#and about how bizarre it is that the supposedly most oppressed people in the world

[butch-reidentified]

This is exactly why I "argue" with gender identity ideologues in my ask box in the hopes that I might be an example to someone (be they radfem, TRA, fence sitter, uncertain, or neither) of what radfems actually believe and that we are human beings not evil bogeymen. we are not reactionaries, not even in the slightest - we are feminist women (often SSA and gnc women) who recognize the indisputable existence of sex-based oppression and very genuinely believe with our whole hearts in fighting for female liberation. we don't hate people who identify as trans, we really truly actually just do not believe in the idea that people have an innate internal "gender identity," because the gender construct is a patriarchal creation that doesn't exist in nature.

She actively went to great effort to show followers of GII that we don't want them to suffer and support their rights and freedom as human beings. She was SUCCESSFUL in getting this across to at least one person, which we all know how rare that is. And STILL she got kicked off tiktok. Idk what her other posts were like, but I'd be very surprised if they remotely warranted that. I just wish I was at least a tiny bit surprised she still got banned for simply not worshiping gender identity and saying that doesn't make her hate those who do.

Wonderfully put

[memecucker]

so like you know the people that go “akshully if you saw the full context marx calls religion the sigh of the oppressed so checkmate” while also clearly not having read the original context bc of you see like, the rest of that page not even the entire text you see Marx explicitly calling for the eventual fading away and abolition of religion and not only that but even if you just looked at the lines people focus on and think a little bit about how opiates are pain-killers so like the “sigh of the oppressed” and “heart in a heartless world” bits are simply reiterating the same thought and not contradicting it?

I was just thinking that’s a lot like, that weird thing with rap where you have like “fake rap elitists” who have this bizarre habit of thinking rappers only started rapping about “partying and hedonism” in like the past ten years and previously it was all “real” and “poetic” and like i’ve seen people uphold 50 Cent or Lil Wayne as examples of when “rappers talked about real stuff and not just partying” as if their most popular songs weren’t intended to be played in clubs and they weren’t specifically attacked by the same type of fake rap elitists in the 00s that pretended Tupac never made club songs

Like in both cases it’s this weird example of a really smug attitude that immediately betrays itself as just as if not more ignorant than the people supposedly being “corrected”

[rametarin]

If the radical feminists were able to more thoroughly contaminate the statistics and the interpretation of them, they wouldn't display what they do. But, they weren't able to completely control all gender related statistics or corrupt all reporting by demanding an ideological filter interpret the data.

They generously interpreted the data from a position of a subjective science that is psychology, and went, "trust me, bro, I'm a professional," deciding that domestic abuse was most surely because of male entitlement and that it was all the men's fault.

Which itself is just attached to Patriarchy Theory and Class Struggle Theory, which according to radical feminists means that society is defacto male chauvinist and white supremacist, no matter what the laws say, no matter what the statistics say, no matter what the people say. According to how they see and understand the world, the fact it's not a society putting women on a pedestal and making it clear about it, means it's a society oppressing women, and that is why they believe rape, abuse and murder of women happens. This bizarre totalitarian phenomenon of culture where men are supposedly first class citizens because the society was founded as androcentrist, and women are hanger-ons and +1s, not people.

However, they could not force the law and the government to institute Patriarchy Theory as working policy and philosophy, so instead they decided to work back based on a proxy of it. They still worked off that philosophy and formed state policy based as if it were true, they just didn't reference it directly.

So Class Struggle Theorists and Marxists appropriated the entire subject of domestic violence and tried to sort it out with power and culture dynamics, as understood by a version of Return of Kings/Pick-Up-Artists, "Alpha Male" mentality, but for communists. Then claiming to be advocates and professionals on the subject of domestic violence and trying to hit reverse and parallel park their ideological shit into public policy in the positive optics of fighting for domestic violence victims, is simply public relations nonsense and heartstrings pullings.

I'm sure the way they'd explain away lesbian domestic violence is they'd blame it on our Patriarchal society that told women that they're more masculine or butch, therefore they must be more violent, blame internalized misogyny and "this androcentric male supremacism society" for brainwashing innocent lesbians subconsciously. But they can't swing that in public policy making or in PR.. Yet. They're trying so hard to impose these values as true on children in gradeschool so when they graduate they'll have internalized them and support them without thinking about it, because that's how they believe "society" works. That you can just institute whatever malarky you want on the population, and they'll mindlessly regurgitate it so long as opposition is not allowed or is associated with evil.

They insist upon a very, specifically ideological idea on what domestic violence is and why it happens, and it's not unlike if you had an aunt that became a doctor but she refused to operate outside the idea of Essential Oils, Tarot and Horoscopes for diagnosis and treatment, for her dogma has her convinced she can read tea leaves and know your true secrets.

And they're allowed to shit these industries and services up with their dogma and nonsense, because we can't filter them out like we could religious fundamentalist extremists. They can easily lie, and in fact know how to lie by omission.

Similarly, if gendered disrespect was the fundamental engine of domestic violence, we would expect to see much lower levels of it in same-sex relationships. But we don’t. Current Australian statistics suggest that rates of domestic violence are similar or slightly higher in same-sex relationships compared to heterosexual relationships. In factoring this out, you’d have to argue it’s a completely different, entirely parallel phenomenon that has nothing in common with heterosexual domestic violence, but which just so happens to occur with similar regularity and express itself in remarkably similar ways, running the now familiar gamut of coercive control, financial and emotional abuse and gaslighting. More plausible is that while there are some factors unique to same-sex and heterosexual cases respectively, their causes have much in common. An explanation that works only for one of them is unlikely to be much of an explanation at all.

[vyctoyr]

Have you ever had a dream like this? I was taking an elevator Elevator of the most regular kind A heavy rectangular box Standing on its less stable side People were still approaching, yet I rushed closed the door I could almost hear their grump Of missing an almost empty hence supposedly enjoyable ride

As the door shuts in front of my face We started going down! Yes, down it went, though I distinctly remembered it’s some higher floors I’m destined to arrive It was an weird feeling Because the elevator seemed to be made of glass, that I could see what a beautiful, beautiful day it was out there The sunlight, people thronging and stuff I wanted to go up, all the way up To see this paradise from above

But instead it was going down!

It wasn’t going down without a struggle, no After a series of futile gestures, much like the heart beat of a dying man at his last five seconds The elevator made its attempts, nothing more than some upward bumps that really concern than promise After which down the shaft we went Sliding down as darkness closed up on me Blocking all fake illusions of such paradise Engulfing me, into the boundless, the everflowing

The elevator was made of glass Or at least some transparent material that granted me a vision However, it was also quite oppressive So it could also be just the regular kind: metal floor, metal ceiling, metal walls Heavy and impenetrable, surrounded me, along with my claustrophobic soul Wishing to escape, but confined permanently in a descending cage

Everything it’s just like Laure’s tunnel In fact I would argue that the very fact I have listened to that two-minute track of recitation is the only reason I was having this rather stupid dream I remembered closing my eyes, picturing what it would be like to spend seventy-two hours without talking And now, I’m living the dream, the nightmare, actually, to be precise Except for her, the tunnel wasn’t moving It was very much stable and in place Her darkness was also healing and would eventually lead to profound revelation Which granted her an extraordinary vision, calmness and catharsis From which she eventually was elevated

For me, there was only descent The perpetual motion that brought me closer to the core by the minute A perpetual nightmare from which no escape is granted While the young kamikaze pilot plummets to his death

An overwhelming panic overtook my entire body Naturally, I was terrified Being the only person on that damned elevator I experienced intense shock, anger, suffocation, agitation As if refusal would somehow magically resolve the doomed situation But only giving way to fatigue and resignation The only things that would last, forever

It was not like I saw nothing, no There was some lighting, though far from ample or warm So under such flickering light sufficient to ward of the swallowing darkness I thought of how bizarre it was, everything in the now upper world Where fairness is nothing more than a poorly fabricated fairytale What did I do to deserve this torture? Why am I the only one going down, at thankfully not a plummeting speed Into whatever god-forbidden crevice the shaft is lodged? How come that I ended up so miserably?

In fact how “unfair” is everything, I wondered? When some die almost immediately after taking their first breath fresh out of their mother’s womb, emanciated by malaria While others were born free and equal, on the land of democracy, destined to become the president who turned out to be a giant incompetent hoax and would fuck everybody in the ass Why do people think we’re getting more and more socialist, an absurd term in itself, when we are at a spot where everything is swamped with consumerism, when everything is more capitalist than we’ve ever seen? What is my place in this world? Do I have a place at all, or is everything just pure chance: the unbearable lightness of being!

After the most exhausting inquiry came a moment of repose Or again, of fatigue and of resignation, I should say My mind was going everywhere, as you can probably tell There wasn’t much to be done in such a pathetically small space I wondered whether it was what these orcas at sea world felt like

The thing was still going down Its motion is quite independent from my feeling Just like the rest of the world, never acting according to our will I thought about bigotry, hubris, and all kinds of blind confidence that are actually various kinds of arrogance as a result of anthropocentric thinking We are not the center of universe, and the universe, she doesn’t care!

It was in this descending box that I first tasted despair Or was it despair? I find it hard to recall What remained is more like the numbness of despair, or again, the fatigue and the resignation that ensued Which, oddly enough, tasted somewhat like hope and love All of them share some defining yet indistinguishable flavors

Yea, you’re right, hope and love were what it was Cuz what else was there to feel on that great spectrum of emotions? The elevator put me in perspective Sometimes the abolishment of false hopes is the only way to true ones One can only find love after the rejection of unctuous mimicry We need to accept what it is, and make the best out of it How pathetically ridiculous is it when some people try to defend their hollow positivism when Camus is the only one standing up agains the eternal lawlessness? How stupidly stubborn, those who turn their back on the suffering, just to protect the scientism and fragile religiosity of justice in which they seek solace? How incredibly selfish, and again, blindly arrogant, for anybody who could simply become this part of collective illusion and self-willing unconsciousness, just that they could feel better, and commit philosophical suicide? They don’t realize that their fabrication, while potent enough to intoxicate themselves, is the sole source of pain Again, the universe does not care

I could only hope, in the descending elevator That we see the world for what it is Just like the little prison that keeps going down Its motion never succumbing to any individual will Following Camus’ advocacy There’s a chance to revolution Or just to make it slightly better, just slightly better is all I’m asking The collapse of utopia, the memory still fresh, like it all happened yesterday

Suddenly, I sensed a radical change of course Instead of going downward, the elevator starts to move to the side Just when I thought it couldn’t get anymore surreal I found that I was finally able to zoom out, literally To see the fast-moving elevator on from afar Suddenly, I saw a city, just its buildings actually, as I’m moving at a frantic speed in a building too Turns out that I had been traveling in thin air The cityscape at night was not exactly beautiful But it was the first thing I had witnessed, after the fatigue and the resignation So without hesitation I basked in serenity Though I cannot forget

The elevator did not stop, nor did I expect it to Maybe it would stop at some point, maybe it would explode and destroy the entire city, killing every life bold enough to live there Maybe it simply wouldn’t stop till the end of the world Or was there an end or a world at all? Regardless, the elevator flies forward Somehow, I could still see everything from afar: the motion, the city, the blurring night sky, the lights in thousands of soulless, identical households, and the silent, colossal concrete structure in which the elevator careens fearlessly ahead Till it’s time for you to ask: what nonsensical nonsense is all this BS? To that I offer no answer, cuz I don’t want to, and I can’t: It was just a stupid and chimerical dream

Have you ever had a dream like this? I bet not, cuz you can’t

- Sep 2, 2020

Based on an old dream that was brought back by another horrifying dream I had at five o’clock in the morning.

[hootpoop12]

Theory time

Alright, so we all know through the context of this being written in a fanfiction/a03 format that this is all a play about canon VS fanon. What is a little hard to decipher is what are the things that are plays off fanon and which qualities are the true aspects of the characters(canon)? ANYWAY here are just a few of the things I am ASSUMING are plays off fanon based on my years in the fandom and sheer obsession of consuming this shit (trigger warning for everything taken place in the epilogue FYI):

-Dave: I think some of the main aspects of fanon influencing his epilogue version is intertwined with “woobifying”, “Slow burn”, and even possibly even “sexuality”. 

        -Woobifying is a fandom concept of reducing a character to “a cinnamon roll too pure for this world” someone you wanna baby (often applied to trans guy characters whether canon or headcanoned). This one is a bit of reach I’ll admit because it DOES makes sense that after years of living with Karkat the dude would soften up but there were times in the epilogue even Dave admits he’s gotten softer and the dude just plain out was very passive. In my time I’ve seen tons of depictions of Dave as a lot more emotional than shown in the comic or a lot more woobified in fics (like in meteor fics where he often has very dramatic emotional outbursts) By the way this is NOT me shitting on you if you like viewing Dave in that way because a lot people with trauma relate to him and use him for “cathartic release”(me fucking too lol). It’s more a guess/observation of maybe why he’s developed in this way due to the comic now being a strange sponge absorbing all fanon, good and bad, into it weird ass grasp.

        -Slow burn is likely the trope that plays into why the hell it took so fucking long for him AND Karkat to admit their feelings. If you have literally ever consumed Davekat content I’m sorry but 99% of it is slow burn lmao every meteor fic is pining, every coffee shop AU is the budding of a lifelong partnership, and every Harry potter furry inflation pwp crossover WHATEVER fic is 10k words building of sexual tension like......To bring their other relationships in canon into this we can see that Dave was able to flirt with Jade and Terezi and entered a relationship with them at a pretty normal rate WHICH can totally be attributed to the fact he views them as girls and himself as heterosexual so was much more comfortable making a move- sure. Looking at Karkat, however, and you see the dude is a little shy about romance sure but he was still able to flirt with Terezi and make awkward moves on John so like......I can’t help but to feel like something outside (us?) was influencing them?

        -Sexuality is another sort of reach but I think it’s something to consider. In terms of the comic....when exactly DID canon end? You could argue at the end of act 7.......or the moment John used his retcon powers to create a new timeline. Fandom Dave (on the tumblr side at least) was usually consider queer and a lot people shipped Dave with another dude. Perhaps John going back and rewriting canon helped bring our influence over Dave’s sexuality into the comic? I remember finding out Davekat was canon and confirming my “Dave is bisexual” headcanon and just thinking in wonder how it felt like Hussie was plucking my desires straight from my head and incorporating them. Which made me HAPPY by the way. If this is anywhere even near truth it’s not like he didn’t do a fantastical and natural job of incorporating it into the comic which shows how “incorporated fanon” is not a totally horrendous thing. The comics always done it with fandom memes and such. 

-Rose Lalonde. Not too sure what fanon influenes were brought onto her to be honest? In candy she was almost like a creepy stepford wife which is. Bizarre to me. Rose is the most contrary and rebellious character so seeing her settle down like that (OR FUCKING DOING SOME GUYS LAUNDRY) is a little strange. In meat she insists that she is an individual despite being married but that could have EASILY been Dirk’s influence? Also her biggest fandom stereotypes off the top of my head is Know-it-all smug meddler, alcoholic, and elegant. Really none of that was applied so still need to consider her more. The most damning thing however is where is all the piss?? If you look at the amount of piss kink rose fanfiction one has to wonder......and I can’t even continue this joke.

-Jade Harley: Gonna keep it real with ya’ll. I feel like this epilogue gave Jade Harley way more character. She wasn’t given much in canon except for lonely silly girl so it makes sense to me why she’d grow up desperate for physical bonds and inserting herself into relationships. I liked her telling John that she wasn’t some princess in a tower anymore cause it shows she KNOWS how everyone has always viewed her and that’s a little sad. As for tropes around her character.....yep people pleaser, silly girl, hippie, shoved aside for literally any other character......Need to think about her more, too. 

-Jake fucking English. What even is there to say? He more than anyone was influenced by fanon and it doesn’t take too much thought to see how. In a lot of fandom jokes and in fanfiction he is basically treated as a stupid piece of meat. I genuinely don’t read much fanfiction about him except from a trust few fans who I know care about him and will write him in a full rounded way. In any case we see a single moment in which Jake has this oppressive narrative taken away from him and it was when he was talking to Dave and Karkat during their election conversation. If that wasn’t already hard enough to read we can look back at the implied rape that took place with him in the beginning of Jane’s relationship with him or over the course of it. John, the one person supposedly not influenced by fanon as he’s still tied to the comic via retcon powers, is even the one to tell people that Jake is basically being raped. So yeah. Good times. I’ll get to Dirk in terms of Jake in a moment L M A O. Imagine that being the saddest lmao you ever just read.

-Jane Crocker: Welp hope you weren't a Jane fan lmao. What can I say except it FEELS like all the subliminal messaging really got to her and she’s like......warped by the condesce? I think if in the comic they showed more of her political takes then maybe this wouldn’t have come as such a shock. Like, I flat out am disgusted by her character now? She’s a facist, abusive, rapist(that was hint, unfortunately)? WOW good take homestuck writting staff?? I mean I know one of you used to write like incest pedo rape porn but aight??????????? Anyways in fanon Jane is treated as the girl who gets in the way of dirkjake so kinda that early 2000s bitchy yaoi girl brand, boring person in the background, or the hottie. They obviously kept saying she was “easy on the eyes” so there’s the hottie trope but that’s about it.

-Roxy Lalonde: Out of ALL the Alphas they fucking escaped with their goddamn dignity PFFT. So in terms of tropes: trans Roxy, alcoholic, and flirty “boy obsessed”. 

        -So with trans Roxy this is like Dave’s sexuality thing I discussed where a widely celebrated headcanon influenced canon and that not necessarily a BAD thing. Like I said, this theory is that canon is just absorbing fanon for better and for worse. I saw people were bummed they weren’t a trans girl but I am actually down with this for two reasons. 1) being all those memes “what’s your gender?” “the void” and 2) a part being friends with someone who’s trans is.....not being used to seeing them as the gender they actually are but taking the time to learn these new unfamiliar pronouns- and get the fuck over it. It’s their choice and you just gotta accept it despite your feelings. 

        -alcoholic Roxy was not at all incorporated which is the biggest fanon about her (not as much in recent years thankfully) so honestly? Kinda diminishes my argument. It’s not like the writers were worried that tossing out their progress as person was bad writing lol look at Dirk.

        -Flirty Rox. In candy they were SUPER fast moving in their relationship with John and despite towards the end they said that Dirk dying made them wanna do something with their life I just....don’t buy it? Mainly because john who is uninfluenced by the fanon tropes even noticed how fast they were moving and how stepford agreeable wife she’d become. 

-Dirk Strider. Aight. So. Here we go. fandom tropes are controlling puppet master, abusive, and cold/uncaring.

        -Dirk is a naturally controlling man, yes. Every version of himself struggles with this, yes. Even if we work on issues does not mean old flaws will never leak out, yes. However, after in the comic itself we see conversations with some of his closest companions and the effort he was making and ready to continue making was completely obliterated. Dirk is someone who takes his projects a little too seriously so why would he toss out this one- the most important one in his life? ANYWAY........Dirk in canon is shown that he’s also not great at multi-tasking or really anything that he really makes himself out to be AMAZING at. Don’t get me wrong I actually view Dirk as a complement dude cause he did get all the alphas into the session in a smoothish fashion (yes hal is him so it still counts) but, like, even when Dirk sounds like an AWESOME engineer to Jake he even admits that he basically had the future’s technology to help and it wasn’t that impressive. So now he’s claiming he’s the BEST? Wack.

        -Abusive Dirk......The sheer amount of people in the fandom who still misconstrue his character as heartless and the sheer amount of fanfiction of sociopathic Dirk might’ve done something. If he is truly becoming his “ultimate self” and he is heart aspect.....all these fanfiction splinters are getting applied to him as well, ya’ll. INCLUDING one of the epilogues writers who literally used to write fanfiction depicting Dirk as a brutally abusive and manipulative version of himself. With the similarities between their big fic and the homestuck epilogue I can’t help but to wonder if they’re subtly trying to incorporate that? After all Alt Calliope goes into detail about how the writer/narrator is IMPORTANT and when one is someone who enjoys viewing dirk as such....well who’s to say pfft Everything about how Dirk treated Jake was some of the most shocking to me. How did you get the guy taking most of the blame for a relationship gone wrong to a man who in a very rapey way makes someone obsessed with him, stupid, and unable to ever receive respect? Horrifying stuff to read, lads. It makes much more sense to me if you look at this fandom’s perceptions on DirkJake. My god there are some bad takes and there’s a whole section of the fandom who was hellbent on making the ship out to be the most problematic ship to ever occur. So whereas in the comic you have Dave pointing out that both sides had issues and everyone was willing to talk things out you had half the fandom insist that it was all Dirk’s fault and he just COMPLETLY forced himself on an unwanting Jake. Yep, sound familiar?

        -cold uncaring. yep tons of depictions of Dirk being cruel to his friends and family and sorry but go reread Homestuck I don’t even know what to tell you if you actually believe that. There’s literally nothing here I could write to help you. As if the whole thing about his character isn’t about how the people around him helped prevent him becoming like that and he hasn’t said in a dozen different ways how much he loves them and wants to treat them better. Get out of here with that shit lmao 

I guess all can be said about Dirk at this point is either 1) the absorption of the vast amount of terrible Dirk depictions from ascending to his ult self has warped him 2) he’s playing a villain just because Homestuck being over means not existing which TERRIFIES him and existing is a higher priority than treating the people around him right or 3) caliborn influence

        1) For the ascending I’m pretty sure this is the theory that’s gonna be right

        2) playing the villain is probably not what it is because on twitter all of the writers are saying the transphobia is literally just him and they’re boosting a lot of theories say “this is a story about friends you love disappointing you and you moving on” So. Yeah. Take that depressing nugget of information. (I literally will be fucking dead inside if that really is where this story is taken. No joke I will probably quit this fandom lol don’t know if any of you really know how big that is for me to say

        3) Caliborn? eh maybe who the fuck knows after typing that last bullet point out I’m too bummed to continue this hah

[vulvapeople]

For the last few days, we’ve seen the headlines about Randy Stair and his murderous rampage all over our news feeds. We’ve learned about Stair’s bizarre obsession with a Nickelodeon cartoon character. We’ve learned about his unapologetic admissions of racist, sexist, and homophobic prejudice.

We’ve also learned that Stair was a transgender woman; a male who claims to “feel” like a woman on the inside, somehow trapped in the wrong body.

On any other occasion, an admitted racist, sexist, homophobic white man who planned and executed a murder-suicide would illicit the publishing of several liberal op-eds on the same day. Yet, there seems to be an incredible reluctance when it comes to discussion of Stair’s transgender identity as it relates to his crimes.

It turns out that claiming a transgender identity is a coat of armor against justifiable criticisms of male violence. In a way, it’s magical. Even a homicidal bigot can be insulated from the wrath of social justice criticisms if he claims to be trapped in the wrong gender. Randy Stair is only one example.

In 2016, Dana Rivers, a transgender-identified white male, made headlines for murdering a black lesbian couple, Patricia Wright and Charlotte Reed, as well as their teenage son, Toto M. Diambu. Where was the liberal outrage? It seemed that when liberals did step forward to express their indignation, it had more to do with anger at Rivers being misgendered. The homicide of a black family at the hands of a white male didn’t seem to warrant a national discussion about transgender identity politics and male violence against women. It certainly didn’t inspire a conversation about liberal sexism, liberal racism, or the ridiculous reasoning behind the prioritization of a murderer’s identity preferences. Instead, the story faded into the ether almost as spontaneously as it came.

There are several others.

In 2014, transgender woman Donna Perry was charged with three counts of first-degree murder. His victims were three women known to law enforcement as prostitutes. Where were the liberal think-pieces on protections for sex workers? In 2016, charges against Julianna Fialkowski, a transgender woman who was accused of raping and choking a female victim, were dropped because of supposed inconsistencies in the victim’s story. Where were the liberal protests against disbelieving the victim? This year, Patrick “Tara” Pearsall was convicted for sexually assaulting two pregnant teenagers. Where were the liberals? Perhaps a better question to ask would be:

Why do transgender-identified males consistently receive the utmost sensitivity from liberals, even when they harm women?

Consistently, liberals will claim to promote women’s rights—perhaps even toss around some woke-sounding, intersectional feminist rhetoric if it helps them validate that claim. Yet, those same “woke” liberals don’t have a problem tossing women directly under the proverbial bus if it means preserving their social justice street credibility. I’d say this is especially true for white liberals, most of whom are very well-versed in the language of white guilt.

In a political paradigm in which virtue signaling carries as much social capital as oppression itself, the worse thing a white liberal can do is sacrifice his standing as an ally to the marginalized by offering criticism of any group over which white privilege is supposedly wielded. This means that transgender-identified males, even those who are responsible for harm against females, must be prioritized over the “cis” women whom they claim are oppressing them. Somehow, refusal to do so will elicit accusations of racism or some other privilege nobody knew that white liberals had in the first place.

…but what does this mean for women?

It means that we must suspend all reason and pretend that women have the social, political, economic, or cultural power to oppress males for our own benefit. By extension, it means we have to pretend that transgender women who threaten females with violence are just oppressed people raging against their oppressors—–not violent males doing what violent males have always done to females.

It means that a black woman who expresses skepticism over the call to respect Dana Rivers’s pronouns can simply be dismissed as an agent of “white feminism”. By extension, it means that a black woman can never have a legitimate cause for complaint at being told to respect a white male who brutally murdered a black lesbian couple and their black son.

It means that liberals will take issue with whether the mainstream media is acknowledging Randy Stair’s gender identity before they take issue with the heinous nature of his crimes. Better yet, it means that liberals will have to remain silent about the fact that transgender women have the same rates of violence as any other male. It turns out that these inconvenient truths might give us cause to question the wisdom of allowing males to identify their way into female-exclusive accommodations.

Even more than all of that, it means that liberalism can no longer be presumed the political home of feminism as males will always be affirmed and validated over females—even males who harm females. Ultimately, there is little debate over whether or not transgender women who commit violence acts are wrong. There are very few liberals in this world who believe that a transgender woman’s anger justifies murder. However, liberal silence on abuses against females sends us all some very clear messages about how liberals prioritize females.

That is to say, they don’t prioritize females, at all.

[millennialdemon]

I completely agree, I am so tired of shounen villains that are extremists who, if they weren't extremists, would be the actual heroes of the story for trying to change the status quo of their world/nation/city etc. The same unfair status quo that our protagonists always ends up conforming to despite it also being the biggest thing they have to fight against in their journey to fulfill their dreams. "This is my villain, he's fighting for justice and equality against an oppressive regime set upon destroying his people. Oh, and also he eats babies!" Maybe let's try something else!

I've talked about Rades specifically in regards to the bizarre topsy-turvy morals of Black Clover a few times, just because the story is so contradictory in so many ways when it comes to deciding who is evil and who is not, and I feel like that is most evident with Rades. On one hand we see the Magic Knights judge Rades for his crimes against humanity (and he does commit them, of course), but prior to the fight we see that the Magic Knights are a bunch of very classist nobles by and large, and they themselves aren't beholden to many moral standards or even a basic sense of honour. Asta goes on a whole rant about how they are no better than his childhood bullies when he witnesses Noelle’s siblings - fellow Magic Knights - humiliating her at a banquet for her poor magical abilities, the same thing Asta has been bullied about for his entire life!

Similarly, the same way Asta and Noelle did not ask to be saddled with difficult to control and/or “no” magic, Rades didn’t ask to be saddled with necromancy and the resulting social fallout. And we learn that Rades tried to be “good” by joining the Magic Knights (and we are supposed to agree that the Magic Knights are good) and using his unconventional magic for something virtuous, and he got exiled for it.

And yet Asta looks up to the Magic Knights and is honoured to be one, and doesn’t protest at all when he is asked to hide their dirty laundry from the citizens of the kingdom he supposedly loves? Why?

It's such a juvenile approach to storytelling. And hell, it could stay the same and still be better if it were just more complex! We could have a class of Magic Knights who do just as much bad as they do good for the kingdom, if we had characters that had complicated feelings about that fact. We could have an extremist terrorist group ready to make any sacrifices necessary to reform or destroy Clover Kingdom, if we had Clover Kingdom sympathizers who were torn between staying and defecting. But so far all I can parse from Black Clover (I have seen 52 episodes) is that not only is it a story that constantly tells its audience how to feel, but it can’t even keep its story straight!

Oh, and I'm not about to rewrite the entirety of Black Clover, but this did remind me that I want to write up a post about the Asta and the Black Bulls we could have got. I also agree that the Asta we have is a pretty bad character to be conveying the underdog message of this story, and I have this AU or remix or whatever you want to call it in my head wherein Asta decides he will pursue being Wizard King, but won’t become a Magic Knight to do it, and the Black Bulls are like an unofficial sort of vigilante group made up of the magical rejects of the Clover Kingdom that fight for righteousness in their own way!

Complaining about black clover

Black clover made all the bad guys kill people because they wouldn't have been bad guys otherwise. "I want to change our country because it is bad, and doing the same exact thing for 500 years has changed nothing" that's a pretty solid point. "I'm going to do this by killing everyone" okay hold on a minute.

Also Asta sucked at conveying the idea he was supposed. It was supposed to be this underdog story of how this nobody became somebody because he never gave up even though he had shit genes. A real pull yourself up by the bootstrap moment, but those definitely can be done well. He's just this poor boy with no magic at all so sad. But also he can pull swords out of thin air (book) turn into the devil and then make said sword shoot lasers and turn into a football field long sword but no actually he's so sad and magicless. Brother. Idk but that sounds pretty magical to me. Yeah he worked hard, but so did the devil believers or whatever and there was an obvious difference between the two. Asta no longer had the ability to pretend like he was on the same playing field as people with very little to no magic, because he wasn't. He had the power to change things in his life, they had nowhere near that amount of power.

Magna was a much better representation of the whole, never give up and you'll make it theme. He had very little magic and because of that he had to get smart about his magic. He had to make technical moves instead of "I stab you with a mile long sword really hard so you die". He did what he could with what he had, and he did it really well. Asta was given a lot of power and did his best to retain a system that kept people without power down.

I thought the anime was sick tbf and I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just being a hater for fun.

[ascendingmatrix]

MORE STRANGE CASES OF SPONTANEOUS HUMAN TELEPORTATION

Posted by M M | Dec 26, 2017 | 2017, Daily Blog, Paranormal 

MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE

One of the more fascinating mysteries I have come across is that of people who, for whatever reasons, have seemingly spontaneously teleported over great distances with no explanation. I have covered this phenomenon here at Mysterious Universe before, on more than one occasion, and it is a mystery that is endlessly intriguing. Although teleportation in recent times has been shown to be a very real possibility, what are we to make of such cases, when a person suddenly and inexplicably transports from one place to another? I do not intend to get into the specifics of how such a process would work, but what I will do is bring you some truly weird cases of when this has supposedly happened.

A very early and strange case of what appears to have been some form of teleportation supposedly happened in 1687 in North Cornwall, England and concerns a young servant named Jacob Mutton, who was in the employ of a William Hicks, the Rector of Cardinham. On May 8, 1687, Jacob was reportedly getting ready for bed when he heard a strange voice calling out, which sounded as if it were saying “So Hoe, So Hoe, So Hoe” over and over again. Upon looking around for the source of the mysterious voice, which he said had sounded “hollow,” Jacob tracked it to the window, but when he looked out there was no one out there in the night, and it would have been odd if there had been, as his window was a full 17 feet off of the ground. This would be the last thing he really clearly remembered before he mysteriously vanished.

The next morning when Jacob was nowhere to be found the premises were searched, but all that could be located was an iron bar from outside his window lying on the ground. However, it soon came to light that Jacob had been found some 30 miles away near the town of Stratton, lying unconscious on a narrow road still tightly grasping a window bar from his bedroom. Jacob proved to be rather dazed and unable to clearly recall what had happened to him at first, and he expressed bewilderment that he should be so far from home in an area that he had never been to before. Upon being brought back home it was noticed that the young man’s demeanor had changed, and that he was rather dour and contemplative rather than his jovial and cheerful usual self. When asked what had happened to him the only thing he was able to vaguely remember was that a “tall man” had taken him out over the land, as if flying. It is unclear just what exactly happened to Jacob Mutton, but it is an intriguing tale to say the least.

In 1926 there was the strange case of French swimmer Simone LaVille, who was in the midst of trying to swim the English Channel. According to reports from the rescue boat that followed her, during her swim Simone suddenly purportedly began to fade away, as if being erased from reality, before disappearing completely. A panicked search began, but the woman could not be located anywhere in the area and no one could figure out how she could have possibly just vanished under the watchful eye of the 18 crew members aboard the rescue vessel. She would allegedly be found 3 hours later in a farmer’s pond 17 miles south of London, with no rational reason, nor any memory as to how she could have possibly ended up there.

Another strange case comes from 1959, when a man in Bahia Blanca, Argentina was driving home after a business trip. According to his account, he checked out of a hotel and got into his car to continue on his way, but when he started the engine he claims that the vehicle was suddenly tightly wrapped within a thick, soupy white fog that seemed to come from nowhere. He peered out of the window but could not make anything out through the oppressive white of the haze, and at some point he believes he passed out, only to awaken to find himself standing alone in a field, with no sign of where his car had gone nor the hotel he had been at. It seemed that he was in an unfamiliar rural area in the middle of nowhere, and he could not figure out just what had happened.

The baffled and disoriented man then made his way to a nearby dirt road and managed to wave down a passing truck. When he asked the driver of the truck if he would take him to Bahia Blanca things would get strange indeed, as according to him they were now in Salta and that Bahia Blanca was over 600 miles away from where they were. The dumfounded man reportedly looked at his watch and saw that only a few minutes had passed since he had been enveloped by the bizarre mist.

The truck driver then apparently dropped the dazed man off at a nearby police station, where he told his story to some very skeptical officers, yet when they checked out his story by calling the hotel he claimed to have stayed at, the receptionist confirmed that the man had indeed just checked out not long before. The mystery man’s car would be found soon after abandoned and with its engine still running. Just what in the world happened to this man and did he really get transported hundreds of miles within minutes? Who knows?

Also from the same country, is a case written of in Our Haunted Planet, by John A. Keel. It comes from 1968, and revolves around 11-year-old Graciela del Lourdes Cimenez, who in the summer of that year was out playing with friends in Cordoba, Argentina. Similar to the previous account, the girl claimed that she had suddenly been surrounded by an impenetrable and oppressive white mist. Startled and frightened, Graciela then tried to run through the thick fog in the direction she thought her house lay, but as she did so she suddenly ran out of the murk into a busy town square, odd considering they had been nowhere near such a place. Gabriella allegedly went to the first house she could find, and when she asked the residents where she was she was shocked to find that she was over 100 miles away from where she had been.

More recently, in November of 2000, a man named Ralph Morily claimed that as he and his wife were relaxing at their Miami home when an unidentified stranger suddenly appeared in their hot tub. When the man was questioned he was found to be rather flustered and confused, and he claimed that he had just dove into the pool of a hotel 8 miles away and surfaced there in the hot tub. This would be confirmed when the stranger’s wife and two teenaged children said that they had watched him dive into the pool but that he had never surfaced, prompting a police search. The next thing they knew, the police informed them of having found the missing man in the hot tub miles away. In it a weird case, and considering it was first reported in the Weekly World News should probably be taken with a grain or two of salt, but for what it’s worth I figured it was worth at least putting out there.

Even more recently brought forward is an account shared by a commenter calling himself Pavel on the Russian Boris Zolotovforum on June 12, 2008. The user claimed that he had been an army officer serving in Kazakhstan in 1967 when he experienced some bizarre events as he was attempting to get back home to Moscow, some miles 3,800 kilometers away. A rough translation of his account reads:

The train from there (to Moscow) is 3.5 days. At 5 p.m., I get from headquarters, with all the documents on my dismissal. Travel documents have not yet been issued to me. Lieutenant Tihonchik on Java motorcycle, stopped near me and proposed a ride. I take the seat behind him and … fall into the darkness. My condition is stunned curiosity. Still with the darkness around, I suddenly hear female voice: – “Don’t make noise with your boots! It’s not Vietnam here! (I was wearing a panama hat).

My vision comes back to me and I find myself in Moscow walking near a metro station close to the building my family lived in. The time is about 8 p.m. hours (time difference between Moscow and Kazakhstan is 3 hours). With joy, I run home… And the most interesting thing I can’t find any travel documents on me.

Finally we have an odd report originating in South Africa in October of 2017. According to the strange story, an infirm 61-year-old man was admitted to a hospital for emergency abdominal surgery, after which he was transferred to the larger Stellenbosch Hospital, in Cape Town, South Africa to recover and for rehabilitation. During the man’s stay, a nurse was caring for him and allegedly went to go fetch some fresh linen, but when she returned to the room a mere minute later the man was nowhere to be seen. It was incredibly strange, as he had been completely bed-ridden and in an immobilized, postoperative condition at the time and barely able to move, let alone get out of bed and walk off in such a short amount of time without anyone noticing. It was as if the patient had just disappeared into thin air.

Over the next few hours a search was launched at the hospital, searching every inch of the facilities and the surrounding area, but there was absolutely no trace of the vanished man. It would not be until 13 days later when the vanished gentleman would finally be found dead, but what is truly strange is just where he was ultimately found. The body was allegedly discovered stuffed up in a confined and typically inaccessible niche within the ceiling slabs of an isolated hospital unit, and neither authorities nor hospital staff have any idea whatsoever as to how this immobile old man could have possibly gotten there, leading to whispers of teleportation. As crazy as it all sounds, the story has supposedly been confirmed by the Ministry of Health of the Western Cape province, Mark van der Heever, and is apparently still under investigation. Did this man spontaneously teleport? Just what is going on here? No one seems to know.

Is there any truth to such tales and how can this possibly happen? While we pursue the technology to teleport objects and pore over the theory behind it all, if these reports are anything to go by it seems as if this has been perhaps happening naturally for years. Are these people tapping into some force we cannot yet comprehend? Are they venturing through vortices or miniature black holes that have sucked them in and spit them out in disparate locations or even miles from home? Is there any truth to these accounts at all or is this all attributable to some rational explanation? It is a mystery that provokes discussion and debate, and one which we may never fully understand.

[almostentirelylost-blog]

La Forza Della Destino

Part I:  The Slacker

 That's me.  I've been slacking.  I think the last thing I wrote was about Salzburg?  That being said, I do have a lot to write about now!  So let's see, I left off in Salzburg, which would mean that the next part is Munich!

Part II:  Munich!

 What a city.  I love that city, and I will without a doubt be returning.  I don't know if I've made this clear yet or not, but I have this really terrible habit of booking my hotel/airbnb the day I'm arriving.  This entire trip has been totally spontaneous, and usually I don't decide on where to go next until the day I want to leave.  Munich was a little premeditated, just that I had a general sort of idea that I wanted to go there at some point.  So while I was on the train from Salzburg to Munich, I booked an airbnb and got a prompt message from the host; " Sorry, not expect to book tonight.  At work until 1900 ".  This meant that I wouldn't be able to drop off my luggage until later on, so I did the only reasonable thing in my situation, and got completely lost in Munich with all of my possessions on me.  There are certain folks that would murder me if they knew I did that, but they also don't have access to internet (don't tell them).  That was a grand adventure, but not nearly so bad as it might sound.  Munich is a very polite, very pretty place.  Lots of parks and open spaces with trees to sit under, grass, and even a canal that has re-routed a substantial amount of water into a park called the English Gardens.  The English Gardens will have a part to themselves later on.  I eventually decided that my feet hurt and because of that I deserved lunch and a beer.  I found those things.  Standard German fare, nothing special to report, with a half litre of Augustiner Brau.  They're everywhere, by the way, the Augustine monks.  They've seemingly monopolized the monastary based commercial brewing business.  Okay, let's see if I can remember this timeline.  Today is Thursday, the 15th of June.  I got into Munich on... the 9th of June.  Yes that's right, I got into Munich on a Friday.  Okay, so now that's all sorted, the story can go on.    The place I ate at was called Zum Durnbrau.  Standard beer hall, standard beer food, standard German social standards in that you have to talk to other people because there are only long, wooden tables with long, wooden benches.  There weren't many people there, though I did get to talking to a couple from Koln, who were interested in my t-shirt.  Well, metal discussions and beer go hand in hand like a dictatorship goes with oppression.  The point of that being that they both usually spiral downward and out of control.  One beer turned into several, three people turned into fifteen, and we had ourselves a riotous good time.  By that time I really should have been getting to my airbnb, to drop my things off at the very least.  I did no such thing, and instead continued looking for things that would be fun to see.  Altstadt Munich is super touristy, so it's hard to get out of the hordes of people, and even when you do you barely hear German.  But I wasn't really there for the people, I was there for the sake of seeing sights, and nothing better for that than ancient Catholic cathedrals.  I've been consistently visiting churches in every city I go to, and for good reasons too.  A lot of these churches are older than the USA.  You simply don't see that in the US, because it doesn't exist, because it couldn't have existed since that country is still more or less a baby on the global level.  The paintings inside are exceptionally beautiful, the organs are consistently these grand, arching masterpieces of human ingenuity, and the alters are serene, quiet and emanant of a time long past.  The Frauenkirche was no exception.  Got my sightseeing itch taken care of, sent my airbnb host a message, and went on my way.  Subways (u-bahn) are sometimes the most convoluted systems of transportation.  Effective, of course, once you figure them out and usually they're far more simple than first impressions would lead to believe.  I've gotten pretty good at them.    My host was extremely kind, and so was his girlfriend.  I don't think I could pronounce their names if my life depended on it, but that's alright.  Just a really relaxed Indian couple that were in Munich to finish their degrees.  They were astounded that I wanted to go back out, and had really only shown up to drop my luggage off, shower, and change.  Fifteen minutes later and I was back out the door, on my way to a metal bar that a friend had recommended to me.  Met some people, had some drinks, listened to some metal, and then made my merry way back to the airbnb for bed.  The next day was gonna' be a big one.  The next day was definitely a big one.  I headed back into the city and first just found myself something to eat and a bottle of juice, things to keep me going while I walked.  Then I just explored the city.  For those that don't know, Munich is host to the world's largest and most notorious beergardens, as well as Oktoberfest.  Well, not just Oktoberfest, but various other beer related parties and holidays.  So after seeing some of the major landmarks around, like the Sendlinger Tor, Das Bayerisches Hof, and the Victuals Market (Saturday morning market with everything you could possibly imagine).  The Sendlinger Tor is more or less just the ancient old gate to the city.  It's huge, it's made out of rocks, and it has something unreadable engraved on it in Latin.  Das Bayerisches Hof is now more or less a really impressive hotel, though it's been around forever too and has hosted some very prominent people (supposedly), and I'm sure has been a drunken riot at some point or another during Oktoberfest (read: every Oktoberfest).    The Victuals Market was everything from a market for locals to buy their weekly fresh produce from outlying farms, to tourists discovering the wonders of Munchener Weisswurst.  Weisswurst is a white sausage with little bits of chives (I think) in it.  I couldn't tell you how it's made, or what it's made of, but I can tell you that it's delicious, that you should peel the skin off, and that you should smother it in whole grain sweet mustard.  That's a South German delicacy.  Maybe not delicacy, but it's delicious.  I also found some Turkish Delights, which are these bizarre jelly cubes covered in powdered coconut, I don't really know anything about them, but they were stupid expensive and way too addictive.  I promise I only ate two.  Anyways, I didn't have lunch because I didn't really need to.  The Victuals Market was loaded with folks giving out samples of their wares, so I sampled my way from one end of the market to the other, and then found myself a nice tree in the English Gardens to have a nap under.  Like I said earlier, the English Gardens get a whole section to themselves.  They're meant to be various gardens all coming together as one, enormous, splendid nature park.  They do that, but the different gardens have their own personalities and people.  I really spent all afternoon just walking through these gardens.  Turns out that there's a place along one of the canals where you can surf.  You're not really supposed to, but that wasn't stopping a crowd of locals standing on either side of the canal in wet suits, waiting their turn to throw down their boards and hop on, to either flail and crash horribly, getting swept away by the current... or to find their balance and show off their skills until inevitably crashing and getting swept away by the current.  Very popular, it seemed, as they had a pretty sizable audience standing around.  I watched for a while and then moved on, my goal was to find a more secluded part of the park, and the gardens.    I found it eventually, an island on a tiny little pond covered in lilies, surrounded by rushes and flowers.  It seemed like privacy incarnate, and was, of course, locked to the public.  Turns out it was a traditional Japanese tea garden.  That sounded like my cup of tea, so I did some digging and found out how to get on that island, did it, drank some tea, wrote down a bunch of ideas for a thing I'm going to do, and inevitably got kicked out because for whatever reason I wasn't allowed to spend all day there.  That traumatized me, and maybe it was also getting late, so I went to the biggest beergarden Munich has to rehabilitate myself.  The Hirschgarten.  The scope of this thing is incredible.  It's a beergarden located firmly away from civilization (probably for good reasons) in the middle of a park, it's catered by the Augustine monks and various local food stands/restaurants.  There's also a little animal sanctuary right up against the beergarden, loaded with peacocks and deer, and other such things.  To be honest I wasn't really interested in the animals that weren't turning on a spit, sizzling and dripping, crisped to the perfect level.  Chickens in these beergardens are called Handl, with an umlaut in there somewhere, and you can either order an entire chicken or a half.  The beer is less flexible, the monks will only serve you one liter at a time and there's only one variety.  That one variety, though, comes from wooden barrels that the monks have to hammer spigots into.  Wooden hammers and everything.  I'd be willing to bet that their fermentation vessels are stainless steel just like every other brewery, though.  So, information on the Hirschgarten.  It can seat about 8,000 people, maybe more at max capacity.  The space around it has been cleared of trees, and the open fields are apparently the ideal place to play soccer and do picnic related things, and besides the monks driving around stacks of barrels with forklifts, there's no machinery to be found.  Beer is cheap, the food is very good, and apparently there's an old Bavarian hunter's club that refuses to let the old ways die out, walking around in lederhosen, wool shirts and socks, and hats with tufts of deer fur sticking out of the top.  Apparently membership requirements include being enormously fat, and world class beer drinking skills.  I talked to them for a while, even if I could barely understand what they were saying.  It was worth it just to see the physics of their moustaches up close, or lack thereof.  I'm developing a theory that extraordinary moustaches don't actually obey our world's laws of relativity and physics, but instead exist in a dimension of their own.  More on this later.  The last day in Munich was sadly, not very exciting.  Mostly just packing my stuff up, getting back to the trainstation, and finding my train to my next destination; Venice.

Part II: The Next Destination  Venice is hot, muggy, and stinky.  Those were the overbearing first impressions I got of the place.  Besides that, Italians are loud and hard to understand.  Even worse, I haven't seen so many toursist in one place before.  The main means of travel in Venice are via canals (duh), by ferry, water taxi, or gondola.  The gondoliers charge an obscene amount for their services ( 100 euros per half hour) and water taxis are only worth it if you have a group... so I forced my way onto a crowded main canal ferry.  I was staying at the Hotel Rialto, only because I had found an extraordinarly good deal on the way there, and fully intended to use that hotel room for all it was worth.  The Hotel Rialto is actually pretty nice, it's right on the main canal and also right next to the Rialto bridge, which is the biggest and most ornate bridge in the city.  All very pretty stuff, if you have the rare opportunity to actually see any of it through the suffocating masses of tourists.  Dropped off my stuff, grabbed my camera, and immediately went on adventure.  The first thing I discovered was that Venice was the most expensive city I've ever been to.  Also absolutely everything costs money.  My grandparents had warned me about that fact, but I sort of ignored them, thinking to myself, " No... that's too ridiculous, they couldn't get away with these things. ".  They do though.  At most restaurants you get charged for the placemat and silverware.  There's autograt on literally everything, including at gelato stands.  Bars charge for use of the glass  you're drinking out of.  Churches charge you just for walking through the door, museums all have guided tours where you're charged based on time, autograt is included, and you're still expected to tip the guide.  It's insane.  I made one executive decision that day; I would treat myself to one very high end dinner overlooking the lagoon, and then I would find myself a grocery store and live like a peasant for the next few days.  I had my nice dinner, and actually managed to find a place that wasn't too horrifically overpriced, the food was outstanding, the house wine would probably be a $50 + bottle in the US... I was very happy with that restaurant.  Made out like a bandit with a tab at 70 euros.    Another notable thing about Venice is that you will get lost.  There's no helping it, the streets aren't streets, they're narrow alleyways that almost feel like caves because of how the buildings lean in toward one another.  You'll run into dead ends at canals, which is great at night because there aren't streetlamps or signs saying " There's water at the bottom of these stairs you're walking down ".  I know this has a very negative tone so far but I actually really enjoyed the walking around Venice part of Venice.  I also randomly stumbled upon a supermarket sort of thing in a dark alleyway, with no signage, that was actually very cheap.  Like cheaper than most of Europe cheap.  Must be where the locals buy their groceries.  Got myself a nice Chianti, some salami, cheese, and bread ( I know, no brains and f-f-f-fava beans), and had a very romantic date with myself sitting on one of the steps looking out over that lagoon Venice is surrounded by.  It was almost even quiet...  Anyway, my visit to Venice was honestly very uneventful, mostly just because I couldn't afford the place and spent the large majority of my time wandering those pretty little alleyways and running into dead end canals.  I did watch a gondolier fall off of his boat, with tourists in it (again, they charge 100 euros per half hour).  I went to a surprisingly modestly priced Vivaldi concierto, and spent one of my nights drinking with a group of extremely opinionated Australians.  Then I left that city behind and came to Trieste, where I am now.  I enjoyed Venice, but I doubt I'll go back there.

Part III: The Seaside City Without a Beach  Trieste is a recommendation my grandmother made to me.  It's a gorgeous little city right up against the ocean (Adriatic, I think?)  It gives a very industrial impression at first, but once you get to walking it opens up into a much more old style, with regal looking buildings and wide, tree lined streets.  Unfortunately no beach, but in a way that's nice too because it keeps it from being a real tourist destination.  My airbnb was easy to find, and I was greeted by a wonderfully friendly elderly lady named Marina, and her black lab, Jack.  Jack is the namesake for their bnb (St. Jack's) and I would take him home with me if I could.  Such a good boy.  Anyways, dropped my stuff off and went to find dinner before retiring for the evening.   Dinner ended up being half the price of what I payed in Venice, and even better.  Still overlooking the sea, though with docks in the way and some sort of enormous industrial ship doing industrial things while anchored a ways off the coast.  But still, the ocean always has a certain charm to it for me, or maybe that's just because I'm not used to seeing it at all.  The next day was wonderful.  Excruciatingly hot, but still a wonderful day.  I made my way to the local castle and was very happy to find that I could really explore all of it.  Most castles have very limited access for tourists, either because they're crumbling old ruins and are dangerous, or because some historical society is doing everything they can to keep it in as good of shape as possible.  This one was both well preserved, and open enough that I was able to see all the things that I wanted to see in a castle.  I got up on the walls, took some breathtaking pictures of Trieste below me (any good castle has a commanding view of everything around it), and then went to explore the armory and the mazelike passages below the main courtyard.  It's pretty incredible how cold those lower passages get, and humid too, with water running down the walls in places and all of that old iron still in place.  Barring off certain hallways and rooms.  They'd had an exhibit too, featuring the old carvings from the castle's cathedral.  I can't imagine what these castles must of have been like in their prime, filled with people, the royalty and military stationed in their garrisons and lavish halls, the peasants milling around the courtyard trying to make appeals or selling wares.  Even in more recent times when cannons were set around the gates, ready to fire at invading forces... I love that stuff.    The cathedral there had an incredible mosaic in it too, covering the entire ceiling and most of the walls behind the altar.  I couldn't tell you what biblical scene it represented, but it was done in such a way that the afternoon sun coming through the stained windows caught the tiles perfectly, lending the altar a sparkling, ethereal quality.  Honestly would've been better if not for the massive group of German tourists milling around, talking and taking up all the space.  I spent my time there, payed my respects to the craftsmen that had likely poured their life into the art in that space, and to the old building itself.  After that I just walked.  Picked a direction and just starting walking, for the sake of seeing more of the city.  See it I did, and I also learned how truly insane these Italians are behind the wheel.  Trieste isn't quite mountainous, but it is very hilly.  So the streets are narrow and often on a pretty extreme incline with sharp turns and sudden dead ends.  Still, everyon drives at breakneck speeds, often honking as they go around corners rather than slowing down.  Streetlights seem more like suggestions than the law, and pedestrians are constantly double checking behind themselves to be sure they don't need to dive out of the way of some car or moped.    I also found my way to the Piazza Unita, which is (according to a local I asked) the biggest seaside square in Europe.  Its charm was lost on me, because most of it was occupied by construction crews setting up some sort of stage for a concert or show of some sort. All the same, nice to see, and it was nice to take a break sitting on the docks with my feet in the water.  Sadly, however, the weather was starting to turn for the worse.  It's a pretty neat thing to watch a storm rolling in over the ocean.  Pretty intimidating, honestly.  So I made my way back to the airbnb, sat down in my room to enjoy a beer and maybe write a little bit, and had a knocking at my door.  It was the other guest that was staying there at the time, a Swiss guy named Jorg.  He wanted to know if maybe he could pay me to use my cellphone so he could call a woman he was trying to woo back home!  I may or may not be a hopeless romantic, and I also love Swiss German, so I said sure thing and let him in to call her.  We ended up talking for a while after, and he invited me to go to dinner with him since he was travelling on his own as well, and wine and food is best enjoyed in company.  So we got our shit together and went for dinner, again, extremely well priced and high quality.  The neat thing about European cities is that street musicians are not only fairly common, but also usually very talented.  The old man in a suit that started playing violin in the restaurant was certainly no exception, and also the inspiration for the title of this entry.  La Forza Della Destino

  More will come soon-ish, and I'll probably upload photos when I have time to sit at a computer for a few hours and do nothing but that.  For now, adventure awaits! Happy Birthday Sophie, I hope you like your present.

[arthursnorthkoreanlitblog]

10 Interesting North Korean Books

1. North of the DMZ by Andrei LankovLankov is these days one of the leading experts on North Korea, but in the 80s he was a young Soviet student in Pyongyang. This collection of vignettes, written with humour and wit, curates all kinds of fascinating details. One describes the regime’s unembarrassed falsification of the past with “hard evidence”. For example, at the time Kim Jong-il was becoming the heir apparent in the 70s, some 200 “slogan trees” were discovered in the forests of Mount Paektu. Supposedly carved by communist partisans in 1942, they praised the newborn Kim. “A Great Sun has been born!” (The Guardian)

2. Long Road Home by Kim Yong. This defector memoir made a profound impression on me. Like a protagonist in a Greek tragedy, Kim’s fate was determined in the stars before he was born. Adopted as an orphan by a privileged family, he grew up in North Korea’s elite class. Only when his birth records were unearthed prior to a key promotion did he discover that his real father was an executed traitor. Here, blood carries ancestral guilt, and Kim fell victim to the system’s nightmare logic. Deported to Camp 14, the country’s most notorious labour camp, the experience he reports is devastating. (The Guardian)

3. A Corpse in the Koryo by James Church Inspector O, a Pyongyang detective, is the protagonist of this highly original twist on the gumshoe noir. An inquiry into a murder at the Koryo Hotel pitches him into a deadly intrigue between powerful factions of the regime. Anyone who’s visited North Korea knows that there is no psychic space anywhere to escape the ruling Kim. Yet Church never mentions him by name, with the chilling effect that his shadow is felt in every chapter. The regime, in all its menace and corruption, is almost a character in itself. (The Guardian)

4. North Korea Confidential by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson When Kim Jong-un had his powerful uncle Jang Song-thaek executed in 2013, a crack appeared in the single-hearted monolith North Korea likes to present. Jang had controlled many of the regime’s business interests, and Tudor and Pearson show how money and foreign culture are rapidly changing North Korean society. Not only did the famine of the 1990s spark a lawless, small-scale capitalism among the lowest castes, it has seen the rise of business elites inside the government and military, for whom making money trumps revolutionary pedigree. Fascinatingly, the success of these classes may ensure the regime’s survival. (The Guardian)

5. Dear Leader by Jang Jin-sung Jang was a propagandist for the regime before fleeing in 2004. His talent as a poet had so delighted Kim Jong-il that he was made a member of the Admitted, an untouchable elite. This memoir is remarkable for its revelations about the country’s power structures and covert ops. The one that set my imagination on fire was the Seed-Bearing Programme: North Korea apparently sent attractive female agents abroad to become pregnant by men of other races. The aim was to breed spies who looked foreign but were thoroughly indoctrinated North Koreans. (The Guardian)

6. The Hidden People of North Korea by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh If you’ve ever wondered how life carries on under pervasive surveillance and extreme political control, this thoughtful book shows how ordinary folk cope, subverting nonsense ideology by hustling and bribing. All of which makes the passages describing the imperial lifestyle of the ruling Kim shocking to read. Children may beg in his streets, but the Supreme Leader lives in a palatial opulence that would shame the emir of Qatar. (The Guardian)

7. The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson Jun Do grew up with nothing, not even a name. He chose his own from the list of 114 martyrs of the revolution given to orphans. Trained as a soldier then as a kidnapper, he carries out his brutal roles with an unemotional curiosity. He does not take the many opportunities he has to defect because he longs to make sense of who he is, and the world that made him – the closed universe of North Korea. Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer prize for fiction, this is one of the finest novels of the century so far. (The Guardian)

8. The Invitation-Only Zone by Robert S Boynton In the 70s and 80s, North Korea abducted civilians from beaches in Japan. These were ordinary people taken utterly at random. In a feat of investigative journalism that reads like an episode of The Twilight Zone, Boynton offers the fullest explanation yet for this this bizarre criminal enterprise. Some victims were put to work teaching local slang to trainee spies, but most were taken for no obvious reason. The disappearances were the stuff of urban myth in Japan until 2002, when Kim Jong-il himself publicly admitted to them. The furore it caused in Japan has still not died down. (The Guardian)

9. The Cleanest Race by BR Myers We’re familiar with Pyongyang’s rants against the west, but what about the propaganda it aims at the home audience? This intriguing study looks at how the regime explains the world to its subjects. For example, they’re told that South Koreans are oppressed by Yankee military occupiers and yearn to embrace the loving rule of the Kims. The truth – that modern South Koreans are happy with their republic and never even think about the Kims – is subversive and very dangerous to the regime. It would simply have no way of spinning this to the North Korean public. (The Guardian)

10. Daughter of War by Pike Logan. Hot on the trail of a North Korean looking to sell sensitive US intelligence to the Syrian regime, Pike Logan and the Taskforce stumble upon something much graver: the sale of a lethal substance called Red Mercury. Unbeknownst to the Taskforce, the Syrians plan to use the weapon of mass destruction against American and Kurdish forces, and blame the attack on terrorists, causing western nations to reassess their participation in the murky cauldron of the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, North Korea has its own devastating agenda: a double-cross that will dwarf the attack in Syria even as it lays the blame on the Syrian government. Leveraging Switzerland's fame for secrecy and its vast network of military bunkers, now repurposed by private investors for the clandestine storage of wealth, North Korea will use Red Mercury to devastate the West's ability to deliver further sanctions against the rogue regime. As the Taskforce begins to unravel the plot, a young refugee unwittingly holds the key to the conspiracy. Hunted across Europe for reasons she cannot fathom, she is the one person who can stop the attack--if she can live long enough for Pike and Jennifer to find her. (Amazon)

[biofunmy]

Lesbians Won The Women’s World Cup

Alex Grimm / Getty Images

Lesbian athletes Ashlyn Harris, Megan Rapinoe, and Ali Krieger of the USA following their team’s victory in the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup France final match between the US and the Netherlands at Stade de Lyon.

Four years ago, at a bar in Brooklyn, I cried a few drunken, happy tears watching soccer titan Abby Wambach, fresh off a World Cup win, run ecstatically toward the stands to kiss her then-wife, Sarah Huffman. Wambach, one of the best players of all time, would be retiring from the game with a 5–2 win over Japan and yet another coveted title under her belt. It thrilled me that someone who’d proven herself the best of the best on the world’s stage was also openly gay, and openly in love. Wambach and her team’s triumph felt less like an American win to me and more like a win for the gays — and lesbians, specifically — just a week after the Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

At the time, Getty Images infamously captioned its shot of Wambach and Huffman embracing with “Abby Wambach of USA celebrates with a friend,” releasing a deluge of memes poking fun at the ways in which mainstream culture willfully overlooks romantic affection between women. But in the years since, the queerness of the US women’s national soccer team has only grown more visible — so visible, in fact, that it’s pretty much impossible for even the densest of straight people to ignore.

Over the weekend, the USWNT beat the Netherlands 2–0 in this year’s World Cup final for its second consecutive World Cup win, a victory that, as star forward, team cocaptain, and America’s lesbian sweetheart Megan Rapinoe pointed out, would have been impossible without queer power: “You can’t win a championship without gays on your team … that’s science right there.” Rapinoe’s out teammates include Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger, who announced their engagement earlier this year, while their coach, Jillian Ellis, is also an out lesbian. And then there’s fan-favorite Kelley O’Hara, who, recovering from a nasty head-to-head collision during yesterday’s match, replayed Wambach’s famous kiss with one of her own: She ran to the stands after the game and embraced her girlfriend, in a moment at once completely unexceptional and rather profound. She hadn’t previously made any grand pronouncement about her sexuality, but openly kissing her partner spoke for itself.

USA Today Sports

Megan Rapinoe kisses girlfriend Sue Bird after defeating the Netherlands in the championship match of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

I don’t closely follow most sports, soccer included — I still barely understand what offsides means, no matter how many times my friends try to explain it to me — but this World Cup, as with the last, I was drawn in by all these incredible lesbians. For one thing, a lot of the players look like the kinds of hot mean girls with ponytails who both intimidated and titillated me in my closeted youth. For another, I’ve become enamored with the way the US team (and especially Rapinoe) has used its international platforms to advocate for LGBTQ rights, equal pay, and racial justice.

Lately, I don’t feel particularly proud to be an American. A few days before the World Cup finals, President Donald Trump hijacked the National Mall to stage his 4th of July rally, as a monument to (white) American exceptionalism and supremacy. At a time of year when we’re all supposed to be celebrating our hard-won freedoms, there are men, women, and children detained in cages and subjected to horrifying treatment at the border. That doesn’t make me proud; it makes me sick. I’m not proud of where the United States — supposedly the best place the world — stands in international rankings when it comes to gun violence or maternal mortality rates. I’m not proud that trans women of color are being killed at epidemic levels, nor am I proud of a health care system that bankrupts citizens for the crime of poor health. I feel, if anything, perversely grateful that my race and class status have afforded me the safety and well-being so frequently denied to others in this country.

I’ve become enamored with the way the US team has used its international platforms to advocate for LGBTQ rights, equal pay, and racial justice.

But do you know what does make me proud? The fact that Megan Rapinoe was among the first American athletes to kneel in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, and that during the World Cup, she continued to protest by refusing to sing the national anthem. I’m proud that Rapinoe, earlier this year, said she wouldn’t go “to the fucking White House” if her team was invited after a potential World Cup win; and I’m proud of her teammates, whom Rapinoe said wouldn’t likely accept a Trump invitation either. I’m proud that Wambach, Rapinoe, and other women’s soccer players would have no problem playing with and against trans women athletes, and have demanded an end to discriminatory anti-trans policies in international sports. And I’m proud that, for all the policy’s other faults, Title IX helped build a team of women champions by mandating schools provide equal sporting opportunities for girls.

Someone’s pride is inevitably someone else’s shame, however, and everything I love about the US women’s team is everything plenty of others despise about it — in our country and around the world.

Rapinoe, for example, for her protests and for her refusal to let an explicitly anti-LGBTQ administration use her as a photo op, is “ungrateful,” “selfish,” “divisive,” and (of course) “un-American.” Trump has led those charges, playing to his base the same way he once did with Kaepernick, accusing Rapinoe of dishonoring the American flag (and, bizarrely, managing to twist a jab at a white soccer player into a racist tirade). It will never cease to stun and disappoint me that so many Americans can be whipped into a furious frenzy when someone who’s gay, or black, or otherwise marginalized dares speak out against injustice in ways they deem to be impolite or brash or unseemly. As Adam Serwer recently wrote in the Atlantic: “when those in power are caught abusing that power in ways that are morally indefensible and politically unpopular, they will always seek to turn an argument about oppression into a dispute about manners.”

Meanwhile, as Rapinoe and her fellow players who have spoken out against US atrocities are branded as “un-American” by conservatives at home, they’re considered by naysayers abroad to be all too American. Even before the US beat England’s lionesses in the semifinals, the British press continually attacked the USWNT for their “arrogance.” Pundits were surely going to lose their minds when, during the game itself, Morgan celebrated a goal with a gently ribbing gesture — she pretended to sip a cup of tea — that, on 4th of July weekend, amusingly recognized the fact that our country was born of anti-colonialist revolution.

I don’t have any problems with poking light fun at a powerful country like England. But I admit I was less comfortable when, in the World Cup opener, the USWNT completely demolished Thailand 13–nil, kicking off early rounds of criticism that the team was too arrogant for reveling in another country’s humiliating defeat. Beating the Brits at their own beloved game is one thing, but bulldozing a team made up entirely of people of color — who have far less cultural and economic power than ours does — feels, I’ve got to say, rather different.

Yes, our women’s team hasn’t achieved pay parity with our far crappier and far less beloved men’s soccer team — an injustice deserving swift rectification. But watching the World Cup, especially in the earlier rounds — before semifinals consisting of the US, England, the Netherlands, and Sweden had rendered the pitches blindingly white — I spent more time thinking about the pay disparities between our women’s team and others around the world, particularly in less wealthy countries.

Our team is great because of public policies like Title IX, and because, in the US, women’s sports are slowly beginning to earn the respect they deserve. Also, of course, we’ve got some incredible individual athletes, all of whom I love and admire. Still, I can’t really bring myself to join the chants of “USA!” whenever I’ve been to games in bars bedecked in red, white, and blue, because there’s a part of me that recognizes at least some of the USWNT’s supremacy is born of unearned American advantage.

While most of the criticisms lobbed against this team have struck me as completely ludicrous, I do cede the point that this is really the first time that an American team has dominated in a truly international sport — which means soccer has become yet another arena for the US to gloat about our supposed supremacy. Merch declaring “USA vs. Everybody” leaves a bad taste in my mouth; it sounds less like a great team (rightfully) owning their greatness and more like an uncomfortably cheery summary of US imperialism’s bloody history.

And yet it is precisely because of my discomfort with slobbering jingoism that I’m grateful to the US players who champion a messier, more honest, more noble vision of the American patriot: someone who is constantly pushing this country — which wasn’t, in fact, built on a foundation guaranteeing universal freedoms — to be a better and more equitable place.

I’m grateful to the US players who champion a messier, more honest, more noble vision of the American patriot.

And even though I haven’t managed to fully embrace the American-branded celebrations of our win (the flags, the constant loops of “Born in the U.S.A.,” all the insufferable chanting), I’ve still felt overcome with joy these past couple days, seeing these women unapologetically celebrating their win. They’ve been shamed for their celebrations because they’re Americans, yes, but also because, obviously, they’re women — women who dare to take up space, who refuse to demur or downplay their own greatness.

The queer joy, in particular, has felt revelatory to me. Rapinoe’s girlfriend, WNBA superstar Sue Bird, wrote a completely delightful Players’ Tribune entry last week about how in love she is with this remarkable human — someone who’s not only openly gay, but credits her sexuality for her successes, and uses her own marginalized identity as a way to empathize with and advocate for others. Watching the game yesterday in a bar with some of my best gay friends, who decided against a “USA” chant and went with “LES-BI-ANS” instead, I felt exactly like Bird: “I was happy. I was crazy. I was PROUD. I was pretending to know about soccer. I was a little overwhelmed. I was pretty damn American. And I was in love with Megan Rapinoe.”

I was also in love with Ashlyn Harris, whose boozy Instagram stories of the team celebrating in beer goggles in the locker room after the game deserves an EGOT, and whose commitment to shouting “gays rule” has sustained me at least through the next week. I was in love with all of them, their goofiness and their clear affection for each other, their euphoria a shining light in this long, dark American summer. We can all use a little joy these days. ●

CORRECTION

Jul. 08, 2019, at 17:29 PM

Adam Serwer’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this post.

Sahred From Source link Sports

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[automatismoateo]

That bizarre feeling of the absurd via /r/atheism

Submitted January 20, 2019 at 09:33PM by -Tasogare- (Via reddit http://bit.ly/2FNwdY3) That bizarre feeling of the absurd

I went to church with my family today because they insist I come with them as a family thing. I hadn't been going for the past several weeks since I hate feeling like a pretender or an intruder in a supposedly "holy" and revered place. The funny thing about your beliefs changing is that you actually pay more attention when you don't believe than when you do. All the words seem to pop out to you and you pay close attention to the internal logic and overarching themes that the priest presents.

Today the readings and gospels were about the miracle of Jesus turning water into wine. Listening to this stuff being discussed in a completely deadpan and supposedly academic manner actually threw me off and I had a momentary sense of complete absurdity, like I was disconnected from reality. I remembered the words of Camus in his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus": "At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without diffulgence, it is elusive. But that very difficulty deserves reflection." "Men too secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, the meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them."

Being disconnected from these religious beliefs and rituals has made me see it as no different than a book club, or a fan convention of some sorts. The deep analysis of words from thousands of years ago and constant worship of God feels to me the same as a Marvel fan convention, or a Harry Potter book club. I don't know how to phrase it but that's just how I feel. It's hard to explain my sentiments without religious people perceiving me as disrespectful but I guess this is how I feel about life in general. It just seems like a bunch of loops and systems, a neverending maze of repetitive behavior, although religion seems to be the most arbitrary since it tries to deal with the absurdity by claiming that there actually is some grand master plan and it is beyond our comprehension. Religion feels like philosophy on steroids.

I'm supposed to be Catholic because my ancestors were conquered for 300 years by Europeans who sailed over from the other side of the world. Somehow that makes everyone in the country believe this is the correct path? One that was forged from oppression and subjugation. I'd probably be Muslim if the Spaniards hadn't come, or if we had fought them off successfully. I don't know how this is supposed to make sense and be completely acceptable. I don't understand why more people can't break free. Do people really never see beyond the surface layer? How is it alright to plant this seed and force it on a child even when they are barely newborn? It just seems so disgusting to me.

Why the fuck do millions of people waste countless hours repeating phrases, standing, kneeling, sitting, singing, shouting, it's all so pointless. These rituals are all the same, we watch superheroes like Thor and Hercules on TV and we accept that we know that religion is "incorrect" yet the current ones being practiced are somehow supposed to be respected? It just seems like insanity on a massive scale. There is so much doublethink and emotional investment for these little dances.

I want to be indifferent but it's just so hard when I'm forced into a place that I am uncomfortable with. Hearing everyone chant the Apostles Creed in unison, hearing everyone sing "take all my will, my life, my memory", it's just a place I do not want to be in or think about. Maybe I'm just overthinking it.

[dareread]

The dismantling of the idea of the West began when medieval philosophers began re-introducing the Sophist notions reduced to ashes by Socrates. This reintroduction came about as a reaction to extreme scholasticism in the Middle Ages. It was a fascinating thought experiment known as nominalism, but it unwittingly wrought massive damage upon the very ways in which Western citizens viewed themselves, disconnecting them not only from other cultures and peoples but also from one another—even within the same communities. Rather than reaching, often in anguish and pain, toward the transcendent and universal, their own priests were telling them to look more toward the muck of this world, perhaps even to wallow in its filth as a simple fact of existence.

Despite the great successes of the Scottish (well, the Celts—Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke) and Americans (especially Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson) in the eighteenth century (and, with less success among the English) and their claims of universalism, the nineteenth century bred the narrowest thought of all—from men such as Georg W.F. Hegel, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, and Sigmund Freud. As each of these men possessed individual genius, they offered the deepest thought possible on a variety of things: biology, adaptation to the environment, economics, breeding, sexuality, and psychology. Yet, they focused so strongly on individual ideas (the particulars of life) that they displaced their ideas (many of which were true) from the context of many true things. So, while we are certainly economic beings, we are not merely economic beings. We are also emotional, stupid, brilliant, wicked, good, procreative, and a million other things, many of which we barely understand about our individual selves. As the great economist and man of letters, Friedrich Hayek noted, to attempt to understand another and not have reservations and humility about such a study is to engage in a “fatal conceit.”

Or as C.S. Lewis’s tragic character, William Hengist claimed in That Hideous Strength, “I happen to believe that you can’t study men: you can only get to know them, which is quite different.”

During the 1960s, the New Left—more culturally than economically Marxist—began a concerted effort to destroy the foundations of Western Civilization, claiming that the West was little more than a facade for a while, European males to maintain a powerful hegemony over society. The view, as the New Leftists argued it, was that such claims as natural law, natural rights, and opportunity for all were merely smokescreens, allowing for the elites to maintain control over the oppressed and the voiceless. Rather than standing for the Platonic and Socratic notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful, the West really maintained a power relationship of one group solidifying and perpetuating its control through sexism, racism, and imperialism. Given the progressive dismantling of liberal education six decades prior to the rise of the New Left, the New Left was able to gain control of departments and promote an agenda of destruction, though often with the best of intentions.

Certainly, there were those who defended a traditional understanding of Western civilization throughout the previous century. In the United States, Irving Babbitt of Harvard, Paul Elmer More of Princeton, Willa Cather, Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, William F. Buckley, Flannery O’Connor, and Sister Madeleva Wolff worked mightily to preserve the western tradition. Abroad, T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, Sigrid Undset, Theodor Haecker, Jacques Maritain, Wilhelm Roepke, and others did the same.

They were each, unfortunately, fighting a rear-guard action, defending the ramparts as the flood swept in and subsumed their efforts, no matter how noble.

Even the few schools that continue to claim to offer a true liberal education—Wyoming Catholic College, St. John’s College, Thomas Aquinas, Faulkner, Hillsdale, Notre Dame, and the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, Minnesota)—are but bizarre counter-cultural institutions.

The West, for most Americans who even think about it, is simply the study of “dead white males” or a shorthand for “lazy white males.” As I write this, students across the United States have shut down universities and occupied buildings to protest the oppression—supposedly—still lingering from the 1960s. Thomas Jefferson, though liberally educated and the author of the Declaration of Independence, has come under fire, in particular, as a hypocrite, the protesting students seeing his enslaving but not his liberating.

And, yet the West has offered so much good in the world. It was not for nothing that Chinese students protested in Tiananmen Square in 1989 holding signs of Thomas Jefferson. The Chinese communists might have seen this as proof of CIA influence, but the rest of us understood that the symbol of Jefferson stood for something much greater than simply Jefferson himself: He stood for the entire Western tradition of natural law and natural rights, applicable to all persons and all times.

The West, as noted above, not only created philosophy (while all significant civilizations have accepted ethics, but, generally, only ethics), but it also introduced the ideas of natural law and natural rights.

The West has also understood that freedom and liberty are not ends, in and of themselves, but means by which we make free decisions toward the good, the true and the beautiful.

The West has also, critically, understood that while natural law and natural rights might be inherent in the very being of man himself, the securing of those rights comes with the cost of great sacrifices.

The West has also understood the necessity of myth, symbol, legend, allegory, and poetry as a means by which to pass the most important lessons from one generation to the next.

And, as the men around Socrates so wisely understood, we use the space offered by free choice to pursue not just the good, the true, and the beautiful, but we pursue these things through the four pagan virtues: prudence—the ability to discern good from evil; fortitude—the ability to persevere against all odds; justice—the giving of each man his due; and temperance—the use of earthly goods as a form of plastic, a means to an end. Later, of course, St. Paul would add the Christian virtues of faith—the ability to see beyond ourselves; hope—the confidence that we matter; and charity—the giving of one’s self for another.

[theimpossiblerevolution]

 I don’t honestly believe that most, or even more than a few, people who are against abortion are motivated by genuine hatred for women or even the oft-cited ‘need to control women’s bodies’. There are plenty of women at the March for Life this weekend. There are even pro-life feminist groups like the one supposedly kicked out of the Women’s March. Many, if not most, of these people genuinely believe that the unborn are full-fledged human beings with the same rights as their mothers. From any rational standpoint, that’s just not true, but if you believe it, then in the context of that conviction, the debate is morally thorny at best, and the idea that abortion is murder isn’t that extreme.

I think even the most ardent pro-choice activist would agree that abortions are not a good thing and that reducing their number would be a worthy goal. And anyone who is truly pro-life, who truly wants to eliminate abortion, should be focused on doing what works: preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place by ensuring that all women have access to contraceptives and know how to properly use them.

So why do so many of them oppose contraception as well? Is it because they hate women? At times it’s hard to say they don’t, but let’s not forget that although the woman bears the burden of carrying a child, it takes two to make one in the first place. Fundamentally, the conservative crusade against contraception and abortion isn’t specifically anti-woman—it’s anti-sex. By banning abortion and restricting access to birth control, this movement wants to make a natural expression of love into an intolerable risk for anyone who doesn’t meet their prescribed ideal of a ‘family’—and the only reason they tolerate that little which they do tolerate is because the human species would literally die out without it. If God would suddenly start delivering babies in cloth sacks carried by storks, half of them would cut off their own dicks right then and there. (Except they wouldn’t, because they’re all hypocrites, but that’s beside the point.)

This bizarre crusade against nature exists for one reason and one reason only, the same reason that people believe in the scientifically untrue idea of fetal personhood—because a bunch of guys two thousand years ago who literally believed the world was going to end within the next thirty years wrote it in a book.

Christianity’s opposition to sex is almost as old as the religion itself. I can’t explain it, though perhaps it does have a great deal to do with the fact that early Christians believed that the Second Coming was imminent and therefore all mundane concerns ought to be cast aside to focus on the spiritual. Jesus himself says it in both Matthew 24:34 and Luke 21:32—‘Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, till all these things [describing the end of the world] be fulfilled.’ The Church has spent the better part of two millennia wondering what the hell he could have meant by ‘generation’; meanwhile, rejection of Earthly pleasures of all kinds has become a staple of Christian doctrine.

In fact, according to many scholars, the notion of women as temptresses that arose out of this doctrine is the root of much of modern misogyny (even if patriarchy was already well established), not the other way around as many people today believe. Men, unable to oppress their own sexuality as their religion demanded (and let’s face it, we can’t blame them—sexuality is quite difficult, not to mention dangerous, to suppress), chose to blame the women who incited their ‘sinful’ desires. In so doing, they invented two thousand years of victim blaming, slut shaming, and impossibly contradictory stereotypes about women. The next time someone asks a rape victim what she was wearing, remember that he’s channelling the Church Fathers.

No, it wouldn’t have been possible without the patriarchy that existed long before Christ. But it also wouldn’t have been necessary without Christianity. So when you’re fighting for a woman’s right to choose, or fighting a society that blames a victim for her own rape, or really fighting for women’s rights at all—

Remember who the enemy is.

[biofunmy]

Lesbians Won The Women’s World Cup

Alex Grimm / Getty Images

Lesbian athletes Ashlyn Harris, Megan Rapinoe, and Ali Krieger of the USA following their team’s victory in the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup France final match between the US and the Netherlands at Stade de Lyon.

Four years ago, at a bar in Brooklyn, I cried a few drunken, happy tears watching soccer titan Abby Wambach, fresh off a World Cup win, run ecstatically toward the stands to kiss her then-wife, Sarah Huffman. Wambach, one of the best players of all time, would be retiring from the game with a 5–2 win over Japan and yet another coveted title under her belt. It thrilled me that someone who’d proven herself the best of the best on the world’s stage was also openly gay, and openly in love. Wambach and her team’s triumph felt less like an American win to me and more like a win for the gays — and lesbians, specifically — just a week after the Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

At the time, Getty Images infamously captioned its shot of Wambach and Huffman embracing with “Abby Wambach of USA celebrates with a friend,” releasing a deluge of memes poking fun at the ways in which mainstream culture willfully overlooks romantic affection between women. But in the years since, the queerness of the US women’s national soccer team has only grown more visible — so visible, in fact, that it’s pretty much impossible for even the densest of straight people to ignore.

Over the weekend, the USWNT beat the Netherlands 2–0 in this year’s World Cup final for its second consecutive World Cup win, a victory that, as star forward, team cocaptain, and America’s lesbian sweetheart Megan Rapinoe pointed out, would have been impossible without queer power: “You can’t win a championship without gays on your team … that’s science right there.” Rapinoe’s out teammates include Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger, who announced their engagement earlier this year, while their coach, Jillian Ellis, is also an out lesbian. And then there’s fan-favorite Kelley O’Hara, who, recovering from a nasty head-to-head collision during yesterday’s match, replayed Wambach’s famous kiss with one of her own: She ran to the stands after the game and embraced her girlfriend, in a moment at once completely unexceptional and rather profound. She hadn’t previously made any grand pronouncement about her sexuality, but openly kissing her partner spoke for itself.

USA Today Sports

Megan Rapinoe kisses girlfriend Sue Bird after defeating the Netherlands in the championship match of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

I don’t closely follow most sports, soccer included — I still barely understand what offsides means, no matter how many times my friends try to explain it to me — but this World Cup, as with the last, I was drawn in by all these incredible lesbians. For one thing, a lot of the players look like the kinds of hot mean girls with ponytails who both intimidated and titillated me in my closeted youth. For another, I’ve become enamored with the way the US team (and especially Rapinoe) has used its international platforms to advocate for LGBTQ rights, equal pay, and racial justice.

Lately, I don’t feel particularly proud to be an American. A few days before the World Cup finals, President Donald Trump hijacked the National Mall to stage his 4th of July rally, as a monument to (white) American exceptionalism and supremacy. At a time of year when we’re all supposed to be celebrating our hard-won freedoms, there are men, women, and children detained in cages and subjected to horrifying treatment at the border. That doesn’t make me proud; it makes me sick. I’m not proud of where the United States — supposedly the best place the world — stands in international rankings when it comes to gun violence or maternal mortality rates. I’m not proud that trans women of color are being killed at epidemic levels, nor am I proud of a health care system that bankrupts citizens for the crime of poor health. I feel, if anything, perversely grateful that my race and class status have afforded me the safety and well-being so frequently denied to others in this country.

I’ve become enamored with the way the US team has used its international platforms to advocate for LGBTQ rights, equal pay, and racial justice.

But do you know what does make me proud? The fact that Megan Rapinoe was among the first American athletes to kneel in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, and that during the World Cup, she continued to protest by refusing to sing the national anthem. I’m proud that Rapinoe, earlier this year, said she wouldn’t go “to the fucking White House” if her team was invited after a potential World Cup win; and I’m proud of her teammates, whom Rapinoe said wouldn’t likely accept a Trump invitation either. I’m proud that Wambach, Rapinoe, and other women’s soccer players would have no problem playing with and against trans women athletes, and have demanded an end to discriminatory anti-trans policies in international sports. And I’m proud that, for all the policy’s other faults, Title IX helped build a team of women champions by mandating schools provide equal sporting opportunities for girls.

Someone’s pride is inevitably someone else’s shame, however, and everything I love about the US women’s team is everything plenty of others despise about it — in our country and around the world.

Rapinoe, for example, for her protests and for her refusal to let an explicitly anti-LGBTQ administration use her as a photo op, is “ungrateful,” “selfish,” “divisive,” and (of course) “un-American.” Trump has led those charges, playing to his base the same way he once did with Kaepernick, accusing Rapinoe of dishonoring the American flag (and, bizarrely, managing to twist a jab at a white soccer player into a racist tirade). It will never cease to stun and disappoint me that so many Americans can be whipped into a furious frenzy when someone who’s gay, or black, or otherwise marginalized dares speak out against injustice in ways they deem to be impolite or brash or unseemly. As Adam Serwer recently wrote in the Atlantic: “when those in power are caught abusing that power in ways that are morally indefensible and politically unpopular, they will always seek to turn an argument about oppression into a dispute about manners.”

Meanwhile, as Rapinoe and her fellow players who have spoken out against US atrocities are branded as “un-American” by conservatives at home, they’re considered by naysayers abroad to be all too American. Even before the US beat England’s lionesses in the semifinals, the British press continually attacked the USWNT for their “arrogance.” Pundits were surely going to lose their minds when, during the game itself, Morgan celebrated a goal with a gently ribbing gesture — she pretended to sip a cup of tea — that, on 4th of July weekend, amusingly recognized the fact that our country was born of anti-colonialist revolution.

I don’t have any problems with poking light fun at a powerful country like England. But I admit I was less comfortable when, in the World Cup opener, the USWNT completely demolished Thailand 13–nil, kicking off early rounds of criticism that the team was too arrogant for reveling in another country’s humiliating defeat. Beating the Brits at their own beloved game is one thing, but bulldozing a team made up entirely of people of color — who have far less cultural and economic power than ours does — feels, I’ve got to say, rather different.

Yes, our women’s team hasn’t achieved pay parity with our far crappier and far less beloved men’s soccer team — an injustice deserving swift rectification. But watching the World Cup, especially in the earlier rounds — before semifinals consisting of the US, England, the Netherlands, and Sweden had rendered the pitches blindingly white — I spent more time thinking about the pay disparities between our women’s team and others around the world, particularly in less wealthy countries.

Our team is great because of public policies like Title IX, and because, in the US, women’s sports are slowly beginning to earn the respect they deserve. Also, of course, we’ve got some incredible individual athletes, all of whom I love and admire. Still, I can’t really bring myself to join the chants of “USA!” whenever I’ve been to games in bars bedecked in red, white, and blue, because there’s a part of me that recognizes at least some of the USWNT’s supremacy is born of unearned American advantage.

While most of the criticisms lobbed against this team have struck me as completely ludicrous, I do cede the point that this is really the first time that an American team has dominated in a truly international sport — which means soccer has become yet another arena for the US to gloat about our supposed supremacy. Merch declaring “USA vs. Everybody” leaves a bad taste in my mouth; it sounds less like a great team (rightfully) owning their greatness and more like an uncomfortably cheery summary of US imperialism’s bloody history.

And yet it is precisely because of my discomfort with slobbering jingoism that I’m grateful to the US players who champion a messier, more honest, more noble vision of the American patriot: someone who is constantly pushing this country — which wasn’t, in fact, built on a foundation guaranteeing universal freedoms — to be a better and more equitable place.

I’m grateful to the US players who champion a messier, more honest, more noble vision of the American patriot.

And even though I haven’t managed to fully embrace the American-branded celebrations of our win (the flags, the constant loops of “Born in the U.S.A.,” all the insufferable chanting), I’ve still felt overcome with joy these past couple days, seeing these women unapologetically celebrating their win. They’ve been shamed for their celebrations because they’re Americans, yes, but also because, obviously, they’re women — women who dare to take up space, who refuse to demur or downplay their own greatness.

The queer joy, in particular, has felt revelatory to me. Rapinoe’s girlfriend, WNBA superstar Sue Bird, wrote a completely delightful Players’ Tribune entry last week about how in love she is with this remarkable human — someone who’s not only openly gay, but credits her sexuality for her successes, and uses her own marginalized identity as a way to empathize with and advocate for others. Watching the game yesterday in a bar with some of my best gay friends, who decided against a “USA” chant and went with “LES-BI-ANS” instead, I felt exactly like Bird: “I was happy. I was crazy. I was PROUD. I was pretending to know about soccer. I was a little overwhelmed. I was pretty damn American. And I was in love with Megan Rapinoe.”

I was also in love with Ashlyn Harris, whose boozy Instagram stories of the team celebrating in beer goggles in the locker room after the game deserves an EGOT, and whose commitment to shouting “gays rule” has sustained me at least through the next week. I was in love with all of them, their goofiness and their clear affection for each other, their euphoria a shining light in this long, dark American summer. We can all use a little joy these days. ●

CORRECTION

Jul. 08, 2019, at 17:29 PM

Adam Serwer’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this post.

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A STRANGE ENCOUNTER WITH ANGELS. IN SPACE.

Brent Swancer

December 13, 2017

Space is often touted as the last frontier, the final wilderness that we have yet to tame or understand, and in many ways this is very true. We have only within the last century really begun to comprehend some of its secrets to any appreciable degree, and there are certainly wonders beyond our imagination for us yet to behold. Yet some mysteries that have been encountered out there in the cold dark of space go well beyond conventional understanding, to propel out into the world of the paranormal and the universe of the truly bizarre. Certainly ranking among these mysteries is a curious close encounter between some of the first people in space and, well, something else.

In April of 1982, the Soviet Union launched its ambitious Salyut 7 space station as part of the Soviet Salyut Programme, which started in 1971 and had the aim of eventually sending up a total of four crewed scientific research space stations and two crewed military reconnaissance space stations. The last to be launched in the program and a precursor to the Mir space station, the Salyut 7 was the 10th space station ever put into orbit by mankind, and was designed to serve as a sort of test of a new system of modular space stations, which entailed the ability to attach new modules to expand the station or adapt it to whatever functions were required, as well as an outpost for various off-planet experiments. The Salyut 7 would end up staying in orbit for a total of 8 years and 10 months, which up until that time was the longest such a station had ever remained in continuous orbit. It is also known for a very bizarre series of bizarre, unexplained events witnessed by the crew.

The Salyut 7 space station

In July of 1984, the Salyut 7 was on the 155th day of its mission and things were going in a routine fashion until there was a sudden transmission from cosmonauts Commander Oleg Atkov, Vladmir Solovyov, and Leonid Kizim in which they claimed that the space station had suddenly been surrounded by an oppressive, blinding orange light. The crew of three aboard the Salyut 7 all then allegedly looked out of the portals to try and see what was causing this inexplicable brilliant glow. At this point they would witness probably the last thing they had expected to see out there.

There hovering in space in front of the space station were what the crew would describe as seven enormous winged humanoid beings estimated as being around 90 feet in height and with calm, smiling faces, and it was from these bizarre entities that the ethereal light was apparently emanating. They were also claimed to exude a feeling of calm and peacefulness, and oddly the cosmonauts felt no fear during the encounter, merely wonderment. According to the witnesses, the colossal apparitions, which they described as “angels,” matched the speed of the space station, remaining in the same position for around 10 minutes before fading away. Baffled by what they had all just seen, the three cosmonauts had a heated discussion on what the beings were and what rational explanation could account for it, but they could come up with nothing. In the end, although they had all seen exactly the same thing, they chalked it up to the stresses and rigors of being in space for so long, resigning themselves to the explanation that their minds had simply been playing tricks on them.

They may have gone on forever convinced that this was some sort of mass hallucination and a bout of temporary insanity, but it would not be their last encounter with these otherworldly beings. On Day 167 of the mission, the Salyut gained an additional three cosmonauts in the form of Svetlana Savitskaya, Igor Volk and Vladimir Dzhanibekov. Not long after these new crew members boarded, the station was once again bathed in that potent, bedazzling light, and this time all six of the crew looked out of the portholes to see several of the massive angelic beings swimming through the blackness of space outside, again with their benevolent smiling faces. Considering that this time they had again all seen the same thing, it appeared that there was perhaps something more going on beyond simple hallucinations.

When the Salyut mission was concluded and the cosmonauts returned to Earth, their strange experiences were allegedly covered up and swept under the carpet by the Soviet government, and the witnesses told in no uncertain terms that they were never to discuss what they had seen up there. Interestingly, intensive rounds of physical and psychological tests performed on the space station crew supposedly showed nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever. They were perfectly sound of body and mind.

Considering the thick secrecy surrounding the odd events, the story did not really get any wider coverage until after the Cold War, but when it did get out it immediately ignited a firestorm of debate and speculation as to what the cosmonauts had really seen. The most rational and scientific answer is that these cosmonauts experienced what they had suspected in the beginning, which is some sort of mass hallucination or madness brought on by the demanding stresses, fatigue, and the harsh conditions of space. After all, no one had ever really spent this much time continuously in space before, and so it should be only natural that they should have such visions.

Indeed, such surreal visual phenomena have been reported by other astronauts and cosmonauts who have been in space for long periods of time, and even earthbound pilots on long, demanding flights. The problem with this explanation is that six seasoned, experienced cosmonauts all saw the same thing at the same time, and all of them were given clean bills of mental and physical health afterward, making it seem rather unlikely that this could all be in their heads. It also seems rather implausible that a group of six highly trained, well-respected cosmonauts would get together and make up such a story as a hoax.

Another fairly rational explanation is that they witnessed some strange, unexplained natural phenomenon and simply misidentified what they were seeing, but even if this were true, why would they all give the exact same description of winged, angelic entities with smiling faces? Getting into more fringe ideas is that these were actual, literal angels, and that their appearance heralded some sort of prophetic information, or that it was even a portent of the Biblical end of the world. There have also been all sorts of claims that everyone from NASA to world governments, to the Illuminati and even the Vatican itself know the truth about the existence of these “space angels,” and that it is all being covered up and kept from the public, with conspiracy theorists routinely producing photographs from space stations and the Hubble Telescope that purportedly show photographic evidence of such entities.

So what in the world did the cosmonauts of the Salyut 7 see? Unbelievably, there have been other accounts of being visited by similar apparitions in space, with some cases coming even before the Salyut 7 sightings. Supposedly the very first human to go into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, had his own encounter with such a creature in April of 1961. At two points during his spaceflight aboard the Vostok-1, Gagarin inexplicably went silent and lost contact, and when he was asked about it later he was not sure what had happened, thinking he may have just briefly lost consciousness. During hypnotic regression, Gagarin claimed that he could remember seeing an enormous, mysterious figure floating in space in front of him, and that he had heard a voice in his head saying, “Do not worry, everything will be fine. You’ll come back to Earth,” before the apparition vanished into thin air right before his eyes. Hallucination or not?

More recently, in 2008 a former member of the Space Shuttle Fleet named Clark C. McClelland came forward to claim that he had years earlier observed a similar being while looking over some monitors of a space shuttle mission at the Kennedy Space Center while on duty at the Launch Control Center (LCC). He claims that over one of the 27-inch monitors he not only observed an enormous entity between 8 to 9 feet tall in the space shuttle’s payload bay, but also that it was actually interacting with the astronauts. He would say of what he saw thus:

The ET was standing upright in the Space Shuttle Payload Bay having a discussion with TWO tethered US NASA Astronauts. I also observed on my monitors, the spacecraft of the ET as it was in a stabilized, safe orbit to the rear of the Space Shuttle main engine pods. I observed this incident for about one minute and seven seconds. Plenty of time to memorize all that I was observing.

McClelland claimed that others had seen the incident too, and that they had been told to keep quiet about what they had seen, meaning that he had sat on this hauntingly bizarre experience until after he retired. He also claims that the government has regular dealings with these creatures and that it is all kept top secret. In this case the entity mentioned is certainly described as an alien of some type, but its sheer size makes it interesting in relation to the space angel phenomenon, and makes one wonder just what it really was this man saw, if anything. Does this story have any credibility at all or is he just a loon?

So there you have it. Angels. In space. This last frontier has a lot of strange stuff in it, but perhaps not much that is as strange as this. Just what is going on here? Was this hallucinations seen by all of these crew members? Was it something else? Who knows? Considering the original news reports of the phenomenon have been quietly relegated to the background and are only really discussed on Internet forums by people who have noticed just how outlandish the story is, we may never know for sure. It remains just one more anomaly on perhaps a whole road of anomalies just waiting for us as we delve ever deeper into the reaches of our universe.