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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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Shortly following reports of an apparent second assassination attempt against former US president and 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Elon Musk decided to speak up.

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔,” Musk, X’s owner, wrote in a now deleted post, in response to another person asking, “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?”

After deleting the post—which could be interpreted as a call to murder President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the US presidential election—Musk indicated that it was merely a joke that fell flat given the context. “Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on 𝕏,” he wrote, adding, “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

The incident was the latest in a long line of increasingly incendiary political posts from Musk, whose substantial defense contracts with the US government may give him access to highly sensitive information even while he makes potential threats against the sitting commander in chief. And they point to the more pressing risk that Musk’s recent rhetoric has posed: the potential to inspire further political violence.

While Sunday night’s post is gone, it appears likely that Musk could receive some attention from federal law enforcement, if he hasn’t already.

The United States Secret Service declined WIRED’s request to comment on Musk’s post. “We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees,” USSS spokesperson Nate Herring tells WIRED.

“In my experience, the Secret Service would take such a comment very seriously,” says Michael German, a former FBI special agent and a liberty and national security fellow at NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Typically, agents would go out and interview the subject to ensure that there wasn't an existing threat, and to make the subject aware that the agency takes such statements seriously.”

German notes that it’s possible the FBI could also launch an investigation. However, it’s unlikely that Musk would face any charges for his post. “On its face, the tweet would not meet the ‘true threat’ test, in that it wasn't a direct threat to do harm to the vice president, so it wouldn't likely proceed to prosecution,” German says. Still, “it would create a record of the investigations.”

The FBI declined WIRED’s request to comment on Musk’s post. X did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Both Biden and Harris have released statements condemning the apparent attempt on Trump’s life and political violence more broadly. In a statement to ABC News, the White House condemned Musk’s post. "Violence should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about,” the statement says. “This rhetoric is irresponsible."

Where things get dicier for Musk is his role as a major contractor for the US Department of Defense and NASA. According to Reuters, SpaceX signed a $1.8 billion contract in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees US spy satellites. The US Space Force also signed a $70 million contract late last year with SpaceX to build out military-grade low-earth-orbit satellite capabilities. Starlink, SpaceX’s commercial satellite internet wing, is providing connectivity to the US Navy.

NASA, meanwhile, has increasingly outsourced its spaceflight projects to SpaceX, including billions of dollars in contracts for multiple trips to the moon and an $843 million contract to build the vehicle that will take the International Space Station out of commission.

The US government’s heavy reliance on companies controlled by Musk has repeatedly raised the hackles of national security experts. Concerns at the Pentagon came into stark relief last September after Musk denied Ukraine’s request to enable Starlink in Crimea, a disputed territory bordering Russia, so it could launch an attack on Russian troops. (Starlink was not under a military contract when he denied the request.) In response to previous WIRED reporting, Musk asserted that “Starlink was barred from turning on satellite beams in Crimea at the time, because doing so would violate US sanctions against Russia!”

Neither the Defense Department nor NASA have responded to WIRED’s request for comment.

Even Musk’s October 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X) had some experts worried about the national security risks it could pose to the US, given his business relationship and communications with the Chinese government, his alleged outreach to Russian president Vladimir Putin (which Musk has denied), and Saudi Arabia’s continued investment in Twitter following Musk’s buyout. Others raised concerns that China may have leverage over Musk, due to his relationships with Beijing related to Tesla, his electric car company that has a factory in Shanghai. And all that was before Musk—a citizen of South Africa, Canada, and the US—reactivated the accounts of conspiracy theorists and white nationalists, and began heavily pushing his own right-wing political narrative. Immediately following the first attempted assassination of Trump in mid-July, Musk endorsed Trump and reportedly pledged $45 million per month to support a pro-Trump PAC, a funding vow he said he did not make.

Musk’s deleted Sunday night post further complicates matters. The CEO reportedly has security clearance given his companies’ work on classified US government projects. While there are many rules around who gets security clearance, such as abstaining from cannabis use, the designation is awarded and maintained on a risk-vs-reward basis for the US government. Given that Musk is perhaps the world’s richest man and most famous chief executive, it may be tricky to pull his security clearance regardless of his flippant discussions of political assassinations.

“This is where Musk's status might have a greater effect,” says the Brennan Center’s German. “It would be hard for managers to revoke the security clearance of someone in a position of power, whereas they could be expected to take quick action against a regular employee who engaged in similar conduct.”

The most concerning aspect of Musk’s post is its potential to further inflame extremist threats in the US, says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, who calls the post “merely the latest example of right-wing incitement that has become concerningly mainstream in recent years.”

“That the owner of a major social media platform—and US government contractor—is opining on the assassination of political opponents should be alarming for Americans across the political spectrum,” Lewis says. He warns that “culture war narratives and thinly veiled racism” have already had effects on the real world, which could be exacerbated by the far-right’s willingness to answer calls to arms.

“These extremists are waiting for the justification to engage in violence,” he says, “and rhetoric like this provides the perfect excuse.”

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adarkrainbow · 5 months ago

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Queering kinship in "The Maiden who Seeks her Brothers" (B)

Continuation of the previous post! I will point out that I am not copying everything there (for example I won't include all the footnotes). If you are interested in more then you'll have to buy the book (or its PDF) :p

The manner in which the king discovers the heroine is also questionable in ATU 451. In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king comes upon the heroine while out hunting and fetches her down from the tree in which she sits; in “The Six Swans,” the king’s huntsmen carry her down from a tree after she throws down all of her clothing except for a shift, after which she is taken to the king. The implication that the heroine is actually the king’s quarry subtly exposes the workings of courtship as a hunt or chase with clearly prescribed gender roles. In both cases, the king weds her for her beauty, and the heroine silently acquiesces. The heroine is slandered in her own home, and, tellingly, her marriage is not stable until her brothers are returned to human form. As Holbek notes, “There is an intriguing connection between the brothers and the king: the heroine only wins him for good when she has disenchanted her brothers” (1987, 551). This suggests that issues with the natal family must be worked out before a new family can be successfully formed.

Anthropological methods also help to illuminate the kinship dynamics of this tale. In particular, the culture reflector theory is useful, but only to a degree, as ethnographic information about nineteenth-century German family structure is limited. More generally, European families in the nineteenth century were undergoing changes reflecting larger societal changes, which in turn influenced narrative themes at the time. Marilyn Pemberton writes, “Family structure and its internal functioning were the keys to en[1]couraging the values and behavior needed to support a modern world which was emerging at this time” (2010, 10). The family in nineteenth-century Germany faced upheavals due to industrialization, wars, and politics, as the German states were not yet unified. Jack Zipes situates the Grimms in this historical context: “The Napoleonic Wars and French rule had been upsetting to both Jacob and Wilhelm, who were dedicated to the notion of German unification” (2002b, xxvi). And yet the contributors to a book titled The German Family suggest that the socialization of children remained a central function of the family structure (Evans and Lee 1981). The German family was the main site of the education of children, with the exception of noble or bourgeois males who could be sent to school, until the late nineteenth century (Hausen 1981, 66–72). Thus we may expect to see in the tales some reflection of the family as an educational institution, even if the particular kinship dynamics of the Grimms’ historical era are still being illuminated.

Two Grimm-specific studies support this. August Nitschke (1988) uses historical documents such as autobiographies and novels to demonstrate that nineteenth-century German mothers utilized folk narratives from oral tradition to interact with their children, both as play and instruction. Ruth Bottigheimer’s (1986) historical research on the social contexts of the Grimms’ tales shows how by the nineteenth century, women’s silence had come to be a prized trait, praised in various media from children’s manuals to marriage advice. This message was in turn echoed in the Grimms’ tales, with their predominantly speechless heroines, a stark example of a social value reflected in the tales. Additionally, Bottigheimer notes that it “was generally held in Wilhelm’s time that social stability rested on a stable family structure, which the various censorship offices of the German states wished to be presented respectfully, as examples put before impressionable minds might be perceived as exerting a formative influence” (1987, 20). Thus, rigid gender roles and stable families came to be foregrounded in the Grimms’ tales.

Moving from the general reflection of social values to kinship structures in folktales, I would like to draw a parallel between German culture and Arab cultures based on how many of the tales in the Grimms’ collection feature a close brother-sister bond. The folktales Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana collected from Palestinian Arab women almost all feature close and loving brother-sister relationships. Muhawi and Kanaana read these relationships in light of their hypothesis that the tales present a portrait of the Arab culture, sometimes artistically distorted, but still related. Based on anthropological research, they note that the relationship between the brother and the sister is warm and harmonious in life, and it is one of the most idealized relationships in the folktale. Clearly I am not trying to imply in a reductionist fashion that German and Palestinian Arab cultures are the same, though a number of their folktale plots overlap; rather, I am stating that if we have evidence that the tales reflect kinship arrangements in one culture, then perhaps something similar is true in a culture with similar tales. Perhaps the Grimms’ tales, collected and revised in a society where families still provided an educational and nurturing setting permeated by storytelling traditions and values, contain information about how families can and should work. Sisters and brothers may have needed to cooperate to survive childhood and the natal home, and behavior that the narrative initially constructs as self-destructive might guarantee survival later on.

Hasan El-Shamy’s work on the brother-sister syndrome in Arab culture provides a second perspective on siblings in Arab folktales. In his monograph on a related tale type, ATU 872* (“Brother and Sister”), El-Shamy summarizes a number of texts and analyzes them in the context of an Arab worldview.8 What these texts have in common with “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” is that the sister-brother dyadic relationship is idealized and provides the motivation for the plot.9 However, since the brother-sister relationship is so strong emotionally as to border on the potentially incestuous, the desire of the brother and sister to be together must be worked out narratively through a plot that makes sense to its tellers and the audience so that “the tale reaches a conclusion which is emotionally comfortable for both the narrator and the listener” (1979, 76). Thus in Arab cultures, this tale type makes meaningful statements about the proper relationships between brothers and sisters, both reflecting and enforcing the cultural mandate that brothers and sisters care for one another

The brother-sister relationship in the same tale or related tales in different cultures can take on various meanings according to context; as discussed previously, Holbek interprets ATU 451 as a tale motivated by sibling rivalry, while El-Shamy interprets related tales as expressing a deep sibling love. Both scholars interpret the tales drawing on information from their respective cultures and yet reach different conclusions about the psychology underlying the tales. The importance of cultural context is thus paramount, and in the case of the Grimms’ inclusion of three versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” in their collection, the life contexts of the collectors also feature prominently

The life histories of the Grimm brothers themselves influenced the shaping of this tale in very specific ways. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm came from a family that was once affluent but become impoverished when their father died, and for much of their lives, Jacob and Wilhelm struggled to provide an adequate income on which to support their aging mother, their sister, and their four surviving brothers. Jacob never married but rather lived with Wilhelm and his wife and children (Zipes 2002b, xxiii–xxviii; see also Tatar 1987).10 The correspondence between Jacob and Wilhelm “reflects their great concern for the welfare of their family,” as did their choices in obtaining work that would allow them to care for family members who were unable to work (Zipes 2002b, xxv). Hence one reason “The Brothers Who Were Turned into Birds” appears in their collection three times could be that its message, the importance of sibling fidelity, appealed to the Grimms. Zipes comments on the brothers’ revisions of the text of “The Twelve Brothers” in particular, noting that they emphasize two factors: “the dedication of the sister and brothers to one another, and the establishment of a common, orderly household . . . where they lived together” (1988b, 216). Overall, the numerous sibling tales that the Grimms collected and revised stressed ideals “based on a sense of loss and what they felt should be retained if their own family and Germany were to be united” (218).

Though the love between (opposite-gendered) siblings is emphasized in the Grimms’ collection as a whole, as well as in their three versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers,” there is also ambivalence. As fundamentally human emotions, love and hate are sometimes transformations of each other, as misplaced projection or intensified identification.11 Thus Holbek’s and El-Shamy’s seemingly opposing interpretations of brother-sister tales can be reconciled, since each set of tales, in their cultural context, grapples with the question of how brother-sister relations should be. The Grimms’ tales veer more toward sibling fidelity, but there is a marked ambivalence in “The Twelve Brothers” in particular. When the sister sets out to find her twelve brothers, she encounters the youngest one first, who is overjoyed to see her. However, he tells her that the brothers vowed “that any maiden who came our way would have to die, for we had to leave our kingdom on account of a girl” (Zipes 2002b, 33). The youngest brother tricks the older brothers into agreeing not to kill the next girl they meet, after which the older brothers warmly welcome their sister into their midst. The initial hostility of the brothers toward their sister, though narratively constructed and transformed, could also represent the Grimms’ ambivalent feelings about their family: as a family that frequently suffered hardship and poverty, there must have been some strain in supporting all of their siblings. As eldest, Jacob in particular bore many of the responsibilities. Zipes notes, “It was never easy for Jacob to be both brother and father to his siblings—especially after the death of their mother, when they barely had enough money to clothe and feed themselves” (9). Including and revising brother-sister tales may thus have been a way for the Grimms to navigate their own complicated feelings toward their many siblings by achieving a narrative resolution for an initial situation fraught with resentment.

The message of sibling fidelity also upholds social norms in a patriarchal, patrilocal society, for brothers and sisters would not be competing for the same resources. In contrast, many of the Grimms’ tales (and fairy tales in general) feature competition between women for resources, a struggle that ultimately disempowers women. Maria Tatar comments on the heroines in the Grimms’ collection who, lowly by day, beautify themselves at night in dresses “that arouse the admiration of a prince and that drive rival princesses into jealous rages” (1987, 118). Classical texts of ATU 510A (“Cinderella”) in particular tend to present women competing for eligible men, portrayals that have drawn attention from feminist critics (Haase 2004a, 16, 20). Kay Stone’s reception-based research on gender roles in fairy tales reveals that readers are aware of the competition between women featured in the tales, “a competition our society seems to accept as natural” (1986, 137).

Inasmuch as “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” depicts a woman leaving her birthplace and getting married, it upholds the patriarchal mandate that anthropologist Gayle Rubin (1975) identified as “the traffic in women.” According to Rubin’s theory, men cement their homosocial bonds by exchanging women as wives, essentially as commodities. Yet in each of the versions of this tale type in the Grimms, the sister continues to live with her brothers at the tale’s conclusion. The brothers do not necessarily take wives of their own, which in two versions leads to an odd arrangement where the brothers live with their sister and her husband. The nuclear family is replicated, but with the addition of the bachelor brothers, thus altering the original family that was present at the opening of the tale. This familial constellation, which may have been recognizable to the extended family structures of nineteenth-century Germany, nonetheless does not conform to heteronormative ideas of the ideal nuclear family.12 Instead, it parallels the extraordinary image of the littlest brother in the third tale left with a wing instead of an arm because his disenchantment was incomplete—a compelling icon of fantasy penetrating reality, demanding to be made livable. The brothers form a queer appendage when added to the family unit of the heterosexual couple plus their children, and the visibly liminal status of the winged littlest brother highlights the oddness of the brothers’ inclusion

This third tale, “The Six Swans,” is more specifically woman centered and queer than the other two, as it begins with female desire (the witch ensnaring the father/king to be her daughter’s husband) and female inventiveness (the father/king’s new wife sewing and then enchanting shirts to turn the king’s sons into swans).13 The sister then defies the father/king’s authority by refusing to come with him, where the new wife is ostensibly waiting to dispose of the remainder of the unwelcome offspring. The sister wanders until she finds her brothers and undertakes to free them by remaining silent for six years while sewing them six shirts from asters. Her efforts are nearly thwarted by her new husband’s mother, who steals her children and attempts to frame her for murder. It is notable that the women in this tale who are the most active—the witch, the witch’s daughter who becomes stepmother to the siblings, and the old woman who is mother to the sister’s husband—are the most villainous. The sister, in contrast, turns her agency inward, acting on herself in order to remain silent and productive. Her agency, the most positively portrayed female agency in this tale, is thus queer in the sense that it resists and unsettles; it acts while negating action, it endures while refusing to respond to life-threatening conditions. That agency should be complex and contradictory makes sense, for, according to Butler, “If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility” (2004, 3). The sister’s agency, so quiet as to be almost unnoticeable, is nevertheless not congruent with being silenced.

The queerness of this tale also manifests in transbiology. Judith Halberstam discusses the transbiological as manifesting in “hybrid entities or in-between states of being that represent subtle or even glaring shifts in our understandings of the body and of bodily transformation” (2008, 266). More specifically, transbiological connections “question and shift the location, the terms and the meaning of the artificial boundaries between humans, animals, machines, states of life and death, animation and reanimation, living, evolving, becoming and transforming” (266). The transitions and affinities between humans and animals in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” interrogate the very notion of humanity as a discrete state. If the heroine’s brothers are birds, how can they still be her brothers? The tale seems to affirm a kinship between humans and animals, allowing for the possibility that family bonds transcend species divisions. The heroine herself is close to an animal state, especially during her silent time sewing in the forest. Viewing the heroine’s state from a transbiological perspective helps illuminate Bottigheimer’s statement linking muteness and sexual vulnerability, when she describes how, in “The Six Swans,” “against all contemporary logic the treed girl tries to drive off the king’s hunters by throwing her clothes down at them, piece by piece, until only her shift is left” (1987, 77). This scene does in fact make sense if the heroine is read to be in a semi-animalistic state, having renounced some of her humanity. Shedding human garments is akin to shedding social skins, layers of human identity, though her morphological stability betrays her when the king perceives her as a beautiful human female and decides to wed her

However, the fact that this remains a human-centered tale renders its subversiveness incomplete. We never learn what the brothers think and feel while they are enchanted; do they keep their sister company as she silently sews shirts for them? Do they retain any fragments of their human identities or memories while in swan or raven form? The fact that the brothers fly to where their sister is bound to a pyre, about to be immolated, suggests that they acknowledge some kind of tie to her. The brothers’ inability to use their bird beaks to form human speech parallels the sister’s silence, rendering both brothers and sister unintelligible in human terms. For the brothers to become human again, they must be framed as legibly human. Bear notes the importance of “publicly dressing the swans as human beings” in order to disenchant them in certain versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” (2009, 55). In “The Six Swans,” the heroine tosses the shirts she had sewn onto the swans as they fly near the pyre to which she is bound. In “The Twelve Brothers,” the brothers as ravens swoop into the yard where the sister is about to be burned at the stake, at which point the seven years of the sister’s silence elapse. Exactly at that moment, “just as they touched the ground, they turned into her twelve brothers whom she had saved” (Zipes 2002b, 35–36). In “The Seven Ravens,” the brothers assume human form after flying into their home as ravens, and when they go to their table to eat and drink, they notice signs of the sister’s presence and exclaim, “Who’s been eating from my plate? Who’s been drinking from my cup? It was a human mouth” (92). The sister’s presence is enough to disenchant the brothers, but it is significant that her humanness causes them to comment and initiates the transformation. Thus, in each of these three tales, the brothers must reengage with human activities—wearing clothing, acknowledging their relationship with gravity and the ground, and eating in human fashion—in order to become human once again.

To explore the issues presented by these tales further, I return to the comparative method, asking why three versions of this tale type really needed to be published in one collection, and what the differences between the versions can tell us. Queer and anthropological perspectives on the brother[1]sister relationship each illuminate the meanings of tales where brothers and sisters love each other excessively—both as taboo and survival strategy. Parental love is almost always destructive, whether it is excessive fatherly love or a stepmother’s desire to be the sole loved object. We learn from the anomalous ending of the text “The Seven Ravens” that neither silence nor heterosexual marriage is required for this tale type to work as a story, to make sense narratively. In that tale, the sister disenchants her brothers when she arrives at their domicile and drops a ring into one of their cups as a recognition token, at which point the seventh brother says, “God grant us that our little sister may be here. Then we’d be saved!” (Zipes 2002b, 92). After the brothers are transformed back into humans, they “hugged and kissed each other and went happily home” (93). Here, enfolding back into the nuclear family is the happily ever after—the only price was the sister’s little finger and her sacrifice to seek her brothers. In the texts where marriage does occur, it is queered by danger and ambivalence. According to my allomotific analysis, silence is but one method of disenchantment. A sacrifice of another sort will do: the sacrifice of a “normal” marriage, the sacrifice of a reproductive future. Yet these things seem a small price to pay for the reward of a family structure, however unconventional, bonded by love and loyalty

As I’ve shown, the Grimms’ versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” affirm some family values on the surface, but the texts are also radical in their suggestions for alternate ways of being. The nuclear family is critiqued as dangerous, and the formation of a new marital family does not guarantee the heroine any more safety. Greenhill describes a parallel phenomenon in the tales she analyzes in her essay: “‘Bluebeard’ and ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ queer kinship by exposing the sine qua non of heterosexual relationships—between bride and groom, husband and wife—as explicitly adversarial, dangerous, even murderous” (2008, 150). The husband in “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” (when he appears) is not dangerous through action so much as inaction, by allowing his mother to slander and threaten his wife. Both men and women are alternately active and passive in this tale type, making it difficult to state to what degree this tale type exhibits female agency, a task made even more difficult when the heroine voluntarily gives up her voice. The sister’s agency lies partially in negation and endurance, which is one way that the tale queers the notion of agency, despite the fact that in each of the three tales the sister takes the initiative and sets out on a quest to find her brothers. By simultaneously questioning the family and making it the sought-after object, the Grimms’ three versions of “The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” complicate the notion of kinship, presenting myriad possibilities for how humans and non-humans can relate to and live with one another. As a story that explores and opposes lethal and idealized families, this tale investigates themes of attachment, ambivalence, and ambiguity that were central to the Grimms’ cultural context and life histories and remain relevant today.

#queering the grimm #queering the grimms #fairytale analysis #queer fairytales #the maiden who seeks her brothers #the six swans #the seven ravens #the twelve brothers #grimm fairytales #german fairytales

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spock-in-awe · 1 year ago

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Hey, so, I made up a term and wrote a whole thing. Hope you enjoy.

Inspired by the concept of liminal spaces, liminal space characters are narratively stuck, their subjectivity seemed rendered inert. They are resistant to transiting to the next phase, on the brink of possible transformation if only they could figure out the how of transforming. However, this arrested character growth is designed by skillful hands to be temporary, and the resulting arc of change is heightened by that seemingly fixed–and problematically so–starting place.

An inherent trope among these characters is a bridging multiple worlds, identities, or contexts. They inhabit an “in-between,” a space of discomfort, uncertainty, waiting, and denial (relating to the personal, the public, or reality itself). Narratively, there might be an impending change on their horizon that they work to avoid, sacrificing pieces of their own ethical system to reach that aim. They might be running from their past actions, straddling multiple spheres of existence, or haunted by what they’ve done but unable to face the consequences. Others might be so committed to completing a task bestowed upon them they barely assess whether they are capable of even doing so. In worse emotional places are those characters who complete the task set before them, only to realize it was a horrible mistake.

At the root is their relationship to subjectivity. Who directed their understanding of self? When did that occur? Was it purposefully manipulative or purely environmental? To move through the liminal space, they must define their own subjectivity, and take control of their own identities after being buffeted by expectation, lineage, or limited opportunities.

One of the most persuasive liminal space characters of the last ten years is Ben Solo, or Kylo Ren, in the Star Wars universe. He is born under incredibly traumatic circumstances, his lineage being a splinter of the light side and the dark. Impossibly high expectations are thrust upon him before he enters the world, so too is a sinister invasion intended to corrupt him in the womb. He is purposefully kept ignorant of his grandfather’s actions, deprived of an opportunity to come to terms with the damage wrought those decades prior. Ben’s parents don’t quite notice how calculating the dark side is, or avoid doing anything about this understanding, until they send him to his uncle’s Jedi Temple. Even under his Master-level uncle’s observation, Ben struggles to integrate everything that is seemingly at odds inside him; the pull to the light, the pressure of the dark. Consequently, he is left in a state of fractured identity, split between what is acceptable and unacceptable, unable to find his place in a galaxy ruled by strict binaries. This tension boils to the surface as rage, violence, hopelessness, and subservience to those he turns after his family members fail him.

Another excellent example is Spock in the Star Trek universe. He is born half human, half Vulcan, a duality that leads to lifelong struggles not only within himself, but in the galaxy, as well. While he must suppress his emotions through training and social expectation, his internal system of rationality is encouraged during his childhood on Vulcan. Despite his father’s choice to partner with a human woman, Sarek seems to resent Spock’s individuality. In Vulcan schools, Spock is bullied by his peers for that part of his identity of which he has no control. In a more recent iteration of Star Trek, it is revealed that Spock also has a form of dyslexia, setting him further apart from those he might otherwise find a connection with. He is a unique individual, someone whose adversities aren’t recognized by those he encounters–let alone seen and validated–and so he is left to find a balance within himself with little support. His world is also one of defined boundaries, clear parameters for acceptable behaviors. This path isn’t easy for him, especially when he seeks to relate to those he finds himself drawn to, or forced to spend time with. Depending on the era of Star Trek, he deflects the advances of those around him, or falls under the influence of an alien biologic, for example, wherein he is allowed to express emotions, and later confesses that being under the pollen’s influence was the only time he felt happy.

Both these examples share a commonality: they are pushed a certain direction in response to family obligation, social expectation, or environmental constraints. This can even go as far as childhood abuse or neglect that carries on through their lives. From the clay of their childhood experiences, the liminal space characters are taught it doesn’t matter what they want for themselves; they must accept and perform an identity according to what people around them dictate as acceptable. For Ben Solo, it is dutiful Padawan to his own detriment, while as Kylo Ren, he is a conflicted tool used by those he bows to. Spock defaults to appearing as a distanced and capable science officer, hiding any internal tumult he may experience. Both have suffered for their struggles and crave relief.

For some, there is a distinct lack of agency often assigned, something that happened at the start of their journey that was entirely out of their control. Ji-Ah, a liminal space creature from Lovecraft Country, is possessed by a spirit that wreaks havoc on those she encounters. She did not consent to the spirit’s arrival–her mother invited it in for reasons all her own–and the human Ji-Ah loses her identity in the process. What is intriguing about this arc is how the spirit is the one to change, not the negated human within. That person was lost, replaced by a spirit who transforms for the better.

San, from Princess Mononoke, was abandoned by her parents in the forest. She was discovered by the Wolf Clan, whose leader Moro takes the human child in as her own to raise entirely as if she were a wolf. As San grows up with deep hatred of humans, she must confront the truth of her existence; that she comes from them, was abandoned by them, and now commits her life to stopping their destruction of the natural world. Her transition through the liminal looks similar to her starting place, living as a wolf, yet her internal conflict finds resolution through connecting with a human man she can trust.

To achieve their goals (which are usually not intrinsically motivated but outwardly so), they may suppress their innate tendencies. These often include compassion, empathy, tenderness, or caretaking. This leads to immense conflict, both externally as they aim to reach certain objectives, or internally as they combat or try to eliminate this intense intrinsic struggle. This conflict may cause violent behaviors, mental instability, or emotional chaos. When these characters are coded as “villains,” they often cause intense harm to others and themselves. They do this usually out of desperation to survive, to fit in, or perhaps to avoid perceived judgement. Depending on the narrative, they are given an opportunity to make amends for this harm. But usually in western media, they are not redeemed, let alone offered the chance to atone for the damage they inflicted while they struggled to actualize as their true selves.

The heroic versions, of which the Star Trek universe has many, benefit from extra layers of character depth, which offers an arc that builds effectively over several seasons. Whether it is an android who observes humans around himself and wishes to emulate their mannerisms, or a previous human-machine hybrid forced to sever herself from the greater machine organism, these characters depend on the external to define their identities. It takes much longer for them to find that truth within themselves.

Other characters fall into a middle ground between villain and hero coding. One such example is Ed Teach, or Blackbeard, in Our Flag Means Death. He inhabits the world as a fulfillment of his own stereotypes and exaggerations. He claims to care about little and presents a bravado to match the fearsome illustrations in history books. But eventually we see his immense dissatisfaction with the role he has been performing. His liminal space, similar to the rest, is that of moving away from this project front toward authenticity.

Joel Miller, a character originated in the Last of us video game and portrayed in a streaming show of the same name, begins as a regular man. He has a daughter, a brother, a job. It is only because of horrifying circumstances that he is forced to transform. He makes himself cold, violent, and ruthless. There can be no remainder of his previous self. Until he encounters someone to protect, and protect, he does, much to his own aggravation. His circumstances are some of the most dramatic across narratives, and how he integrates, or fails to integrate, his warring selves has fascinated audiences for over a decade.

Neither of these previous two examples have conclusions in their streaming narratives at this point. Both are left on the cliffhanger of violence, of rejection of social expectation around them. Both revert to a previous state of being, but in different ways: Ed to his Blackbeard persona, Joel to his protective father role. Whatever results from these decisions (however conscious or reactionary they are), is inconsequential. And therefore, potentially read as villainous once more, buckling under the pain of the past and fear of that suffering’s return.

The character Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer willingly suffers for his previous actions. Over time, he begins to recognize what he has done, takes action to make amends, and fights for his redemption. Though by the closure of the show he is deprived of what he most craves–connection–his final actions are entirely the opposite of his original ones. He countered the vampire tendencies within himself, found wholeness, and dedicated himself to a goal that was selfless.

As Spike was for some time, these characters can be confused about where they belong and crave that understanding and connection. There is a deep ache to be understood, though few of them acknowledge this desire. In fact, many go out of their way to deny it, to pretend otherwise.

The character of Nimona, originating in the graphic novel of the same name, traverses the murky landscape of being a shape shifter. She camouflages her deep interest in finding a companion by presenting herself as a “sidekick,” someone for the villain mastermind to rely on and trust. She is uncertain of herself, carrying the wounds of centuries past, convincing herself that violence and domination are paramount. When she bonds with her new friend in unexpected ways, her deeper needs rise to the surface. But these are frightening. It is only when she is shown radical acceptance and safety does she integrate her various parts at the end of the story.

Killian Jones in Once Upon a Time jostles between presenting his desires in a joking manner, and hiding them beneath layers of anger. He is bound by revenge and denies anything in conflict with that goal. His swagger is an exaggeration, a front or projection, which is a common detail across these stories. If he claims to be a heartless villain, no one will discover just how victimized he once was.

These characters may herald chaos or drama within the narrative, amusement or disquiet for the audience. A character like Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter series is written from the outset as a direct–if youthful–antagonist. Yet later in the story, insight into his wounded mental and emotional state arrives, eliciting the reader’s compassion. He was inculcated in an environment of bigotry and toxic superiority, of which he must decide personally to move beyond.

Liminal space characters can appear unique in their behaviors and presentations when compared to those around them. Perhaps this is because of a heightened defensiveness, or anxiety, or refusal to engage with typical romantic situations.

For those who are deliberately off-putting and aggressive, sarcastic and aloof, or extremely isolated by design, the audience must confront their own biases, as well. When the narrative is effective, we as consumers may empathize with these struggling individuals. We may understand why they have taken the steps they have, protected themselves, lashed out at others.

What I love most about liminal space characters is the potential for them to heal the dueling perspectives within themselves. These characters at some point must question themselves, and when done successfully, the audience does the same: How capable are we of forming our sense of self? What does harm look like? How do we live with our mistakes? How do we shape ourselves? Is it possible to make a new choice after a long pattern of harmful behaviors? Where does this character go after discovering they have wronged so many? When is that redemptive effort enough?

Both the characters questioning themselves, and not questioning themselves (ie following external demands), may lead to feelings of loneliness and rejection. Prince Zuko of Avatar the Last Airbender rotates entirely around his father’s acceptance, and whatever he must do in order to receive it, he will. There is no cost too high, and he questions nothing. Until he stumbles into a bond with a supposed adversary, which begins to shift his perspective. This is a common trope within these stories, as well, the mirror opposite coming into sharp relief by comparison.

Frustratingly, there are far more male-presenting liminal space characters than female ones in the duality of Western media, so the “adversary” is often portrayed as female (I’m optimistic this will change as more diverse writers share their stories). In a compulsory heterosexual context, there is potential for romance, as well. This is perceived in the canon text and also by fans through their own stories. An opposing character–such as Kitara in Avatar the Last Airbender, Rey in the last Star Wars trilogy, or Captain Kirk in Star Trek–may help these liminal space characters realize they are not a lost soul, no longer a victim to their circumstances. They can offer an opposing viewpoint: what if you took a different path? You’re not required to stay this way. It’s never too late.

Hope gives the liminal space characters the sense they can make new choices and change. Hope is the kernel, the light slanting through clouds, the assurance nothing is permanent, not even a limbo state of the mind.

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zenaidamacrouras1 · 2 years ago

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Raise your voice for gender affirming care:

How to call your legislator or write a letter to the newspaper.

Caveat is that I am based in the US and would assume that these rules more or less apply to other countries but what the hell do I know? Please feel free to repost with tips for your home country, sorry to be so United States about it.

The most recent chapter of my Captain America fanfiction (sorry, did you think I was on tumblr because I am cool?)(because yes! I am!) is a performance arts piece where readers are invited to become a part of the story by taking a political action on the central issue that the characters are working on - which is legislation against gender affirming care.

The rules:

You are 100% welcome to plagiarize anything I’ve written in this fic in your opinion piece.

If you do write a letter to the editor, or call an elected, please leave a comment saying so!

How to contact your US Elected Officials:

You can find your state and federal electeds via this tool: https://openstates.org/find_your_legislator. You can also just search your zip code and [state and federal congress] [school board] etc.

Your opinion is much more influential with state and local electeds - definitely reach out! You do not have to be fancy. Just say your general opinion.

Generally speaking, when you call or email an elected (calling is always, always better, but emailing is always, always better than nothing), they just check a box of like “yay or nay” on an issue. They don’t have a special tracking tool for how many amazing facts you have memorized or how articulate you sound. They won’t debate you. You share your opinion, they ask your zip code, and that’s it.

Pro tip: Put your electeds' office phone numbers in your address book and call after business hours so you get a voicemail. Call drunk. Whatever. Back when I had a ton of health issues and bad health insurance, I used to call Congress every time I was in a waiting room to complain about how much we need health care reform (2-3 times a week).

Just remember, you are likely to get a 20 year old college intern or staffer, so be nice. They are at the bottom of the food chain and possibly not even getting paid money.

Why should I write a letter to the editor?:

The Opinion pages are the most read part of any paper. Politicians have staff that read them every day. Activists I know have gotten personal phone calls from high-level politicians who were either pissed or happy about an opinion piece.

How do I get it published?:

Just search [your local paper or the town where you live] and [publish a letter to the editor] it should pop up. Papers make it pretty easy for you to find the info. Usually there is a 200-word limit for an LTE and a 500-word limit for an op-ed. Op-eds are like a fancy LTE: they are harder to get placed, and you usually need some kind of expertise or hook. Happy to answer questions.

How to write a letter to the editor:

Here is a Planned Parenthood overview on how to write an LTE, it’s looking at abortion rights and specific to the Southwest, but it’s pretty decent. I put my own formula below with purple italics examples from the op-ed in my fic —you can re-order these, mix and match, whatever:

Paragraph 1: Current events + context of why this matters now (local context is good, but national is okay):

This year has seen an alarming array of troubling new laws that aim to make it a crime for doctors to act ethically and in accordance with widely accepted standards of medical care. I would be opposed to any law that comes between a patient and their doctor. But these laws are especially distressing to me, as they target some of our nation's most vulnerable children.

Paragraph 2: Identify yourself, why you care, and why people should listen to you:

Steve says: As a person who knows a little bit about history, I invite you to please join me on the right side of it. Obviously Captain America is famous enough he doesn't need to name his qualifications. You don’t have to have anything fancy, just acknowledge one role you play as a human member of a community. You don’t have to come out as transgender in the newspaper (unless you want to!). Everyone is a million things you can identify as that give you moral standing. If you have a personal story, feel free to share it. You could say: As a parent, I am horrified by the bullying behavior of lawmakers, and would never want to see a law like this come between my child and the healthcare they need. Or: As a student, I want to see all my classmates treated equally. It makes me feel unsafe when I hear about teachers misgendering their students.

Paragraph 3: Make your argument with Value, Vision, Problem, Solution

Paragraph 1 and 2 were about providing context for why people should listen to your argument. Now in Paragraph 3, you make the argument. A great way to frame your arguments are Value, Vision, Problem, Solution. This is a very old and common messaging tool and nothing I made up. Steve’s op-ed in my fic includes these, though slightly out of order. Leading with a value that you feel might have more universal appeal is a great way to reach people who may disagree with you. If you are stressed about how to articulate your argument in any situation, this is a great four-sentence formula to use to organize your thoughts. One thing I like about it is it leads with Value—which you don’t need any special expertise to have. You don’t have to memorize 900 perfect facts. You just have to be against child abuse.

Value: a somewhat universally held value that applies to this situation:

No child should have to live in fear of discrimination. Child abuse is bad. Children should be protected. Everyone deserves a safe place to live.

Vision: the big thing you want to happen—invite people to see your positive vision:

Our nation’s children should not have to witness grown adults drumming up hysteria over nonexistent problems because they aren't tolerant of the beautiful diversity of humanity. (Typically framed more positively than the above. For example: --Transgender children should have access to healthcare/bathrooms/proper pronouns. --I want to see a country where all children are free to play and be themselves. --Transphobic lawmakers should be launched into the sun / etc. )

Problem:

Denying trans youth gender-affirming care is an affront to science and medical ethics. These abhorrent actions cause transgender youth to endure untreated pain, and some will die because of these policies. The very existence of these laws harms all transgender children in our nation, because the laws perpetuate discrimination and give undue affirmation to biased, unethical science driven by an agenda of hate. (This is a great place to add facts or research to back up the problem. There are many powerful statistics showing the disproportionate emotional burden transgender people carry as well as the enormous medically proven success of gender-affirming care, as well as the fact that they violate the US constitution.)

Solution:

I hope you'll join me in thinking about the ways you can join the fight for transgender rights, and the rights and dignity of all LGBTQ people. Together we can protect our transgender youth, and make this moment not a story of when our nation made a grave error that harmed a generation of transgender children, but a time when we chose to stand up and change the course of history for the better. (Here is a great place to list specific bills you support or detest, or call out specific politicians who are either doing good or bad work in this arena. Whenever you can, try and namedrop a politician or a bill name/number—they are definitely tracking those. But you don’t have to!).

That's it! An LTE can be 3 paragraphs, and in general, I recommend the Value, Vision, Problem, Solution framework as one to keep in the back of your mind to organize your points in any context.

#activism #how to write and LTE #and also fanfiction #and also performance art #gender affirming care #fanfiction #mcu real life crossover

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emmashouldbewriting · 2 years ago

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I don’t know anything about the US education system but since Archie and Lili have British titles even though they’re not working royals, they should go to British schools and learn about British history etc! Yes they’re American but it doesn’t seem right that their family are British royals and they aren’t being taught about things from that country. I’m British so I learnt about things like Henry Vlll, suffragettes and world war 1 and 2 etc.

American here -- we do learn about those topics in school though not to the extent that a British student does. As one would expect, we study American history so we do study WW1, WW2, the suffragettes, but through an American lens. Henry VIII, King John, Magna Carta, etc. is also in our history curriculum -- because the US was formerly a British colony, a lot of our early colonial history is tied to British history so we do study a bit of British history as it impacts the founding of the US and our parts in WW1 and WW2, but not a whole lot.

But at a minimum in terms of history, the way it's generally broken out is:

elementary/primary years (grades 1-5 or ages 6-10), you learn the basic fundamentals of American history (explorers, colonies, conflicts with Native Americans, founding fathers, manifest destiny, etc.).

middle school years (grades 6-8/ages 11-13), you do a bit of a deeper dive into American history, you learn civics, and you start learning world history.

high school (grades 9-12/ages 14-17), it's more world/western history (which covers some basic British history but still not anywhere close to the scale Brits do), another round of American history, and another round of civics/government.

And while it wasn't mentioned, I do want to give a shoutout to British literature. Our literature classes (we call them English classes here) also go into quite a bit of British history as well through the books that are read. A unit on Shakespeare or Dickens or Jane Austen/Bronte Sisters would also go into what was happening in Britain at the time to give context to the stories, characters, and settings.

The way the US education system works is that it's pretty fucked up. Between politics and the other thing American schools make international news for, it's been fucked up for a long time. I apologize for my French but there's really no other way to describe how messed up our education system is. Almost any American parent you speak to, we would all JUMP at the chance to send our kids anywhere else in the world for their education. That's why Meghan's choices to leave the UK and raise her children here in the US is so mindboggling to many of us (well, me and my friends). Yes, the US is her home and yes, she deserves the chance to raise her children the way she was but: why would you keep your children in a country where they may not ever come home from school one day when you have a better choice?

Anyway. I digress. From a politics standpoint, every president has their own program for the education system (No Child Left Behind for Bush, Common Core for Obama, School Vouchers for Trump) so the standards change every four years based on whoever gives the president the most money for their campaign to influence the education platform. Then on top of the national education program, all the states have their own education programs, which are also at the mercy of politics and lobbyists and those are changing often too based on whichever party runs the state legislature and whoever the most powerful education lobbyist is in that state, which 9 times out of 10 is probably someone with stakes in standardized testing or textbooks.

this is from our school discussion for the sux the other day and I'm posting it even though I've forgotten half of what I was saying because 1: this is informative and 2: anon put a lot of work in so THANK YOU!

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hardynwa · 1 year ago

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Okereke elected fellow of World Academy of Sciences

Prof. Chukwumerije Okereke has been elected Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences for the Advancement of Science in Developing Countries in recognition of his contribution to science and its promotion in the developing world. According to a statement, Okereke is a professor in Global Governance and Public Policy at the School for Policy Studies, Bristol University, UK, and Director of the Center for Climate Change and Development, Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ebonyi State. It stated that Okereke was a globally recognised leading scholar on global climate governance and international development, specialising in the justice dimensions of the international climate regime and just societal transitions to the green economy. According to the statement, he had a track record of high-impact research focused on understanding and addressing systemic barriers to economic and social inclusion in the context of climate policy and green economy transitions, “He drafted a climate change law in Nigeria, modelling Nigeria’s long-term low-carbon development strategy, designing African Unions’ Adaptation Initiative, and drafting the first-ever national green growth plan in Africa, for the Government of Rwanda,” it said. Okereke said, “I am delighted to have been elected Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries. It means a lot to me because I have always been driven by a desire to highlight the challenges faced by developing countries in addressing climate change while also pursuing economic growth as well as the opportunities to leverage climate action to build resilience and achieve economic growth. “Developing countries face multiple challenges related to colonial legacy and unjust international economic order which work to the advantage of advanced countries.” According to him, approaching climate governance from the framework of justice enables us to tackle, not just the issue of climate pollution, but also the more fundamental question of global equity and fairness needed to ensure that everyone can lead a decent life regardless of where they are born. “This recognition encourages me to continue to work as there is still quite a long way to go to achieve climate justice for the vulnerable countries of the world,” Okereke added. Read the full article

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squeeze-the-lemon · 2 years ago

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My proof that JD from Heathers had a SQUIP

It was late at night when I was listening to the Heathers soundtrack, when all of a sudden I came to the realisation that JD (heathers) has a SQUIP (bmc). (all according to the Heathers off-broadway soundtrack and the original bmc soundtrack)

Jason Dean 1) On September 1st, 1989, JD is a senior at Westerburg high school in Ohio 2) Lost his mother at a young age -- trauma 3) Moves from city to city often due to his dad’s work at Big Bud Dean Construction -- is a loner 4) Likes slushies from 7-11 which is a constant in his life

SQUIP 1) Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor -- a super computer made of math 2) Helps user achieve a goal and will go to extreme lengths to do so 3) Activated by green Mountain Dew, deactivated by red Mountain Dew (in the bmc universe, red Mountain Dew was discontinued in the 90s, not 1988) 4) Gets shut off by intoxicants -- alcohol messes you up, right?

JD and his SQUIP We can assume from JD going through '10 high schools' that he doesn't get chance to settle down in one place and make friends. High school is already a difficult place and it is made infinitely harder for him because he never stops in one place long enough. He went through 10 high schools in 3 years, that's over 3 high schools each year. He can't make deep connections with anybody because he doesn't have the chance.

Enter... the SQUIP

The SQUIP is programmed to make JD's high school experience less awful by showing him how to make short term relationships that leave a lasting impression on people, hopefully to make his high school experience more bearable. And the SQUIP carries out its task flawlessly. In Fight for Me, Veronica is immediately drawn to the attractive, loner bad-boy type because she finds him interesting. He rides a motorcycle for goodness sake! (This is similar to how Jeremy's SQUIP dictated his conversation to Brook). JD repeats what the SQUIP tells him to say. This happens again in Freeze Your Brain.

BUT

Before we go any further, it is important to note one thing. JD has found a way to temporarily shut off his SQUIP, and its not through alcohol like Jeremy suggested... its his slushies. His precious, precious slushies which give him a brain freeze, because 'who needs cocaine' when slushies are right there.

Freeze Your Brain This whole song is the SQUIP trying to make JD seem mysterious and edgy before JD freezes him out, is edgy and trauma dumps. He also mentions how when the 'voice in your head says you're better off dead' he just goes and reaches for a slushie - clear reference to the SQUIP telling Jeremy 'everything about you makes me want to die' and the final song 'Voices in my head'

Red Mountain Dew So we know that JD has a SQUIP at Freeze Your Brain. But how can he go from that to killing three students, threatening Veronica and almost blowing up a school. Well? The answer lies in the next appearance of JD - Dead Girl Walking. At the surface, Better chug that Mountain Dew seems like an innocent line, especially when compared to the context of the song. But it is this line that holds the key to the entire mystery, and it is Veronica’s order that leads to the death of her classmates.

Because there is a way to permanently shut off SQUIPS: Mountain Dew Red as stated in Be more Chill. At the time BMC is set, Mountain Dew Red is such a threat to the existence of SQUIPs that they get it discontinued. It is Michael’s obsession with 90’s drinks that saved the world from getting SQUIP'd. Though in real life Mountain Dew Red was discontinued in 1988, in the BMC universe it happened in the 90s meaning its possible that what JD chugged was red, and so permanently shut off his SQUIP

When he chugs the mountain dew, he, perhaps unknowingly, shuts off his SQUIP. There is no longer an external (internal?) force controlling him. It is the first time in a long time that JD can think and act for himself without the use of slushies.

From then on, we see his acts of violence escalate.

The Me Inside Of Me: Poisons Heather Chandler. She dies. Convinces Veronica to forge a suicide note

Our Love is God: Shoots Kurt and Ram. Manipulates Veronica to go along with him by lying to her

Seventeen: We ask ourselves: does he really love her? Maybe he does, maybe he's lying again. We don't know. He's unpredictable, we can’t trust him

Meant to be Yours And so, we come to Meant to be Yours. I've seen this song performed in many different ways but in the end it always comes back to JD who has finally snapped so we see him unrestrained and it is terrifying. Its this mix of rage and sadness which in him is a deadly combination.

He has lost his SQUIP which acts as his restraint and self control. Without it, we get the real, terrifying, movie-esque JD.

And then obviously later on if that wasn't enough he tries to blow up a school.

Timeline Its difficult to pinpoint exactly when or where JD got the SQUIP but considering he travelled so often it could have been anywhere. When going from Las Vegas to Boston he could have travelled through New Jersey (where bmc is set) before stopping in Ohio. Its possible.

This makes so much sense to me though. There are so many links that I can't not believe this (at least for the original off-broadway production). Did this convince you??

My headcannon is that JD's SQUIP looks like Christian Slater ok bye

#heathers #heathers musical #be more chill #be more chill musical #dead girl walking #bmc squip #be more chill squip #jason dean #muscials #theory #rambles

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crystalelemental · 2 months ago

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At the outset of the year, district decided to do their big welcome back presentations for staff, which uh. It went bad. It went really bad. Some of it for good reason. Some of it for the dumbest reasons.

The good reasons are the new head of district seems like a lunatic. Both because he's up there bragging about balancing the budget (cutting a ton of jobs, closing entire buildings, basically refusing to pay for anything), and partially because he's talking about how teaching can't be rote we have to teach deeper thinking (a sentiment that sounds very good, but is in fact not how some learning works and also results in kids not knowing multiplication facts, phonics, or spelling, which are all pretty damned rote). Honestly I am not optimistic about this guy's reign.

But the real reason many people are mad is the other presenter. To be up front, I kinda liked the guy a lot! I think his perspective was interesting. There are aspects I strongly disagree with, but I think he generally knows what he's talking about. He had a good sense of a lot of the issues in education, like a tendency to over-correct and fixate on small behaviors that are easily managed. He made a lot of comparisons to pentecostal preaching, which was neat, but his style was solid.

The problem arose when he got a little too real. He talked about how our population is very majority black students, and how education has uh. Let's say not been particularly kind. To this demographic. Citing issues of underfunding and that schools are literally built by the same contacting companies that build prisons, etc etc. As part of this, though, he talks about white culture as it applies to teaching, the very "sit still, do as your told" approach to showing respect, that sort of thing. And, in a perhaps ill-advised move, talks about race in two contexts.

First: about how white teachers really cannot effectively teach black students without confronting racial biases, specifically stating that you cannot claim to be doing all you do for black youth and hanging out with friends that proudly fly a confederate flag on the weekends. Those mentalities do not mesh.

Second: about black teachers who have internalized the aforementioned white power structure approach to teaching so much that they're sometimes harsher than the white teachers about it. Which is real. I have seen it many times at this school alone.

Needless to say, many people got offended. The fun is guessing which group is actually offended.

It's the white teachers, let's not pretend. Every single white staff member I've talked to barring one has been pissed at this guy, complaining that he's saying they're not doing their jobs well and that white people shouldn't teach black students. Which is. Just so wildly out of touch with what was said it drives me insane. I have had more conversations this week about racial power structures than I have in my entire life. It's good conversations, but it is wild to see how far people will go to just refuse understanding a point once this topic is brought up. I always worry about my own sensibilities on the topic but honestly maybe I'm doing okay.

It's just...staggering. At some level. Dealing with the realization of how much internalized biases and beliefs refuse to be challenged. That even if someone makes an obvious, if exaggerated, point, people will go out of their way to misinterpret and be mad about it to avoid thinking about what it all means. I'm very tired this week.

#personal shenanigans

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dailyanarchistposts · 2 months ago

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Postscript on Post-Script

Literacy, and it's role in society, is a huge topic, one deserving of much debate and conversation. But it’s important to me that the reader is aware of my discomfort with literate-cen- tricity. It seems implied by the writing and publishing of my thinking that I view literacy as a neutral, if not important, tool in the spreading of ideas. But this isn’t the case. Literacy has many aspects that make its neutrality questionable. In fact, I believe that a better world would have difficulty making a place for it.

Literacy presupposes many relationships between humans and between humans and their environment. Are we going to be sitting in schools learning how to write and spell and read or will we be at the river learning how to fish, or in the field learning medicinal herbs and edible plants? Will we be laboring at a printing press, with its machinery and ink, or honing our oratorical skills at gatherings? Will we be in a machine shop making parts for the press or reciting poetry from memory to our lover in a meadow? Books are like cars or computers or electric guitars. We make use of them today, within the context of this particular social order, but will we really be interested in or able to maintain the cultural values and relationships necessary for their survival?

I have greatly benefitted from books, from poetry and radical theory to how-to and fiction books, I’ve been enriched by their possession. And there is a lot of knowledge that elite classes While the rule of capital and centralized power might seem omniscient, they actually are not. There is a totality of domination, but the totality is not yet dominated. There are many psychic and geographical blind spots, openings, frontiers, where the sentinels and soldiers are few or at least fewer. We can take advantage of these. Our struggle for individual and collective freedom isn’t pointless or hopeless or so overwhelming as to make total surrender appear reasonable and inevitable.

For instance, because so much of our captivity relies on internalized cops, on the daily reproduction of social misery by our own compliance with the various roles expected of us (worker, soldier, consumer, man, woman, etc.), the weakest point in our opponents armor is probably our own ability to refuse these expectations of predictable behavior. It is through withdrawal from scripted roles and cultural constructs that we will get to know our neighbors and comrades, indeed ourselves, in a more honest light, revealing our true complexity as individuals, and thereby be better able to create the communities of resistance that could form the bases of our offensives. It also means attempting to collectively withdraw from our participation in the institutions and behaviours of capitalist civilization: entertainment, schooling, dependence on welfare states, wage work rather than subsistence skills and self-reliance, electoralism and other forms of representation, etc.

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thebadsocialworker · 2 months ago

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To Ham, or Not to Ham ?

It's snowing feelings out there, better stay inside so you don't get cold.

"He who talks more is sooner exhausted" -Lao Tzu

So this is somewhat impossible to understand out of context, so you have to read the full verse. Basically, this quote is about the concept of "wu wei" in Dao. Wu wei can roughly be described as "effortless action". If you want to know more about Dao, google it at work.

I interpreted this quote as relating to the concept of inaction as action (Dao), mental health, and our reactions to stimuli. This quote is for the hot heads, the borderlines, the traumatized... any of you that feel like you need to stay at home to avoid going to jail, whether jokingly, or more literally.

How many of us have reactions to things out of fear of doing nothing and what that means. How many of us have experienced injustices as children that were let go, not addressed, never apologized for? Bullied kids who didn't fight back but wish they had. Children that grew into adults that react violently, react harshly, or even just erratically. It's because we have a distorted understanding of inaction.

Whatever happened to you, it resulted in you carrying a resentment towards the people that hurt you and the people (or even yourself) who were supposed to protect you. It doesn't matter how you end up with this feeling, the point is that you have it. You felt as if "no one did anything to help me; nothing happened to the person that hurt me."

This is how you learned that "doing nothing" is worse than doing literally anything else, including things that are destructive to us. Some people are also put in positions where their inaction towards an offense could affect how they're treated in a more amplified setting such as prison, in schools, etc. It all stems from the fear that inaction will attract further harm to us.

Integrating this concept of wu wei, inaction in this sense would be the goal. Neutrally stating, you don't need to put in any effort as doing such would continue to create further actions in the universe experienced beyond you and the stimuli. When applied to the year of 2024 and its reality:

At the most extreme, your action results in the traumatization of others- murder, abuse, r*pe, physical harm. Actions that create further actions that are not beneficial or natural. Extreme effort. At the other end of the spectrum, is complete non-action. You do nothing, it is "effortless". Some of us get close but still engage in actions that are palpable to others, perhaps hardly, but still felt.

Hardly ever do our most extreme reactions satisfy us. Rarely do they not hurt us in some capacity, internally or externally. Think of it less of someone "did" something to me, and more "I could also alter the course of nature at this time as this person has also done."

Sometimes, we react to people that don't even deserve the reaction, they're rude to us and don't even know us. It's then that we make take this personally due to our numerous experiences in life that have already sensitized us to being disrespected. People we may know deeply might also hurt us. It still doesn't mean they deserve the effort in perpetrating an extreme action.

People don't deserve the effort because it is impossible not to be harmed yourself in the process, when exacting a reaction. Non-action carries only the connotations you believe in. Inaction as a response doesn't mean anything other than not further altering the natural course of the universe in a way you may not be able to fix.

I know this is all easier said than done. Let me remind you that personal growth while you're alive cannot be rushed, it shouldn't be rushed. There are many spaces for mistakes and the same amount for contemplation. Every effort you put in no matter how small you feel it is, is never wasted, because you're investing in yourself.

-thebadsocialworker

#mentalhealth #thebadsocialworker #anger problems #anger issues #trauma #tw abuse #child abuse #tw violence #fighting #laotzu #inactionasaction #wuwei #dao

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automatismoateo · 3 months ago

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Smarter Every Day Creationism Update via /r/atheism

Smarter Every Day Creationism Update This is an update to my previous post here. My summary of the video and a statement of my thoughts on it is found in a comment here. Destin reached out to me this morning to have a zoom call. We discussed our research, the breakdown of communication between people holding opposing beliefs in the US, and his intentions with this video. I am a PhD student in physics, doing research in photonics. My thesis is on a device for the subdiffractive confinement and enhancement of light in the mid-IR. He's doing work in impact fusion. He claims that his intentions were (I am paraphrasing here and I could get this wrong) to encourage people to have empathy for those with different beliefs, so that they can open a line of dialogue and find the truth together rather than driving eachother further to one side or the other. He recommended I read the books Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi and Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal by Ben Sasse. I've not read these books, nor have I yet looked into them at all, but I assume they are related to this issue that he was attempting to address with his video. I shared how I believe his framing seemed to imply that evolution and intelligent design/creationism were of equal merit, and how evolution skepticism generally reflects an anti-science attitude which has real and dangerous political and material implications. He asked for feedback on how one can successfully deliver his intended message, to which I said I've not got a clue: it's hard. He seemed somewhat receptive to the idea that his words were poorly chosen and have these implications, though he has the perspective that when you have 11 million viewers, people will get mad about something. But I encouraged him to watch back the end of his video and to think about the context of the book he mentions and the history of the bacterial flagellar motor being used by intelligent design proponents to try to force creationism into schools. He did explicitly state that he believes in separation of church and state and that we should not be teaching creationism in schools, so that's something. According to Destin, the scientists featured in the video did review and approve it before it was published. This was a pretty long discussion, and this brief summary really can't capture exactly what was said. But I'm posting here as an update anyway. I'd hope that in the spirit of what Destin apparently intended with his video, the comments be respectful. But also, again in that same spirit, that we seek truth and are critical of bad ideas, such as intelligent design. Edit: The PI of the featured research group, Professor Iverson, responded to my email. She confirmed that she signed off on the video and had this to say I also do understand that you feel disappointment that [Destin] used his platform to consider topics beyond science and coupled this to our recent research. However, I am not sure that I agree that his comments endorsed creationism. I also think that it is important to meet people ‘where they are’ and with curiosity. By understanding how they arrived at their conclusions, one can hope to open a conversation that allows them re-evaluate their internal paradigm. Submitted July 31, 2024 at 04:54PM by Sasmas1545 (From Reddit https://ift.tt/uSApgxq)

#reddit

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rowanwiccae · 1 year ago

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I so deeply appreciate this post and explanation of a very real and very pervasive mentality that has absolutely been spreading on sites like here and insta and now even tiktok (I don’t have tiktok for reasons but I have several friends who do and they often share posts with me that I’ve had to explain are misinformed or outright wrong).

Nuance, context, understanding of the time period of which books are written are so vital and recognizing how time and social construct reshapes our ideas and influences new authors is just as important. (not to mention several old school authors who’s works changed and reshaped as modern ideas reshaped our pagan ideas today. Buckland was known for being very social in witchy circles and learning and sharing all sorts of new information in his museum right up until his death not even a full 6 years ago). Critical thinking skills were important in grade school, why would they not be so for the media you consume outside the classroom? If you can read classic stories like Alice in Wonderland or H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and be totally unbiased about a literal p***phile for an author or outright fascist sympathizer and misogynist who wrote your fave spooky stories but can’t handle Buckland’s big blue book of outdated gender stereotypes from the mid 80s then u seriously got some internal reflection to consider.

Death of the author is a subject that comes up often as a reason to excuse older texts and authors or absolve them of their own checkered pasts rather than acknowledging that not everything we read is pure or untainted by the author’s reputation. But some people are just not as bad as others. There are just some things like outdated stereotypes and no-longer recognized sexism that just doesn’t compare when it comes to social harm of modern authors who spread very real fascist propaganda or wish harm onto POC or LGBTQ communities. Cunningham, Gardner, Buckland, (1 gay man, 1 bisexual man and 1 supposed straight man who was also a nudist) these aren’t your bad guys, at least, these aren’t authors who are going to hurt you or force you into a state of helplessness or harm with their written works. If you can read their works critically and understand the NUANCE of the subject, ur a better researcher than those writing blacklists without context.

The uselessness of Witchcraft Author "Blacklists"

Every once and a while I see a "Witchcraft Author Blacklist" either in the tags or getting passed around here on Tumblr, and never in my life have I thought it was a remotely useful thing.

Because every single time, they lack and semblance of nuance. Like yesterday I ran across one that literally equated Scott Cunningham with Stephen Flowers. Yes, Cunningham, a person who wrote some things that need to be read critically is, apparently, as bad as a literal fucking Nazi whose books help fund the AFA.

Like are there Cunningham books I wouldn't recommend? Absolutely. Should most of his works be read with a critical eye and take into account the state of the community and available information when he was writing them? Yes. But... like... there's a huge fucking difference between these two things.

Also, this list claimed because Cunningham wrote about Wicca his works were somehow homophobic. Have there been homophobic Wiccans? Of course - but Cunningham, an openly gay man, was not one of them.

Additionally, there are people who get included on these lists where I wouldn't recommend anyone read their books to learn witchcraft per se, but their works have important historical significance.

Like Gerald Gardner - should anyone learn from Gardner? Fuck no. His works are full of misinformation and outright bullshit. But it literally is where the modern witchcraft movement was birthed, so there is value in understanding where we came from.

Aleister Crowley falls into this category too - harder even. Crowley was gross as heck, but how can you understand what in the modern community is still descended from his works or propagating his gross ideas... if you're unfamiliar with his works?

Also, he's super dead, so it's not like he's benefiting from someone reading his stuff.

It's just so deeply frustrating that people make these lists to start with. Like, I have written or talked about how certain authors should be avoided -- but I always do my best to include context, reasons, and explanations why. I will specifically explain why I don't think they're valuable to read. Making a laundry list where you make unsourced or unexplained claims about a huge list of people doesn't help someone understand what might be wrong with them.

Also, my recommendations are usually about how a new witch shouldn't read their work, because it's about not having the experience to see what is and isn't bullshit in what they read yet. They don't have that baseline yet. That doesn't mean that some of these books might not be significant or worth reading at some point in their journey. Just not at the start of it.

It's just... a complete lack of nuance. Like I don't recommend Silver Ravenwolf because her books are, frankly, poorly researched and bad. I don't recommend Stephen Flowers because he's a fuckin' overt WHITE SUPREMACIST whose publications have been used to fund the AFA. These are not the same. When we pretend that they are, we are doing a massive disservice to all of us.

It... it honestly feels like Christian purity culture repackaged. If you can't handle nuance, I don't think you can really handle that much witchcraft to start with. The world isn't black and white -- there are overt evils out there, but most everything else is a shade of gray and pretending otherwise is poisonous.

#I ranted #sorry #I do that #this was a subject that's come up a lot but I didn't feel validated in making my own point #I've tried before in the past and was met with verbal attacks #informative #critical thinking

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ohtea3 · 6 months ago

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Penny for my thoughts?

Welcome Back to Blog 4, Week 4, and unfortunately, my last blog for this block…

Today's topic - ''my overall reflections''- a strangely timed blog, considering we still have 2 weeks left! It was just last week that my peers and I checked in to see how each of our projects were going and how we could re-strategize for the time we had left. But nonetheless, here is what I’ve learned working at the Kenville Community...

The one thing about community is that it is different from working in a hospital setting; you have to be open-minded, creative, and able to think on the spot due to resource and time constraints. We also work in a variety of places (i.e. clinics, schools and fields) and run multiple projects. The clients themselves rarely have a single issue, often times we are treating the people within the clients context and their environment as well. As health science students we are trained using a medical model to focus on pathology, as OTs, we've been trained on MOCA and MOHO, and yes, all these models are important. But still, it either has a narrow focus, is individualistic, or does not consider the broader picture of the client and context.

Thus, it's important to immerse yourself in the community and do a community needs assessment, such as the ABCD, PESTLE, CBR MATRIX, or SWOT Analysis, so you can have a holistic picture of the strengths and issues of the community and how it impacts its people. This picture summarizes the community entry process; the article it’s from identifies 3 principles for effective community engagement: LOOK, LISTEN, AND LEARN, you can read more about that here (Vermeulen et al. 2015).

In Kenville and many of the informal settlements, socioeconomic issues such as financial insecurity, homelessness, lack of service delivery and high levels of substance abuse, GBV, xenophobia, and teenage pregnancy are common. It's important for OTs to be aware of this as it informs us on what intervention is required in terms of promotion and prevention, to tackle key issues within the community. These social injustices can also lead to existential weariness- aka Occupational Ennui as my supervisor, Christopher, defined it-, which makes people feel stuck in this state of exhaustion or hopelessness and not wanting anything better for themselves. At Kenville, we've noticed this culture of poor participation and willingness to attend coming from the community. Too often, I have had a patient promise to come for an appointment but have not shown up despite previously benefitting or needing OT services. Initially, this was confusing, then it became disheartening as I spent hours preparing and waiting for them to come, and now it's worrisome... Even in our group projects, attendance is low, i.e. despite the high unemployment rate, our job skills group still has no members. Do we need to understand the community better? Do they not accept us? Are other external factors that deter engagement– such as stigma, lack of time, no transport perhaps?

This reminds me of Kraus's article I read earlier this year, who had a similar experience of the community not accepting him. The strategies he wrote to mitigate this involves self-emancipation-to liberate yourself from both internal and external constraints (i.e., bias, stereotypes, or cultural norms) by developing self-awareness-; cultural sensitivity; and a rich understanding of the community by: engaging with leaders first; seeking guidance from ‘cultural interpreters’; spending time engaging in task-orientated community activities; allow community member to take lead in projects (i.e., allow them in the decision-making process), and working collaboratively with community members. This picture summarizes key points and you can read more about this experience here as well:

Another aspect when working with Kenville, is feeling overwhelmed by the number of injustices I see and the various projects that can or should be done. It sometimes feels hopeless, and you're left questioning whether your actions will make a huge difference (Richards & Galvaan, 2018). This apparently is a common feeling by community-based OTs as mentioned by my peers and even literature such as the one below:

It's reassuring to know that it's not only me who feels like this sometimes. It then creates an opportunity for us to use our collective knowledge and experiences, to try and find ways to tackle these issues within the OT scope. This is why I sometimes enjoy Wednesday tuts, as I enjoy hearing different perspectives and focusing on the HOW, like how can we as OTs bring about systematic change, can we? I guess, the reassurance and comfort we get then, is pretty nice too. It gets you through the block and sometimes gives you the motivation, to try and be more innovative. In our tuts we spoke on, trying not to do it all - yes advocacy and education will always be our role to try to bring on systematic change. But it's just as important to focus on individual clients - if you change the life of one kid, that’s one future family you have changed, and that’s what also brings about systematic change. Also, knowing that there are other stakeholders that we can contact, to collaborate with to bring about a larger change.

Now that we've addressed my experience during the community block and what I've learned, how will these thoughts translate to keeping my penny next year, aka passing community service? This link is about an OT community service experience and is quite an interesting read if you are a student:

https://www.theothub.com/article/occupational-therapist-rural-south-africa

From this block alone, I've gained much experience on how a community operates, of course, bearing in mind that each community has different issues, which also depend on the type of community, i.e., rural vs. urban vs. informal settlement… The idea is basically cultural humility and accepting that I will never truly know everything about a community, but I should try my best to do research and collaborate with the community to better understand them and get them to engage in therapy based on their needs. It’s also important to expect some resistance and see so many injustices, which can be emotionally taxing; nonetheless, you keep showing up and trying your best. It’s important to rely on a support system to prevent burnout and emotional exhaustion, after facing all these issues and listening to clients trauma. Having a good relationship with supervisors and feeling satisfied with your job can also help with this (Struwig, 2020).

To summarize my reflections, I can truly say that this block was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. In the process, I've learned a lot about the community and myself. Community reminded me of why I chose OT in the first place; it's this hands-on/working directly with clients who need it, which is what drew me into health science in the first place. Dare I say, it made me feel immense gratitude and some happiness? I would be lying if I didn’t mention the struggles as well; from the increased workload, projects all over the place, patients not pitching up for sessions, and feeling as if I'm not doing enough; all do play negatively on my mind and cause me stress. But hey, I'm an optimist, so I'll give this block the benefit of the doubt!

And yes, please, a penny for all these thoughts would be GREAT for funding our projects- aka another worry...

Until next time- maybe not, hmm we will see..

Peace✌️

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