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variousqueerthings · 3 years ago

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Daniel LaRusso: A Queer Feminine Fairytale Analysis Part 1 of 3

Disclaimers and trigger warnings:

1. These fairytales are European, although there’s often overlap in themes globally. I know European fairytales better, which is essentially the reason I’m not going to branch out too far. I opted to also stick to Western movies so as not to narrow things down, but also in particular “waves hand towards all of Ghibli” amongst many others. There’s a reason the guys in Ghibli are so gender.

2. TW for discussions of rape culture and rape fantasies

EDIT: FUCK I’M A GOBLIN CHILD! FORGOT TO PUT A MASSIVE MASSIVE THANK YOU TO @mimsyaf WHO HAS BEEN THE NICEST, KINDEST EDITOR ON THESE THOUGHTS AND CONTRIBUTED SO MUCH TO THEM AND GENERALLY IS A WONDERFUL PERSON!

Part 2

Part 3

1. Introduction

I recently wrote a little thing, which was about Daniel as a fairytale protagonist – specifically one that goes through some of the kinds of transformations that are often associated with female protagonists of fairytales.

I used quotes from Red Riding Hood, Labyrinth, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Dracula, which, as an aside – the overlap between fairytales, horror, and fantasy and the ways each of those genres delve into very deep, basic questions of humanity and the world is something that will always make me feral. I will be generally sticking with fairytales though. Also I am very excited about some of those Labyrinth concepts going around!

I’m going to use “feminine” and “masculine” in both gendered (as in relating specifically to people) and non-gendered (as in relating to codes) ways throughout this, depending on context.

To be binary for a moment, because sample-sizes of other genders are low, women are usually able to fall into either feminine or masculine arcs, although sometimes the masculine-coded woman can become a “not like the other girls” stereotype and the feminine-coded woman a shallow cliché – in both cases they’re also under more scrutiny and judgement, so it’s always worth asking “is this character not working for me because of the writing or because I have ingrained biases? (Both?)”

Men don’t often get feminine-coded arcs. Because. Probably a mix of biases and bigotry. But there are some that seem to have slipped beneath the shuttered fence of “Sufficient Narrative Testosterone,” and Daniel LaRusso is one of them.

2. Some Dude Comparisons (Men Doing Manly Action-Hero Things like being trans symbolism and loving your girlfriend… seriously those things are hella manly, I wish we saw more of that onscreen…)

a. Neo

Much like Neo The Matrix, whose journey is filled with transgender subtext and specifically and repeatedly references Alice In Wonderland, Daniel doesn’t go through quite the kind of hero's journey usually associated with Yer Standard Male Hero, especially the type found in the 80s/90s.

Neo is my favourite comparison, because of the purposefulness of his journey as a trans narrative and the use of Alice. But I’m sure there are other non-traditional male heroes out there (but are they trans tho? Please tell me, I want trans action heroes).

Neo “passes” as a socially acceptable man, but online goes by a different name - the name he prefers to be known by - feels like there’s something inherently wrong about the world around him and his body’s place in that society, and then gets taken down the rabbit hole (with his consent, although without really “knowing” what he’s consenting to) to discover that it’s the world that’s wrong - not him. And by accessing this truth he can literally make his body do and become whatever he wants it to.

Yay. (The message of the Matrix is actually that trans people can fly).

Neo is – kind of like Daniel – a strange character for Very Cis Straight Guys to imprint on. He spends most of the first movie unsure about what’s going on, out of his depth, and often getting beaten up. He is compared to Alice several times and at the end he dies. He loses. He has to be woken up with true love’s kiss, in a fun little Sleeping Beauty/Snow White twist. Yes, after that he can fly, but before that he’s getting dead-named and hate-crimed by The Most Obvious Stand-In For Normativity, Agent Smith, and being carried by people far more physically capable than he is (people who also fall outside of normative existence).

Trinity and Neo in The Matrix. The fact that a lot of the time neither of them is gendered is something. Literally brought to life by true love’s kiss.

I’m not about to argue that Daniel LaRusso is purposefully written along these same thought processes, so much as the luck of the way he was written, cast, directed, acted, and costumed all came together in the right way. And this is even more obvious when compared to That Other Underdog Fite Movie That Was By The Same Director as Karate Kid.

b. Rocky

The interesting thing about Rocky is that he is (despite being a male action icon) also not written as a Traditionally Masculine person. Large portions of Rocky – and subsequent Rocky films – are his fear and insecurity about fighting vs his inability to apply his skills to another piece of work and wanting to do right by his girlfriend (and future wife), Adrian. The fighting is most often pushed onto him against his will.

Much like in Karate Kid there is barely any fighting in Rocky I. Most of it is dedicated to how much Rocky loves Adrian and the two of them getting together. The fight is – again like in Karate Kid – a necessary violence, rather than a glorified one (within the plot, obviously watching any movie like this is also partly about the badassness of some element of the violence – whether stamina or the crane kick, it’s all about not backing down against a more powerful opponent).

Rocky is played by Sylvester Stallone. He’s tough, he’s already a fighter (albeit in the movie not a great one yet), he’s taking the fight for cash – so although he’s also soft-spoken and sweet, you’re aware of the fact that he’s got those traits that’d make a male audience go “Hell Yeah, A Man,” or whatever it is a male audience does watching movies like that… cis straight men imprinting on oiled muscle men sure is a strange phenomenon, why do you wanna watch a boxing match? So you can watch toned guys groaning and grappling with each other? Because you want to feel like A Man by allowing yourself to touch the skin of other men?

Apollo and Rocky in Rocky III. This sequence also includes prolonged shots of their crotches as they run. Sylvester Stallone directed this. This was intentional. Bros.

Daniel LaRusso is not built like that. But that doesn’t really have to matter. Being smallish and probably more likely to be described as “pretty” than handsome, and not having a toxic masculine bone in his body does not a feminine archetype make. It just makes a compelling (and pretty) underdog.

c. Daniel

So where does the main difference really lie? Between Rocky and Daniel? Well, Rocky has the plot in his hands – Daniel, largely, does not. Rocky is acting. Daniel is reacting or being pushed into situations by others. Just like our boy Neo. Just like Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Snow White – just like some of the women in some contemporary(ish) fairytale films like Buttercup (Princess Bride), Dorothy (Wizard of Oz), or Sarah (Labyrinth).

This isn’t a necessary negative about stories about girls and women, so much as looking at what it is girls and women in fairytales have/don’t have, what they want, and how they’re going to get it. It’s about power (lack of), sexuality (repressed, then liberated), men, and crossing some taboo lines. It’s also about queerness.

3. The Karate Kid Part One: Leaving Home

Daniel LaRusso is a poor, skinny, shortish kid (played by a skinny, shortish twenty-two-year old) who doesn’t fit in after having been taken away from the home he was familiar with against his will. Not every male protagonist in a fairytale leaves of his own will, and not every female protagonist leaves under duress – Red Riding Hood, for example, seems perfectly happy to enter the forest. However generally a hero is “striking out to make his fortune,” and generally a heroine is fleeing or making a bargain or being married off or waiting for help to arrive. She is often stuck (and even Red Riding Hood requires saving at some point).

Daniel then encounters a beautiful, lovely girl on the beach, puts on a red hoodie (red is significant), is beaten up by a large, attractive bully, loses what little clout he may have had with his new friends, and generally has a mostly miserable time until he befriends and is saved by Mr Miyagi. To do a little Cinderella comparison: Miyagi is the fairy godmother who pushes Daniel to go to the ball in disguise as well, and that disguise falls to pieces as he’s running away.

Then Daniel asks for help, Miyagi gets him enrolled in a Karate Tournament, and starts teaching him. Daniel wins the tournament and gets the girl, the end.

While Daniel has chutzpah and is a wonderful character, none of the big events are initiated by him, except for the initial going to the forest/beach (and within all of these events Daniel absolutely makes choices – I’m not saying he’s passive): Lucille takes them to California, Miyagi pushes him to go to the dance, Miyagi again decides to enroll him in the tournament and trains him, and only because Kreese doesn’t allow for any other option, Ali is the one who more often than not approaches Daniel, and even their first encounter is pushed by Daniel’s friends.

Daniel really is at a dance/ball in disguise and receives a flower from a girl who recognises him through said disguise, it’s unbearable! It’s adorable! I get it Ali, I fucking get it!

Daniel’s main journey within this – apart from not getting killed by karate thugs (love u Johnny <3) and kissing Ali – is to learn from Miyagi. He’s not necessarily a full-on feminine fairytale archetype at this point, although there are fun things to pull out of it, mainly in the context of later films and Cobra Kai: the subtext of karate and how that builds throughout all the stories, the red clothes, the themes of obsession, his being targeted by boys whose masculinity is more than a little bit toxic and based on shame… more on all that coming up.

He doesn’t technically get a home until they build him a room at Miyagi’s place, but he definitely leaves the woods at the end of this one, trophy lifted in the air after being handed to him by a tearful Johnny and all.

And then they made a sequel.

4. The Karate Kid Part Two: Not Out Of The Woods Yet

Daniel’s won the competition, Kreese chokes out Johnny for daring to lose and cry, more life-lessons are given (for man without forgiveness in heart…) and Daniel and Ali break-up off-screen, confirming that TKK1 was not really about the girl after all, which, despite Daniel and Kumiko having wonderful chemistry, is also an ongoing theme. Daniel enters the screen in The Most Baby-Blue Outfit seen since Tiana’s dress in Princess and the Frog? Or that dress in Enchanted? Maybe Cinderella’s (technically silver, but later depicted as blue)?

(Sidenote: At everyone who says Sam ought to wear a callback to that suit, you are correct and sexy).

Surprise, Miyagi’s building him a room.

Double-surprise, Miyagi needs to go to Okinawa.

Triple surprise, Daniel reveals he’s going with him, because he’s his son dammit.

The Karate Kid Part Two is maybe the least Daniel-LaRusso-Feminine-Fairytale-Protagonist of the three, because it’s not really his movie. Daniel runs around with Kumiko (aka the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen), continues to be The Best Non-Toxic Boy a middle-aged Okinawan karate master could ask for, lands himself another Built Karate Rival (twice is just a coincidence, right? Right?), and eventually doesn’t die while wearing red again – twice: When Chozen almost strangles him to death at the Miyagi dojo and then during the final fight. The Saving Of The Girl (both the little girl in the storm and Kumiko) actually puts him in a more traditional masculine space than the previous movie did, even if the main theme of the film is about compassion and kindness and by the end, once more the boy whose masculinity is built on rockhard abs and matchsticks is on his knees. Daniel just has that power over big boys. It’s called kick/punch them in the face hard enough that they see stars.

There’s an aside to be made here about how much Daniel really is an observer in other peoples stories in this, although he is the factor that sends both Chozen and Kumiko into completely different directions in life (Chozen and Kumiko main characters when?) Anyway he comes out of it presumably okay, despite being almost killed. Maybe a few therapy sessions and he’ll get over it. Too bad Terry Silver is lurking around the corner…

5. The Karate Kid Part Three: The Big Bad Wolf

Alright people have written Words about the third movie. It’s fascinating. It’s odd. It’s eye-straining. It’s like olives – you’re either fully onboard the madness or it’s too off-putting for you (or you’re like. Eh, don’t see what all the fuss is about either way...). It’s basically a non-consensual secret BDSM relationship between a guy in his thirties (played by a Very Tall twenty-seven year old Thomas Ian Griffith) and a 17/18 year old (played by a shorter twenty-eight year old Ralph Macchio).

Also recently we got more information on Mr. Griffith’s input on the uh… vibes of the film. Apparently it wasn’t just The Sweetness of Ralph Macchio’s face, the screenplay (whatever that amounted to in the first place – release the script!), the soundtrack, the direction to not tone it down under any circumstances, the fact that Macchio categorically refused to play a romance between himself and an actress who was sixteen, no: it was also TIG coming up with fun ways to torture Daniel’s character and suggesting these to the director. Clearly everyone has fun hurting Mr Macchio (including Mr Macchio).

The point is that aaallll of that amounts to that Intense Homoerotic Dubiously-Consented-To D/s subtext that haunts the movie and gives a lot of fun stuff to play with. It’s also a film that – if we’re analysing Daniel along feminine-coded fairytale lines recontextualises his role in this universe.

The Fairytale goes topsy-turvy. Through the looking glass. Enter Big Bad Wolf stage right. Karate is a metaphor for Daniel’s bisexual awakening.

“Oh, when will an attractive man touch me in ways that aren’t about hurting me?” he asks after two movies of being hurt by boys with rippling muscles. “Why do men continue to notice me only to hit me? Do you think wearing red is making me too noticeable? Anyway, Mr Silver looked really good in his gi today.”

Daniel’s diary must be a trip.

#daniel larusso #the karate kid #cobra kai #ck #johnny lawrence #cobra kai meta #my writing #part one of three #some comparisons to matrix and rocky because I love to talk about those #terry silver

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valeriehervo · 4 years ago

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Valérie Hervo runs Les Chandelles, the legendary Paris sex club where members of French high society, politicians, barristers and rock stars (and an increasing number of Brits) come to indulge their erotic fantasies. Can it survive the twin threats of the pandemic and a moral backlash?

Adam Sage

Saturday March 20 2021,

Valérie Hervo is outraged. She has just been listening to a radio station where two male presenters, chatting about her forthcoming appearance on their show, kept referring to her as the owner of a “group sex club”.

“That really is low-class vocabulary,” she tells me. “It’s very macho as well. Only a man would say something like that.

“And it is not what this place is about. To me, it is a journey through the mystery of the senses to a land of sensuality and encounters.”

Hervo is particularly aggrieved at what she took to be the implication that she organised sexual games for the benefit of men.

Nothing could be further from the truth, she insists. “Here, everything revolves around women’s pleasure. This is a place where a woman can do what she wants, when she wants and with whom she wants – and if she wants to do nothing, she does nothing.”

Hervo opened Les Chandelles, her recreational club – as she would prefer it described – in 1993, and it has since become a part of French high-society folklore.

Any Parisian will tell you that this is the place where the country’s political, economic and cultural elites live out their sexual fantasies beyond the sight of ordinary mortals, where government ministers, television presenters, rock stars and chief executives engage in the ancient practice of libertinage.

But what exactly goes on behind the plain façade in a narrow street near the Louvre in central Paris? And what might this tell us about French values? Or indeed about British values, given the steady flow of clients rumoured to have crossed the channel in recent years in the hope of fulfilling their “erotic potential” under Hervo’s stewardship?

With telephones barred from the club (they have to be left at the entrance) and hardly anyone willing to talk openly about their evenings there – “It’s a matter of intimacy,” says Hervo. “You don’t start telling everyone about your sex life at dinner parties” – such questions have given rise to few answers and much speculation.

Now, with the club closed because of the pandemic, Hervo, 53, has written a book that explains what happens when the dancefloor empties, usually around 1.30am, and the salons around it fill with writhing, sighing bodies.

Les dessous des Chandelles, which could be translated either figuratively as The Secrets of the Chandelles or literally as Underneath the Candelabras, is the portrait of a quintessentially French establishment.

Where else would the lost property include designer thongs or customers eat Ladurée macarons off the back of a naked woman, a famous male barrister end up in an alcove with his female rival days after their clash in a criminal court, or Mick Jagger reportedly be turned away for wearing a pair of jeans?

Hervo explains that her club is a bastion of French “savoir vivre”, where a select group of beautiful, intelligent and well-educated people conduct themselves in a way befitting a nation that has given the world some of its greatest suggestive literature, from Molière’s Dom Juan to Laclos’ Les liaisons dangereuses.

Consider, for example, her account of one of the Eyes Wide Shut theme parties she holds from time to time. “A naked woman, her gaze hidden by a Venetian mask, lies on a table,” she writes. “A nymph in a transparent toga joins her. She kneels down and delicately pulls her legs apart.”

She has torrid encounters herself, for instance with a woman whose perfume she found bewitching and whose body she discovered behind a veil in an alcove.

Much of her time, however, is spent looking after her patrons, like the couple of regulars who realised to their horror that their adult son and his partner had also begun going to Les Chandelles. Hervo tells how they begged her to help them avoid what they said would be a “regrettable” meeting.

On another occasion, a male customer arrived with his mistress, explaining to Hervo that his wife was stuck at home because she was ill. An hour later, the wife arrived with a younger man, she writes. “Don’t say anything to my husband,” she told Hervo. “He thinks I’ve got the flu.”

Hervo promptly rushed downstairs where she found the husband, “naked and frolicking with his partner and a few other accomplices”. She advised him to leave through the emergency exit.

I am discussing these and more adventures with Hervo at a table in her club’s pink and white restaurant, which is to be found at the bottom of stairs that wind down from an ordinary-looking blue door on the street.

Opposite us is another staircase that leads to what could easily be mistaken for an 18th- century Parisian literary salon – were it not for the mattress in the alcove at the end of it.

A third staircase, encased in walls painted in gold leaf, descends to a dancefloor, a bar and more salons with their alcoves, benches and mattresses.

It is difficult to find an English word to describe Les Chandelles. Some have called it a swingers’ club, although that conveys none of the cerebral sophistication and cultural aspirations that go with elite sex in France.

Others have used the term wife-swapping (or échangisme, as the French call it), but Hervo is no more happier with that than with group sex.

“For me, échangisme is very reductive and sad,” Hervo explains. “It involves some kind of contract between four people and they all need to agree, which can’t happen very often.”

What prevails at her club, she says, is libertinage, a concept dating back to a 12th-century rebellion against the church by disaffected clerics who were determined to place physical love above the courtly version promoted by troubadours and their ilk.

The contemporary version of this philosophy involves making “everything possible and nothing obligatory”, Hervo says.

One couple might go for sex, either with each other or with someone else, she says. A second might go along to watch. A third could be happy with a turn on the dancefloor.

“For some, it is enough to have an imaginary journey. For others, they will want a little bit more. But what happens in the salons is the icing on the cake and it doesn’t matter if nothing happens, because we’ve had such fun with the preliminaries.

“Everyone goes at their own rhythm. You may be happy with a look, a caress or with voyeurism. But that is all very different to échangisme.”

Libertinage, which has come and gone in France over the centuries – the early 17th and the mid-18th being among the high points – enjoyed a return to fashion from the late Nineties with the emergence of hundreds of clubs amid a spirit of unrestrained freedom.

The number has since fallen, with adepts taking to organising their own house parties. At the last count there were 269 such clubs left, according to French state radio.

The health crisis looks likely to drive many more out of business, their activities scarcely being compatible with social distancing.

Les Chandelles, however, has a status apart, and this should offer it protection against the vicissitudes of fortune.

Hervo says her customers include “politicians from both the left and the right” and “celebrities from across the whole world” (she refuses to divulge their names).

Hervo says that as her club’s fame has grown, so has its allure to visitors from Europe, the US, Asia and “a lot from Britain”.

It is not enough just to cross the channel and knock on the door, though. In order to get in, you need erotic knowhow, Hervo says, along with familiarity with Parisian savoir-vivre.

“It is an alchemy. A way of being,” she says.

In his Histoire du libertinage, Didier Foucault, a history lecturer at Toulouse University who is a specialist on the subject, writes of how the practice became fashionable after 1600 among aristocrats driven “by a haughty refusal to bow either to common law or to any authority whatsoever, be it temporal or divine”.

There may be something similar about the French elite that frequents Les Chandelles. The entrance fee is €96 for two, or €310 with dinner and a bottle of Deutz champagne thrown in. If Deutz is too downmarket, there is Cristal Roederer for €490 or Dom Pérignon Rosé for €470.

But the selection policy is not based on money, Hervo insists. More important to her are “elegance, refinement, education and taste.

“I have a very tough door policy. I turn away a lot of people.”

The badly dressed, the ugly, the vulgar, have no hope of getting past her, she says, while the overweight may struggle as well, at least if they are male.

“I know I shouldn’t be saying this, but I am going to say it anyway. I think I would be more concerned by a fat man than a round woman. Round women can be very beautiful but, in general, men who are fat are… Well, someone who lets himself go physically is someone who does… not respect himself. And if he doesn’t respect himself, he is less likely to respect other people.”

Les dessous des Chandelles is a strange, almost dual work. On the one hand, it is a window onto this secretive world of privilege and exclusion created by Hervo beneath Rue Thérèse in the French capital.

On the other, it is a tale of the author’s personal voyage through libertinage and her claim that the sexual liberation she found along the way, first in other clubs and then in her own, helped to unshackle her from a traumatic childhood marked by incest, guilt and depression.

Our conversation reflects the same duality.

For much of the interview, Hervo comes across as the archetypal Parisian businesswoman, complete with carefully applied make-up, an elegant hairdo, an articulate discourse, a headstrong Yorkshire terrier and a well-trained fiancé – Tom, the maker of an excellent Sancerre white wine, who rushes off shortly after I arrive and returns later with an armful of her outfits for the photoshoot, including an all-white suit and a glittering jacket.

One minute she is talking with off-putting clarity about the female orgasm, telling me in a tone that brooks no argument that “a woman’s sexuality is so much richer than that of a man”. The next she is explaining, with equal equanimity, how she resisted underworld attempts to take over her club following her divorce in 2005.

Like all self-respecting Parisiennes, she knows how to throw a strategic fit of pique as well, announcing that the photographer is driving her mad and that Tom had better summon a friend for help, and be quick about it. The friend duly arrives with a bottle of sancerre to enable Hervo to get through the afternoon session.

Yet, from time to time, there are signs of the scars left by childhood, as when she concedes that she took refuge in libertinage in part because “at night-time, you can’t see the suffering so much… the glitter masks the pain”.

At one point, her eyes fill with tears as she discloses that her relatives have refused to speak to her since the publication of her book, which recounts her rape by her grandfather as a young girl, her parents’ refusal to believe her, her teenage struggles with depression, her toxic marriage to a man 20-odd years her senior, and her salvation in swingers’ clubs.

It was her former husband who introduced her to libertinage. She writes of her first experience in a club where “in a salon plunged into darkness… some couples are making love while others are observing them”.

She did not want to join in – at least not the first time – but says, “My emotion [was]great and my excitement real.”

“I was 24 and I instinctively knew it was right for me,” Hervo tells me. “What I liked in those places was a feeling of freedom and especially a feeling that I was meeting couples who seemed to get on well together.

“That was not the image of the couple I had received as a child because my parents argued all the time. It was like Disneyland as far as I was concerned.”

When her former husband suggested opening their own swingers’ club in Paris, she jumped at the chance. He put up some of the money, they borrowed the rest and she became the manager.

“It was a success straight away, because I think it was the first club to give so much importance to women,” she says. “At that time, in 1993, in other clubs, the women were just treated as objects and it was the men who took charge of the games and who brought along their wives.

“I think that they were probably men of little courage who were not able to cheat on their wives and who went to this sort of place instead. But that was not at all in the spirit of libertinage.”

Les Chandelles would be different, she decided. “Women who are objects are women without humanity. Here, I made sure that the women were subjects.

“In fact, I created here what I never had myself. I tried to encourage women to take their time, to dare to set the tempo, to ask men to be attentive and unhurried and to be gallant, because women adore gallantry.”

She says her door policy has always involved refusing entrance to couples if she suspects that the woman is being dragged along against her will or kept in the dark about the true nature of Les Chandelles. “Even now in 2021, there are boors who don’t tell their partners where they are taking them,” she says. “It’s increasingly rare but it still happens. But if I have the slightest doubt, I question them. You get a feeling for these things.”

Inside the club, no means no, she says, explaining that men can be expelled for repeating a request to a female customer if they are turned down the first time.

“I think women are much safer in this sort of place than in traditional nightclubs where they get hassled all the time,” she tells me.

She says that she herself came to see Les Chandelles – of which she has been the sole owner since extracting herself from her disastrous marriage 16 years ago and buying her former husband’s share – as a refuge from the wounds left by her troubled childhood.

“This has been my bunker and my incubator,” she says. “It was where I revitalised myself, and where I discovered myself too.”

Can her club really be as idyllic as she pretends?

For years, Les Chandelles has been described in the French press as a favourite haunt of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, who resigned following his arrest on suspicion of rape. Although the charge was ultimately dropped, reports of his attendance at Les Chandelles have done nothing for its image.

Recently, it has also been linked with Gérald Darminin, President Macron’s interior minister, who, it has emerged, went to Les Chandelles in 2009 with a woman who had asked him for help in overturning her criminal conviction – he was legal affairs adviser for an opposition political party at the time – and who has accused him of raping her later that evening.

He denies her claim, but the publicity has scarcely been an advertisement for Hervo’s establishment.

She says the coverage has been misleading and unfair. DSK, for instance, barely ever visited Les Chandelles, she insists.

“There are many other politicians who came more often than him and who were much more important than him,” she says.

As for Darmanin, she says that when he dropped into the club a little over a decade ago, he was a young bachelor, and that young bachelors sometimes visit “for an evening with – what’s that word they use now? – oh yes, les sex friends, that’s it.

“And there’s nothing wrong with that. If you find yourself on your own for a year or so, you might want a regular one of those. Why not?”

Until now, the interview has gone smoothly enough, interrupted only by the barking of Cerise, Hervo’s Yorkshire terrier, at the emergence of the photographer from below.

But then I make a big mistake. Noting the entrance policy favours single women – who are allowed in on evenings otherwise reserved for couples, when single men are banned – I ask Hervo whether she uses them as an enticement for male patrons seeking a threesome with their wives and another partner.

She looks daggers across the table. “That is really a stupid, male, Cro-Magnon thing to say,” she tells me. “It’s very maladroit of you.

“Single women come because they want to have fun, because they could meet a man who pleases them, or a woman, or perhaps neither. Sometimes, it’s just two women friends who come for a drink because they know that here they won’t be bothered and because they will be appreciated because they are pretty.

“When I began here, I didn’t receive single women in the evening, because society considered that a woman who came alone to an establishment like mine was either a whore or a bitch. I fought to make people understand that life does not work like that, and I am proud to say that today I have single women among my customers.”

I ask Hervo if she is a feminist. “I certainly am not a neo-feminist,” she says, explaining that she laughs off wolf whistles in the street, likes being complimented on her looks and wants to “seduce or to be seduced, freely. But I am feminist for some things. I am in favour of women being able to experience pleasure alone at first, to discover their bodies and to enjoy their bodies, and only afterwards to share all that with a partner if they so wish.

“That sort of thing has not always been possible in the past.”

Pointing out that Foucault’s history of libertinage shows how sexual freedoms have come and gone over the centuries in France, I wonder out loud whether the country is shifting back towards greater restraint.

“You’re right, it is,” she says. “The difference is that today, it is not religion that is trying to cover everything up, it’s our moralising society. There is a very prudish scent around these days.”

In a thinly veiled attack on #MeToo, she complains in her book that the social networks have been transformed into “popular tribunals”, that the law has come to treat women “as weak beings which have to be protected” and that the ancestral French game of seduction is being subjected to new codes and new rules.

It is difficult to determine whether the pandemic will brake or accelerate this trend. Some predict that when the crisis ends, we will see a repeat of les années folles (the mad years), as the Twenties were known in France, with a yearning for freedom, parties and libertinage.

Others forecast the continued spread of the Anglo-Saxon-style feminism that Hervo abhors and the curtailment of French love-making and seduction. She is not overly worried, though. On a personal level, she has emerged from years of therapy able to confront her past and look forward to the future, she says. She has become a part-time therapist herself, has a house in the country, where she has spent much of the past year, and is planning to “marry the man I love” this summer.

Even if the moral backlash gathers strength, she thinks that Les Chandelles will continue to triumph.

“There have always been currents and countercurrents, but if society goes one way, people will need a place of liberty where they can do what they want, where they will have the freedom to talk, to exchange.”

Indeed, she believes that her club may even come to play a role similar to that of literary salons in the 18th century, when they nurtured the ideas that helped to topple the ancien régime.

Only in France could there be dreams of Enlightenment amid the shadows of a basement sex club. Les dessous des Chandelles by Valérie Hervo is published by Cherche Midi

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bi-dazai · 4 years ago

Text

honestly i think i have a weird anger or cultural confusion where other gay and trans ppl are like much happier and comfortable to come out and shit and be open, but I've always had an extremely complicated relationship with it because it's always made me feel so isolated and lonely, even with other gay ppl around. and younger ppl especially will like go around coming out so frequently and meanwhile if I'm going to even tell you that I'm attracted to women I have to trust you 110% and that isn't something that comes easy.

I'm terrified of like. Wearing even rainbow goddamn socks because I'm scared shitless of getting bullied, or harassed, or even assaulted. Which is ironic considering I try to be quite fashionable in public but with being openly bi (let alone being openly TRANS) it's a complete no-no.

Like I think as much as I love being bi and nb at the same time I still despise it, I still think it's ruined my life. I have gender dysphoria about my chest whereas if I was cis I would be so happy with how feminine my body is. My first ever relationship with another girl at the moment being cut short by abusive homophobia fucked me up in innumerous ways, leading me to like...severe issues with the way i feel about sex and emotional attachment and touch.

And ofc there's the homophobia, like at this moment I'm probably leaning towards getting a fuckbuddy or smth over tinder but like a romantic relationship with another person is terrifying, like I'm insanely private w relationships even w men, I won't let us hold hands if I think too many people might see bc i have this stupid complex

There's more and more but my relationship with being Out is one where it's something that I simultaneously desire and despise, being Out is one of the most terrifying concepts I can think of and to me having someone refer to me as "they" and not as a woman is simply not as important as being safe, as not living in even more fear of assault.

And then all around me ppl my age (although usually younger) are all coming out to anyone and everyone like it's just casual, saying their pronouns like it's nothing. And first it's disbelief and shock because holy fuck, has everyone gone fucking mad?? Are we all so fucking stupid that we just forget the everloving fear homophobia strikes into you?? And then it's the jealousy, that these people have this comfortable relationship with their own gay/transness and enough trust to actually open up and tell a room full of strangers "please call me they not she". It's disappointment and anger in myself that almost 7 years after forcing myself to whisper "I'm bisexual" to the bathroom mirror in the middle of the night and then cry my eyes out because it felt like I'd been cursed, and probably over a decade since I'd started having sexual feelings about all genders, and an entire lifetime of having feelings for men women and others, after so long I'm still just a coward who sits and hates it all, who fears it all.

But then recently I've come to the realisation that the way I realised I was gay was a way that's kind of...dying out. That being the mostly offline way.

Don't take this the wrong way but I've found a lot of people go online and find this overwhelming amount of support and representation for gay and trans identity. You can argue validly this statement, but the context I use this in is comparing it to like. 2013. People were way less online. Being an online celebrity was a novelty.

At school there were dyke, faggot, tranny, etc, thrown around as if they were confetti. Jokes about "lesbos" and "lesbihonest" humiliated any girl who was too close to another girl. I grew up not just in Brisbane Queensland but in a town that was connected to the mainland only by two bridges - a landbridge and a humanmade bridge. The school was overwhelmingly anglo. Overwhelmingly right wing.

I realised I was bi with minimal help from Tumblr. I realised I was bi because I fell, hard, for my best friend. And then she liked me back, and our relationship was amazing. But the school found out. We held hands under the table, we found a quiet moment to kiss and everyone pointed and stared. We made out in the shadow of a building and turned to find twenty people watching gawkeyed, pointing, fascinated.

The entire time her mum was abusive, and massively homophobic. She blamed me for turning her daughter gay. She forced us multiple times to break up at the threat of violence. Eventually we did. We never talked about it. Our friendship never returned like it used to. It was awkward, tinged with sadness, regret, yearning and young love cut short.

It was traumatic, to say the least.

Tumblr in 2014, despite the cringe screenshots, wasn't actually mostly about LGBT positivity or whatever. I first saw the term bisexual on, if you can believe me, a quotev story in 2011 about a cheerleader and an emo girl who get together in a secret relationship. You were either gay or straight, or you had an exception. Bisexual felt right, though, for me, felt accurate, was accurate.

It was years of confusion and secrecy and guilt, peeks at other girls in the changing room that I couldn't help and I didn't understand why. Then it was months and months of anger and frustration at myself that I was feeling this way and confused about myself, and then when I said those words it felt like I was being torn apart. It felt like my life had fallen apart. I cried every goddamn night, I felt awful all the time.

At school the kids noticed. They noticed before I started dating my friend, they noticed the way I looked at her and they interrogated me about it. I'd claim up and down I had a crush on another boy - true perhaps, but it was a passing interest - and then they said they told him and analysed how I reacted. And then the interrogations continued for months because the gay girl was entertainment for them. Around me, as I walked between classes, had lunch, walked home, dyke dyke dyke faggot hahaha.

And then the relationship happened and then leelah alcorn happened and I learned what a trans person is. And sometime when I was fifteen I saw nonbinary begin to pop up, terms like genderfluid and nonbinary and they rang true like bisexual did, but the last time I went down a rabbit hole like that it ended in trauma, and another person got hurt. I didn't throw homophobia at her, but I felt and still feel responsible for it. I didn't turn her gay, but I made it obvious. I don't quite know how to say it.

I knew I was nonbinary, deep down. One day I decided to add that to my tumblr bio. Nobody gave a shit, just like nobody gave a shit when I said I was bi. But that was because I wasn't open about it even online. I couldn't talk about that stuff or I'd curse myself.

Time went on, I got more comfortable, collected fresh new traumas. My brother came out as trans. Around me, friends came out as gay and trans. But they kept coming out. They didn't stop at close friends and trusted family, they told teachers, their entire class. I didn't understand. Why the fuck would you put yourself at risk like that?? And I still don't. I said it was jealousy and anger at myself before, and maybe it is still a little bit, but now, it's just concern.

As I said, the way I realised I was gay is the rather old fashioned way - offline, through trauma, and almost entirely unenjoyable and traumatic. A lot of kids still go through that for sure. But the ones I see telling everyone over that they're gay or trans are, in my experience, not those ones. As the internet began to become more of a general use thing and less of a "only recluse weirdos" space, the online LGBT safe space began to expand into an audience bigger than before. Online, you were safe. Nobody knew your name, you were behind a screen. Homophobia was veiled, you could just delete a hateful anon, could just log off. You could put up your pronouns and people would use them because, well, ppl didn't really have any other identifier someone might use for your gender. So this positive uplifting atmosphere spawned for the most part. And instead of learning through confusion and rare chance encounters with random words and crying into the sink every night that you're gay, you much easier come across this content that tells you indepth what this is and that it's okay. And you think, well wow, that's me, and then...you know, I guess. Not denying there's some of the classic self hatred etc but...you have this safe space online to fall back on, and I cannot emphasise how much that has pushed the acceptance and widespread knowledge of lgbt people in the past 5 years. I didn't exactly have that space, and my realisation was through mostly real life channels, which were swamped at all sides by homophobia, at worst, abusive, at kindest, it would treat you like a sideshow attraction.

Being someone who arguably isn't old enough to brush this difference away with being an "older gay" but still having had a gay experience quite different to the majority in my generation (applying this to area as well) I have to say I'm confronted with this comfortableness other days have a lot and it's always jarring. I think also that while it's important and I'm happy that "younger" gays and transes have at least one good support network/space to fall back onto online, I do think it creates this kind of...dangerous other side, especially for those who go to schools that are LGBT positive and have families who are also friendly to that sort of stuff. I find that young gay teens are totally unprepared and unhardened for the fact that most people you run into in real life despise your guts for existing as who you are. And while we can make as many soppy gay narratives as possible about being honest about who you are and losing shame, we need to face the fact and teach young lgbt kids that being Out isn't just something you do as a ritual in being gay or trans, it's a brave thing and it's completely optional. And furthermore, most importantly, it's insanely dangerous.

I don't think that teenage, raw fear of the consequences of even the very concept of being Out has ever left me. Perhaps I have to thank the homophobic 14 yr olds who swamped me in slurs and trauma, because it's given me a survival sense that's kept me closeted so far you'd never get in.

But occasionally I'm tempted, particularly with my transness which I am only out to perhaps 3 people about, to venture into the world of telling people about yourself. I started a new uni semester and in a tutorial, the teacher handed out cards. We were to use it as a placard to write our names on it so the teacher would learn our names over the next few classes. And, if we chose...our pronouns.

I stared at that card for what felt like a million years. This has always been an ordeal. People don't know how to pronounce my name, even though it's a rather simple one. But pronouns? I'd never really told anyone those. Online, yes, and once when I was asked by a friend i was brave enough to say "any will do" but this - this wasn't the curated safe online space, this wasn't a one-time phrase to a friend. This was an open, permanent thing that would sit below me every class, declaring me to 18 other people. I wrote down "NATALYA", then beneath "she/". And then I stared some more. I felt like I was going to die. I felt like I was the biggest fool, because before I could stop myself I wrote "she/they". No "he", not yet. But...it was there.

At the end of the class the teacher collected the placards. I wanted to run back screaming, wanted to ask her for a new card so I could be safe again. But I didn't because I would look like a freak and a coward.

I still think it's stupid. I still think I've put some petty gesture that no one will ever respect (if they can call you she they won't ever call you they) above my own safety. The thing that really struck me was that it didn't feel good. The reason I wrote it like that, I believe in hindsight, is that I was curious what those other kids feel like, because it must feel good to declare that you're a tr*nny d*ke in front of the entire class, good enough to beat the stomach-lurching dread that precedes such an action. But it didn't. It just felt like an unnecessary risk. And it made me feel worse, like there was a target on the back of my head.

I think I could talk about this forever, about how so many kids believe coming out is this thing you're required to do to be a good gay, but it's not. It's stupid stupid reckless, and in my case it ends with you getting fucked over.

But Ive written for ages and gotten prosaic halfway through so I'm gonna shut up. Basically why the fuck do you guys come out to everyone like please stay safe instead of this it isn't worth it.

#tw d slur #tw f slur #tw homophobia #personal #i didnt hear much transphobia in my grade until towards the end of highschool #because nobody back then rly knew what a trans person was #also #long post #like REALLY long #t slur

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rudjedet · 5 years ago

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According to Wikipedia, the Egyptian language had a word for a third gender or sex, often translated as "eunuch" but perhaps referring more often to nonbinary or intersex people. Do you know more about gender variance in pharaonic Egypt?

Full disclosure before I answer this: gender studies with regards to ancient Egypt are not my specialty, and I’m unlikely to do all the nuances proper justice.

First, about the word sxt.y (plural: sxt.yw), which is the word you’re referring to that allegedly refers to a third gender or sex but which is translated as “eunuch”. It is not conclusive, per the knowledge we have now, that this is a separate gender/sex category. It’s mostly translated as “eunuch” because it comes close to a word for castrate, sxt. But that translation in itself is debatable.

@thatlittleegyptologist said the following about the word sx.ty in this ask:

Sekhti is the word that has a possible translation of ‘eunuch’ but it’s absolutely far from certain. We only say ‘eunuch(?)’ because it has a similar writing to ‘sxt’ ‘castrated’, of which there is only one attestation meaning it’s a hapax legomenon (only existence of the word). There are several other verbs written as sxt including: to run, to turn back, to destroy, to grasp, to weave, and a bird trap.

There are only 4 attestations of the word in the Egyptian corpus. Three refer to it as ‘sage’ or ‘sorcerer’ and one refers to it as ‘castration(?)’ meaning it has an uncertain translation. The text that does this is the hapax legomenon one I mentioned previously.

It has no depictions in art, and doesn’t exist as a term until the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, as Eunuchs themselves were not a thing in Ancient Egypt until this period. Therefore we cannot say that this is a separate ‘gender’ in Ancient Egypt, because before the Ptolemies this concept of sxti doesn’t exist. The Ancient Egyptians themselves did not have them so we cannot place them within their gender roles.

However, if you want to read more about eunuchs in Ptolemaic and Roman times I would suggest looking at Greek and Roman Eunuchs and their function in society, as they will tell you far more about how they were seen in gender terms than looking at anything from Ancient Egypt.

As far as gender variance goes, this is tricky because the ancient Egyptian gender division is different from ours, and also subject to change throughout the millennia that span Egyptian dynastic history. Not only that, it’s nigh impossible to transpose Western modern gender terms (such as nonbinary) onto an ancient non-Western culture because there is a disconnect between how they saw the world and the way we do.

But it wasn’t as simple as “Egyptians only knew the male and female sex/gender” either. At least in the realm of the divine, something akin to intersexuality may’ve been known. Sometimes Nut, a goddess, is portrayed with a phallus to indicate power; or Neith is said to be part man, part woman. But at the moment we do not have conclusive evidence (i.e. textual or pictorial) to show that there were mortal people who considered themselves outside the known Egyptian gender binary.

This might be because the Egyptian societal ideals were very strict (and we do know that not everyone held as rigidly to the ideals of society and religion), and they were therefore never mentioned in text or on reliefs because it was simply not done. But it might also be because there weren’t any people who (had the tools to) consider themselves outside of that gender binary. Without unequivocal evidence, it will always be some degree of inconclusive.

I will probably regret bringing up Hatshepsut again, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t use her example to explain why exactly it is so difficult to transpose our modern definition of what constitutes evidence of “this individual is transgender/nonbinary” onto the Egyptian record.In our modern society, the use of pronouns is a fair indication of whether someone is cis or trans. In ancient Egypt, since the Egyptian languages itself are gendered and thus sometimes, the use of masculine or feminine markers specifically was a matter of grammar, not so much.

The people who know only (the bare essentials) about Hatshepsut will say that she was transgender, or at least nonbinary, because she used “male pronouns” to refer to herself. However, she did also use female pronouns and markers, and almost all other female kings that we know about did the exact same thing. Sobekneferu and Taweret also referred to themselves with a mix of male and female markers and epithets. And because we know that certain Egyptian words (such as “king”) only take male markers no matter the sex of the person using it, it’s far more likely that we’re dealing with a grammar issue rather than three genderqueer queens.

However, that doesn’t mean none of the three could have been genderqueer, we just don’t have the tools to definitively say they were. The best indication of gender we have, in modern and ancient times alike, is the individual’s own words. In case of Hatshepsut, Sobekneferu, and Taweret, we know that they referred to themselves with feminine markers wherever and whenever they could. That’s something you absolutely can’t ignore when you try to argue the gender-identification of any of these women (and I use “women” here as the term to refer to the ancient Egyptian gender identity. I have never used nor will I ever use the term “cis” to describe any of them. They were women. Not cisgendered women, since cis, too, is a modern gender identity and thus equally difficult to use when describing an Egyptian individual).

I wouldn’t argue that the Egyptians didn’t have gender variance beyond the man/woman binary that we see in e.g. art and literature, but it is hard to pinpoint the exact nature of the variance, if any, considering they didn’t think about these things the way we do now, as well as their long history.

Deborah Sweeney, who we’ve cited many times before, wrote a really excellent paper on sex and gender in ancient Egypt. She talks about these matters with more nuance than I can, so I absolutely recommend reading the paper, which is only 16 pages long. And if you’re interested in certain topics she covers, check out her references/bibliography. But for most laypeople, Sweeney’s article will cover the majority of Egyptian sex & gender in enough detail.

Here are some highlights from the article in case people want a quick laydown:

The Egyptians considered the world a place of dualities. The two halves of any given concept weren’t divided eternally however; instead, they reconciled them. The best example is the king incorporating both aspects of Horus and Seth into his rule, even if Seth was chaotic and too raucous to be of any use on his own. This seems to apply to their views of gender as well.

In Egyptian art, representation of gender is very strict, e.g. men are portrayed with darker skin than women and women only take half a step forward or even stand with both feet together, and the art almost never deviates from these conventions. In real life, this division didn’t always seem to be as strict. Take for example New Kingdom female entrepeneurs; women who either made a name for themselves or took over their husband’s trade after his incapacitation or death.

“Masculinity” as a concept in ancient Egypt differed even between social groups. A scribe would have had to meet other standards of masculinity than a soldier or a farmer would. There also seems to be a divide between elite masculinity and masculinity for the lower social classes. Still masculinity mightn’t have been expressed the same way by everyone, even within the same social grouping.

Women were in the text corpus often juxtaposed against men, i.e. it was their relation with the men in their lives that was highlighted, and very little is known about interpersonal relationships between women. We obviously know more about royal women, but their experiences aren’t at all indicative of general female experience in ancient Egypt.

The Egyptians didn’t categorize people based on sexual preference (i.e. “this is a homosexual scribe”, “that market lady is bisexual”). While same-sex relationships weren’t the social norm and were usually depicted as an abberation and/or an insult, there’s strong evidence in favour of same-sex couples/relationships in real life.

For any further in-depth questions, I’d refer to @thewanderingarchaeologist, whose PHD research is on this very topic.

Please consider donating to my ko-fi if you enjoyed this rather incomplete explanation!

#Egyptology #gender identity #ancient egypt #anon asks

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lesbiansforboromir · 5 years ago

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Messaging you bc u seem like a well of tolkien knowledge. Is sex really considered elf marriage? Does that mean aragorn is an 87 year old virgin, or do you think he had the odd affair here and there (denethor)? I mean, it would be kind of a dick move to cheat on arwen, since she gave up her immortality and everything, but 87 years is a long ass time. this is totally not a move to get aragorn/denethor headconons, btw

I’d act more modest if this wasn’t all I was qualified to do now but it’s still very sweet of you to say. ANYWAY. Ooo lets get into this one.

So, for a start, this concept comes from a section of HoME called LaCE (Laws and customs of the Eldar). Which means, right off the bat, we have to make it clear that this is not true blue tolkien approved canon. Then again, you could make that argument for most of the lore we have and LaCE is the first and only time Tolkien properly discussed sexuality and sexual customs within elves. Hence it wins a place in the overall fandom canon.

So yes in essence Tolkien says that, to elves, sex is marriage. He also says that they do it like rabbits for the first few years to get the babies out of the way but once that’s over with they lose interest, so that sex is just for babies. (He also, interestingly, says that no elves are ‘born in the wrong bodies’ or something to that effect, which means that Jrrt had some concept of ‘trans-ness’, enough that he needed to specify this, which I always find interesting but thats off topic!!)

With all that being said, people do tend to just ignore it and have whatever fun they like, which is very valid. I am unfortunately cursed with a brain that demands I make sOMething of the canon it’s given or I just can’t get dopamine. So I do apply to it. BUT, as with everything Tolkien writes, you have to look at it not as a word of god, but as an in-universe historical text written by an in-universe author and then translated/copied/edited by in-universe historians with in-universe biases! And specifically, LaCE is written by a mortal human man and probably at least partly by a man named Aelfwine, who is from our world and literally just got lost in a storm and fell into Middle Earth and found Tol Eressea one day and decided to write a book about it.

How well do you think a human man from the irl earth who had to be taught elvish and arrived millenia after the war of the ring could accurately understand and describe Quendi laws and customs from that time? I’ll give you a hint, not that well!

And even then, lets look at the title, it’s not ‘Biologically determined behaviour of the eldar’ it’s ‘laws and customs’ so... the general cultural attitudes, not the absolute unflinching facts of elven life. We also know canonically it’s bullshit since... Finwe literally married again after his first wife died... like he literally went to Manwe and was like pwease mistew manwe siw can I have some mowe coochie? and they just said hmmmm yes you may and I DO need to make a bigger post about how fucking wild it is that Finwe actually needed that permission and how that essentially proves my theory that a lot of these customs are Valar enforced and holdovers from Valinor so the Silvan and Avari elves wouldn’t even apply to this- ANYWAY!

That’s a longwinded way of saying I think it’s likely that Aragorn was an 87 year old virgin but it’s not a for definite thing. And, of course, I do just really love the idea of him and Denethor having this wild and angry yet passionate love affair for a hot second but that just breaks down because of all the pressures on them from Denethor’s father ect ect and they both just rebound heavily onto much stabler and more sensible women whom they can fall in love with and adore without all the damn stress. Certainly I think Denethor would be Aragorn’s only exception, he just hasn’t met someone so starkly his equal in all fields before, neither has Denethor, and that’s very potent to the both of them.

ALSO at this point this wouldn’t be cheating. Aragorn just got a crush on Arwen and decided that was that before launching himself into the wild before she’d even MET him. She had no idea who he was until he returned from Gondor and came to Lothlorien, where they officially fell in love and got engaged. After that point I think, yes, that was that for Aragorn’s sex life until he’s married to Arwen. He’s stubborn and an elf fetishist and he’s not gonna give Elrond an inch more reasoning to deny him his daughter’s hand.

Although the like... weird tension in an AU where Denethor lives... Denethor looks older, more bent, he’s shorter than Aragorn where they used to be of a height... You can really see the struggle of the last 40 years written into his skin whilst Aragorn’s only gotten more regal, age has only made him more venerable and he still doesn’t look that old. But that potent and indomitable spark in Denethor that first drew Aragorn to him is still right there, impossible to ignore... It makes him want to slip right back into their combative and competative banter, he feels oddly young again.... Perhaps a “You shrunk, Lord Steward,” slips out without him meaning too, and Denethor just levels him with this gaze that seems to cut him in two, that strikes to the heart of him, as he answers, “You left, your majesty.” Like bOOM fucking MURDERED in your own hall, how does it fEEL to be boneless Aragorn???

... I hope some of that was what you were looking for :)

#LaCE #tolkien #denethor #aragorn #lotr #erran vs tolkien #chats #Anonymous

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rabbithole86 · 5 years ago

Text

A Tale of Beards and Lavender: Imagining the Secret Lesbian Club of Hollywood

It’s strange, but true: at least once a week I sit down and Google the celebrities I think might be not-straight. There’s Anna Kendrick and Brittany Snow (hoping the Bechloe romance of Pitch Perfect finally comes true), Leighton Meester (sure she married Adam Brody but…), Naomi Watts, and Emma Stone (to name a few). Up until fairly recently Ellen Page, Miley Cyrus and Kristen Stewart were also on my list. They make up what I like to imagine is the “Secret Lesbian Club” of Hollywood. In my mind, this is basically an underground ring of awesome gays who like to get together fairly frequently to watch Bound, talk about butch/femme aesthetic, read gender studies texts, and figure out ways to insert queer subtext into their work. And who do I imagine is at the centre of it all? Taylor Swift of course.

Some might say this is wishful thinking. But the thing is, when you spend most of your days thinking queerly (that is, making the familiar strange, particularly with regard to sexuality and gender), you can’t help but see the world through rainbow glasses. It seems to me that “normal” is entirely a fiction, and everyone is a lot queerer than all that. That doesn’t mean there aren’t people with “opposite-sex” or “heterosexual” desires, but just that: a) what we ordinarily make of pairings along these lines belies the complexity of human experience; and b) a lot of people are probably a lot less distinctly straight (or gay) than assumed. With this in mind I look to Hollywood, which produces so many of the cultural texts we consume that show visions of a perfectly normative heterosexual life. I spend much of my time—as is tradition in queer theory—re-reading texts differently, to uncover the hidden queer subtext in popular culture. So, why not re-read the lives of actors themselves, given that we can be 99% sure that the narratives produced about them by tabloids and other press are also entirely fiction?

For me Taylor Swift is the perfect example of someone we ought to re-read, because she is held up as the epitome of the normal, wholesome heterosexual girl of today. For one thing, she made her debut on the country music scene, which is notoriously unfriendly to the gays—despite producing a bevy of flamboyant stars who epitomise the queer concept of “camp” aesthetic (Dolly Parton, for example). The boy crushes of Swift are heavily interrogated in the media, and her relationships with women are (for the most part) understood as purely platonic. However, if you look a little closer, we can see a queer subtext in Swift’s life and oeuvre that suggests a rather more fluid expression of desire. Here are a few things to note:

She dated Taylor Lautner and it was really awkward:

There is no doubt that it is common practice in Hollywood for studios to pair stars up for promotional purposes. This is referred to as ��showmance”. But there is also the well-known though little-discussed practice of “bearding” (typically this refers to setting up gay male actors with female stars) or in extreme cases “lavender marriage” where the charade involves putting a ring on it (Rock Hudson is one well-noted example). We can’t be sure whether is was a bearding scenario when Swift and Lautner got together, but they sure were very showy yet extremely uncomfortable together.

She used to have a pretty intense relationship with her violinist:

During her country music days, Swift toured with a band which included violinist Caitlin Evanson for eight years. Unlike those Taylor x Taylor pics, Taylor and her violinist had sparks galore. Evanson, who is ten years older than Swift once commented, “Taylor is a 40 year old in a 19 years olds body”, which is just the kind of thing you’d expect an older girlfriend to say about their younger lover.

There was that time she apparently kissed Karlie Kloss:

Karlie Kloss is supposed to be the closest of Swift’s girl-clan, and in 2014 they were spotted kissing at a club. The photos are pretty dodgy and might well be fake. But I include this point here because it started a bunch of rumours about Swift’s sexuality, which is important for the next point.

Her song “New Romantics” is probably about being more than straight:

Swift’s new single off 1989 includes a number of lyrics that reflect a queer subtext. These include:

1.”We show off our different scarlet letters— Trust me, mine is better”: given that scarlet letters refer to adultery, Swift is basically saying here “I’ve got other partners but they’re not who you expect”.

2. “We team up then switch sides like a record changer”: note here that Swift doesn’t seem to be just referring to switching partners, but switching sides.

3. “The rumors are terrible and cruel/But, honey, most of them are true”: this might be referring to the gay rumours as noted above.

4. “And every day is like a battle/But every night with us is like a dream”: this suggests an outside persona that clashes with what goes on behind closed doors, specifically with a partner.

5. “The best people in life are free”: this might refer to the practice of studios paying for beards. Swift is saying, the best people in life are not the ones you get contractually set up with.

“I Know Places” is about secret love

One thing you can say about Swift’s hetero romances, is that they are very very public. Instagram pictures posted by Swift, hundreds of photos in gossip magazines, TV interviews, and so on. However this song from 1989 refers to a love that Swift must hide away. The song also starts with “You stand with your hand on my waist line/It’s a scene and we’re out here in plain sight”, which suggests a romance that might not be perceived as one at first. This might be a reference to that phenomenon that people will believe anything before they believe you’re in a gay relationship—i.e. “oh, you’re sisters?” or “you guys are such cute best friends” etc.

Let’s be clear here: I don’t want to essentialise sexuality, like it’s some nugget of “truth” that can simply be unearthed like a buried crystal. But I do think there is some benefit in cracking open what is considered normal, so that we can begin to see how this is really just a fiction that *no one* lives up to. This also isn’t to condemn those who do not “come out” of the proverbial closet, because we ought to realise that attempting to live up to the fiction of normality is often enacted as a mode of survival. The horrible reality is that once stars come out they can’t survive easily in Hollywood. Among others, Ellen Page has talked about how she has struggled to get parts playing straight characters since publicly declaring her sexuality.

In any case, you might be thinking: why care about Taylor Swift’s sexuality anyway—shouldn’t that be none of our business? Fair point. Perhaps when you apply a queer “re-reading” to real people it can all get a little…gossipy. Despite this, I continue to hold onto the fantasy that our icons of culture aren’t all that straight and narrow. I think I care so much because I grew up looking and acting pretty heteronormative, and was treated as such. But while I had mad crushes on boys and aspired to extreme girliness in aesthetic, my desires were not simply straight. I had girl crushes too, I just didn’t know how to make sense of my complex range of feelings. I guess that’s why I hang onto the idea that there’s a Secret Lesbian Club in Hollywood, headed by the girliest boy-mad celebrity of all…because in that alternate universe, sexuality might be hidden but it sure isn’t black and white.

source

#taylor swift #gaylor swift #kaylor #karlie kloss #karliekloss #taylorswift

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mirroredfaces · 6 years ago

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To Toptal Reader(s) and other visionaries...

Part I: Drives and Dreams

On 22 May 2019, I will graduate from Barnard College of Columbia University with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Anthropology and concentration in Archaeology. Through diverse coursework at “Barnumbia,” I have developed an immense appreciation for the entanglements of working with the dead... not to mention their many material remnants.

While the archaeological questions we can explore are limitless, I am most captivated by the mysteries of the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition in Western Eurasia. Within this diverse field, I am most drawn to the amorphic figures we call “Neandertals” and to questions of their coexistence with modern human populations. Alongside the timeless and noble savage, the figure of the caveman is crystallized in our consciousness in childhood; nevertheless, I am shocked by narratives of our maligned “cousins” as brute quasi-humans, predestined for a swift demise at the onslaught of “modernity”.

Neandertals have gone by many names. Our image of them continues to mutate in academia as well as popular culture, but what does current archaeological evidence indicate of their livelihood? of their treatment in death? How can archaeological findings speak to their figurings of the cosmos? to their ontologies? What of their contemporaneity with modern human populations? What of art? At a more metaphysical level, how do our epistemologies influence our interpretations? How do media interact to craft particular (pre)historic narratives? How should we convey archaeological findings to a wider public, with a semblance of disciplinary accord, nuance and authenticity?

These questions are far from simple. This fall, I will develop the intellectual frameworks and practical skills through which I explore such questions through a Masters of Science in Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford. After receiving this degree, I hope to apply my newfound skills in chronometry, biomolecular studies, and materials analysis in doctoral work on the Middle and Upper Paleolithic of Eurasia. At a theoretical level, I will continue to grapple with concepts of personhood, gender, sexuality, marginality and symbolism.

Though the prospects of a tenured university professorship appear slim, I see my future in academic archaeology. Nevertheless, I will descend the ivory tower to spark and engage in wider public discourse on our shared human history. As I am enthralled by visual portrayals of Neandertals, I will also pursue work in paleoart (e.g. sculptural dermoplasty, experimental reconstruction). One day, I aspire to write a re-imagined Clan of the Cave Bear series (à la Jean Auel), grounded in current archaeological research. While these goals are admittedly idealistic, their realization starts with feet on the ground, an open mind, and a willing attitude. Financial security is also an important ingredient for success, and as a first generation American dependent on a single mother, a Toptal Scholarship would greatly aid this cause.

Beings of the deep past dwell in alterity, in the shadows of our evolutionary tree and the fringe of cultural consciousness. In an era of increasing nationalism, xenophobia, racism and sexism, inclusive archaeologies offer the potential to reflect our shared origins and inspire a more tolerant present. Neandertals are a maligned population construed as an evolutionary dead end or scapegoat for genetic inheritances; but rather than indulge satire of the caveman, or the far more malicious trope of indigenous savagery, why not explore their sophisticated survivorship and contributions to humanity and the earth? Why not try to learn from inter-(sub)species interactions?

I see a future where human superiority is destabilized; where people respect one another, no matter their nationality or religion or gender; where we care for our selves and our planet. While archaeology is an unconventional lens to enact this future, it is the discipline that inspires me each and every day. If I can share the inspiration I draw from the deep past with others, and mobilize a more tolerant and inclusive present, I will change the world one mind at a time. I would be inexpressibly grateful to Toptal for mentorship in accessing non-academic publics and increasing the visibility of my work-- be it literary, scientific, or artistic. Archaeology is a discipline reliant on networks, and unfortunately mine are slim.

At Barnard, I have learned to empower and be empowered by bold women. As I enter a discipline dominated by white men, I will emanate the strength I have built here wherever I go. With support from the Toptal Scholarship, I can travel to Oxford unburdened by fears of ever-increasing financial debt. I can ease the financial strain placed on my mother from my undergraduate education, and launch my own path of independence. It is time to begin my professional career as an empowered female archaeologist. In this constellation of drives and dreams, I am ready to take the next step - onto the stage at Columbia University’s commencement ceremony, into the School of Archaeology at Oxford, and then, well, I suppose time will tell?

Part II: Humble Roots

Education is expensive, especially abroad. I was raised terribly aware of this fact, thanks to my mother’s tales of her early life in the United States. At the ripe age of eighteen, she emigrated from Hungary to attend UC: Berkeley while learning English and painting houses to pay her way through school. She went on to obtain a PhD in Neuroscience and complete postdoctoral work at Stanford University; yet her success was painfully juxtaposed with the sorrow of her (now, late) sister. Jacinta eloped at eighteen, with a young lover turned abusive spouse. She was ultimately stuck in an abusive marriage and in their childhood home, never to travel beyond Hungary’s borders. My first view of Jacinta was her hunched back as she hobbled down the sole paved street in Alsónemesapáti, letters in hand. She worked for the town’s postal service, delivering mail on foot.

I am humbled by my family’s roots, not to mention the courage of my mother—who not only fled Soviet control, but also transitioned to single parenthood whilst battling cancer. As I meditate on Jacinta’s hardships and the alternate realities that could have played out in the Hungarian countryside, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for my mother and for the upbringing she sought to provide us. I can never hope to repay her for her sacrifices, or for the hard choices she made to give her children lives of opportunity. I recognize my privilege, and my responsibility to use it for good. I recognize the obstacles—seen and unseen—that lurk in my path. Lastly, I recognize the impact of a Toptal Scholarship on my quest for knowledge and independence.

With a Toptal award, I can cross the ocean to join the university with the strongest archaeology department in the world. Without the stress of loans and debt, I can apply myself whole-heartedly (or rather, whole-mindedly) to my studies. I can do so in an environment of academic rigor that fosters community and originality. Unfortunately, the financial strain of my time at Barnard College continues to burden my mother and I. In fact, the anticipated pressure inspired me to apply credits earned in high school and graduate a year early. A $10,000 Toptal award could be applied directly to my future tuition, or cover my housing and living expenses during my masters.

In sum, a Toptal Scholarship would position me that much closer to academic success and financial independence, whilst releasing my mother from the title’s economic grip. She has spent far too long focusing on others to the negligence of herself. Why prolong her duress, when I can progress? It is time I journey abroad in the pursuit of higher education and the responsibilities and freedoms of adulthood—in a beautiful and ironic iteration of my mother’s own tale. With your goodwill and my steadfast commitment, these reveries can become a reality. Thank you kindly for considering my application.

#dreamit #doit

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harclay · 5 years ago

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so i made this post a while back

Also is it Averyl-level hubris to invent a word in the Old Tongue that roughly corresponds to a “third gender” occupied by gnc gay people which has survived as a term in the relatively isolated culture of the mountain clans and is used more as an insult now but which Averyl and other northern gays can identify with? If so I’m gonna go full on hamartia

and i wanna talk about how this idea has developed since i first had it

the term i’m going to be using to name this gender category is argr. this word is an old norse word which was originally an insult referring to effeminacy in men and lechery in women, and did not, historically, correspond to a third gender or a gay identity as we understand it today; i’m not using it in its original definition, however, but in my own. i first chose this as a kind of placeholder name because i’m not good at inventing languages, and i do still kind of think of it as a placeholder, but i also have no confidence that i’m going to think of a replacement--so i’m rolling with it for now. my sincere apologies to ANY viking’s ghost or old norse enthusiast im offending here, but i gotta do what i gotta do

so, first of all when i say “third gender” i’m not suggesting any specific parallels to third genders in any given historical or modern culture. i’m leery of doing that because often the whole concept of “third gender” is a modern, white, anglo-western intrusion onto indigenous cultures, and to try to appropriate (modern, white, anglo-western) ideas about gender in indigenous cultures and apply them to GRRM’s Diet Medieval Europe would be uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Bad™. (and if anyone feels that’s what i’m doing i’m WIDE open to criticism.)

i use the term “third gender” here, specifically, to mean “a category of being recognized as outside normative structures of manhood and womanhood.” i think its possible that in its very, very original form in the days of the first men, the category of argr was conceived as totally separate from man and woman--a third gender with its own symbols, signals, and rituals of gender, separate from masculinity and femininity--but that construction didn’t survive, except in associations of otherness and of being outside the typical patriarchal construction of family, with its goal being procreation and the handing-down of property. now, in averyl’s day, this category is constructed specifically in conversation with masculinity and femininity, and is not truly understood as a third gender by the above definition.

argr is now a category occupied by wlw/mlm of averyl’s culture who don’t conform to typical masculinity and femininity, and are understood to be primarily or exclusively partnering w other women or other men. you don’t necessarily need to be Butch™ on averyl’s level to be read as argr; any person who chooses not to get married or have children will have an argr whiff about them--again, it’s the being outside the patriarchal construction of family, the “opting-out” from procreation. (which doesn’t mean that wlw/mlm never want to have kids; this is simply a part of how an argr person is “read” by people in their culture.) rather than construct this as a parallel to non-binaristic gender systems in any major living or historical culture from our own world, i’m suggesting this as a fictional reflection of the ways many wlw and mlm feel alienated from traditional womanhood and manhood, and see themselves as either outside traditional gender constructs entirely, or in some way appropriating/reinventing those constructs in a way that makes them something entirely new.

averyl does identify with the word “argr” and to an extent thinks of herself as such; the same can be true for many SGA people from her culture. but the term is also, particularly in the mouth of any non-argr person, an insult, along the lines of “you dyke” or “you f*g”--two terms which specifically mark a gender-nonconforming SGA person--such that if a person wanted to insult averyl on the basis of her gender nonconformity and sexual desire for women, they would call her “argr.” it is NOT considered a ‘polite’ word and generally isn’t spoken about openly, but a kid growing up in the mountains would hear it tossed about e.g. between guardsmen passing through as an insult, or might hear it spoken about the two women who live together on their own farm, and through implication come to understand what it means.

the fact that this word exists does not mean the mountains are a haven for LGBT people or that argr people are recognized as legitimate. but the existence of this category, even as a highly stigmatized one, is a way for a woman like averyl to develop a gradual sense of identity in relationship w the societal constructs around her. this is a particularly big deal in contrast with southron cultures where homosexuality, particularly women’s, is so unspoken as to go almost totally unnamed and be almost entirely invisible. the absolute silence surrounding LGBP affectivity in southron cultures would be utterly deadening to averyl and is a dimension of how she sees southron people, even the highborn, as in many ways unfree.

#⚔︎ headcanon tag.#for some reason im rly anxious about posting this even though i have negative two followers

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mediarevolt · 6 years ago

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Solidarity Statement

As pro-revolutionists committed to cultivating revolution, many often look to coalitions to do the work of collaboration and moving with the oppressed towards revolutionary practice. In actuality, when we work together it's important to not only iron where we agree and have affinity, but where we disagree and where our affinity diverges, where our strategies might actually be counter to one another: i.e. antagonisms. So that we are not surprised in the future, and we don't flatten struggles for the sake of false unity.

In Los Angeles, or more accurately, occupied Tongva land, in regards to the recent call to ban and isolate the Psyco Brigade/las O.V.A.s/La Conxa, and Defend NELA and the less recent decision to kick them out of the Defend Boyle Heights coalition:

There is information conveniently being left out of the conversation by DBH - namely, that the Los Angeles Red Guards and, their front-group project Serve the People, (coalition members of Defend Boyle Heights) were previously banned from the La Conxa space last year 2018 June due to predatory mactivist behavior and recruitment tactics.

The OVA’s/Pscyo Brigade was kicked out from the Defend Boyle Heights coalition after they had started detailing "red flags," or concerning dynamics and behaviors by coalition members: which had resulted in boundaries being set to exclude Red Guards and STP-LA from La Conxa. Just prior to making a presentation on these red flags within the Defend Boyle Heights Coalition, they were kicked out of the coalition for what they call “identity opportunism”. *Essentially, this term describes a tenet of Maoist ideology. Mainly that “identity politics” is seen as a non-politics since it does not build-up to their desired unified Maoist party line. So then, for Maoists “identity opportunists” are those who they conceive as using their identity as a way to push an agenda other than Maoism. A topsy-turvy inversion of the notion of identity as a site of varied oppressions.

Since the call for isolation was released one of the signees has come forward disclosing that they did not consent to signing the statement and actually contradicted the narrative of events set forth in the statement (the O.V.A.’s were not kicked out of an event for death threats). This, and other information, casts serious doubt on the alleged death threats and the credibility of the statement in its entirety.

Consequently the drafters of this statement want to offer some solidarity, counter-narrative and perspective to those being asked to sign onto the ban and enforce isolation of the Psyco Brigade/OVAS.

We remind ourselves of the autonomy and resilience of groups and people free to respond however they desire/need to, defensively or offensively, to predatory recruitment tactics by overt vanguardist organizations. For the purposes of this paper, vanguardist organizations refer to groups who themselves claim vanguardism as a central strategy of their intent, purpose and organizing. Those vanguardist entities which position themselves as the higher authority or specialized professionals in the liberatory movements of oppressed people- the saviors, gatekeepers, proselytizers and managers reproduced in resistance movements.

We support the role of self and communal determination in combating rank opportunism by left-authoritarian organizations working under the cover of coalitions. To be in coalition is to be in collaboration. Coalitions often hold space for multiple affinities with some strong clear principles and boundaries that bring people together for a shared goal or desired outcome. Some of these left orgs use coalitions as cover to recruit people to their ideology and specifically, their party or organization, and then isolate those who they view as "competition" in the ideological social war when recruitment does not go according to plan. By left-authoritarian we mean those in the broad leftwing who view hierarchy, coercion, state-power, organized authority and policing as a means to an end: sometimes known as authoritarian socialism or communism.

We oppose predatory behavior and macktivism for the purposes of recruitment, gaining information and access to space and communities, resulting in collectives and spaces feeling infiltrated. Infiltration is not just an overt act from state agents, but tactics used to gain and manipulate information, access and people, by those convinced their own goals outweigh the dynamics it takes to get there (their ends justify their means). This is not the spirit of collaboration, camaraderie and liberation we seek and spark, which definitely holds within it space for disagreement and rupture. This is symptomatic of an authoritarian tendency in organizing that seeks to control and manipulate instead of empower us to engage in our own liberation. We do not embrace a false equivalence, or conception of liberal notions of equality, by presuming infiltration is weaponized against all genders the same way, toward the same end, with the same impact.

Ideological divisions exist and have been amplified as the OVAs/Psyco Brigade has developed their commitment to collective autonomy and revolution which leans more toward autonomy, self-organization and a flattening of hierarchies. This cannot be overlooked as a key ideological divide with some of the forces at play within Defend Boyle Heights.

Gender (and race, ability, sexuality, and more) is not a secondary identity to that of the exploited worker /proletariat engaged in class war. We are, of any gender, engaged in class war. We are, as women, as nonbinary folks, as trans and gender nonconforming people, as men, engaged in class war in particular ways that include all of the iterations in which class war shows up in our lives. We will not, as the below quote by Red Guards LA posits, wait until after a theoretical socialist revolution to use subsequent waves of revolution to "collectivize domestic/reproductive labor" to resolve "the contradiction between men and women". The contradiction is truly in the daily enforcement of gender as yet another role and job under capitalism and society that is associated with treatment/mistreatment and produces (and is produced by) bosses, masters, and #theotherPig. We will not attack capitalism without also attacking this society. This is not a distraction from class war, this is an amplification of class war." "After the revolution the socialist construction of the dictatorship of the proletariat with a reconstruction and collectivization of domestic/reproductive labor will initially resolve the contradiction between men and women. Subsequent cultural revolutions can also resolve the more aggressive residue patriarchal ideas that linger on as the dying old ideas of a dying old world."

As a coalition that has repeatedly and openly not only called for violence, but shamed others for not being down for "revolutionary violence" we find their response to these unsubstantiated death threats to be disingenuous and oddly opportunistic ideologically. Threats of death are serious accusations that concern trust, safety and security and should have nothing to do with DBH’s purported qualifications and judgment of the O.V.As as revolutionary or not. In fact, it is common for women in revolutionary movements to be used for their anger and furious organizing efforts until it is no longer convenient or threatens an established order of things. Bash back, which is a hxstoricaly queer, trans, lgbtq, women, femme direct response tactic, has always been a form of communal defense and revolutionary violence. For example, in 2014 Queerpocalypse descended on the Los Angeles Anarchist bookfair flipping tables and posting up outside the event, in a rejection of “inclusivity” models dealing with queer representation in anarchism and leftism. Folks were agitating the space, addressing centuries long antagonisms between default representation politics, hetnormativity in organizing spaces and the reality of struggle and oppression, especially within “anarchist” spaces. Lived experience and agitation sometimes rises to meet and challenge our theoretical revolutionary spaces- this is not identity opportunism. We insist on inviting our whole selves into our movements or they are not our movements; and we refuse for our participation to be reduced to another form in which we are treated as exploitable workers devoid of our actual selves.

Beware the forces you breathe life into. It is one thing to call for a boycott of local businesses or nonprofits and expect automatic compliance. It is another to apply the same tactic and strategy on more autonomously self-organized collectives and spaces. We will not fault the OVAs/Psyco Brigade for being who they have always been, women and marginalized genders self-organized toward revolution, and growing into understandings that do not fall in line with left-authoritarian ideologies.

"A lack of accountability to a higher power" is often weaponized against autonomous folks or anarchists in an intent to portray us as independent and unrelated to the communities we organize in. Defend Boyle Heights is not the higher power we are looking to empower to regulate self-organized community efforts that don’t align or fall in line with their ideology or strategy. Are you?

We have seen time and time again: even abusers and misogynists receive the benefit of the doubt of Transformative Justice processes, and it is suspicious to see no commentary or transparency detailing any attempts to resolve this issue or address the underlying root issues being dismissed as “identity opportunism”. We look to other iterations in Los Angeles in which figureheads, leaders and organizations have fallen under intense, necessary but methodical scrutiny complete with fact-finding, testimony and even tribunals. Even in such cases arising to the occasion of physical violence and abuse in the name of revolution, after evidence, proof and process that had been gathered, the entire organization was not banned or called to disband. It is one thing to dissociate, break coalition, rupture, and another entirely to call for isolation and actively campaign for isolation.

Collective autonomy- collective disposability we oppose the isolation of a radical collective in its entirety due to the actions or threats of a few. This is not accountability, but collective punishment. Even as we recognize the autonomy of each person and the responsibility of our organizing efforts to hold ourselves accountable, to call for such a broad ban and isolation without due diligence and full transparency of the above details regarding coalition member organizations is negligent, amounts to gatekeeping and reminds us of carceral politics that would dispose of community members altogether with no attention to interpersonal hxstories and real-time dynamics.

Further:

We recognize that not all our comrades are familiar with the differences in principles, strategies and tactics between left authoritarian v. more autonomous anti authoritarian organizing within leftist and revolutionary frameworks and communities in general. We caution against dismissing these contradictions as “sectarianism” when there are real time behaviors and interpersonal dynamics in organizing practice that show up according to these lines.

We know these dynamics and contradictions between revolutionist ideologies are not limited to this time and place. We encourage others to detail their “red flags” and how authoritarian leftism is showing up in their communities, at the cost of their autonomous & anti-authoritarian organizing.

DBH takes an openly-Maoist line against identity politics which views any sort of attention to identity, other than one’s class position, as being liberal, revisionist or anti-communist. Those of us drafting this piece come from a variety of identities and understand that our lived experience goes beyond our class-belonging (but also includes it): women are harassed on the streets regardless of class; Black people are subjected to gratuitous violence by the police regardless of income; queer people are coerced into heteronormative lifestyles regardless of their job title and people with disabilities which make the sale of their labor-power difficult still are forced to pay for their own livelihood. To say these identities are inconsequential is not only offensive, it deeply misunderstands the nature of the capitalist society we live in and therefore defaults to /privileges entrenched power systems inextricably interlocked with capitalism. But DBH calls attention to all this “identity-opportunism.” As though there is any explicitly gained opportunity, and at the expense of the community or liberatory efforts, to being a woman, a Black person, queer, or a person with a disability, or facing the multiplicity of these experiences in this capitalist, hierarchical and authoritarian structured world.

Conclusion: those of us that have drafted this statement are not locked-away in our ivory towers, writing out abstract essays for academic consumption. We’ve been involved in organizing, creating radical propaganda, putting on events, facilitating workshops, hitting the streets and other forms of radical action, solidarity & mutual aid. We write this because we know how destructive this type of Left-Authoritarian organizing is to the goals we have and we must defend each other against these types of attacks whether from the Left or the Right.

- Some Pissed Off 'Los Angeles' Anti-Authoritarians

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gdcvhrd · 3 years ago

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Reflection

To reflect upon my time in this course, I will have to take a brief moment to go over my time in 2020 with this class. To set the stage, I just came back from a trip that left me in a horrible state of mind. So horrible in fact that I could not properly function when it came time to work. I blew off this class and did other things to feel better. I regret that now as I now see that I missed a great learning experience. Now that I have fully finished the class, I can say that the most interesting topic for me was something that did not really have a name in anything that I read in the class. It came from secondary research because I was struck by how cultures not connected to Europe end up with their laws. Of course it all starts with colonization. It is here that I found the words that I was looking for. Imported homophobia. There is not a traditional definition, just the concept that the laws applied from the homelands in Europe stamped themselves onto the cultures they conquered, corrupted, and destroyed. It also does not have to be a European thing either. Islamic expansion also plays a part in the concept of imported homophobia wherever it has planted itself. History shows that before the expansion of most monotheistic religions with exceptions to Judaism, homosexuality, bisexuality, gender-nonconforming, etc. was acknowledged and accepted. Of course with Spain going one way and Portugal going the other and the British, French, Dutch, and Germans joining not long after to effectively take over the world. While Islamic expansion for the most part was tolerant of peoples cultures, the spread of Christianity was not. That right there is what has bothered me the most it seems. It is the constant need to interfere in other peoples lives when things were just fine before they came. Now that they are “gone”, their influence on the culture that they built after they destroyed the previous one is one that is still being overturned. Some places are stunted more than others. For example in the continent of Africa where the setting of our book Under the Udala Trees takes place. The book is set in 1960s Nigeria. Nigeria was in the midst of civil war at the time and would go on to become an inhospitable for those in the LGBT community. This book really made me feel for the plight of those in the LGBT community but especially for those in Africa. While it is tough to be who you want to be in most parts of the world as a gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, etc. it is especially hard in the majority places in Africa. Vigilante executions and torture are tolerated by most governments. This was where my journey really began as I soon became enthralled by the topic of imported homophobia. It is such a common yet only recently has it become a topic of discussion online.

In my first post, I link to an article that started my research. This was during the writing for the Student-led Discussions for Under the Udala Trees. The article goes over how current African governments call homosexuality “unafrican”. When in reality, it was very African with many groups and tribes have specific words to refer to homosexual people and activities. What was unafrican was the laws put in place by African governments that repress the LGBT community there. The second post is from Stonewall UK where I get a deeper understanding of what I am trying to understand. It is also the first article that gives me the term imported homophobia. It goes over the legacy of imported homophobia and how slowly some African countries, like Botswana, are repealing their harsh laws that criminalize homosexual activities. This linked me to other articles they used as resources to write their pieces. One of them which I did write about was King Mwanga ii. He was the gay/bisexual king of Buganda, a part of Uganda. He opposed the creeping expansion Christianity and Islam into his nation. I learned that he had 16 wives and many male servants who had sexual relations with. There came a time where his servants converted to either Islam or Christianity and refused to continue the relationship with the king as it went against their newfound faith. He had them all killed. The Christians and Muslims eventually won out with help from the British Empire and Mwanga was no longer a king. So it seems to me that homosexuality was around until the Scramble for Africa. Another article that stuck out to me was from the BBC when Uganda thought that locking aid behind the improvement of human rights was a form of bullying. This one stuck out to me because the new culture that the British helped build in Uganda can not separate themselves from what was imposed on them. Now that it is socially acceptable for people to be openly homosexual, Uganda and other African countries will have to undo the century plus teachings they were forced to learn. To build off of that article, I found another by The Guardian that details how American Evangelists are picking up where European colonists left off. Evangelists are probably my least sect of Christianity because of how predatory they are. So to hear them in Africa having about the same influence as the colonists that left really hurts because progress will halt in getting the human rights needed in the continent. It does not help that I already do not like missionary trips. I just wish that people would leave others alone. If they did not ask for help, you do not need to insert yourself into the situation. One of the more interesting articles took me out of Africa and brought me to New York to the Russian community in Brooklyn. A different yet similar import. Homophobia from Russia into the US. Not that the US needs any help with homophobia but it is a far better situation than what happens in Russia. At least here in the US, we acknowledge that there is inequality. Immigrants from Russia, their kids that may be LGBT in may find themselves at odds with their parents. Russia is a very conservative nation. Orthodox Catholicism and government crackdown hard on the population in general and recently very hard on the LGBT community. So when the Russian people came to America, some being in the LGBT community, were hoping to at least be somewhat free from the stigma. Of course nothing can ever be easy as the Russian community is still conservative even overseas. So the LGBT community comes together to hopefully reach out to the rest of the Russian community to open their minds.

One thing that I learned about myself from this class is that I really do not like it when people have the feeling of interfering with another person’s life or culture. For example I think that people have somehow forgotten that people choose to wear a veil or head covering in regards to Islam. In fighting for their human rights, some may just violate them instead. While I can not fix what has happened centuries ago, I can do my best to make the world a better place. I just want people to live their life as they see fit with no outside interference. For some that seems too much to ask for but times change and people change. The future can only get better from here if we do something about it.

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graciecatfamilyband · 7 years ago

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To the reviewer of Just A Little of that Human Touch on AO3 who wrote:

YES YES YES to your portrayal of Alderaan as a liberal feminist society with sex education and Leia being a crusader of that! THIS feels real. THIS feels like the kind of society Breha Organa and Leia by extension would have cultivated.

I already thanked you for your review, but I wanted to add (and the comment box on AO3 didn’t feel like it was the right place to do so)-

A lot of time we fanfic authors borrow from Earth and its history as we conceptualize societies in the GFFA. There's a lot of fun royal customs that people like to explore in relation to Alderaan. A lot of us grew up reading about the British monarchy and other European monarchies (what can I say, a lot of us are nerds! Raise your hands if you read those Royal Diaries books growing up? Other historical fiction dealing with this stuff? How many we got in the house?), and that seems to have inspired a lot of Alderaanian customs in fic, which is cool!

Personally I'm interested in how Alderaan as a matriarchal planet with at least a traditionally female power structure (although I like headcanons that Alderaan moved long ago towards a real gender equality model rather than actually denying men opportunities, including to rule!) might differ from a lot of the patriarchal monarchies in our Western history. Virginity and female-centered sexual purity focus makes a lot more sense when the heir of the throne needs to be related to the King (and the heir of any given family needs to be related to the father); much less so when traditionally the heir needs to be related to the Queen (and the heir of any given family related to the mother- if Alderaan even has such a concept of family heirs!). And then of course with Leia's open adoption (in the sense that the people know about it- and I think they must because she is not the same ethnicity as her parents, although I've seen some takes on it where its like an open/fake secret that work well), that seems to indicate modern-day Alderaan may not give an F about biological lineage anyway. Which I think also says some things about the society and how it views sex and reproduction.

That, combined with our knowledge of Alderaan as a place that puts such a high degree of value on education (and a good sexual education is an important part of ensuring people have access to all those other kinds of higher education, as babies too early really can make that so much harder) as well as the value the society places on art and, in my head canon at least, the well-being of children (parents having children too early is also associated with very poor outcomes for children; parents having unstable or abusive relationships also is associated with very poor outcomes for children)- well, it just makes sense to me that Alderaan would care deeply about good sexual education that involves, as Leia said, not just contraception but things like healthy relationship skills. Important elements that are too often left out of a discussion of practices that take place in the context of relationships!

So yes, I agree that this approach seems to fit Bail and Breha’s personalities well (and Leia’s for that matter!), but also think that this is the kind of society that likely shaped those personalities, you know?

And of course Leia never shies away from pushing envelopes galaxy-wide, and supporting such an organization would (hopefully- although fascist regimes get weird about this sort of thing!) be a way for her to advocate for something she believes in that is valuable, and, while pushing the envelope, actually do-able (as opposed to openly advocating for overthrowing the Empire).

I received an anon message about how I was ruining Star Wars and Star Wars fanfiction with my naked sociopolitical agenda, and how its absurd to apply Earth morality to Star Wars in- any? such a?- way. At the time I didn’t want to post it, but it seems relevant to mention here. Honestly, what “hurts”- other than the fact that someone felt the need to go out of their way to share this opinion with me without signing their name- is that it implies I have no “legitimate” thought process behind this choice for the story. I believe that I have sound reasons why I think Alderaan was this way. Sure, it’s in line with my own points of view- but that’s in part because I think Alderaan is intended by George Lucas to be a beacon of democratic values under a repressive regime, and a symbol of all that is nurturing in the Galaxy, and to me that fits with these ideas. Other people may disagree with my interpretation of Alderaan, as well as how democratic values and a value placed on life would translate into sexual mores. Other people do disagree, and write it differently! That’s fine. But I don’t feel that I’m drawing it out of nowhere. And as usual, this is only a critique when the Earth morality we’re drawing from is “progressive”- no one feels the need to go into the inbox of authors who wrIte about Alderaanian courtiers planning to check Leia’s hymen before her wedding night to tell them not to project specific Earth cultural practices onto the GFFA. Their incorporation of Earth history is seen as well thought-out, valuable, and detailed world-building; mine is considered a cheap trick.

And no one should go bother those writers either! Their stories have something to offer, just as I believe mine does. (And I know fanfiction is free, amateur authors, blah blah blah- but honestly, fanfiction being free isn’t the primary reason to behave supportively and decently toward people who make themselves available on the internet. Sure, you can post a negative review of Claudia Gray’s books on your own blog- and sure, you really should not do that with fanfiction, because its unnecessarily mean for people who hare having fun in their free time and doing what’s meaningful to them- but its still rude to go to Claudia Gray directly and tell her she’s ruining Han and Leia, or Star Wars, or how much you hated her stuff! Direct-to-author contact should always be polite, whatever the context.) I believe strongly that everyone should be able to bring whats interesting and meaningful to them to the stories they want to tell in fanfiction, and I personally think there should be room for both approaches!

From my perspective, there has been a lot of handwringing lately about fanfic being ruined by “overly political” agendas and about authors (mis?)using Han and Leia to work out “ideas about female empowerment.” (Although perhaps that perspective is colored by the anon message!) I’d be lying if I said that didn’t dull my enthusiasm about writing Han and Leia, period- no matter how light or fluffy or smutty or “divorced from real-life”. Because even if my past pieces are not considered to fall into that category, that atmosphere makes me feel stifled, like I’m no longer writing for me but like I’m writing to prove that I am still valuable in this community by coloring in the right lines. So while the entire bones of the story were written in August, as I “colored it in”, it did come to include more sociopolitical elements than I originally conceived of it having. I only did so in ways, however, that I felt enhanced the human story at the core, rather than took away from it. They came to me naturally, organically, as the story unfolded, rather than me sitting back and trying to find places to jam them in. Another kind reviewer whose words are etched in my heart noted that “it's all the details that really make it, that tell the story,” and while she was referring to things like body language, I like to think that these details were no less a part of that, and added to rather than drew from the story. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have included them. People may of disagree about whether or not I succeeded, and its possible that my own skill deficit was part of that! But, while I may have failed, I don’t like the idea that they couldn’t have been included in such a story in a way that was relevant.

I do affectionately like to think of this- even if I am being somewhat tongue-in-cheek/ironic- as my “political screed” fic, because a) I recognized upfront that I was powerless to stop it from being taken that way, even if I took out every possibly “political” element, simply because it involved Leia having previous partners; b) it’s as “political” as I think I’m capable of getting, which is to say (to me)- not very! its a story about the characters above everything, so it gave me a chuckle to call it political; c) it was a way to prepare myself for a comment like the one I received, which I thought was probably inevitable; and d) it was my way of proving to myself that I did not need to live in fear of writing a “wrong” fic and being tossed out on my ass. I can continue to write whatever is meaningful to me and take whatever response I get. If many people don't want to read it but are still down to read my other stuff, that’s great! If some people don’t want a voice like mine around at all, its better that I know that now rather than worrying about it for the next eight months before finally gathering the courage to publish a prompt I promised to write for a friend, and having my heart broken all over again after spending a lot of time and energy mending it.

And honestly, the overall response has just been so heartening. So many people have recognized it as fundamentally a story about Han and Leia connecting with each other and it just warms me to my toes to hear that it resonated. The recipient who it was for was thrilled to see some of her own headcanons included too, so I feel like I’ve done my job and gained a meaningful writing experience (that prompt- “and we never talked after that”- was really hard to right a nice, hopeful Han/Leia story for!).

So thanks, dear reviewer(s), and I hope I added something interesting to your comments about Alderaan! 💚💙💚💙

#alderaan #alderaanian culture #alderaanian headcanons #meta?#fic meta?#virginity discourse (goddess help us)#???#my fic Just a Little of that Human Touch #longpost yikes #sorry

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abodynamicslife · 7 years ago

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Alpha, Beta, and Omega, particularly in the context of wolves, are early scientific descriptions of social status or rank. The idea is that the Alphas are the most dominant, powerful individuals; that the Betas are their subordinates, like lieutenants; and the “Omega” is the lowest-ranking wolf, the pack punching bag, who is submissive to everyone else and whose job is to take their abuse, and also to cajole the pack into play.

The paranormal romance genre has developed its own little sub-tropes around the framework of Alphas, Betas, and Omegas in werewolf packs, so they’re not always drawing directly on these terms as they’ve been applied to wolf packs, but it’s definitely still one of the most common versions you’ll see of werewolf society depicted in fiction.

There is also a popular trope that’s specific to fanfiction, which is also called “Alpha/Beta/Omega” or “A/B/O” dynamics, and though it shares many of the same roots as far as Alpha dominance and Omega submission, it’s not the same trope at all. A/B/O stories treat the idea of Alpha, Beta, and Omega more like sexual orientation and a description of physical sex characteristics. Some of the same problems exist in both tropes — and it gets particularly confusing when authors write A/B/O dynamics into a werewolf character setting where Alpha/Beta/Omega are also used as werewolf social ranking.

The fact that these terms are so popular, and used in so many different ways, adds an extra layer of confusion to their use, because werewolf fans will have already come across so many different ideas and iterations of what exactly “Alpha,” “Beta,” and “Omega” mean in so many different fictional universes, versus what they mean in real life, compounded with the fact that, well… the basis of the whole concept is rubbish.

Why Alpha / Beta / Omega for Werewolves Simply doesn’t Make Sense

The concept of Alpha / Beta / Omega wolves comes from flawed, outdated science. We know now that wolf packs in the wild are typically just a family unit: the “alphas” are in fact just the parents, or the breeding pair, and most of the other wolves in the pack are their offspring from the past several years. (There are many other pack configurations, including extremely large packs that might include aunts, uncles, wolves welcomed from other packs, and more, but a wolf pack on the most basic level is simply a family.)

How would your werewolves have started using these terms in the first place? They weren’t commonly associated with wolves until the 1950s. Even if your werewolves wanted to apply human scientific terms to their own society, if that society pre-dates the 1950s, it wouldn’t make sense for them to use those terms for themselves at all.

- If in your universe werewolf society goes back to much more ancient times, or are simply not coming straight out of human society with human views, they would already have their own fully developed culture, social practices, and language to describe themselves.

- The most important thing I’d love for people to understand about our ideas of power, dominance, and rank in the social life of animals, is that these are almost always just humans projecting our own nonsense onto animals.

When Alpha / Beta / Omega Might Make Sense for Your Werewolf Characters

- When your werewolves were created by, are being studied by, or are under the control of military, government, or science forces.

- When your werewolves weren’t born as werewolves, but acquired the condition from a bite, and have no idea what they’re doing.

- When your werewolves don’t use the terms for themselves, but humans have applied it to them.

There are undoubtedly other occasions when those terms might make sense, and hopefully you can give it some careful consideration to how the history of these terms might interact with the werewolf society you’ve built, if indeed your werewolves have any organized society at all.

Now Write!

I haven’t written this post with the intention of shaming authors who use this convention, but with the hope of encouraging authors to branch out a bit more in the way they write werewolves, and hopefully provide you with a bit more background on where these terms come from and their possible pitfalls for worldbuilding.

Read the full article here!

RANT ALERT

I clipped a lot of the article, to just focus on the main bits. I thought it had some interesting points, but I also thought this article was an incredibly presumptuous way of telling werewolf writers and worldbuilders how to build their own make-believe universe.

Okay, we get it, Alpha/Beta/Omega ranks were based on flawed research from the 1940s-50s, and as opposed to unrelated wolves in captivity, wolves in the wild don’t actually act that way at all. Nice. Fascinating. But werewolf fiction/horror is HARDLY one to be a stickler for factual scientific accuracy or realism in the first place.

It’s one thing to want a realistic plot and feasible character/storyline development in werewolf fiction (hello, Teen Wolf is a glaringly painful example; you’re justified to freak out trying to follow the plot holes and inconsistency and baiting). It’s another thing to single out a trope you don’t like and say in your “non-shaming” article that:

“....as much as I obviously hate this entire trope and wish it would die (sorry, I’m trying not to be judgmental, but I’m failing).”

If you don’t like ABO, or any other trope, and it bothers you that much that it’s scientifically and biologically inaccurate, there’s a very simple solution: DON’T READ OR WATCH IT.

Does it REALLY matter that werewolf stories often rely on the ABO trope in order to build their fictional stories? Yes, it often perpetuates a stereotype about human-derived hierarchies and behavioral norms, but the article is missing the point: These are WERE-WOLVES. Not REAL WOLVES. They’re ALREADY HALF HUMAN. So of course they’re going to invoke some form of human interaction and societal structures!

Then the article brought up the bitten versus born wolves. Even BORN wolves are still descended from human ancestors. “Werewolf” literally means (Hu)Man-Wolf -- the same way werefox means man-fox and werejaguar means man-jaguar. It’s rare to find a werewolf historiography in literature or film that does not begin with a HUMAN either:

being bitten by a wolf from the offset (ie: magical/scientific rabies)

using magic/potions/charms to become a wolf (eg: shamanism, animism)

being cursed into becoming a wolf, often via cannibalism (eg: Lycaon)

becoming a wolf via death-rebirth spiritualism (eg: Eastern Europe lore)

or some combination of the above

In the universes where ABO is applied to werewolves, it usually appears where multiple werewolves are already living/passing amidst normal human societies together. Technically, they’re IN CAPTIVITY; they’re not living in THE WILD. These werewolves are busy reigning in the wolf, not the human. Their community is their pack, and they’re led by a top werewolf, just like humans societies (Teen Wolf “alphas”, True Blood “packmasters”, etc). Otherwise they live like ordinary people, more or less. So by the article’s own stance that ABO ranks were only applicable to wolves not living in the wild, ABO actually applies!

In werewolf literature/film where the main character is bitten by a mysterious rogue/wild/feral (were)wolf who only exists as a plot device (usually killed in order to “cure” the character or lift the “curse”), there are no packs or ranks anyway, since that lone (were)wolf was a one-off for the sake of the storyline.

So it’s not surprising at all if werewolf packs started adopting human terms to describe what they are, even if before the 1950s they didn’t have a name for their system -- which brings up another point:

We’re taking it for granted that fictional werewolf packs around the world are even speaking English and using ABO tropes in the first place. Who’s to say that wolf packs in Europe and Mexico and Africa and Asia and the Arctic and North America are all using the same terms to describe themselves? Especially when you think about the social structures already inherently different around the world, applied on top of the ways different cultures perceive animals like wolves. You already get hints when looking at werewolves/wolves/canines in mythology and folklore and seeing how different they are!

I just think the article took the whole thing too seriously; suspend your disbelief. No one expects werewolf fiction to be scientifically accurate -- it’s myths and horror and pop culture, and the ABO kink/trope emerged from it via Supernatural fanfiction, not some special on Animal Planet or National Geographic issue. It’s all FICTION.

#werewolves #abo real life references #info on canines #abo dynamics

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lnrewlbrj3krj23 · 8 years ago

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Given social media’s intrusion onto older media, what is a justifiable distribution?

Due to increased media, we know more about each other's lives. From the roaring 20s dime novels and radio, to the 50's baby boomer's tv revolution, so each generation becomes more liberal, realizing the need for recognizing the other. With media, we tell more details about ourselves, and recognize each other.

The degrading of society's morals is in one part, the loss of the image of purity, and very strange "iconographization" of purity. What I means is that purity becomes expressed mainly in images in media rather than in positions of authority and power in real life.

In a way, real life authority, such as God or the King was in everyday life before, until the explosion of media captured those concepts of purity in the stories we describe to one another. How many princes or heros are there, pure of heart in (B)ollywood? How powerful their sense of heart is (either for humanity or a girl, who is another purity), to enable those pure of heart to save the world? And how often does this difference of purity become exploited in porn -- the ultimate image flipper, where the pure are debased?

Is it strange then, to have sexuality, the degrading of society's morals and purity in media all tied together as an obverse triangle? In a strange way, media becomes a distortion of everyday life, an the sense of the everyday becomes a reflection of media. What is in media is not everyday, and what is everyday is not media.

So then, this continues on, from books into social media today, except that with so much distortion, we discover that we cannot know the everyday without stories. The cycle of knowledge is accelerated as we start to learn about the nature of knowledge through the refinement of stories.

Take the "young millennial who narrates his own adventure", a genre stemming from the likes of ferris bueller. In such a story we learn about what's very important to the narrator. Such narrow cuts (haircuit, girl, car, habits) form the sense of self. This narrative too gets played, as a moral tale that can lead to bizarro fiction, media wrapped in porn and very odd priorities in life due to strange configurations of social context, such as The Haunted Vagina.

Media distorts morals by distortedly representing who we are to ourselves. We can be anything we like, especially via the media we choose to share This relates to power because if all the interesting stuff happens though our favorite media, doesn't real life become a shadow of what is online?

Is this not the dilemma that faces current humankind? That we are absorbed with the inessential? The appearance of a loss of power is the loss of our ability to be who we are, because we are too focused on what we are not.

A Deal Marker

The image is what the man is supposed to be. Obviously he is "supposed to" because he is not. There is a gap between "is" and "is to be". The infinitive as the fourth form of being, stated by Heidegger is the one that is always becoming due to morality.

[quote about how morality is metaphysical because people will be writing about morality for the next hundred years]

So neo-liberalism was in direct line to the creation of space increasingly powerful media afforded throughout human history. As our technology became better, so we learned more about who we were, until the latent content of history forces a social "weight" passed on by generations. This weight forms the basis of the priorities of each culture, whose horizons is the lineage afforded by nationalism and stories (nationalism is a story).

Thus while the globalist have often been contrasted with the nationalists, the state is but a model/generic name for both nation-states and states of being. It can be said perhaps, then that media is the state of being. And thus the one who is most on it, in theory, has the greatest expression of purpose. But this is a definite limit, as Trump cannot even get congress to pass a vote. It is pretty insightful of Congress to recognize the power of media.

But then again, Congress is the power of media, in part because they are over-recorded and formalized. Buried in the history of all its sessions are honorrings of fallen comrades, procedures, and other kinds of technocratic record keeping. So it makes sense that lawyers, the technocrats of paperwork forms the basis of social change. The state of marriage, or a corporation or a sale of a home isn't a "word" it's an excessively" long document that defines the basis for what ownership is by protecting ownership. The media is still today a legalism that descends from the runic legends that written language is magic. The presence of correct documentation is as much a function of media as social media peddles in cat pictures and other kinds of information humans think is important.

So at most, the damage of media's extensiveness isn't just the rallying of powerful celebrities to incite political rebellion it's also the lack of any actual power Trump seems to have. He can't do deals by intimidating congressmen because they are all lawyers who understand that power is the ability to justify decisions... the most emboddened of which sought to continue the work of other lawyers herself, a lawyer politicianing her way, or a politician who is able to technocrat through law (perhaps a pre-cursor was a Louis Brandeis who first used business as it was current practice to inform the decision making process and thus hide the willfulness of judges. Brandeis helped the metrics of law's ability to hide personal will (and thus also apply it) but was really only part of an already existing tradition of media's power: as William Howard Taft was both President and Supreme Court Justice.

This shows law also in two other aspects of government:

1. In fact Obama is pretty secretive. He is able to hide away his decision making behind the most obscure of reasons, the lack of knowledge. In that way the opposite of business men are lawyers who understand how to control knowledge. The ones who navigate the bureaucracy best are the ones who are able to hide in it, which leads us to

2. Neil Gorsuch who is able to hide personal decisions behind law over other people's lives, and even be proud of it. Neil Gorsuch has tasted power, and so he's willing to continue to exercise it. In that sense, the Republicans are lawyers for their business clients just as Democrats are lawyers for their people (voter) clients.

But regardless, so we find a failure of the status quo system with Politicial Correctness (a kind of lawyer talk) so media of the law kind, like media of the social kind cannot guarantee social change. Perhaps this experiment is what pissed people off, that they felt commonized and disregarded by lawyers. What do lawyers know? They, at least the politician-kind, treated all of the world, politics and business as a matter of a kind of law. (Witness Attacus Finch, a dad who change the world for all. Or studies for defining queer in life, to help justify the lawyers legislate laws about what is or is not queer.) or legislate about what is or is not fair for disability, and thus extort money through law... meant to directly help the very abused. The disability civil rights groups got these laws passed, and now some lawyer use it to justify taking money from businesses.

Law is helpless here too, as politicians can't do the bidding of businesses (or at least small business) because other politicians are afraid disabled voters will "fire them"

The power of media with civil rights can be read thusly: Media allowed generations and people to reach a new agency about who they were. It is as if the narratives and sensory associations of media told us who we were. So that business, symbolic authority (through evil villians, as well) had authority over people, and livelihoods. So they too would gain prestige like kings, and thus be associated enough with that kind of success. So the success of business would be enough acceptable by people to vote Trump into having the symbolic authority to run the country like a business.

This draws a parallel: business hides its power by justifying its inequality. Trump "worked for it", he "deserves" it. Law does the same thing. Gorsuch hides his personal will behind the veneer of legalism. In essence, Gorsuch's ability to get through the Senate hearing to be a Justice depends on his ability to justify his decisions to lawyers who are working on their own interest because their job depends on fidelity to voters (or in some cases, corporations).

And so, it is also law's ability to interfere with society, increasing technocratics the outrage of which, was to extend their media-based justification formalism to Take away a formal land's war-vessel. Was it then a surprise when the field of business through Trump bumped into a catty-corner law reserved for its own super-authority? When business sales and bullying through position and birthright only helped create the veneer of power and authority -- of which being president was used. In essence the president as king is the power media can give a lawyer.

But it's still just image. Republican leadership just forgot they were no longer primarily lawyers working for rich clients. They mistaked the cohesion of their party, their little brand of brothers, for who they were. In essence, reflected in media now: Repubs are afraid of allowing ACA to disappear because they don't work for rich clients. They are more politician than lawyer, wanting to please their voters. In the end, even those who are mostly lawyers believe that the law has to be based in something.

(Note the power of lawyers, to erase the Last Week Tonight story from websites across the world -- esp YouTube -- except in Argentina, where the offense was made.)

Lawyers are the gatekeepers of media. They are the next area to be disrupted by social media, as audiences watch court drama and judge for themselves, to pressure lawyers to keep certain views. As lawyers were able to justify what should be written for everyone (as a politician) so law is really a marker for hiding decisions. Could social media serve that way? Is this not Black Mirror's episode about killer bees run by social media? In essence killer bees are the nature mankind reinvented to save itself from its own destruction of nature. So social media is meant to help people be connected, and instead it damages them.

The scary part is that Trump unveils that politics is just lawyers running around unable to do their jobs, for confusion of who they are. Maybe we then also lose the justification for this government. People want to see Trump fail because he's bad. When he full loses his justification for being President (as deal maker) he may lose his reputation. He believed in his own hype. But if we see Trump fail, the question is, who will step up? Another lawyer for social engineering? This is a lawyer who justifies his authority by an appeal to a perception of a past symbolic authority. Could he possibly work with other lawyers and do what Trump failed to do? Or will this older symbolic authority fail against the same fear that politicians have of their voters? In essence as people stop believing in lawyer-justifications, will lawyers be able to keep order? Social media rips at the veneer of lawyerly justification as laws are ironically too "complex" to be appreciated by the public. That complexity demanded respect before social media was around.

In essence if lawyerly justification in old media is to lose its symbolic authority, the question remains: is a universal justification in new media able to pick up the mantle?

New media got Trump this far, but it shows that Trump's justification (as a deal maker) was weaker than new media's ability to get him to be president. New media's ability is also weaker than the legalese set forth by the founding Fathers and all the lawyers who came after, eager to secure the balance of power that could help them survive... so a democracy of an increased populance (due in part to media's narrativization of being) retain the final say (in terrible mob form), or were the founding Fathers full of their own bullshit? Did they think the media they were creating strong enough to protect them, or weak enough so that the country ran itself under the excuse that the wise and powerful were protecting them?

So we see that justifications run the country. And that we teach each other the excuse of order under these justifications. The justifications are not yet that social media will be used against us who knows how effective this will ever be but that we may become under the influence of social media bots for no coherent reason.

If words could justify power for the most powerful system, one that threatened to create globalism, think about what money can do.

Investors are still going crazy, because young people want homes, and older people are still alive. Information, money and legal authority still justify authority, as authority is anything that changes social and material positioning.

So social media shows us something: first, what we want to see, and then what we didn't want to see. how corrupt some people can be when they are claiming to help others. In this sense, social media is not a tool even if each website is a tool. Social media is a mirror. Each us will see in it who we think we are/the form of our priorities.

The most meaningless thing is the thing that people can see whatever meaning they like in it, so at first we share common ground. Then such a thing literally changes the world by fragmenting it so that we no longer share common ground.

Media has this power to influence people because media is an extension of how humans socialize. Our purpose is to organize, so media in law, and social media have this power, this ability to change reality.

In essence, who/how we think we are will change who/how we are, just maybe not to increase coherency.

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52ciab-blog · 5 years ago

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bacardi and cola with taxis, scott richard 2004

the beauty of old friends….

PRESS PLAY

faith ft. Mr. Probz galantis & dolly parton

and now an essay on why america needs to debunk itself from anti-american AMERICAN racist USURERS & "color coding" racism ….

***********************

recently i was laid into by an unsolicited critic. but you know me, i lap that stuff up like delicious poison!!!!

the most delighting part in all of this criticism was when the phrase LETHAL ACTIVISM was levied against me. as if i’ve ever harmed anyone or my intentions on here are to harm others!!!! i know it was levied unfairly because i know the critic. and the critic was hurt. so it was more of a personal attack designed to hurt me back for being honest.

but, for the record, my battle is against USURY. and the spirit of USURY is not a person.

this is a lifetime struggle against an invisible demon which has been infecting the human people since long before its earliest recordings/sightings/mentionings (it is first recognized and named in the INDIAN text the Mahabharata).

USURY is a destructive LIVING FORCE that infects humans just like AIDS did (yep, the lap dogs of USURY did that, too). Usury, as a spiritual force manifests as a mental disease that leads the victim of the disease to believe that they are better than other human and non-human life forms and can enact schemes of power and control over those other humans and other life forms in taking by force the CONTROL of their reproduction cycles and sexual habits.

it is the equivalent of BESTIALITY. and many people are so delusional that they think bestiality is people fking animals. this is simply NOT TRUE.

BESTIALITY is when you (as a human force) take over the reproduction and sex rights of other species and imprison them for practical purposes.

it is an ancient prohibition because of how it leads to social disorder by OBVIOUSLY favoring those who would abuse the spirit of life to gain sht. THINK RWANDA, duh!? it was a cow blood war started by belgian setups of economic disparity and favoritism. they used animal husbandry to divide the two populations.

and i call these sideline instigators the FOOD AND BEVERAGE cartels (F&B cartels). you’re welcome.

and BESTIALITY is a natural physical deformation of the spirit of USURY when it acquires henchmen like the F&B cartels. so is SLAVERY. and pharmaceutical drug addiction.

but back to LETHAL ACTIVISM…

as INACCURATE AND UNKIND as this attack on my personhood is — i am not this stream, i am not this essay, i have written over 1300 hundred essays and they are in the group THINK CLUB if you dare to want to know/piece together more of who you think i am. good luck keeping up, i have chased after the great spirits for decades without resting — and added to it that i practice GENTILITY and DISTANCE from other humans.

i will also protect other people’s children from harm. sometimes i will also protect others, but it might also look to some like i’m doing it as an attack against the aggressor, but those people with that view generally think more slowly AND do little in any time of REAL crisis.

they are flighters. the cowards among our species. ironically, these are the same cowards who later call us heroes for just doing the VERY ORDINARY THING. their award is just more shame on people who don’t run away.

so perhaps my critic was really expressing a fear of the nearness of LETHAL ACTIVISM in our societies? perhaps the HUMAN SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE has had enough of this INFECTION of USURY in the elites of human society?

perhaps my critic is realizing for themself that the spiritual world is once again calling upon ALL OF US through "fate and destiny" (geopolitical locationing) to rise up against the weight of this construct. but my critic doesn’t even realize time has weight!!??!? pity the sciences and maths which could leave something so basic off the menu!!!

perhaps this critic has identified a rising spirit and sees in me a harbinger of this ENERGY. fair play.

but if my words could KILL, i would say this to my critic,

"i hope you live forever!! i hope my love for you stays inside your heart and keeps you company throughout the ages!! i hope you weren’t lying about love like you are lying about most things in your life. I didn’t even want you to be free. I just wanted to have fun. WTF, playboy!!!!"

and perhaps my critic now knows that there is a greater magic than the feeble white man’s sciences of falsely identified and defined numbers, of falsely applied logics of math without philosophical support — sorry, kids, stories ALWAYS come before numbers. always have, always will. and science is just a wee little story based on astrology which converted into astronomy with the astrolabes of discovery, and then slowly headed into a collective concept that eventual gave birth to physics as the role of the "real" star interpreter took on precedence in the courts of europe. and china. and india. because there are many cultural responses to the idea of the sky and the idea of stars and the idea of rotational charting and map making. i know, it was all just for FUN right from the start [wink wink, glad the lore of the young and all the unknown lovers could chime in on all the personal criticism. ah, how disgusting and messy polyamory gets, it just never ends…].

but SERIOUSLY, it was just for fun. it still is!

the innocence of someone looking up in the sky and thinking, "there’s that ONE light again! and LOOK! the other!!!"

but this isn’t magic. it is correlation. it’s us seeing something and going, "hey, look at that!" and then agreeing, "I SEE IT, I SEE IT, WE SEE IT". and the WE is born of this endeavor.

obviously, real magic can take place when you conjoin these correlations.

in my life real magic is grafted directly from circumstance and variables and available energy. and it is directed through the voice or the imaginative voice of the spell caster. everyone sort of already knows this. we’ve been told all about it since we were children.

for example, how many "astronauts", the children of those early astrological wanderings, have actually "touched" the surface of anything NOT human made but out of the orbit? [he falls over laughing, but all the gold bars wasted and laundered through fake space programs have piled up so high above his head that he can only see glittering skyscrapers] www.flickr.com/photos/gazeronly/albums/72157650835706423

we are fking funny!!! and now, how much FAKE money has been dumped into the lavish lifestyles of those employed and funded by this expansive waste of money?

this is not magic.

so to my critic, perhaps there should be some gratitude that those like me who touch these powers are kind to our critics? perhaps it would behoove said critic to acknowledge that their narcissism is not the source of my inquiries and does not direct my willingness to accept answers. i am not magical in order to entertain narcissists. that’s what hollywood is for anyway. and "court magicians". that is SLEIGHT OF HAND, which is USURY, not magic.

so what do they know of love? they still use it like a back hoe and everyone who wants a job sucks dck to get it. if you have bad knees or they get tender fast from kneeling, buy knee pads, cckskr. [and that’s a compliment if you do it well. you’ll get the job cuz anyone can act.]

so please, let me state for ALL PUBLIC RECORD that i am not a LETHAL ACTIVIST. in fact, i’d never even heard of it before.

i am a cultural activist and i fight for the spirit of humanity and the preservation of those gifts which manifest themselves as forms in our lives — community, identity, stability.

i fight against usury and those who debt-enslave others, sell weapons to kill children and their parents, sell drugs to kill the caretakers of children, and those who traffic humans or fk kids (whether by economic coercion or actual action) — so BOO HOO HOO. sue me!

or educate yourself. but please, lethal activism??!! that’s just mean. and i can shrug that one off. i get it, you’re hurt.

but more importantly, there was a startling book written and released in russia (allegedly) back at the turn of the 20th century. it’s a short handbook that describes in realistic and profoundly brutal terms the manner in which a TINY group of CLAIMED ELITES can take over and enslave the masses, which are LESS HUMAN than these elites.

and while it is TRUE that the book was purportedly foisted onto a group called the LEARNED ELDERS (the kingship of jews, actually, because apparently it’s more complicated than people want to believe…) who were apparently attempting to destabilize the governments/aristocracies/oligarchs of western europe. i mean, anti-semitism was a GD section in the book stores in russia and germany and other "nation states" of the day. and apparently it was a huge section. and if you know me, i’ve been trying my best to get people to understand that the UNITED STATES is literally MANUFACTURING its own breed of anti-semitism on television and streaming. shows like AMERICAN DAD, which have had top ratings for years, are disgustingly ladened with all manner of jokes and put-downs and weird sideways. (yes, i wrote an essay about that, too, seven years ago…)

www.flickr.com/photos/gazeronly/6931096786

this is often INVERSE DUMPING. if you watched the video you’ll know what i’m talking about, as MATT WEITZMAN’s role in all of this is totally suspect:

"Matt Weitzman was born to a Jewish family[2] in Los Angeles, California. His father is Lew Weitzman, a long time literary agent for over 40 years. Matt attended American University, where he became and brother of Alpha Epsilon Pi,[3] and graduated with a communications degree. Shortly after college, he pursued acting with some success, then later began writing for television sitcoms. As a child, Weitzman was an avid comic book collector and reader of fantasy and science fiction. This is what he has called "inspiration" for upcoming projects." wiki

if you read my work, you know that i know all about the super hero creation market and who started it and how it’s literally a LOSER’S spirit buried in skin tight homosexual man worship. but you can do some of your GD research about history because darnit, there’s so much of it to swallow. let’s just say that people who are genocided (this includes homosexuals) definitely dream of striking back against their "oppressors".

and super heroes are the capitalized/capitalistic version of the pantheon gods of the ancient world.

the primary difference is that super heroes work for the highest human agencies of government control so you can see how this fantasy framework immediately instigates conspiracy and dread-laced confectionaries of BETRAYAL, DECEPTION, LIES AND MURDER. super heroes are embedded in contemporary politics, whereas the ancient "gods" are fantastical and have been relegated to olive leaves and togas. i hope this makes sense. anyway, if you read the PROTOCOLS, again, you don’t need to hear the messenger!!!!

the comic book industry is insidious and mentally deformational on young people’s minds. it is a vulgarity and glamorized FAKE body types (historically) to gain market claims before becoming powerful enough to overtake alternate markets in foreign lands. after being blown to bits in wwii, manga took off like mad in japan: " Since the 1950s, manga has steadily become a major part of the Japanese publishing industry.[7] By 1995, the manga market in Japan was valued at ¥586.4 billion ($6–7 billion),[8] with annual sales of 1.9 billion manga books and manga magazines in Japan (equivalent to 15 issues per person).[9] Manga have also gained a significant worldwide audience.[10] In 2008, in the U.S. and Canada, the manga market was valued at $175 million. Manga represent 38% of the French comics market, which is equivalent to approximately ten times that of the United States.[11] In France, the manga market was valued at about €460 million ($569 million) in 2005.[12] In Europe and the Middle East, the market was valued at $250 million in 2012.[13]" wiki

we could talk a long time about the after effects of being holocausted or target hunted, but let’s get back to the PROTOCOLS!!!!

and again, who cares who wrote this book??!?!

it was written and it’s been around long enough to have been read by all humans who can read. so READ IT!!!! (then you can listen to the 27hours of information released by the u.s. governement on the four decade collusion that led to the manufacturing of 9/11. IT’S CALLED A COMMISSION REPORT in case one doesn’t already know that the U.S. released a very weird and disturbing BODY OF TEXT to the world. perhaps if YOU read it, you’d know more, too. at least you’d be able to see the amazing LIES that this nation’s government TELLS and gets CAUGHT telling and then TELLS more and gets CAUGHT telling and then TELLS more…)

anyway, who cares? i mean, let’s be liberal and BLAME all men, because FK it was a MAN who wrote the book after all. EVERYONE can agree that it was NOT written by a woman. that much is true!!!

but instead, "they" want you to believe and focus on the jewish part of authorship. and you will see this in the introduction of the book. because it’s old enough to be an antique, the book has acquired its own sense of history.

but AGAIN, i’m a gnostic. i don’t care if it is about to be written and released tomorrow for the first time ever, i think you should read it!!

it is the INFORMATION AND STRATEGIES inside the book that are so valuable.

just like every girl should STEAL the book THE GAME from somewhere and read it so she can know what SHTTY men are out there and also what shtty girlfriends do to each other.

and again, i am not the one on the cover of this SHTTY DATE RAPE HANDBOOK FOR MEN that is saying i’m of "jewish" descent. he does that himself, but again, i hope my FKING hating his book and the tricks he has gathered and compiled from america’s rich history of DATE RAPE ARTISTS doesn’t make me the bad guy. and i’m certainly not going to look at all the awesome people that i know of personally and throughout the world who call themselves jewish and think, hmmm, they’re all date rapists!!!! nope, just him. and harvey weinstein. and what do we call people who go to date rapes on purpose more than once? are they victimizing the date rapist? i get so confused when there is such a moral sexual breakdown in breeder semantics. if you have to give hed to get ahed, how many times do you have to give hed and STAY AHED?

like am i supposed to hate catholics because machiavelli wrote a political treatise on how the medici’s could do the same thing to their own people — fiscally date rape and murder their peers? rather, you should hate the catholic state for its actions and historical thuggery and it’s sexual violations against thousands and thousands of boys. that would make a lot more sense instead of putting it on the dupes who fall for such drivel. and i’m so distrustful i’m like, "what is the vatican hiding that they are willing to use PEDOPHILIA as a distraction?!?!" HLY FK!!!! how come we never go for real answers?!?!"

but isn’t that how REVERSE DUMPING works?

just ask MALCOM X!!!!! here’s a quote you can look at: ""the F.B.I. can feed information to the press that makes your neighbor think you are something subversive. the F.B.I. can do this very skillfully. they maneuver the press on a national scale and the C.I.A. maneuvers the press on an international scale" 1964

and let’s be honest, that was 55 fking years ago!!!! do you not think that the information societies that play nation states like checker pieces haven’t become paranormous?

when/if you get to the FACEBOOK essay down below, you’ll see this more clearly and you will understand how it’s a TRILLIONAIRE’s front who is using SCHOOLS and their products — including zuckerberg’s whole life (he’s being "hannah montana-ed©"!!!) — as fronts to generate dominant world control of new surveillance technology and ALL of its advancements.

so you do know malcom got reversed dumped, right!?!?! you DO at least know that, right? and you do know that whenever black men of power rise they are beaten down with the myriad temptations of the USURERs CLUB (drugs, sex, power, alcohol, attention). and if that doesn’t work, assassination.

that’s hardcore REVERSE DUMPING. whites usually don’t end up getting the bullet, poor Vincent foster…

but in our real world, in our daily lives, SOFTCORE reverse dumping happens when you tell someone honestly that they have a problem and then suddenly they try to reduce your world to ruins simply because you objected to THEIR DISHONESTY or TREACHERY or UNKINDNESS or ECONOMIC SLANDERING. suddenly, for saying, "hey!! you’re lying to me!!!" i am the LETHAL ACTIVIST? "hey! you’re giving people AIDS!! and i’m the LETHAL ACTIVIST? and worse, somehow giving people AIDS on purpose is better than FIGHTING BACK? better than letting them do it again to a new target group? really?

but it’s true. if you say anything about this book, you are probably going to be labeled anti-semitic.

but for me, that’s the LIE. i have hung out with way too many cool people that i admired and respected and adored and have also been HIGHLY influenced by to care about their JEWISHNESS. more often than not, i wasn’t even concerned with their "jewishness". if they wanted to share their ideas and what this "meant" to them, they would. not unlike gays who must constantly come out of the closet so that people don’t accidentally say something irrevocably hateful because they couldn’t tell the person was gay because they weren’t having sex in front of them and there were no other visual clues.

as a homo, i resent people who would take an entire ethnicity or culture or way of being and say EVERYONE in this "fake group" is

a: in agreement with each other b: the same c: so easily reducible

these are things STUPID (by choice) and IGNORANT (disengagement and self-interested) people share — judging LITERAL groups that have been intellectually arranged on very BARE and SEPARATIZING notions is PRIMARY BULLSHT. and the USURERS love this because it deflects from the FACT that they are a REAL GROUP in their "servitude" to the demonic forces of USURY. read plato if you need to understand some of things socrates was railing on against.

so USURY forces us to talk about these FAKE CLUSTERS or SHARDS as if they are real and have a genuine existence. they don’t, they’re just like everything else — they are proximity ideas that will die and pass away. there is a historylessness to most of us.

as a result these dynamics are all constructs of fate and birth. you happen to be colombian, you happen to be vietnamese, you happen to be [insert something here], cuz you’re just a gosh dern human at the beginning and the end.

they are all mutable and they all come with their own seeds of separation and distinction. they all create their own INTERIOR hierarchies where they enact the same

all that aside, the truth is that this book is FKNG amazing. and you’d know if you read it. it’s BRILLIANT and the game is on.

it is a playbook for raping the little people who don’t matter. it’s where the original idea of a MASTER CARD comes from, for fks sake!!!!! it is the birth of the credit system we fking use everywhere these days!!!!

but i guess most of you don’t realize that our dear president in the 1920s read this short work of political theory. that alone should give you cause to go and read it just to see how useful this information is and how much of it is CURRRENTLY IN USE and how easily it would be to dismantle this strangulation if more people would educate themselves instead of fking around indulging in their side lives of debauchery and social mayhem, lol. but those are the treats of the USURER!!

take more loans!! live beyond your means!!!!

and now that we are again in a period where ANTI-SEMETISM is being blatantly and openly promoted by ECONOMICALLY PRONGED SEMITES (why is it so cool to throw your own people in front of the bus for your cause? who told you that was legit politics? — seriously, look at the producers of almost any television show. you will immediately start to see a trend that is alarming — as if anyone is still even reading this essay. but if you are an american who was of asian descent you might notice the clear absence of your ethnicity on television and in television production roles. but china and japan and many other countries in those regions have their own ENTERTAINMENT CARTELS in full-swing, too. but in "america" you have to admit really fast that NPR and other outlets of alleged news are stocked and renewed with a fk lot of people who also identify with minority groups that have been historically punished throughout centuries for running USURY GAMES on the "humans" they deemed less worthy.

and you should be able to figure out that i’m not talking about homos. but you can do your research instead of lambasting me for referring to the idea that there are ACTUAL DATA POINTS worth noting. after all, isn’t the OLD TESTAMENT the most anti-semitic book ever written? i’ve read it. it’s a history of shtty people who never got along with anybody and it always ends in genocide and slavery. i’m fking literate!!!! i didn’t write that GD book!! i just read it. it’s fking anti-semitic.

so if you are curious instead of a KNEE-JERK, read the protocols and you will find out that i’m not SAYING ANYTHING, i’m just the messenger alerting LAZY FKRS that sht is going on and has been in process for over a century. it’s NOT new.

further, i’m just the guy who got jumped by the side of the road and there was no good samaritan to assist me.

but, i survived. and now, i know how to spot the robbers. i’ve been jumped endlessly since then. i learned from camille paglia that einstein was wrong.

repeating the same act over and over again actually does eventually lead to breakthrough depending on who is performing the experiment. WE are the magical element in science!!!! it’s OUR imagination that gives science life, not the other way around.

and, unlucky for me, my "self constructs" have been shattered so many times that i no longer perceive information the way i did when i could hide behind those constructs. i’ve been lied to and cheated on in every imaginable way. i scare the SHT out of people with how quickly i unravel all their hateful lies in person. people are scared to be around me because i can "see" their sins and write them in the sand — they become terrified of my experience.

alternately, only by accident, have i lied and cheated. and when i do, i grovel back and apologize and i take it on myself to acknowledge my awfulness. and i don’t PRETEND that i deserve forgiveness.

lucky for me, this is very rare and usually under strange and weirdly unimportant circumstantial moments when the character or nature of another being alters my balance. that is to say, i remember almost every lie i’ve ever told and how it hurt the person or aided me to my "advantage".

and i didn’t like myself as a liar. i have a good memory and i don’t practice denial. it is not the gnostic way. denial does not lead to KNOWING. i don’t want to be with a lover or a friend and know that i lie to them or told them a lie. i find that so uncomfortable and disgusting and faithless.

lying is humanity’s greatest toy. and people play with it constantly. and then they are old and feel stupid about how they spent their lives. yay!

research can lead you to a different outcome. and if you take the time to read this political tract, you won’t need me to explain anything to you.

instead you will read the words which are well over one hundred years old at this point. and who cares about its origin or anti-semitism?!??! study the ACTUAL CONTENT. it is like a book of magic spells (barely, magic is so much cooler). learn to see that to this fking day people use ANTI-SEMITISM to keep you from reading the book. they don’t want you to know about it. they want you to ignore this book. and THEY are white, yellow, blue, green and red, for all you COLOR CODED RACISTS who think people are GD colors!!!! THEY are the oligarchs and secret emperors who control the drug trade, the weapons disbursement programs and the natural resource allotments for "nation states" — the USURERS’ favorite little pet projects and "clients".

if you take time to read this tract (it’s only about 100 pages), the realizations will also help elucidate a lot of things about the history of HUMANS who have actively used these techniques to undermine cultures and societies wherever they go. they are information collectors and litigators. these are their tools to bind.

but first, to give you some boundaries on this, i will use myself as an example.

let’s make it personal for just one second…

as a HOMOSEXUAL who was tortured as a four year old child and had my penis raped with a steel object by a white male doctor in his thirties under the auspices of something medical — no one will tell me to this day what the reason was for doing this to two little boys, two pretty decent little twins — i have spent my life being degraded and humiliated by other people for not running away from the horror that overtook my life.

for example, even before i thought i was gay my father completely disowned me for "having a negative reaction" to being raped in the dck. he came home and found two crazy kids instead of the fun ones he’d maybe seen the day before. he told me very directly when i was 28 that he had come home one day when i was about four and i was a "cold, aloof and a distant prick." those were his exact words. and this was before i knew what had happened. and i said, that sounds like child abuse! he said, "i figured if you wanted to be that way, i could be that way, too." and he never talked to me or touched me again. and i mean LITERALLY. in speech he shifted over to using only the objective command form of language from then on. it was very isolating, but i was terrified of him anyway since he used corporal punishment in the same way male hookers in hollywood use cocaine — liberally when available!!!!

anyway, i didn’t find out till age seven that "fag" and "fairy" and "queer" somehow vaguely applied to me like a death sentence… san diego was very homophobic and murderous and one of the pilot cities where the idea of a "hate crime" was born to separate HUMAN HUNTERS from ordinary murderers…

so as a child i was terrified of going into a bath room with other men/males after this episode. and this meant ALL public bathrooms.

i was literally terrified that i would be brutalized again. every time i had to urinate and was out in the world, i became desperately afraid that if i went into the bathroom and couldn’t lock everyone out, i would be raped again. that’s how four year olds perceive the world. once raped, ten times shy.

and the horror of this was with me constantly. weirdly, i had no memories of the incident. it had shattered my mind, my being, everything about me.

i only "know" it happened because I demanded to know at least the dates when it became clear that it had actually happened (there were two follow up visits to the damage). my twin brother never forgot it. somehow, his mind stayed in tact during the episode. during my childhood he would frequently bring up the event but he was just four years old as well. all he could actually remember was the book he was reading in the waiting room before it happened. and weirdly, i, too, remember the entire book that i was reading.

and sadly, he hated me for not remembering. all i remember is that he kept saying something about a farm bird ( a red rooster) over and over again asking me if i remembered. but i had no idea what it meant. finally, when i was 38 he actually told me. he had no idea that i had no memories and he thought i was colluding against him all these years.

his book was about a red rooster. my book was about a little red hen, which is also the title of the book. the little red hen wants to make bread but also wants company during the process and seeks that instead of making bread. finally, in desperation, the little animal gives up and goes out to do ALL the tasks to make bread. then, the bitter pill at the end, the smell of the baking bread brings ALL the other animals that were asked for help. they all want baked bread!!!! heheheh.

then the doctor stuck a sounding device (metal rod) up our dicks. i don’t remember that part.

so yes, scott has shame!!!! i can’t remember. it sits on top of me like a desperate crime committed by someone else.

forgive me if i want to make sure that this stuff doesn’t happen to other children while their mother is in the waiting room. forgive me if i don’t trust doctors and lawyers and mortgage brokers and bankers. forgive me if i know their dark side.

i guess that’s why i am a "living sign" of this shame. so be it. i will be brave. i can withstand the shame of others. besides, it is PERSONAL shame that i have no room for in my life — the shame one lavishes up for oneself — a shame that has come from within instead of from without. a shame that sickens the GOD within and ails its arrival. this is the shame of INTENTIONAL DECEPTION and TRICKERY.

at least my shame has been given to me by society.

it’s not mine, which is why i can use it in magic. and it’s surprisingly powerful. and most people know this, because there is so much shame in these essays i write. it’s almost unbearable, which is why so few readers make it to the end of any of them. again, this is intentional.

i don’t want all of you to suffer. just those of you who have the courage to stare into the horror without flinching. just those of you who are actually brave enough to become REALIZED.

so my magic of shame erodes and undermines everyone who reads these essays all the way through to the end. and these few readers are the only audience i care about. because they are agents of change. they can taste the poison and find the cure. it is our task!!! and they know it, too.

like me, they have made it their goal to make sure that people who think this kind of behavior is “okay” are taken out of positions of power. and i use these essays that i write to plant seeds and to allow others to see their voice in another, because i KNOW i’m not alone.

when PHILOMEL’s tongue was ripped from her throat, the gods made a new bird that could sing that shameful crime of the king who raped her and then tried to silence her by stealing her voice.

i don’t write these essays because i think ANYONE reads them and goes, “right on!! i’m hitting the fave button!!!"

i write these essays and do the research so that those whose voices are being ripped away can use their new wings to be more than a bird song. so few, these birds who will now fly and sing!

in fact, i don’t imagine most people make it to the end of any of these “essays”. it’s a MACHINE GUN MASSACRE form of writing that INTENTIONALLY only speaks to one or two people who WILL make changes. the INFORMATION will change them — it will not be me, it will not be my personality and it will not be my writing “style”. it will be the idea of the truths that reach into their hearts. and the truth hurts all the time. but even if it doesn’t set you free, it liberates you from LYING!!!! and the lying must stop.

so, as an open HOMOSEXUAL (though it could be easily argued that sexual abuse caused a major deviation), i’ve been clustered grouped my whole life with a stunning array of MEN who are also drawn into the actions of sex with other men. and even in our tiny percentage of ABNORMALITY, there are stand-outs. and these stands out are traditionally distinguished separately.

these stand-outs were called FAGS and TRANNIES and LADY MEN and QUEENS. these are the homosexuals who have serious disagreements with normalized “GENDER ISSUES”.

they are also the most ANTI-MALE of the homosexual community and often dipped/drenched in STEALTH AND TRICKERY AND DECEPTION as a means of counter-balancing the wretchedness of interior feelings and the way the outside society has responded/treated/abused them as people.

they are notably, an attention-deficient group of people who are deeply damaged and wounded from an early age for being different and expressing that difference. the negative treatment reiterates the behavior and more often than not practicers of this type of homosexuality are drawn to the whoredom of the female sexual personae — they end up enacting the slutty side of female sex behavior.

this in turns creates a repulsion in the normalized community — holy sht, a man-woman slut that is parading full-speed and lecherously commanding the attention of everyone or anyone around them.

but isn’t this just the succubus? this isn’t really a homosexual thing as much as it is a social deviation away from the norms that repress and punish homosexuality. the desire to be butterfly attractive is a REACTIONARY stance. it’s not generative and creative. it’s a deviation and a lash-back. it’s a way of vamping. and this same horror is being practiced in the emerging "trans" community. using THEY and THEM to separately disassociate from those who came before is a sign of grammatical desperation. US and WE would be the right choice and the trans community, by allowing the MEDIA to take THEMS over, are being used in the exact same way homos were used — to POLARIZE the majority which makes it easier for banks to weasel into people’s lives with cheap loans and get people to vote for gigantic tax breaks for corporations. but i get it, most of you are TREE PEOPLE and you don’t know you live in a forest. well, not until there’s a fire or the tree cutters show up…

so let’s be serous, having DRAG QUEENS and limp-wristed female copyists representing a community of men who are mostly MARRIED FATHERS is pretty fkt up. right?

because how does that seem like a mature or realized way of embracing the circumstances — that we aren’t allowed to be who we are.

it’s a "DRAG up". it’s dressing like royalty when you’re a pauper. it’s a halloween night that everyone wants to forget later.

in the meantime, the vast majority of homosexuals remain invisible out of fear of being lumped together with the strange HARVEY MILK FREAKS that keep getting chosen to reflect the community.

and the media has been using this polarizing effect to control voting in the united states for the past ten years. the fake front that controls the media now pits homosexuals against others. it pits cops against fking crazy criminals. it promotes car crashes as news. it tracks weather mods and pretends that it’s actually REAL weather instead of manipulated fkery (to this day it is so strange to me that there aren’t classes being taught about this stuff). and it ALWAYS supports tourism unless the intended country is being sanctioned by the invisible front. then they run bad ads.

and i don’t know why all of you don’t know this already. malcom x was pretty clear about it and was even killed for being so clear about it: that is, and I QUOTE

and our human society is super pissed off at the idea of a polygendered society. this is not the USURER’s dream. polygenderism does not put bi-polar gender PARENTING at the forefront of all life. and this would devastate the USURERS. because if PARENTS are the focus of CHILDREN, then the parents become natural "marks" for taking LOANS.

you can loan money to people who need/are told to want stuff for their kids. you can TRAP THEM INTO DEBT SLAVERY very easily by making the ownership of HOMES and CARS and EDUCATION priorities of the capitalistic construct. forget food, clean air and water. those debts will come after these other debts destroy the vast resources of air, water and food. the INTENTIONAL famine is being constructed so fast right now in the city with UBER EATS and AMAZON food delivery. perhaps you need to go back and read that little story in the bible where JOSEPH, while sleeping with the pharoah’s wife, tells the pharaoh that if he really wants to be a great pharaoh all he has to do is create the illusion of prosperity for seven years and then follow it with seven years of mayhem and famine. in this manner, the pharaoh could take over all of his lesser sub-servants’ territories through economic strangulation on the food and water.

but let’s be HONEST!!!!

GENDER ISN’T SEX. so these gender benders NEVER really represented the homosexual community anyway. nor did HARVEY MILK, though now there is a concentrated effort to make him the FACE OF THE "GAY MOVEMENT". ah, how fking sick are we?!?!? harvey milk was the ultimate HOMOPHOBE. just read his history!!!! he preyed on desperate young men, NYC lawyers thought he was scum (arrogant, haughty and a ditch) and we all know what scum 85% of NYC lawyers are… or just lawyers in general, i shouldn’t specifically lay into manhattan fks like our dumptruck fake president.

so back to the story — HOMOSEXUALITY is just SEX WITH MEN BETWEEN MEN. it’s not about relationshipping. that’s GAY stuff. gays are the men and women who are brave enough to simply NOT CARE about the societies in which they exist and choose to be open about their desire to RELATE with their own sex. and this makes a community of sorts. it brings like toward like and cretes "ghettos".

but remember this: BRAVERY is the one thing that almost all humans admire about our collectively shared spirit.

NONETHELESS, as a homosexual man, having a flaming flirtatious, narcissistic sht like HARVEY MILK representing the “gay community” is a fking farce. it’s the WORST example that could be chosen. but harvey milk belongs to the AD MACHINE in fake jewish hollywood. however, AGAIN!!!! if you read about his life ONLY a little bit, you will see what a loser he was and that he actually DID NOTHING while he was in political office (a mere ten months before an angry fellow employee iced him!!!).

in fact, all harvey milk did was get elected. is that HEROIC?

instead, he just pissed an irish catholic white man named dan white off and dan shot his sorry ass for fun, so kicking off the TWINKIE TRIALS where "sugar" was the culprit.

is that heroic? is that a hero? he literally was so shtty that he was shot incidentally. but don’t forget, he also aided and abetted in the suicide of one of his desperate young fk buddies that he preyed upon. the guy was a mess. he embezzled and used people like toilet paper. seriously, you can look this all up.

and if harvey isn’t enough of a reflection of this strange absurdity, we have HERCALES as our example of a greek hero. and what a silly life he lived! he ended up being killed with centaur blood because his wife just wanted him to be faithful. Νέσσος had the last laugh in the end because he knew his blood would kill heracles and that this was the joke — a dead hero can’t be faithless. get it?!!??

and for the record, i’m going to list the VERBS that are attached to each one of Heracles 12 feats (sometimes called labors), which oddly read like a new drinking party game called STEAL, CAPTURE, SLAY:

SLAY SLAY CAPTURE CAPTURE CLEAN SLAY CAPTURE STEAL OBTAIN OBTAIN STEAL CAPTURE cerberus "Heracles says that, although Eurystheus commanded him to bring back Cerberus, it was not from any desire to see Cerberus, but only because Eurystheus thought that the task was impossible." hahahaha, poor cerberus — a three-headed barking dog tooled to the end.

so let’s be real now, is this a “HERO” according to the histories that we keep. these are the actions and accomplishments of a "hero"?

HERACLES’ FEATS, which you can see by the verbs, are pretty straightforward — SLAY, CAPTURE, STEAL, OBTAIN and one menial labor of cleaning out horse stables…

well darn, so much for heroes. especially now when people refer to common soldiers as heroes instead of corporate thug-pawns protecting non-national oligarchical interests in faraway lands at the expense of actual HUMANS.

nothing new there, right? no wonder people made up a CHRIST to try to sort through the FK and KILL schemes of the human condition.

anyway, my point is that when you allow a BAD ROLE MODEL to represent an entire community, it allows bigger communities to PERSECUTE AND TERRORIZE the entire subset community.

AIDS for example was used to terrorize ALL homosexual men. its purpose was LITERALLY to free up the uranium 235 that gets converted “upwards” to uranium 238. so if the african people were enmeshed in a variety of health/life crises they wouldn’t be able to stand up to the western powers and take “control” of the “resource” that was under the land they lived on doing nothing for them.

so voila! — a disease starts in africa with ORAL VACCINES distributed by the JONAS SALK institute. this disease found its way into the gay community quickly due to the nature of sex practices or some other dastardly design — there is a patient O (as in OH, not ZERO). in this case it stood for "out of california, because the was no actual patient zero, AIDS broke out in several places simulatneously in the united states (and remember the first wave of AIDS had an incubation period where you could go over a decade without showing any symptoms.)

"Gaëtan Dugas (French: [ɡaetɑ̃ dyɡa]; February 20, 1953 – March 30, 1984), a Canadian flight attendant, was a relatively early HIV patient who once was widely regarded as "Patient Zero" or the primary case for AIDS in the United States. "

and we don’t need to argue about who it was at the institute who tainted the vaccines. they did. that’s all you need to know. it was intentional.

and recently, i brushed up against a worker who is in the WAR PROMOTION industry that keeps this nation fat and rich and over-medicated. i heard what i already know — there is a cone of information silence at every level as you ascend. the higher you rise, the dirtier you get. this man, for example, produced a working model for the exact point at which a toxic agent will collapse your breathing tissues in your throat. it is a bio-mechanical “model” which is now used to identify the amounts of any of these toxic agents you need to dump on a population to get the results you want. oddly, he doesn’t take any responsibility for this work or the way in which the work is used around the world now and SOLD to other governments and information societies.

so this CONE OF SILENCE methodology is exactly what allows 99.99999% of the good/stupid people to feel fine about the shtty things they are doing and creating while the .00000001% adds the TAINTED POISONS and TOXINS at the last second.

and, as i was saying earlier, that’s what this book THE PROTOCOLS of the LEARNED ELDERS of ZION is about — how to become the .000000001% and subdue the majority. and who cares whether russian anti-semites wrotes it? does that change the EDUCATIONAL VALUE of the CONTENT INFORMATION? or is that just there to keep people from reading it? ANYONE can use the information, for example, duh!!!! ANYONE.

i mean do people listen to pop songs sung by women about getting nasty and dirty and sexual and think, HEY, A MAN WROTE THAT!!!! they should. 99% of weird love songs from the seventies in the world of disco — which brought us cocaine, tight pants and a general hedonistic sense of ennui — are written and arranged by men.

songs like "so many men, so little time" which proudly make all manner of boisterous claims to female sexuality are just fkt up lies written by men hiding behind their human props. but people don’t think that, they think, "YO! that woman wants to be fkt!" but it was really IAN LEVINE.

so we need to ask ourselves, did this fear of anti-semitism, for example, stop WHITE WESTERN OLIGARCHS from benefitting from the strategies presented? and why wouldn’t ANYBODY in china also read this text to gain a superiority over their enemy? why wouldn’t anyone who was infected with the taint of USURY not find this effective?

people in the U.S. study the book THE ART OF WAR, which is hilarious, as there is no such “art”. art has no FKING PURPOSE that kills people. it is the EXACT OPPOSITE OF ART. it should be called the "FKERY OF WAR and how to win". that would be more direct.

but i don’t hear everyone getting all up in china’s business and calling the nation a bunch of euphemistic hate slurs about murder and warfare. and rightfully so, it’s just a book and most people don’t care about books.

so if i get all up in the business of the PEOPLE who are using the book to murder and squelch the human spirit around the world, please don’t call me anti-semitic. and if i write essays about how parents are the very worst thing about children, please don’t call me anti-breeder. oh, wait, no, please do!!! i’m definitely upset with the way you people breed and then abandon your children.

and a note to all of you who think cheating is only an issue between you and your husband or you and your wife, maybe you should wake up to the fact that you’re cheating on your children almost more than your spouse. worse, your cheating will alter the entire development of your children whether they know it or not. the SICKNESS of your dishonesty will fester its way into the very essence of their personalities. and this is the sin that is spoken of that passes from “father to child”.

when jesus did his showdown with the men who were about to murder a woman for fcking around with other men against her husband, we are told that jesus started drawing nasty pictures in the dirt of the men and the fkt up stuff that they had done. one by one as the pictures emerged, the men judged themselves on what they saw and left.

and here’s where christians FK the story up as usual. they claim that JESUS forgave the woman. but this is not true. JESUS did not forgive the woman. instead he said the very worst thing you could possibly say — literally the most deviant thing of all to commission a human with — he said GO AND SIN NO MORE.

and to this day, when people ask me to forgive them, and i’m feeling generous, that’s what i say.

GO AND SIN NO MORE!!!!

why do i care about your sins against me? i haven’t held onto them. i have no forgiveness for anyone. i am not a christian. i am not weak and pathetic. i do not need salvation and i am not a sinner.

i am a gnostic. we do our best to NEVER lie to ourselves or others. we do our best to NEVER do things we hate.

that’s it. we’re not complicated. we don’t have agendas. we’re not out to sucker-punch you. we want to see GOD emerging from you as you are!

we carry love and intelligence. we believe that the GOD is inside of you (not that you are the god!) your job is to the let the GOD out.

that’s it.

but apparently the whole lying and cheating thing is too much for everyone (cheating is when you support a lie through omission or design a lie to be directly misleading, etc.)

personally, i find it amazingly exciting not to be able to lie or scurry sideways. it’s so EASY to lie. and once you start, why stop?

which leads us to the real essay about a man who went to an entitled school and designed a very remedial app that was chosen by the invisible empire to collect information and behavioral patterns from weak people who need attention. also known as FACEBOOK.

***************************

look how far we’ve come & ""CONGRESS MAN, YES" & several of the reasons why USURER’S LOGIC makes FACEBOOK the future press darlings of 2018", scott richard image and painting from 2012 (original photo from 2010)

PRESS PLAY

i love you, i know yello (1983)

an essay that cites TONS of quotes and incidents from the recent congressional meeting regarding FACEBOOK taking over the world and why you should have invested when i told you to invest… i did. just so proof would equal pudding.

(FYI the stock went up to 208 from 164 two weeks after this essay was written. it’s back down to what it was at that time again. facebook is spreading its profits into subsids now, so it’s not on my BUY NOW list. but if you can smell out the little geniuses facebook intends to buy, you might be able to find some juicy investments. i still believe that tesla will produce some kind of design innovation that will be purchasable for worldwide distribution…)

"CONGRESS MAN, YES" & several of the reasons why USURER’S LOGIC makes FACEBOOK the future press darlings of 2018 and beyond based on the CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS + transcript notes and observations by scott richard

usury sucks for everyone. even those who profit.

and we don’t FIGHT USURY.

we fk it until it destroys everything around us.

FB means fk buddy, literally, not facebook…

anyway, i know from great and long experience that americans graft their identity concepts from the products and services they use and abuse.

you can’t go broke betting on the fall.

to not buy FACEBOOK stock would be like turning down a 50% off willy wonka chocolate bar that ALSO comes with a free golden ticket to the chocolate factory.

so while i listened and periodically watched the 5 hours of boring and often JUVENILE hearings, i couldn’t help thinking how clever deception really is. FACEBOOK does soooo many things that you have no idea about.

where did you think all that FAKE money was going?

and it was sooooo touching when a couple of the congress people dared to ask when mark would stop selling OPIOID DRUGS off FACEBOOK. he conveniently said, never.

but don’t worry, the u.s. sent it’s least qualified people to talk to FACEBOOK about this, lol.

i mean, the vast majority of these congresspeople were like children who have no clue about adult concepts.

for example, not one congressperson asked if those "privacy settings" weren’t hackable — as in something so FKING SIMPLE like "well, a hacker can hack past those infantile settings." instead, they gave zuckerberg the legal opportunity to talk-stall his way out of their four minutes. it was EMBARRASSING to see how stupid most of these congresspeople really are and how unlearned about important tech philosophy. most of them had no idea even what "privacy settings" were, so many spent their four minutes being "schooled". fking waste. that’s like sending me to the olympics for weightlifting…

so the first problem is that congresspeople don’t really know a lot about anything. in general, they are "OUT OF THE GD LOOP" when it comes to understanding worldwide things like the fking INTERNET!!??! they know a little about a lot.

anyway, each congressperson was given four minutes to ask zuckerberg questions about what happened.

the LARGE majority wasted these minutes with grandstanding. only a handful seemed to have an inkling of what the real reach and danger and anti-American stance that FACEBOOK has against the united states.

so instead of gathering relevant testimony and commitment from FACEBOOK on super important legal issues regarding citizenship protection and unethical information exchange, they paraded themselves for THEIR fake american constituent’s votes. it was DISGUSTING. how fking shallow bipartisan azzhoes really are.

instead of REPRESENTING AMERICA, they represented their own careers.

and honestly, every single person on MEDZ or overeating or over drinking these days is acting like an ANTI-AMERICAN. supremacy is also a form of ANTI-AMERICANISM.

we’ve reached a point where our daily choices are becoming ANTI-AMERICAN and in violation of other citizens’ rights to be free. but i guess we don’t see it clearly, mostly.

in the city, it is much more obvious. especially a FAKE SANCTUARY city like san francisco, the sanctuary is REALLY being given to the monied and the foreign investors, not the locals. it’s a FAKE moniker for investors, not a representation of anything more. but most people are like these congresspeople — out to get more votes from their base. but that’s not AMERICAN. that’s just regional self-interest.

thankfully, there were a few exceptions and those ones were AWESOME to hear. they were incredibly revealing. and it is clear that their voices are being thrown out. so that’s a drag, but you can’t really stop FACEBOOK. they are not a social platform. they are the world’s largest company and they fund TONS of stuff around the globe.

for example, FACEBOOK is going to have the largest WORLDWIDE "counterterrorism" team. already there team is competitive with world powers. soon, they will be larger than any nation’s.

now, those of us who are in the know, well, we KNOW that the COUNTERTERRORISTS are the real terrorists.

if you listen to the 9/11 commission report you would know this, too. or, if you listened to anything the islamic world is saying you’d know this, too. but i already know you don’t listen to those people.

doesn’t change the truth — the COUNTERRERRORISTS are the real terrorists.

so now FACEBOOK will be the leading force in this deception.

already they have over 200 people working full time in 30 different languages in counterterrorism.

if you don’t get what this means, you should go read my facebook farewell that i wrote about two years ago when i stopped contributing to the largest surveillance system ever built and used against humanity.

i had written a similar program concept in the 90s. it was called CYBERBUDDY.

the idea was you would input your info into a program (we call them apps now) that tracked your emotional and physical world by remembering everything you input and being able to remind you of things — how you felt about others, what had happened and what others had done to you.

and, as all the social media programs do, it would have a backside that was constantly selling your information to buyers.

but the user never knew this.

anyway, that’s exactly what FACEBOOK did. and let’s be honest, FACEBOOK was CHOSEN.

it’s not that great.

there were way better platform possibilities. but the world cartels needed something legit, so they chose the HARVARD-based platform. and it worked. they inserted the most deviant and self-revealing and WORSE betraying platform known to humans.

this congressperson is holding up a chart. it shows FACEBOOK’s profits.

they are escalating exponentially. from 1 billion in 2006 to 26 billion in 2016 and then WATCH THE FKING LEAP!!!!

40 BILLION dollars in 2017.

buy now. you won’t be crying later.

anyway, zuckerberg intends to have more than 20,000 people working on counterterrorism within a year or so. they are also building an endless array of surveillance and algorithmic tools that will affect ALL world trade. they are also deeply involved in ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE development.

basically, if you wanted an anti christ of jewish origins, you are looking at the rise of the kingship. but if you’re not scared and don’t go that way right away, dip into OVERHEAD STUDIES to see just how amazingly controlling all of this is when you also have KILL DRONES and security enforcement.

already OVERHEAD STUDIES are being used against the u.s. population to imprison us.

anyway, for most people this will seem crazy and like a new gibberish. so be it.

i started to take notes about a third of the way into process when i started to get a feel for how the "hearings" work. it was new for me, but i’ll post the transcript of my notes which are a lot of actual transcriptting.

the republicans are all for it and that’s why you should bet on FACEBOOK. especially since the majority of FACEBOOK’s users are and will be NOT from america. so our "opinion" of this is just that.

FACEBOOK is bigger than the u.s. government and for the record, the whole counterterrorism surveillance team works from outside the u.s.

where there are different laws…

okay, so here’s the transcript which i LAUGHINGLY call:

CONGRESS MAN, YES

because this is the tactic zuckerberg and his lawyers realized was the WINNING COMBO.

who knew congresspeople were so fking stupid? especially from the stupid states. geez.

no wonder so many extra-foreigners are making a bid at stealing so much of the united states’ property.

it must be fking easy with so many dum fks.

and to those congress people who used this momentous occasion to further their careers instead of protecting the american public, FKU!!!!!

*********************************

PRESS PLAY

no stars

figures on a beach

the partial notes:

CONGRESSMAN, YES

i would love to be a congressperson, but to be one, i would have to not understand any of this. so why are they “representing” us??!?!?!

zuckerbergs tactics.

agree with the person.

deflect away from the topic by using their weakness and lack of knowledge.

obscure the truth. pretend you’re not a MASSIVE CONGLOMERATE but a calendar site for connecting people’s lives HALLMARK.

once zuckerberg figures out how to run the clock down, he takes over everytime.

some senators (usually republican) have long winded and meaningless monologues followed by easy to answer questions of no importance except to wind the four minute clock down.

20K employees for content control.

some senators (usually democratic) try to get him to answer YES OR NO questions. his tactic for stalling in this case is deflect back to their misunderstanding of the precise language or meaning. it makes them look dumb (a lot of the are and don’t understand why FACEBOOK is such a walking/talking front for a secret information and collection agency as well as worldwide product mouthpiece)

the best questions take all four minutes and then zuckerberg can deflect easily. fk that!!!

NOT A SINGLE CONGRESS PERSON (well, maybe one, but he petered out oddly) got through their questions. most had MANY left and were forced to “submit” them for consideration. BULLSHIT!!!!

SMASHFACE his “prank” site.

"we’re getting ready to overreact”

we do nothing or we overreact!

you need to save your ship?

diamond and silk. african american women.

what is unsafe about two women supporting donald trump?

mr. schrader from oregon.

do you delete and save.

yes.. all things saved.

document retention policy.

preserve mails/conversations

testified that you don’t sell information.

but others do. aren’t you complicit?

"complaint only” enforcement.

kennedy democrat

wasted the whole time trying to explain himself.

“i’m sorry, i don’t understand your question.”

targeting options are shared likes. shared by facebook.

ad ranking. meta data. behaviors. newsfeed. relevancy vs. GIVING to advertisers.

how do people then “own” their own data?

then gets lost in the process and time runs out.

part of the rub

second you focus the individual instead of societal impact… you’re out of time.

but news and media. blah blah blah

mr flores. texas

large oil company monopoly 1800s 1900s

telecom company monopoly in the70s

thanks for being good.

wasted the whole time with a bizarre lecture.

conservatives are mad about BIAS.

they can’t see past their stupidity.

policy responses.

ideological agnosticism regarding their users public facing activities

finally, some questions. do you believe FACEBOOK SHOULD BE IDEOLOGICALLY NEUTRAL?

i agree we should be a platform for all ideas. [cuts him off and moves to next question. bam! yeah!!

with respect to privacy we need a baseline when we talk about a virtual person, name address websites visited, picture, etc. ownership issue is the individual’s creation.

they own it.

do you agree.

yes.

use of data issue and full disclosure for unlimited time.

easy understand.

runs out of time.

california

mr cardenas

biggest business model and totally unregulated.

shows shareholder revenues table

2009 net revenue less than a billion dollars

26 billion for 2016

40 billion dollars for 2017

CEO of cambridge analytica stepped down during the meeting.

does that solve the issue around the controversy.

no, two issues. how were they able to buy data from a developer that people chose to share it with? but some of the info originated on facebook.

people had it on facebook and CHOSE to share their AND their friend’s information…

question:

buy information to add or augment to build around them their profile.

we just recently announced that we’ve stopped working with data brokers as part of the ad system.

yes, standard practice.

you did engage in it.

yes. until we announced we were shutting it did.

facebook threatened to sue the guardian if it revelaed the cambridge analytica story.

hey maybe you don’t want to do that.

“there may have been an specific factual inaccuracy.”

however they did go through with it regardless.

then ONLY then did facebook apologize for 89 million users info ending up in other people’s hands.

‘

it’s time that you FACEBOOK want to be a leader and american you can be a leader.

are you committed to being a leader. you can in fact do right by users of facebook.

time’s out. two second answer?

"i am definitely committed to taking a broader review of our responsibility. not so that we don’t just give people tools but so they are used for good.”

first five or ten minute , ten minute recess.

5;40

TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES LATER…

mre. brooks indiana

platform of facebook and other platforms help keep us safe from terrorists and recruitment of women and children to join terrorist organizations.

facebook didn’t exist before 9/11

isis and al acaida use these platforms.

terrorism recruitment.

now terrorists use social media.

then you talked about dangerous or objectionable content needing to be reported but what if they don’t? what if people just assume that someone else is reporting.

what is the leadership role of facebook, our role in stopping recruitment.

thank you for the question. there is no place for that in our network.

we’ve developed a number of tools so that 99% of isis and al acaida is flagged before we even see it.

we’re proud of it as a model for removing "harmful content".

as of march 29th there were ISIS videos, executions,

april 9th five pages of hezbollah content

what is the mechanism?

is it AI

2-0K people?

what are you using.

this is just within a week.

counter terrorism team at facebook with 200 people.