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abbynx · 3 years ago

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0 to 100 real quick

La Squadra reacting to a usually silent, patient teammate snapping and going off

Genre: Platonic, just the bois being bros, definitely a self-projection, comfort

Warning: Cursing, mentions of breakup and manipulation

Your phone rang for the umpteenth time, the stubborn caller failing to realise how many times you've wordlessly made it clear you want nothing to do with him. All you ask of him was to finally leave you alone and yet he continues to persistently pest you. Your will power proved itself mighty to be tolerating his nineteenth call in five minutes.

It was your ex being a stubborn son of a bitch who has a lot of time in his hands, constantly asking you to pick up the phone and let him 'smooth out and explain' his recent relationship with his 'friends' behind your back. You were nowhere near stupid, nor gullible after joining the mob. despite your outward appearance as an innocent, average civilian you've hardened over time with the help of your career and turning your feelings off was no longer a challenge. Over time it simply became a light switch.

After his recent actions came to light, you bear to hesitation to break it off. For a moment you felt guilty when he gave his explanation to why he started seeing other people without you knowing; of course you knew what you were getting into when you signed your soul away to the devil to work in this line of career, you were constantly faced with death and lacked the time to spend time with him. He had no knowledge about what you do for a living, but you knew how to make it clear you were never going to be a simple one-call-away. But over time you've finally gained some self-worth and self-preservation to see through his guilt tripping, before you dropped his ass.

Now you were here, rejecting his calls before pocketing it back in your pants before resuming the movie night. Even putting the phone on silent it continued to bother everyone around you as you continued to nonchalantly press the reject call button.

How can you be this patient, the rest of the team questions but the answer lay before them. Risotto hired the timid assassin with potential for their unwavering patience and swift wits to wiggle them selves out of severe situations, something the time could use to be honest especially when you have a ticking time bomb with no timer and goes off at random. Perhaps the question would be simply answered with a short and simple one: "It's just Y/N being Y/N."

With the pestering phone calls bothering you for the past few days, your team can't help to be annoyed on your behalf and would like to chuck your phone into the deepest trench of the ocean and buy you a new one.

Much to everyone's chagrin, they watch you pick your phone up, however, what you did next was new and unexpected. Instead of rejecting the call, you finally picked up. Most of the time you'd politely greet, but today was certainly different. As soon as you picked up the phone, you wasted no breathe to speak and cut to the chase. All eyes turned to you, some were concerned, curious, shocked, or proud.

"Can you quit blowing up my phone, dude? Twenty FUCKING calls every second is getting tiresome. If you're calling me to 'explain' to me how you're not meeting your hookups then fuck off and get lost! what? Do you miss your personal ego booster? Well then fuck you, go try and choke on your own dick! Do you fucking think I'll believe your half-assed bullshit lies and pathetic fucking cries and bitching will win me over? You must be so fucking DELUSIONAL to be thinking you're worth the effort! What? Are you sad that I’m not a passable doll you can manipulate and mold to your liking? Is that it, you crazy son of a bitch? Can't you fucking get a clue that I'm over it? Huh? I couldn't care less about the new lies you've come up with to try and win me over, I'm done! Finished! Tapos! Ho finito! He terminado! Я задолбался! WHAT OTHER LANGUAGES DO I NEED TO SPEAK TO GET IT THROUGH THAT THICK FUCKING NOGGIN OF YOUR’S? CALL ME AGAIN AND I SWEAR TO ALL THINGS CONSIDERED MIGHTY THAT YOU WON’T HAVE ANY TEETH LEFT, DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND YOU FUCKING CHEATER? DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND? Good."

As soon as you finished the call, you calmly set it down with a sigh of relief. Peace at last. You adjusted yourself comfortably on your seat, wanting to watch the movie on display, when you felt you've made yourself quite the spectacle.

“What?”

Formaggio

- “Woooh, they went off!” His initial response was to high-five you for some reason but you accepted, nevertheless.

- Very shocked and yet enthusiastic at how you handles yourself at the face of a situation like this. Not to mention, the build up! From you trying to tolerate the caller for the past few minutes, before picking up the call and gave them an ass whipping to remember for the rest of his life!

- He would feel sorry for the person of the other side of the line if it weren’t for the fact he cheated on you, so good for him to be told off.

Illuso

- “Heh, about time you told him off.”

- Silently supportive at how you handled yourself at the face of a situation like this and admires you for it. It was very entertaining while it lasted, now he just wants to go back to watching the movie.

- Along that, he was shock that this hidden side of yours came put of nowhere and came out strong, which he thinks is pretty fucking rad. He now thinks back at the times where he gave you backhanded comments and how you managed to keep yourself cool under it... He now reminds himself not to get on your bad side, ever.

Proscuitto

- “.... Thank fuck you’re done, I was starting to think about throwing your phone out.”

- Extremely flabbergasted, as he has never heard you speak fluent in profanities, nor raise your voice at the duration of your stay in La Squadra. and addition to that, the fact you leaned on your seat and calmed yourself immediately as if nothing happened.

- Nevertheless, he feels proud at you for standing up to yourself and standing your ground. You have always been the timid one entering the world of crime and he overlooked your development within this new and risky life style. Looks like his mentoring worked wonders on you and he feels proud of himself.

Pesci

- “......”

- He was too shaken up to speak, he has never heard you be this angry and frustrated before as you’ve always kept calm in every situation and he admires you for that.

- He is shaken up, sure but it doesn’t really change how he views you. You were still the patient person he has ever met-- he just happen to witness you lose your cool once but he’s sure that this won’t define you.

Melone

- “Good for you for getting rid of that guy.”

- He’s just relieved that you’re finally done with the guy who has been giving Melone weird vibes the moment you told him about your then boyfriend. A few alarm bells rang in his head as you detailed how he acts around you and despite being happy for you back then, Melone was extremely vocal about his concerns. Looking back at it, he feels that his ‘paranoia’ wasn’t far off.

- He isn’t really shock, he’s just happy that you’re standing your ground and establishing yourself as a person who don’t need no one to use as a co-dependent crutch. After being around Ghiaccio, he really isn’t that phased anymore.

Ghiaccio

- “Fucking finally!”

- Similar to Melone, he’s just relieved your done with the phone calls and clingy boyfriend who is a walking-talking red flag. He hated how you didn’t have time back then to hang out with your other teammates just to spend time with your boyfriend to make up lost times, that often lasts until midnight and Ghiaccio can still hear you talking to your phone.

- Ghiaccio cares about you despite his distant veneer, and wants the best for the people he cares about. So he was happy that you finally broke your relationship of with a guy who doesn’t deserve you. Also, he’s starting to think that your choice of vocabulary all came from him and is unsure whether he should feel proud or not.

Risotto

- “Oh... Okay, good for you.”

- He blurted the first thing in mind, because he was just so shock at how you responded. He hired you for being so patient and calm at all times and now looking back, he doesn’t really see himself thinking that one day you’ll be going off without stopping to breathe and stutter.

- Don’t get him wrong, he actually thinks it’s awesome that you stood up for yourself like that, but just give him time to reel back to reality. He just never thought you’d explode that hard.

Gelato and Sorbet

- “See Sorbet? I told you they’d snap eventually!”

- The couple was immensely entertained at your empowering speech being quite the ego breaker and worse-fate-than-death threat. They adore it whenever they see a usually timid newcomer becoming unafraid to stand their ground and tell their oppressors off, it honestly feels like a proud parent thing for them to see their baby kid all grown up and kicking people in the guts with their words.

- If you would want a rebound, they won’t hesitate to set someone up with you who is far better than your dog-faced ex because they know that people are barely worthy for you

#la squadra x reader #platonic #x reader #comfort #formaggio x reader #illuso x reader #prosciutto x reader #pesci x reader #melone x reader #ghiacchio x #risotto x reader #gelato and sorbet x reader #JoJo's Bizarre Adventure #jjba golden wind #jjba part 5 #la sqaudra #all the foreign language are basically just 'im done'

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potteresque-ire · 4 years ago

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More ask answer about Word of Honour (山河令, WoH) and the so-called “Dangai 101 phenomenon” under the cut ~ with all the M/M relationships shown on screen, does it mean improved acceptance / safety for the c-queer community?

Due to its length (sorry!), I’ve divided the answer into 3 parts: 1) Background 2) Excerpts from the op-eds 3) Thoughts This post is PART 1 ❤️. As usual, please consider the opinions expressed as your local friendly fandomer sharing what they’ve learned, and should, in no ways, be viewed as necessarily true. :)

(TW: homophobic, hateful speech quoted)

After WoH had started airing, I had waited for one of China’s state-controlled media to publish opinion pieces about the show. Specifically, I’d like to know ~ what is the administration’s current take on Dangai (耽改), as a genre? How does it characterise the closeness of the same-sex leads—the closeness that is suppressed when the original IP, of the genre Danmei (耽美) was converted for visual media presentation?

This is important, as China is a country where the government’s attitude becomes the official public attitude. The state opinion pieces will be quoted and parroted, especially if they come from heavy-weight sources (state-controlled media also have their importance/influence hierarchy). Production of the upcoming Dangai dramas will adjust their scripts accordingly. Marketing tactics will also adjust, make sure it doesn’t spread “the wrong message”; Dangai and Danmei dramas have both been pulled off shelves during or immediately after its airing before (Addicted 上癮 and Guardian 鎮魂, respectively), despite having already passing the censorship board.

If a heavy-weight state opinion piece pans the one-lead-fawning-over-the-other scenes in WoH (there are a few of them), for example, scenes / lines of such suggestive nature will likely disappear from the upcoming Dangai dramas for at least a year or two. If the critique spills over to a harsh stance against the presence of queers in Chinese media, all future Dangai dramas can become strict “socialist-brotherhood” stories, their “no homo” message reinforced by, for example, by inserting a female lead (or changing one of the leads to female).

Whether the official public opinion equates the true public opinion or not, public behaviour in China is quickly driven by the official public opinion. Example: the Xi regime’s conservative stance on queer issues has already translated to a quick deterioration of queer tolerance in China; open expressions that were tolerated, even welcomed, just several years ago are now met with significant hostility in the public.

This is a reflection of the nature of their government. A quick thought experiment may explain this. Take … jaywalking. It’s probably fair to say we’ve all committed this “crime” before?

Will you still jaywalk if your government declares it immoral to do so? Where I am, in the United States, the answer is definitely a no. The public will probably laugh at (and make memes about) the poor official who made the declaration, kindly ask the government to do something useful for once (f*** off), and keep jaywalking.

Now, what if the declaration comes with a law that includes a one-year prison term + lifelong criminal record for jaywalking? Let’s say this law is fully executable and irreversible, given this being a thought experiment—nothing you, or the public, can say or do can contest it.

Will you still jaywalk, even if you disagree with government’s stance that the act is immoral? You’ve got a neighbour who continues to defy the law. Will you think twice before letting your young loved ones go out with them?

Very soon, jaywalking becomes “bad”—even though such “badness” had little moral basis at its origin. It is bad because the government has “characterised” it to be so—an authoritarian government that doesn’t allow challenge of the characterisation.

The retention of queer elements in Dangai is the jaywalking in the example. The Chinese government stepping in to characterise (定性) an event, a phenomenon etc is common, and the people know the drill well that they fall in line quickly.

If a powerful state-controlled media publish a negative opinion piece on the queer elements in Dangai / Danmei, therefore, those elements can disappear overnight.

My question had been: will the state do it? The Xi regime has made its distaste for LGBT+ representation in visual media abundantly clear with its NRTA directives. However, while the Chinese government typically puts ideology (意識型態) as its Guiding Principle, exceptions have always been made for one reason. One word.

Money.

TU is a legendary financial success story every production company (Tencent itself included) wants to replicate. As a result, there are ~ 60 Danmei IPs (book canon) with their copyright sold for Dangai dramas; this long line of Danmei dramas in the horizon has been nicknamed “Dangai 101”, after the name of the show “Produce 101” Dd was dance instructor in. These dramas are all competing to be the next TU by profit.

Adoration from fans is nice, but money is what matters.

C-ent is currently in a financial bleak winter. The anti-corruption, anti-tax-fraud campaign started by the Xi regime in 2018, which cumulated to a sudden (and unofficial) collection of 3 years of back-taxes from studios and stars, has drained a significant amount of its capital; the number of new TV dramas being filmed fell 45% between 2018 and 2019, and production companies have been closing by the tens of thousands. The tightening of censorship rules also means production is associated with more risk. The commercial sector outside c-ent is also eager for replications of TU’s success—they need more “top traffic” (頂流) idols like Gg and Dd whose fans are sufficiently devoted to drive the sales of their products. Such “fan economy” would benefit the government, even if it doesn’t have direct stakes in the companies in and outside c-ent. People’s Daily, the Official State Newspaper, previously published a positive opinion piece on fan economy in 2019, estimating its worth at 90 billion RMB (~13.7 billion USD) per year.

But if the state allows the queer elements in Dangai’s to pass the censorship board (NRTA) for profit, how can it do so with the current “No homo” directive in place? From previous experience (scarce as it may be), the queerness has to be sufficiently obvious for the shows to make the profit everyone is wishing for. Dangai dramas in which the leads’ romantic relationship remains subtle have not sold the way TU does, even if they are well-reviewed and feature famous, skilled actors (as Winter Begonia 鬓边不是海棠红 last year.)

NRTA, and the government behind it, can’t just say I’m turning a blind eye to the flirting and touching for the money. What can it say then?

Here’s what I’d thought—what it can say, or do, is to “characterise” these Dangai dramas in a way that leave out its queerness. It did so for TU. TU’s review by the overseas version of People’s Daily devoted a grand total of two characters to describe WWX and LWJ’s relationship—摯友 (“close friend”). The rest of the article was devoted to the drama’s aesthetics, its cultural roots. (The title of the article: 《陳情令》：書寫國風之美 Chen Qing Ling: Writing the Beauty of National Customs).

How could it do that? The State’s power ensuring few questioning voices aside, I’ve been also thinking about the history and definition of Danmei (耽美)—Dangai’s parent genre as the causes. Based on the history and definition, I can think of 3 ways the queer elements in Danmei (耽美) can be characterised by the state, 2 of which provide it with the wiggle room, the movable goalposts it needs should it choose to want to overlook the queerness in Dangai.

The 3 characterisations I’ve thought of, based on the history and definition of Danmei (耽美) are:

1) The queer characterisation, which focuses on its homoerotic element. * Summary of the characterization: Danmei is gay.

2) The “traditional BL” characterisation, which focuses on BL’s historic origin as a “by women, for women” genre. The M/M setup is viewed as an escapist protest against the patriarchy, a rejection of traditional gender roles; displays of M/M closeness are often “candies” for the female gaze. * Summary of the characterization: Danmei is women’s fantasy.

3) The aesthetic characterisation, which focuses on beauty—from the beauty of the characters, the beauty of a world without harm to the romance. * Summary for the characterization: Danmei is pretty.

The queer characterisation (1) is well-understood, and likely the default characterisation if it is to be made by the fraction of i-fandom I’m familiar with. Most i-fans I’ve met, myself included, would likely and automatically associate the M/M relationships in The Untamed (TU) and WoH with queerness.

The “traditional BL” characterisation (2), meanwhile, equates Danmei with BL as the genre of homoerotic works developed in 1970’s Japan for women comic readers, and has been widely interpreted from a feminist point of view.

Under such interpretation of “traditional BL” works, the double male lead setup wasn’t meant to be an accurate depiction of homosexuality. It wasn’t about homosexuality at all. Rather, it was about the removal of women and along with it, the rage, the eye-rolling, the unease women readers had often felt when attempting to interact with mainstream romance novels of the time, in which the female leads had mostly been confined to traditional women roles, and their virtue, their traditional feminine traits.

The M/M setup therefore acted as a “shell” for a het relationship that allowed removal of such social constraints placed on women. The lead with whom the woman audience identified was no longer bound to the traditional role of women, such as being the caregiver of the family. The lead could instead chase their dreams and roam the world, as many contemporary women already did or aspired to do; they were no longer limited to playing the passive party in life and in the relationship—and they enjoyed such freedom without risking the love, the respect the other male protagonist felt for them.

BL, in this traditional sense, has therefore been interpreted as an answer for, and a protest against the heteropatriarchal gender norm still dominant in societies deeply influenced by Confucianism, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China. The M/M setup is, at heart, (het) women’s fantasy. The inclusion of two young-and-beautiful male leads also satisfy “the female gaze” ~ the popularity of BL among het women has therefore been compared to the popularity of lesbian porn among het men. In both cases, the audience is drawn not for the homosexual element but by the presence of double doses of sexual attraction.

(Please forgive me if any of my wording comes as disrespectful! I’m not used to talking about these topics.)

The availability of the “traditional BL” characterisation (2) is key to bypassing queerness as a topic in the discussions of Danmei (耽美).

The aesthetic characterisation (3) is very closely related to 2) in origin, but deserves its own point as a characterisation that can stand on its own, and may be more obscure to the English-speaking fandom given the common English translation of Danmei (耽美) as Boy’s Love.

Boy’s Love, as a name, amplifies the queer characterisation (1) and de-emphasises the aesthetic characterisation (3); Danmei (耽美), meanwhile, does the reverse.

Where does the name Danmei come from?

When BL was first developed in Japan, it used to have a now out-of-fashion genre name: Tanbi. Tanbi was borrowed from same name describing a late 19th century / early 20th century Japanese literary movement, known as Tanbi-ha and was inspired by Aestheticism in England. Aestheticism “centered around the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it need serve no political, didactic, or other purpose”. Along the same line, the core belief of authors of Tanbi-ha was that art should celebrate beauty and reject the portrayal of ugliness in human nature, the darkness of reality:

…Tanbi writers argued that the ideas of naturalism writers such as “objectivism,” “truth is more important than beauty” and so on would “oppress human beings’ desire” so as to “lose beauty and human nature.” Accordingly, they insisted on “acute mental and emotional sensibility” [Ye, 2009].

(Source, with more details on Tanbi.)

Neither romance nor homosexuality were requirements for works in the original Tanbi-ha genre. BL borrowed the name Tanbi because its early authors saw their work created under the same principles: the emphasis on the beauty of their characters, their love (romantic and platonic), in a world that was also beautiful and untouched by ugliness such as sexism and homophobia.

The stubborn persistence on keeping one’s eyes trained on the beautiful, the willingness to turn a blind eye to reality for the sake of the beauty is built-in in the genre’s name. Tanbi meant more than beauty, aesthetics; its kanji form was written as 耽美; 耽 = to sink, drown in, to over-indulge in; 美 = beauty.

Tanbi, therefore, literally means to drown in, to over-indulge in beauty.

Over time, as the genre expanded its writing style, Tanbi eventually fell out of favour as BL’s genre name in Japan. However, as it gained popularity in the Sinosphere in the 1990s, starting with Taiwan and Hong Kong, the kanji of Tanbi was retained as the Chinese name of the genre.

In Mandarin Chinese, 耽美 is pronounced Danmei. A hyperfocus on the aesthetics, the utopian aspects of traditional BL is therefore retained in Danmei by its name. People’s Daily could therefore devote its review of TU on its aesthetics. Realism, including politics and all discussions of social issues, can therefore be swept aside in the name of respecting the genre’s tradition.

I’ve mostly been reading about and observing c-fandom, and I believe these 3 characterisations have all attracted its own kind of fans. Fans who care and talk about queer issues even when it isn’t encouraged by their sociopolitical environment, who shine a light upon these issues in their fan works. Fans who treat the M/M leads as if they were a traditional cishet couple, such as calling one of the leads 老婆 (wife) and assigning him biologically female functions when needed (via, for example, the ABO trope). Fans who insist the works must meet their beauty standards, rejecting those that fail (for example, if the leads are not good looking enough) by claiming they’re there for Danmei, not Danchou (耽醜, “over-indulgence on ugliness”). Fans who are drawn to the genre by a combination of these characterisations.

By the history and definition of the genre, all the above reasons for fanning Danmei are as valid, as legitimate as one another.

I thought about this related question then: are c-fans of the second (traditional BL characterisation) and third (aesthetic characterisation) groups homophobic? When I first asked this question, I—a fan whose fandom experience had been entirely in English-speaking communities—assume the answer was yes. I thought, in particular, the insistence of treating Danmei’s M/M couples as cishet couples in a homosexual shell had to be conscious queer erasure. How can anyone ignore the same-sexness of the leads? How can anyone talk about Danmei without associating it with homosexuality?

However, as I read more—again, specifically about c-fandom, and in Chinese—I realised the answer may be a little more complex.

Previously, I had largely thought about homophobia in terms of individual attitudes. This has to do with my current environment (liberal parts of the United States), in which the choice to accept or reject the queer community has become a close to personal choice. Pride flags fly all over the city, including the city hall, every summer, and most churches welcome the LGBT+ community. I hadn’t considered how an environment in which queers have never enjoyed full social exposure, in which education of related topics is sorely lacking, would affect Danmei’s development as a genre.

In such an environment, it is difficult for Danmei to evolve and incorporate up-to-date understanding of RL queerness.

The consequence I can see is this: Danmei is more likely to be “stuck” in its historical characterisation as (het) women’s fantasy inside than outside the Great Firewall, with its queerness de-emphasised if not erased—and it draws fans who are attracted to this kind of characterisation accordingly. This is, perhaps, reflected by the fact that the (het) women-to-queer ratio of Danmei / BL fans is significantly higher in China than in the West (Table 1 in this article summarises how Danmei / BL fans have split between different genders and sexual orientation in the Sinosphere vs the West in different research studies).

Another driving force I can see for Danmei to retain BL’s traditional feminist and aesthetic characterisations: women in China are not free from the social pressure that led to the birth of BL in 1970’s Japan. While many of them have achieved financial freedom through work and have high education, the young and educated have been subjected to immense pressure to get married and have children especially in the past decade.

In 2007, the China’s state feminist agency, the All-China Women’s Federation (中華全國婦女聯合會), coined the term 剩女 (literally, “leftover women”) for unmarried, urban women over 27 years old. The government started a campaign that, among other things, associated women’s education level with ugliness, and their unmarried status with pickiness, moral degeneracy. The reason behind the campaign: birth rates are plummeting and the state wants educated women, in particular, to nurture a high quality, next generation workforce. More importantly, the government sees a threat in the M/F sex imbalance (high M, low F) that has commonly been attributed to the country’s “one child policy” between 1979-2015, which encouraged female infanticide / abortion of female foetuses in a culture that favours surname-carrying boys. The state fears the unmarried men will become violent and/or gay, leading to “social instability and insecurity”. Therefore, it wants all women, in particular those who are educated, to enter the “wife pool” for these unmarried men. (Source 1, Source 2: Source 2 is a short, recommended read).

For Chinese women, therefore, patriarchy and sexism is far from over. Escapist fantasies where sexism is removed—by removing women from the picture—are therefore here to stay.

Danmei is therefore not queer literature (同志文學). The difference between Danmei and queer literature is highlighted by this reportedly popular saying (and its similar variations) in some Danmei communities:

異性戀只是傳宗接代，同性戀才是真愛 Heterosexuality is only for reproduction. Only homosexuality is true love.

The attitude towards heterosexuality is one of distaste, viewed as a means to an end the speaker has no interest in. On the contrary, homosexuality is idealised, reflecting the disregard / lack of understanding of some Danmei fans have towards the RL hardships of c-queers. The ignorance may be further propagated by gate-keeping by some Danmei fans for safety reasons, keeping queer discussions away from their communities for fear that their favourite hangouts would meet the same uncertain fate of other communities that previously held open queer discussions, such as the Weibo gay and lesbian supertopics. Such gatekeeping can, again, be easily enforced using tradition as argument: the beauty 美 is Tanbi and Danmei (耽美), remember, includes the beauty of utopia, where ugly truths such as discrimination do not enter the picture. A Danmei that explores, for example, the difficulty of coming out of the closet is no longer Danmei, by its historical, aesthetic definition.

[I’ve therefore read about c-queers viewing Danmei with suspicion, if not downright hostility; they believe the genre, by ignoring their RL challenges and casting them as beautiful, even perfect individuals, and in some cases, by fetishising them and their relationships, only leads to more misconceptions about the queer community. Dangai, meanwhile, has been viewed with even more distaste as potential weapons by the state to keep gays in the closet; if the government can shove the Danmei characters into the “socialist brotherhood” closet, it can shove them as well.

I haven’t yet, however, been able to tease out the approximate fraction of c-queers whose views of Danmei and Dangai is negative. The opposing, positive view of the genres is this: they still provide LGBT+ visibility, which is better than none and it would’ve been close to none without Danmei and Dangai; while Danmei may skim over the hardships of being queer, fan works of Danmei are free to explore them—and they have.

This article provides insights on this issue. @peekbackstage’s conversation with a Chinese film/TV director in Clubhouse is also well worth a read.]

That said, Danmei can only be dissociated from the queer characterisation if there’s a way to talk about the genre without evoking words and phrases that suggest homosexuality—something that is difficult to do with English. Is there?

In Chinese, I’d venture to say … almost. There’s almost a way. Close enough to pass.

The fact that M/M in traditional BL has been developed and viewed not as queer but as a removal of F also means this: queerness isn’t “built-in” into the language of Danmei. The name Danmei itself already bypasses a major “queer checkpoint”: it’s impossible to refer to a genre called Boy’s Love and not think about homosexuality.

Here’s one more important example of such bypass. Please let me, as an excuse to put these beautiful smiles in my blog, show this classic moment from TU; this can be any gif in which the leads are performing such suggestive romantic gestures:

How can I describe this succinctly? In English?

Two men acting in love? Er. That’s… the definition of gay, almost.

Two men acting gay? Well. GAY.

Right. Fine. Let’s go negative. Queerbaiting? … Still gay, because the word “queer” is in there.

[Pie note: for the record, I don’t think TU or WoH is queer-baiting.]

Personally, I find it impossible to describe the GIF above in English that I do not automatically associate with RL romantic love between two men, with homosexuality. But can I do it in Chinese?

… Yes.

There’s a term, 賣腐 (pronounced “maifu”), literally, “selling 賣 the rot 腐”, derived from the term known among i-fans as fujoshi and written, in kanji, as 腐女. Fujoshi, or 腐 (“rot”) 女 (“women”), describes the largely (het) female audience of the Japanese BL genre (>80%, according to Wikipedia). Originated as a misogynistic insult towards female Japanese BL fans in the 2000s, fujoshi was later reclaimed by the same female BL fans who now use the self-depreciative term as acknowledgement of their interest being “rotten”, for BL’s disregard of the society’s traditional expectations on women.

賣腐 is therefore to “sell the rot” to the rotten women; ie. the suggestive romantic gestures, exemplified by the GIF above, between the M/M leads are catering, performing fan service to their target audience.

[賣腐 is also a term one will see in the state opinion pieces.]

There’s nothing gay about this term.

I’ve therefore found it possible to talk and think in Chinese about Danmei while giving little thought to queerness. The history and definition of Danmei allow that.

Again, I’m not saying any of this to excuse homophobia among in Danmei and Dangai fandoms. The point I’m trying to make is this — given that Danmei has three potential characterisations, two of which can be discussed without abundantly evoking queer concepts and vocabularies, given that history of Danmei, as a genre, already favoured characterisation 2 (traditional BL), the government addressing homosexuality in its opinions on Danmei and Dangai is far from a given.

By extension, the popularity of Dangai may mean a lot or little to c-queers; by extension, the state can approve / disapprove of Danmei and Dangai in a manner independent of its stance on homosexuality, which is itself inconsistent and at times, logic-deying (example to come…).

This is both good and bad, from the perspective of both the government and the c-queer community.

For the government: as discussed, the “triality” of Danmei allows the state to “move the goalpost” depending on what it tries to achieve. It has characterisations 2 (the traditional BL characterisation) and 3 (the aesthetic characterisation) as excuses to let Dangai dramas pass the censorship board should it want their profit and also, their promise of expanding the country’s soft power overseas by drawing an international audience. These characterisations also allow the state to throw cold water on the popularity of Danmei / Dangai should it desire, for reasons other than its queer suggestions—despite the Xi regime’s push against open expressions of queerness (including by activism, in media), it has also been careful about not demonising c-queers in words, and has countered other people’s attempts to do so.

Why may the government want to throw cold water on Danmei and Dangai? They are still subculture, which the state has also viewed with suspicion. In 2018, a NRTA directive explicitly requested that “c-ent programmes should not use entertainers with tattoos; (those associated with) hip-hop culture, sub-cultures (non-mainstream cultures), decadent cultures.” (”另外，总局明确要求节目中纹身艺人、嘻哈文化、亚文化（非主流文化）、丧文化（颓废文化）不用。”).

Subculture isn’t “core socialist values”. More importantly, it’s difficult to keep up with and control subculture. 環球網, the website co-owned by People’s Daily and Global Times (環球時報), ie, The State Newspaper and The State Tabloid, famously said this on its Weibo, on 2020/03/04, re: 227:

老了，没看懂为什么战。晚安。 Getting old. Can’t figure out what the war is about. Good night.

The State also cannot stop subculture from happening. It doesn’t have the resources to quell every single thing that become popular among its population of 1.4 billion. What it can do to make sure these subcultures stay subcultures, kept out of sight and mind of the general public.

Characterisation 1 (the queer characterisation), meanwhile, remains available to the state should it wish to drop the axe on Dangai for its queer elements. I’m including, as “queer elements”, presentation of men as too “feminine” for the state—which has remained a sore point for the government. This axe have a reason to drop in the upcoming months: July 23rd, 2021 will be the 100th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the state may desire to have only uniformed forces and muscled, gun-toting “masculine” men gracing the screens.

What about for c-queers and their supporters (including group I fans)? What good and bad can the multiple characterisations of the genres do for them?

For c-queers and their supporters (including group I fans), their acceptance and safety are helped by the Dangai genre, by the Dangai 101 phenomenon, if and only if the state both characterises the queer elements in these dramas as queer (characterisation 1) AND their opinions of them are positive.

Personally, I had viewed this to be unlikely from the start, because a queer characterisation would mean the censorship board has failed to do its job, which is embarrassing for the Chinese government.

Characterisations 2) and 3) are not bad for c-queers and their supporters, however, and definitely not “enemies” of Characterisation 1); they can not only serve as covers for the queer elements in Dangai to reach their audience, but also, they can act as protective padding for the LGBT+ community if the content or (very aggressive) marketing of the Dangai dramas displease the government — with the understanding, again, that the “traditional BL” arm of the Danmei community is itself also highly vulnerable by being a subculture, and so its padding effect is limited and it also deserves protection.

The downside to achieving LGBT+ visibility through Dangai is, of course and as mentioned, that these dramas are, ultimately, deeply unrealistic depictions of the c-queers. The promotion of these dramas, which has focused on physical interactions between the male leads for “candies”, can encourage even more fetishising of queers and queer relationships. The associated (character) CP culture that makes and breaks CPs based on the dramas’ airing cycle may also fuel negative perception of queer relationships as attention-seeking behaviour, something that can be initiated and terminated at will and for the right price.

Finally, with all this said, which characterisation(s) have the government taken re: Dangai and/or WOH? And what opinions has it given to its characterisations?

PART 1 <-- YOU ARE HERE PART 2 PART 3

#pie metas #yizhan #bjyx

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evilwickedme · 3 years ago

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ok so to sum up my feelings for leverage: redemption, season 1(a): (long post warning, there’s a tl;dr at the end)

I knew that Hardison wouldn’t be in most of the season due to Aldis Hodge being a busy bee nowadays, but I didn’t realize that meant he’d only be around for the first two episodes. He was sorely missed, not only because of my attachment to him, but also because he’s usually the grounding factor in the group dynamic, and his role as info guy and tech guy was split evenly between two characters who had their own issues.

That said, Hardison is absolutely a highlight of the two episodes he’s in. his speech about redemption was everything I could’ve hoped for (plus, more evidence for the Jewish!Hardison pile...). I wish we’d gotten to see more of his dynamic with Breanna because what we saw was funny and sweet and we don’t generally get to see Hardison taking care of somebody who so desperately needs taking care of. I hope that Aldis Hodge is around for more episodes in 1(b), because what we’re left with feels a little hollow.

Sticking to original leverage characters for now, for the most part the leverage crew still felt true to the original series as characters, even if the show itself was a little bit confused at times. The actors understand their characters and embody them so well that I think one could give them the trashiest script ever and they’d still sell it. Sophie is a particular focus in 1(a) because of Nate’s death, and she’s particularly well written as a result.

That said, I’m super bitter that we saw little to no mastermind!Parker. Parker’s character being given the mastermind role was a big deal and it feels like they’re walking it back because they feel uncomfortable with it. It is eventually given an in-text excuse, but literally in the last episode, and it was not a particularly convincing reason, and in fact contradicted moments from previous episodes (Sophie leaving for a client meeting and ignoring Parker in ep3 comes to mind). It’s frustrating, it makes the end of the original leverage feel pointless, and letting Parker make a decision once in a while is not the same thing at all. The original series repeatedly showed us that while everyone in the team had their strengths, Parker works problems and solves them in unique, interesting ways, and other characters’ days in the limelight tended to be comedic or even failures. It’s a broken promise, and a pretty major broken promise at that.

On a more positive note, Parker’s dynamic with literally everyone was fantastic. She’s possibly the best written character this season. They’ve taken the autism out of the subtext and into the text (although obviously still undiagnosed), and given her coping mechanisms that were taken seriously in the text even when they were played for laughs, which I appreciated. Her attempts to mentor Breanna were sweet, her friendship with Sophie was electric and at times (CRIMES) hilarious, and as usual, she has a fantastic dynamic with Eliot that makes my heart burst. If you don’t think they’re romantically involved, at least acknowledge there’s a life partnership here. They’ve spent the last decade together.

(We’ll get to Harry.)

Eliot isn’t given much arc-wise, which is frustrating since he’s my favorite. He’s being presented as the goal at the end of a redemption arc, ie to keep working at it every day until your soul heals or whatever, and it doesn’t reflect the message they’re trying to convey via Hardison’s speech and our two new characters. He’s got his moments, but I think they under utilized his potential.

Breanna!!! Breanna’s my new favorite, except for Eliot. She’s hilarious, she’s insecure, she’s nerdy and excited in a way that’s similar to Hardison but still distinct in its inherent teenage-girl-ness and I LOVE IT. Unlike the previous series, where Hardison’s “age of the geek” was often a joke played on Hardison, we’re at the point where Eliot and Parker are both right there with him, and so they accept and even appreciate Breanna’s nerdiness. Also, canon gay character? In YOUR Leverage? It’s more likely than you think.

(No, I never thought they’d make ot3 canon on screen. I hoped, but I didn’t think it would actually happen.)

I think Breanna’s the character that will be the most interesting to see grow. She’s got a lot of potential and a list of crimes a mile long (or more). I adore her with all my heart. I want to see her tiktok account.

Harry. Oh, Harry.

It took me a while, but I do like Harry. It took a while, because the narrative positioned him at the same level as Nate back in episode 1 of original Leverage. But in episode 1 we didn’t know the other characters. We had Nate as the POV character, and so we cared about him because we were seeing the world through his eyes. (This is TV Studies 101. I know this, because I took TV Studies 101 in 2019.) In Leverage: Redemption, we no longer have a POV character, for several reasons:

Nate, previously the POV character, is dead.

As it is, by mid-season 3 of leverage Nate was no longer a POV character. This is, coincidentally, the point where the leverage writers realized they had four other characters in the main cast they could do something with, and in-universe, Nate accepted that he was a thief, not a special Good Man.

Sophie is sort of a POV character for the first episode of the revival, but only for the first few minutes. Afterwards, the series settles into the groove of seasons 3-5, i.e., the entire crew is our POV. We know our crew, and we love them as is.

Narratively, however, Redemption insists on positing Harry as the POV character, because it is his redemption we are pursuing most vehemently. And I think they really relied on us already knowing the actor - I’ve never seen him in anything before, so to me he was a completely fresh face and they put almost no effort into selling him to me. Beyond being competent and consistently mildly baffled by the antics of the leverage crew, I honestly don’t know who this man is by the end of EIGHT episodes with him. I have a much better handle on Breanna by the end of 1(a), and I can tell you I knew all five of the original leverage crew better by the end of the first episode of the original series than I do Harry. What’s the name of his daughter, John Rogers. Is he still married. How old is the daughter. Why is none of this worth mentioning. Give him a sense of humor that isn’t reacting to other people’s shenanigans. I’m so frustrated. It’s bad writing.

I did manage to grow to like Harry by the end, but I’m pretty sure this is down to Noah Wyle’s charismatic portrayal of an under-developed character, at least partially. And I never stopped being frustrated at not knowing who this man is at all.

The two highlights of the season are undoubtedly episodes five and six. Episode five was the first time I felt like the episode was more than a collection of good moments between the main cast and mediocre moments between the main cast and also the main plot. The issues with pacing and tone that I suffered through for most of the season were mostly non-existent in ep5 and 6, and at least in episode 5 I attribute that to the pared down cast. They had time to focus not only on our actual characters - Sophie, Parker, Breanna - but also on the case. This is the only client from 1(a) I am going to remember next week without googling it first, mark my words.

Episode six worked for the exact opposite reason - it completely disregarded the client and plot and immersed itself in the characters. Breanna gets a moment to shine, but everybody else gets their bits and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the script that was most fun to write. The characters felt natural, real, and captured the found-family dynamic that’s been missing all season for the first time.

While episode 2 is the weakest episode, I don’t actually have much to say about it. I am disappointed in episode 8. For a mid-season finale, I really expected them to do something. Instead, it was an episode about Nate Ford that copped out of being about Nate Ford (both with fake-Nate and with the new version of him being relayed to us). I would have told the writers to give that energy back to episode 1 and write an episode that’s about anybody who isn’t Harry, oh my God. I know I said I grew to like him but so many episodes were about Harry. He’s the newbie! Why didn’t Hardison get an episode that was actually about him, considering he was only around for two episodes? Why does Eliot have to be the butt of the joke when the theme of the series should directly tie back to him in a much more meaningful way? The last episode parodies their own tagline by saying Eliot isn’t just a hitter, but it deftly avoids noticing that they’ve turned him into nothing more than very muscly comic relief, including in that very episode!

Also, I hated the Marshal. Eliot actively looked uncomfortable around her.

tl;dr

The season took a while, that’s definitely true. But it did find its footing eventually, and by the halfway mark of 1(a) it finally felt cohesive again. The characters were played fantastically even when they weren’t well-written, and if nothing else, the humor landed every time. It still has its kinks and problems to work out, but if you look at it as a brand new show rather than a continuation of one that went off the air over eight years ago, it’s actually doing rather well. I’m choosing to judge it in both lights - according to its own standards, it establishes its identity in episode five; according to Leverage standards, it establishes its connection to its roots in episode six. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed 1(a), and continue to have high hopes for 1(b).

fic writing will commence in three, two, one...

#leverage #leverage meta #leverage redemption #leverage ot3 #parker leverage #alec hardison #sophie devereaux #eliot spencer #breanna casey #harry wilson #mine

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filmmakerdreamst · 4 years ago

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Xena: Warrior Princess Review

During Pride Month 2020, I finally got around to watch ‘Xena’. A show that had been in my to-watch list for years, but never got around to start. And when I finally did, I was pleasantly surprised. It was not what I expected and it was everything I think my 11 year old self would have loved.

The one thing that surprised me about the show, was the lack of packaging. Even though it was a fantasy, it also played with different kinds of genres too. I’ve talked about this before in my other review - ‘Xena’ was made at a time when TV had very few rules/rarely had a set audience, since there were parts of the show that were clearly for kids and there were other parts that were clearly for adults (therefore had much more flexibility). I admired how they weren’t afraid to break barriers and touch on deep themes such as religion, morality, redemption, spirituality, motherhood, forgiveness etc - even more than shows of today are able. I also loved how they played into the idea of ‘murder’ and how much it can damage a person - not just the person who commits the act, but the many people affected afterwards. I wasn’t expecting it to be that extreme. It made me think that this must of been the inspiration for ‘Game of Thrones’.

I see a lot of comments here and there, saying how ‘cheesy and terrible’ it was but to just accept it because its part of the fun. And while like any show it does suffer from the occasional spell of bad writing (the whole of season 5) but it was also shown to be very aware of that fact and never took itself too seriously - unlike some shows I could mention.

And regarding the ‘cheese’ factor (what 90s show wasn’t) It definitely can be, but I would call it ‘camp’ and ‘experimental’ more than anything else. (Don’t diss the poor use of CGI - I’m personally sympathetic to what was avaliable to them at the time) The style of humour reminded me of Taika Waititi’s filmmaking. If you’ve watched any of his films such as ‘Hunt for The Wilderpeople’ or ‘Jojo Rabbit’, then you know what I’m talking about. I liked how little they cared about being accurate or logical, which added to the ‘bonkers’ element in the show - which you can see in all of Taika Waititi’s films.

In all seriousness, a show centered around two women in their late twenties, who are realistic sizes (not trying to play teenagers). One of whom is a reformed mass murderer, who has lived a life experience, trying to do good in the world for the first time, picking the other one up who has no life experience prior (after they bugged them until they said ‘ok fine’) in their path to redemption. Just two women who become friends travelling the world together, fighting crime, having a laff, learning from one another without any toxicity - when suddenly when the stakes are raised - they realise ‘oh I'm actually falling in love with this person’ I have watched a lot of badly written shows in my childhood enough to know that, that’s not ‘cheesy’. I’ve never seen a story like that in my entire life. I’m not at all surprised that Russel T Davis was inspired by it while writing the Doctor and Rose’s relationship in ‘Doctor Who’ since he’s gay himself.

What’s more amazing about their love story is how they’re both develop as separate people as well. There was this video essay explaining ‘Why you should watch Angel’ the spin off series to Buffy; how ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer ‘was all about growing up and ‘Angel’ was all about being an adult. With Xena: Warrior Princess, you have both of those stories at the same time.

Xena’s character was such a multifaceted experience to watch. And I can’t imagine anyone else who could play her as well as Lucy Lawless. What planet did they get that actress from? She's flawless! The amount of skill she has to put herself into a very physical role is astonishing. I personally had a love/hate relationship with her character all series long. Not in the way that I hated her, just that I couldn’t trust if she was all good or bad, which I know was intentional on the writers part. I haven’t seen a character quite like her before. She felt very much like a fallen angel; almost like the villain of her own story. Some of my favourite episodes come from fleshing out her character and dark past (‘Locked up and Tied Down’ is one of them) which reminds the audience that's she's not the stereotypical hero everyone expects. I loved her transformation from being this incredibly stoic warrior to being content and happy with who she is in season six, all because of a woman she fell in love with along the way.

I’ve always thought of Gabrielle as the real hero and narrator of ‘Xena’. She’s the prime example of ‘a normal person becoming extrodinary’. Gabrielle’s coming of age story starting out as an innocent girl from a poor village dreaming of adventure, and ending as this vicious warrior who realises the ‘adventure’ wasn’t how she made it out to be is honestly the best character arc that I’ve ever seen. I loved how travelling with Xena made her realise her passion for writing (which was never going to happen in her home town, given the ‘sexist’ and ‘heteronormative’ ideas) and that she became a amazon princess like Xena. In regards to her sexuality, which is more up for debate than Xena’s (which I think we can all agree is bisexual) I personally interpret her as gay, just in terms of how she was written. Theres this moment in season 4 where she's being held up her hair, and Xena “symbolically” cuts it off ‘freeing her’. And she never really gets with a man afterwards, unless she’s being ‘possessed. It reminded me of a moment in one of Hayao Miyasaki’s films ‘Laputa, Castle in the Sky’ where the bad guy Moska shoots Sheeta’s ‘princess hair off’ which symbolises her transition from child to adult.

The cinematography was breathtaking. There was some great utilisation of New Zealand as the scenery. So was the soundtrack. You could tell it was made by experienced filmmakers. One of my favourite things about the show was the domestic elements - moments in the show where time seemed to stop - which made the world around the characters seem very real and magical. Even though it was a show that featured a lot of action/adventure, there was also this gentleness to it as well. For example, you could feel the wetness of the rain, the warmth of the sun and the clashing of the waves. This technique is used in Hayao Miayasaki’s work a lot .

The technique is referred to as ‘MA’ 空虚 meaning emptiness in Japanese. ‘Miyasaki describes this as the time between a clap’

“If you just have non stop action, with no breathing space at all, its just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension” - Hayao Miyasaki

youtube

The episode ‘A Day in the Life’ in season two is a really good example of this technique being used.

To my understanding, they used a lot of the local actors in New Zealand, which according to Lucy Lawless, consisted of ‘African immigrants and other different ethnicites’. It was so refreshing to see such a diverse show (despite some slip ups) especially in the 90s. I appreciated the idea that if the actors or extras couldn’t do an ‘american accent’ people could just talk in their natural speech which was also very refreshing.

The LGBT representation was surprisingly amazing. I never expected so many queer characters in one show - especially under the censors. There was this one episode where they had a trans woman - played by an actual trans actress - win a beauty contest. It made me cry. Not to mention the actress was an aids activist. It was actually Lucy Lawless’ idea to kiss her which was incredibly controversial at that time considering how everyone thought you could catch aids just by kissing. I can definitey see how it validated people back in the 90s.

When people told me that Xena: Warrior Princess was one of the greatest love stories, I thought they were exaggerating a little. But no, watching the show in context, I found out that it really is. Despite its obvious restrictions, It made me realise (regarding token gay couples today) how often television writers rely on physicality and drama to convey a ‘love story’ and how much of it is actually pandering the audience. One of the reasons why Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship felt so genuine is because it was built on mutual respect/compassion and they were also best friends. I felt like I was witnessing something very real and private. It didn’t need kissing scenes or drama to make it interesting.

It really helped that most of the writers were queer also. There’s this opening scene in season 4, panning over to Gabrielle giving Xena a massage (metaphor for sex - because they weren’t able to show that on screen) which I consider to be one of the most iconic scenes in media - considering how I wanted to sick up my supper when I watched the 10 minute ‘empty’ explicit sex scene in ‘Blue in the Warmest Colour’. The difference when something is written by a queer women vs a straight man.

Because the creators weren’t allowed to write their love story in the normal way, due to the studio forbidding them to, they found creative ways to showcase that love on screen - which made for a very magical/sensual experience. And I can safely say, if anyone has doubts about watching ‘Xena’, whenever I expected to be queer baited at a few points in the show, I was proved wrong time and time again. It’s the most romantical show I’ve ever seen in my life!

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weyassinebentalb · 3 years ago

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Gaza Conflict Stokes 'Identity Crisis' for Young American Jews

Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel.

As a child in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said.

It was a refuge in his mind when white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or kids in college grabbed his shirt, mimicking a “South Park” episode to steal his “Jew gold.”

But his feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears someone make anti-Israel statements.

“It is an identity crisis,” Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and weird.”

As the violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s long-standing strife in a very different context, with very different pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

The Israel of their lifetime has been powerful, no longer appearing to some to be under constant existential threat. The violence comes after a year when mass protests across the United States have changed how many Americans see issues of racial and social justice. The pro-Palestinian position has become more common, with prominent progressive members of Congress offering impassioned speeches in defense of the Palestinians on the House floor. At the same time, reports of anti-Semitism are rising across the country.

Divides between some American Jews and Israel’s right-wing government have been growing for more than a decade, but under the Trump administration those fractures that many hoped would heal became a crevasse. Politics in Israel have also remained fraught, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-tenured government forged allegiances with Washington. For young people who came of age during the Trump years, political polarization over the issue only deepened.

Many Jews in America remain unreservedly supportive of Israel and its government. Still, the events of recent weeks have left some families struggling to navigate both the crisis abroad and the wide-ranging response from American Jews at home. What is at stake is not just geopolitical, but deeply personal. Fractures are intensifying along lines of age, observance and partisan affiliation.

In suburban Livingston, New Jersey, Meara Ashtivker, 38, has been afraid for her father-in-law in Israel, who has a disability and is not able to rush to the stairwell to shelter when he hears the air-raid sirens. She is also scared as she sees people in her progressive circles suddenly seem anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, she said.

Ashtivker, whose husband is Israeli, said she loved and supported Israel, even when she did not always agree with the government and its actions.

“It’s really hard being an American Jew right now,” she said. “It is exhausting and scary.”

Some young, liberal Jewish activists have found common cause with Black Lives Matter, which explicitly advocates for Palestinian liberation, concerning others who see that allegiance as anti-Semitic.

The recent turmoil is the first major outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza for which Aviva Davis, who graduated this spring from Brandeis University, has been “socially conscious.”

“I’m on a search for the truth, but what’s the truth when everyone has a different way of looking at things?” Davis said.

Alyssa Rubin, 26, who volunteers in Boston with IfNotNow, a network of Jewish activists who want to end Jewish American support for Israeli occupation, has found protesting for the Palestinian cause to be its own form of religious observance.

She said she and her 89-year-old grandfather ultimately both want the same thing, Jewish safety. But “he is really entrenched in this narrative that the only way we can be safe is by having a country,” she said, while her generation has seen that “the inequality has become more exacerbated.”

In the protest movements last summer, “a whole new wave of people were really primed to see the connection and understand racism more explicitly,” she said, “understanding the ways racism plays out here, and then looking at Israel/Palestine and realizing it is the exact same system.”

But that comparison is exactly what worries many other American Jews, who say the history of white American slaveholders is not the correct frame for viewing the Israeli government or the global Jewish experience of oppression.

At Temple Concord, a Reform synagogue in Syracuse, New York, teenager after teenager started calling Rabbi Daniel Fellman last week, wondering how to process seeing Black Lives Matter activists they marched with last summer attack Israel as “an apartheid state.”

“The reaction today is different because of what has occurred with the past year, year and a half, here,” Fellman said. “As a Jewish community, we are looking at it through slightly different eyes.”

Nearby at Sha’arei Torah Orthodox Congregation of Syracuse, teenagers were reflecting on their visits to Israel and on their family in the region.

“They see it as Hamas being a terrorist organization that is shooting missiles onto civilian areas,” Rabbi Evan Shore said. “They can’t understand why the world seems to be supporting terrorism over Israel.”

In Colorado, a high school senior at Denver Jewish Day School said he was frustrated at the lack of nuance in the public conversation. When his social media apps filled with pro-Palestinian memes last week, slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Zionism is a call for an apartheid state,” he deactivated his accounts.

“The conversation is so unproductive, and so aggressive, that it really stresses you out,” Jonas Rosenthal, 18, said. “I don’t think that using that message is helpful for convincing the Israelis to stop bombing Gaza.”

Compared with their elders, younger American Jews are overrepresented on the ends of the religious affiliation spectrum: a higher share are secular, and a higher share are Orthodox.

Ari Hart, 39, an Orthodox rabbi in Skokie, Illinois, has accepted the fact that his Zionism makes him unwelcome in some activist spaces where he would otherwise be comfortable. College students in his congregation are awakening to that same tension, he said. “You go to a college campus and want to get involved in anti-racism or social justice work, but if you support the state of Israel, you’re the problem,” he said.

Hart sees increasing skepticism in liberal Jewish circles over Israel’s right to exist. “This is a generation who are very moved and inspired by social justice causes and want to be on the right side of justice,” Hart said. “But they’re falling into overly simplistic narratives, and narratives driven by true enemies of the Jewish people.”

Overall, younger American Jews are less attached to Israel than older generations: About half of Jewish adults under 30 describe themselves as emotionally connected to Israel, compared with about two-thirds of Jews over age 64, according to a major survey published last week by the Pew Research Center.

And though the U.S. Jewish population is 92% white, with all other races combined accounting for 8%, among Jews ages 18 to 29 that rises to 15%.

In Los Angeles, Rachel Sumekh, 29, a first-generation Iranian American Jew, sees complicated layers in the story of her own Persian family. Her mother escaped Iran on the back of a camel, traveling by night until she got to Pakistan, where she was taken in as a refugee. She then found asylum in Israel. She believes Israel has a right to self-determination, but she also found it “horrifying” to hear an Israeli ambassador suggest other Arab countries should take in Palestinians.

“That is what happened to my people and created this intergenerational trauma of losing our homeland because of hatred,” she said.

The entire situation feels too volatile and dangerous for many people to even want to discuss, especially publicly.

Violence against Jews is increasingly close to home. Last year the third-highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States were recorded since the Anti-Defamation League began cataloging them in 1979, according to a report released by the civil rights group last month. The ADL recorded more than 1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment in 2020, a 10% increase from the previous year. In Los Angeles, the police are investigating a sprawling attack on sidewalk diners at a sushi restaurant Tuesday as an anti-Semitic hate crime.

Outside Cleveland, Jennifer Kaplan, 39, who grew up in a modern Orthodox family and who considers herself a centrist Democrat and a Zionist, remembered studying abroad at Hebrew University in 2002, and being in the cafeteria minutes before it was bombed. Now she wondered how the Trump era had affected her inclination to see the humanity in others, and she wished her young children were a bit older so she could talk with them about what is happening.

“I want them to understand that this is a really complicated situation, and they should question things,” she said. “I want them to understand that this isn’t just a, I don’t know, I guess, utopia of Jewish religion.”

Esther Katz, the performing arts director at the Jewish Community Center in Omaha, Nebraska, has spent significant time in Israel. She also attended Black Lives Matter protests in Omaha last summer and has signs supporting the movement in the windows of her home.

She has watched with a sense of betrayal as some of her allies in that movement have posted online about their apparently unequivocal support for the Palestinians, and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. “I’ve had some really tough conversations,” said Katz, a Conservative Jew. “They’re not seeing the facts, they’re just reading the propaganda.”

Her three children, who range in age from 7 to 13, are now wary of a country that is for Katz one of the most important places in the world. “They’re like, ‘I don’t understand why anyone would want to live in Israel, or even visit,’” she said. “That breaks my heart.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

source https://www.techno-90.com/2021/05/gaza-conflict-stokes-identity-crisis.html

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rilakoya · 4 years ago

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No Place Like Home

A Perspective! and Reality!AU

Word Count: 2.2K

Warnings: Raw honesty and social justice themes

A/N: Personal experiences ahead. I call it an AU because sometimes we’re so into escapism that reality feels like the fantasy.

6:20 pm

“OMG, social media is so dead today!”

It’s Tuesday after the protests have begun, and my roommate is bitching and demanding his privilege. I like to believe that he means well, but he’s also a diva, and complaints are his forte.

“Well, it’s Blackout Tuesday-” I begin, but he cuts me off, eager to make his point, true to form.

“No, look, I get it. Really I do. But all I keep seeing is a black screen. I keep my phone on dark mode for a reason. I don’t want to have to keep downloading games because I need something to occupy my time today.”

Need. That’s definitely a feeling I’m familiar with. I need a sense of false security in order to leave my house and interact with others in a way that meets social expectations. I need a keen sense of self and social awareness and nimble cultural reflexes in order to ensure that I’m not perceived as angry or bitter in my responses to the way the world treats me. So what if I actually am, in fact, angry. Society has taught me that it deems my anger irrelevant, unworthy of notice, and I have been conditioned to recognize that showing it doesn’t get me what I want or need. Which makes me think again about my roommate’s commentary. He needs social media to be more lively, despite the fact that entire people groups are protesting unjust and inhumane treatment. And I need hope that my brothers won’t occupy body bags simply because they exist today.

I guess each person has their own struggles.

I’m a fiction writer. And at the risk of sounding boastful, I’m pretty good at it. But that’s just because good fiction requires a healthy dose of imagination, and I’m a master.

I have to be.

Every day since I was a little girl, I wake up and imagine that the fair rules of engagement apply to me. I imagine that I may expect the same level of courtesy and respect as my fairer-skinned counterparts.

In school, when my teachers would unspokenly expect me to work twice as hard to receive the same level of acceptance, I imagined that they did the same with all the children. When my scores indicated that I was a highly gifted student, multiple grade levels above my peers, but was frequently accused of cheating, plagiarism, and other forms of academic dishonesty because my superiors were unable or unwilling to accept that a little black girl could have possibly produced such results, I imagined a world where education systems were tailored to students and where teachers and administrators saw the value in children rather than just their preconceived notions about them because of the color of their skin.

When people granted me interviews because of the “normal” name on my resume and the professionally “white” sound of my voice, only to thank me after minimal interviews and promise to call once they saw me, I imagined that they recognized that my professional experience and qualifications were worth more than the wage that their budget permitted, instead of acknowledging that they often chose to hire someone who was less qualified but whiter than me, and when they paid said person more, I imagined that I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed doing that type of job anyway or working at that company anyway. Even though it was the same at many companies.

When people tell me that I am “pretty for a Black girl,” or “too pretty to ‘just’ be Black,” as though being Black isn’t already the most blessed form in creation, I imagine that what they’re really saying is, “you’re so fucking gorgeous that I don’t even know how to compliment you properly, so please forgive me while I babble like a moron and potentially insult you. I’m so awestruck that I just can’t help myself.”

I wrote my first smut during one of many unjust police stops, when the only purpose of the detainment was to harass me and remind me who was in control. I imagined that it was really a sexy roleplay and that I liked it. And when the trauma and anxiety of constantly wondering if I’m about to be stopped once again for Driving While Black threaten to be too much, I imagine that I’m really just in my house, writing it all down for a story. Even though the stories carry too much shame for me to comfortably share. I imagine that’s all just part of the process.

When I interact with the world, and no matter what, am told that I’m either “too much” or “not enough,” sometimes both at the same time, I imagine that what they’re really saying is that because I originate from the beginnings of creation, because I have both the secrets of the Earth and royalty in my blood, I don’t fit the mold, and they don’t know how to process my greatness. And this enables me to smile when I feel like shattering into a million pieces, when I’m reminded of how I don’t meet the social standard, how I don’t fit in.

Most of all, every day I imagine what it would be like to feel like I truly have a place on this vast Earth that I can safely call home. Home is where we are safe, where we are welcomed, where we belong.

I was born in Germany, but I don’t belong there.

I’ve lived in Mexico and Guatemala, but it’s not safe for me there.

Some of my ancestors were from Africa, but it’s a large continent, made up of many countries, all foreign to me because of cultural eradication, so I could visit, but really I don’t belong there.

My forebears were brought to the Americas as slaves, worked like dogs, and treated as less than animals, and although early settlers were considered “Americans” relatively quickly, after four centuries, I still don’t belong here.

I’m not even 40, but I was born during the Cold War, in a country that has successfully recovered from antisemitism, but not from antiblack sentiment.

Both of my parents were born before the Civil Rights Act was passed, in the middle of the Civils Rights Movement.

My grandparents were born near the end of the Great Depression and lived under Jim Crow law. My grandparents. The ones who told me stories while holding me on their knees, the ones who spent their lives sweating and striving for me to have better.

My grandma’s grandma was a slave. My dad remembers an aunt (a great-aunt) coming to his school in elementary to talk about the fact that she had been born a slave.

I think that people forget that it wasn’t that long ago, forget that the tyranny and oppression has gone on for so long.

They forget that Europeans have been enslaving Africans since the 15th century. For those who hated school, that means the 1400s. Slaves were brought to the Americas as early as 1503. The only reason we didn’t reach the country we now call the U.S. until the early 1600s was because it took England that long to decide to colonize the area.

They forget that in my great-great-grandparents’ time, in my great-grandparents’ time, in my grandparents’ time, at the time my parents were born, I could have been beaten, raped, falsely accused, cheated, ignored, taken advantage of, or killed just for the color of my skin.

They forget that, 401 years later, 155 years after the Civil War, 157 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, 152 years after the 14th Amendment, 57 years after MLK marched, 56 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, nothing has changed.

They forget that it is our American right to speak out, to decry our oppression.

The First Amendment says that we have the right to freedom of speech and press, that we have the right to peaceably assemble and ask the government for a solution to our complaints of unfair treatment. But we are silenced, gassed when we protest peacefully, and our cries for justice have been ignored for generations.

The Second Amendment says that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Yet time after time, legally armed, law-abiding Blacks are arrested or shot just for being a person of color in possession of a gun, while white gun owners can brandish their weapons freely without fear of being shot or unjustly detained.

The Fourth Amendment says that citizens may not be subject to unreasonable search and seizure. It’s where the concept of a search warrant comes from. Yet Blacks and other people of color have been subject to racial profiling and racially motivated searches, frisking, and seizure of property for as long as we have been citizens of this country.

The Sixth Amendment says that citizens have the right to a public and speedy trial, by an impartial jury, to know what we’re being accused of, to be confronted by the witnesses against us, and to have the opportunity to gain witnesses in our favor, and to have the right to an attorney in our defense. This is one of the biggest jokes. People of color remain in cells for weeks and months before trial, and are often coerced into plea bargains for crimes they didn’t commit in the first place, just so they can get out of jail sooner rather than run the risk of being remaining in jail for months, only to face a courtroom that is predisposed against you because of stereotypes and shady police records, with a public defender that is overworked at best and disinterested or corrupt at worst, resulting in extremely long sentencing with little to no account for the time the individual has already been incarcerated, seemingly as a penalty for refusing to take the fall and essentially “wasting people’s time”.

The Eighth Amendment says that “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” I could laugh if it weren’t such a blatant lie. Bail is disproportionately higher for people of color than for whites, as are the fines, and while cruel and unusual punishments may be subjective, I would argue that legalized slavery for a criminal population that is disproportionately comprised of Blacks and people of color AND murder by law enforcement before even reaching a judge BOTH qualify as cruel and unusual, particularly since it’s extremely notable how many white people, even accused or convicted of especially heinous crimes do not meet this fate, while a Black person could do so for merely moving wrong during a traffic stop.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime. However, the only thing this changed for Blacks was the beginnings of racially motivated mass incarceration, starting from 1865 until the present.

The Fourteenth Amendment says that anyone born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen of the USA. It also says that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

There are 20 other Amendments as of 2020, but this Amendment alone is the root of the problem. Black Americans are just that- Americans, and yet, we are DENIED equal protection under the law. We are DEPRIVED OF LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY, without due process of law.

But people seem to forget that Blacks are American citizens, too. And so, they seek to preserve their peace and forget to care.

So, as I turn up my headphones to tune out my roommate’s irritatingly ironic assertions of oppression, I turn my attention to the places where I have a voice, to remind people that this movement is more than just a lofty idea or the overreaction of a group of people that’s too sensitive or hung up on the past. I remind them that the problem is that the actions and attitudes, the injustices and imbalanced systems are still happening NOW, in the present, mid-2020. That’s why we can’t stay silent. Why no one can. I use my influence to remind the world what those who came before me died to obtain:

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. The Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the [blatant racist or the white supremacist] but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice. Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., excerpted out of order from sections of a letter from Birmingham Jail, Alabama, 16 April 1963

I remind those who care to listen that I exist in this world, hated and unwelcome. My very existence is one of danger and risk, especially if I choose to be myself. For me, there is no place like home.

I remind the world that I can’t breathe, and that for me that’s not just a catchphrase; it’s not just a concept to use for merit mongering or fitting in. It’s the fear that chokes me, the anxiety that suffocates my hopes and dreams. For me, it’s a reality.

#THIS IS NOT A FANFIC #rilakoya rambles #Blackout Tuesday #BLM

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alexsmitposts · 5 years ago

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When the Going Gets Tough, the US Runs to its Criminal Friends Donald Trump’s consistent use of the term “Chinese Virus” when discussing Covid-19 has raised a few eyebrows. Having been locked down and had the foreseeable future taken away, the world has no choice but to defer to his leadership. But rather than leading the world, he leads a chosen part of it against another part of it in every speech, leaving yet more of a legacy of hate and mistrust, as if the US hasn’t done enough of this. Other Great Powers have always had the same problems. Anything associated with former colonial masters is either rejected outright, even when it does not have to have that association, or localised to remove those associations. But this means countries develop by adopting new friends, whoever they may be. Often they are not too discriminating about who those friends are, or what strings are attached to that friendship, as they see it as a “path to independence,” not accepting that it cannot take them there. The former Soviet states provide many examples of this, but so do former colonies of anywhere, who once ran to the Soviet Union to achieve the same ends. So backed into a corner of its own construction, the US is deciding who else should be allowed into that corner. Kim Jong-un was invited, but seems to have been kept out, for now, by exposing that the only global superpower is indeed a helpless prisoner in its corner But there are some states who will always be there, no matter what. Is it because they are also mature democracies which respect freedom, human rights and rule of law? If they were, North Korea would hardly have been invited. Like an addict, the US chooses the friends which justify its crimes. The definition of US values which Washington imposes on the developing world would never be considered acceptable at home. So it seeks friends who play the same game, hoping that will justify this practice – which it would never need to do, if it really believed in the values it claims to have. Double coverage Can you imagine a world in which the US was not a friend of Israel? Many other countries, principally its neighbours, have arguments with the Jewish state, both over how it conducts itself and its very existence. But although there is also a US Arab lobby, based on shared oil interests rather than common political cause, the huge influence of the Israeli lobby in the US is recognised and well-documented. What does Israel actually stand for which other Middle East countries, including democracies such as Lebanon, do not? How is it more consistent with US values to support Israel rather than its neighbours? The usual answers are bound up with “self-determination” and righting historic wrongs, albeit at the expense of others. Why should the suffering Israelites not have their own homeland? Why should all the crimes committed against them over the centuries not be compensated by support for that homeland? Having done all that, should the US not have a reliable ally in this turbulent region? These arguments are of course hypocritical, as they do not apply across the board. Ask, for example, the Kurds, the Serbs, the Catalans, the Native Americans themselves. Israel has another attraction, which is all about the US, not Israel itself. The latest democracy reports by V-Dem and Freedom House, who compete with and do not consult each other, both make sobering reading for Israel watchers V-Dem, run from Sweden, is rather more neutral in its political posturing, whereas Freedom House inclines towards the “socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor” definition of freedom. Yet both reports explode all the claims the US makes about Israel, and about itself. If Belgium were compared to Bolivia as a democratic state, it would be greatly offended. Yet in the V-Dem report, Tunisia, not Israel, is called “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Admittedly this stretches the definition of “Middle East” a little. But who want to be outranked for democracy by a country synonymous with instability, corruption and disregard for human rights? The report paints the following picture: “Tunisia is the star pupil of democratization of the past ten years. Transitioning to democracy in 2012 after mass protests ousted the dictatorial regime of Ben Ali, its score on the LDI rose steeply from 0.11 in 2008 to 0.68 in 2018. However, the data also suggest that the new government is not fully independent from the military and thus potentially vulnerable to interference. Ahead of the election in 2019, political parties are still relatively weak and young people – the driving force of the revolution – infrequently engage in formal political institutions.” Tunisians themselves may feel their country is nowhere near the level of a real democracy, but it is largely being allowed to get there. Democracy exists because sooner or later everybody does it, if left alone to do so. Those who don’t want that are tolerating this expression of freedom, and the US is not vocal in its support of Tunisia and what it is trying to do. Tunisia is 41st on the V-Dem list of liberal democracies, which headed by Norway. Israel is 51st. It is well behind Uruguay and Chile, two countries still struggling to rid themselves of notorious CIA-funded repressive pasts, and just behind Croatia, famous for its discriminatory behaviour towards its Serb population. The Freedom House report includes Israel as one of 25 established democracies where freedom has declined over the past 14 years. The country gets its worst ever overall score of 76, well behind Mongolia and only 6 points ahead of Hungary, which is categorised as only “partly free”. What’s wrong with Israel? This long list provides part of the answer. But the US recognises it as a kindred spirit because the US itself was founded by implanted settlers dispossessing and humiliating the native population. This is what US-Israeli friendship is really about – trying to make two wrongs a right. Other countries have their own sordid histories, but don’t offer the same exculpatory PR opportunity. At a time of global crisis, the US should lead, not try to find excuses for itself. United by the wrong common language US relations with most countries wax and wane, depending on the political direction of the wind vein; the other country it always supports unquestioningly is the UK. Few even want to suspect there is an improper reason for this, but this crisis is indicating that such confidence is misplaced. As the former colonial power, though admittedly long ago, the UK should be seen with much more suspicion by the US. American historiography makes much of the struggle against the British and the principles the American colonies fought for, implying that the UK is not a “land of the free” where “all men are created equal”, so it should be the opposite of what the US wants in a friend. “Special Relationship” However the US and UK have long had a “Special Relationship” – the one which prevented the UK joining the EU and its predecessors for twenty years. Why? For the same reason Australia, which used to describe itself as being the “southern outpost of the British race,” also had a “White Australia” immigration policy for many years? The almost English-speaking White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, WASPs, who founded and have always run the US preserve their privileges by treating the UK as an example, despite deliberately contradicting its political system and developing a very different culture. The British must be racially superior, regardless of their crimes as colonists, or the US would itself be a very different place. This relationship also suited the British, who could regard Americans as the same as them when it suited them. US success was firstly an extension of UK success, then an acceptable alternative to UK decline. But now the “Special Relationship” is coming home to roost in a big way. During the Second World War, despite the tensions and differences in practical impact between the two countries, everyone pulled together. For a generation afterwards, rebuilding was held to require consensus. But for the past forty years both countries have followed a similar trajectory. Regardless of the complexion of government, they have sought to divide people into “good” and “bad” rather than supporter and opponent. The “bad” people – whether they are foreign, Muslim, ideologically unsound or whatever, are responsible for all the ills of their countries, while the “good” are being unfairly disadvantaged by treating those “bad” people the same way as them. These policies have had one inevitable consequence – creating an ever-deepening sense of injustice amongst those who are disadvantaged to begin with, and would be under any sort of policy through no fault of their own. These are the people openly courted by Trump and Boris Johnson to win power. First it was good versus bad, now it is outsiders versus the whole system, because that system, the creation of good versus bad, has failed to deliver what it promised the good. Going down this route will only make things worse, as no one will be satisfied and the sense of injustice will only grow. But having started, both countries are running to each other for help because they can’t stop, or their governments would collapse overnight. The Covid-19 virus was treated by both countries as another dimension of the “liberal elite conspiracy,” something invented to profit the “bad people” who had hurt so many voters. Neither took it seriously, either saying reports were exaggerated or coming up with ridiculous but low cost cures such as Johnson’s “herd immunity.” When forced to realise the extent of the crisis, they have insisted on pursuing racist policies which help no one. Trump reportedly tried to buy up all the cures for the US before nasty foreigners could get their hands on them, and still insists, by classifying his health emergency response meetings, that the virus is about China rather than health. Boris Johnson is refusing to postpone or even delay the Brexit trade deal negotiations because getting away from “foreign control” is considered more important. He refused to either join the EU’s ventilator scheme, a decision later blamed on an error the EU has debunked or boost the UK manufacturers who make them, but then gave the manufacturing contract to a Conservative Party donor, one of the “good people” who can make the problem go away at the cost of the “bad people” who die in the meantime. Johnson also claims to have Covid-19 himself, but gave a post-diagnosis speech at which there was no sign of the uncontrollable cough all sufferers apparently have. It would be entirely in character for this to be another BoJo publicity stunt. Perhaps we will never know, but is this the way to lead his country, or the world, through a crisis to a better future? Rule by the Mob The world’s largest economy and only superpower cannot claim to be the land of the dispossessed, particularly when run by a billionaire. But it has always claimed to be a force for good, which all like-minded nations should want to ally with. The US is not choosing its friends based on how good their values are. It wants ones who will justify its own crimes by being just as bad. When everyone is both a victim and a carrier of a deadly virus, these issues should not matter. But the US is only reinforcing its policy, at the expense of the whole world, because it has left itself with no alternative if it is going to remain the USA. There have been times when gangsters have effectively run cities or whole countries. Democracy is supposed to protect us from this, because at the end of the day, gangsters will serve the interests of their criminal friends rather than the people. This is why career criminals are classified as maladjusted: they cannot survive in a world where people try and act according to biblical precepts, whether aware of doing so or not. The BIGGER the problem, the GREATER the need for both leadership, and some semblance of decency, but we have no choice to trust in our leaders in times of crisis. But the bigger they are, the more they are running to their criminal friends instead of stepping up to resolve the crisis, or stepping down to make way for those who can. This is what a corrupt system throws up, even amongst those who claim to be overthrowing that system. There is an alternative, but it was always going to take a crisis like this to give enough people an incentive to make it real. Human beings are better than those we have set up as examples. This time we should really mean it when we say “never again.”

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patlee · 6 years ago

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Yeah. Just imagine.

Chad Curtis blocked me when I commented on his 2016 post at the time, but I felt his fact-averse “essay” was worth revisiting, now that we are two years in to a Trump presidency. As has become emblematic of the Trump presidency and his base, provable facts don’t matter.

After becoming president, Donald Trump has made 7,546 false or misleading claims over 700 days, as researched and catalog by The Washington Post.

An Oxford University study found that Trump supporters share more fake news on social media than any other political group. This “essay” is no exception, with the demonstrable falsehoods beginning with the first sentence. I’d like to think Chad may have had a change of heart since then.

You can see Chad’s original post here.

Imagine an America where Hillary Clinton is President...

By Chad Curtis / November 3, 2016

If she can acquit the rapist of a 12 year old girl, knowing he was guilty, and laugh about it, what other atrocity will she actively pursue injustice on against the helpless?

If she can look into the parent’s eyes of the fallen Benghazi soldiers, who she left for dead when they called hundreds of times for help, stand over their caskets and lie to them about what happened to their sons, saying “what difference at this point does it make??” what lie will she not tell?

If she, behind closed doors to her rich donor friends, can call Hispanics “taco bowl voters,” and “needy latinos,” black Americans, “professional never do wellers and super predators that need to be brought to heel,” catholics “bastardized” actively working within the democratic party to overthrow the religion, Bernie Sanders supporters “basement dwellers and a bucket of losers,” Trump supporters, a “basket of deplorables and irredeemable,” Arab-Americans “sand n***ers” Bill Clinton’s rape accusers “looney toons and trash” with her top staffers saying she “hates everyday Americans” how can she lead a country of people she hates and detests so much?

If she can hold such a corrupt organization as the Clinton Foundation, where donations in the multi-millions were illegally made by foreign dictators in exchange for power and influence in the U.S. State Department, all the while enriching herself to the point of being worth over 100 million dollars, under the mask of a “charitable foundation,” can you only imagine how she will use the White House on a grander scale for her own financial gain, while selling out the United States to foreign powers?

If she and her campaign can accept over 100 million dollars in donations from Wall Street and over 50 million dollars from middle eastern countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia etc, that throw gays off buildings, behead them, believe its ok to rape women, and don’t allow them to drive or go to school, and refuse to give any of that money back, will she sell out any cause for a price? How can she possibly say she will stand up for gays and women?

If she can fund Islamic terrorist groups and supply them weapons, and 20% of her campaign is funded by middle eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, what possible outcome other than more attacks, more killings and bombings, and more broken American families can we expect under a Clinton Administration?

If she can look into American parents’ eyes and say “it is the primary role of the state to teach, train, and raise children, parents play a secondary role,” what will she not do to continue to break down the family in our country?

If she can break federal law and delete 33000 emails and destroy 13 phones with a hammer after being subpoenaed by U.S. Congress, and lie about it repeatedly, all the while colluding with the White House, department of Justice and attorney General to cover up her crimes, what national security matter will she not endanger us with by deliberately breaking the law and deliberately covering up?

If she can say it is her “dream to have a hemispheric common market and open borders” what length will she not go to destroy U.S. sovereignty and cede our country to a one world government? If her top aide Huma Abedin’s mom is the editor of a Muslim brotherhood magazine that promotes sharia law and death to America, along with Huma’s convicted pedophile husband, this in addition to her former KKK mentor, how bad can her judgment be? And how many others has she aligned herself with in her inner circle that hates America’s values?

If she can stand on the DNC convention stage and smile at the American people, knowing she rigged the process, along with the DNC chairwoman, going all the way back to 2014, to ensure her win and silence the American people’s voice for Bernie Sanders, what else will she rig and who else will she silence, and who else will she collude with for her own gain?

If she can cheat and accept questions from Donna Brazile prior to multiple debates to give herself an unfair advantage, how far will she go to break any rule or law necessary to get herself ahead? And how deep is the corruption within her own party?

If she will intimidate and force her husband’s many rape victims to stay silent and keep them from coming forward, what other victims will she keep from justice and how can she possibly be a champion for women?

If she will raise our taxes by 1.3 trillion dollars, despite literally losing 6 billion dollars while running the State department, and already being the highest taxed country in the world, and being 20 trillion in debt as a country, including raising taxes on the middle class, what will she not do to further strain hard working families financially and how else will she mismanage your hard earned money? Does she even care?

If one of her biggest mentors is Robert Byrd, a former high ranking KKK member, whom she said was a man of "surpassing eloquence and nobility," how much of the KKK values does she support?

If she can stand arm in arm with Barack Obama and break criminal law by sending Iran 400 million dollars to Iran as ransom for hostages, and lie to the American people about it, are there any limits to the lengths she'll go to further severe trust between the American people and government?

If she can exploit a situation like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, by stealing 14 billion dollars through the Clinton Foundation given for relief, instead funneling the money to themselves and their friends, while most citizens and kids still live in dire poverty and in tents, and the Haitian senate president saying “they are nothing but common thieves who should be in jail,” what depths will she go to enrich herself at the expense of others, even those in the worst possible situations?

If she actively aligns herself with and supports terrorist groups like BLM, and doesn't seek support from America's largest police force, how far will law and order fall and how many officers will die because of her choice to empower terrorism and political correctness?

If Hillary’s supervisor during the Watergate investigation in the 70’s says, "Hillary was a liar, she was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality,” considering her recent lies about her emails etc, and focus on disbanding the 2nd Amendment, what 40 year personal record is more concerning than that?

If she can say “the supreme court is wrong on the 2nd Amendment,” in a private speech to rich donors, what will stop her from doing everything in her power to rewrite the constitution and remove the right to bear arms?

If her and her team can hire the mentally ill, paying them $1500 and an Iphone, to go to Trump’s rallies and incite violence, injuring many, throwing eggs on women and severely injuring police officers, and then blame Trump for the violence, what other disgusting tricks will she employ for her own personal gain?

If 48+ people close to Clinton, like Vince Foster, Ed Willey, Suzanne Coleman and just recently Shawn Lucas have mysteriously died, when having opportunity to give incriminating evidence against her and her family, could it be that she will go to any lengths to protect her position of power?

If she can say to an unborn baby just hours before being delivered and say “the unborn do not have constitutional rights,” you are not a person, we are going to mutilate and tear you out of your mother’s womb and kill you, and also say she wants to be the “planned parenthood president” and supporting partial birth abortions, who and what else will she kill with no remorse?

What kind of country would allow this kind of person to be employed in government? Let alone be promoted? Let alone run for President?

We should pray for America.

A vote for Hillary Clinton is your signature on all of the above. Not voting is your signature on all of the above. A third party vote is your signature on all of the above, as a third party has no chance of winning.

A vote for Donald Trump, with all his imperfections, is to stand in the gap against all of the above.

A vote for Donald Trump, an imperfect person, is to put a renewed focus in our country on American independence, our 2nd Amendment, life, religious liberty, our constitution, leading from the front, on border safety and security, rebuilding our military, a constitutional supreme court, ethics reform in government including term limits on congress, on economic strength, smart trade, rebuilding our inner cities and school choice, removing common core, law and order, and on honoring and championing the only people standing in the gap between chaos and anarchy in our country and abroad, our police officers and military veterans.

He is a billionaire who at 70, could be enjoying the fruits of his labor with his family, but instead has spent over 100 million dollars of his own money on his campaign and has endured the most intense media pile on in American political history, all because he wants to give back and fight to make America great again. He has not taken more than one day off in 18 months, traveling the country, working tirelessly, fighting for that cause.

This election could be America’s last chance, to draw a line in the sand and start to push back against the corrupt Washington machine, driven by the Clinton’s for decades.

This election is

“We the people” and Donald Trump

vs.

The smug arrogance of the corrupt Washington establishment, donors and special interests, Wall Street, globalism, George Soros, open borders, corrupt democratic and republican insiders and elites, the liberal mainstream media, Hollywood, dishonest politicians, political correctness, everything Americans are sick of in our government, and the ultimate Washington insider mob boss, the most corrupt, criminal and dishonest person to ever run for office, a felon, Hillary Clinton – all working together to maintain their power, status, and money in a corrupt system.

Americanism vs. Globalism.

Trump wants to make America stronger than ever. Clinton wants us to cede to a global government, and sell our nation off piece by piece.

“My highest duty as President is to protect our citizens and uphold the Constitution of the United States. It will be America first. Once again we will be a government of, by, and for the people. I will be America’s greatest defender and most loyal champion.” –DJT

“It is my dream to have a hemispheric common market and open borders.. we have been working to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. Ignorant voters are our best key to win.” – HRC

This could be our last chance to take back our country. November 8 can be our new American Independence Day.

We may not see an opportunity like this again in our lifetime.

The most powerful weapon we have is our vote.

As someone who wants this country to be great again, to stand for goodness again, for my kids and grandkids, I will be standing in the gap against all that this woman has proven to be on November 8, and voting for Donald Trump.

Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he will fight for America. As should we all.

Please share.

You can see Chad’s original post here.

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translationandbetrayals · 5 years ago

Text

Shiki eugenics, traditionalism and the theory of genocide

It goes without saying that there will be spoilers for Shiki (1998 Book, 2007 manga adaptation and the 2010 anime)

It is not a grand statement to say societies are defined by traditions, that which dictates how we live and understand our positions in our close communities; be we the exploited, oppressed, controled or the perpetrators of such negative social phenomenon of the “civilized” world. Despite this, we can call the many categories of citizenship as social construct, it is important to pinpoint recorded behaviour that base their justification on the “true nature” of all things: traditionalism (or at least conservative traditionalism). I believe that it is this concept that is the actual main drive of the conflict in the story of Story of Shiki, I say this not to dismiss the very real violence between the humans and “vampires” (Shiki) but to in fact enhance our understanding of what really is at stake; how we come to accept perspectives of the natural. I must advise that when I talk about the story of Shiki I will mainly be referencing the animated series.

1.-Mundane repression of the self; Traditionalism.

Shiki’s story takes place in small rural isolated Japanese village called Sotoba, it holds a long traditional history of wood craftsmanship that most of the 1300 people living there still uphold to, everyone knows everyone else and it is kinda hard to have a family scandal without being notice. This peaceful and uneventful place (at least superficially) is the initial status quo that this series begins with and that most of the villages subscribe two, they are also fragile towards superstitious beliefs and hesitant before change, which is evident when everyone is unhappy with the “strange european like castle that is out of place in Sotoba” suddenly appears out of nowhere...Well, almost everyone.

Megumi is, sadly for all of us, a teenager...one of the bad ones. I will admit that I am a bit biased with my taste in people but I can sympathize with Megumi's adversity towards the other villagers is not totally unwarranted; Sotoba status quo indirectly oppresses Megumi’s sense of identity, example of this are when the villagers laugh at her “weird” sense of fashion which does result in her social isolation (be it self imposed). For people living in rural villages and towns, “cities” function more as a ideological concept than a urbanistic definition for they represent a place where diversity is plentiful in contrast of their current location. Let’s be clear that diversity in this context really means opportunities of interest for the subject, in Megumi's case these opportunities is fashion, celebrities, aesthetics of the “elegant woman”. This ideological framework of cities is also applied by one of the main characters, Natsuo, who dislikes living Sotoba because “there is nothing to do here” but in his case it is also because he is trying to resist his parents political ideas being pushed onto him. At least in the case of these two characters, the “rebelous phase” of teenages is not motivated political or ideological but instead is the result of frustration they feel other the lack of power they have over their lives; they seek freedom (from their social surroundings).

When reviewing this mundane repression of the self, one may be hesitant to pin down traditionalism as not only guilty of oppression but if it is even harmful. One could even criticize the teenagers of being selfish, individualistic while the villagers live in a peaceful and happy community (which will be disrupted by the arrival of the supernatural). So let’s talk about gender and witchcraft for a little bit: The assigned role women as the housewife and a reproductive engine of the workforce is one construct by the rise of bourgeoisie and establishment of capitalist societies, it is maintained by forms and rules of traditionalism; you may understand this as types of sexism, be this systematic or cases micro sexism. Despite the degree of human suffering from this tools of oppression, the fact of a mater is that this forms of repression are mundane compared to the tools used to establish the traditions of the capitalist housewife: the witch hunts. European societies always had patriarchal elements in them, but there were women with strong social capital in the form of the wise women; rebellious wise women by the way. The objective of the witch hunt and the capitalist housewife model, despite one being extreme and borderline genocidal and the other normalized and traditionalized, share the same objective: the oppression of women's agency in their labor; and operate under the same justification: the (just) resistance towards the subversion of the natural. To explain clearly the relation of this very real case of oppression with the teenagers agnst of Megumi and Natsuno, despite the repression of the self (and their agency) is mundane, it can be ague (with the understand of history) that such forms of minor social pressure is the result of a criminal chronology of oppression of those considered “deviants” of the status quo, maybe result of a event that could be considered a war crime.

2.- Understanding fatalistically nature; Eugenics.

In most monster story (at least in a traditional sense), the most critical moment of the story is the reveal of exposing of the monster; the horrifying truth that the atypical town folks discover that their is a monster in their mist; the commonality is under threat! In Shiki’s case, the reveal of the monster is not only a case of commonality under threat but of the rational thinkers why of understanding nature in danger of completely collapsing.

Toshio Ozaki is our main rational thinker in the story (he is a literal authority of science; a doctor). When Toshio receives his first live victim of the Shiki at his hospital, he at first come to a rational diagnose, a light case of anemia. But when his patient suddenly dies, he is not only surprised that his rational conclusion (that it is simply a light case of anemia and that it is impossible for it to be lethal) but at his supposed incompetence as a doctor; the consistency of his rationality is linked to his identity of being a doctor. Despite the consistent consistency of science enthusiasts to separate they methodology from the political (this being imposible) and traditionalism, the scientific method has been incorporated into traditionalism as part of its arsenal to succeed in its objective: the oppression of the social deviant and adversary; What was once used to confront conservative and religious beliefs and prejudice is now (and even before 1920) used to defend conservative and naturalist beliefs and prejudice. A similar comparison can make to the function of Toshio Ozaki in his community; what was once a justifier and defender of healing and care uses the same knowledge to justify and defend what is basically a whole race/tangent-species of humans (the shiki). As the professional doctor Toshio receives more and more evidence of the existence of the Shiki, in fact he gets so much evidence that it is simply would be idiotic to reject such a reality. But despite coming to terms with their existence, Toshio needs to realizes the ritual of the scientific method to confirm 100% of the reality of the Shiki; which means experimenting or to be more accurate experimenting on his vampiric wife. He justify this (honestly) very uncomfortable act and the genocide of the Shiki that they are “no longer human” and that they are “unnatural”. The “rational mind set” and “scientific mind” takes a much more a social role in Shiki tan one of empiricist thought but that of social roles: when Toshio tries to suggest the existence of Shiki towards his friends of “rational thinkers” (the fact that they almost always meet in a cafe, a place where you can have the “intellectuals drink”, solidifies this characterization of them) they immediately shut down his ideas with the justification that they are “rational thinkers”; the suggestion of the supernatural, a element that subverts the natural, is not only impossible but demonstrate a degeneration of intelligence in such a mindset, a closed minded way of seeing the natural.

For the Shiki them self, they are the subversion of nature. At least this is what Toshio establish and a categorization that the villagers accept, the Shiki also adopt this assign roled as a matter of fact; They see themself as slaves to their nature. Sunako and Seishin draw parallels from their conversations as creatures being assign their “natural” role, Seishun had ti adopt his “natural family” role as the villagers monk and Sunako had to accept her natural role as a blood thirsty Shiki driven only by first. Yet when it comes to the ending of any kind of life, be it human of shiki, there is a consistent dismissal of the value of death; for the Shiki death is meaningless, for the Humans the killing of Shiki is not a ethical issue because the Shiki are not human.

The use of eugenic rhetoric is always a narrative contradiction; one of personal superiority and threat of personal extinction. When it comes to the Shiki and humans, yes- the shike are faster, stronger and will live forever...but they are not right, they are not natural; and therefore they are worst the normal humans and they will end normal humans: their extermination is rational.

3.- The big bang of Traditions: Use of hate speech and theory of genocide

The story of Shiki climax is that of the genocide of the “Shiki people” invoking a ancient tradition that is used not only as a coverup but as a social instruction for everyone to follow despite being a extraordinary situacion; that being the extermination of the Shiki. After invoking this ancient tradition, the bloody act is normalized and traditionalized: the men hunt the Shiki down and the women make sure they are dead, clean up and of course makes the bloody sandwiches. It brings up questions of where this villagers received such training to make a rapid response towards the “subversion of the natural state” came from, but we forget our history that such traditions are incubated by invents of great violence and hate as where the witch hunts. It is easy to dehumanize the Shiki because there is a long tradition of defining what is natural and what is not; life and death. It is easy to kill what is not human because there is a long tradition of rationalization of moral killing; we kill animals and plants so we can live. Traditions we maintain the objectives of destructive events like witch hunts through what I classify as mundane repression or oppression you can see this in the forms of hate speech and systemic discrimination; despite their lack of “flashiness of the disaster” they can result in very harmful results to groups of people. The real threat of Traditionalism is not its micro aggression, but its ability to invoke grand events that can result in mass deaths.

What makes Shiki such a good monster story is not the monsters or the reveal of the monster, but how people faces the existential threat of something “unnatural” disrupting the “natural” order of things, a commonality defined by centuries of tradition...tradition that is waiting, like a sleeping knight, to fight against the “darkness” once again.

Videos related to this subject:

Vid 1 ::: Vid 2 ::: Vid 3 ::: Vid 4

A wired...wired video about someone talking about themselves being a trad...that being a traditionalist… view at your own discretion (It’s kinda of what you would expect).

The “trad” Vid

Bonus:

Mystery vid

Pedro Pons

#Anime #submission

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padawanlost · 6 years ago

Note

Do you think Anakin would have been better off as a separatist? I think that if Dooku really got to know Anakin, they would have made an interesting partnership and brought a lot of reforms to the Outer Rim and the Separatist Territories.

Noooo. TheCIS were controlled by Palpatine. Some of their complaints were valid butthey were Palpatine’s puppets, just like the Senate. And no organizationcontrolled by Palpatine was a good organization for Anakin.

And Dookuwas not some woke, benevolent leader. He was Sith set on galaxy domination andgenocide. Also, he looked down on Anakin before he even met him so thepossibility of Dooku ever looking at Anakin with anything but indifference ordisdain was highly unlikely. He was haughty, elitist, ableist, prejudiced and completelydismissive of everything and everyone he didn’t consider worthy.

In an AUworld where Dooku and/or Anakin are different people under different circumstancesand Palpatine wasn’t playing both sides, sure, they could’ve gotten along andmaybe change things but in canon, no, I don’t see it happening.

“[…]The boy is as much a danger to himself ashe is to his enemies. And thatmechanical arm—” Dooku’s lip curled with cultivated distaste. “Revolting.”“Then perhaps you should have spared his real arm.” “Hmp. A gentleman would have learned to fight one-handed.” Dookuflicked a dismissive wave. “He’s no longer even entirely human. WithGrievous, the use of these bio-droid devices is almost forgivable; he was sucha disgusting creature already that his mechanical parts are clearly animprovement. But a blend of droid andhuman? Appalling. The depths of bad taste. How are we to justify associatingwith him?” [Matthew Stover’s Revenge of the Sith]

AfterGeonosis, Anakin wasn’t even considered human by Dooku. And Anakin Skywalkerwould never willingly associate himself with someone who hated droids andpretty much everyone who wasn’t human and powerful. Anakin had his issues andmade his mistakes but his ideals and Dooku’s were never aligned. They bothagreed the Republic was broken and that’s it. They even diverged on what theyconsidered an ideal functional Republic. Anakin dreamt of a Republic of equal opportunities,Dooku wanted a Republic where the elite (HIS elite) was in charge.

If Anakinhad joined the CIS he’d still be Palpatine’s puppet because Palpatine wouldstill manipulating its leaders. He would still have to fight and go through allthe trauma the war inflicted. He still wouldn’t have a voice because theinternal politics of the CIS weren’t all that different from the Senate’s. Hewould still be the alienated, former-slave with no political power orinfluence. Joining the CIS would mean trading the Jedi’s negative influence andthe Sith’s indirect influence for only the Sith’s direct influence. It’s wouldbe jumping out of Yoda and Palpatine’s lap straight into Dooku’s lap (= Palpatine’slap).

But let’ssay Dooku and Anakin team up. They wouldn’t be able to change anything because therewas a war going on. The Republic would never allow them to take control quietly.And, more importantly, the most powerful players in the game controlled theCIS. Any meaningful social change would have to be accepted by the wealthiestcorporations in the galaxy. Corporations that profited from the crime and povertyin their territory.

Dooku wasonly elected their leader because acted like their leader. He said all thethings they wanted to hear so they supported him. The moment he changed his speechfrom “more power for us” to “power for everyone”, they would no longer support himand Dooku would lose his ability to change anything. So Dooku only had power ifhe supported the people who didn’t want to share power and resources, whichmakes the idea of him ever being capable or willing to support meaningfulreforms highly unlikely.

#ask #anon #count dooku #anakin skywalker #au #sw meta #padawanlost #mine #what if #meta: anakin #meta: dooku #gffa politics #txt

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bakwoodzman-blog · 6 years ago

Text

The Three Trigger Terms Being Used to Stop Critical Thinking

August 17, 2018 | Sigmund Fraud | www.wakingtimes.com | 3,191 views

It’s a strange world of newspeak we live in. What was once a society devoted to logic and progress is now being herded in echo chambers of thought control and anti-critical thinking. Without the ability to examine an issue impartially and completely there is little hope of maintaining liberty and freedom, as history repeatedly demonstrated.

Today, we find that thinking is a diminishing art, and in its place, sound bites and stop-thought terms are used to put the brakes on the mind. These terms are widely used as signals to prevent minds from looking too deeply at a topic or issue.

“Thinking critically means making reasoned judgments that are logical and well thought out. It is a way of thinking in which one doesn’t simply accept all arguments and conclusions to which one is exposed without questioning the arguments and conclusions. It requires curiosity, skepticism and humility. People who use critical thinking are the ones who say things such as, “How do you know that?” “Is this conclusion based on evidence or gut feelings?” and “Are there alternative possibilities when given new pieces of information?”” [Source]

The three terms most widely used today to this avail are detailed below.

1.) Conspiracy Theorist – This term is so overused that it really is devoid of any practical meaning. If you were to examine it at face value, though, it describes a person who is looking to understand injustices in our world and is willing to look at uncomfortable facts in search of negative influence… of which there is plenty in our world today.

However, ‘conspiracy theorist’ has literally become a derogatory term that is attributed to anyone who refuses to accept mainstream narratives at face value. It doesn’t matter that there is overwhelming evidence to indicate that mainstream media does not value objectivity or report on important issues thoroughly or truthfully.

Now we find this term applied as a prefix to well-known journalists and media personalities, almost as we use the term Doctor. It’s an adjective that precedes them everywhere, so that before you even know what issue is being discussed, you know that the issue is coming from someone considered to be fringe and unacceptable.

2.) Alt – We see the label ‘alt’ being applied more and more frequently as an adjective for sentiments that supposedly do not fit in with the accepted status quo. Ideas outside of the box.

Alt-Media. Alt-Right. Alt-Left. Alt-News. Alt-Health. And so on.

The signal here is that the mainstream is the safe space, and that any segment of ideas or thought given this prefix is outside of that mainstream, and therefore not something ordinary people would want to associate with. It takes complex ideas and sensitive issues and benches them, so that when the hive mind stumbles upon something ‘alt’ they immediately react with fear, disdain and feigned outrage.

There is no ‘alt’ in our world. We are one, and any faction of ideas is really just a spinoff of the shared reality we all live in. If segments of this shared space are off-limits and labeled as so, we all lose.

3.) Hate Speech – This term is one of the all-time favorites of politicians and tyrants. After all, what could more dangerous than hate?

Newsflash: Hate speech is not the same thing as a hate crime. Speech is just that, speech. It is literally vibrating air moving through space, and unless we’re talking about and LRAD crowd control cannon, sound really can’t cause people physical harm.

It is fascinating to watch how people use this term so freely as if speech itself can be criminal. American society is founded on the idea of freedom of speech and self-expression, which at its core is the recognition that as human beings we do not and never will all see the world in the same way. It is an acknowledgement of the fact that different people have different ideas about how the world is and should be. That these differences shouldn’t be used as a basis for discrimination.

The term hate speech is one of the most loaded and ambiguous terms in the political lexicon. Beware.

Final Thoughts

Next time you see or hear these terms being used, ask yourself what it is about the story that you’re not supposed to think too deeply about. Allow both sides of the argument to share equal time in your mind, and honor the independent, sovereign being within yourself that deserves a chance to make up its own mind about how it wishes to view the world.

***

About the Author

Sigmund Fraud is a survivor of modern psychiatry and a dedicated mental activist. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com where he indulges in the possibility of a massive shift towards a more psychologically aware future for humankind.

This article (The 3 Trigger Terms Being Used to Stop Critical Thinking) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Sigmund Fraud and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.

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We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos (Click for details).

Contributed by Sigmund Fraud of www.wakingtimes.com.

Waking Times is an independently owned and operated online magazine that seizes on the transformational power of information to trigger personal revolution and influence humanity’s evolution.

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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How Many Gay Republicans Are There

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-many-gay-republicans-are-there/

How Many Gay Republicans Are There

List Of Lgbt Politicians In The United States

How Many GOP State Senators Are There, Adam?

This is a chronological list of openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender politicians who have held office in the United States. Historical figures are included only if there is documented evidence of an open queer identity.

Most out LGBT politicians in the U.S. are part of the Democratic Party, which has taken a more favorable stance than Republicans towards LGBT rights.

Nbc Outcourt Orders Idaho To Provide Gender Surgery For Trans Inmate

Despite the backlash to the Trump endorsement, Charles Moran, the groups national spokesperson, told NBC News the group has no plans to rescind its support for the president as it was a universal decision determined by the board of directors and chapters.

When asked whether Henry was involved in the endorsement decision, Moran said he could not speak to that as he was not on the phone call during her resignation but that he and the board thank her for her service to the Log Cabin Republicans.

Henrys departure comes just weeks before the groups Sept. 17 Spirit of Lincoln reception in D.C. The annual event has typically included a dinner and reception featuring high-profile Republican attendees, but this year there will only be a reception.

Were seeing a lot of what I thought would happen: A lot of prominent leaders are leaving the group, Evans told NBC News. We need a Republican group that advocates for LGBTQ issues, but the Log Cabin Republicans have sent the message that this is not their priority.

While Democrats Take The Lesbian And Gay Community For Granted Donald Trumps Republican Party Is Delivering Real Results

Democrats are using their convention this week to tout their agenda for the next four years, including their promise to stand up for the lesbian and gay community. For years, Democratic Party leaders have taken for granted the lesbian and gay community along with other minority communities thinking they had no where else to turn. Those days are over.;

Ive fought for civil rights for gay Americans for the past four decades. Today, the Republican Party is delivering real results and leadership for our community:

It hasnt always been this way. For years, the GOP generally stood against the inclusion of gay and lesbian conservatives. As one of the Republican National Committees first openly gay members, and a longtime leader of Log Cabin Republicans, Ive worked tirelessly alongside many friends and colleagues to pull the party into the future. Today, thanks in large part to the leadership of President Donald;Trump, the party has delivered meaningful policy victories for gays and lesbians.;

He didnt abandon these principles when he assumed his position behind the Resolute Desk.;

Don’t Miss: Why Are Democrats And Republicans So Divided

Log Cabin Republicans V United States

A lawsuit filed by LCR in federal court challenging the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which excludes homosexuals from openly serving in the U. S. military, went to trial on July 13, 2010, presided by Judge Virginia Phillips. LCR argued that the policy violates the rights of homosexual military members to free speech, due process and open association. The government argued that DADT was necessary to advance a legitimate governmental interest. LCR introduced several admissions by President Barack Obama, including that DADT “doesn’t contribute to our national security,” “weakens our national security,” and that reversing DADT is “essential for our national security”. Rather than address plaintiff’s claims or bring evidence to support their own claims of national interest, the government relied exclusively on the policy’s 1993 legislative history.

On September 9, 2010, Phillips ruled in favor of plaintiffs, finding that DADT violates the First and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

On September 29, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the district court’s decision, ruling that the legislative repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” by President Barack Obama and the outgoing Democratic congressional majority in December 2010 rendered the case moot. The dismissal left the lower court ruling without value as precedent.

Support Metro Weeklys Journalism

These are challenging times for news organizations. And yet its crucial we stay active and provide vital resources and information to both our local readers and the world. So wont you please take a moment and consider supporting Metro Weekly with a membership? For as little as $5 a month, you can help ensure Metro Weekly magazine and MetroWeekly.com remain free, viable resources as we provide the best, most diverse, culturally-resonant LGBTQ coverage in both the D.C. region and around the world. Memberships come with exclusive perks and discounts, your own personal digital delivery of each weeks magazine , access to our Member’s Lounge when it launches this fall, and exclusive members-only items like Metro Weekly Membership Mugs and Tote Bags! Check out all our membership levels here and please join us today!

Also Check: Why Do Republicans Hate John Mccain

Hawaii And South Dakota

At the start of this election cycle, only three U.S. states Hawaii, South Dakota and Mississippi had no openly LGBTQ elected officials at any level of government. This year, candidates in Hawaii and South Dakota hoped to get their states off that list.

However, in Hawaii, Adrian Tam who upset a 14-year incumbent in the August Democratic primary for the state House of Representatives defeated Republican Nicholas Ochs, making him Hawaiis only openly LGBTQ elected official.

Why Dont They Support Gay Rights

The reason why gay Republicans dont argue for gay rights is that they dont need to care. They wont get subject to any physical attacks or abuses for being gay. For example, Peter Thiel is a rich Silicon Valley billionaire. He doesnt deal with homophobia because he can just buy out your company and fire you. Hell never be subject to a hate crime because he can afford private security. People like Guy Benson, while not a filthy rich billionaire, also have a lot of privilege. He looks straight presenting, so he wont get harassed by strangers for being gay.

When you become rich and privileged enough, the problems that affect people in your situation completely disappear, and it allows you to not care about the issues that pertinently affect your community.

Whether people like them or not, gay Republicans will still exist, but they need to stop taking credit for advancing gay rights because they never did.

Also Check: Why Do Republicans Oppose The Affordable Care Act

Poll: Large Majorities Including Republicans Oppose Discrimination Against Lesbian Gay Bisexual And Transgender People By Employers And Health Care Providers

Half Say Society Hasnt Gone Far Enough in Accepting Transgender People

Large majorities of Americans think it should be illegal for either employers or health care providers to discriminate against people because they are lesbian, gay or bisexual, or transgender, a new KFF poll finds. This includes large majorities of Republicans, independents and Democrats across a range of questions about such discrimination.

The poll gauges the publics views following two major developments this month that move in opposite directions on LGBTQ protections. First, the Trump administration finalized regulations removing protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity in health care, arguing that the definition of sex does not extend to either. Then last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that gender identity and sexual orientation are protected under the definition of sex discrimination in the workplace.

The poll finds:

9 in 10 in ten adults agree with last weeks Supreme Court ruling, say it should be illegal for employers to fire or refuse to hire people because they are lesbian, gay, or bisexual or transgender .

About 9 in 10 say it should be illegal for doctors or other health care providers to refuse to treat people because they are lesbian, gay, or bisexual or transgender .

85% say it should be illegal for health insurance companies to refuse to pay for health care services for people who are transgender.

Other findings include:

Topics

Gay Republicans Explain Why They Are Proudly Supporting Donald Trump

The Gay Minority – How Many Americans Are Gay?

Trump was the GOP nominee to positively refer to the gay community at the RNC.

Gay Republicans Say Why They’re Supporting Donald Trump

— Charles Moran, a gay Trump delegate from California, was standing just feet from the stage at the Republican National Convention when he heard billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel give his now-famous speech.

Every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican, Thiel told a cheering crowd at the RNC in Cleveland this past July.

Thiel made history that night as the first openly gay RNC speaker, and this week he doubled down on his Donald Trump endorsement, donating $1.25 million to his campaign.

Thiel sits on the board of , and so when many in the online community lashed out at him for supporting Trump, Facebook founder stepped in to defend him, writing in a post, There are many reasons a person might support Trump that do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia or accepting sexual assault.

Moran said listening to Thiels speech was an incredible moment.

This is my Republican Party, Moran said. This is what I’m here for. This is the candidate I’m here to nominate. The guy who brings somebody like Peter Thiel to the deck and puts him up on stage — that’s my Republican Party.

As Trumps chances of winning the election appear to continue to drop in the waning days of his campaign, many gay conservatives, an unexpected segment of the Republican Party, are still backing him.

You May Like: Do Republicans Support Same Sex Marriage

Nbc Outtrump Applauds Poll Showing 45 Percent Support Among Gay Men

Kazmierczak called Trump a staunch supporter of gay people and their rights, but he said he makes a distinction when it comes to religious groups.

“He doesn’t want gay rights forced on religious institutions,” Kazmierczak said. “It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t support gay people. It means that to him, religious freedom is more important than social issues.”

Trump made a halfhearted effort to court the LGBTQ community in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. He called the massacre of 49 mostly LGBTQ people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that year an “assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want and express their identity.”

At the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Trump swore “to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”

And two days before Election Day, he grabbed an upside-down Pride flag inscribed with “LGBT for Trump” at a rally in Colorado and waved it around.

Once in office, however, Trump has consistently opposed LGBTQ rights from rolling back Obama-era nondiscrimination protections to banning openly transgender service members in the military. The national LGBTQ rights group GLAAD has accused the Trump administration of 181 separate attacks on the community since his inauguration.

President made history for #LGBT Americans and nobody knows that better than . #GetOUTspoken

LogCabinRepublicans

Women Young Adults Have Highest Estimations Of Us Gay Population

U.S. women estimate that about three in 10 Americans are gay or lesbian — the highest of any key subgroup, and much higher than men’s perceptions .

Meanwhile, average estimates of the U.S. gay population vary by age. Adults aged 18 to 29 offer the highest estimate , and adults aged 65 and older, the lowest .

Among political partisans, Democrats and independents estimate that about a quarter of Americans are gay or lesbian, while the average approximation among Republicans is a bit lower .

Even the groups offering the lowest average estimates of gays and lesbians in the U.S. exceed Gallup’s figure on all LGBT identification by about four times.

Mean estimate

Gallup, May 15-30, 2019

You May Like: How Many Democrats And Republicans Are In The House

Back Into The Wider World

After Bakers speech, the groups first female chairman, Sarah Longwell, announced the afterparty was at Nellies, a popular gay/sports bar with a weekend drag-queen brunch. You boys enjoy yourselves, she said, Ive got kids at home. Someone appeared in a skin-tight Make America Great Again dress and posed for photos in front of the Log Cabin logo with the dress designer; they were the most exotically outfitted attendees:

Online, Democratic critics unsheathed their knives. Your org has accomplished nothing in 40 fucking years as the GOP has gone from bad to worse to Trump on your watch, the activist and advice columnist;Dan Savage wrote;in response to a cheery tweet from Angelo celebrating the night. Go fuck yourselves Log Cabin Republicans, Savage wrote.

At the Mayflower, after a few minutes of post-speech;networking chatter, much of the room cleared out.

Outside the grand ballroom two women in pantsuits walked down the wide marble hallway from the party. They casually held hands for a moment, then unclasped as they approached the crowded lobby.

Next to the front door stood a group of men in well-cut suits in shades of charcoal. It was impossible to tell if they were they from the Log Cabin event or part of the Mayflowers regular carousel of business guests.

And that, the Log Cabin Republicans would tell you, is exactly the point.

Working For Lgbt Americans

In 2019, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced that pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences;Inc., would donate pre-exposure prophylaxis medication for uninsured, high-risk HIV individuals.

As part of the president’s Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America initiative, this medication, which could run up to as much as $20,000 per patient, per year, would be distributed to up to 200,000 individuals each year through at least Dec.;31, 2025.;

The Trump plan is focused on communities most in need and has received;support from those who have been involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

In similar fashion, Trump announced during Pride Month in 2019 that his administration was launching a global campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality. His leadership on this issue couldnt be more necessary;;even in 2020, 72 countries;still identify same-sexual orientation as criminal, including eight;where it is punishable;by death.;

This campaign was spearheaded by former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, an openly gay member of the administration who subsequently served as acting director of U.S. national intelligence, becoming the first openly gay Cabinet member in our history. In coordination with the United Nations, the European Union and other human rights organizations,;the campaigns goal is to pressure nations into ending homophobic laws, securing the safety and freedom of all LGBT individuals throughout the world.

Also Check: Which Republicans Voted Against The Budget Resolution

Lgbt Demographics Of The United States

This article is missing information about LGBT demographics in the U.S. territories. Please expand the article to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page.

The demographics of sexual orientation and gender identity in the United States have been studied in the social sciences in recent decades. A 2017 Gallup poll concluded that 4.5% of adult Americans identified as LGBT with 5.1% of women identifying as LGBT, compared with 3.9% of men. A different survey in 2016, from the Williams Institute, estimated that 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender.

Studies from several nations, including the U.S., conducted at varying time periods, have produced a statistical range of 1.2 to 6.8 percent of the adult population identifying as LGBT. Online surveys tend to yield higher figures than other methods, a likely result of the higher degree of anonymity of Internet surveys, and demographic of those utilizing online platforms which elicit reduced levels of socially desirable responding. The U.S. Census Bureau does not ask about sexual orientation in the United States Census.

Burning During The War Of 1812

On August 2425, 1814, in a raid known as the , British forces invaded the capital during the . The , , and were burned and gutted during the attack. Most government buildings were repaired quickly; however, the Capitol was largely under construction at the time and was not completed in its current form until 1868.

Also Check: Who Gives More Democrats Or Republicans

Trans Rights: A Perplexing Issue

Like many other gay conservatives, however, he seems to disconnect gay rights and transgender rights. Kabel recalled a recent article with a quotation from the conservative activist Tony Perkins that contrasted the Democratic and Republican platforms in 2016.

“The only issue Perkins raised was the transgender bathroom issue,” Kabel said. “And I thought, ‘That means we won.'”

Kabel called transgender equality “one of the most perplexing issues going.”

“Transgender people deserve support and protection just like anybody else, but it’s a very complex issue,” he said. “It’s remarkable when you hear their stories, but it’s just a very perplexing issue about how to really address it and do it so that they’re protected but other people aren’t hurt, so that people’s religious views are actually taken into consideration.”

Transgender visibility is all but absent in the Log Cabin Republicans, from their leadership to their messaging.

An OUTSpoken Instagram post compares the LGBT left to the LGBT right by putting an image of a person who appears to be transgender or gender-nonconforming next to a shirtless picture of former U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock, while the campaigns store sells T-shirts bearing slogans like “gay for Tucker” “gay for Melania” and “gay not stupid.

OUTspoken sent Brokeback Patriot, who has stated trans women are not women, to New Orleans Southern Decadence party to ask passersby if they think Trump is pro-gay.

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reorganisingpridesheffield · 6 years ago

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Reorganising Pride Sheffield

How Pride can be improved

We are a group of LGBTQ+ community members from Sheffield and the surrounding area who have genuine concerns about the way that Sheffield Pride is being run and has been run in the past.

Recent events and current Pride Sheffield Committee policy have forced us to speak out for a better Pride that recognises our past victories and future needs.

Pride is for all members of the LGBTQ+ community, but with the manner that the Pride Sheffield Committee has organised and conducted themselves, we feel they do not share our beliefs.

Pride is political

We are hurt and angry about Pride Sheffield's statement on social media claiming that Pride is “a celebration, not a protest.” In addition to this falsehood, the original application further ignored Pride’s origins and meaning by stating “we will not be accepting any applications by Political Groups for this years (sic) event.’’

In a statement to Pink News, director of Pride Sheffield Committee Darren Hopkinson stated: “It’s the same group of people every time we have an issue who we have problems with. We are currently working with our lawyers to take action against those who have created all this drama for no reason.”

When Hopkinson realised the error of his statement to Pink News, he then refuted that the statement was published by Pride Sheffield at all, stating “we did not put that statement out…legal action is now being taken.”

Hopkinson eventually took responsibility for Pride Sheffield and his own words and retracted the statement.

Because of these statements made by the head of organising and others, we believe that Pride Sheffield are still attempting run events under the same ethos of ‘Pride as Party’, stripping the event of political meaning.

We need to remember that Pride is indeed a celebration, but also a protest and a political statement. Lest we forget, there are still countries around the world where our LGBTQ+ family cannot be visible in away way, on penalty of imprisonment or death.

Currently, there are no free spaces to organise community events at Pride.

Pride Sheffield needs to recognize that the struggle still exists for many by creating spaces for grassroots community organisations at the forefront of fighting for our rights, and our siblings around the world.

We want space to host free workshops to help educate the public and the community about our rights and needs.

We want spaces to honour LGBTQ+ people that have come before us, and share our history, and mourn those we have lost.

We cannot fully understand the battles and sacrifices made for us and the work yet to come without such spaces.

Police out of Pride

As an alternative to police attending pride to offer “security”, we urge the current committee to consider volunteer security to lessen police presence. Additionally, we believe that Pride Sheffield should consult with black and minority ethnic LGBTQ+ people about police presence, and listen to what they have to say.

Police don’t protect

During Pride Sheffield 2017, South Yorkshire Police allowed a hate preacher to shout homophobia into the crowd using his megaphone in Endcliffe Park. The man was yelling homophobic slurs and damning passersby to hell. Having stationed himself in the middle of the park, he was impossible to ignore.

The police refused to remove him or even ask him to leave, stating it was a matter of freedom of expression.

Section 4A of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 states that :

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he— (a) uses threatening or abusive words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening or abusive, thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.

We believe that using slurs, and speaking angrily in a crowd at passersby in a public space gave the police grounds to legally remove this person. They chose not to.

A community member, in an attempt to peacefully end the spread of hate, pulled the cable out of the megaphone. The police reacted by grabbing their wrist and twisting them away. They pulled their hand free, but not before the officer left them with bruises and lacerations.

When the crowd uproar finally forced the police to act, they didn’t ask the preacher to leave. Instead, they told him he could remain at the main entrance of the park.

South Yorkshire Police protected the ‘freedom of speech’ of a bigot over the health and safety of LGBTQ+ people and allies.

Police should not be allowed to use Pride for publicity

In 2017, police vehicles were parked in the festival site while running lights and sirens. They played with children while carrying firearms.

This is a blatant attempt to normalise an armed police presence at community events. Their presence and actions shows no concern for the needs and safety of the marginalised people that they have harmed in the past and continue to harm today. We believe armed police should never be the norm.

We believe that Pride Sheffield should consult with black and minority ethnic LGBTQ+ people about police presence, and listen to what they have to say, as they are most vulnerable to police violence.

Having the police armed and present at community events shows a callous disregard for the concerns and safety of BME people.

Recent statistic show that BME deaths in police custody are double that of white British people, despite only representing 13% of the UK’s population. Overall deaths in police custody have risen 64% in the past year alone.

Prioritise community groups

Historically, Pride march leaders are not corporate sponsors, but LGBTQ+ community members and allies who have shown great support.

However, at the Pride march in Sheffield, corporate sponsors such as Aviva, Nando’s and Sainsbury’s are usually selected as march leaders. We believe it is inappropriate to sell a position of privilege and trust to the highest bidder. Parade leaders need to be community members, not corporations.

In selecting corporations over community, Pride Sheffield is promoting ‘pinkwashing’: a marketing strategy where corporations fund acceptable, widely supported LGBTQ+ events for publicity commercial gain. Frequently this strategy is used to hide previous wrong-doings, or gloss over a lack of anti-oppressive practices the rest of the year.

A Pride parade should never be lead by a for-profit company, but instead by groups whose work challenges homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, and all forms of oppression.

Parade leaders need to be community members LGBTQ+ leaders and allies. People and organisations who have shown great support should be chosen to represent the achievements of their communities, not a faceless international corporation.

We believe leaders should be nominated based on merit, not their ability to buy their way to the front of the march.

Keep Pride Sheffield free and accessible

In addition to having a corporation lead the parade, Pride Sheffield Committee is doing charging community groups and charities to march (this is on top of having ticketed events such as “the official after-party”.)

We march for our rights, for visibility, for celebration. What should be a free right to all LGBTQ+ people, allies, and charities now has a price tag.

LGBTQ+ people are statistically shown to work in lower paying jobs. Charities and grassroots organisations don’t have spare money lying around. As a result, the fee to march would most likely exclude the people who need visibility and support the most, such as refugees, migrants, and young people.

We believe that Pride Sheffield Committee should let community members march for free, in addition to giving community groups free stalls, and reinstating the community tent.

Pride Sheffield events should never be for profit, and main events such as the parade and stalls should be free and accessible to those who deserve them most.

Events that cost money to attend should have tickets available for free or at a discount rate for students, disabled people, or those who are unwaged.

Any proceeds made at Pride Sheffield after covering costs of events, should be provided directly to Sheffield LGBTQ+ welfare support groups, such as Lesbian Asylum Support Sheffield (LASS) and SAYiT.

We want to be involved

The Pride Sheffield Committee needs to advertise meetings widely and encourage people to run for positions on the committee who represent the breadth of BAME groups, disabled people, migrants, trans people, women and other marginalised groups. It is not enough to say “you are welcome here”, they need to show their desire for the participation of disabled people, of BME and QTPOC, by going out and meeting them in their own spaces and hearing about what would make Pride truly inclusive and special for them.

Worryingly, there seem to be no public policies or practices that typically exist for such large organisations, such as safer spaces and accountability policy documents.

Pride Sheffield should host at least 3 open meetings a year, in which any member of Sheffield’s LGBTQ+ community should be allowed to attend, hear reports on the committee’s work so far and share any ideas or concerns they have. These events should be accessible, free, and widely advertised.

We believe Pride is for all members of the LGBTQ+ community. When Pride is free from fear of policing, free from fear of exclusion, then we will truly have an event everyone can be proud of.

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For more information about police presence and abuse at the 2017 Pride Sheffield, please visit the Action for Trans Health Statement.

For more information about what constitutes hate speech/hate crime under UK law, the Sussex Police have created a guide for LGBT+ people.

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cameoamalthea · 7 years ago

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Drawn Child Pornography?: When is ‘Enjoying Garbage’ Illegal?

This post is academic in nature and does not constitute legal advice. This blog does not offer legal advice.

I explained in a previous post that fictional depictions if minors engaged in sexual activity are not legally the same as child porn, and not illegal in the United States. Simply put, there is no such thing as ‘drawn child pornography’ because the highest Court has decided that drawings and cartoons aren’t comparable to child porn.

However, any adult material may be found to be obscene. Obscenity laws are complicated to explain, because even the Court has found it a bit tricky to pin down what makes something obscene.

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.��

Since, “I know it when I see it” isn’t really a testable legal standard (and we can’t expect Judges to look at every bit of porn in the world to figure out what goes too far) the Court came up with “The Miller Test”.

Whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards”, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,

Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions[3] specifically defined by applicable state law,

Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.[4]

18 U.S. Code § 1466A pretty much reiterates The Miller Test’s standard; but notes that obscenity laws apply to cartoon images of minors.

This law really doesn’t change anything, as something obscene would count as obscene regardless of whether it’s of a minor or not.

Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition

Established that drawn images of minors are not child porn, but it didn’t create not create an exception where any porn can be found obscene unless it’s about minors. Drawn porn involving minors is treated the same as all other porn (except real child pornography which is banned), which is to say - it can be illegal if it’s found to be obscene.

All 18 U.S. Code § 1466A does is make it clear that just because something is drawn or sculpted, it’s not exempt from being found to be obscene under the same standards as everything else.

So would porn of underage anime characters be illegal? Well obscenity is also complicated because it’s not a national standard or even a State by State thing.

It’s a ‘contemporary community standards’ thing.

So the standards of the exact community where you live…

So those standards can vary in the same state. The community standards in Miami may be different than the standards in a small, conservative town in North Florida.

For example in Texas, (conservative community, could only appeal to the conservative 4th Circuit) a man was charged with Obscenity for manga that didn’t have images of minors, they just weren’t for kids. In Texas v. Costilla a clerk in a comic book store convicted on obscenity charges for selling 18+ manga about adults to adults.

The Prosecution argued “I don’t care what type of evidence or what type of testimony is out there; use your rationality; use your common sense. Comic books, traditionally what we think of, are for kids. … This is in a store directly across from an elementary school and it is put in a medium, in a forum, to directly appeal to kids. That is why we are here, ladies and gentlemen. We’re here to get this off the shelf.”

That’s community standards. Any cartoon or comic book that’s not children should be considered obscene because cartoons and comics are for kids.

So anything can be found obscene depending on the community. But let’s look at some cases that involved drawn images of children.

In United States v. Whorley – A reader is convicted for viewing and printing manga of a sexual nature on a public computer

It was lolicon, but it was also a public library. He was looking at graphic porn at a public library (which are frequented by teens and children who could probably notice what he was looking at on his computer) and printing it out.

Even if it wasn’t lolicon, that still wouldn’t have been socially acceptable. Legally, the community standards applied would be that of the local library. He also wasn’t reading manga, he was just printing out the porn bits.

The article @sourcethatshit linked about the case also notes: “ Whorley used a VEC computer on two earlier dates in March 2004 to receive digital photographs of children engaging in sexually explicit conduct, the U.S. attorney’s office said. The 20 obscene e-mail messages described, among other things, parents sexually molesting their children.”

So despite the Header “A 53-year-old Richmond man yesterday became the first person convicted under a 2003 federal statute that makes obscene cartoon drawings as well as photographs an illegal form of child pornography” which leads with obscene cartoon drawings, this “as well as photographs” is the important bit here.

(And while this case is the sort I hate reading unless I have to - reading graphic criminal cases and bloody personal injury cases are the worst, I’m going to actually read the case).

Ok - so this is not a case of Man arrested and charged for having child porn because of cartoons. It’s a case of man who was charged with having actual live action child porn and also obscene cartoons. He was also clearly a sexual predator from his search history. So not the ideal candidate for a Civil Liberties group to use to fight about whether the loli/shota porn should have counted as obscene.

This was a sexual predator who belonged in jail, so the appellate Court (which is a conservative Court, this arrest happened in Alabama) didn’t see reason for to reverse.

“Whorley’s history of downloading child pornography, which was not represented in the recommended Guidelines calculation because, except for the 1999 conviction, the prior conduct had not resulted in Whorley’s prosecution and conviction. The court also noted Whorley’s repeated failure to abide by the terms of supervised release from his prior conviction, including continuing to access computers without the probation officer’s approval, numerous false statements concerning attempts to obtain employment, failure to obtain employment, failure to report to the Department of Rehabilitation Services, failure to report to the Offender Aid and Restoration Program, and most disturbingly, his presence at local malls and public libraries frequented by children in direct disobedience of his probation officer’s instructions.”

The dissent recognizes the some of the charges are “bullshit” and should be reversed, but the majority of the Court and the Supreme Court don’t really want to wage a war over freedom of speech in a case that would give an actual sexual predator less jail time.

I recommend checking out the dissent for a good explanation of what artistic value might mean legally. The arguments made in the dissent would probably more compelling if it was just a man charged with doing dirty role plays with other adults or buying bad cartoons.

This was a child sexual predator, a repeat offender in fact, and they wanted to throw the book at him. (Seriously, fuck Whorley)

The other case @sourcethatshit mentioned has a misleading title “Manga Collection Ruled “Child Pornography” by US Court”

In Handley, he pleaded guilty.

The Court didn’t rule on anything. The prosecution accused him of something and he pled guilty. There wasn’t any deliberation or ruling. There was man backed into a corner agreeing to be punished rather than to fight for his constitutional rights.

The thing about rights and what’s illegal is just because you have rights doesn’t mean the police and prosecution will respect them, just because you haven’t done anything illegal doesn’t mean you won’t be arrested.

Many people accused of crimes that did not commit plead guilty because fighting it is costly and can mean spending a long time awaiting trial before getting on with their life. Additionally, prosecution often uses the threat of harsher sentences to convince the accused to plead guilty. According to the Comicbook Defense League

“When Handley awaited trial, prosecutors did not distinguish between manga and obscene material. They prohibited him from viewing or accessing any manga or anime on the Internet, ordering anime video or written material, or engaging in Internet chat, the latter harming his ability to prepare his defense.

When Handley awaited trial, prosecutors did not distinguish between manga and obscene material. They prohibited him from viewing or accessing any manga or anime on the Internet, ordering anime video or written material, or engaging in Internet chat, the latter harming his ability to prepare his defense.

Handley was also forced to undergo mental health counseling.

…the government assumed an aggressive posture towards Handley, and ultimately he chose to plead guilty rather than face a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years in prison.’

Given the Texas case was never successfully appealed and a man was sent to jail just for selling comic books that were 18 + I can see the logic in not fighting. The Handley case, to me, seems more of a case of a innocent man pleading guilty of a crime he didn’t commit rather than fighting for his Freedom of Speech while waiting in a jail cell for the case to be appealed.

I stand with the Comic Book Defense League in my belief that:

“Art is not child pornography. Art provides a safe place for individuals to explore culture, identity and ideas. Prosecuting individuals for possession of comics does not prevent or punish the sexual abuse of real people.

Manga and comic books are realms of legitimate speech that are protected by the First Amendment.”

#censorship #obscenity #laws

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