#and also neither of them know anything about feminist theory or history at all. but i feel like that's obvious

[greatkateweathermachine]

cheryl and veronica are both misandrists but the difference between the two of them is that cheryl's trying to single-handedly turn society into a matriarchy with her weird little cults, while veronica would love to be the only feminist on planet earth just so she can feel superior to everyone else

[a-room-of-my-own]

A while before the latest hoo-ha about Judith Butler, I had just been reading her again. Though she claims her critics have not read her, this simply isn’t the case. I read Gender Trouble when it first came out and it was important at the time . That time was long,long ago. She was just one of the many ‘post-structuralist’ thinkers I was into. I would trip off to see  Luce Irigaray or Derrida whenever they appeared.

I got an interview  with Baudrillard and tried to sell it to The Guardian but they  didn’t know who he was so its fair to say I was fairly immersed in that world of theory.  For a while, I had a part time lecturing job so I had to keep on top of it. Though Butler’s idea of gender as performance was not new , it was interesting.  RuPaul said it so much more clearly in a  quote nicked from  someone else “Honey ,we are born naked, the rest is drag”

What I was looking for again , I guess is not any clarity – her writing is famously and deliberately difficult-  but whether there was ever any sense of the material body. She wrote herself in 2004 “I confess however I am not a very good materialist. Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language” . 

Butler from on high ,cannot really think about the body at all which is why they (Butler’s chosen pronoun) are now the high priestess of a particular kind of trans ideology.  The men who worship Butler are not versed in high theory. The fox botherer had a “brain swoon” at some very ordinary things Butler said. Mr Right Side of history nodded along in an interview. Clearly neither of these men are versed in any of this philosophy and would be better off sticking to tax law and the decline of the Labour Party. Butler is simply a totem for them.

Butler said in the Guardian interview for instance  “Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us.”

So yeah? That’s a fairly basic view of the social construction of gender though I take issue with the assigned at birth thing ,which I will come back to and why I started reading her again in the first place.

This phrase “Assigned sex at birth” is now common parlance but simply does not make sense  to me. I am living with someone who is pregnant. I have given birth three times and been a birthing  partner. I know where babies come from. There is a deep disconnect here between language and reality which no amount of academic jargon can obliterate. 

Babies  come from bodies. Not any bodies but bodies that have a uterus. They grew inside a woman’s body until they  get pushed out or dragged out into the world. 

The facts of life that we are now to be liberated from in the form of denial. Only one sex can have babies but we must now somehow not say that. The pregnant “people” of Texas will now be forced into giving birth to children they don’t want because they are simply “host bodies”. The language of patriarchal supremacy and that of some of the trans ideologues is remarkably close, as is their biological ignorance.

There is no foetal heatbeat at six weeks for instance. When a baby is born , doctors and midwives do not randomly assign a sex, they observe it and they do it though genitalia. 

There is a question over a tiny percentage of babies ,less that one percent with DSDs but even then they are sexed with doctors having  difficult conversations with parents about what may happen later.

Somehow, though when I read the way in which this is now all discussed it is clear to me that the people talking have never been pregnant, never had a foetal scan, never been near a birth , never miscarried, do not understand that even with a still birth babies are still sexed and often named. 

If you want to know the sex of your baby you can pay privately and know at 7 weeks ((*49-56 days from the first day of the mother’s last menstrual cycle). A 12 week scan will show it. That is why so many female foetuses are aborted . I have reported on this. 

Talking to paediatricians about this is interesting because they do indeed have to think through these things that we are being told are not real eg. that sex is just a by-product of colonialism for instance.  Sometimes pre-conception , geneticists will be looking at chromosomes because certain diseases are more likely in men or women. Males have a higher risk of haemophilia for instance.  

One doctor told me “When babies are premature, the survival advantage of females over males is well known throughout neonatology. This is sometimes something we talk about with parents when there is threatened premature labour around 23 weeks' gestation and options to discuss about resuscitation and medical interventions. In fertility treatment (or counselling around fertility in the context of medical treatments) it is pretty inherent to know whether we need to plan around sperm, or ova + pregnancy.”

She also said that if she involved in a birth that “assigning” isn’t the word she world use. “Observed genitals a highly reliable observation, just like measuring weight or head circumference which is also done at this time. “ Another doctor said that anyone involved with a trans man giving birth  would be doing the best for the patient in front  of them. 

Sex then is biological fact. A female baby will have all the eggs she will ever have when she is first born which is kind of amazing. It is not bio-essentialist to say that our sexed bodies are different nor is it transphobic to recognise it.

Except of course in my old newspaper ,The Guardian who are now so hamstrung by their  own ideology they have got their knickers in such a twist they can barely walk.  They completely misreported the WiSpa incident , basically ignored the Sonia  Appleby  judgement at the Tavistock. Appleby was a whistle blower ,a respected professional concerned with safe guarding. She won her case. The cherry on the cake this week was an interview with Butler, themselves (?) in which they went on about Terfs being fascists and needing to extend the category of women.

Does anyone EVER stop to think that most gender critical women are of the left, supporters of gay rights, often lesbian and that this is not America? We are not in bed with the far right. This is bollocks. Just another way to dismiss us.  

As we watch Afghanistan and Texas ,to say Butler’s words were tone deaf is to say the least. But they didn’t even have the guts to keep the most offensive stuff in the piece and overnight edited it out without really explaining why : the bits where Butler described gender critical people as fascist. Perhaps because the person their “reporters” had  defended against  transphobia at WiSpa turned out to be a known sex offender,  perhaps because someone pointed out that Butler was throwing around the word fascist rather like Rik Mayall used to do in the Young Ones. 

All of this is rather desperate and readers deserve better. When I left that newspaper I said that I thought and expected editors to stand up for their writers in public. Instead they go into some catatonic paralysis. I may have not liked this interview but it should never have been cut. Stand by what you publish or your credibility is shot.

But this is about more than Judith Butler and their refusal to support women . Butler is not really any kind of feminist at all. What this is about is the large edifice of trans ideology  crumbling when any real analysis is applied. Yes, I have read Shon Faye’s book and there are some interesting points in it and I totally agree that the lives of trans people should be easier and health care better . I have never said anything but that.

What Faye does in the book is say that there can be no trans liberation under capitalism so there will be a bit of a wait I suspect. 

Yet surely it is the other way round and what we are seeing is that trans ideology (not trans people – I am making a distinction here ) represent the apex of capitalism .

For it means that the individual decides their own gendered essence and then spends a fortune on surgery and a lifetime on medication to achieve the appearance of it. Of course lots of people spend a lifetime  on medication but not out of choice.  Marx understood very well that the abolition of our system of production would free up women.

Now it is all about freeing up men. Who say they are women. Quelle surprise.  

 Nussbaum’s famous take down of Butler is premised exactly on the sense of individual versus collective struggle “ The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler’s self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others. “

Such thinking now dominates academia. There is simply an unquestioning  rehearsal of something most of know not to be true thus Amia Srinivasan writes in The Right to Sex  “At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned.”

What does ‘sorted’ mean here? A tiny number of intersex babies are born. A tiny number of people are trans and decide to change their bodies. The feminist demand to challenge gender norms without mutilating any one’s body no longer matters. What matters now is this retrograde return  to some gendered soul. This is not something any decent Marxist would have any truck with . Of course one may change over a lifetime and of course gender is never ‘settled.’ We are complex people who inhabit bodies that often don’t work or appear as we want them to.

But not only is there a denial of basic Marxism going on here , what becomes ever more apparent is  that there is a denial of motherhood. Butler said “Yet gender is also what is made along the way – we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level.”

Self-assignment is key . One may birth oneself. No longer of woman born but self -made. This is a theoretical leap but it also one that has profound implications for women as a sex class. We are really then, just the  host bodies to a new breed of people who self-assign.

Maybe that is the future although look around the word and there isn’t a lot of self-assignment going on. There are simply women shot and beaten in the street, choked to death or having  their rights taken  away. There is no identifying out of this , there is no fluidity here . This is not discourse. It is brutality and do we not have some responsibility to other women to confront male violence ?

Instead the hatred is aided and abetted by so called philosophers describing  other women as Terfs. It is utterly depressing.

The sexed body. The pregnant body. The dying body. The body is in trouble when we can’t talk about it . I thought of Margaret Mary O’Hara’s  beautiful and  strange lyrics and what they might mean. I await my child’s return from the hospital as hers is a difficult pregnancy and thank god they are on the case. The sex of the child she carries does not matter to me at all .

It simply exists. Not in language but within a body. 

Why is that so difficult to acknowledge? 

[wowsoboring]

Deconstructing Baseless Harry Potter Arguments#2 (i) : Harmione Edition

Obviously I once again do not mean to target all Harmione shippers. I know quite a few who're very good human beings and tolerant and accepting above all. However these aren't. In this case, you might sense quite a bit of levelheadedness in the beginning, however you must not be fooled as it goes south and takes a nasty turn very quickly. Don't get your hopes up, this is some of the worst shit I've ever seen, especially the way in which it progresses through its course. Naturally, for this post I have picked my own style of writing which will match that of those redditors. Reddit is the perfect breeding ground for all these weird cults, honestly. I shall be resorting to a formal language and style of conversation, very much like a debater would to sound as pretentious as these do. These posts are found on the instagram handle toxicharmonyshippers who gather such toxic musings and sayings for Harmione shippers while respecting the ones that are nice.

1)

Oh yes, let's use words like 'vehemently' to sound smart, why not? Of course, this little tidbit of the highly stupendous post seems more or less civil at the start. They also have the common decency to say "some Romione shippers" rather than generalizing all of us. Very nice of you, how very saint like. Let's wait till they drop the act and show us their true colors. Harkening back to the argument, I have but one question for you, "where do you find these people?". Where's the proof? Who are these radical Romione shippers who worship Ron and dislike Hermione? I haven't seen any such shippers and I am surrounded by Romione shippers on tumblr, instagram and fan fiction sites as well and haven't met the people you speak of. Some point out her flaws, yes, but no one hates her or dislikes her that much. I have seen two or three Romione shippers across hundreds and thousands who're skeptical of Hermione's perfection. Skeptical. Not hating, disliking, or anything. Of course, unlike this person, I have evidence: find these pi charts for your referral (clickable): https://imgur.com/a/QfPnQbB

you can, through these, see the amount of Hermione bashing across Harry Potter fanfiction and you can see that even in Romione fanfiction there's more Ron bashing. Hermione-bashing is a non-issue. That's what it is. Regarding the "nagging" statement, where's the lie in that? "Annoying" is somewhat subjective, I personally don't find her annoying at all. Who are these people and how often do you find them? "Mary Sue" is only reserved for Movie!Hermione. I have only seen book fans call her that. No one has ever called Book!Hermione Mary Sue. The movie does paint her as a flawless, all-rounder who's also drop-dead gorgeous. Only things she's bad at are flying and divination, all of which she denounces as useless, even though flying is like biking for wizards, divination, sure, not that important. with a teacher like Trelawney, even I would denounce it as hokum.

2)

Remember what I said about waiting for them to show us their true colors, well here they are. Bask in the glory of their senseless arguments. Why, I am from reddit, heck I have 25 thousand karma points on there, I just left because it was too stupid for me but I can argue like them very well. And in this case I would like to say that these people are under the impression that Ron is just there in the story for the sake of existence. And he doesn't work hard. That argument is of course, wrong. Because Ron (in no particular order):

1) fights a troll when he's 11

2) is willing to sacrifice himself when he's 11

3) stands up for his friends

4) makes sure Harry feels like he belongs in the family

5) worries about Harry and rescues him from literal jail

6) stands up against Draco rather than by-standing and enabling his behavior

7) tries his level best to make sure Norbert the dragon is in safe hands and carries it out, albeit not in perfection

8) is with Harry every step of the way in his confronting the basilisk

9) sends Harry and Hermione long letters and calls them often to check up on them

10) stands up on a bitten leg to defend his best friend

11) always apologizes for any of his mistakes and is forgiving when others wrong him

12) works his way to join the Quidditch team unlike Draco who most certainly bought his way in

13) destroys at least 2 horcruxes

14) finds out how to defeat a horcrux

15) has an excellent enough memory and observation to notice Harry speaking parseltongue and also using it to his benefit which proves he's resourceful

now since I have 8 more such pictures to rebut and I do have a life, I will stop. These aren't even a twelfth of the remarkable things Ron has done though, so rest assured.

oh wait what did you say about him just existing and not working for anything? If I recall correctly, he did just as well as Harry did in school and didn't score well only in subjects he didn't care about. Which is true for most people except for Hermione who has an eidetic memory which not everyone has, understandably. Rote memorization is not the best way to get by in life, by the way.

what are the "so many reasons" behind why Harry is the best fit for Hermione? Kindly share so I can rebut those too, I'm rather free nowadays, my finals have been cancelled. You say there are so many reasons but don't even give one, yet you want me to take you seriously. I'm afraid that's impossible.

Romione shipper here, i don't dislike Hermione. I haven't met or seen many people in the book!romione fandom who dislike Hermione (except for Movie!Hermione). The question of someone you like ending up with someone you dislike doesn't particularly make sense. In Friends, Chandler ends up with Monica: now I'm not the biggest Monica fan (I don't hate her but I don't like her very much either) but they are my favorite couple because they make sense. It's about compatibility and character traits, not liking or disliking because that's just a set-up for a ghastly invitation for people to pair up hideousness. "Oh yeah, I like Harry and I also like Hagrid, they should be together. I mean it would be very very disgusting but that's my logic, now, you can't fight it. "- that's how you sound. Please read what you write. Your logic is just...abysmal. That's all I can say without breaking my resolve and berating you with colorful profanities.

3)

This is without the doubt, the easiest one to rebut. It's a delight to see such terrible arguments at my disposal. Come on, dear Harmione shippers, write something that makes me question my choices, not things that make me scoff in disbelief.

In this case, you're essentially providing us with theories. Unproved theories and speculation of what you believe because you'd say anything you like. Where's the proof of your theory, though? Where is that crazy radical Romione shipper who does this? Kindly show me these people. Oh yes, you wanna say we objectify Hermione and disrespect her and view her as a prize. This aches me, that you believe this. No one has ever insinuated this, ever, in the history of anything. What is this winner-loser theory? How do you round off Harry Potter to "an alpha-male ends up with lead-lady" trope and still say you're a fan of the series? Harry Potter doesn't fit in with that format. Ron, Hermione and Harry are co-heroes. Similar to how there's no main character in Friends or the Heroes of Olympus series or the Avengers. We're not living in the 80s anymore. Hermione will be a hero, invariably whether she ends up with Harry, Ron or no one. She ends up with Ron and that's it. Talking about her like this doesn't make you sound any better either. Now you're calling me a misogynist because I don't support the ship of two people who describe themselves as siblings. That's very mature of you. Well here's the thing- I'm not a misogynist. It's as simple as that. I believe that women are capable of anything and everything. I believe Hermione is an amazing person and she is a hero and a different person. I believe the series would be impossible without her. I believe she is no one's prize. There's no requirement of a prize. I just think, similar to canon and the truth and her romantic interest, she will have a great relationship with Ron. There's nothing complex or deep about it, really. No personal weird-thing, no psychological complex, no internalized misogyny. There's nothing deeper than what I said. I am not sexist. I am a feminist. I am all for women empowerment. I love women with the fabric of my being. I love Hermione. I think she's amazing. You only become sexist when you ship people with unstable power dynamics, a bully-victim relation or something of the sort. Neither Romione, nor Harmione are sexist. Heck if you paired Neville with Hermione you wouldn't be sexist. And I hate talking about this so much, I can't even tell you. This talk does make it sound like I treat Hermione like an object and I assure you I respect her and I normally won't talk like this unless someone just outright calls me sexist for something that's not sexist. And this is that situation.

4)

in the case of Romione, no one is too good for anyone. Both are amazing people who're heroes and have done amazing work. That's all I have to say. There's no league, they are romantically interested in each other. I have no intention on sounding lame, but, in love there is no league. As long as you're not putting in any effort and are extremely lazy and leech off of your partner, there is no such concept and no, Hermione is not "too good" for him. Unless of course you're talking about movie Hermione, who is too good for anyone.

5) (halftime!)

oh yes they try to pull this off and wonder why we hate them. Classic. This person likes to sound british, so let's switch up our language, yeah? At least then I won't be out of my element. Let me correct ya, Ron at his best is an amazing, loyal, friendly, brave, strategic hero. There you have it. Ron and 'git' can't be used in the same sentence. Now if you talk about Ron's achievements, I re-iterate you to point two. If it's too much work, here:

1) fights a troll when he's 11

2) is willing to sacrifice himself when he's 11

3) stands up for his friends

4) makes sure Harry feels like he belongs in the family

5) worries about Harry and rescues him from literal jail

6) stands up against Draco rather than by-standing and enabling his behavior

7) tries his level best to make sure Norbert the dragon is in safe hands and carries it out, albeit not in perfection

8) is with Harry every step of the way in his confronting the basilisk

9) sends Harry and Hermione long letters and calls them often to check up on them

10) stands up on a bitten leg to defend his best friend

11) always apologizes for any of his mistakes and is forgiving when others wrong him

12) works his way to join the Quidditch team unlike Draco who most certainly bought his way in

13) destroys at least 2 horcruxes

14) finds out how to defeat a horcrux

15) has an excellent enough memory and observation to notice Harry speaking parseltongue and also using it to his benefit which proves he's resourceful

hey, see, I like Ron and I took the time to copy-paste this instead of asking you to scroll up. And I'm a lot of bad things but I am not lazy. I stick to my deadlines like Hermione. I start my homework in library class and continue it during phys ed the day its given. And I am not exaggerating. Bloody hell, I wish I was. I'm the ceo of deadlines, mate, don't tempt me! So you can see that Ron is much more than just a "nice bloke". And being a "nice bloke" isn't a bad thing either. He's all the things I said: intuitive, strategic, helpful, loyal and on top of that he's also a nice person. Yes, I do see a bit of myself in Ron. I do. I see the insecure side. I waste my time hating myself and criticizing myself and undermining myself, telling me I'm no good. But Ron overcomes that. He inspires me to appreciate myself. Is that a bad thing? Are you going to shame me for having a low self-esteem? Do you want to worsen my low self-esteem and make me feel more like shit?

Now the person who replied to your comment saying, "he isn't a nice bloke most of time.", he is. He is not being nice twice in a span of 7 years. How often do you act rudely or with jealousy? Wasn't Harry yelling at everyone in caps lock in OOTP. Now I don't condemn him for that because he's a fucking hormonal teenager like me and that would make me a hypocrite, but by your logic why don't you condemn him? Or why not condemn Hermione for saying "I only date good Quidditch players" and shoving canaries at Ron's face because someone else kissed him, while she kept using Krum and Cormac to make him jealous. She wasn't being a nice girl, then, was she? Now, once again, i don't dislike her or hold that against her because guess what, mate, I'm a hormonal teenage girl who gets jealous most of the time and would probably react in a similar fashion in the spur of the moment (Not defending her actions here, just putting myself in her shoes.) In short, Ron is a nice bloke MOST OF THE TIME.

6)

It would be misogynistic to think that. The thing is, NO ONE DOES my dear friend! My dear daft friend. I have never heard anyone say that! why are you so hell-bent on portraying us as misogynists when no one ever says that? Stop assuming. Just stop. You are crossing a limit here, aren't you? Yes you are. You cannot say these sort of things. We never said that or believed that, no one ever said this to be a reason to ship Romione. God what is wrong with you? Literally, stop fucking ASSUMING god damn it! Do you want me to assume things about Harmione shippers? Do you want me to go there? Because I will go there! I will go there the moment you tell me to. Just challenge me.

Ron is not a perfect best boi , the reason why so many of us like him is that he's imperfect and tries to become better through the course of time. You are once again assuming and I am once again asking you to stop.

Ron might be an ordinary wizard. He might be poor, sure, but he's a pure-blood and won't face much if he chose not to fight. But he did. He fought. Now I identify with Ron's attitude a fair bit, but I am also likely to spend my day in a library without noticing. People aren't one dimensional. Stop trying to act like you're a psychologist, i know you're not. I don't even think Hermione's overbearing at all! You just insulted someone you're a big fan of. Jesus.

Both Hermione and Ron are strategic, jealous, passionate, feisty, argumentative, intellectual...

that's like 6 similarities. They aren't polar opposites in the slightest. Their differences are just: workaholic, not workaholic. Nerd, not a nerd. Like that's fucking it, man!

8)

being relaxed doesn't make you less independent or driven. A relaxed and levelheaded Hermione will think through things, not be impulsive, not panic etc. She doesn't need Ron. I don't understand your obsession with acting like we ever insinuated that. Then she doesn't need Harry either lol. Stop shipping her with Harry, then or like shut the fuck up. Being a bit relaxed won't stop her or anyone from hitting great strides. Just don't get relaxed to the point you're lazy and casual about everything, that's it.

9)

What do you mean? Ron is balanced. He does finish his work on time. And even if he does procrastinate, she could also help him not and be more driven. Of course, this is an open invitation for you to call me a sexist bitch because I said that she could help him and now you'll think her goal is to help him become better yada yada yada. Fuck off. Defeating the horcrux taught him enough. He respected her. He remembered about the elves when she didn't. He begged to be tortured instead of her. He wouldn't need it because school work and jobs are different and the same person might perceive those differently. Calmness and relaxation doesn't hinder your potential. Not caring and laziness does. You can't function if you work and are stressed 24/7 with zero breaks. Period.

10)

No i do not want (nor does anyone want) Hermione to become Ron. Being slightly calmer doesn't change up your personality. I'm sure many people dislike those sort of fanfics without a doubt. I hate OOC and I don't want Hermione to lose her intellect with Ron because that makes no sense. Ron himself is intellectual and loves arguing with her. They'd boost each other, more like it.

-------

okay thats it i am exhausted as fuck. thanks for reading, i appreciate it. notes and reblogs are appreciated, this takes work.

[leonardhoee]

Matchup #2

Thanks for the request @aurora-morning​ 💜💜

So I match you up with...

Comte!!

Your Song

Okay now this man is a complete gentleman but he's also very secretive so it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking at first.

He was in love with you pretty much since you arrived but you would never be able to tell. He spoils you and takes you out shopping almost every week. He brings you to the finest restaurants and brings presents back for you from various business trips. 

However, you think all of this is because he's just being nice. Truth is, with all the life experience he has, he doesn't really know how to handle his feelings and he deals with it in the best way he knows how. By spoiling you.

Your awkwardness isn’t a problem for him. If you think you did anything that might seem weird don’t worry he’s definitely seen worse (he’s seen naked, drunk Leo on a roof and he had to bring him back down, it doesn’t get worse than that)

He thinks that maybe you're better off not knowing about how he feels for the whole month you're there, because it might be scary being with a pureblooded vampire that's as powerful, and has as many secrets as he does. 

But he tries to spend time with you every chance he gets and he secretly asks Sebastian to ask you to bring his rouge and tea to him so he gets to see you. 

“Oh what a coincidence you're here Ma Cherie, why don't you stay a while and maybe help me with some paperwork? We can go to dinner together afterwards”

Speaking of dinners, he will leave a dress on your bed (that he designed specifically for you) with a note telling you to be ready by a certain time and he will take you to the best restaurants in Paris. Before you guys go home he takes you to his favorite bakery and gets you the best strawberry shortcake in the city.

“No of course its not a date I just didn't want to go to the restaurant alone” *nervous laugh

He is absolutely willing to make the first move. He’s a very perceptive man and can easily tell if social situations give you anxiety. He’s more than happy to be social for the both of you.

He thinks your glasses are adorable and sometimes he tries them on when you’re not around.

Both of you are basically flirting with each other by trying to impress each other and it’s quite hilarious to watch as a third party. (Pleaseee just admit your feelings already dorks)

It gets to a point where his feelings are blatantly obvious to Sebastian and Leonardo and they both encourage him to just tell you how he feels because he’s going to regret it if he doesn't. (Thats rich coming from you Leo)

He finally decides to do it and he brings a bouquet of Roses to your room and takes you on a walk in the garden where he had Sebastian plant your favorite flowers. (He figured he shouldn’t go TOO overboard but after that be prepared for the most extra dates ever.)

He is actually incredibly nervous but he looks perfectly calm on the outside as he tells you everything he loves about you and asks if you’d do him the honor of letting him love you as you deserve to be loved.

Doesn’t know how to tie a tie (hence all the clip on ties) and he’ll ask you to tie it for him.

He is a Feminist™ and he will never look down on you or talk over you. He values your intelligence and your opinions and he’ll always ask for your advice. He doesn’t just consider you his girlfriend, you’re his partner in every aspect of his life and he will treat you with the respect you deserve.

He is protective but he respects your independence and won’t overstep his boundaries. He just wants to support you in any way he can.

He is your number 1 fan and will be the first person to encourage and support your hobbies. He is so proud of you and will definitely brag about you to everyone.

He loves your voice and asks you to sing to him every night. He likes to lay down in your lap and have to stroke his hair as you sing to him. It’s his favorite thing to do to relax, he’ll usually fall asleep after. (Please do this, he desperately needs the sleep)

(One time neither of you realized Leo was sleeping under Comte’s desk while you were singing to him and both of them ended up falling asleep. You only found him after you hesrd a loud thump under the desk.)

He is incredibly affectionate and he hugs you and kisses you on the forehead and tells you he loves you every time he sees you. Everyone teases him for it but he couldn’t care less. He’s so whipped for you and he wants you to constantly feel how much he loves you.

As the two designated Mom Friends, you guys become the mansion’s parents. Congratulations!! You’ve just adopted 11 kids so have fun with that! Arthur will definitely come to ask you stuff Comte would otherwise say no to because he knows you can convince “dear old daddy” to do anything.

Gentleman in the streets but he’s a freak in the sheets. He is utterly devoted to your pleasure as you are a goddess in his eyes. Secretly loves to be bossed around by you and tied up.

He is incredibly romantic and he will send you love letters. He’ll speak French to you in bed if you want too. He quite literally treats you like a princess.

Being the person he is, he’s well versed in many subjects and will patiently listen to all your theories and will even give you more information on any of the subjects your desired. He’ll even teach you alchemy if you ask him.

He’s traveled a lot and tells you about history from all the different times he’s visited Philippines. He would love to take you there if you want to see what it looked like in this time period! He loves learning about other cultures and can actually speak a bit of Tagalog.

Your wedding would be a big deal (like inviting royalty kind of big deal. After all they ARE Comte’s friends) and will have multiple events. You’ll have two wedding ceremonies (one of them is a typical french wedding and the other one is a Filipino wedding ceremony) and he will host a ball at Versailles for your reception. (You already KNOW Leo is gonna roast tf out of him in his best man speech)

Anyways you guys are adorable!! Please adopt me.

Hope you enjoyed!!💜

Here’s my Comte playlist!

[hillaryisaboss]

Roseanne proves Russian propaganda worked: 7 reasons we can't allow Roseanne to normalize Trump

I hope Roseanne’s reboot is all one big satire. One big “bait-and-switch.”  

What do I mean by that, exactly? What I mean is… I hope what Roseanne is secretly doing is showing us how the working-class lost its way and ended up voting for Donald Trump. And that through Darlene moving home, and presenting Roseanne with a gender-fluid grandson, she slowly starts to realize her vote for the #1 bully of all-time was a mistake.

I hope the entire 10th season of Roseanne shows this evolution in Roseanne’s character – Trump supporter realizing the errors of their thinking when presented with modern America.  And who knows… maybe Roseanne herself is the only person able to reach these misguided working-class voters.

But if that’s not the case, and this isn’t one big ploy by Roseanne to change the hearts of Trump supporters, this is required reading for all Americans.

For better or worse, we all know Roseanne Barr is a bit of a bully like Trump.

Roseanne constantly fired people from her show (sound familiar?), viciously attacked critics (I can’t wait for her to read this), threatened to sue people, and thrived on constant controversy, celebrity feuds, and tabloid sensationalism. Roseanne and Donny are more similar than one might think.    

Is Roseanne the female version of Trump? 

Many on her show thought she was a tyrant, something Donald Trump wishes he could be in real life. Which is why all of these similarities between Roseanne and Trump make it all the more ironic and hypocritical when Roseanne attacks the bullies her grandson faces at school for wearing girls clothing.

Roseanne… you literally voted for a man that enabled the bullies that attacked your grandson. To ignore this glaring hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness is mind-boggling. Bullies across our nation were given the “green-light” to attack minorities when Trump won the Presidency. Roseanne should do some serious self-reflection and soul-searching on how her vote for Trump (the #1 bully of all-time) emboldened the very kids who bullied her grandson.

So all of this hypocrisy begs the question:

How did feminist hero Roseanne Barr go from supporting Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton during the 2008 Democratic primary (even writing a pro-Hillary article for the HuffingtonPost), to supporting Donald J. Trump (con-man and pussy-grabber) for President in 2016?

The answer is simple: Russian bots on Twitter.

After using Twitter to run for President in 2012, Roseanne submerged herself in political propaganda on Twitter (which she has since deleted).

There is no better proof than Roseanne herself that the Russians were successful with their online propaganda campaign. How else do you explain a feminist hero voting for a pussy-grabber over the most qualified woman to ever seek the Presidency?

Putin feared Hillary, and turning former supporters like Roseanne against Hillary was part of the mastermind. The ultimate con in American history to destabilize our nation in Putin’s favor.

Sadly, Roseanne is using her shows reboot to justify the unjustifiable: voting for a proud bigot who conned working-class people by scapegoating minorities and promising to return us to an America we will never be again.

So how will Roseanne go about justifying the unjustifiable?

By trying to say Hillary was an equally bad candidate – the “lesser of two evils” argument. Which was, after-all, Russia’s ultimate goal: muddy the waters so the American public thinks both candidates are equally bad.

“Neither Trump or Hillary will change anything, so why not give the finger to the establishment by voting for Trump? At least he gives the illusion of being on our side. He looks and sounds like us, right? Burn down the system!!”

This is a very petty and immature rationale from a group of people that have felt forgotten by the “establishment.” But it’s a rationale I fear far too many working-class people used to convince themselves that Trump (a 4-times bankrupt silver-spoon Daddy’s boy fraud) was somehow their guy.

Or maybe the working-class simply supported Trump in order to seek revenge against America for feeling ignored? But why is it always liberal America’s job to understand conservative America’s bigotry and ignorance? Didn’t 3 million more people vote for Hillary?

Given that blue America is the majority, don’t allow Roseanne to use her reboot to justify the unjustifiable. Never allow the minority support of bigot Trump be normalized or rationalized.

So in preparation of Roseanne’s reboot, I present to you 7 reasons why Roseanne is wrong about Hillary, Trump, and America:

1. Roseanne’s reboot tackles the skyrocketing cost of prescription medication.

Hillary Rodham Clinton fought for universal healthcare in the early 1990s, and eventually helped pass the Children’s Health Insurance Program – a program that covers 8 million children.

Hillary also secured healthcare for 9/11 first-responders as New York Senator, and President Bill Clinton passed the Family and Medical Leave Act.

I guess in addition to believing Russian propaganda, Roseanne doesn’t remember history, either.

The Clintons have been tackling the issue of healthcare for decades, and deserve credit for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Two achievements we take for granted now days but are actually a result of the pragmatic Clintons.

Heck, while Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, the Clintons helped expand access to healthcare in poor, poverty stricken communities. Around the same time, Donald Trump was being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination (doesn’t Roseanne have an African-American grandaughter in the reboot?).

The Clintons have a long record of achievements on healthcare. Why is this well-known history ignored by Roseanne? Did she forget?

2. Roseanne says Trump talked about “jobs.”

Hillary talked about jobs, too. But the media never covered it. Studies show that for the most part, the media only covered Hillary’s fake “e-mail scandal.”

Hillary had detailed policy plans to create jobs in 2016 America, such as clean-energy jobs. She even gave numerous speeches on her plans – speeches that weren’t covered by the media.

Meanwhile, con-man Trump promised to bring back coal jobs that will never come back to America. The original Roseanne Conner would have easily seen through Trump’s deception. Unfortunately, Roseanne Barr spent too much time on Twitter being subjected to Russian propaganda. I guess technology has unfortunate, unintended consequences?

Roseanne should have spent more time doing independent research regarding Hillary’s jobs plan rather than re-tweeting Russian bots on Twitter. Hillary promised green energy jobs of the future. Con-man Trump promised coal jobs that will never come back to America.

Oh and does Roseanne remember that President Bill Clinton created 22 million new jobs during the 1990s?

If you want to talk about jobs, let’s remember the prosperous and pragmatic Clinton Era. Meanwhile, con-man Trump shipped jobs overseas to China, stiffed American workers out of contracts, and hired immigrants rather than American workers to build his buildings.

Hillary’s jobs plan was crafted for the future. Trump’s jobs plan was crafted to con Americans into thinking we could transport back in time.

3. Roseanne says Hillary is a “liar, liar, pantsuit on fire.”

That’s only if you believe Russian propaganda and 40 years of manufactured “Clinton scandals.” Hillary was rated by fact-checking websites as the most honest politician running for President in 2016.

Furthermore – Hillary has never been found guilty of anything in over 40 years of “investigations.” I guess that would make Hillary the best liar of all-time, right? 40 years and not a single guilty verdict. Personally, I hope one day there is a book written debunking every single Clinton conspiracy theory.

Meanwhile, Trump has the all-time record for false and misleading statements. No President has ever lied at the rate Trump has lied. There is no distant second. Trump is in a league and category all on his own.

So making a joke about Hillary (who has never been found guilty of anything in 40 years) as being a liar rings hollow when you voted for a man who lies multiple times per-day (maybe even per-hour). I guess there was a true lack of self-awareness when this joke was written? Not only is it hypocritical, it proves Russian bots corrupted Roseanne’s mind.

Again – Hillary was rated by fact-checkers as the most honest 2016 candidate for President. Trump is the biggest liar of all-time. Hillary, unlike Trump, has never been found guilty of anything. Every single Hillary investigation has turned up nothing. No trial. No guilty verdict. The same can’t be said of Trump who has been found guilty or settled out of court hundreds of times.

This is yet another example of the Russians trying to muddy the waters and make Hillary seem like just as big of a liar as Trump is. Nothing could be further from the truth.

4. Roseanne says the Clintons are equally as corrupt as Trump.

Roseanne, just like Trump, consistently re-tweeted conspiracy theories about the Clinton Foundation, even though fact-checking websites debunked all of them.

Let us remember: the Clinton Foundation was given a higher charity rating than the Red Cross and provides 11.5 million people with HIV/AIDS medication – that’s more than half of all those affected by the virus worldwide.

Many of the Clinton Foundation conspiracy theories pushed on Twitter made it seem as though Hillary was just as bad as Trump. However, the Trump Foundation illegally paid off Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to hide Trump University fraud. Meanwhile, the Clinton Foundation helps treat millions of people affected by HIV/AIDS – treating more than half of all those affected by the virus worldwide.

Furthermore, the Clintons pay 35% in taxes (what do you pay, Roseanne?). We have yet to see all of Trump’s tax returns. Who truly is the corrupt one based on tax-rates?  

5. On Jimmy Kimmel, Roseanne said no American should want their President to fail.

So why did Roseanne support Trump, a man who led the racist birther movement against Barack Obama, the first African American President? And no, Hillary was not the “original” birther as Russian propaganda would have you believe.

Point is – why did Roseanne enable and spread the propaganda of those who made it their mission to make Obama a one-term President?

This is yet another example of Roseanne’s hypocrisy.

If Roseanne actually believes what she is saying, why did she enable and embolden those who wished for Obama to fail as President? The double standard is both maddening and terrifying all at once.

6. Roseanne hates Hillary’s foreign policy.

As Secretary of State, Hillary passed the first-ever U.N Resolution on gay rights (proclaiming: “human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights” on the world stage), and made it so trans Americans can legally change their gender on their passport. Hillary also rebuilt relations with every nation after the disastrous Bush Administration, traveling to 112 countries — more than any other Secretary of State. Our worldwide favorability rose 20% during Hillary’s tenure. Her primary focus was on women’s rights and health, bringing up issues such as forced abortion and maternal mortality rates. Hillary re-opened relations with Burma, enacted a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and killed Osama Bin Laden. She also was instrumental in putting together the Paris Climate Agreement, something Trump has since removed us from.

Roseanne supports Trump’s foreign policy because he enables Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians. Remember: Trump appealed to all prejudices – including prejudices against the Palestinian people. As a Jewish woman, Roseanne is a hardcore supporter of Israel.

Trump’s foreign policy consists of Twitter wars with dangerous dictators. How is that better than what Hillary accomplished as Secretary of State?

7. Roseanne hates the Clintons because of NAFTA.

George Bush Senior originally put NAFTA together. Bill Clinton oversaw the implementation of NAFTA due to denying Bush Senior a second term. NAFTA was originally Bush’s baby (not Clinton’s).

Instead of only remember the negatives of the Clinton Era, let us also remember the numerous positives:

—4-balanced budgets due to the superb compromising ability of Bill Clinton—Surplus —22 million new jobs —7 million fewer Americans living in poverty —Minimum wage up 20% —Assault Weapons Ban —Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act —Northern Ireland peace process —Campaign Against Teen Pregnancy: all-time low abortion rates —Office on Violence Against Women —Violence Against Women Act —Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP): 9 million children insured —Tax-credit for low-income Americans —Family and Medical Leave Act —Incomes rising at all income levels

Didn’t Roseanne also do well during the 1990s? And yes –  Roseanne’s show may have helped Clinton win in 1992. But Clinton resoundingly won re-election in 1996 due to producing results for the American people. 

Incomes were rising at all income levels, 22 million new jobs were created, minimum wage was up 20%, more children had healthcare (9 million covered under CHIP), and our country had a blanched-budget and a surplus. We also passed the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Plus, in-case you were wondering, Glass Steagall had nothing to do with the 2008 financial collapse according to fact-checking websites (try blaming Republican George Bush for a change). And sure… welfare reform sucked. But that’s because we had a GOP-dominated Congress and Bill Clinton was a true pragmatist (exactly what we need in a leader).

On balance, the Clinton Era was a great era for most Americans (including Roseanne). Just look at the long list of accomplishments! Hillary’s platform would have ushered in another pragmatic Clinton era, which would be going far better than the current Administration.

The worst thing that ever happened to Roseanne Barr was her Twitter account. She was constantly subjected to pro-Trump and anti-Hillary propaganda, causing her to support the pussy-grabber over the first-female nominee for President. In her Russian corrupted brain, Hillary was just as bad, if not worse, than Trump.

It’s truly sad that a former feminist icon didn’t support the first-female candidate for President due to Russian propaganda. This former feminist icon opted instead for a well-known misogynist. (And please don’t bring up Bill Clinton as your defense because he had consensual affairs and was then held accountable for his transgressions). Trump has yet to be held accountable for his abuse of women, and a true feminist would never support a man like Trump for President.

Unfortunately, Roseanne is going to attempt to use her shows reboot to legitimize Trump and justify her vote for the pussy-grabber. However, as much as Roseanne may try, Trump is not a legitimate President. Donald lost the popular vote by 3 million votes and was elected with Russian help (treason).

I don’t care how “forgotten” you feel by the establishment – it is never acceptable to support bigotry, discrimination, scapegoating, sexism, bullying, or hatred. I will never root for this “President” to succeed so long as he is a bigot filled with hate. Because if Trump succeeds, bigotry will be validated. That is something I will never support and something the original Roseanne Conner never would have supported, either. But the original Roseanne, unlike the Roseanne of the present, wasn’t corrupted by the Russians.  

Trump’s victory –aided by Roseanne/Russians on Twitter– legitimized bigotry and discrimination everywhere. Roseanne helped the very bullies she defends her grandson against. The embodiment of hypocrisy and irony.

Roseanne fell for the con-man fraud who promised to bring back obsolete coal jobs instead of researching Hillary’s jobs plan the media never covered – a plan that would have led to huge job growth, powered primarily by clean energy jobs of the future.

Roseanne is the ultimate example of the effectiveness that the Russian propaganda campaign had on Twitter. Roseanne was duped by Russian bots into thinking Hillary was as big of a liar as Trump (fact-checking websites confirm Hillary was the most honest 2016 Presidential candidate while Trump was rated the least honest). Luckily, even without Roseanne’s support, Hillary still won by 3 million votes. Roseanne will never be a member of the true American majority.

Roseanne is forever a member of the manipulated minority – manipulated by both Russian bots and a con-artist that was born with a silver-spoon in his mouth. A man who prides himself on bullying and sexism. A man who cheated working-class people out of contracts his entire life, shipped jobs to China, and hired immigrants over American workers to build his buildings. A man whose tax-plan only benefits people like himself.

The woman who always spoke truth to power and never fell for anyone’s manipulation finally did at the hands of Russian bots on Twitter. A true American tragedy.

Over 165 million Americans were subjected to Russian propaganda online saying both candidates were equally as bad. So for those that say Russia’s propaganda campaign had no impact on the election, look no further than Roseanne as “exhibit A” proof.

Roseanne preferred a “relatable” con-man over an overqualified “elitist” woman. Hillary was too “smug” for Roseanne’s taste. She preferred the pussy-grabber propaganda artist who looked and sounded like Dan Conner. A con-man who puts billionaires like himself above people like the Conners. A con-man who cheated drywallers like Dan Conner out of money his entire career.

I’m still holding out hope this is all satire and in the season finale of the 10th season, Roseanne will admit she was wrong about Trump and that she should have voted for Hillary (you know, the woman who worked for decades on healthcare and whose husband left us a booming economy and surplus). Because after 1 year of a Trump Presidency, can anyone really still say their vote was the right decision? I’d give anything to transport back to the Clinton years based on what we currently have now.

Roseanne Barr truly could do our country a great service by helping convince those who voted for Trump that they were wrong. Sadly, she’s still on Twitter submerging herself in Russian propaganda – believing that the Democrats are just as bad as Republicans. I guess that’s how Roseanne went from supporting Hillary in 2008 to now supporting Trump.

Thankfully, Hillary still won by 3 million votes despite Roseanne betraying women and supporting a sexist bigot. I’m proud to stand with the 66 million majority who voted for the slogan “Stronger Together.” Trump’s Electoral College victory will never represent me or the majority of Americans.  

Sadly, I guess false promises and scapegoating can even manipulate those you once viewed as idols. Maybe birds of the bullying feather truly do flock together?

So please defend Hillary and tweet @therealroseanne when she bashes Hillary with lies on her shows reboot.

Because we need to declare once and for all: Hillary is not nor has she ever been “just as bad as Trump.” Just ask the millions of people who receive HIV/AIDS medication from the Clinton Foundation – over half of all those affected by the virus worldwide. Or look at the hundreds of guilty Trump convictions vs. the zero guilty convictions for Hillary. Or the fact that the Clintons gave us 4-balanced-budgets while Trump had 4-bankruptcies. Or Hillary’s work at the Children’s Defense Fund investigating African American juveniles being placed in adult prisons. Or the Clintons working tirelessly on the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Face it Roseanne: you were duped by two abusive, sexist men (Putin and Trump) into hating Hillary, the first woman to run on a major party’s ticket for President, and who will become a bigger feminist icon than you could ever dream of becoming. Critics always said Roseanne hated other women who were more powerful than her. Did Hillary take your crown, Roseanne?

The old Roseanne Conner is a true feminist icon.

The new Roseanne Conner voted for the sexist pussy-grabber, which enabled bullies everywhere (ie: the kids who bullied her grandson).  

PS: Or maybe Roseanne simply wanted Trump to win so there would be a reason for her show to be given a reboot? 

Never normalize the con-man bigot silver-spoon fraud.

@roseanneonabc

[ars-historia-est]

Ancient Greeks aren’t a currently existing marginalized group, therefore you can’t appropriate anything from them. You getting your panties in a bunch is not comparable to the actual tangible harm caused to groups experiencing real cultural appropriation. No one is systems discriminating or committing violence against modern Greeks because of fanfiction.

That wasn’t the point of the post. The point was,as your anon message so aptly demonstrates,that all of you that are so willing to get offended over even respectful use of other cultures and mythologies become downright hostile and condescending when actual,living,Greek people,with a claim to their mythology ask you not to forget that it IS  part of a living culture,and as such deserves to not be divorced from its cultural and historical context.

Do whatever you want,anon, I couldn’t care less. Headcanon Artemis as a lesbian. Draw Apollo black. Insist that the myth of Medusa is actually feminist,whatever. It’s your right,and I neither wish nor care to infringe upon that. I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to,because none can dictate to the other what to think or do. But don’t go around claiming that you have a real grasp on the meaning and philosophy behind Greek mythology and culture when you do those things. Don’t pretend there is some higher moral cause,because you know well that it is all wish-fullfilment and indulgence. It is not bad at all,but you don’t get to be offended when people with actual knowledge talk about it and explain the meaning behind concepts and images that have become bastardized by pop culture. You aren’t discovering any higher truth while making memes about how Zeus was all but a rapist and writing high school AUs where the gods take Gender Studies. You’re having fun.Have your fun,but don’t pretend you wouldn’t get YOUR panties in a bunch if it was done to any other “approved” culture.Greek mythology is worthy of some respect. It was,after all,a religion once upon a time,and a very important one at that.

As for the oppressed part, it is really not at all to your credit that you deem cultures worthy of respect and consideration only when they are “oppressed” according to your narrow,arbitrary definitions. Greeks have been very much oppressed,you know. They fought hard to keep their culture.They were enslaved, they had genocides commited against them,war crimes,deportations, they faced racism in Europe and in America. Their economic and social position is at present extremely precarious. Nations that have benefited greatly from their culture and mythology and innovations now point the finger at them,and laugh and slander them. So,anon, you don’t know jack shit about Greece and its history,like I can tell you don’t know jack shit about a lot of things.

So,next time, don’t impose your US-centric, theoretical, utilitarian oppression theory on a nation and country so far removed from your experience. You are not the arbiter of the respect each culture deserves. That is not only insulting and degrading,but also imperialist. And oppressive.

Two can play this game,you see.

If you deign to respond,come off anon. We are having a conversation.I won’t eat you.

[seawolvesanddragons]

Merlin Short - The Youtuber AU

Alright, to start with, Gwaine [Username: AngrIrishman] mostly does prank videos; his is primarily a comedy channel. It starts off as in the moment pranks (probably while he is uni). As he gains more followers and grows more confident he starts doing a few sketches, usually the same characters in different scenarios (the series “drunk Irishman confused by British things is the number one favourite.) After a semester or two he drops out of uni, deciding it isn’t for him and he was only following family pressure, and he wants to do follow this youtube idea. He mostly pranks friends and family, all harmless stuff. After he meets Merlin he does a good deal of his pranks on him, but Elyan and Percival show up the mst as his victims (or partners in crime) since he’s lived with them both. He’s always willing to help out his friends with their videos, and often appears in Percival’s gaming competitions. Occasionally, for when Gwaine wants to address something serious or do a straight video of something bothering him, he has a series of “what’s aleing me today” where he talks about the serious stuff under the guise of drinking. His is one of the bigger youtube stars and his fame only skyrockets after he meets the others.  Percival [AllTankedUp] started in youtube as just responding to some of the more ridiculous challenges (planking, cinnamon challenge, parkour, etc) but ended up accidentally setting a ton of records. He started getting a lot of followers suggesting more challenges for him to do. After a year or two he began  

uploading video game run throughs after he purchased a video game and streamed playing it, not expecting anything big to come of it. The first video ending up trending for a few hours and requests came pouring in. However his biggest project, and the one he is most proud of and best known for, comes along in year three, after he met Elyan. They began recreating live action versions of video games, giant board games, etc. The internet fucking loses it over these videos. Most of them are endearingly low budget - the first is a live action super mario, where they had set up mushrooms and platforms in the park and a plushie princess peach is the prize. Elyan did MATH for this, guys.  Percival has to do exactly what Elyan tells him to do when Elyan holds the “controller” and vice versa. The video is ten minutes long and mostly consists of them falling over. Percy barely wins in the end, but he holds the plushie up all proud, looking adorable. By the next day they have over a hundred subscribers asking for more. Some of the live actions are HUGE events, brining in all of Percy’s friends and acquaintances and even family members but that’s usually only once a year. Typically, it’s no more than Percy, Elyan, and Gwaine or Leon or Merlin. Elyan helps out a lot with most of the recreations, but Percival came up with the idea and is the driving force behind it. He also has a side channel for workout videos after 2 1/2 years of requests, where he posts irregular updates. Elyan [Elyuminati] gets pulled into youtube by Gwen, and starts out as the occasional guest star in her vlogs, before submitting the odd vlog video himself, usually just him ranting about whatever in his life is annoying him at the time. It was meant to just be a way to let off steam, he didn’t expect anyone to watch them, but Elyan has a certain kind of odd charm and humor that attracts a humble but loyal following. During his gap year he travels around Europe and posts a lot of video diaries as a way of keeping in touch with Gwen, and it steadily improves over time. He starts doing “day in the life of” or “creepy ghost tour” or just sharing crazy stories about his travels. Elyan’s not a bad artist, so he’ll sometimes recreate brief sketches of the crazy stuff that happened to him while narrating what is going on. After his gap year (which almost turned into two) he returned to the UK and ended up rooming with Percy, who he knew from youtube, and started getting a degree in maths. His channel with Percy to do live action games took off, and he ended up being offered a job at a radio station after a year or so. The radio felt he had a personality that worked over radio just as well as camera. His radio show has a little bit of everything in it: acting as a voice of the millennial people, sharing whatever crazy thing happened to him that week, traveling and reviewing places and (his latest obsessions) weird news stories and conspiracies. (Leon and Gwaine could be blamed for the last one.) He doesn’t post as much except for the game videos or guest starring in others, since’s he’s busy with his radio show, but he will occasionally do a vlog session now and again, usually on his theories on conspiracies, game of thrones, and why the cosmos hates him enough to stick him with Gwaine. Leon [GiantRedGnomes], unlike Percy and Elyan, actually means to start a youtube channel. He starts off with gaming videos, including a dramatic series of the SIMS that everyone gets a little too invested in. However Leon is very conscious of the good that youtube can do, and so he also starts doing more educational style videos with fun animation. His main topics are history (but the fun kind, he focuses a lot on the weird parts of European history that no one ever talks about) space and alien life, etc. He also reviews a lot of popular tv shows and movies and shares his thoughts, opinions, and predictions for them as well as how the nerdier stuff checks out. Being the gentleman that he is, he typically tries to post both spoiler and non spoiler versions. He and Merlin start a Dnd series where they do short campaigns with different members of their friend group and other willing youtube stars. Lancelot [Lancephew], like Leon, does youtube “for the greater good.” He started youtube in high school as a project to bring “truly great people” into the spotlight by interviewing the people in his town about amazing things they had done in their lives, and he still tries to post videos like that whenever he can. Half of his videos are him taking news stories, politics, economic theories, etc and explaining it in layman’s terms for the average viewer. He shares his own opinions in the video as well. During college Lancelot started adding a musical element to his interview stories, writing his own songs to bring into the background. This branched out into him writing instrumental music, which he often shares on youtube and itunes. Lancelot is currently doing a YouTube Red project in aide of a charity that is about small town civilians having to deal with a zombie dystopia in a realistic manner - asking questions such as “do we still have to pay for data?” “Can someone take my braces off.”) Also, he’s dating Gwen and they do really cute “ask us questions” and dating game videos that the internet loves. There are also several videos of his dog doing crazy things he manages to catch on film. Gwen [GwenSmash] is mostly a youtube vlogger, and she shares a little bit of everything. Her day to day life, sped up streams of the cosplay outfits she makes the group, sims and gaming videos, ask/advice videos, review videos, and stories in a series called “Growing up Gwen” where she shares moments of her childhood/teenage years having to deal with being the only girl in a household of guys, such as buying a bra, trying to find a video game character that is a female without exposed breasts, etc. After she gets to know all the guys better, she will share moments of being one of the few girls among many guys, and has no shame in calling them out. Half of her twitter is photos of the guys holding up a sign saying “I said/made *insert sexist remark here*.” She doesn’t really try to limit herself to one brand and just does all kinds of videos. She and Morgana are often work together/guest star in each other’s videos as flatmates and best friends.   Morgana [ExplodingSparkles] got into youtube during college at Gwen’s encouragement. She liked to create her own music mashups and Gwen starting encouraging her to share them on youtube. Nowadays, she and Lance will team up occasionally to do music together, and she has written a few of her own songs, all released on youtube/itunes. A LOT of her video vlogs are feminist, LGBTQA, and wealth inequality rants, typically following her having to talk to Uther. She as a popular series called “Ask Morgana” where she answers questions her subscribers ask her. The beginning/middle of her channel (when it was getting big) has a lot of anger and rant videos about everything wrong with the world. Morgana eventually grew out of her angry stage, and began discussing the issues from a healthier pov, such as how you can be an ally, etc. She also started doing a lot more comedy sketches, all written and directed by herself. Some of them just have her in it as multiple people, others have her and Gwen or other guest stars. Some of them are just sketches about funny moments in her life, but most are original content, such as “Smart Shakespeare in Five Minutes” where she acts out a sketch of Shakespeare’s plays where everything goes very differently, usually based on one character making a smarter decision. Arthur [KingCamelot] started doing youtube in his final year of boarding school, and for the first year or so he and Morgana both tried to hide the fact that they were doing youtube from each other, until one day Morgana stumbled across his channel after it was recommended after one of Gwen’s videos. This was over summer break and the result was her barging in during one of his vlogs, and the entire (loud and hilarious) conversation was caught on film. Arthur later uploaded it to youtube, and neither will admit it is one of their favourite videos. Arthur kept it in a vlog style during uni, sharing his thoughts on current events, challenge videos, his favourite books and tv shows, his daily life and his struggle with uni/the business degree his father wanted him to get. He ended up switching to film editing sophomore year after Morgana, Leon and other youtuber friends supported his ideas. While it made things rockier with his father, Arthur was much happier. Videos became much more frequently after that, and Arthur began to guest star in his friends videos as well. Arthur became a big name on youtube almost instantly, largely because of his good lucks and his notoriety as the son of a famous parliament member, but remained a big name through his own merit. About midway through his time at uni Arthur began to post videos about insightful topics about things that suggested he was starting to see the world a bit differently. After he graduated about 4 years ago, it started to turn into full blown advocacy and outreach videos raising awareness for social change. Of course, Arthur didn’t get to that point by himself. Enter Merlin, stage right. Merlin [MerlinTrixx] started youtube HIS final year of public schooling, about two years after Arthur. He started with just short simple vlogs and magic tricks that even professional magicians couldn’t figure out. He followed Gwen and Morgana and saw Arthur a few times in their videos or recommended suggestions. After picking up on Arthur’s rather one sided view of how wealth and poverty work he called him out on it in a private message. Arthur did NOT take it well. There began a video war where both boys passive aggressively mentioned the other. Before it got to far, however, they accidentally ended up meeting at a youtube convention. (Arthur was there to speak on a panel, Merlin went to learn editing tips). The recognized each other and ended up talking for the remaining two days of the convention and became fast friends. Gwen, who had known Merlin through uni for about a year now, had had no idea that Arthur and Merlin had been complaining to her for the past few months about each other and was ready to knock sense into both of them when she found out. After becoming friends, Arthur and Merlin began showing up in each other’s videos more. Merlin, who hated his roommates, began hanging around more at Arthur and Leon’s flat (they went to a different uni in the same city, but had moved off campus) instead of Gwen’s as much. By the end of sophomore year, Merlin had gained a decent number of followers and his channel consisted of vlogs, his magic tricks, him and Arthur hanging out and being weird, and sharing his vast and unparalled knowledge of all things fantasy and nerdy. He, Leon and Gwen get into the longest discussions when they do reviews together. Merlin takes some time off of school, still unsure what he wants to do beside youtube, and moves in with Arthur to split the rent. The videos continue in earnest, and views/followers for both boys continue to grow as they feed off of one another, make more compilation videos, and add more content. After a couple of years, more than half their followers are wondering if they are more than just flatmates, but they are keeping quiet on the matter. The both still have their own channel, which they update frequently, but they also have a shared channel where they do reviews of shows they both like, ask/challenge requests, gaming videos, a few prank videos - they got into a prank way with Percy, Elyan and Gwaine once. Morgana and Gwen somehow won. They also do a deep discussion on Arthurian legend and other mythos, in comedic style. They are known as the “Avalon Nine” - a nickname given to them by the internet after they learned they all knew each other and they frequently appear in each others videos now that they all live in the same city. Morgana and Gwen had met in boarding school, and are currently living together after Morgana moved back after Uni until Lancelot finally asks Gwen to marry him, which Morgana suspects will happen soon. Gwen met Merlin at their uni, the same city that Arthur and Leon were going to uni in. Arthur already knew Gwen through Morgana and they had hung out fairly often, which only increased after they both befriended Merlin. Merlin and Gwen both met Lancelot separately at youtube conventions, and thought it hilarious the day they found out they both knew him. Lancelot moved to the city after graduating uni. Elyan met everyone through Gwen and Morgana met everyone through Gwen and Arthur. Gwaine met Merlin at a convention and later Merlin recognized him auditing his film class for “free editing tips/ideas.” They became fast friends and Gwaine spent a few nights in Merlin’s dorm when his water or heat wouldn’t work. He moves in with Elyan when he comes back from his gap years. Lancelot and Percival, who knew each other prior to the rest of the group, lived with each other for a while before the landlord sold the building. Lance moved to a single while Percival moved in with Elyan and Gwaine. There have been a series of “who knows you better” challanges and games throughout the group, including ones based off of dating games, best friend games, and family games. Merlin and Arthur have won them ALL. Even against Lancelot and Gwen that one time. Leon shared in one of his videos that Arthur and Merlin are also banned from teaming up in charades, pictonary and catch phrase in the gaming videos because they are undefeatable and possible psychic.  Bonus:  Mordred is obviously much younger than the others (just now starting Uni while the others are in their mid to late twenties). So he grew up watching a lot of their earlier stuff and he just idolizes them. He somehow managed to befriend them through social media/convenstions and is a bit surprised he is actually on first name basis with these amazing, talented (giant dorks). He appears in their videos sometimes but is hesitant  to upload anything on his own channel for a long time, since it is harder to get started on youtube now than it was for his older friends. After some encouragement he uploads a few, and the whole  group advertises him since they all kind of adore him, he’s like a little brother. Unlike the others though, Mordred doesn’t vlog or do video games or reviews or anything. Oh no. His videos are all freestyle rapping/spoken word poetry. About whatever catches his fancy. The weirdest thing is they’re GOOD. Its at such odds with his personality but it is what it is. Gwaine has started a betting pool on when Mordred reaches 1,000 subscribers.  Cenred is a little asshole who does mean/staged prank videos and blogs full of sexist and racist remarks on youtube. The group hates him, half of youtube boy cots him and he has had several scandals.  Elena is a youtube they all know and are friendly with, but because she lives in Scotland they aren’t as close. She does a lot of gaming videos, embarrassing stories from her life, and videos about her horse.  Morgause is a powerful admin/part owner of youtube and constantly makes decisions that hurt most independent and creative youtubers. At one point she tried to flag coming out videos or videos with content/opinions she didn’t agree with. She also pressures them to do advertising and tampers with the recommended and trending list. The group pushes back against these regulations, and it turns into an all out war, where Gwaine, Merlin and Arthur are all nearly banned from youtube before Morguase is fired. 

[kittenmalfoysactualartblog]

You said you had characters and I’m interested to hear more. I also wanted to know what a dollhouse is. I have an idea but I don’t wanna assume ya know

*toyhouse. Or more specifically toyhou.se a website for organizing characters, sub characters, literature, and images of said characters. It's super cool, but still in beta so one needs a code. I barely managed to snap one up from someone offering online. It's a bit of a lifesaver, although a bit annoying that I have to constantly log back in.toyhou . se/ KittenMalfoy/ characters/folder:295919I'm not sure if it'll let me link since I never get asks, but delete the spaces and you've got my toyhouse and the folder of my main characters and world. Vampires basically. I have a lot of lore unfortunately it's not linked and I might have to make another post for all of that, and me and my friend are working on a unique language for the vampires. And they have their own religion, and its said that all other religions are based on it. Not all but a lot, but the vampires exaggerate. And I have this gigantic world in my head and at least 90% isn't written down anywhere.Tera Perne is the real main character and the main plot line follows her from the time she was turned until modern era. And shes somewhere around 2000 so she's interacted with so many people. At first I just had the main "side characters" if you will on toyhouse. That would be Victoir Perne, Vita and Cassius Voltair, Iggy, Larry, Davide Knighting, Elizabeth Ringer, and Narcissa, and Lilith. With some added side characters for a chiche plot line that I decided not to pursue.So these main characters are important to me and I started building their mansions and clan houses in Minecraft when I didnt have motivation to write. But I started running out of my main characters. So some dumb part of me decided let's add 28 more characters, most of whom are not yet on toyhouse. So I started making icons and outfit collages for them to get a sense of who they are. Putting them online gives them age, clan, where the live, what they do. But I still havent given them personalities, so I scrolled on here for some quick prompts to write fast one shots for these new characters.And toyhouse added the literature feature so I can connect these oneshots to my characters. Most dont have any ideas yet, but there in the works still.I have so much of the lore in my head it will fill this answer fast. But the rundown is the common weaknesses of vampires are false. They are almost God like. Unless you set them on fire. Then they're dead dead. Forever. Lilith, Adam's first wife before Eve, was the original feminist and the mother of all vampires. There are real stories about this. And I played on that as the birth of vampires. This brings into the religion. Lumos, who is the good and light and creative powers in the universe, is the actual God in Christianity. Nox is all the dark, destructive, chaotic forces in the universe, and is generally Satan/the devil, although he has more powers. And it breaks off here that Lumos created the universe, Nox likes putting his(altho technically neither sex nor gender. Same goes for Lumos) nose into everything, but they both sat back to watch Earth come together with only some minor touches. And evolution is technically correct in this world. Lumos and Nox would simply help it along in the creation of mankind.Theres a lot more to the religion, but I'll save it right now. More to vampire lore. Lilith is the mother, and for a period physically birthed what is called the first generation of vampires. When she was cursed to be a vampire, so were her children. Nox blessed them with venom to turn humans to make more of their kind. Only those who were birthed are the first generation. I think we all understand how generations work. Lilith died eventually, and so her vampire children began splitting into clans. Generally, first gens were clan leaders. Altho, of course, as time progressed younger and younger vampires started their own clans.In more modern times, surviving first gens literally have control over the world. Mankind has the illusion that they have power, but in this reality they dont. At all. Vampires choose governmental leader, plan all wars and battles. Specifically I mention Hitler and the Nazis in my story. Hitler was definitely vampire appointed and rumored to be a vampire himself. Those conspiracy theories of him surviving after the war ended. Could be true in this universe. Vampires often had Nazi servants and would use the famous Nazi human experiments to find more servants, or just used them as a guise for research of vampirism, how it works, and where it starts.Blood servants are a whole other set of lore and history. Basically if a vampire shares his blood with a human, that human loses his will and the vampire can order them to do just about anything but kill themselves. The blood servants, or slaves as vampires call them because they're assholes, have no free will.I dont know what else to add cuz I havent slept, but theres a very long but shortened version of it all without all the complexities.

[a-room-of-my-own]

Four years ago, I wrote about my decision to live as a woman in The New York Times, writing that I had wanted to live “authentically as the woman that I have always been,” and had “effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities.”

Three years ago, I decided that I was neither male nor female, but nonbinary—and made headlines after an Oregon judge agreed to let me identify as a third sex, not male or female.

Now, I want to live again as the man that I am.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Despite participating in medical transgenderism for six years, my body is still intact. Most people who desist from transgender identities after gender changes can’t say the same.

But that’s not to say I got off scot-free. My psyche is eternally scarred, and I’ve got a host of health issues from the grand medical experiment.

Here’s how things began.

After convincing myself that I was a woman during a severe mental health crisis, I visited a licensed nurse practitioner in early 2013 and asked for a hormone prescription. “If you don’t give me the drugs, I’ll buy them off the internet,” I threatened.

Although she’d never met me before, the nurse phoned in a prescription for 2 mg of oral estrogen and 200 mg of Spironolactone that very same day.

The nurse practitioner ignored that I have chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, having previously served in the military for almost 18 years. All of my doctors agree on that. Others believe that I have bipolar disorder and possibly borderline personality disorder.

I should have been stopped, but out-of-control, transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.

I’d learned how to become a female from online medical documents at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital website.

After I began consuming the cross-sex hormones, I started therapy at a gender clinic in Pittsburgh so that I could get people to sign off on the transgender surgeries I planned to have.

All I needed to do was switch over my hormone operating fuel and get my penis turned into a vagina. Then I’d be the same as any other woman. That’s the fantasy the transgender community sold me. It’s the lie I bought into and believed.

Only one therapist tried to stop me from crawling into this smoking rabbit hole. When she did, I not only fired her, I filed a formal complaint against her. “She’s a gatekeeper,” the trans community said.

Professional stigmatisms against “conversion therapy” had made it impossible for the therapist to question my motives for wanting to change my sex.

The “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (Fifth Edition) says one of the traits of gender dysphoria is believing that you possess the stereotypical feelings of the opposite sex. I felt that about myself, but yet no therapist discussed it with me.

Two weeks hadn’t passed before I found a replacement therapist. The new one quickly affirmed my identity as a woman. I was back on the road to getting vaginoplasty.

There’s abundant online literature informing transgender people that their sex change isn’t real. But when a licensed medical doctor writes you a letter essentially stating that you were born in the wrong body and a government agency or court of law validates that delusion, you become damaged and confused. I certainly did.

Painful Roots

My trauma history resembles a ride down the Highway of Death during the first Gulf War.

As a child, I was sexually abused by a male relative. My parents severely beat me. At this point, I’ve been exposed to so much violence and had so many close calls that I don’t know how to explain why I’m still alive. Nor do I know how to mentally process some of the things I’ve seen and experienced.

Dr. Ray Blanchard has an unpopular theory that explains why someone like me may have been drawn to transgenderism. He claims there are two types of transgender women: homosexuals that are attracted to men, and men who are attracted to the thought or image of themselves as females.

It’s a tough thing to admit, but I belong to the latter group. We are classified as having autogynephilia.

After having watched pornography for years while in the Army and being married to a woman who resisted my demands to become the ideal female, I became that female instead. At least in my head.

While autogynephilia was my motivation to become a woman, gender stereotypes were my means of implementation. I believed wearing a long wig, dresses, heels, and makeup would make me a woman.

Feminists begged to differ on that. They rejected me for conforming to female stereotypes. But as a new member of the transgender community, I beat up on them too. The women who become men don’t fight the transgender community’s wars. The men in dresses do.

Medical Malpractice

The best thing that could have happened would have been for someone to order intensive therapy. That would have protected me from my inclination to cross-dress and my risky sexual transgressions, of which there were many.

Instead, quacks in the medical community hid me in the women’s bathroom with people’s wives and daughters. “Your gender identity is female,” these alleged professionals said.

The medical community is so afraid of the trans community that they’re now afraid to give someone Blanchard’s diagnosis. Trans men are winning in medicine, and they’ve won the battle for language.

Think of the word “transvestite.” They’ve succeeded in making it a vulgar word, even though it just means men dressing like women. People are no longer allowed to tell the truth about men like me. Everyone now has to call us transgender instead.

The diagnostic code in my records at the VA should read Transvestic Disorder (302.3). Instead, the novel theories of Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling have been used to cover up the truths written about by Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Alice Dreger.

I confess to having been motivated by autogynephilia during all of this. Blanchard was right.

Trauma, hypersexuality owing to childhood sexual abuse, and autogynephilia are all supposed to be red flags for those involved in the medical arts of psychology, psychiatry, and physical medicine—yet nobody except for the one therapist in Pittsburgh ever tried to stop me from changing my sex. They just kept helping me to harm myself.

Escaping to ‘Nonbinary’

Three years into my gender change from male to female, I looked hard into the mirror one day. When I did, the facade of femininity and womanhood crumbled.

Despite having taken or been injected with every hormone and antiandrogen concoction in the VA’s medical arsenal, I didn’t look anything like a female. People on the street agreed. Their harsh stares reflected the reality behind my fraudulent existence as a woman. Biological sex is immutable.

It took three years for that reality to set in with me.

When the fantasy of being a woman came to an end, I asked two of my doctors to allow me to become nonbinary instead of female to bail me out. Both readily agreed.

After pumping me full of hormones—the equivalent of 20 birth control pills per day—they each wrote a sex change letter. The two weren’t just bailing me out. They were getting themselves off the hook for my failed sex change. One worked at the VA. The other worked at Oregon Health & Science University.

To escape the delusion of having become a woman, I did something completely unprecedented in American history. In 2016, I convinced an Oregon judge to declare my sex to be nonbinary—neither male nor female.

In my psychotic mind, I had restored the mythical third sex to North America. And I became the first legally recognized nonbinary person in the country.

Celebrity Status

The landmark court decision catapulted me to instant fame within the LGBT community. For 10 nonstop days afterward, the media didn’t let me sleep. Reporters hung out in my Facebook feed, journalists clung to my every word, and a Portland television station beamed my wife and I into living rooms in the United Kingdom.

Becoming a woman had gotten me into The New York Times. Convincing a judge that my sex was nonbinary got my photos and story into publications around the world.

Then, before the judge’s ink had even dried on my Oregon sex change court order, a Washington, D.C.-based LGBT legal aid organization contacted me. “We want to help you change your birth certificate,” they offered.

Within months, I scored another historic win after the Department of Vital Records issued me a brand new birth certificate from Washington, D.C., where I was born. A local group called Whitman-Walker Health had gotten my sex designation on my birth certificate switched to “unknown.” It was the first time in D.C. history a birth certificate had been printed with a sex marker other than male or female.

Another transgender legal aid organization jumped on the Jamie Shupe bandwagon, too. Lambda Legal used my nonbinary court order to help convince a Colorado federal judge to order the State Department to issue a passport with an X marker (meaning nonbinary) to a separate plaintiff named Dana Zzyym.

LGBT organizations helping me to screw up my life had become a common theme. During my prior sex change to female, the New York-based Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund had gotten my name legally changed. I didn’t like being named after the uncle who’d molested me. Instead of getting me therapy for that, they got me a new name.

A Pennsylvania judge didn’t question the name change, either. Wanting to help a transgender person, she had not only changed my name, but at my request she also sealed the court order, allowing me to skip out on a ton of debt I owed because of a failed home purchase and begin my new life as a woman. Instead of merging my file, two of the three credit bureaus issued me a brand new line of credit.

Walking Away From Fiction

It wasn’t until I came out against the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children and transgender military service members in 2017 that LGBT organizations stopped helping me. Most of the media retreated with them.

Overnight, I went from being a liberal media darling to a conservative pariah.

Both groups quickly began to realize that the transgender community had a runaway on their hands. Their solution was to completely ignore me and what my story had become. They also stopped acknowledging that I was behind the nonbinary option that now exists in 11 states.

The truth is that my sex change to nonbinary was a medical and scientific fraud.

Consider the fact that before the historic court hearing occurred, my lawyer informed me that the judge had a transgender child.

Sure enough, the morning of my brief court hearing, the judge didn’t ask me a single question. Nor did this officer of the court demand to see any medical evidence alleging that I was born something magical. Within minutes, the judge just signed off on the court order.

I do not have any disorders of sexual development. All of my sexual confusion was in my head. I should have been treated. Instead, at every step, doctors, judges, and advocacy groups indulged my fiction.

The carnage that came from my court victory is just as precedent-setting as the decision itself. The judge’s order led to millions of taxpayer dollars being spent to put an X marker on driver’s licenses in 11 states so far. You can now become male, female, or nonbinary in all of them.

In my opinion, the judge in my case should have recused herself. In doing so, she would have spared me the ordeal still yet to come. She also would have saved me from having to bear the weight of the big secret behind my win.

I now believe that she wasn’t just validating my transgender identity. She was advancing her child’s transgender identity, too.

A sensible magistrate would have politely told me no and refused to sign such an outlandish legal request. “Gender is just a concept. Biological sex defines all of us,” that person would have said.

In January 2019, unable to advance the fraud for another single day, I reclaimed my male birth sex. The weight of the lie on my conscience was heavier than the value of the fame I’d gained from participating in this elaborate swindle.

Two fake gender identities couldn’t hide the truth of my biological reality. There is no third gender or third sex. Like me, intersex people are either male or female. Their condition is the result of a disorder of sexual development, and they need help and compassion.

I played my part in pushing forward this grand illusion. I’m not the victim here. My wife, daughter, and the American taxpayers are—they are the real victims.

[willthoughtout-blog]

I don’t know anything & Viva la Revolution

This was going to be a review for Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. I finished reading it a week or so ago, and thought it was utterly fascinating and completely changed my perspective on a load of different things.

But I’ve been thinking about it some more, and now I’m not sure that the most noteworthy thing is the book itself. Instead, I’m alarmed at how new the perspectives in the book were to me. Why hadn’t I been introduced to them before?

Sapiens is a history of the human race, from pre-historic humans evolving through different ways, then through the Cognitive Revolution, then the Agricultural Revolution, and then modern history. At the end, Harari discusses the future of the human race, and how we might change with gene-editing and so on.

What Harari does brilliantly is tie all of this enormous history together, and put it all in context. This storytelling and contextualisation alone makes this worth reading.

Reading a history where humans were once middling in the food chain. Reading a history that stresses how little we’ve changed since then. Reading a history that relates our current behaviours to evolutionary instincts (for example, the survival instincts that validate binge-eating). These are perspectives that I’d never been forced to seriously consider before. But why?

In my university studies, no one ever presented these arguments. Politics teaches all about recent, local histories - the customs and institutions that shape contemporary decision-making and discourse. Economics, by contrast, focuses on modern market economies, with supposedly natural laws of supply and demand deriving from self interest, featuring ‘rational’ and well-informed consumers. 

Neither discipline apparently saw it necessary to delve into a history that starts more than 2 or 3 decades back, or consider the activities of hunter-gatherer humans that existed for millennia, dwarfing the time period of modern political history. 

In my mind, this is a failing. Both disciplines would be enormously improved if they considered a longer view of history, with more sociological understandings of how humans work.

For example, as Sapiens outlines, racism is basically wholly socially constructed in each society. Depending on the culture and power dynamics of any given society, any one group might be racially targeted. But sexism? Virtually every known society since the Agricultural Revolution has involved patriarchal power relations. Why is this? Basically, no one knows. But in modern political teaching, it feels like sexism and racism are taught as broadly similar traits. How many politics professors stop to ask if they are? Perhaps it’s worth asking if humans are naturally disposed to patriarchal societies, in the same ways that elephants are to matriarchal ones. This doesn’t mean that we should accept unequal power. But surely we need to understand its root causes as much as possible, and I haven’t heard any feminist scholars talking about built-in patriarchy in the human psyche.

And for economists who model humans as broadly self-interested, how is this supported by sociological evidence about communal tribes? I don’t think human genetics radically changed in the 19th century. I think the dominant theories of humans did.

So, the subjects I studied might be a bit narrow. Big news.

But the thing is, it’s really hard to appreciate that what you’re being taught is just a certain set of perspectives when you aren’t taught anything else.

The reason Sapiens was so transformative to my way of thinking was because I’ve never been taught any anthropology. I’m sure it isn’t actually a bunch of whole new stuff - the guy didn’t do the research himself, he just collated it well. If I’d been able to do Anthropology 101 at uni, I’m sure one lecture would have opened my eyes as much as the first few chapters did.

This is what I hate so much about our uni system. It’s built around the idea that you’re being trained in a certain subject. If you study maths, you’re going there to do maths. Why would you learn sociology?

But is uni a glorified vocational training course? Or should it be? I don’t think so. Maybe it is for vets and doctors. But for the rest of us, only a small amount of the things we learn (if any) will be useful in a job. I much prefer the vision of a university that involves broadening our horizons, teaching us about the world and becoming better informed citizens. I’m sure this would make us better at our jobs, too.

The correlation between what people study and what they do later on is already low. This is something we can make the most of - we’re free to make our university system broader. If all the history undergraduates are just going to go into finance anyway, why not teach them about genetic engineering too?

I know we have ‘open units’, but these are just tinkering around the edges. (Also, I didn’t get any, so I’m bitter). 

I think it’s time for a (vomit) American-style system, where you learn about all different subjects, and then towards the end pick a specialist subject (perhaps).

It will teach economics graduates to be better policymakers, if they know that market ideologies aren’t the only way to view the world. It will make finance graduates better traders if they understand the environmental impacts of their trading. It will make genetic engineers better ethicists if they study philosophy. It will make students overall better citizens and democrats if they understand the different oppressive forces that have affected groups over the years, including their own country’s empire.

So, this book taught me a lot of things. But most of all, it taught me about my ignorance. And I think it’s time we changed the educational system that caused that ignorance.

[reactingtosomething]

Reacting to The Old Guard

She Is Not In Any Way Playing

The Setup: It’s our first Reaction to a comic book! And it’s not from the Big Two! Written by Greg Rucka (Wonder Woman, Gotham Central, Black Magick) and drawn by Leandro Fernandez (Punisher MAX, The Incredible Hulk, Deadpool & Cable) -- a duo who previously collaborated on Wolverine and Queen & Country -- The Old Guard is about (mostly) immortal warriors who can trace their lives back through Napoleon’s attempted invasion of Russia, the Crusades, and the conquests of Alexander the Great. They’re led by Andromache of Scythia, but you can call her Andy.

Andy’s fought and fucked, loved and loathed her way across thousands of years and at least six continents, and she is tired. So when a seemingly routine rescue mission goes way off the rails, and just a few hours later her team learns that -- contrary to what they’ve believed for a century or two -- they’re not the last immortals left after all, Andy has to find out if she can still surprise a world that she didn’t realize could still surprise her.

Kris, who briefly studied ancient military history in college, really liked Rucka’s Batwoman: Elegy and his webcomic Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, so when he learned about The Old Guard he asked Marchae -- a BIG fan of Rucka’s Lazarus -- if she’d want to react to it.

Two spoiler notices below, but until the jump it’s just first-issue stuff.

KRIS: So we’ve both read some Greg Rucka before

I don’t think I’m an expert, but I’m fairly aware of at least the range of his work

MARCHAE: I am a HUGE fan of at least one of his comics!!!

KRIS: And he seems to be One of the Good Ones re: male feminist writers

MARCHAE: YES I absolutely agree and spent even more time thinking about that as I read The Old Guard

and this notion that I have about “super heros”

but also I like some of the things he examines in his works, at least what I’ve read

KRIS: Oh good I think we’ve all wanted to hear more from you about your theory of superheroes, so definitely feel free to get into that when it’s relevant

MARCHAE: LOL

I definitely will talk more that’s for sure - and especially since I’m reading Jessica Jones at the moment

KRIS: Also I really like how distinctive most of the faces in this are, just wanted to say that upfront although I am not super qualified to discuss the art

MARCHAE: So I’ve spent some time making connections between what I’m currently reading , a traditional comic, versus the indie books

Neither am I - but the art is gorgeous

KRIS: OH and for our readers who may not be super into comics (yet), maybe we should say how we’re reading

I’m using the Comixology reader on their website, in Guided View mode

MARCHAE: And I use an app from my public library called Hoopla

I also use  a guided view mode - however I definitely prefer hardcopies

KRIS: I like Guided View a lot, although occasionally you lose some of the impact of splash pages, and there are very rarely (but especially with older comics) sequencing errors

ANYWAY sorry tangent

MARCHAE: I am reading newer ones mostly, it definitely feels more cinematic to me reading it electronically.

I like it a lot especially for fast paced ones like The Old Guard

like an action film

KRIS: But I wanted to just get it out there that there are good accessible digital ways to read comics, which is often more affordable, and also for some reason Amazon is selling a bunch of Marvel comics at massive discounts

Yes! Thank you for getting us back on track -- the action layouts here are great

MARCHAE: Affordable and FREE!

and you’re welcome!

I am a newbie to comics- I’ve only been reading them for a year maybe less - and I am obsessed with how much I can relate to them from a screenwriting perspective in terms of sequencing and layout. In this weird abstract way. This was one of the best one’s I’ve read in a while in terms of the pacing with layout - and I love it. I actually started re-reading the book just to gawk at the art etc

KRIS: Oh you should check out Rucka’s web comic Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether [see above] -- it was like the equivalent of a page or so twice a week, and Rucka’s script for each entry was included

MARCHAE: **GASPS**

KRIS: I always mean to really break down and study a comic book or two but just like with studying TV, I end up being too lazy, and just hoping I’ll absorb lessons through sheer osmosis

MARCHAE: LOL -

I have studied the dialogue

I think more closely than anything

although I really need to study their structure

KRIS: That’s interesting

I would not guess that most comics writers do dialogue as well as Rucka

MARCHAE: It’s something about these short bursts of dialogue that kind of flow with the quick images we get that makes sense to me… I’ve read a couple that I really prefer

KRIS: I’m interested in how comics people obviously think in “shots”

MARCHAE: Revival is good and so is Alex and Ada … it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they are super character driven

KRIS: and I think a lot of screenwriters don’t

MARCHAE: YEAH

KRIS: or aren’t necessarily really well trained to

MARCHAE: It is fascinating when you think about because there are SO MANY correlations between the two

because as screenwriters and movie makers we end up having to think like comic writers when we get to the storyboarding portion of the work

which i guess is more of a production function

but

KRIS: Right, it should be super obvious, and we do get TOLD to think in shots but there’s still such a division (at least in our film school experience) between learning to write and learning to tell stories visually

MARCHAE: I feel like with comics the action - even  in some of the not as good ones I’ve read is all about taking you to that next shot

EXACTLY!!!

KRIS: Honestly this is one of my very favorite parts in the whole book, just as a visual storytelling beat:

MARCHAE: I was grateful that I had the experience of reading comics at least near the end of my time in school… i did take a lot of lessons from the comics

OHHH

tell me why

KRIS: I think a lot of the impact for me was in the guided view

The panel before this is Booker trying to talk Andy into the mission: “He says there are kids involved, Andy. Kids.”

Then in GV you get everyone looking at Booker, and you can linger on that panel

MARCHAE: The guided view makes a tremendous difference!

it feels like a moving image

KRIS: Then the next panel makes you sort of realize that it’s not really “everyone” looking at one person, but Joe and Nico looking back and forth between the new guy and the boss

although I guess you don’t get the “new guy” information until later

MARCHAE: Exactly

KRIS: Yes! The movement is there, and can have this weird interaction with how long you can linger in a single shot

But I guess what I like about this page is how the visuals help establish the relationships even without Andy’s exposition

MARCHAE: And i feel like you should be able to tell the story without the words

some of my favorites were the panels without words period

I especially love the first few pages

KRIS: Yeah, and in a nutshell that’s what comics writers are trained to do and what a lot of screenwriters (including me!) are often too precious about their own dialogue to internalize

MARCHAE: its just a few bits of inner dialogue

(side note your dialogue is beautiful!!!)

KRIS: Yeah but I didn’t become a playwright

MARCHAE: YESSSSSS

KRIS: ^That spread is so amazing and efficient

MARCHAE: YESSS  and YESSS

those were my favorites

oh my word and its just pretty

KRIS: It’s not even a really dense two-page spread by any means and there are only like 30 words on it

But it tells us so much about Andy

MARCHAE: I’m looking at it now on my device and its in guided view - so it shows up as each individual panel

YES!

KRIS: Right

MARCHAE: and I’m hooked from the beginning and that’s what I think makes this story effective and invests you in it

Rucka does this with my favorite comic - Lazarus

also

KRIS: She’s a warrior, she’s been around forever, she’s bi, she’s tired, she doesn’t have a lot of meaningful human connection in her life

MARCHAE: And we get that quickly

and efficiently

KRIS: and obviously the sense of repetition

in her day-to-day (century-to-century)

MARCHAE: thats been going on for centuries

[SPOILERS throughout below]

KRIS: Oh sorry did you want to say more about Lazarus

MARCHAE: It’s okay -

I was just going to say that there are some definite similarties between the two books

Specifically just the idea of strong female protagonists who are capable and leaders

and also the notion of these women dodging death

All. the. time!

I thought it was interesting to have read and to be a HUGE fan of both books now

and think critically about what he means to demonstrate and also why i consider the woman he portrays more heroic than other “heroes”

that was a long rant LOL

sorry

KRIS: And there’s a quietly great line in chapter 2 about how everyone just defaulted to Andy being the leader because she was the oldest, so it was obvious

MARCHAE: Yes I remember that

KRIS: And I haven’t really thought about this, but it’s interesting and I’m assuming very deliberate that the oldest and the youngest leads are the women

But so matter-of-factly

MARCHAE: Yes - I did note that and remember being worried for Andy and what it meant later on in the series

and also the conflicts that we could expect to see in the future books

I think it’s smart  honestly and kind of this mentorship that also gets to happen between the two women

we know that historically women have a difficult time finding mentors so I guess it is great to see it demonstrated in this medium

I think we’ll eventually see some bickering between the two , but ultimately a respect which is also not often depicted in other medium as much as I feel like it should be

KRIS: I’ll save it for a little later but I did screenshot that great (affectionate) bickering toward the end

MARCHAE: YES!

KRIS: We often write these in a way that sort of assumes the reader knows at least generally what we’re talking about but maybe we should try explaining a little about at least the main character relationships here

MARCHAE: That’s true - especially considering this is our first time reacting to a comic book

KRIS: Oh my god wait I just want to show this page transition I didn’t pick up on in Guided View

MARCHAE: I was trying to find a good article that listed the main concept with characters (mostly because I need to know how to spell andy’s real name)

KRIS: The color palette!

MARCHAE: It’s beautiful I liked these panels

KRIS: They only say Andy’s whole name twice but it’s not the same both times!

MARCHAE: I have this weird way that I read them… 1. for story. 2. art with story 3. only with art

KRIS: Oh interesting

MARCHAE: even the layout is nice

KRIS: I’m not much of a re-reader (or re-watcher) but I should be

MARCHAE: I don’t generally - but because I am so used to reading “regular books” I have to almost get the story then go back so I can appreciate the art with the story

then just the art cause #pretty

KRIS: Oh man I sidetracked us again

OK so

Andy!

MARCHAE: its okay really theres is a lot here to talk about actually!!!

Yes, Andy short for Andromeda?

I think

KRIS: I THINK Andromache is what her name is supposed to be, since that’s what the Comixology store “logline” uses

MARCHAE: YES

KRIS: and that’s what Booker calls her

MARCHAE: I was all off LOL

KRIS: but when she tells Nile an issue or two earlier, she says Andronika

which I’m assuming is just a continuity mistake on someone’s part

MARCHAE: I am now curious if it changes with the time

KRIS: and maybe a reprint will correct it

MARCHAE: like each century she modifies it?

yes but she’s centuries old

and most important

KRIS: But I got the sense that we were given everyone’s “true” name at least once

MARCHAE: Immortal - she can’t die - at least she’s not able to right now

KRIS: So “Andy” is her modern day shorthand and maybe in the 1800s it was something else, but Andromache is her birth name

MARCHAE: yeah! that’s my deduction at least

KRIS: So Andromache means “battle of a man”

(I think Andronika would mean something like victory of a man?)

MARCHAE: I love your to the minute, on the spot research!

KRIS: Well Andromache I knew because I briefly studied Greek in undergrad and have always been a little bit of an Ancient Greek Stuff nerd

What I’m not sure of is in what sense “battle” is being used

MARCHAE: are the names from the same era?

I guess it could be two fold

KRIS: Like, is it a battle as in an event, or is it in the sense of “she’s got fight like a man”

MARCHAE: Oh i was going in a different direction!!!

wow

yours is probably more appropriate LOL

KRIS: Andromache is at least as old as the Odyssey

MARCHAE: I was thinking more of “battle of a man” - as in battle against one’s self

KRIS: Oh interesting

MARCHAE: like man against man conflict which i suppose is fitting considering that she’s somewhat immortal

KRIS: oh I meant the Iliad -- Andromache is the wife of Hektor

MARCHAE: OH YEAH

Also thinking of “battle of a man” to mean battle of time and life

we always want to live longer, better, never die

KRIS: I don’t know much at all about Arabic so I don’t know how old Joe’s real name is, etymologically speaking

MARCHAE: and here Andy is wanting to be done

I loved that scene where introducing himself

KRIS: Yeah, that’s pretty classic

MARCHAE: and we get to Joe!

So I am checking an article and [the Newsarama interviewer] says Andy’s real name is Andronika

https://www.newsarama.com/33272-rucka-joins-the-old-guard-with-queen-country-artist-fernandez.html

(also side note I feel redeemed and a bit smart that he mentions some of the themes I pointed out and made similar comparisons! )

KRIS: OK skimming now

“John Wick meets Highlander”

That’s pretty great

MARCHAE: Truth!!

KRIS: Oh Black Magick I should link to that [see above]

MARCHAE: I haven’t read that one

KRIS: Anyway where were we?

MARCHAE: Ok we have digressed again! I guess a brief synopsis of the main characters

KRIS: Right right

So we have this 4-person mercenary team

MARCHAE: Right and they’ve been connected FOREVER it seems like

KRIS: Led by [Andronika/Andromache?] Andy, who is literally biblically old

MARCHAE: Well it doesn’t seem like - they have been together for ever

KRIS: Then Nico and Joe (Nicolo and Yusuf) who met during the First Crusade, so 1090s

And presumably they linked up with Andy sometime between the Crusades and the Napoleonic Wars, when we get Booker

MARCHAE: There is a lot of history here

KRIS: And there’s this stuff about how when a new immortal dies for the first time, other immortals (maybe within a certain range?) start having dreams about them

MARCHAE: and that’s how they are introduced or at least made aware that they will be meeting someone new? did I read that correctly

KRIS: Yeah

MARCHAE: HA - I misread your text LOL

I literally rephrased what you said LOL

KRIS: Andy had to figure it out the first time it happened, like the dream doesn’t spell anything out for them

MARCHAE: They are often killed or incredibly injured during their battles and they heal themselves which is how they discover ultimately that they are immortal

for a spell at least

KRIS: Oh there are some GREAT “match cuts” in this

There’s a really good one in the Nico/Joe origin story

MARCHAE: OH YEAHHHHHH

KRIS: 

But that whole sequence is great

MARCHAE: I loved the twist there

KRIS: So yeah sorry for our readers my mental leap isn’t obvious, but this is preceded by a couple pages of Joe and Nico during the Crusades repeatedly killing each other

MARCHAE: I sent over a few screen shots hopefully they will come through…

The book definitely has a distinct aesthetic that’s for sure

KRIS: It’s mostly serious but lightly comic, like they just don’t question it, like okay yeah I guess I’ll just kill you again

Oh getting your screenshots now

Yes the faces (again)! You can see the modern Nico and Joe even under all the facial hair

MARCHAE: you mentioned my idea of hero

KRIS: Yes

MARCHAE: and your point “it’s mostly serious but lightly comic”

that’s the thing… saving lives/the world is a serious thing

these people have real problems that are connected usually to slightly dystopia ideas of our current world

I feel like with more mainstream comics we are in some alternate reality all together and the people are trying to be funny and trying to save the world and trying to be cool…

I feel like in Rucka’s books (and also a few other’s I read) it’s rooted in something that i can grasp and their problems are real

so in this text it’s when does my suffering end

in a book like lazarus it’s why won’t my family love me

and it’s not in this over the top let me fly all over the place and shoot missiles out of my hands kind of way

it’s serious

it’s business

KRIS: But I think tonal variation is a good thing

for the genre and the industry

Like a lot of the recent DC movies are SUPER SERIOUS on a surface level, but they’re not necessarily handling ideas in an intellectually rigorous way

MARCHAE: I absolutely agree I guess in a world I could see myself being saved by someone who is more similar to Andy than say Captain America

I think that’s the thing I like is that it is this exploration of more complex ideas in these types of comics and I feel more connected to the work

it’s more accessible

KRIS: And even though the Marvel movies are lighter, and not SUPER thematically driven, they’re relatively smart about the thematics they do include

See I think most people would say Marvel’s tone is more accessible

But I think you might mean accessible in a different way

MARCHAE: LOL hence the mega fafillion dollar industry

KRIS: Like you’re looking for something concrete to latch onto

MARCHAE: I think I agree with you there - I want a take-away

KRIS: And I think the Iron Man tone is more “here is a world that speaks the language you speak with your friends” in a generalized sense

MARCHAE: I can give you that…

the more mainstream comics make the business of saving the world seem less serious

I also am a lover of drama and heavy topics so I think there is also the attraction - these people don’t always feel like they have be “on” to me

they are trying to make it

and that I can relate to!

KRIS: I think that’s because “saving the world” isn’t REALLY what they’re about, though, to the extent that they’re about something

I think at some point, maybe with all four of us, I do want to talk more about the difficulty you have with comedy

MARCHAE: It’s like an intervention LOL

KRIS: No! Well maybe a little. But it’s so ingrained for you that I think I also just want to understand

Maybe when we eventually return to Sweet/Vicious, which I still really want to do

MARCHAE: comedy is truly a challenge for me with the exception of a few - but even those make a larger statement in my opinion!

we do need to finish S/V

KRIS: I’d also like to see you and Keely talk about comedy

ANYWAY

We should talk about Nile

MARCHAE: that might be fun - Keely and I have talked about why I like her brand of comedy best…

OK NILE

KRIS: So Nile is an American Marine

in a Female Engagement Team in Afghanistan

MARCHAE: I absolutely adore her

she’s the “youngest” immortal

KRIS: So at first I didn’t realize she didn’t know she was immortal

For some reason I assumed she had abandoned the team at some point

MARCHAE: OHHHH

KRIS: But then she becomes our (great) audience surrogate

MARCHAE: Which is why I like her - she’s new- but it’s clear she’s competent

and is legit just trying to understand “what the heck is going on here”

KRIS: Yeah, and she gets to push back a lot when Andy is like “don’t worry about it”

But never in a way that sells out either of their characters

I feel like so often the “new one” is obnoxious

or the “old one” is a tired “Asshole with a Heart of Gold” trope

MARCHAE: Agreed! it is very organic and you can believe in them… but also it establishes what the relationship can be

I also think that because we know that eventually these people run out of “changes” to live - I almost felt like we are operating on a clock

ticking clock*

it ramped up the tension for me when reading  - my mind was legit going a mile a min.

KRIS: And it’s this female friendship that never really leans on “the women! they are alike and get along because they are women!” but also doesn’t completely pretend gender doesn’t matter

Oh man that freaked me out when Andy shot herself to convince Nile

I was like “WHAT IF THIS IS THE ONE, ANDY WHAT ARE YOU DOING”

MARCHAE: YESSS

Because she doesn’t know when the one will be

that’s what makes me nervous about this entire series …

KRIS: The moment when they find Booker [temporarily] dead was amazing to me

MARCHAE: like antsy and I like the characters so it’s worse LOL

KRIS: Andy’s narration is like “he’s the youngest, if he’s really dead it would be so unfair”

And we’re trained to THINK that means “unfair because he was so young”

But then there’s the reversal of “unfair to ME (Andy)”

MARCHAE: Right! But he isn’t young at all - none of them are except for Nile

it kind of plays with your mind when you put into context that one of them is 5000 years old? did I read that or am I making that up - either way it’s insane

But there is also this entertainment of how in real life we all want to live forever, Andy is ready to kick the can

KRIS: Yeah in the last issue Andy says she’s over 6000

so the others are ALL babies compared to her

MARCHAE: yet they don’t ACTUALLY live forever at all

geesh i was off by 1000 years

good googley-moogley

KRIS: haha

So we get what becomes, by a little bit, our central relationship between the oldest woman in the world and the youngest woman on the team

MARCHAE: I love that! LOVE LOVE LOVE IT!!!

KRIS: although the book really does manage to make all the relationships pretty robust

Nico and Joe are our romance, and where a lot of our humor comes from

MARCHAE: The majority of it actually… and they are some deep relationships

KRIS: Andy and Booker obviously have a lot going on because of her dependence on his tech savvy and then The Twist

MARCHAE: (but this isn’t unusual for Rucka which is why I’m #obsessed and why he was my entrance into comics)

KRIS: I loved how the running joke of Andy’s inability to learn new tech ends up becoming a totally serious, really important story detail

MARCHAE: It actually does and it runs through the entire story

it’s smart and well thought out and incredibly problematic in our current world

KRIS: Only tangentially related but I really like how well the body language is rendered in this panel:

MARCHAE: and intentional on the writers part and what I’d imagine- if I were a 6000 years old hero - a real real problem

KRIS: Here’s a better one for the “joke” aspect

MARCHAE: LOL

KRIS: If you had that panel out of context it would be totally relatable for a lot of people

MARCHAE: she is so clueless - and it’s funny

KRIS: Although maybe with relatives who don’t look as young as Andy does

MARCHAE: Oh god I know all too well!!!

It’s also funny because she’s so on top of it in every other area of the job

I want more of her backstory too - I am so curious - I’ve already downloaded the other book

KRIS: which other book?

I love her

MARCHAE: I misread - I just looked and it doesn’t exist LOL

😟 sad face

I was curious about what your thought were about the exploration of being immortal

or mostly immortal

KRIS: I mean personally I still find the idea of death terrifying, maybe because I’ve never really dealt with it yet

So I’m kind of in the “yes we should try to become immortal” camp most days

And I tend to feel that the idea that immortality would ultimately be boring or soul-crushing is kind of a self-serving one, to make us feel better about mortality

BUT

I think this is a really good exploration of it

MARCHAE: interesting!

KRIS: The speech Booker gives to Nile about why she shouldn’t contact her family is really really good

MARCHAE: and kind of sad I loved it (not because it was sad, but because it was good)

KRIS: And Andy’s ultimate epiphany -- she doesn’t want to die, she wants something to live for again -- is really simple in the best way

And it’s also really sad, and I think mostly unremarked upon, that it takes Booker betraying the team for Andy to realize that the team is what she has to live for

MARCHAE: yeah…. she’s incredibly melancholy to me and I like that she’s wanting to push again

they are her family

KRIS: And it’s great that part of how Nile pushes the change in Andy’s mindset is very specifically “millennial” -- she’s always hustled, she’s worked a bunch of jobs briefly and picked up a bunch of random skills

in a way that’s convenient to the plot but doesn’t feel TOO Convenient

MARCHAE: Exactly - I could believe and buy into each and every single character

KRIS: Everything about Nile is like, That’s So Real

MARCHAE: I wanted to be on the team by the end of it

even the emotions that Andy experiences

there is a lot of hurt …maybe that imitates from the page

A lot of it is in her inner dialogue, the panel placement and the colors

but you feel for her

and you want her to win and win hard

KRIS: So hard

It was amazing to me that they actually fit a Booker redemption arc into this

and it works because of Andy’s feelings

MARCHAE: they do! A lot rides on the protagonist here - And what I think is amazing is that she carries so much of the tone for what we experience over the story - because of her we are able to buy the rest of them

I think if we had been led by anyone else it might not have been as effective

KRIS: It’s very successful at being clearly led by one character but still having a really strong “ensemble” feel

And that first issue and a half have to do so much heavy lifting to establish the team relationships so we buy the motivations when they spend most of the rest of the story separated

MARCHAE: It really is amazing from a storytelling standpoint

I could see the movie adaptation as I was reading it

Its so well crafted

KRIS: I think this arc could actually work as a feature

MARCHAE: (have you read lazarus?)

KRIS: and not lose much detail

Not yet

MARCHAE: (KRIS!!!!!! THAT IS A FEATURE WAITING TO BE MADE)

(BUT KRIS READ IT STAT!!!)

And it would be beautiful to shoot those period scenes

KRIS: It would

(I just love the face drawing so much in this book)

MARCHAE: they are much more expressive than others  - I feel like other books Ive read are more sketch like

?

KRIS: This sequence was VERY cinematic too

Not in a spectacle way but just in a general visual storytelling way

with the elevator door

I feel like a lot of superhero books don’t bother making faces distinctive

MARCHAE: That bugs me too - I think it’s why i started reading them three times

KRIS: It can get especially ridiculous when people don’t bother drawing Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne differently from each other

The one issue I can think of in The Old Guard is that in the first issue, it wasn’t super clear to me that Joe was a man of color

And I feel like Andy’s skin tone was also a little variable, but it’s more or less obvious that she’s supposed to be from Somewhere In the Mediterranean

MARCHAE: I  didn’t entirely register that either until he said his name

I can agree with that too

I also get the impression that Nile is also likely a POC as well

KRIS: Nile for sure read to me as a black (or possibly multiracial) woman, I guess the color was just off in the first chapter

MARCHAE: it was refreshing to see a more diverse group of characters that’s for sure

KRIS: Oh shit my mistake I guess the Scythians (Andy) are of Iranian/Central Asian descent

Yes! Which was why I was so glad Joe turned out not to be white -- at first I was like “hmmm this is an oddly white book for someone as woke as Greg Rucka”

MARCHAE: OH NO WAY!! (Re Andy)

KRIS: I really should have known that from like freshman year classics courses

MARCHAE: You are much more well versed than I am in historical references  and I definitely don’t have a tremendous breath of the classics

KRIS: I guess we should talk about the action

It’s almost funny that we haven’t, much

This is very much an action story

MARCHAE: There is so much action that’s for certain and I LOVE IT

KRIS: And all of the set pieces are distinct

MARCHAE: I love seeing it on the page, the pacing of it, how the panels are set up and YES the set pieces!!!!

KRIS: Which is definitely something superhero comics struggle with

Guided View is GREAT for these layouts

MARCHAE: It works beautifully and makes the work fly

KRIS: There have to be some good interviews out there with comic artists about how that’s influenced their approach in the last several years

MARCHAE: like the action legitimately in this comic soared off the page in my opinion I wanted to be in it

that’s really interesting I’ll have to take a gander

KRIS: I do have to say, I wished Andy’s axe had come back

MARCHAE: YES! She’s fierce!

theres a cover where she’s flailing that axe

She’s powerful

the look on her face

even and her posture

I LOVE THIS IMAGE

KRIS: For our readers, that variant cover is by Nicola Scott, Greg Rucka’s collaborator on Wonder Woman: Year One

Yeah even though I’ll tag this as a spoiler post I won’t include the axe sequence, everyone should have to go read the book to see it

It’s short but awesome

MARCHAE: Its so unapologetic and that makes me happy as a woman!

(re the axe photo)

but to talk about action

I really liked this and how it looked!

KRIS: so good

The other standout for me was the Crusade battle -- the use of silhouettes in the night scene

MARCHAE: it reminded me of the old school batman TV show but also has this frantic feel to it like if you are in the room - the images move almost

KRIS: And the use of the BANGs in the background instead of within most of the panels is really interesting

MARCHAE: OHHHHH that’s a great one too

KRIS: literal background noise

MARCHAE: it reminds me of sound

AHHHH YESSSS!!!!

visual cacaphony

which i suppose is a bizarre pairing of words but the best i could come up with

KRIS: It conveys the chaos but also leaves the actual action layouts clear

MARCHAE: nothing is left to confuse the reader - which when I was a newer reader of comics was always confusing

KRIS: Oh here’s that great banter scene:

MARCHAE: these comics are new user friendly

KRIS: Definitely an advantage of indie books

MARCHAE: I like that one - laughed a few time reading this book like legit noise came out which doesn’t happen terribly often

KRIS: I mean I get it, if you’re writing Big Two characters, you want to reference the stuff you grew up with, it can’t be an easy balance to make it accessible to new readers and rich for longtime readers, but still, you can’t blame people for having trouble getting into most recent Marvel or DC stuff

Yeah I guess a way to describe how humor works best for you is that in a scene like this it’s like, cathartic?

Or it’s a release valve

You like it as punctuation, not as the baseline

MARCHAE: I can read it now but I tried starting with Hellboy and was like ABSOLUTELY NOT!

KRIS: Oh that’s interesting because isn’t Hellboy indie? Was it that you jumped into a late story arc?

MARCHAE: I am not sure… if it is… All i know is that it was a challenged to follow on the page

I think I started at the beginning?

Also YES! in regards to humor!!! It’s kind of like a sigh 😊

KRIS: I only know the movies but I’d believe it’s just a weird-ass book as a first comic

MARCHAE: I do not love humor as a baseline - ever generally

LOLOl

it was not a good first jaunt I didn’t finish it and sold it back and the comic book store owner was like what do you like - we chatted and he handled me Lazarus

and I’ve been hooked on the comics since and they all have the same tone save one that I like called Alex and Ada

We’ve digressed again

KRIS: yep

I’m just grabbing a link for Alex and Ada to put into the post [see above]

MARCHAE: yeah its drastically different in tone from what I generally read - but the characters and story were pretty good!

Also an Image comic if I’m not mistaking

KRIS: Yes

MARCHAE: Yup!

KRIS: (For readers: Image is a publishing house like DC and Marvel, but all of its books are creator-owned and independent of each other, rather than company-owned characters in a shared universe)

MARCHAE: Correct! The ones I’ve read seem incredibly character driven to me and tend to be more focused on themes and ideas

What else are we missing - I feel like we’ve covered so much with this one trade!

?

KRIS: I was just gonna ask you that

We haven’t really talked about the villain but I think that’s okay

Don’t want to spoil everything

We really want you to read it yourselves, everyone!

MARCHAE: I really hope people read this one!

Along with the others we’ve recommended!

KRIS: It’s very accessible if you’re new to comics, the art is clean and you won’t have trouble following it, and Greg Rucka is arguably one of the most acclaimed writers in comics right now so I promise it’s not a risky buy

although MM did you get it from the library, you said?

MARCHAE: I did using the Hoopla App but I will probably eventually buy it for my collection (I do have a comic collection and I keep them in plastic!)

KRIS: Should we talk about the ending? I can add another FOR REAL MAJOR SPOILERS warning around here

[the VERY END is briefly discussed below]

MARCHAE: Can i just say I was absolutely sad when it ended

I was mad indeed

but yes let’s

KRIS: I really liked it

MARCHAE: I think I just wanted the book to keep going LOL

KRIS: Oh for sure

But there’s just a lot of great storytelling in those few pages

Even just that first page in Malta

MARCHAE: And it really is a hero saves the day type deal and shows Nile and Andy working collaboratively

again the art is beautiful (I just sent another image let me know if you get it)

KRIS: Just got it

Yeah it’s such a hero shot

MARCHAE: The entire team really comes together!

KRIS: And the use of light is great

MARCHAE: (sent over another one)

KRIS: Yeah I don’t think I’ll include that in the post for spoilers’ sake but it’s a great page

I think the “zoom out” makes it

MARCHAE: but even the quote at the end is amazing: “ Soldiers live and wonder why”

and it perfectly encapsulates what this story is about thematically

why do they - survivors guilt

the desire to move forward and be better

the desire to end something peacefully and in your own time

KRIS: Glen Cook is a fantasy author you might like -- maybe check out The Black Company

MARCHAE: but you do want this story to keep going and be with these characters for much longer than the trade allows

I WILL!!!

KRIS: Someone’s adapting that series for TV, I forget who but I think for one of the premium cable channels

More great body language:

MARCHAE: http://deadline.com/2017/04/eliza-dushku-star-the-black-company-series-adaptation-david-goyer-im-global-1202076367/

There are so many interpersonal nuances in this book it was fun to look at

KRIS: I like that Nico is very clearly ignoring Joe here -- no word balloons, but it’s obvious that this is heated

and classic Andy not wanting to deal

MARCHAE: he’s turned away from him entirely

KRIS: (I love that I can say “classic Andy” after just five issues)

MARCHAE: LOLOLOL

she’s so unimpressed by the entire situation

probably mentally sighing

KRIS: So what do you think of the punishment?

MARCHAE: its kind of devastating I think for Booker - It also makes me curious about what time feels like for these people

KRIS: Yeah

MARCHAE: What does 100 years feel like when you’ve lived a fafillion years already

KRIS: They have no friends besides each other

You don’t even really get the sense that Booker sleeps around the way Andy does because the team is a liiiiittle bit judgey about it in #1

MARCHAE: LOL they kind of are!

and it would just be complicated - we see that with Andy and her relationship

it reminds me of the first book of a series i like called the discovery of witches

just that idea of engaging in a relationship with someone who is mortal you’re constantly reminded that you are too much - and that the person you are with will never be enough for you because they will perish

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8667848-a-discovery-of-witches

(the text is now being turned into a major television show)

KRIS: I really love that the last two pages have no dialogue

It’s not a long epilogue at all but it also doesn’t feel too abrupt because those last two pages are a really well done kind of fade-out

MARCHAE: it’s incredibly effective - just as much as the opening which had very little dialogue

KRIS: I mean, just to really drive this home for everyone, not that I think anyone missed this, but THE LAST LINE OF THE BOOK IS “you’re alone”

And it’s so simple, it’s not a Dramatic! scene at all, it’s so understated, and that’s why it lands so hard

Andy’s not a Dramatic! person

MARCHAE: and you absolutely know she means it and is not in any way playing with this man

KRIS: ANDY DOES NOT PLAY

MARCHAE: Almost like I’ve worked to hard to get us here  - I’m disappointed and i hate to do this but it has to be done

KRIS: It’s so good

This will probably not be our last comic Reaction. Marchae really hopes you read not just this but other Rucka work. In the meantime, follow us on Twitter!

[scifimagpie]

Political Oroboros: Why Marx Is Not Enough

First of all, I realise the title of this piece is inflammatory, so let me lay out some caveats.

I am absolutely not conservative. (One of the first things to know about leftist fighting and discussions online is that 'liberal' has two different meanings; the broad sense in which conservative commentators use it, and the more specific and technically correct sense that leftists sometimes use it - as well as the tertiary sense of, "anyone who isn't quite radical enough.') 

I wouldn't necessarily call myself a liberal in the sense of condoning a capitalist system; I do find the most common ground with proponents of democratic socialism. However, some elements of communist ideology do seem solid, although I tend to like many of the ideas I've seen from anarcho-syndicalists more.

Confused by those terms? You're not alone, but some of the hippest trends among the youth of today are not just trap music and street wear - it's political and philosophical discourse. Different streams of communism and anarchism and debating the concepts of idealists through the ages is pretty great, but treating those ideas as a firm road map and, perhaps, the only acceptable solution or map, is not so excellent.

After several weeks of careful surveillance and investigation, I also came to some unsettling and unsavory conclusions.

Source 

There's a weird and disconcerting mix of progressive and regressive ideas in this new wild west of a political movement; using "gay" and "retard" as insults in this year, and talking about second-wave feminist gender concepts (Penis =  man! Vagina = woman! are not scientifically validated ideas anymore, even if they have held sway for a long time) as though they're based on reality is...a special kind of confusing, frankly.  The person mentioned below isn't actually the "leader" of Antifa (antifacism is a general belief and approach, not an organization; the Black Bloc is something different) but the points they're making shouldn't actually have to be made. And yet, here we are. (To clarify: this person's opinion is, as far as I'm concerned, correct, because it's a summary of historical facts.)

We can try to tweak the perspective on things and change the way someone is seen, but facts have this tendency to assert themselves. And when those facts take the form of thousands of dead bodies, politely covering them up or scootching them out of the way is a bit harder. In the case of leaders such as Winston Churchill, it's been easier to laud their successes and forget the death toll because they were victorious, but it doesn't erase his contributions to the Bengal Famine and his decision to test gas weapons on Kurdish villagers. 

Yet even when we debate the value and leadership of dictators, history tends to reassert itself. 

“History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always—eventually—manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve.”  ― Terry Pratchett, Mort

 Nobody is good enough

Of course, just because someone agrees with history (!) and is willing to unflinchingly consider mass murderers as guilty of their crimes doesn't mean they'll avoid participating in the cannibalistic discussions of leftist politics. A particularly difficult issue has been criticism of the Youtuber Contrapoints, who has both been lauded for her very real effects in de-radicalizing extremists, and criticized for fumbling her way through understanding non-binary genders (and struggling to deal with the flood of online criticism afterwards.) But merely liking a figure who is problematic (or worse, Trash, if they have failed one time too many) can be grounds for a friendship breaking up or the sort of extremely tense, stressful discussion that keeps one awake for hours afterwards.

As I said on Facebook one night, "Whiny comment of the night: it would be easier to unite the left if the radicals weren't so dead-set on everyone just converting to their beliefs as much as possible.And Seems like you can learn about Marxism, cultural history, feminism, and all of that...but it's impossible to unlearn American cultural hegemonic approaches and seeing violence as the default/best option."  But to clarify, this isn't speculation without sourcing. I did a bit of an investigation into a few leftist pages, and it was really unnerving to see the number of pro-gun and "eat the rich" and "fetch the guillotines" sorts of remarks and posters. The thing is, we've all done that dance before, and it's going on in other countries at the moment. Riots and protests are excellent when they work, but sometimes, they don't - and we don't talk about what happens when they don't. 

The risk of small government

At the risk of sounding like a cranky old lady, smaller governments are still governments. People who think some military junta of kids with guns can replace all the architecture and organizational levels of "the state" are welcome to try working in a city planning office as an admin assistant some time. Having done that myself, I would welcome anyone who wants to just replace and rewrite all those land laws, which by the way exist for reasons, to maybe take a civil engineering course or two.

And if you DON'T want to replace all that architecture, just get rid of the bad stuff - congrats, that's actually just reformism, which is still a far cry from "just accepting things the way they are." 

As a fan and casual scholar of cults, I've had many opportunities to see examples of small, ideologically-driven communities turn rotten. Frankly, I wouldn't trust my own town to just secede and govern itself, even though I'm very pleased with our mayor's decisions. I know too much about white people and sociology and Christianity (as well as other religions and groups) to trust that small, self-governing, autonomous groups will be fine on their lonesome. We're kinda in a globalized society with many, many supply chains. If you don't like that, get working on a time machine.

Yet even if one were to travel back in time, we've always had international trade and whatnot, and isolationism has never worked especially well. Also it's how you get fascism in the first place, so...history says it's how you make the exact monster you're trying to fight. Worst of all, these defenses of fascists and murderers do nothing but divide us along sectarian points of conflict. 

Sometimes I worry the Revolution will just be online and never actually get offline

— 🏴🛡Justin🛡🏴 (@sharkle82) July 19, 2019

What do we do? 

Honestly, my approach lately has just been to ignore Leftbook and debate spaces and not engage. Trying to discuss theory and concepts has led to some arguments over the applications of violence that have, honestly, made me stop trusting and just lose certain friends altogether. One otherwise brave and locally committed person said, "violence is neither good nor bad. It's a tool." Although I agree that self-defense actions are not exactly violent, I just don't think we should glorify aggression, or be eager to shed blood. It tends to lead to bad results, and it's uncomfortably similar to the stance we're opposing. My take?

Personally, I don't trust anyone who thinks the problems will all be fixed if we just kill a few of the right people.

The people who sit around day-dreaming about 19th century revolutionaries aren't necessarily the ones helping to, say, actually fight the battles that need fighting here and now. It may seem ridiculous to say, "hey, watch out for this," and also, "but you can basically ignore it," but frankly, that approach has worked extremely well for me in real life. 

The key is this. What do you want to accomplish, in practical terms? Forget about "praxis" and "theory"; what are the concrete, fundamental changes you want to see, and the results you want in society and your community? Every change comes incrementally. Evolution is unavoidable. However, we have an existing system that we can use - and dare I say it, that we can apply our strength to if we're determined enough. 

How to change the world 

Writing actual letters to politicians in my city, province, and country, engaging in the community fight for preservation of a local Safe Consumption Site, signing petitions for various environmental protection causes, and applying pressure to politicians, as well as keeping an eye on actual local white supremacists, fascists, and extremists has done more and had a greater impact than anything in my decade or so of arguing with people on the internet. 

My only regret is that I didn't start using my skills in the real world much, much sooner. It turns out that all the people who insist that those in power won't listen to "us" are, unequivocally, wrong. And while I do have white and cis privilege to thank for some of my results, I would also argue that we on the left must not presume our own helplessness and confine ourselves to training arenas online.  Get out there. Talk to politicians. Stay up to date on the news and follow multiple sources, rather than reading 150-year-old essays. And above all, embrace the power of both individual actions and solidarity. 

I have more to say about this topic, but instead of creating another series, a few essays may be cropping up. Until then, however, I have real work to do, both in the political world and out of it. For one thing, books aren't going to finish themselves! 

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and Max the cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

[loudlytransparenttrash]

Feminism is Misogyny

Feminists may be responsible for saying some of the most misogynistic things that I’ve ever had the displeasure of hearing and reading. Typically you’d expect to hear things that are anti-woman from the people deemed as the usual suspects. But I want to make it clear that feminists and feminism may be the single greatest blow to the progress of women in the history of mankind.

You might say, “How can this be? Feminism is supposed to be a cause for equality.” Over the last three years, I found myself researching feminists and feminism after dedicating my life to this movement, but the more I have researched, I found myself faced with this glaring paradox. A paradox which had me casting off the feminist label entirely.

While feminists say that feminism is about equality, actions speak louder than words. These actions suggest an uncomfortable truth. Feminism is not the assumption that we are equal, but the assumption that women are weak and need a leg up. It’s the idea that women are oppressed by an all-powerful patriarchy, and that we need to push men down to thrive as fully functioning independent creatures.

If a man were to suggest that women were weak and needed help doing everything from getting jobs to basic decision making, you’d say this man was sexist. If a man said that a woman could never make meaningful decisions about her life because of her weakness, you’d call for this man’s job and ask that he be fired. If he suggested that women could be easily manipulated and brainwashed into making those decisions, you’d think he was absolutely nuts.

So why do we let feminists do it? Contrary to popular belief; Feminism suggests that women are weak in body and in mind. It suggests that women were no different than slaves to their husbands in antiquity and that they were treated slightly better than beasts of burden. But this is merely historical revisionism fueled by postmodernist bullshit.

To say that for thousands of years, women never used their wits and were living mindlessly under male subjugation is to lie to yourself and everyone else. Both men and women made decisions that you may not agree with or understand in today’s society where we don’t have world wars, plagues and famine on our door steps. Men were being forced into war and were being used as pawns while women and children were protected at all costs and have always been seen as the future. Did women have it easy? Of course not. Did men have it easy? Of course not.

The narrative of modern feminism suggests that all men in the past were boorish pigs subjugating women. That these men, feeling jealous of the power women wielded, kept them out of sight and under control. Was that the case, or was this a more practical reason for keeping a woman inside the house?

The more dangerous the world is, the more men are likely to want to protect the women that live in it. It’s not societal constructs - biology and human insticts have since the beginning of time made tasks and goals more suitable for one sex over the other, both having their positives and negatives. I’m not saying that they are right or wrong for doing this, I’m merely explaining the process behind it. 

One thing that is a fact though, that women who must be protected, limits a woman’s freedom. It keeps women as fragile flowers who must be protected from the elements. The issue we have though is today’s feminists still demand the highest security even though today’s elements are completely different to when feminism was first born.

What are feminists doing today? Getting men fired for telling a joke they don’t like, getting professors fired for disagreeing and male college peers kicked out with false rape claims. Safe spaces, trigger warnings and the concept of both affirmative consent and action. There have been several notable second wave feminists who outright said that they believed all heterosexual sex is rape, because they believe that women simply do not have the power to meaningfully consent to sex. In reality, the people removing a woman’s ability to consent to sex, are feminists.

These feminists went so far as to suggest that if a woman isn’t saying “yes” like a broken record, then a man can accidentally rape her. The people single-handedly turning women into fragile flowers that need special protections, are feminists. The people suggesting that women can not get hired or recognized as assets to a company are, you guessed it, feminists.

Women are not being made to do things for themselves. In the effort to protect women and help them succeed, you’ve created a generation of women who’ve never had to apply themselves as much as men. The women who actually apply themselves and work hard, get lumped in with the women who’ve never had to get their nails dirty. All of this is made possible through the power of affirmative action.

In trying to save and protect women, feminism has removed women’s agency. They talk endlessly about choice, but choice means nothing if you lack agency. Women’s choices mean nothing if you believe women to be so easily manipulated by men and our culture as a whole. To them, the women making choices they don’t agree with, must be suffering from a bizarre kind of Stockholm syndrome.

Most women feel insulted that feminism thinks they are far too weak and stupid to make meaningful choices. Make no mistake, there are feminists right now who think that women are far more likely to be manipulated into living a traditional lifestyle than men. Because to them, no woman in her right mind would choose family over her career.

The freedom that feminists have claimed to fight for, is not the right to be protected. The freedom that they are suggesting was won for women, is a woman’s freedom to make her own choices. That means the freedom to make choices you don’t agree with. It’s the freedom to fail, succeed, and grow.

All these choices mean nothing without consequences. To take away consequences, is to remove the weight of women’s decisions. Feminists have succeeded in doing that, by suggesting that anytime a woman makes a decision that is problematic, that she is merely being manipulated by our patriarchial culture. She can’t be held responsible for her actions, because no one pulled her aside to explain to her how she’s oppressed. If she does something morally reprehensible, she can always blame it on a man.

I wonder how many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers would have been thwarted by this nonsense. No one told my grandmother, or her mother, that they couldn’t do things. They were strong women who worked alongside men, and achieved just as much as men. They did so all without the help of feminists and feminism. These women were forged through strength and perseverance.

But women don’t need strength and perseverance anymore to succeed. Now they just need a vagina, and STEM fields and business corporations will roll out the red carpet for them to avoid being seen as sexists. You don’t need to be as skilled as men anymore, because feminists have lowered the bar for you and your predecessors. You don’t need to prove you’re as physically fit and strong as a man to join the armed services because feminists have demanded to give these women a break and make it easier for them.

To believe that patriarchy exists in the first world, is to believe that women are absent from decision making on everything from voting, to their choice in what latte to drink. You have to believe that there weren’t female anti-suffragettes, and that there aren’t women who protest against abortion. You have to believe that there isn’t a great number of women who voted against free tampons and birth control. You have to believe that women don’t vote conservative or become housewives.

On the other end, sex workers, models, and actresses would also be poor manipulated flowers that don’t know they are under male control. They would be innocent weak willed damsels tricked into living a life of submission to the male gaze. How could they possibly make the decision to be “objectified” in this manner, don’t they know they’re oppressed!?

Feminists want women to have choices as long as they make the choices they agree with. When you look at the facts, you come to the uncomfortable conclusion that every woman of note, prior to the existence of women’s suffrage, accomplished everything they did without the help of feminists or feminism. When forced to acknowledge this fact, it becomes obvious that the only thing women need to be empowered in the first world, is the desire to empower themselves through self-reliance, hard work, and dedication.

You don’t need feminism. Feminism needs you and the money you are willing to throw at it. They have to convince you that there is this carefully coordinated conspiracy against women by men, to keep them down. If a culture has a deep contempt for women, they aren’t going to care that women are upset. They aren’t going to try to protect them, and they certainly aren’t going to take your protests seriously.

You could not convince a culture with deeply entrenched misogyny to give women voting rights, birth control, or abortion. You could not convince them to give women alimony, child support, or affirmative action. If there is a group with a deep contempt for women and their choices, it’s feminists and their various theories on how we’re all being manipulated by men on a conscious and unconscious level.

I as a first world woman, am not oppressed and neither are the other first world women reading this, it doesn’t matter what your skin color is, you aren’t oppressed in this country. Women do face sexism at times, sure, but so do men and yes it’s a problem but nothing on the part of modern feminism is doing anything to stop that.

What modern feminists are doing is telling the world that women are easily offended by these “microaggressions” and need to be protected from nearly everything. This is because feminists get offended by everything from being smiled at, to being complimented on their shoes. If anything feminists are responsible for breeding more sexism in the population than ever before.

These women are encouraging men to protect women from sexism and everything else that they don’t like. They might say that a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle, but let’s compare what men have done for women compared to feminism and we can decide then who’s more important for women. Only a fraction of women call themselves a feminist so I think we all know that answer, as much as feminism loves to exaggerate its importance, women simply don’t want to be told to hate and wage war on men. 

You aren’t going to eradicate sexism. Discrimination based on sex happens through natural human preferences, developed through learned experiences. If you see women acting like entitled fragile flowers, instead of strong independent women, then those men will see women as entitled fragile flowers. You aren’t going to eradicate a male preference, by merely demanding it to be so.

In trying to eradicate a preference for men, these women are breeding a contempt for women in our populace with their outrage. Mark my words, there will be a breaking point. There will come a time that we all stop catering to the whims of feminists, until no one takes these women seriously anymore and we have already started to see this happen. This is the bed you are making for yourselves, you will soon be forced to lie in it.

[sociologyontherock]

A Meandering Life in Politics

By Marilyn Porter 

Stephen Riggins asked me to write an article for Sociology on the Rock about the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He knew I had once been a member. This is true. I had to be very quiet about this affiliation when I applied for immigration to Canada in the early 1980s. At the time, membership was an absolute bar to entry to the US, and while such a bar was not explicit in Canada, I chose not to mention it at my immigration interview. In any case, my sojourn in the CPGB was neither long nor very significant. I will come to why I joined a little later in this meandering saga of my political life.

My first memory of politics came when I was about eight. It may have been the 1950 election that kept Attlee and the Labour Party in power. More likely, it was the 1951 election that restored Winston Churchill and Tory rule. My mother was a die-hard Tory mostly, I think, because she saw conservative politics, like attending church, as some kind of class obligation. My father took no interest at all. The men who worked on our farm in Wales were devout working-class labour voters. The trigger issue in 1950 or 51 became what colour of ribbons to put on the farm’s cats and dogs. I forget how it was resolved but I do remember absorbing the remarkable tension around the issue. 

Our Welsh constituency (Caernarvonshire at the time, later Gwynedd) had been Liberal under its most famous MP, David Lloyd George, but became a safe Labour seat until Plaed Cymru took over the seat in 1974 and they have retained it ever since. The MP when I was growing up was Goronwy Roberts. He had a long and fairly distinguished career as Minister for Foreign Affairs and later as Leader of the House of Lords. He was also a very good constituency MP. Even my mother had to admit that. In 1960, I became 18 and eligible to vote. Despite my blinkered education, I already knew that I was aligned with the progressive Left, although I had little notion of what that might mean. I did know that I would not vote Conservative. So I wrote to Goronwy Roberts and asked him why I should vote for him. He replied with a detailed and personal letter, which not only convinced me to vote for him but also instilled in me the importance of elected representatives taking a personal interest in every one of their constituents.

At this point, I was also starting my degree in history and political science at Trinity College Dublin. While Labour and socialism in Ireland have a distinguished record (think James Connolly), by the time I got there official party politics had been reduced to irrelevant squabbles between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. The real action was, and continued to be, the situation in the North.

The Trinity population was a strange mix. Literally in the middle of Catholic and radical Dublin, it had very few Irish Catholic students partly because John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin, was an extreme conservative and expressly forbade Catholics from attending Trinity on pain of excommunication. And partly because University College Dublin had moved to a much bigger campus, Belfield, and was expanding rapidly with considerable government (and church) support. My two closest friends were both Anglo-Irish, one a daughter of a general in the British Army and one the daughter of a tea planter in India. Of my two closest classmates, one was a Protestant from Belfast and the other was an Ibo from Nigeria. For both of them “home” was fraught with danger and division. The Northern Irish fellow student survived at least a bout of violence, but the Nigerian became involved in the civil war and was killed the year after we graduated. I learned from both of them that politics was not a game to be taken lightly. My activism at the time tended to be short term and practical. I sat under Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin fasting for some cause in Africa and picketed to stop police “moving on” itinerants, meanwhile learning a radical version of Irish history and a sympathetic version of the nascent IRA movement in the North. 

At this point – 1967 – I had another transformational experience and added another layer to both my analysis and action, although it did mean that I missed a good deal of the political action of 1968. 

My husband and I went to Africa, to work as volunteers at a socialist run school in Botswana. Swaneng Hill School was specifically founded by Patrick van Rensburg to challenge the apartheid state of South Africa. It was designed on Nyrere-inspired socialist principles and staffed entirely by volunteer teachers. I have written elsewhere about some of the problems caused by enthusiastic but untrained volunteer staff trying to provide the only secondary schooling in the country, while at the same time trying to develop a socialist commune. (“My First Day at School,” Your Voice: Newsletter of the MUN Pensioners’ Association, December 2020. See also “The Edge of Experience” in Creating a University: The Newfoundland Experience, edited by Stephen Harold Riggins and Roberta Buchanan). However, while the practice may have been a little bumpy, theory was flourishing. A good proportion of the staff were American draft dodgers and many others had come from repressive regimes. We had study groups on radical theorists like Laclau’s Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory; Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man; Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, and education pioneers like Paulo Freire. I actually read Marx’s Capital for the first time, or most of it. At the time there was scarcely anything written about Botswana apart from the anthropologically interesting Bushmen. However, trying to find something relevant to teach the students introduced me to a range of literature on development and social issues and set me on the path to sociology.

There was, however, no feminism and the structure of the school and the culture around it was downright sexist. My husband was a teacher; I was just “a wife.” Progressiveness only goes so far. I noticed this – how could I not, stuck teaching staff kids in the school-run primary school and hanging out with other “mothers.”

In the summer of 1969, we came back to the UK and settled in Bristol so that my then husband could get an education degree. With a two-year-old and pregnant, I risked boredom and frustration. That soon ended when I became simultaneously involved in the local women’s liberation movement and a PhD student in sociology at Bristol University. This marked my true birth into academia, politics, and feminism.

I will try to deal with the three strands separately although, obviously, they were not distinguishable in real time. Nor should they be as it was the mingling and interaction among the three that led to my individual, probably idiosyncratic version of them.

The PhD program, which took me 5 years to complete (1974-79) enabled me to acquire a full – and hitherto missing – education in the philosophy and theory of Marxism and socialism. I studied all the usual Marxist texts and learned about Maoism and forms of socialism emerging in Latin America. Most of all I studied Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and related writings. Like many of my generation, my introduction to Gramsci came through John Berger’s A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor. In particular, Berger’s reading of the Gramscian distinction between “common sense” and “good sense” resonated with me. Reading Gramsci threw a whole new light on how to understand what “ordinary” people meant when they talked and how better to interpret it while leaving “ordinary” people with the dignity they deserve.

Meanwhile, my fellow feminists were educating me in contemporary left politics. This was particularly messy around the fracturing Trotskyist groups. While Leninism was attractive in its lean rigor, I could not handle the authority of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which obviously was not going to include me. The Maoist groups wore really drab clothes and always shouted everyone down at meetings, but supporting strikes and movements like the Night Cleaners and the Ford Seamstresses was becoming an important part of my life and the Women’s Movement on its own did not seem to provide all the tools I needed to become fully aware and involved. I had noticed for a while that many of my feminist friends were members of the CPGB, and that they exhibited a kind of discipline that was markedly lacking in the broad women’s movement. If they said they were going to be on the picket line at 6 AM, they were, and with coffee for the rest of us. So I joined, although in Bristol it made very little difference to my activities. The difference occurred when I moved to Lancaster 1978-84 to teach at the University of Manchester (sorry, complicated husband troubles).

In Lancaster, feminism was largely confined to the university and not many feminists got involved in local left-wing politics. However, the Communist Party in Lancaster was small but very active. We even had a band that marched with strikers and other labour demonstrators. Alas, the CP’s Women’s Band marked the lowest point of my musical career. I was demoted from the cymbals to the triangle. As a local branch, we were able to send delegates to the regional meetings held in Manchester. I remember them as smoke-filled and full of testy disagreements about tactics, but I did also meet and learn from older members who could remember times when the CPGB had been much larger and more influential than it was in its dying days. (The CPGB effectively vanished in 1991 when Nina Temple disbanded it in favour of a more European-focused organization.)

I was also gone by then, taking up a one-year position at Memorial in 1980, which I eventually transformed into a proper position in 1984, via a number of summer sessional appointments. I also began my Newfoundland-based research, mostly on women in the fishery, which led to my 1993 book Place and Persistence in the Lives of Newfoundland Women and introduced me to a network of women scholars working on rural and fishing issues in Scandinavia. It also led to two co-edited collections of writings, Their Lives and Times: Women in Newfoundland and Labrador: A Collage (with Carmelita McGrath and Barbara Neis, 1995) and Weather’s Edge: A Compendium of Women’s Lives in Newfoundland and Labrador (with Carmelita McGrath and Linda Cullum, 2005).

By this time, my attention had turned to women’s issues in international development, especially Indonesia and Pakistan. I learned countless lessons about both countries, especially Indonesia, and about doing fieldwork in such a different place and about conducting research with colleagues from different backgrounds. 

In terms of politics, I learned a lot about how people, and especially feminists, put their ideas together in very different circumstances. I learned to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open.

Meanwhile, back home I, along with Ken Kavanagh and Bill Hynd, established a successor to Oxfam, which had closed its St. John’s office, the Social Justice Co-operative of Newfoundland and Labrador. This is now in the hands of a new generation, as it should be. I remain a member of the Newfoundland and Labrador New Democratic Party, and have served on the executive several times. For me, the NDP fills one of the lowest common denominator roles for my political identity because I live here and feel a sense of duty to contribute to the best possible political party. However, most of my current concerns and activities are national or international, and mostly around peace and environmental movements such as being an active member of Oxfam and Inter Pares, a Canadian social justice organization.

So my political life dwindles, in step with the state of my hips and, indeed, the state of the world. But as we dwindle, the next generation steps up. My own family is an illustration that ideals and activism and political knowledge do pass down to the next generation. All is not lost. The world will turn again.

[repmywind02199]

AI's desire

AI's desire

It’s easy to imagine an AI winning a game of Go, but can you imagine an AI wanting to play a game of Go?

At the Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York, Kathryn Hume pointed me to Ellen Ullman's excellent book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology. There's a lot worth reading here, particularly Ullman's early essays about her days as a woman working in the male-dominated field of programming.

In Part 3 of her book "Life, Artificial," Ullman talks about artificial intelligence, robotics, and the desire to create artificial life. On our attempts to build artificial life, she writes:

What these views of human sentience have in common, and why they fail to describe us, is a certain disdain for the body: the utter lack of a body in early AI and in later formulations like Kurzweil’s (the lonely cortex, scanned and downloaded, a brain-in-a-jar); and the disregard for this body, this mammalian flesh, in robotics and ALife [Artificial Life].

By connecting the poverty of AI with its denial of the body, Ullman follows an important thread in feminist theory: our thinking needs to be connected to bodies, to physical human process, to blood and meat. The male-dominated Western tradition is all about abstraction, for which Plato is the poster child. And abstraction is also one of the most important themes in programming. As the saying goes, “there is no problem in computing that can’t be solved by adding a layer of abstraction.” It's ironic, I think intentionally, that the most important voice of abstraction in Ullman's discussion of robotics is Cynthia Breazeal.

So, there's a horror of meat, of meatspace, that's baked into our thoughts about robotics. Ullman writes: "This suspicion of the flesh, this quest for a disembodied intelligence, persists today." Her frustration with human conversation that had devolved into vocal email messages, from her first chapters, certainly feeds Ullman's critique of abstraction. So much of what it means to be human is baked into the reality of meat, of fluid, of our bodies.

I've always wondered what you would find if you cut open one of the robots from Asimov's Foundation books. Meat? Metallic parts? Asimov’s robots are indistinguishable from humans. P. K. Dick has a similar problem in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, though he’s much more attuned to the ironies and contradictions of robotics. Dick’s robots are clearly sentient, and they can have sex with humans (illegal, but you know…), but they also clearly have "parts" inside, some sort of electro-mechanical nervous system. If you shoot them, they go "sproing" (or something like that). You don't really know if they're robots until they're dead. But once they're dead, there's clearly something in them that makes it obvious.

Shortly before Ullman got to bodies, I started thinking about desire, a theme Ullman picks up a chapter or two later. Desire, of course, is an important theme in critical thought. But we don't have to go that far. What would an artificial intelligence want? And that's connected with the body problem: what would an artificial intelligence feel?

That's where things become difficult. We know we can create machines that play Go better than humans. I'm willing to grant that a computer will eventually be able to do just about anything better than I can. There are already programs that can write articles based on a data feed, there are programs that can play pianos, add a robotic body and we have programs that can walk to the mailbox, add some cameras and we have programs that can look at birds, flowers, and other objects.

I've criticized the hype about modern AI (not the AI itself) because all these tasks are currently separate. The program that plays Go can't pick up the mail, and so on. A "general intelligence" will have to be able to solve all these problems and more. But let's start exercising our imagination (still a uniquely human capability) and see where we can go. Can I imagine software that does everything I listed above, plus a lot more? Yes. I don't think we'll have it for a while, but it's fundamentally an integration problem. Once we solve the individual pieces, assembling them into a whole should be possible.

Here's where it gets difficult. Can I imagine that software wanting to play a game of Go? Can I imagine walking by and hearing a computer say "Hey, Mike, want a game?" Well, sure: you can take AlphaGo and connect it to an Amazon Echo, and have it ask passers-by whether they want to play a game. With a camera and computer vision, it could even identify potential opponents by name.

But does that mean the computer wants to play a game? That's where my imagination runs into trouble. I don't even know what that question means. How would a computer decide whether to play Go or look at flowers or listen to music? I can imagine a programmable sense of aesthetics; but I still can't imagine the desire to do this rather than that. And can I imagine a program that says "I'd like to play piano better, so I'll spend some time practicing"? After all, machine learning isn't about devices that outperform humans ex nihilo; AI systems get good at what they do through training, which looks an awful lot like practice (and is even more laborious). A program could certainly detect an unacceptable failure rate, and put itself back into training mode. But would a robot want to practice just for the sake of practice?

I have the same problem with sentience. Yes, we can give an AI a body, making it a robot. We can build sensors into that body. And we can make the robot groan or cry out if it is injured. But I still can't imagine the robot feeling pain in the way a human or an animal feels pain.

The reason I can't imagine a robot's desire, or its pain, has nothing to do with the capabilities, real or imagined, of our hardware or software. It has everything to do with the substrate: I can't imagine putting that desire into silicon (or DNA, or whatever our future computers are made from). This is the point where my imagination fails. I can't imagine making something that wants.

It's not just that I don't know how to; I don't know how to write a program that plays Go, but I know that people can. There's a point at which my ability to imagine just stops, and that's it. The "made-ness" of the thing, the fact that I have seen the interior, makes it impossible for me to imagine desire, volition, sentience, any kind of interiority. The paradox of interiority is that it doesn’t exist if you can see the interior.

And do we care? If so, why? Consider William Carlos Williams' short poem, "This Is Just to Say," which briefly became a Twitter meme. I can’t reproduce it because of copyright, but in it the speaker apologizes for eating some delicious cold plums that someone was apparently saving to eat later.

Is that poem important because of the human consciousness behind it? Would it be the same if it were just a clever arrangement of words? The poem is purposely neither clever nor ornate. If a machine at DeepMind spit out two sentences like these, attached a name, and published it, would I care? And why? Does it matter that there's an observer (and an eater) of the plums, and that this message is addressed to someone? A computer could certainly use the words "delicious" and "cold," but do we care that it might not experience the sensuality of cold, delicious plums?

This poem is a statement by someone who needs to be forgiven to someone who forgives; it's a statement about breakfast, about desires. Could an artificial intelligence desire plums, breakfast, or forgiveness? If computing is ultimately about abstraction, whether that's an abstraction from flesh or the abstraction of reducing conversation to email, the central fact of desire, and of Williams' poem, is that it defies abstraction.

According to Ullman, Breazeal thinks that computers will have desires that aren't similar to ours: desires for repair, fuel, whatever. Ullman has trouble imagining a robot's "interior life" and doesn't find what she can imagine at all compelling: better to be a human and want human things than to wax ecstatic over machines that have become connoisseurs of electric current. Writers like Asimov damaged the discourse on AI before it even got started, by imagining machines that were indistinguishable from humans, without thinking enough about how machines would be different.

But I wonder: is my inability to imagine an AI with desire simply a failure of my imagination? Or is it a fundamental limitation to what is buildable?

Continue reading AI's desire.

https://ift.tt/2lAUNA7

[csemntwinl3x0a1]

AI's desire

AI's desire

It’s easy to imagine an AI winning a game of Go, but can you imagine an AI wanting to play a game of Go?

At the Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York, Kathryn Hume pointed me to Ellen Ullman's excellent book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology. There's a lot worth reading here, particularly Ullman's early essays about her days as a woman working in the male-dominated field of programming.

In Part 3 of her book "Life, Artificial," Ullman talks about artificial intelligence, robotics, and the desire to create artificial life. On our attempts to build artificial life, she writes:

What these views of human sentience have in common, and why they fail to describe us, is a certain disdain for the body: the utter lack of a body in early AI and in later formulations like Kurzweil’s (the lonely cortex, scanned and downloaded, a brain-in-a-jar); and the disregard for this body, this mammalian flesh, in robotics and ALife [Artificial Life].

By connecting the poverty of AI with its denial of the body, Ullman follows an important thread in feminist theory: our thinking needs to be connected to bodies, to physical human process, to blood and meat. The male-dominated Western tradition is all about abstraction, for which Plato is the poster child. And abstraction is also one of the most important themes in programming. As the saying goes, “there is no problem in computing that can’t be solved by adding a layer of abstraction.” It's ironic, I think intentionally, that the most important voice of abstraction in Ullman's discussion of robotics is Cynthia Breazeal.

So, there's a horror of meat, of meatspace, that's baked into our thoughts about robotics. Ullman writes: "This suspicion of the flesh, this quest for a disembodied intelligence, persists today." Her frustration with human conversation that had devolved into vocal email messages, from her first chapters, certainly feeds Ullman's critique of abstraction. So much of what it means to be human is baked into the reality of meat, of fluid, of our bodies.

I've always wondered what you would find if you cut open one of the robots from Asimov's Foundation books. Meat? Metallic parts? Asimov’s robots are indistinguishable from humans. P. K. Dick has a similar problem in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, though he’s much more attuned to the ironies and contradictions of robotics. Dick’s robots are clearly sentient, and they can have sex with humans (illegal, but you know…), but they also clearly have "parts" inside, some sort of electro-mechanical nervous system. If you shoot them, they go "sproing" (or something like that). You don't really know if they're robots until they're dead. But once they're dead, there's clearly something in them that makes it obvious.

Shortly before Ullman got to bodies, I started thinking about desire, a theme Ullman picks up a chapter or two later. Desire, of course, is an important theme in critical thought. But we don't have to go that far. What would an artificial intelligence want? And that's connected with the body problem: what would an artificial intelligence feel?

That's where things become difficult. We know we can create machines that play Go better than humans. I'm willing to grant that a computer will eventually be able to do just about anything better than I can. There are already programs that can write articles based on a data feed, there are programs that can play pianos, add a robotic body and we have programs that can walk to the mailbox, add some cameras and we have programs that can look at birds, flowers, and other objects.

I've criticized the hype about modern AI (not the AI itself) because all these tasks are currently separate. The program that plays Go can't pick up the mail, and so on. A "general intelligence" will have to be able to solve all these problems and more. But let's start exercising our imagination (still a uniquely human capability) and see where we can go. Can I imagine software that does everything I listed above, plus a lot more? Yes. I don't think we'll have it for a while, but it's fundamentally an integration problem. Once we solve the individual pieces, assembling them into a whole should be possible.

Here's where it gets difficult. Can I imagine that software wanting to play a game of Go? Can I imagine walking by and hearing a computer say "Hey, Mike, want a game?" Well, sure: you can take AlphaGo and connect it to an Amazon Echo, and have it ask passers-by whether they want to play a game. With a camera and computer vision, it could even identify potential opponents by name.

But does that mean the computer wants to play a game? That's where my imagination runs into trouble. I don't even know what that question means. How would a computer decide whether to play Go or look at flowers or listen to music? I can imagine a programmable sense of aesthetics; but I still can't imagine the desire to do this rather than that. And can I imagine a program that says "I'd like to play piano better, so I'll spend some time practicing"? After all, machine learning isn't about devices that outperform humans ex nihilo; AI systems get good at what they do through training, which looks an awful lot like practice (and is even more laborious). A program could certainly detect an unacceptable failure rate, and put itself back into training mode. But would a robot want to practice just for the sake of practice?

I have the same problem with sentience. Yes, we can give an AI a body, making it a robot. We can build sensors into that body. And we can make the robot groan or cry out if it is injured. But I still can't imagine the robot feeling pain in the way a human or an animal feels pain.

The reason I can't imagine a robot's desire, or its pain, has nothing to do with the capabilities, real or imagined, of our hardware or software. It has everything to do with the substrate: I can't imagine putting that desire into silicon (or DNA, or whatever our future computers are made from). This is the point where my imagination fails. I can't imagine making something that wants.

It's not just that I don't know how to; I don't know how to write a program that plays Go, but I know that people can. There's a point at which my ability to imagine just stops, and that's it. The "made-ness" of the thing, the fact that I have seen the interior, makes it impossible for me to imagine desire, volition, sentience, any kind of interiority. The paradox of interiority is that it doesn’t exist if you can see the interior.

And do we care? If so, why? Consider William Carlos Williams' short poem, "This Is Just to Say," which briefly became a Twitter meme. I can’t reproduce it because of copyright, but in it the speaker apologizes for eating some delicious cold plums that someone was apparently saving to eat later.

Is that poem important because of the human consciousness behind it? Would it be the same if it were just a clever arrangement of words? The poem is purposely neither clever nor ornate. If a machine at DeepMind spit out two sentences like these, attached a name, and published it, would I care? And why? Does it matter that there's an observer (and an eater) of the plums, and that this message is addressed to someone? A computer could certainly use the words "delicious" and "cold," but do we care that it might not experience the sensuality of cold, delicious plums?

This poem is a statement by someone who needs to be forgiven to someone who forgives; it's a statement about breakfast, about desires. Could an artificial intelligence desire plums, breakfast, or forgiveness? If computing is ultimately about abstraction, whether that's an abstraction from flesh or the abstraction of reducing conversation to email, the central fact of desire, and of Williams' poem, is that it defies abstraction.

According to Ullman, Breazeal thinks that computers will have desires that aren't similar to ours: desires for repair, fuel, whatever. Ullman has trouble imagining a robot's "interior life" and doesn't find what she can imagine at all compelling: better to be a human and want human things than to wax ecstatic over machines that have become connoisseurs of electric current. Writers like Asimov damaged the discourse on AI before it even got started, by imagining machines that were indistinguishable from humans, without thinking enough about how machines would be different.

But I wonder: is my inability to imagine an AI with desire simply a failure of my imagination? Or is it a fundamental limitation to what is buildable?

Continue reading AI's desire.

https://ift.tt/2lAUNA7