today, not least the one leading our country.

So while Won’t You Be My Neighbor isn’t a particularly inventive film as a piece of cinema — its choices are expected, and we’re still left with questions about how Rogers’s work shaped his own life — that may in the end be for the best. The film succeeds on the radically subversive and obvious notions we learned when we were children: that being nice is not a weakness; that speaking with care is a thing we do simply because we believe the person we’re talking to is a human being with worth and dignity. What’s most startling about Won’t You Be My Neighbor, and what makes it feel almost elegiac, is how very jarring that message feels.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor opens in limited cities on June 8 and will expand over the following weeks.

Original Source -> The Fred Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor feels radically subversive

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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intelligentautisticmedia-blog · 7 years ago

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Autistic Community Manifesto Part 1: Us Autistics Chapter 1: Autistic Brotherhood by Charles McIntyre

Prelude:

Greetings fellow Autistics, I am Charles McIntyre, I am 26 and was diagnosed with PDD-NOS (Autism) when I was 4. My greatest strengths are Hyper Empathy, being analytical, seeing details and patterns others miss and word-smithing.

My greatest struggles are connecting with people, executive dysfunction, SPD, CAPD. I officially formed the group Call "Intelligent Autistic Media" in April 2017. Our mission statement is to spread 1. Autistic Pride 2.) Encourage and instruct Autistic Self Advocacy 3.) Defeat Anti-Autistic stigma and myths, 4.) Encourage and instruct NT Ally ship 5.) Improve the lives of Autistics and their families as much as possible.

I run this Facebook Group has at this about 380 members and we have been active for almost a year. We are an okay group, but I have not been as a successful leader as would like to be. I believe this to be because I my struggles with struggles with executive dysfunction and my inability to connect to people in an effective and consistently. In short, I am more a creative, ambitious visionary, than a leader and organizer.

So, I decided to write this sort of "Manifesto of Campaigns" as way to offer up a list of campaigns and initiatives I believe could elevate the status of the Autistic Community and solve some of our problems. It is hope that this manifesto will inspire various members of the community to time, resources, and talents to execute the fore mentioned project and initiatives. I feel like success hinges on ability to organize and mobilize. With our collaboration and unity can we ever hope to overcome NT supremacy. I am not sure if everybody will agree to all my ideas, but I am throwing them out there regardless. If you do find ideas appealing, please contact me. I hope to set up some collaborations. If you have any constructive criticisms, please elaborate. If you don’t have anything of meaning to add please ignore and scroll pass.

Part 1: Us Autistic Chapter 1: Autistic Brotherhood

Now, as were particularly diverse demographic of exceedingly unique individuals, unification is of course easier said than done. I would propose constitution or a share list of demands. As often have embracive personalities and none of us like to walk on eggshells we try to be patient with each other as much as we and agree to interact with a shared written code of ethics or social guidelines

Here is an example of such a code: 1.) If you are not of groups demographic stay in your lane. Ie don't talk about something that you don't understand. 2.) If you post something covers anything that may cause someone a panic attack or extreme discomfort; ie Sexual assault, violence, bigotry ect... ad a Trigger warning. 3.) If you post anything that has possible uncomfortable subject matter or contents; ie swearing, sex, sensory issues ect ad a content warning. 4.) Do not use sarcasm or hyperbole or otherwise confusing language. 5.) While in debate or disagreement do not assume hostility unless it is blatant. You maybe projecting or overthinking. Try asking the other person to clarify. 6.) Try to stay on topic with the post while commenting. 7.) If you see a post or comment that upsets you or that you disagree with scroll past it unless you deem it necessary. 8.) When engaging in a debate be polite and avoid using vulgar language or name calling. 9.) Walk away from an argument if it gets to heated. 10.) If someone does not want to argue, don't drag them back into thread by tagging them. This is harassment. 11.) Do not play mind games or gaslight. This is harassment. 12.) Conversing with multiple people use tags to distinguish to whom you speak.

First and foremost, though, we must spread Autistic Pride and self-love. I did not want to admit to having any connection to my fellow Autistics until I was able to accept my own Autism. Even now sometimes I get discouraged and wish I was different. I think Autistic self-defecation should thought as virus that we must try to remedy as soon as possible lest it spread through toxic interaction. This does not we shove pride down are fellow Autistics’ throats, but we must always strive to encourage and uplifting whenever possible. This again would require us to mutually patient with each other.

One idea I have for unification is reject any ideas that we can be or should be Neuro-typical. We shall not try to be what are not. In do this we should reject Neuro-typical social customs viewpoints. We should instead develop our own Autistic social customs and viewpoints. Thus, establishing Autistic social culture.

As we all know functioning labels divide, silence and stigmatize people across the autistic community. The simplest fly, generalize, and stereotype the experiences of all autistic people. We must never let the neuro- typicals force them on us nor any other autistic. At the same time however, we must be sensitive to the two different ways autistic people struggle. We must never imagine that our experience with autism the same as anyone else’s experience with lot. To demonstrate this point, I’m going to exemplify to members of the autistic community with very different forms of autism without relying on functioning labels.

Many of us know of John Elder Robinson. He is the author of such books as “look me in the eye”, “be different” and others. In both books, he talks about his struggles and talents. Some of his struggles include sensory processing disorder, social ineptness, aversion to eye contact and possibly executive dysfunction. There is natural engineering talents and creativity, he was able to leave home, find employment, incomplete independence, at age 16. (He also grew up in a different time).

This contrasts with the experiences of Carly Fleishman. Carly, who is a brilliant young woman, is a brilliant writer, and has developed quite the charming TV personality has struggles and talents very different to Mr. Robinson. In the memoir she wrote with her father Arthur Fleischman; “Finding Carly’s Voice” Carly is described as being nonverbal, having episodes of intense sensory overload, as well as experiencing more extreme meltdowns and coping with more prominent stemming. Throughout her early in adolescent years Carly has been sent to live in a variety of institutions designed for people with her type of autism. Before she learned to effectively type, or diagnosis also included intellectual impairment. She has recently been nominated for a reward called a “Shorty”, but I am uncertain if she has managed to live independent yet.

Essentially what I’m saying is, we must give recognition to struggles and talents of the Carly Fleishman’s, the John Elder Robinson’s, the Naoki Higashida’s, Stephen Wiltshire’s and everyone else in between in the autistic spectrum. It might be most convenient, we mapped out different types of autistic. This way be as crude was insensitive as functioning labels but would be more like 16 personality types. It would provide some symbolic shorthand to understand the person struggle and strength, without knowing everything about that person.

If we do not commit ourselves to encouraging self-advocacy and union ship in cooperation with people throughout different autism types, if we say, “oh yes, I am autistic, but I don’t want to be associated with these autistics, because I’m not freak like them,” then we are not really better than those neuro- typical bigots alienate, and discriminate against us. We autistics are also all we have. We must be inclusive as possible to maximize our numbers. If we cannot be inclusive to towards our own people how can we expect neuro- typicals to be inclusive towards us?

Once we have figured out way to bring empowerment, self-love and pride to people across the spectrum must also remember to be intersectional. Intersectional means that while we focus on autistic issues, make ourselves aware that people with identities other than autistic marginalized in different ways and therefore may have different struggles. To illustrate example, I once got accosted with a police officer because he suspected me of smoking cannabis at a town dance. The truth is my eyes were red because I was crying. I couldn’t look him in the eye, because I am in fact autistic and my ability to look people in the eye diminishes as I get more nervous. He thought I was lying in my have arrested me of his partner had pulled him away as he pulled away he shouted, “if you’re lying to me 10 times worse!” Now this was not my only encounter with police. Not my only misunderstanding. It is very common for autistic people to have some dealings police either as a victim or as a suspect. As we are autistic, it can be difficult to be out how to figure these situations and police sir severely under trained to understand or accommodate autistic people. While this incident was fortunate, I will tell you, that would ruin been worse if I were Black. Police tend to unjustly patrol black neighborhoods more and act more hostile towards people of color. If I had been black is much more possible that I would have been arrested and/or beaten by the police. Being intersectional means that we are sensitive to such issues of extra vulnerability to autistics who have extra vulnerability due to belonging to another marginalized demographic.

Being intersectional means that as leaders we do not let the members of our community indulge in any form of bigotry. Mustn’t allow any; racism, six them/misogyny, homophobia, trans-phobia, ablism, Islam phobia, anti-Semitism, classism or any other form of bigotry. (If we criticize any creed or religion we must be careful not to act discriminatory against all the members of that said creed or religion. For example: is perfectly fine to criticize Christianity and other religions for things that homophobia, trans-phobia, misogyny, racism and ablism Etc. but we cannot take this out on a random Christian. We should be accepting of people of differing creed identities under the condition that they are accepting of people different identities as well. Again, if we are not willing to be accepting of people from demographics that are different from us, if we indulge ourselves in bigotry, we are no different than those neuro- typical bigots that alienate discriminate against us.

Once we formed an all-inclusive and all accepting that all intersectional, autistic community we must strengthen it. We need people to feel pride. To do this we must remind people that autism is a pervasive condition meeting affects every aspect of a person. This means that while your struggles are because autism strengths and talents and expertise is also thanks to autism. We must also remind those autistics who have not found self-acceptance, of those autistics across the spectrum are found major success. Again, self-pride is necessary to push one’s self forward on a tough road ahead.

It will also be important for autistics to be experts in autism. We must do this to best understand ourselves and spread awareness to others. Also, I want us all to be old to really drive it home to those neuro- typicals who believe they understand autism better in anyone else that we are the ultimate experts. And we understand autism in ways that no one else can possibly can.

One of the most important things for everyone in the autistic community to know how to do is self-allocate. I will go over this in more detail in a future chapter. It should go without saying that is a tool that carves our path to self-empowerment and control of our own destiny. Self-efficacy is something that autistic children should learn from an early age. We must never allow members of her community to be apologetic for being autistic.

One interesting person has memorized the basics of self-advocacy, they are ready to graduate to social political activism for the entire autistic community. I will also go into more detail on such ideas in a later chapter. Basically, we must make sure people the autistic community are aware of the political and activism tools out their disposal. We must help make sure members over community are aware of how they are being marginalized and how their community the daily subject of social political discussion whether they like to acknowledge it or not. A shocking number of autistics seem to be oblivious facts. Thing to consider is while autism can make it difficult to stand up for oneself against an oppressor, we all must learn to do so.

This has been chapter 1 of my autism community manifesto. And I discussed basic folkways autistics should apply to themselves to get along with the community, how to make sure the community stays all-inclusive and intersectional, how people in the community should be proud aware of their own autism now they should learn how to self-advocate and eventually politically activate for the community. I hope you found it useful so far or at least provocative. Next chapter will discuss stuff out is the and social political activism in greater detail. Until then, this has been Charles McIntyre, power and peace to the community!

#Autistics #autism #autistic culture #autistic pride #autism self advocacy

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